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Regional secretary with the National Education Union
Grace Blakeley: ‘Corbyn is looking to a new ideal of worker ownership'
Daniel Powell met the wildly popular young Marxist economist defying the liberal-left’s soft stance on EU neoliberalism

ARTICULATED in the vocabulary of economics rather than the standard lexicon of political soundbites, young rising star of the labour movement Grace Blakeley is proving to be a formidable challenger to the established commentariat of broadcast media, with memorable television appearances including explaining the economics of democratic socialism to a bemused Andrew Neil on his own BBC show and debunking former Tory MP Michael Portillo’s attempts to justify a decade of austerity.

The Labour Party’s proposals to move in the direction of democratic socialism have provoked alarm from right-leaning media, but much of the party’s manifesto is modelled on the orthodox economics of John Maynard Keynes, which formed a basis of the 1945-1979 post-war consensus.

During this period, Conservative governments retained some Labour policies — including the nationalisation of key industries plus the creation of a broad welfare state and National Health Service, following the landslide victory for Labour’s Clement Attlee in 1945.

Laura Pidcock MP discusses class at the Newcastle launch of Blakeley's book
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