Martin Wolf has written in the Financial Times today about Britain's political instability. He notes that the country has had six prime ministers since 2010, that productivity growth has roughly halved since the 2008 financial crisis, and that gilt yields are now higher than those in Italy. His diagnosis is that the UK is suffering economic and political weakness. To some extent, he is not wrong.
But then comes his solution, and it is precisely the package of fiscal discipline, structural reform, and deregulation that has governed British economic policy for four decades and delivered the stagnation he is describing.
Not once does Wolf ask whether the neoliberal framework he so clearly worships is itself the problem. That question is simply not available to him.
Instead, Wolf uses the term "infantile populism" to describe those who question neoliberal fiscal orthodoxy or believe public need should take precedence over bond market sentiment.
That phrase is revealing. That is because the genuinely infantile position in this piece is his own. His insistence that a failed model simply needs better implementation, that the answer to four decades of disappointment is discipline and more reform, and that anyone who thinks differently is throwing a tantrum is what is truly infantile. What it reveals is a refusal on Wolf's part to grow up and face the real world, which is not as his childish neoliberal fantasy suggests it might be.
A country with its own currency and its own central bank is not, in fact, powerless before the bond markets, or anything else. But Wolf cannot engage with that argument and that reality. It falls outside the terms his worldview permits. And so he falls back on what is, quite literally in his case, childish abuse.
The real ungovernable fantasy Wolf reveals is not British politics. It is the belief that neoliberalism just needs another chance.
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You can substitute the bond markets with the currency markets if you like. Or are believing currency markets can be tamed by capital controls?
Sorry, but what does your comment mean?
T. A. R. A.!
Might other relevant factors include?
1) A sychophantic main stream media
2) A state education set up which effectively suppresses dynamic/critical/lateral thinking and questioning and answers assessment?
3) Political parties who are more concerned with their well-being rather thah that of the citizenry and their children
Not to be pedantic……but why point to state education? The author of the article and nearly all the others we see written in the press are, I’m going presume, for good reason, privately educated. They all teach only neo lib economics.
Much state education, esp. at secondary level, is now undertaken by Academies and the people who run them can set the curriculum subject to certain restrictions. My grandson went to the academy run by JCB. He didn’t do any humanities at GCSE. The rationale for academies is that they offer an alternative to ‘state education’. The governors often have opinions ( I hear ) taken from the Daily Telegraph and want those values reflected. The American Charter school program was in many ways a model for Education Reform Act and is a privatisation of the education system -with the state paying. There may be some good examples but it feels another neo-liberal policy. I think it is an area which needs to be closely examined and not nodded through.
There is still a national curriculum and exam system. I am not sure there is as much freedom as you imply.
So agreed.
One of the infantile attributes of Neo-liberalism is not to recognise human frailty such as greed (monopolism) as a problem and turn it into something ‘rational’ instead. It negates thousands of years of what we know about human behaviour and has spent the last 50 years destroying post war progressive policy meant to police it.
The other major fault is to have this desire for everyone to get along and ‘agree’ – as long as it is about a limited number of Neo-lib ‘iron laws’ – markets, a small state (just enough to make theft legally possible and protect private assets) etc. This particular trait is actually where the Neo-lib authoritarian streak comes in and it throttles bona fide democracy which holds that freedom is always an ongoing variable, a contestable, negotiable, changing conversation in search of a fair distribution of means and individual agency within a moral framework called ‘society’. That is too much hard work for the get rich merchants of Neo-liberalism. So, it must be dispensed with.
Wolf has always worn sheep’s clothing – wringing his hands at disaster and catastrophe whilst cheering the whole charade on from his pulpit in the FT. Poor, deluded man that he is. It’s pure Thatcherism isn’t it ‘ Oh, we didn’t go far enough, we were too cautious’, blah blah. What do they say in politics these days: ‘Never admit that you were wrong’. Nothing to discuss then? Yeah Martin, if you say so. Dream on. It’s obviously everyone else’s fault isn’t it but not your faulty ideology.
He thinks we must live with TINA – There is no alternative.
He’s wrong. Think TIARA – There Is a Radical Alternative. (I just made that up).
And thank you
Great! Let’s have a TIARA boom today.
(Music hall fan)
That is bad….
[…] businesses over the last 30 years. Any pretence to the contrary is just that: it is a pretence. As I have already noted this morning, the FT is heavily into promoting neoliberal pretence […]
‘The mind, like a parachute, functions only when open’ went the quote I saw years ago. I try, but when I started reading your blog, I was amazed how many little neoliberal orthodoxies I had imbibed over the years even while I was thinking ‘there must be a better way’. It has been said that neoliberalism is something many people have faith in, as if it were a religion – Mr Wolf as you say cannot see things any other way, and likely never talks to the barista in the coffee shop about how they find life.
Embrac3d neoliberalism is a real threat to the well-being of many.
I was listening the Any Questions on Radio 4 this weekend, which had another poorly balanced panel – Conservative activist Mark Littlewood (PPE at Oxford and formerly IEA, not Popular Conservativism), Conservative MP Damien Hinds (also Oxford PPE), Labour MP Chris Curtis (chair of a Labour group that wants to remove barriers to unleash growth, formerly a pollster at YouGov) and Mariella Frostrup (who I guess was considered a leftish columnist who would balance Littlewood).
There was little dissent to Littlewood’s depressing predictable opening position, that the government needs to shrink (although he did not say which things it should not do, but I assume he wants to cut spending in social security and health and education and housing and leave people to fend for themselves like a modern Scrooge – are there no prisons, are there no workhouses?) and cut taxes to encourage entrepreneurs and growth. The same dogmatic prescription in that had failed to deliver significant growth for almost 20 years.
I know Mark.
Comrade Littlewood as I call him.
He is boringly predictable
According to Wolf, the punishment beatings must continue until morale and growth improve, and if they don’t improve it’s because everyone is doing it wrong. So that’s all right then.
Mr Murphy, this is bullying of the worst sort – accusing an old gent of being infantile – shame on you & what is worse he is of course right “fiscal discipline, structural reform, and deregulation” this is what will make Britian great again and deliver such successes as: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/may/25/south-east-water-homes-kent-sussex-supply-outages
I wonder if Wolfie (like a bag of shrunk wrapped prunes that you can never sell) was one of those affected – here’s hoping. 🙂
Worth noting that Italian bond yields are where they are because the ECB buying large numbers of them in the secondary market post 2010. The EU justifies buying Eurozone member state bonds (corporate and governemnt) within its neoliberal frame within a myriad of bond buying programmes with various excuses, they chop and change them from time to time. current ones are CSPP, PSPP, ABSPP and CBPP3. Previous ones included SMP, CBPP1 and CBPP2 and I’ve doubtless missed some. The public sector purchase programme (PSPP) is the largest
Graph showing ECB bond holdings under main current programmes since 2015
Academies (and academy chains, MATs) are not currently bound by the national curriculum.
https://www.gov.uk/national-curriculum
That freedom can be and is used both for good and for bad ends.
It looks like our increasingly authoritarian control freak of a gov’t intends to stamp out such dangerous subversive freedoms.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/childrens-wellbeing-and-schools-bill-2024-policy-summary
I’m not sure how this affects fee-paying private schools. I suspect not at all.