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Jonathan Hinder’s call for ‘economic nationalism’ is tragically misguided

From energy to housing, Britain’s economy has stagnated due to a lack of liberalisation

Unproductive state-owned industries will not improve life for ordinary Britons

Jonathan Hinder, Labour’s MP for Pendle and Clitheroe, has taken to X to deliver what he clearly hopes will be received as a bracing call to arms. In a forty-second video (the medium is very much the message) he laments that ‘Trump’s whims, tariff wars, global energy prices’ now ‘dictate living standards in Britain’. The culprit, naturally, is ‘Thatcherite thinking’, which ‘handed our state power to the markets’. The remedy? ‘A new economic nationalism’. Rebuild our industry. Strengthen our defences. Develop our own technology. Are we just going to complain, he asks, or actually do something about it?

It is a stirring performance: it is also entirely wrong.

Let us begin with the premise that privatisation sold off ‘our common assets’ and left ordinary Britons ‘renting back what is ours’. The claim sounds intuitive, which is precisely why it has survived every encounter with the evidence. 

Take water. The public is told that ‘greedy’ private companies have extracted profits while infrastructure crumbles. Under the Water Industry Act 1991, Ofwat conducts a price review every five years that determines not just what companies can charge customers, but how much they are permitted to spend on infrastructure. At the latest review, called PR24, water companies requested £112 billion of investment; Ofwat initially proposed cutting that to £88 billion, the largest proposed cut in the sector’s history, before settling on £104 billion, which is still a 7% reduction on what companies said they needed. Five companies have since appealed to the Competition and Markets Authority, arguing the settlement is inadequate. On dividends, the picture is bleaker still. This is not a market running wild, but rather it is in a straitjacket, where the regulator decides how much can be invested, how much can be charged and how much can be returned to the investors whose capital is supposed to fund the entire enterprise. I’d be delighted to learn which neoliberal economist or politician was advocating for those policies.

The surprise is not that some companies have underperformed, but rather that anyone is still willing to put capital in at all. The failures people blame on privatisation are, in almost every case, failures of a regulatory regime that has simultaneously constrained investment and then expressed outrage at the consequences.

Energy tells a similar story. Hinder implies that a state-owned energy system would insulate Britons from the global market shocks. The energy crisis of 2022–23 was driven by the wholesale price of gas on international markets following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – a price that no domestic ownership structure, short of autarky, could have avoided. Britain’s liberalised energy market, regulated through Ofgem under the Gas Act 1986 and Electricity Act 1989, has in fact provided the mechanism through which prices have since fallen: the price cap for Q2 2026 is set at £1,641, down 7% quarter-on-quarter, and more than £200 lower than a year ago. Ofgem reports that supplier switching has increased by nearly 20% year-on-year, with consumers increasingly taking advantage of time-of-use tariffs and competitive fixed deals. Those on fixed tariffs paid around £115 less than the cap on average last year. Competition is working. It is not perfect of course, but just like democracy, the market is an imperfect but superior process. 

But the most damning indictment of Hinder’s ‘economic nationalism’ is that his own Government is actively undermining the domestic energy production he says he wants. In November 2025, Labour published its North Sea Future Plan, formally banning new exploration licences for offshore oil and gas. No new Seaward Production Licences, no new Seaward Petroleum Exploration Licences. Meanwhile, the Energy Profits Levy, introduced by the Conservatives in 2022 and enthusiastically extended by Labour to 2030, imposes a combined effective tax rate of 78% on North Sea producers.

CapX readers will not be surprised at the results: UK crude production has more than halved in five years, falling from around 1.1 million barrels a day in 2020 to roughly 474,000 barrels a day by September 2025: an all-time low, even during a Europe-wide energy crisis. US majors Apache and Chevron have announced their intention to exit the UK Continental Shelf entirely. According to Offshore Energies UK, without reform, production will fall by a further 40% by 2030, and the UK is on track to import 80% of its oil and gas by the end of the decade.

The real irony of Hinder’s complaint is that Britain’s genuine economic weaknesses are the product not of too much market liberalism, but far too little. Start with housing. The planning system, governed by the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 and shaped by the National Planning Policy Framework, has for decades strangled supply. There is no known ‘neoliberal’ system which requires you to go through a full, lengthy and expensive planning process to build a pond, never mind entire housing estates. The well-documented planning absurdities that spawn from Whitehall and are proliferated through every planning authority in the land are not the fault of the market, but of zealous regulation. The great Blue Labour hero Clement Attlee created the planning noose around our most productive and growing cities (the Green Belt), which the Government have thankfully pledged to breaching.

Hinder’s call for ‘economic nationalism’ also collides awkwardly with the reality of what protectionism actually costs ordinary people. He opens his video by lamenting Trump’s tariff wars – then immediately proposes the British equivalent. The whole point of free trade, as Adam Smith observed 250 years ago this week, is that it allows nations to specialise in what they do best and import what others produce more cheaply. A programme of economic nationalism, which would involve rebuilding British industry behind tariff walls, subsidising domestic production, directing capital by political fiat, is a programme of making everything more expensive. The people who pay the price are not politicians in the Westminster bubble, but the working-class families in Pendle and Clitheroe whom Hinder claims to represent.

There is a final point worth making, and it is the one that Blue Labour never quite wants to confront. The post-war period of nationalised industry and economic planning that Hinder’s rhetoric romanticises was not, in fact, a golden age for British workers.

By 1979, Britain was the ‘sick man of Europe’. State-owned industries were grotesquely inefficient, propped up by subsidy and protected from competition. The winter of discontent was not caused by Thatcherite thinking, but rather the crisis that made Thatcherite thinking necessary. The liberalisation that followed, though imperfect, sometimes brutal in its distributional consequences, badly managed in specific cases, nonetheless produced three decades of sustained growth, falling poverty and rising real wages. The legitimate grievances of the post-2008 period of stagnant productivity, regional inequality and a housing crisis are real. But their causes lie in failures of planning, infrastructure investment and skills policy, not in the basic architecture of a market economy.

Hinder asks whether we are going to complain about being buffeted by global events or actually do something about it. Fair question. Here is what ‘doing something’ actually looks like: radical planning reform to unleash housebuilding. A fiscal regime for North Sea oil and gas that encourages domestic production rather than driving it abroad. A tax system that rewards work and investment. A trade policy that opens markets rather than closing them. These are the policies that would concretely and measurably improve the lives of the people Jonathan Hinder says he wants to help.

What they are not is ‘economic nationalism’. That phrase has been tried before, in countries with far more natural resources and industrial capacity than Britain. It has never worked. It will not work here. And the people who will bear the cost of discovering this, yet again, are precisely those whom the Blue Labour movement claims to champion.

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Maxwell Marlow is Director of Public Affairs at the Adam Smith Institute.

Columns are the author’s own opinion and do not necessarily reflect the views of CapX.