Is neoliberalism at last unravelling in Britain?

Professor Tony Payne  - Director of SPERI

Labour definitely has a big enough constituency of people hurt by recession and austerity to which to appeal.  It has moved on from New Labour and has developed a veritable array of useful economic policies.  But it hasn’t succeeded in crafting a convincing story about the nature of a new British growth model grounded in the ‘responsible capitalism’ once articulated by Ed Miliband.  Its self-confidence has been damaged by its presence in office when the party stopped in 2008 and it has failed to explain to the British people that the crisis was a crisis of the market and that only emergency action by the last Labour government prevented a recession from being a depression.

The Lib Dems can be briefly discussed, because they now have nothing distinctive to say to the debate about the British political economy – a striking shift from the years 2003-9 when Vince Cable was warning presciently of the risks of the accelerating deregulation of finance.

UKIP is really interesting.  Although there is much that is nasty about the party and its programme for British exit from the EU would be catastrophic for many sectors of the economy, it is in fact the only political party in England speaking directly to the egregious levels of inequality that have come to characterise the Anglo-liberal growth model.  Many parts of England (and Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland for that matter) were left out of the growth party generated by the Britain’s post-Thatcher embrace of globalisation – and they resent it.  UKIP muddles this with nostalgia for a 1950s England that has irredeemably gone, and is interested only in English manifestations of this discontent, but at least it touches it.  UKIP is conservative and radical at the same time.

The SNP’s near-victory in the Scottish referendum drew extensively on a strong measure of cultural nationalism, fuelled by longstanding differences in key institutions in Scotland from the rest of Britain.  Yet what was truly remarkable, and new, was the support that it won for independence in working-class Glasgow and other Labour heartlands.  This was not just a Scottish response to British misrule, but also perhaps even more a popular class response to the biased governance of a narrow ruling class – passionate evidence that the people of old industrial cities like Glasgow no longer had much of a role in the British political economy and felt angry about it.

Finally, the Greens for their part have been drawing on a growing sense amongst more and more people that economic growth, however delivered, can’t just be allowed to resume as normal business – that in effect a radically different political economy is needed in the context of escalating environmental threat and intensifying climate instability.  The Greens are as yet an inchoate political force, but their impact is unlikely to lessen.

What does all of this add up to?  It is obvious: a political economy that has failed its people and a politics that is lashing about wildly trying to develop a coherent response.  Politics is always fundamentally a politics of political economy – the play of agents responding to and seeking to manage structural changes in society and the economy.  This is the politics that we need now to be talking about in Britain.  Everything else is either fluff or derivative of this core crisis.

One final point, a point of conjecture still at this moment: do these various trends show that, at last, neoliberalism is unravelling in Britain, and unravelling, what is more, from below?  Many have noted that the anticipated anti-neoliberal moment did not occur after 2008-9; instead, the mainstream political elite turned to either the actual pursuit of neoliberal austerity (the Conservatives and Lib Dems) or its mimicry (Labour).  However, in politics change often begins at the bottom and forces its way to the political surface.  Possibly, just possibly, the British people in their apparently contradictory reactions to the crisis are now signalling that they have had enough of neoliberalism and want something that actually delivers to their aspirations and needs.