Neoliberalism’s apotheosis? Class, capital and the ideological development of the UK Labour Party’s planning reforms

Planning reform is a central part of the new UK Labour government’s programme. This article shows how their proposed reforms draw upon a neoliberal problematisation of planning developed by several think tanks, where the planning system is seen as creating delay, as overly regulatory and as providing too much space for deliberation. The article shows that Labour draws on this problematisation while developing its own solutions through a series of institutional fixes as part of its turn towards ‘modern supply-side economics’. The article argues that the foregrounding of planning reform in Labour’s programme is an attempt to align the interests of rentier and finance capital with those of the new petite bourgeoisie. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0 .