Ann Pettifor invited to join Labour Leader’s new Economic Advisory Committee

PRIME’s Director, Ann Pettifor, has been invited by the Leader of the Labour Party, the Rt Hon Jeremy Corbyn MP, to be a member of an Economic Advisory Committee, convened by the Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell MP, and reporting directly to the Leader. The Committee is asked to “discuss and develop ideas around the official economic strategy that Labour will be advocating under the new leadership”. 

The Committee, which is to meet quarterly, includes

• Mariana Mazzucato, Professor, University of Sussex
• Joseph Stiglitz, Professor, Columbia University, recipient of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in economics.
• Thomas Piketty, Professor, Paris School of Economics
• Simon Wren-Lewis, Professor, Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford University
• Anastasia Nesvetailova, Professor, City University London
• Danny Blanchflower, Professor of Economics Dartmouth and Stirling, Ex-member of the MPC
• Ann Pettifor, Director of Policy Research in Macroeconomics (PRIME), and Honorary Research Fellow at the Political Economy Research Centre of City University

The Labour Party’s press release cites Jeremy Corbyn MP:

I was elected on a clear mandate to oppose austerity and to set out an economic strategy based on investment in skills, jobs and infrastructure. Our economy must deliver security for all, not just riches for a few. I am delighted that John McDonnell as Shadow Chancellor has convened this group to advise the leadership as we set out our economic vision.”

Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell MP addedthat the Committee 

will assist in developing a radical but pragmatic and deliverable economic policy for our country [and] in developing a fairer and more prosperous economic alternative based upon investment and growth which reaches all sections of society. Austerity is failing the people of this country. Working alongside world leading economists Labour will present the coherent alternative our country desperately needs.”

Ann Pettifor said

I am honoured to be asked to serve on Labour’s Advisory Committee, with such distinguished colleagues. The Committee’s members are experts in a very diverse and complementary range of economic policy (both fiscal and monetary), and I am confident we can collectively help to develop ideas and policies that will serve the interests of all sections of British society. 

But this calls for a change in the dominant economic paradigm which has unduly focused on the finance sector to the detriment of society as a whole, and of those active in both the private and public sectors of the real economy.

Britain urgently needs a coherent economic policy that will equip society, and especially our young people, for the future, and in particular one that will help us tackle climate change. Economic policies that will harness the combined, mutually reinforcing strengths of both public and private sectors to invest in Britain’s future, and challenge the  economically and socially harmful obsession with austerity.

I hope to play my part in overturning the Chancellor’s deficit fetishism, and his employment of it (as Lord Turnbull argued recently) as a smokescreen for an attack on the state.