A plan for Britain

Plus: Wetherspoons on the moon?!

Jun 10, 2026

It is often, strangely, when political parties are feeling most despondent that new ideas emerge. After the New Labour project came crashing down, for instance, many of the party’s erstwhile intellectuals engaged in the “Blue Labour” debates (blue not, despite common assumption, due to its conservative inflection, but due rather to its founder Maurice Glassman’s depressive mood at the time, encapsulated by his favourite album, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue.)

Labour today is once again kind of blue. It is barely second in the polls, and nothing seems to be going its way. And yet again, Labour luminaries are belatedly debating what they should be doing in government, in response to Tony Blair. We have critiqued some of Blair’s proposals in past Lightbulbs, but at least he has got the party talking. The editorial of Prospect’s new edition (out today) encourages leadership hopefuls to engage seriously with one of the big questions of our time: how to not just manage decline but get the country growing again.

For our cover essay, Nesta CEO Ravi Gurumurthy tackles this question, setting out a governing plan for Labour. In doing so, he looks to Manchester—where the likely next prime minister famously hails from—arguing that the city illustrates “what this country needs”. But while others have treated “Manchesterism” as a byword for increased public ownership, Gurumurthy argues the city’s approach has been more nuanced: “the state does fewer things but does them at the dosage the problem requires.” To elaborate on his essay, Gurumurthy also joins our editor Philip Collins on the Prospect Podcast.

If Andy Burnham does take the keys to Number 10, he has one thing going for him beyond his regional blueprint: low expectations. As Andrew Adonis writes, the United Kingdom is the “new Italy”, now infamous for constant changes of government. So much instability for poor Larry the Downing Street cat. If Burnham could just steer a steady ship for a while, he might change this perception—as Italian PM Giorgia Meloni has done.

While Labour is debating its future, the British right is avoiding such serious conversations in favour of a relentless doomerism about crime, migration and urban life. Even those who are grappling with the failures of the last Tory government, and who have a plan for growth, are being distracted by the “space-imperialist kitsch of right-wing AI memes”, as one Unherd columnist recently put it—such as the half-joking suggestion to put a “Wetherspoons on the moon”. In this month’s mag, I analyse two online trends that exemplify the British right’s increasingly bipolar utopian-dystopian visions: “decline porn” and “anglofuturism”. Warning: prepare for flying taxis and polar bears in the non-existent Croydon water park. It gets pretty weird.

Email your thoughts on Maurice Glassman’s record collection, the true meaning of Manchesterism and whether we should put a Wetherspoons on the moon to ben.clark@prospectmagazine.co.uk.