Theme: Political Economy | Content Type: Journal article

Building Everyday Wealth for Britain's Communities: A Labour Alternative to Levelling Up?

Sarah Longlands

nattanan-kanchanaprat-money-growth

Nattanan Kanchanaprat

| 1 min read

Community wealth building provides an important counterpoint to the orthodoxy of place based economic policy in the UK. It puts forward a framework for economic change which shows that local areas can intervene effectively to build wealth from within so that they are less reliant upon extractive forms of economic development. Instead, wealth building within a community is about recognising the wealth that already exists in an area and intervening to encourage that wealth to flow more readily, particularly from capital to labour. This article explores the background to the development of community wealth building in the UK and its connection with the debate on the everyday economy. It finds that there is a close alignment between the objectives of building wealth and the everyday economy, particularly in areas which not only feel ‘left behind’, but arguably, who have been kept behind by a policy regime which has actively dismantled their sense of place, agency and identity, and in turn, devalued the role and purpose of the businesses and economy that already exists, in favour of elusive ‘growth’ and/or ‘pioneer’ sectors.

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Volume 96, Issue 3

Latest journal

Volume 96, Issue 3

This issue features a collection titled 'The Intellectual and Political Legacy of David Marquand', who died in April 2024, edited by Colin Crouch, Ben Jackson and Peter Sloman. In this collection, authors including Jean Seaton, Will Hutton and Hilary Wainwright consider Marquand's legacy as a great progressive thinker, his biography of Ramsay MacDonald, Labour's first prime minister, and the role of socialism for Marquand. Other articles include a commentary by Deborah Mabbett titled 'Welfare reform by numbers'; Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams on 'The Vices of Values: Matthew Goodwin and the Politics of Motivation'; Helen McCarthy on 'Why the WASPI has no Sting: Gender, Generation and Pension Inequalities'; and Sam Taylor Hill, Tariq Modood and John Denham on 'Multicultural Nationalism: Saving the White Working Class from Blue Labour?' A selection of book reviews feature Edmund Fawcett's review of 'Nationalism: A World History' by Eric Storm and Samuel Cohn's review of 'Controlling Contagion: Epidemics and Institutions from the Black Death to Covid' by Sheilagh Ogilvie.

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