I want to see the end of neoliberalism and everything it stands for because until we do, we won't live in a world where people matter.
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This is the transcript:
It's been possible to move from centre right to far left in UK politics in the course of a lifetime and never change your opinion.
To suggest that this is true, I looked at a letter in the New Statesman published a year ago, but drawn to my attention recently. It was written by a chap called Dr. Stephen Watkins, and he said this in 1962:
I was a conservative. I believed privilege could only be justified by service, high taxes on very high incomes were necessary to prevent an entrepreneurial economy becoming a rentier economy, and Keynesian growth would finance public service improvements and a welfare state that steadily reduced inequality. I was suspicious of ideologically driven large-scale change. These were the mainstream policies of the Conservative Macmillan government at the time. In sixty years, I have moved from centre right to hard left without changing my mind.
Dr. Stephen Watkins is not alone in having noticed this phenomenon. I've experienced it as well. When I was a younger man, younger than Dr. Stephen Watkins is, but nonetheless, somebody who could remember politics in the late 1960s and very definitely in the 1970s, it was possible to be a Conservative and believe in the provision by the state of a social safety net, and to believe in a mixed economy, and to believe that it was good for the country as a whole, that we redistributed wealth.
There were people in the Conservative party who were thoroughly decent in their approach towards society at large, those who were in need, and the requirement for a balanced economy where dogma did not rule every decision, but finding the right solution did.
And then we got neoliberalism. And neoliberalism is a dogmatic political philosophy. It's not based upon any facts. It's based upon a set of conditions that have been created by economists so that their mathematical models work. They have absolutely no relationship with reality at all.
Let me give you a simple example of the conditions that are required to apply so that neoliberalism works.
You are meant to have perfect knowledge of what is going to happen from now until the end of time, or at least the end of time as far as you are concerned.
And you will never change your mind about anything between now and then because your preferences are immovable. If you now choose something from a menu when you go in, you will never change your preference ever again. If you like a particular television programme, you will never go off it. And this is, of course, completely absurd.
Back in the day when Macmillan was in office, and I'm not saying he was a great Prime minister, but he did build a mighty large number of council houses - an achievement, which has been rarely matched except by Harold Wilson since then - back in the day when he was Prime Minister there were people who were looking to make the world a better place, and not just for the wealthy. In fact, really not for the wealthy, because the wealthy already knew that they were incredibly well off. Instead, there were people in all the political parties who were trying to make a world, who were trying to make the world a better place for everyone in the UK as a whole.
Now, there was one very good reason for that. Those parties were dominated by men who had been officers in the main in World War II, and they had realized that it was their duty on returning home to create a world that was better for the people who had served with and for them.
And that was what motivated both parties at the time. They wanted this outcome, which was a world that was fairer, not equal, but fairer for everyone. And the consequence was we literally got that.
And yet now we don't. Now we have this dogmatic hatred of equality.
We have a dogmatic love of wealth.
We have a dogmatic hatred of government on what it can achieve.
We have a love of markets and the inequality that they can create, plus the externalities that they can create, like climate change.
We have a world that is based upon dogma and not on decency or care.
Dr. Stephen Watkins is right. He was a conservative in 1962. I knew plenty of people who were Conservatives when I was at university, for example. There were some who were the early Thatcherites, and they were pretty obnoxious at the time. There were others who were perfectly fine, who I could cooperate with and work with.
But these days, everybody has moved right. And I mean everybody, because Labour is now in the obnoxious bracket. Labour ranks high amongst those who believe that it is their duty to worship the market above all else, and as a consequence, they do not care about people.
If you do care, you're now on the hard left, except I would add a caveat. I'm not on the hard left.
Like Stephen Watkins, I have hardly changed my political opinions since I was a young man. I was a social democrat, then - a person who believed in pragmatic solutions to real-world problems and who was willing to go out to look for them and who believed that markets had a role, but so did the state.
Who believed that finding the right balance between the two was the thing that was necessary to achieve wellbeing for everyone to the greatest possible degree in society.
Who believed that the state had a duty to care for those whom the market had failed.
Who believed the state had a duty to care for the planet when there was no one else to act as its representative.
Those things do not make you hard left. They make you a decent human being. They make you a person who cares. They make you someone who can recognize the need and the right to have empathy in your own life. That's what good politics should be about.
The hard right - what the Conservatives and Labour have become - is what is wrong with British politics and what is wrong with politics around the world. And until we get rid of neoliberalism, we won't be rid of this politics.
I want to see the end of neoliberalism and everything it stands for because until we do, we won't live in a world where people matter.
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“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
“The time is always right to do what is right.”
“Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’”
“True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice.”
“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”
All statements by Dr Martin Luther King Jr, who died on this day in 1968.
Thanks
Dr King visited Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church in 1961, and gave a sermon. In 1965, on his way to pick up the Nobel Peace Prize, Dr King stopped off at St Paul’s Cathedral and gave a sermon. The sermon was the same on each occasion. It was “The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life”.
If you and you contributors can spare 40 minutes or so and would like to listen to it today, in memory of Dr King, below is a link to a recording of this sermon, made in the US. In this country, we’re not in the habit of having events that celebrate Dr King. Perhaps that needs to change.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlvFpmkAAkM
Noted to watch later.
Thank you.
Those politicians returning from the war truly realised that we were well and truly ‘in it together’.
They saw that to defend yourself from Fascism and aggression you had to be inter-dependent. Social status meant nothing, the working class/middle class and toffs all working together.
That is the actual basis of all human success, and it will be the end of it if it is not re-asserted.
History has taught me that there has been a war over monopolising wealth since Adam was a lad. Human societies everywhere know about the abuse of monopoly power; the destructive power of debt. They also know that power – money – corrupts anyone and has to be watched. It makes humans inhuman and behave like Gods, lacking empathy, out of touch and exceptional.
