When Miatta Fahnbulleh became chief executive of the green and left-leaning New Economics Foundation (NEF), she was one of the first black women to head a UK think tank. “I was like: ‘Oh gosh. OK – well, there you go, there’s an accolade!’” she says. The economist had come to the UK from Liberia with her family as a child, then progressed through Oxford University and into the civil service, before becoming an adviser to the Labour opposition and moving from there to the Institute of Public Policy Research and then on to the NEF. “I’ve been in the policy world for a long time – which is still middle class, white and male-dominated,” she says. While the situation is improving on gender, Fahnbulleh notes that “even today, you still have to fight to get an equal hearing”.
“The economy doesn’t work for people and planet and you fundamentally need to think about how you transform it in order to do that,” Fahnbulleh says, articulating the view the NEF has been pushing since its creation in 1986 during an era of Thatcherite economic policy under Nigel Lawson. Through the New Labour years, coalition government, and into the populist present, the think tank has often ploughed a lonely field of green progressivism, but with the climate crisis, unprecedented government intervention to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic, and the breakdown of the global neoliberal order, the “outlier” ideas associated with the NEF have propagated and become a staple part of the debate. Fahnbulleh points to both Theresa May’s emphasis on an economy that “works for everyone” and Labour’s 2017 manifesto For the Many, Not the Few as examples of how the politics has shifted on the economy. “I think all parts of the [political] spectrum are having to do different things to respond to the moment that we’re in,” she says.
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