Grace Blakeley: Why the UK Economy Feels Stuck (and What It Means for Your Money)

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[0:00] Sammie: You’ve been

[0:19] Sammie: quite critical of Labour under Starmer since they’ve come in. I have. Obviously, Labour Party is supposed to be for the working people. The party would look to mobilise us in these types of situations. They’ve very much changed from, say, a more leftist approach to a much more sort of centre-left. In your opinion, what do you see the future of Labour at the moment?

[0:44] Grace: I don’t think it’s looking good. It’s not looking good. And it’s hardly surprising why. This was a party that came in promising people change, using the legacy of Labour historically to say, we will come into power and we will make society less unfair. We will improve your living standards. We will listen to you and we will stop this process of rising inequality and decline that you have experienced now pretty much ever since the financial crisis. Because for most people, life since 2008 has been one of stagnation and decline. And I’m talking about incomes. I’m talking about, you know, a sense of community,

[1:29] Grace: a sense of hope. And also, yeah, just a kind of slow degradation of all of the services and the infrastructure and the support that they need to live good lives. There’s been this steady, but very noticeable decline. that most people have experienced. And the Labour message was basically, we will fix that. And people believed it because they believe that Labour is a party for working people because it’s in the name. Labour, work, you know, like this is a party that was formed by unionists. And so when they come in and they renege on all those promises, two things happens. Firstly, trust in politics sinks to zero. much lower lows. And trust in politics was already very low. There

[2:15] Grace: was a stat, I think it was last year, that only 9% of people trust any political party. Even the ones they vote for. 9%.

[2:23] Sammie: Wow.

[2:23] Grace: So it’s just like trust in politics is extremely, extremely low. And this is only going to make it worse because once again, you see a politician, a political party coming in, promising things and then refusing to implement those things once they get into power. Things like, you know, Rachel Reeves was supposed to close the loophole on carried interest for private equity. Yes. So it would have been such an easy win. Yeah. And just because she’s got these guys from the industry knocking on her door and saying, don’t do that, she doesn’t. That erodes people’s trust in politics. Then there’s the wider question of how people, how other political parties are going to respond to this. And I think there is a very, very clear line here for the far right, which is basically your life has been getting worse for a long time. Labour

[3:08] Grace: told you that they were going to fix it. They told you we’re going to try it the left-wing way, and that didn’t work. So actually, this shows that we were right all along, and the reason you’ve been getting poor is that migrants have been stealing your wages and stealing your houses, basically. And it’s more compelling after Labour have been in power, not just because Labour’s feeding into that message very actively, but also because it shows that this apparent other option… has not worked even though it was an option that wasn’t actually tried because they basically just continued the economic policy of the Tories it really makes the argument being made by far right politicians like Nigel Farage all the more convincing and that’s the thing that worries me the most about the next election

[3:49] Sammie: yeah yeah I mean they’re growing in popularity at rapid rapid rates and you know the when you’ve got quite an angry working population some of those arguments sound pretty good yeah like But they’re words and they’re not the actual way of things. And if that happens and we swing that direction, which is what’s happened in the US pretty much, where it’s looking more likely every day that that will happen here. How dangerous is that?

[4:20] Grace: It’s really dangerous. It’s particularly dangerous if… You are, you know, a recent migrant to one of those communities, right, as we saw during the riots that happened last summer. But it’s dangerous for all of us because people like Farage are selling snake oil. They are, you know, what has Trump done? Trump won by basically exploiting the anxieties and the fears and the hopelessness. of people who’ve had this long experience of decline. Now, that isn’t to say that, you know, all of the people who voted for Trump are really poor and desperate. No, but they do feel like their lives are getting worse and they don’t feel like there’s a politician that is really speaking to them. A lot of them liked Bernie, actually. People switched from Bernie to Trump because they wanted someone with an answer

[5:05] Grace: to this question of why is my life getting worse? Mainstream Democrats just say, oh, you’re wrong. Your life isn’t getting worse. Actually, employment is quite high and growth has been good. So I don’t know what they wanted someone to speak who spoke to that question of my living standards are declining and even more than that I feel powerless to stop it like I feel like I have no control and no agency in my life that there are all of these huge trends that are happening around me and I don’t feel like I can respond to that now there’s a left-wing response to that which is what I’ve been talking about we come together in our communities we build movements we fight back the right-wing response to that is you elect a powerful leader all-powerful leader really who you can kind of project your anxieties

[5:51] Grace: onto and he says i’m big and i’m strong and i’m going to take on the vested interests and i’m going to make our country great again and just by connecting with that figure you then feel more powerful and you feel less scared this is how like fascist leaders have worked throughout history um and that is, you know, what I’m really scared about. To be honest, I don’t know if Farage has got the charisma to be able to hold that kind of role. But, you know, there are people on the far right who do. Exactly. So I really think we’re at this point of if the left or just, you know, we ourselves cannot answer these these issues around a sense of a lack of belonging powerlessness fear anxiety about the future by building movements in our

[6:36] Grace: communities in our workplaces and on the streets then the far right is going to sweep these people up and to be honest it will make the violence that we saw last summer look like like a walk in the park because there’s a lot of very scary stuff that can come out of that

[6:49] Sammie: yeah yeah it’s it’s so interesting to watch it at the moment it’s it seems you know we see this kind of decline in popularity of Labour, massive rises in reform. I mean, the sheer amount of numbers in the last election, I mean, Labour really didn’t win by popular vote. They won just because of the amount of seats they took, which was scary to see. But we’ve seen the likes of Dominic Cummings recently. He’s got his Substack, say what you want about Dominic. There’s quite a lot of people have to say, but one of the things he is pushing for is Mm-hmm.

