Colm Murphy

@colmpm.bsky.social

6620 Followers 2733 Following

Historian of UK and ROI politics and political economy. Senior Lecturer at QMUL and Deputy Director of Mile End Institute (https://www.qmul.ac.uk/politics/staff/profiles/murphycolm.html). Book on Labour and 'modernisation' (https://tinyurl.com/37tzatvk).

What it is to be a moderniser is naturally contingent on what is modern; successful modernisers of one era, attuned to one media world and set of public norms and attitudes, will have little in common with the successful modernisers of thirty years later. Will someone who was head of broadcast in the 1990s have what it takes to be director of communications in the 2020s? When they leave, should that person then be replaced by 1997’s deputy communications director? Looking at a Prime Minister less popular than Hamas, the answer would seem to be “no”.
Screenshot of opening of Renewal piece, readable here: https://renewal.org.uk/articles/keir-starmer-and-the-philosophers-stone/
"LOST IN TRANSLATION: Reform UK has proposed an amendment to the government’s Election Bill that would send candidates who use Irish, Gaelic or Cornish on election leaflets to jail. Reform MPs co-signed New Clause 107 to the Representation of the People Bill that would require all election publications to be “in the English language or the Welsh language” only. Five of six Cornish MPs have signed a joint statement of condemnation. The Byline Times has more."
Letter in the New Statesman from Jim Denham of Birmingham: "There is no pleasing John Gray, is there? After decades of denouncing "progressivism", the Enlightenment and any idea of human progress, Gray now has a US president who embodies the backwardness and nihilism he craves, and he still doesn't like it. Why does anyone continue to take him seriously?"
"But while the diagnoses are not so difficult, the prescriptions are rarer. Debate now tends to be ultra-incremental (like the work of many think tanks, keen to meet immediate needs); overly driven by opinion polls (which, taken too far, is often fatal for political movements); ultra-vague, like many recent philosophical commentaries (e.g. Michael Sandel) or the work of radical left figures such as Kohei Saito who promotes degrowth without even hinting at how it might work in practice; or much stronger on literary eloquence than strategic insight (like the writers in forums like the LRB, most broadsheet newspapers and magazines)."
"He was not so much committed to growth as dependent on it to keep things going, for redistribution was ruled out. His economic policy is fiscal rectitude, support for innovation and “entrepreneurs”, and subsidies for foreign investment in the UK. Starmer’s Party rejects, with grim determination, public ownership even of natural monopolies. These must remain “investible”. Starmer’s Party’s conservatism extended to being deeply Unionist, even in relation to Northern Ireland. It even started to believe in Brexit, and trumpeted minor trade deals just as the Tories had. It aped the Tories and Reform on immigration."
A screenshot of the headline of this article: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/westminster/2026/05/one-crazy-trick-can-rescue-keir-starmer
A defaced page in a university library book. After "For Robin", a pencil annotation adds "Hood - for all your help in archery lessons. Down with King John!"
Screenshot of the title and abstract of a piece by Colm Murphy. Title: "The Unavoidability of Scarcity and Necessity of Political Choice". Abstract: "Advocates of the ‘abundance’ agenda dream of a bright future, but in the UK its possibility relies on economic sacrifices in the present. The consequent politics are wicked and demand ideologically informed choices about scarce resources."
Another potential concern about these estimates is the possibility that countries select into the war based on its anticipated impact on progressive taxation. A few considerations suggest that this is unlikely. First, a large literature on entry into World War I suggests that few initial participants expected the long costly, mass-mobilized war that ensued but rather anticipated a short and decisive conflict.Footnote51 Second, it seems implausible given what was at stake that countries would choose to participate in the war even in part based on considerations about the impact of the war on the progressivity of taxation. Third, at least some accounts suggest that, with the partial exception of the United States, the participant countries in our sample did not select into the war at all, much less as a function of its anticipated effect on progressive taxation. A common account is that the event that precipitated the war was of course a political assassination and the participation of France, the UK, and Canada was not certain until Germany decided to follow the Schlieffen Plan for a general European war that started with a Western offensive.Footnote52
This image shows the title and abstract for a new journal article by Benjamin Bland, published in the Journal of British Studies. Title: "“I Am Not Anti Black Music But …”: Popular Music, the NME, and Race in Late Twentieth-Century Britain". Abstract:"Popular music culture has often featured in postwar British history as a site of tolerance and inclusivity, of multicultural exchange and anti-racist activism. This article, while not denying music's intersections with progressive causes, presents a different narrative. I use the pages of Britain's most prominent weekly music paper, the New Musical Express (NME), to demonstrate the important role that music has played in perpetuating wider processes of racialization in the late twentieth century. Surveying contestations over race in the mid-1980s and early 1990s, it highlights the ways in which popular music institutions such as the NME could function as sites of racial formation, reproducing the social power of whiteness even when providing space for what was often referred to as “black music.” The article underlines the degree to which popular music could produce hegemonically white cultural spaces, despite the diversity of musical culture at large. In so doing, it indicates the significance of popular culture for understanding patterns of racialization into the latter years of the twentieth century and beyond."
This is the abstract for the article 'Labour's choices: The political economy of Keir Starmer's party', by Colm Murphy. It reads: 'This article explores the dilemmas at the heart of the economic strategy of Keir Starmer’s government by tracking developments in British (centre-)left political economy since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. It first traces the emergence of a shared narrative of political economy circulating among the UK and transatlantic centre-left, as well as some further left and right, over the 2010s and into the early 2020s. Identifying the core diagnoses and prescriptions contained within this narrative, this article situates them in economic, ideological, and political developments since 2008. It then traces the fragmentation of this economic imaginary from 2022. In combination with an unhappy transition to office, this fragmentation has generated a deeply confused and internally contradictory economic strategy in the UK Labour government. This paper then explains this process by placing ideological and political developments in their material and external contexts. A worsening macroeconomic and geopolitical context actively decomposed the constituent parts of the narrative and challenged some of its assumptions; in turn, this revived submerged disagreements within the governing party. The paper consequently argues that while these tensions can be explained partly by ideological closure, they derive to a significant and probably greater extent from institutional and material factors, especially questions of statecraft and the UK’s misfiring growth regime in an increasingly gloomy global context. The paper ends, however, by cautioning against an overbearing determinism. It indicates the remaining arenas for political agency open to the government, should it prove able and willing to act.'
Chart of currency composition of global Forex reserves 1947-2013. Sterling collapses from over 80% in 1945 to close to 0 after 1975. The dollar rises to between 50 and 80%, bouncing around. The DM was in the teens, and the euro is over 20%
Front cover of Martin Daunton, "The Economic Government of the World, 1933-2023"
Insofar as the government has a broader economic strategy it is implicitly to reduce household spending to pay for investment, though they never put it like that. But the political price is high. The cost of living remains the number one concern for voters and there is nothing in this budget to suggest that’s going to look any different in three years’ time
We shouldn’t be surprised, then, that some government advisors are reportedly arguing for keeping to the letter of the manifesto pledge as much as possible. They advocate a ‘smorgasbord’ of smaller tax rises to make up the missing ‘headroom’. Yet, the obvious danger is that cobbling together a ragtag of tax hikes will alienate vocal interest groups, absorb government attention, and only just create sufficient fiscal headroom. To reduce the risk of another tax rising Budget in 2026, more ambition is required. In contrast, direct taxes reliably raise significant revenue. Estimates vary but a 2p increase in the basic rate alone would yield up to £20 billion by 2028-29. Even if Labour also cut National Insurance for lower earners on grounds of intergenerational fairness, as recent reports strongly suggest they will, they could raise up to £11bn a year.