Robert Skidelsky death – some recollections

The biographer of Keynes in three volumes – Robert Skidelsky – died on April 15, 2026 at the age of 84. As I explain below, Skidelsky was what we consider to be a mainstream ‘deficit dove’, who are Keynesian and Post Keynesian economists that are comfortable with using fiscal deficits to increase economic activity when there is mass unemployment, consider the government must then pursue surpluses on the other side of the cycle to balance out the fiscal position over the full cycle. They couch their recommendations in conservative logic bounded by appropriate movements in the debt to GDP ratio. They are ‘mainstream lite’ and typically oppose Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). As I explain, I met Skildesky in London a few times when MMT was becoming very popular (early in GFC) and we had fundamental disagreements even though he was attracted to certain element of MMT including the Job Guarantee. Here are some recollections.

Early Background

Skildesky’s 1975 book on the British fascist leader – Oswald Mosley – was the first encounter I had with his work (I read it in the late 1970s when I was entering graduate studies).

Mosley hailed from the British gentry and became a Tory MP in 1918, then turned independent because he was opposed to the British policies in Ireland at the time.

He then became a Labour MP in 1926 in a different constituency.

During this period he was a dedicated Fabian socialist and in the 1926 election campaign the Tory press constantly accused him of being a ‘Champagne Socialist’.

Skildesky wrote in his biography of Mosley (pp.159–160):

The papers were full of gossipy items about the wealthy socialist couple frolicking on the Riviera, spending thousands of pounds in renovating their ‘mansion’ and generally living a debauched aristocratic life.

He also was highly dismissive of the British Fascists at the time and thought they were low-rent ‘buffoons’.

With the outbreak of the Great Depression and the rise in mass unemployment, Mosley left the Labour Party in 1930 and lost the seat at the 1931 election.

In 1930, he published the so-called – Mosley Memorandum – which was rejected at the Annual Labour Party Conference in that year and precipitated his exit from Labour and his decision to set up the – New Party (UK).

An April 1931 article in the – Socialist Standard – by Edgar Hardcastle – The Mosley Party. Old Fallacies Re-Furbished – is an interesting commentary and analysis of this period.

The opening paragraph reverberates with the modern day:

One cannot but sympathise with the exasperation of Labour Party members who were promised something new and striking when their party came into office, and now find themselves not even in the position of defending the Government’s actions against criticism, because the Government has, for all practical purposes, not committed any actions. It has just sat tight, apparently paralysed with fear of the consequences should it try to put its programme into operation. As Lady Cynthia Mosley complains, they have had to listen to the Liberal Party smugly reproving the Government for being unprogressive and for allowing itself to be scared into inactivity by the Conservative opposition.

And so it has always been – seemingly.

The party of workers paralysed by the forces of capital.

The Memorandum – or officially – A National Policy – was published by Macmillan and sold for six-pence or around £2.50 today.

The key features were:

1. Public Works: A massive state-funded program to build roads and infrastructure to create jobs.

2. Protectionism: High tariffs to protect British industries from unfair international competition and the creation of an Imperial trading bloc.

3. Credit Expansion: Government-controlled credit and increased public spending to stimulate the economy.

4. Structural Reform: Nationalisation of key industries (like electricity and transport) and increasing pensions and the school-leaving age to reduce the labour surplus.

It proposed a “National Economic Planning Council which would rationalise production and marketing with a view to eliminating waste, overlapping and inefficiency.”

It also would establish “Commodity Boards to control the importation of foreign goods which under-sold any home industry. The object of restricting the entry of cheap foreign goods would be to enable the home industry to be re-organised. Protected industries would have to pay an adequate wage”.

So he was an early critic of what we now call globalisation.

The Memorandum was supported by John Maynard Keynes who wrote that:

I like the spirit which informs the document. A scheme of national economic planning to achieve a right, or at least a better, balance of our industries between the old and the new, between agriculture and manufacture, between home development and foreign investment; and wide executive powers to carry out the details of such a scheme.

Keynes was no Socialist by the way.

