Cambridge Economic Policy Group: Beheading a Turbulent Priest

The Godley-Cripps Cambridge Economic Policy Group (CEPG) of the Department of Applied Economics (DAE) was effectively terminated by the abrupt and unexpected refusal by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) to continue to fund its policy-oriented macroeconomic modelling research. The closure of the CEPG cannot be treated as just some wayward project application turned down—it was a landmark intervention that epitomised the turn to Thatcherism, dovetailing with the agendas of several other stakeholders, be they professional rivals to the CEPG outside Cambridge, but then also with the hostile strategies of the Hahn-Matthews orthodox axis with its own axe to grind and ambitions of dominance to pursue within the Faculty of Economics in Cambridge. This chapter unravels the occluded and complex story of an ostensibly simple event. The first part of the narration highlights some relevant features of the wider national context and political conjuncture that form the backdrop against which the specific episode occurs. The spotlight then shifts to the SSRC, the scene of action. Here, the quick decision of the SSRC to terminate CEPG funding is dissected forensically to investigate its antecedents; the post-mortem reveals that behind the hostile SSRC decision lay a lengthy trail leading to a complex network of multiple stakeholders whose combined interests came to be well served through the coup de grace delivered by the SSRC then under the direction of Michael Posner, himself a Cambridge economist. Pulling together the many floating pieces of the puzzle confirms that, as with an iceberg, what is directly visible is but a minor fraction of the whole story. As such, this rendition, albeit speculative in parts about the shape of the submerged sections of the iceberg, also serves as a necessary corrective to the received internal narratives on the fall of the Cambridge heterodox traditions which have tended to focus, almost exclusively, on methodological and technical issues of CEPG’s research ignoring deeper political and ideological dimensions that might account for the hostility towards the CEPG team and its high-profile radical policy-oriented research.