In the early twentieth century, R. H. Tawney argued that questions of ideology go against the grain of our national psyche. As a country we are “incurious to theory, take fundamentals for granted, and are more interested in the state of the roads than in their place on a map”, he wrote in The Acquisitive Society (1920).

There’s much about our present political moment that further strengthens these practical instincts. The pace of Labour’s political turnaround in recent years means there has not been much space for reflective conversations about the nature of social democracy. But as Tawney went on to say, “it is not enough to follow the road. It is necessary to know where it leads.” 

This maxim is particularly important when in government. At the end of Labour’s last period in office, James Purnell and Graeme Cooke, writing in a 2010 paper for Demos, reflected that New Labour’s “ideological flexibility” brought the party “three major disadvantages in government”. It didn’t help prioritise when faced with difficult choices. It created “blind spots” that left important issues on the back burner. And, with no clear thread to connect policies together, it made it hard to create an enduring electoral coalition.

Keir Starmer himself is dispositionally disinclined towards the ideological – he has repeatedly said there is no such thing as “Starmerism”. What’s more, his government is now under huge and urgent pressure to “deliver change” in the most challenging of circumstances. As such, the bandwidth for big ideas feels even more constrained. 

However, it’s not that the wider party doesn’t have them. The Fabian Society – where I used to work – has always been a key source, home to a rich intellectual tradition that has been central to Labour thinking over the course of its 140-year history. The Fabians are most associated with the big state, ‘democratic collectivism’ of Sidney and Beatrice Webb. However, in a recent Fabian pamphlet, I argued that there are two other strands of the Fabian tradition that are more relevant for the Left today. 

The first is revisionism, whereby each generation of social democrats has sought to consider the appropriate ‘means’ by which their ultimate ‘ends’ can be achieved in modern conditions.

The second strand is the Fabian communitarians – most notably G. D. H. Cole and R. H. Tawney – whose theory of change was rooted in the power of local people and the relationships they form with each other. While communitarianism has long been part of the Fabian story, it has tended to be a subplot. But the big state has been struggling for some time to get to grips with the complex nature of contemporary problems. So the time has come to reverse the balance of history and make the communitarians the mainstream of social democratic ideas today.   

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Historian Tehila Sasson challenges the traditional view that neoliberalism originated on the political right, arguing instead that its roots run through the British Left and the growth of international nonprofits that unintentionally helped legitimise the neoliberal project. Our editor Jonny Gordon-Farleigh interviewed the author to find out more.

JGF: The central provocation of your book, The Solidarity Economy: Nonprofits and the Making of Neoliberalism, is its challenge to the prevailing narrative that neoliberalism originated primarily from the political right.

Instead, you offer an alternative account – one that traces the roots of neoliberalism through the British Left from the 1950s and, in particular, through the growth of the nonprofit sector. By doing so, you illuminate a more complex relationship between the Left and the neoliberal project.

Rather than continuing with a commitment to state-managed economies and the welfare state, parts of the Left shifted toward an approach described as being “in and against the market” – a form of market-based socialism that would advocate for a “distinctively nongovernmental project.“

Could you retrace this historical process that links capitalist development, decolonisation, and the rise of INGOs?

TS: The Solidarity Economy explores how nonprofits – particularly large international aid organisations such as Oxfam, Save the Children, War on Want, and Christian Aid – emerged as key actors in the British, and to some extent global, economy through their development and aid programmes.

Traditionally, these organisations have been studied through the lenses of politics and international governance. Historians, international relations scholars, and anthropologists have often framed NGOs within the broader narrative of "non-governmental governance" that gained prominence in the latter half of the twentieth century. Their activities have also been situated within what historian Charles S. Maier describes as the emergence of alternatives to the "project-state".

My book builds on this scholarship – an essential foundation for the narrative I trace – but seeks to broaden the scope. Rather than viewing these NGOs solely as instruments of governance, I argue that they played a formative role in shaping the British and the global economies. These organisations were not only influenced by economic theories and policies; they also developed economic ideas of their own, like fair trade, and actively shaped economic life through their development and aid initiatives. In doing so, they became integral to the third sector of the British economy.

Historians often refer to organisations like Oxfam and Save the Children as ‘NGOs’ or as ‘charities’. Instead, I use the term ‘nonprofits’ to highlight the unusual positionality these organisations occupy, particularly in how they relate to the world of profit.

