Swinson's search for a new economics

The ex-Lib Dem leader believes real progress is being made towards reimagining capitalism, reports Matthew Bishop

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Is altruism having a moment? Park your scepticism and consider the following: Labour just made an almighty U-turn on welfare reform. Mark Carney, a champion of upholding values in business, is in power in Canada. Gifts from the top 50 US philanthropists grew by roughly a third in 2024. And ex-politicians are getting involved in charity.

"We are in this moment of rupture, where the old economic consensus around neoliberalism has lost credibility and is going away but the new economic paradigm has not yet become clear," says Jo Swinson.

"The irony is that the defenders of the neoliberal status quo seem to be centre-left governments in different parts of the world." That, she argues, is one reason the left is struggling: "People have sussed out that this economic system doesn't work." By contrast, "the part of the right that is being successful has stopped defending neoliberalism, because they know that it's not popular and that defending it is not going to win them votes."

For the past five years, having swapped politics for philanthropy, Swinson has been leading Partners for a New Economy (P4NE). This is a collaborative effort by a group of charitable foundations to develop a better paradigm than neoliberalism's market-led globalisation. In five decades of dominating economic policymaking, neoliberalism lifted millions out of poverty but at the expense of widening inequalities and the devastation of climate and nature.

Granted, we've been here before. Philanthropic efforts to create a better economic system go back to at least Victorians like William Morris and William Lever, while the limitations of GDP as a measure were laid bare by Robert F Kennedy in the 1960s. Clearly, the dream of an alternative dies hard.