For about a decade we thought we had cracked it. The end of boom and bust. The ‘end of history’. Balanced, sustainable growth and the inevitable march of progress would follow. But all that came to an abrupt halt when the banks crashed in 2008. Since then, the political debate on both sides of the Atlantic has crystallised around the question of whether ‘progress’ might be possible after all.

At the Centre for Progressive Policy, the idea of progress and what progressive politics and economics might look like are of central interest to us. As a non-partisan think tank we look to identify practical, data-driven solutions to policy problems, focussed on the question of how we make economic growth more inclusive.

Inclusive growth asserts a new structural economic doctrine – one which seeks to tackle inequality and poverty as an integral part of achieving more sustainable, quality growth. Inclusive growth is about moving away from the ‘grow now, redistribute later’ of our current approach to create broad-based prosperity as an intrinsic outcome.

In this essay, CPP director Charlotte Alldritt explores what this means in practice.