[...] Government no longer ‘delivered’ public services, but ‘procured’ them. New Labour’s major structural legacy lay here, in hollowing out swathes of public assets and service provision for the benefit of rent-seeking firms, through the expansion of Private Finance Initiatives. Under these schemes, contracting companies establish Special-Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) which borrow capital to build and maintain schools, hospitals and prisons, with revenue streams guaranteed for thirty years or more. The Thatcher and Major governments had already experimented with PFIs. Blair and Brown went on to adopt them on a much larger scale, advised by their friends in the City that ‘partnering’ with finance capital would be a more providential way of raising resources for school- and hospital-building programmes than imposing higher taxes on wealthy corporations and the rich.

The Manifesto’s central narrative was of economic rebalancing away from the financial sector, to reanimate the productive economies of the regions through public investment, renationalization, environmental protection and egalitarian social spending. The focus of Labour’s industrial strategy is a National Investment Bank, run by a brains trust of progressive economists, industrialists, entrepreneurs and trade unionists, which would raise and manage a £250 billion fund, spread across ten years, to invest in new technology, the information economy and infrastructure, with the aim of shifting 60 per cent of energy to zero-carbon or renewable sources and raising Research & Development funding to 3 per cent of GDP by 2030. This would be a real boost to the national R&D, which in 2016 was £33 billion. [29] The NIB would support a network of regional development banks, providing ‘patient, long-term finance’ to small businesses, plugging gaps in the supply chain and promoting alternative forms of ownership such as co-operatives. While backing for co-ops and small business has long been a staple of Labour manifestos, the commitment to a public-utility finance system is new, as is the nod to Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute or Norway’s State Pension Fund.