The most rhetorically effective trick of modern political economy is the simultaneous insistence that we live in a free market and that nothing about that market can be changed. The first claim says the state is small, distant, and neutral. The second claim says the state cannot intervene to redirect capital, build housing at scale, or restructure who owns what. Both are widely believed and they cannot both be true. If the state is genuinely small and neutral, it could intervene at scale. If the state cannot intervene at scale, it is because something is preventing it, which means the system is not neutral.

Grace Blakeley's work is, at heart, a sustained attack on this contradiction. Her argument, which she has built across three books and a steady stream of journalism, is that the modern Western economy is not a free market and has not been one for a long time. It is a managed economy in which the state and large capital are deeply intertwined, planning together for outcomes that benefit capital owners and forcing the rest of the population to absorb the costs. The economy is planned. It is just not planned for us.

This is a useful idea. It is more useful in Ireland than almost anywhere.

Who she is

Grace Blakeley, born 1993, is one of the more prominent younger voices on the British socialist left. PPE at Oxford, time at the Institute for Public Policy Research, then a long association with Tribune magazine and Novara Media. Her books, Stolen: How to Save the World from Financialisation (2019), The Corona Crash (2020), and Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom (2024), trace a single argument across the post-2008 decade and a half.

She came up through the Corbyn-era Labour Party, and like much of that current she has had a difficult time with Starmer's reorientation. The work has, if anything, sharpened in opposition. Vulture Capitalism in particular is notably bolder in its theoretical claims than her earlier writing, and reads as a settled position rather than a developing one.

The central thesis

The argument I want to focus on, because it is the one I think is most useful, is that the distinction between planned and unplanned economies is largely a fiction. All large modern economies plan. The Soviet model planned through the state for state-defined ends. The Western model plans through corporations, central banks, finance ministries, and a layered institutional architecture (IMF, WTO, EU competition policy, BIS) for capital-defined ends. The Western planning is more diffuse, more decentralised, and less openly acknowledged. It is still planning.

Blakeley's evidence for this is straightforward. Look at the actual mechanisms by which large outcomes are produced in the modern economy. Quantitative easing is planning. Bank bailouts are planning. Industrial policy via tax incentives is planning. Trade architecture is planning. Public-private partnerships are planning. Regulatory capture by the regulated is planning, just hidden. Strategic government procurement is planning. Subsidies for favoured industries are planning. Land-use rules that constrain housing supply while protecting asset values are planning. Pension fund regulations that channel ordinary people's savings into supporting financial markets are planning.

The pretence that all this happens through the impersonal operation of free markets is, in her account, a story we tell ourselves so that we do not have to argue about who the planning is for. Once the pretence drops, the argument becomes recoverable. We are not asking whether to plan. We are asking who plans, who they plan for, and how the rest of us get a seat at the table.

This is a clarifying frame. It does not require accepting the rest of her programme to find it useful.

Where she is right

I think she is right about the diagnosis at the level it is offered. The 2008 bailouts demonstrated, conclusively, that when the cost of letting markets clear is too high for the asset-owning class, the state will intervene with whatever resources are required. The post-2008 monetary expansion delivered enormous wealth gains to existing asset holders and very little to wage earners, in a way that reflected deliberate central-bank choices about which prices should be supported. The post-Covid response did the same on a larger scale. The European energy response in 2022 again socialised a private-sector loss across the household sector. None of this was a free market clearing.

She is also right that the language of inevitability that surrounds these decisions ("there is no alternative", "the markets demand it", "investor confidence requires") is often a description of political will dressed up as natural law. There are usually alternatives. The alternatives have been considered and rejected, often for reasons that would not survive open discussion. The dressing-up is the trick.

She is right, finally, that the modern Western state and modern Western corporations are interlocked in ways that make the conventional left-right argument about state vs. market increasingly unhelpful. Both the state and the corporate sector are doing things that the textbook descriptions cannot accommodate. A serious account of who runs the economy has to engage with the actual interlocking institutions rather than with the cartoon versions of them.

Where she is vulnerable

Worth being honest about. Blakeley is at her best in diagnosis and at her weakest in prescription.

The proposed alternative, economic democracy, draws on a long tradition that includes worker cooperatives, public ownership of key sectors, participatory budgeting, and decentralised planning. The historical record of these models is mixed. The Mondragón cooperative federation works. The Yugoslav self-managed-socialism experiment did not, at scale. The post-war British nationalised industries delivered some real successes and some genuinely catastrophic failures. Worker cooperatives have an excellent record at small scale and an uncertain record at the scales required to run modern infrastructure.

She acknowledges some of this in Vulture Capitalism but the book is more focused on diagnosis than on the operational engineering of an alternative. A reader who is convinced by the diagnosis still has to do significant work to figure out what specifically she is recommending be implemented next year, and how, and by whom. The argument is more available as a critical lens than as a programme.

There is also a real question about the role of innovation in her model. Markets, with all their failures, have a track record of generating new productive technologies that planned alternatives have struggled to match. Whether democratic planning can do this work is an open empirical question. Her treatment of it is gestural rather than rigorous.

