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We need a socialism of faster, fairer and greener growth
Peter Hain challenges Britain’s neoliberal orthodoxy and outlines his vision of financial markets ‘harnessed for the common good’

In Britain, as across the world — notably continental Europe — the left has struggled to offer a coherent response to the banking crisis which blew like a whirlwind across the globe from 2007-8.

Despite the cataclysmic failure of neoliberalism which the global banking crisis represented, it hardly incited a resurgence of democratic socialism.

Instead, parliamentary parties of the left slipstreamed the right’s incessant demand for savage cuts. But that just meant heading down the same austerity road at a slower pace, when (as Keynes showed in the 1930s) getting the economy back on the path to growth was always a surer way to sort out the public finances.

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