I threw my metaphorical hat in the air and gasped “at last” when I read your editorial (Keynes’ ideas worked in the 1940s, and now they are due a comeback, 17 February). Between 1945 and the 1970s, working-class living standards rose at an unprecedented rate, with full employment, housing standards transformed for millions by the building of quality council housing, free healthcare and secondary education, the establishment of the wider welfare state and much more. The genius of Keynes was at the heart of this revolution. I grew up in that world and was taught Keynesian economics as a student in the 1960s.
It was a tragedy that Keynesianism was later trashed and suppressed by the intellectual inferiors of monetarism, neoliberalism and globalisation. They were vengeful and profoundly wrong in all they propounded in their counter-revolution. JK Galbraith and others spelt this out, but were ignored in a rampant ideological drive to the right.
Over two decades in parliament, I was one of a small band of left Keynesians who spoke out against the neoliberals, with Austin Mitchell, Denzil Davies, Michael Meacher and Bryan Gould, who sadly left parliament too soon in 1994, returning to New Zealand, but who still speaks great wisdom from afar.
Robert Skidelsky in the Lords continued to fly the Keynesian flag from more Conservative ranks, and others deserve credit too, but the phalanx of neoliberals stretched from Downing Street even to the TUC after the 1970s. The last academic bastion of Keynesian economics was the Cambridge Economic Policy Group, Wynne Godley and colleagues, but Thatcher cut their funding.
The key factor in my continuing to buy the Guardian for over 50 years is your own great in-house Keynesian economist, Larry Elliott. Long may he scribe in your columns.
Kelvin Hopkins
Labour MP for Luton North, 1997-2019
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