Once leaving Labour with several other Labour MPs (who went into the New Party) his attraction to the macroeconomic ideas of John Maynard Keynes defined his way forward.

Right-wing conservatives (like Winston Churchill) tried to duchess his support to rejoin the Tories but only pushed him further into the camp of the fascists.

His European study tour in the early 1930s convinced him that fascism was the way forward given it married Keynesian economics with nationalist policies.

The Great Depression convinced him that laissez-faire Capitalism was defunct.

His dislike of the major parties and the parliamentary dysfunction that they regularly descended into turned him against parliamentary democracy.

And the Labour Party rejection of his National Policy plan convinced him that the traditional workers’ party no longer represented the interests of the working class.

The economic successes of Italy and Germany through strong Keynesian style macroeconomic policies in the early 1930s demonstrated empirically how a strong state with correct policies could function to improve the welfare of the people (minus the Jews and other discriminated against minorities).

In 1932, he founded the British Union of Fascists having been attracted to the antisemitic rantings of Mussolini and Hitler combined with his multiple falling outs with the two major parties.

Like many fascists both in Britain and elsewhere, the macroeconomic ideas of John Maynard Keynes were highly attractive.

The reason for this little detour into British politics in the early 1930s relates to Robert Skildesky.

His 1975 book was sympathetic to Mosley despite the latter becoming an arch-fascist who any progressive would rightly shun.

Skidlesky called Mosley the “first Keynesian in British politics” and a visionary.

He also claimed that the British Union of Fascists, who were a nasty and violent assortment of thugs, were “more sinned against than sinning”.

Skildesky also claimed that Mosley’s antisemitism was an ‘opportunistic development’ to further the political interests and promote his real agenda, the National Policy.

The violence that Mosley provoked against Jews in London’s East End was constructed by Skildesky as being caused by “sections of the Jewish community”.

So when I read that book in my early graduate study years, I was not a fan of Robert Skildesky.

Fast Track 2008

I didn’t give much attention to the 3-volume Keynes biography that were published in 1983, 1992 and 2000, respectively.

I read them but I was not very attracted to Keynes’ work in general, seeing him as part of the gentry and hostile to Marx and Kalecki, even though significant parts of the General Theory were well expressed by Marx in 1863.

While Post Keynesians typically begin with Keynes’ General Theory (1936) in explicating the principle of effective demand, the essential elements underpinning the critique of Say and the modern understanding of involuntary unemployment in a monetary capitalist economy can be found in Marx, particularly in his 1863 work – Theories of Surplus Value.

Please read my blog posts for more discussion on that issue:

1. Marx and MMT – Part 2 (September 28, 2021).

2. (Modern) Marx and MMT – Part 2 (September 30, 2021).

I also thought the work of Polish Marxist economist – Michał Kaleck – who was a contemporary of Keynes and was blocked by the latter in his quest for an academic position in Britain, was a far bettern ‘modern’ extension of Marx than anything Keynes had to offer.

Like Mosley, Skildesky was a party hopper – Labour, then SPD, then Conservatives, after he became an Upper House peer in 1991.

When the GFC arrived with the collapse of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008, the interest in Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) from the media, academics and politicians grew rapidly, not the least because we had been suggesting such a crash was not a matter of if, but when.

After 12-odd years of trying to gain traction, MMT was suddenly flavour of the month and many academic types, sensing an opportunity for personal gain, started to create the impression that they had known the essential aspects of MMT all along.

I received many E-mails in that period from such people, congratulating me on discovering what they already knew.

It was rather distateful to say the least, given that the vast majority of these characters had built careers on an approach to economics that was the exemplar of what MMT was seeking to replace.

Where there was some overlap, one could easily drill a little bit further and find the overlap was superficial at best.

The most overlap came from the ‘deficit doves’ in the Keynesian and Post Keynesian camp who who while comfortable with using fiscal deficits to increase economic activity when there is mass unemployment, couch their recommendations in conservative logic bounded by appropriate movements in the debt to GDP ratio.

They tell us that as long as the ratio is stable there is no problem.