On one hand, they hold charitable status and benefit from associated tax exemptions. On the other hand, they actively engage in profit-generating activities, most notably through trading companies they establish and operate. These organisations were key players in shaping the fair trade movement, campaigning for corporate social responsibility, and, at times, calling for consumer boycotts against multinational corporations while simultaneously partnering with other businesses. Some were deeply involved in the distribution of microfinance, while others experimented with models that blurred the line between commerce and ethics. Across these initiatives, they developed a range of practices aimed at being not just economically sustainable but morally justifiable.

A central concern of the book is to explore how these organisations navigated – and often embodied – the tensions at the heart of what is sometimes called "ethical capitalism”.

An interview with Pete Davis: Co-director of the Join or Die documentary and author of Dedicated: The Case for Commitment in an Age of Infinite Browsing

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This is the first in a new series of conversations around the theme of Contemporary Communitarianism. For this issue, STIR’s editor Jonny Gordon-Farleigh speaks to writer and civic advocate Pete Davis about why the decline of local clubs and associations represents a crisis of democracy and what can be done to transform a "gaseous" society into a culture of solidarity.

Robert Macfarlane’s writing has ascended mountain peaks and followed ancient trackways, and his previous book, Underland, delved into the “deep-down dark” of caves, mines, catacombs, and the Onkalo nuclear disposal facility. His latest book, Is a River Alive?, straddles the surface and the subterranean, focusing on three main water bodies: the Rio Cedro, flowing through the ‘cloud forest’ of Los Cedros in Ecuador; the creeks, lagoons, and estuaries of Chennai in Tamil Nadu, India; and the Muteshekau-Shipu, or Magpie River, on the ancestral territory of the Innu Nation, Canada. There is also a chalk river who flows near to Macfarlane’s home in Cambridgeshire, and he brackets the book’s sections with visits to the swelling and subsiding springs. (Note the ‘who’ used throughout the book to move away from the objectifying ‘which’, ‘that’ and ‘it’ ordinarily used for non-human beings). 

At the heart of the book is the titular question, which Macfarlane asks both of himself and the activists, ecologists, and adventurers he meets along the way. He assures the reader that it is not meant rhetorically; though its answer is complex, it is meant seriously with real-world application and consequences. It is also not supposed to be novel – Macfarlane describes it as an “old-growth question”. But it is thoroughly timely. The book comes in the wake of a number of landmark cases of the international ‘Rights of Nature’ movement, in which rivers, forests, and national parks have been granted legal rights and ‘legal personhood’. The Rights of Nature movement is in recognition of the triple planetary crisis we face of climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss, and the urgent need for “radical protection and restoration of watersheds, forests, wetlands and biodiversity”, in the words of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (GARN). The movement also acknowledges the relationship of Indigenous peoples to more-than-human entities, often viewed as part of an interconnected web rather than as resources to control and exploit.

So, can a river be considered a living entity – “life-giving and rights-bearing” – and what would this mean for law, culture, and politics? 

Desecrated waters

“If you find it hard to think of a river as alive, try picturing a dying river or a dead river.”

In 2024, storm overflows in England discharged untreated sewage for a record total of 3,614,427 hours, according to The Rivers Trust. No river in England or Northern Ireland is in ‘good overall health’. The River Lym near where I live was declared “ecologically dead” in 2023 due to intense sewage releases, with the local water company making vague promises of change by 2027. The dire predicament of our rivers has become the norm in recent years. Writing of this rapidly shifting baseline, Macfarlane writes that rivers have become “rivers you cannot drink from without falling ill, which have in turn become rivers you cannot swim in without falling ill”.

The privatisation of water companies in England and Wales has, unsurprisingly, proved shockingly bad for the ecosystems treated merely as an endlessly extractable resource. All over the world, commons laws and practices of sustainable use have been broken to allow authorities and companies to use rivers for monetary gain. Of the rivers Macfarlane spends time with, the waters of Chennai are the sickest: litter, sewage, and heavy-metal pollution have poisoned the rivers almost beyond repair. Yet activists, like the young Yuvan who guides Macfarlane in this section, attempt tirelessly to heal and protect the wounded ecosystems. The cloud forest of Los Cedros, meanwhile, was saved in 2021 by a ruling made in 2008 by Ecuador's Constitutional Assembly, granting nature the right to exist, regenerate, be restored, and be respected. When, nearly 20 years later, a Canadian firm came prospecting the forest for mining, the law protected the forest and river by ruling that mining would be a violation of Ecuador’s constitutional Rights of Nature.