These are not fatal objections. They are the questions that have to be answered next, by her or by someone else working in the same tradition.

Why she matters as a voice

For three reasons.

First, she is articulating a structural left position in language that non-academic readers can engage with. The mainstream British and Irish left, as currently presented in centre-left newspapers, has largely accepted the framing that markets are natural and the question is only how much state correction is warranted. Blakeley starts from a different frame entirely. The audience that has only encountered the cautious centre-left reading often finds her clarity refreshing even if they do not agree with the conclusions.

Second, she names institutions and individuals. The mainstream-economic discourse tends towards systemic and abstract description, partly out of professional habit and partly out of legal caution. Blakeley names the firms, the funds, the regulators, the policies, the politicians. This makes the argument testable in a way that systemic-only descriptions are not.

Third, she is paired with people like Stevenson, James Meadway, Aaron Bastani, Yanis Varoufakis, and others who are collectively reaching a young audience with a coherent post-2008 left analysis that the older social-democratic centre had largely lost the vocabulary to articulate. Whether or not the analysis ultimately wins political argument, it is doing real work in providing a frame that lots of younger people clearly recognised they needed.

How it lands in Ireland

Vulture Capitalism is in part a literal Irish term. The "vulture funds" that bought distressed Irish property at scale after 2008, often via Section 110 SPV structures that allowed them to operate effectively tax-free in Ireland, are a textbook case of what Blakeley is describing. The state was not a neutral observer of this process. The state designed the tax architecture that made it possible, defended it in the face of public objection, and continues to defend the broader institutional landscape that allowed it. This is planning. Planning for capital. By the Irish state. With the explicit cooperation of Irish finance ministries across multiple governments.

The IDA-led FDI model is the same point at a larger scale. The Irish state has, for sixty years, organised its tax system, its regulatory system, its labour-market policy, its competition policy, its industrial-property policy, and its diplomatic policy around the project of attracting and retaining foreign capital. This is one of the largest and most coordinated industrial policies in modern Europe, executed continuously across changes of government. It is not the absence of planning. It is intense planning, with a clear beneficiary class.

The Irish housing crisis sits inside this frame. The state-supported expansion of REITs and large institutional landlords, the design of HAP and the Help-To-Buy scheme as transfers from the state to landlords and developers, the chronic underbuild of public housing in favour of private market provision, all are policy choices made by a planning state acting on behalf of capital. The voter perception that "the government is doing nothing" about housing is technically incorrect. The government is doing a great deal about housing. It is just doing it for the people who already own most of it.

This is, I think, the most consequential thing Blakeley's frame does for Irish political argument. It moves the question from "how do we get the state to intervene" to "we already have intense state intervention, on whose behalf is it operating, and what would it mean to point it at the rest of us". The first question has no traction in current discourse because the framing is wrong. The second question is exactly the question Sinn Féin, the Social Democrats, and PBP are circling around without yet articulating fully, and the question the duopoly cannot afford to have asked clearly.

If Irish political argument is going to mature past "more public spending vs. fiscal responsibility", which is the thin pretence the duopoly currently runs on, the Blakeley frame is one of the more useful tools for getting there. The argument shifts to substance fast.

Where to start

If you have an evening: any long-form Blakeley interview. The Owen Jones podcast, the Novara Downstream episodes, or the Bad Faith appearance with Brie Camp. The interviews catch the voice and the live argumentation in a way the books do not.

If you have a week: Vulture Capitalism (2024). The most recent and the most fully developed statement. The first section is the strongest. Read with a notebook because the references chain out into a much larger reading list.

If you want the earlier theoretical foundation: Stolen (2019). More focused on financialisation specifically and on the post-2008 period as such. A useful primer on the asset-price-inflation mechanism.

If you want the academic background she is drawing from: Wolfgang Streeck's How Will Capitalism End? and Buying Time are the more rigorous statements of the structural diagnosis. Streeck is older, more pessimistic, and writes for an academic audience, but the analytical machinery is similar. Blakeley should be read as the political-popular face of an analysis that has serious academic backing.

The thing Blakeley does, which most British and Irish political journalism does not, is to take the actual operational mechanics of the modern economy seriously and ask what they are doing to whom. That is most of the work. The rest is, again, taking the argument and asking what it means in Irish terms.

Related in the Political Literacy series

  • Gary Stevenson — empirical companion thinker working the same diagnosis from inside finance
  • Yanis Varoufakis — the operational political-economic frame on the same questions
  • George Monbiot — environmental and political-economic journalism that connects to the same analysis
  • What Is Socialism? — the broader analytical tradition Blakeley operates inside
  • What Is Neoliberalism? — the policy regime Blakeley's work most directly addresses
  • What Is Distributism? — the surprising structural alternative that shares some of Blakeley's commitments

Plus the framing piece, What Do Ireland's Parties Actually Stand For?, and the full Political Literacy archive.