They use the mainstream ‘government budget constraint’ framework which is predicated on the assumption that the currency-issuing government has a financial constraint and that the financial markets are the ultimate arbiters of how large the fiscal deficit can go.

In other words, the anathema of MMT principles.

Skildesky was in that camp and in 2009 he sought me out when I was in London for work commitments.

I met with him twice during that visit – being polite.

We disagreed on several major points of macroeconomic theory although he was interested in the Job Guarantee idea.

He had more success, I think, with the American MMT economists who seemed to think he was a like-mind, which I considered came about because they are much more oriented to the work of Keynes than I am.

He later wrote a Project Syndicate article (August 15, 2019) – The Case for a Guaranteed Job (behind a paywall).

I note in that article he refers to me as “Warren Mitchell”.

Unfortunately, he considered it “Keynes with a Twist” and this instigated his critique of MMT.

He noted that public works programs have had a long tradition but as the 1960s arrived fell into “two problems”.

First, he channelled Milton Friedman’s attack on fiscal intervention based on the idea that the government can never really time the economic cycle properly and by the time fiscal injections are made, the downturn is over and the injection just overheats the economy.

Second, fiscal deficits are inflationary and he quoted James Callaghan who as British Labour PM told the 1976 Annual Labour Conference in Blackpool that:

We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending … I tell you in all candor that that option no longer exists, and insofar as it ever did exist it only worked by … injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy.

This was the classic abandonment of full employment by the British Labour Party and was the result of Callaghan and his Chancellor Denis Healey becoming infested with Monetarist thinking.

Margaret Thatcher was not the first Monetarist government – Callaghan and Co were.

We analysed that in detail in our 2017 book – Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World (Pluto Books, September 2017).

Skildesky was not a hard-core Monetarist – but was a deficit dove.

He considered MMT to be radical and wrote that Keynes said that:

Economic prosperity [in a capitalist society] is excessively dependent on a political and social atmosphere which is congenial to the average businessman.

And

Substitute “financial markets” for “average businessman” and you have the world as it is, not as MMT theorists would like it to be.

The City of London rules argument – which is one of the areas I disagreed with him when we met in London some years before that article was written.

The ‘argument’ though is a core belief (paranoia) of the British Labour party and most Post Keynesian economists.

Skildesky also considered that the likes of Kenneth Rogoff and Lawrence Summers were correct in their critique of MMT saying that “MMT is inherently inflationary”:

They have a point, of course: it seems naive to believe that taxes can be increased whenever necessary to stop inflation.

He also wrote that “I am not persuaded that MMT is the best way to challenge the orthodox theory of sound finance” and echoed the mainstream claims that democracy would collapse if governments didn’t accept a financial constraint:

To say that there is no theoretical reason why sovereigns need to “apply to the people” for money is correct, but it fails to consider why the rules of “sound finance” were invented in the first place. The rules were put in place precisely to prevent governments from spending money at will. That governments should apply to parliaments (ultimately, “the people”) for “supply” is part of the theory of the limited state.

This goes back to the claims made by famous US mainstream economist Paul Samuelson who gave an interview with Mark Blaug in 1988 film – John Maynard Keynes – Life – ideas – Legacy – and said:

I think there is an element of truth in the view that the superstition that the budget must be balanced at all times … Once it is debunked takes away one of the bulwarks that every society must have against expenditure out of control. There must be discipline in the allocation of resources or you will have … anarchistic chaos and inefficiency. And one of the functions of old fashioned religion was to scare people by sometimes what might be regarded as myths into behaving in a way that long-run civilised life requires.

A ready admission that economists think that lies are better than truth when advancing a particular agenda and putting a brake on political volition.

Conclusion

So while I wasn’t attracted to Skildesky’s work in the 1970s when I first encountered it, that disdain was reinforced when I came into contact with him and his ideas on my work in the 2000s.

But another death of an economist that was one generation before me, pushes our generation one step closer to the exit.

That is enough for today!

(c) Copyright 2026 William Mitchell. All Rights Reserved.