Why subscribe?
Our country is in deep, deep trouble. Growth in our economy is flagging. Faith in our politics is crumbling. Yet somehow the richest are getting richer, while the poorest face hardship unknown for years. Here on these ‘isles of wonder’, the cradle of the industrial revolution and home to the Mother of Parliaments, freedom, security and hope are now in short supply.
We can't go like this.
Yet in Westminster, you’ll find plenty of people who seem to think the way out of this hole is with the politics of divide and rule, a few more culture wars and blaming ‘outsiders’.
I don’t think that’s right. And I know plenty of people in Parliament who agree with me.
So this site is dedicated to finding ideas that rekindle the common good by reconnecting economic growth and social justice. Ideas that good people don’t just ‘like’, but might actually vote for.
I’m Liam Byrne and for almost twenty five years, I’ve battled in Parliament for the poorest community in Britain, East Birmingham, where five generations of my family lived and worked. There I’ve fought a long fight for new investment, and to highlight the plight of the homeless and hungry.
I went from a failing comprehensive school to a Fulbright Scholarship at the Harvard Business School, before co-founding a highly successful technology firm. I’ve written a history of our country, told through the lives of our most successful entrepreneurs. I’ve served in Government as the youngest member of Gordon Brown’s Cabinet, helping run 10 Downing Street during the Great Financial Crisis before becoming Chief Secretary to the Her Majesty’s Treasury.
When we lost office, I co-founded the cross-party Parliamentary group on inclusive growth and began working across Parliament to help expose and shut down Russia’s kleptocracy and clean up the scourge of economic crime in London. Today, I chair the global Parliamentary Network on the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
It’s this experience that’s taught me just how our economy - and our government - needs to change. And that’s what this blog is all about: ideas for positive change at home and abroad, ideas that will help create wealth - and fairly share it.
It was back in the Treasury that my team discovered the problem that today we call the ‘squeezed middle’; the way our economy had basically stopped working for working people. So for almost a decade and a half, I’ve worked with people in business, trade unions, faith communities, civil society, academia and international financial institutions, across the political divide and around the world, to find solutions to that will make a difference. Lots of these ideas will feature in my new book: the Inequality of Wealth: Why It Matters and How We Fix It.
I know many people will know me for the note I left to my successor at the Treasury; it was an old tradition, dating back to Churchill, a bit of gallows humour, to tell the in-coming minister that ‘there is no money.’ Over the years, that note has been used as a fig leaf to cover all kinds of bad decisions by my successors. So I guess you could say this blog is the notes I wish I’d left…
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