Affiliation:
1. Professor of Political Economy at the University of Glasgow and Visiting Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Bonn
Abstract
The pursuit of a distinctive agenda around democratic public ownership under the Corbyn leadership was symbolic of the departure from the largely neoliberal economic governance perspective that dominated Labour Party policy in and out of government during the New Labour years. In contrast
to some of the more dismissive critiques of the Corbyn‐McDonnell moment, which either want to caricature it as stuck in a ‘hard left’ groove from the 1980s, or as identifiable as a more traditional social-democratic project of the post 1945 era, it argues that the proposed
programme of democratic public ownership (DPO) was genuinely transformative in its framing around economic democracy as an alternative to neoliberal governance. It was different from past radical Labour programmes in its commitment to decentred and pluralist institutions and ownership forms,
yet still concerned with achieving radical change through the state.