At 30, Grace Blakeley may already have an established career as an economic commentator, but her academic life got off to an inauspicious start.
She was born and raised in “quite a political household” in Basingstoke, England, and remembers being read Communist Manifesto loud as a girl; in the 1980s, her parents traveled to Central America to join the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign, while her grandfather, a trade unionist, spent his life campaigning for workers’ rights while working at Sainsbury’s. When Grace was sent out of class for being disruptive – which happened often – she would spend the rest of her class on a bench outside, working her way through the sections of Marxist theory. “I used to drive my parents, my teachers and pretty much every adult around me around the bend,” she says now, laughing, with the measured diction and sharp enunciation of someone who spent her twenties making cameos. Good morning Great Britain. “I’ve been expelled from school a few times for things like climbing on the roof… When I was diagnosed with ADHD three years ago, it didn’t come as a surprise to anyone.”
Despite her rebelliousness, she won a place to study PPE (philosophy, politics and economics) at St Peter’s College, Oxford, where she put her authority issues to good use by questioning the status quo – and those keen to maintain it – at every moment. play. (Her refreshingly defiant character is still largely intact today; you might recognize her from viral clips in which she went toe-to-toe with Piers Morgan on topics like “mansplaining.”)
If her undergraduate degree was where she blossomed among the dreamy spiers of Oxford (“I’d only wanted to learn about what I wanted to learn, and that’s finally what I had to do”), it’s her Masters in African Studies at St Antony’s. College, also at Oxford, proved a real turning point for her philosophically. “You know, PPE was invented as a course to train the people who would run the British Empire,” she reflects, “whereas when I started my African Studies course, I started learning about independence leaders inspired by socialism, whose countries were effectively decimated by the structure of the global economy.”
Until then she had envisioned a career in international development, but she soon realized that there was much more reason to ‘start a revolution’ in her own country: ‘For example, I read how the City of London facilitates tax avoidance, and allows money laundering on behalf of these terrible armed groups that are messing up the rest of the world.” Before her late twenties, she had published two books delving into the shortcomings of 21st century capitalism: Stolen: How to Save the World from Finance (2019) and The Corona Crash: How the Pandemic Will Change Capitalism (2020).