Neo-liberalism is what Frederic Bastiat described as such:
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it”.
For all I know, Bastiat was talking about men of the state thinking about taxation as he was seen as a classical liberal economist. But as is typical of many Liberal and Libertarian thinkers (James Buchanan basically accused the public sector of monopolising behaviour in his Public Choice theories but typically ignored corporate monopolism) they always unknowingly reveal their shortsightedness with regard to human nature, such is their adherence to the concept of the sovereign individual.
Great post.
Thanks
Appreciated.
[…] have already noted this morning that we need to be rid of neoliberalism if we are to have politics that cares about the well-being […]
This resonates deeply. It’s sobering how staying rooted in compassion, fairness, and pragmatism can now be framed as “radical left” when once it was the common ground of post-war politics. The Overton window hasn’t just shifted — it’s been yanked rightward by decades of market dogma and deregulation zealotry. That someone like Dr. Watkins can stand still and watch the entire political spectrum slide past him speaks volumes. The problem isn’t that people have changed — it’s that politics has lost its moral centre. Until we stop mistaking economic theory for human truth, we’ll keep mistaking cruelty for competence.
Thanks
It’s not just that the overton window has been shifted rightwards – even when we find ourselves on the left we forget we’re all really moderates. My French neighbour reminded me of this recently, when I described Mélenchon, the leader of LFI, now France’s biggest left political party, as ‘extreme left’. But he isn’t, my neieghbour objected – he doesn’t believe in revolution, doesn’t want to nationalise everything…. He brought me up short – I had simply forgotten the long European left negotiation between ‘democratic socialism’ and ‘revolutionary socialism’ – and that I, for all my feeling of now being far to the left of UK Labour, find myself still on the ‘moderate’ side of what are really just mainstream, parliamentarian social democrats like Mélenchon – or Corbyn.
Agreed
I like so much of what you have said here – perceptive and well argued.
One niggle: ‘hard left’.
At Normandy, my uncle, who had previous experience of using (rigid) ladders, was ordered, wearing full battle kit, to be the first down a ‘rope’ ladder from an unsteady troop ship into a landing craft being tossed about by big waves. He was to be the unit’s machine gunner. The enemy concentrated their fire on him as the most dangerous opponent. A gentle man, he was required to aim to kill people. He and many thousands like him wanted a free NHS. They voted for the Attlee policies which established the welfare state while the right wing press (‘hard’ right? – as the press still is in the main) campaigned against the government.
On 30th March, you posed the question, ‘Why won’t Labour tax wealth?’. A Corbyn government would have done so but he had supported the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign. McSweeney, who claimed to have identified Starmer as a potential party leader, labelled Corbyn as ‘hard left’ to oust him. [Few of us can imagine the full legacy of the holocaust. Just to mention it brings tears to my eyes, but genocide of Palestinians cannot be an optimum response.]
Corbyn’s policies were moderate compared with those of some other European countries. They were not ‘hard left’.
‘The Fraud – Keir Starmer, Labour Together, and the Crisis of British Democracy’ by Paul Holden and ‘Weaponising Anti-Semitism – How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn’ by Asa Winstanley claim to throw light on these matters.
Thanks
It may not that people ‘believe’ the tenets of neolib, but rather they know not to question it if they want to get anywhere.
It could be that we are already in an authoritarian society where ‘thought’ and ‘discussion’ (the quaker meeting house) is beyond the pale.
That Monbiot and Jones still get exposure in MSM is a glimmer of hope – but they and their ilk – Murphy et al – only get a tiny fraction of the exposure given to the Tufton street mafia and Faragists.
Indeed. Fifty years ago, when teenage me was first developing political awareness, I proudly identified as a One Nation Conservative. A lifetime of of living and learning with my eyes open has pushed me somewhere left of where I was at as a smug and naive grammar school boy, but the ground beneath me has shifted far more dramatically to the right in that time. Now I find myself well to the left of the Labour Party, and it seems more like them than me who has changed most.
Living offshore, I do have a local explicitly social democratic party that I am able to actively support. However, we are essentially a municipality with some devolved powers, and have to dance to English tunes. So I am deeply displeased with Labour becoming the Tory B team, and fearful that the reaction to them will be the triumph of the neo-Nazi A team.
I am the social democrat I was as a teenager – athough rather more developed in my thinking, but essetially similar in outlook. And yet, apparently, I have moved markedly leftward. I have not.
Thank you to Andrew Broadbent, above.
With regard to Monbiot, I can help explain why he gets some airing.
He, a few years older, and I went to the same school.
He and his cousins Nigella and Dominic Lawson are heirs to the Lyon tea and ice cream fortune. Lyon ice cream also employed Thatcher as a chemist.
Monbiot’s father and grandfather were Tory local officials.
Monbiot is not as progressive as people think.
“neoliberalism is a dogmatic political philosophy. It’s not based upon any facts.”
I agree with the overall thrust of the blog 100%.
But
Perhaps we need to hone our definitions. “Late Soviet Britain” A.Innes, is not an easy read. But,… page 24:
“Soviet & neoliberal regiemes implemented strategies and policies rooted in arguments about unviersal truths of the political economy that are not just utopian but tautological”
the eviceration continues over nearly 400 pages.
page 29: “neoclassical economics resides in a tautological form of reasoning. .. it creates conclusions & neoliberal strategies that are valid first & foremost (only) by their logical form”.
By the time Mrs Innes has finished with neoliberalism there is nowt left – only an imbecile would think it has anything to offer…………..it was based on a Hayek categroy error and has been wrong in every way posible ever since.
Agreed
I have read much of the book – still not all…