At 30 years old, Grace Blakeley may already have a well-established career as an economic commentator, but her academic life got off to an inauspicious start.
Born and raised in “a pretty political household” in Basingstoke, England, she remembers being read the Communist Manifesto aloud as a girl; in the ’80s, 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 holding down a job at Sainsbury’s. When Grace got thrown out of class for being disruptive—a frequent occurrence—she would spend the rest of her lesson sitting on a bench outside, working her way through volumes of Marxist theory. “I used to drive my parents, my teachers, pretty much every adult around me round the bend,” she says with a laugh now, speaking with the measured diction and crisp enunciation of someone who’s spent her 20s making cameos on Good Morning Britain. “I got expelled a few times from school for things like climbing onto the roof… When I was diagnosed with ADHD three years ago, it came as a surprise to precisely no one.”
Regardless of said 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 questioning the status quo—and those keen to maintain it—at every turn. (Her refreshingly defiant nature is still very much intact today; you may recognize her from viral clips in which she’s gone toe-to-toe with Piers Morgan on subjects such as “mansplaining”.)
If she thrived among the dreaming spires of Oxford during her Bachelor’s degree (“I had only ever wanted to learn about what I wanted to learn about, and that’s finally what I got to do”), it’s her Masters in African Studies at St Antony’s College, also at Oxford, that proved a real turning point for her philosophically. “You know, PPE as a course was invented to train the people who would be going off to run the British Empire,” she reflects, “whereas when I began doing my African Studies course, I started learning about independence leaders inspired by socialism, whose countries were effectively being decimated by the structure of the global economy.”
Up until that point, she had envisioned a career in international development, but soon realized there was far more cause to “start a revolution” in her own country: “I was reading about how, for example, the City of London facilitates tax avoidance, and allows money laundering on behalf of these horrendous armed groups that are screwing over the rest of the world.” Before the end of her 20s, she had published two books delving into 21st-century capitalism’s failings: Stolen: How to Save the World from Financialisation (2019) and The Corona Crash: How the Pandemic Will Change Capitalism (2020).