The centre-left has no economic story. Industrial policy offers one. 

Something has gone wrong with centre-left politics, and the problem is bigger than any single election.

Across the United States, Britain, France, and Germany, populist movements are dismantling the working-class coalitions that centre-left parties spent generations building. The details differ by country, but the pattern does not. Parties that once represented working people are being abandoned by them. 

The centre-left conundrum 

 The centre-left bloc has become the home of the credentialed, the comfortable, and the connected. Even out of power, they carry the baggage of incumbency. The result is a profound political trap: the voters they need and have traditionally represented are the ones demanding something different. What makes it harder still is that centre-left parties were architects of the very globalisation that hollowed out their base, which makes the reckoning harder to face and harder to sell. 

I saw this from the inside. In 2024, I worked on the headquarters staff of Vice President Kamala Harris's campaign, on the team that helped craft the economic advertisements we ran throughout the cycle. We knew what voters cared about: grocery prices, jobs, housing, and healthcare. We spoke to every one of those concerns. But we were treating symptoms, not the disease. A post-election autopsy found that 53 percent of Americans believed the country needed "a major change and a shock to the system." When electorates demand transformation, promising to manage the status quo more carefully is not a campaign strategy, it is a concession speech. 

Studying alongside policy practitioners from around the world at the Blavatnik School of Government has made one thing clear: this is not a problem unique to America. The demand for something fundamentally different is everywhere. So is the centre-left's inability to answer it. The best policies are never just solutions; they are stories about what a society is building and why it matters. The centre-left has forgotten this 

An industrial narrative

When centre-left parties talk about the economy, they fall back on the same answers: tax policy, entitlements, spending. A laundry list with no story about what is being built. Industrial policy offers an opportunity to tell a new and bigger story. The government makes deliberate bets on the industries that will define economic and national security, absorbs the early-stage risk that no private investor will touch, then steps back and lets the private sector compete. What this produces is not just a set of policies but a narrative. 

There is a national mission voters can rally around, strategic industries they can point to, and a mechanism that rewards competition rather than dependency. Most importantly, there is a role for the citizen: not as a dependent, but as a builder. A tax credit doesn't offer that. 

The clearest illustration of what that story looks like in practice is electric vehicles in China. A decade ago, BYD Auto was a Chinese battery manufacturer almost nobody outside the industry had heard of. Today it outsells Tesla globally. Beijing made electric vehicles a national mission, provided infrastructure and capital, then let dozens of companies fight it out. Most failed but BYD survived because it built better batteries. Its workforce has nearly tripled since 2021 to approximately one million employees. Workers were not just filling jobs, they were part of a national project. China has replicated this model for 5G, drones, and solar panels. 

The sequencing is what matters most. Beijing absorbed risk when the technology was unproven, the market uncertain, and the capital requirements too enormous for any private investor. Only once that early-stage risk was underwritten did competition enter. The government did not pick a winner and protect it indefinitely. It created the conditions for winners to emerge, then got out of the way. 

Western governments have proven they can do this too when they have the political will. After the Space Shuttle retired in 2011, NASA funded SpaceX and Boeing to develop competing vehicles rather than building one itself. Today the United States accounts for over 86 percent of all mass launched into orbit. The government created the conditions. The market delivered the results. The point is not to replicate Beijing's model, but to recognise that deliberate public bets on strategic industries produce outcomes no private investor would have funded alone. 

Two other economic approaches compete for centre-left attention: cash transfers and antitrust policies which are designed to promote competition. Both have policy merit but neither works as a message. Cash transfers tell voters they are economically obsolete and offer a cheque. Antitrust tells voters they are powerless and offers litigation. Both cast citizens as problems to be managed whereas industrial policy treats them as people to be mobilised. 

The service economy is split into two tiers: high-paying jobs requiring degrees in expensive cities, low-paying jobs everywhere else. Manufacturing offered middle-class wages in communities that didn't need to be tech hubs to thrive. Centre-left and centre-right governments let that bargain collapse. Industrial policy is how you rebuild it. A skilled worker in Germany's automotive industry earns roughly €65,000 a year without a university degree. A retail worker in the same city earns half that. That gap is not inevitable; it is the result of political choices. 

Industrial policy also offers a way out of the centre-left's climate trap. Clean energy is not simply a moral cause to champion; it is an economic opportunity to harness. Electric vehicles require factories and steel. Solar panels require chemical processing. Batteries require mining and refining capacity. For too long, the centre-left has framed decarbonisation as a sacrifice worth making. It has pushed workers straight into the populist right’s arms. Industrial policy reframes it as a project worth joining. 

In 1968, Robert F Kennedy warned that to be without work is to be without use to one's fellow citizens — to be invisible, relevant to no one, with no hope for the future. That warning went unheeded. Across advanced economies, deindustrialisation hollowed out communities that the economy passed over and politics forgot. 

Those communities are still waiting for an economic story in Pennsylvania and Lancashire, in the Ruhr and the outer suburbs of Paris. Their dream is not for better management of the status quo, but for a story with a vision of what comes next and how they will participate  in building it.