The Only Thing We Have To Fear Is Fear Itself

Boris Johnson is rumoured to be about to go all FDR on us later today. The withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union, including the Single Market and the Customs Union, would provide a double opportunity, both to reorganise the British economy under State direction, and to begin to develop a fully independent British foreign policy, including in relation to the United States.

The Conservative Party has already been moving in those directions. We are entering a new pro-business age. The pro-business tradition came down to the Attlee Government from the ultraconservative figures of Colbert and Bismarck, via the Liberals Keynes and Beveridge, and it held sway in Britain until the Callaghan Government's turn to monetarism in 1976.

That tradition corresponds closely but critically to the Hamiltonian American School as expanded by the American System of Henry Clay, a pro-business tradition that between the 1860s and the 1970s worked to make the United States the world's largest economy, with the world's highest standard of living, culminating in the glorious achievements of the New Deal, which in turn made possible the rise and triumph of the Civil Rights movement.

With a strict division between investment banking and retail banking, large amounts of central government credit, at low interest rates and over a long term, would build great national projects, notably enormous expansions in infrastructure. Those would then pay for themselves many times over, ably assisted by pro-business tariffs and subsidies, and by a pro-business National Bank to promote the growth of productive enterprises rather than speculation.

A sovereign state with its own free floating, fiat currency has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling inflation. Those means must therefore be under democratic political control.

And here we are. Good will come out of this. It is already beginning to do so. The Budget of March 2020 has ended the era that began with the Budget of 1976. The Centre is the think tank for this new era. It already has plenty going on.