[7:40] Sammie: is there a new movement that could come out that could really rise up and, you know, take a stronghold?

[7:46] Grace: I really hope so. You know, the trouble, of course, with our democracy is that it really does favour two big parties and then parties with regional support because you almost have these like mini general elections in every seat. So whoever wins in each seat, you know, gets, yeah, and you get this system that then just is very biased towards the two biggest parties. So it’s very hard to form the third parties. A lot that have tried have failed. You know, there was the famous case of the SDP or Change UK. Oh, God, yeah. If you remember Change UK. Yeah, no, I do. Yeah, wow. Exactly. Yeah. What a throwback.

[8:24] Sammie: Monster raving lunatic parties as well. Like, there’s so many that pop up, isn’t

[8:28] Grace: it? Yeah, exactly. But, so just starting a new political party from scratch is quite difficult. But what I will say is that political movements that are grounded in or in a wider kind of social movement can translate that power into politics. And we saw that, for example, in the last election when you got some independent candidates elected largely because people were really angry at Labour over Gaza. So that movement translated into the election of some of these candidates. And then you had quite a few green candidates elected as well because they fought really strong local campaigns. They basically got lots of people out on the doorstep. They knew that they weren’t going to get any support in the media. So they just spoke No, of course not.

[9:13] Grace: Yeah. Yeah. political system yeah and that’s dangerous it’s especially dangerous in a system like ours because you can imagine a situation in which you know reform doesn’t necessarily get that higher vote share but because they’re very well spread out and they manage to win a lot of seats in a lot of different places they really flip and potentially become the second largest party that would be extreme and there are reasons to think that that wouldn’t happen but I do believe that there’s a lot of arguments to say that we

[9:58] Grace: could end up with another hung parliament with a lot of reform MPs, not that many Tory MPs, not that many Labour MPs, and then a few others kind of dotted around.

[10:07] Sammie: Yeah, we’ve seen that before. We have, yeah. And it’s not ideal really,

[10:11] Grace: is it? No, it’s not a recipe for stability. Do you remember the time when we had an election every like two years? Why don’t we have like five prime ministers in five years or something?

[10:18] Sammie: Yeah, wild. It is like… troubling to say the least but I think hopefully we should start to see some sort of change over the next couple of years like people will start to see and hopefully because of what Trump’s doing

[10:33] Grace: in America it’s

[10:34] Sammie: sort of showcasing that that ideology really doesn’t work because everyone can see that that’s going wrong. Exactly. And so that’s kind of like a case study live for you for the UK not to do the same thing.

[10:45] Grace: If I was doing a campaign against reform, I’d just be plastering that picture of Farage and Trump in their gold elevator everywhere and just being like, they’re going to destroy your pension pot. No, but seriously, I do think that will be something of a liability because, you know, even amongst the right internationally, Trump is no way near as popular as he is amongst his base. He’s pretty unpopular, even among people who are like fairly right of center here. So that will be a big liability for Farage as well. And yeah, I mean, if we, especially if, you know, this… craziness drags the world economy into a recession, which is not unlikely, that is going to be something that really comes to bite the Republicans, but also all

[11:30] Grace: the movements associated with Trump as well at next elections.

[11:34] Sammie: Yeah, yeah. I want to touch on the book because I have just, I’m about, yeah, a couple of chapters in and just really loving it. But I’d love to know for you, obviously, we’ve touched on the real core messages behind it. but is there anything we haven’t touched on that you really think is important for people to take away from this argument that we’ve spoken about today?

[11:55] Grace: I would say two things. I guess like I’m trying to think about what the message I would want to give specifically to your audience, right? And I feel like the thing that I would say is it’s very easy to look at what’s going on in the world right now and feel hopeless and feel powerless. It’s very easy to look at the trends that are taking place in your life and think this is my fault. I failed and I blame myself. And the message that I really want to bring and that I try to bring in the book is to say that you are not powerless. You’re just isolated and you should not blame yourself for trends that have been going on for a very long time and that are affecting so many people around

[12:40] Grace: you just as much as they are affecting you. And the antidote to both of these things, to this idea that you are on your own, you should blame yourself and you don’t have the power to change your life is just building connections with other people and not just in a kind of like, you know, Making friends and doing nice things together. That’s obviously important for your mental health. But building movements with people who are like you to deliver change. That could be anything from organizing with people to protect your local library in your town through to organizing with your coworkers to demand higher wages from your boss. through to taking part in a protest, maybe, about an issue that you really care about. All of these things will bring you together with people

[13:25] Grace: who care deeply, just as much as you care, who are being screwed over just as much as you are being screwed over. And that is the point at which you’ll start to realise, OK, I’m not alone and I do have the power to fight back.