If anything, Labour's defeat seems to be bringing the party back to reality. After years of supporting free trade (the EU is, after all, a huge FTA) and being led astray by globalist/no-border ideology, its members seem to waking up to the fact that socialism = protectionism. 1/
See for example @lisanandy's recent support for Britain-first industrial policies "The case for committing the next Labour government to putting UK manufacturing and domestic steel first couldn’t be clearer", she said. (Ironically, that would be illegal under EU law). 2/
This is, of course, perfectly sensible. What's absurd is that for years the left has opposed protectionism as a "nationalist", "right-wing" and "harmful" econ policy - and embraced globalist free-tradist ideology (yep, the ideology of capital). And largely continues to do so. 3/
As Ann Pettifor writes: "Only globalised capital [or, I would add, a left that has completely lost the plot] could reframe the term ‘to protect one’s economy’ – protectionism – as harmful". To protect one's economy and people/workers? That doesn't sound too fascistic, does it? 4/
Indeed, even Keynes famously sympathised with those "who would minimize, rather than with those who would maximize, economic entanglement among nations. Ideas, knowledge, science, hospitality, travel – these are the things which should of their nature be international...". 5/
"But - Keynes continued - let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible, and, above all, let finance be primarily national". This is as true today as it was then. Even truer, in fact, given the ecological crisis, largely a result of global trade. 6/
As Pettifore writer in her book on the Green New Deal: "Trade, on the scale undertaken today, is not sustainable. Nor is it socially or ecologically just. A key principle of the GND economy is surely that countries and their peoples be as self-sufficient as possible". 7/7
