The Richard J Murphy YouTube Channel
Debate ammunition: The fear of losing
Funding the Future | Issue | May 2026
Today's topic
Dear England, neoliberalism and the fear of losing.
The core argument
The greatest economic threat facing Britain is not inflation, debt, or stagnation: it is fear. Neoliberalism has deliberately cultivated a culture in which failure is treated as personal shame, uncertainty is treated as an enemy to be eliminated, and individuals, businesses, and governments are paralysed by the dread of being judged inadequate.
The antidote is not courage but curiosity, and Britain's public life will not recover until it replaces the operating system of fear with one built around what is possible rather than what might go wrong.
The argument structure
Step 1 — The diagnosis: Britain's defining economic problem is not inflation, debt, or low growth; it is fear. The English football team before Southgate embodied this exactly: world-class talent paralysed not by lack of ability but by dread of failure and personal blame. Fear and performance are fundamentally incompatible, and that incompatibility extends across the whole of British public life.
Step 2 — The ideological cause: Neoliberalism manufactured this culture of fear deliberately. By insisting that perfection and maximum optimisation are available to everyone, it turned ordinary failure into personal shame. Those who profit from the system use the myth of personal responsibility to blame those who suffer from exploitation, thereby disguising the extraction of wealth as the natural consequence of individual inadequacy.
Step 3 — The real antidote: The opposite of fear is not courage; it is curiosity. Where fear closes down possibilities and demands certainty, curiosity opens possibilities and accepts uncertainty. The same contrast applies to social order: the opposite of chaos is not control, through targets, audits, and league tables, but coherence, which emerges from within people and institutions rather than being imposed from outside. Control is inherently fragile; coherence is genuinely resilient.
Step 4 — What a curiosity-led society looks like: Governments that ask what is possible rather than what might go wrong; businesses that invest in an uncertain future rather than hoard against it; public services built around purpose rather than targets; politicians who tell the truth about trade-offs. This is not idealism. It is what functional societies already look like when they are working, and it is what Britain must recover.
Their argument → your rebuttal
| They say | Your response |
|---|---|
| “Britain's problem is low productivity and lack of investment, not some vague cultural condition like ‘fear'. You cannot fix the economy with psychology.” | Fear is not vague; it has specific, measurable consequences. Businesses that refuse to invest because they “dislike uncertainty” are demonstrating fear in action. Governments that will not borrow for productive investment because of bond-market anxiety are paralysed by fear. Name one developed economy that grew by hoarding, retreating, and refusing to take risks. |
| “Neoliberalism delivered rising living standards for decades. It was a culture of aspiration, not blame.” | Rising living standards in the postwar decades had nothing to do with neoliberalism, which only took hold from 1979. What followed was wage stagnation, deindustrialisation, rising inequality, and the dismantling of the safety net that had previously freed people to take risks. The aspiration was real; the system that claimed credit for it was parasitic on what preceded it. |
| “Gareth Southgate did not win the World Cup or the Euros. His record proves that changing a team's culture does not deliver results.” | England reached a World Cup semi-final, two European Championship finals, and a Nations League semi-final under Southgate: performances without precedent for a generation. The argument is not that curiosity guarantees victory, but that fear guarantees underperformance. Southgate proved that a frightened team performs far below its potential. That is precisely the point about the British economy. |
| “Public services need targets and accountability. Without performance indicators, how do you know whether money is being well spent?” | The evidence from decades of targets, audits, and league tables in the NHS, schools, and social care is that institutions lose sight of their actual purpose in the struggle to hit the numbers. Good outcomes happen when professionals are trusted and properly resourced. Audit culture does not create good performance; it creates gaming, burnout, and the appearance of order over the reality of it. |
The one-liner
“Fear is not a side-effect of the British economic model; it is the mechanism by which that model keeps people in their place, and until we replace it with curiosity, neither government nor business nor individuals will perform anywhere near what they are actually capable of.”
Further reading
| Post | Date | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
Dear England, neoliberalism and the fear of losing |
May 2026 | The blog post accompanying this video, sets out the core argument in full. |
Why are governments so frightened? |
April 2025 | Analyses how neoliberal ideology has left governments incapacitated by fear of markets and of their own populations. |
Neoliberalism is dying: what's next? |
Jan 2026 | Traces the historical construction of neoliberalism and why the postwar welfare state offered genuine freedom from fear. |
Neoliberal economics is fiction |
Mar 2026 | Critiques the intellectual incoherence of neoclassical economics and its suppression of curiosity. |
The far-right fear education |
Jul 2025 | Argues that attacks on universities and curricula are designed to create ignorance as a tool of control. |
Schools are killing creativity |
Jun 2024 | Examines how the UK education system suppresses creative thinking in favour of measurable outputs. |
When might we have child-focused education? |
Dec 2024 | Critiques target-driven schooling and asks when education will be rebuilt around children rather than metrics. |
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I very much like the ‘their argument- your rebuttal’ section. This articulates the reason to believe in a different way forward. ‘Their arguments’ are very predictable and have apparent power as the resident thinking. Having a response/challenge/antidote laid out is a very skilful tool
Thanks
Teaching people to think and behave.. classic State control
Wow.
I know you are a troll but this is amazing when I am doing the exact opposite of what you claim.
Take today’s stupid comment award
@brisn mccloud
“Teaching people to think and behave.. classic State control”?
An oxymoron, if not straightforwardly moronic, comment, since if you teach someone to think, and to behave on the basis of that thinking, then the very last thing you are doing is controlling them.
Unless the thinking and independence are false. But in that case, the teaching is false, because it is not based on freedom, but on control. Real education is never about control, but about liberation.
The true relationship between the teacher and the taught is that of the loving parent: as a parent your job is to make yourself irrelevant, because your offspring can function on their own, without your help, because of the lessons you have taught them.
This is the very opposite of control. It is something much subtler and and more profound, encapsulated in the words influence and example.
You get it, Andrew. Thank you
Thank you, Richard. This and the related YT video felt like the first bright warm day after a long winter.
Not to excuse but to understand them, I like to extend the fear drive to include those who promote and profit from neoliberalism. What other than colossal fear explains their behaviour? Greed? Wanton disregard for others? Absolute power corrupts absolutely? Thirst for control? The need to compete and win? The incessant need to ‘out-rich’ others? Sure. And dark fear underlies it all. I think, down deep, we share the same core fears: “I am alone in the world,” “There’s not enough,” and “I am threatened.” Together these fuel strong needs to protect, control (or avoid), and amass. Right or wrong, this approach to leads me to curiosity: How much does fighting them entrench their fears? How can we help them find the crack in their psyches where the light gets in (HT to Leonard Cohen)? What seeds of curiosity can they nurture? If we don’t have contact with these folks, how can our curiosity, leadership, and inspiration reach them?
I so enjoy you reminding me of curiosity as the antidote.
In your corner,
Michael
Many thanks.
Read my third post on pedagogy tomorrow to understand what pleasure your comment brings to me.
To address specifically audits and targets, they may be important in various cases, but you can definitely see perverse outcomes. For example, dishonesty that only exists to claim meeting targets, a blame culture that seeks to find someone else to be responsible for not meeting targets, and clear needs ignored because they are not adequately represented by targets.
Firstly, the set of metrics should always be subject to review and improvement, and second there can be a particular issue with arbitrary targets rather than sliding measures of performance. If they are defined sensibly, to treat moderate changes as moderate and not create cliff edges, then they are more likely to be useful.
An example I’ve seen regularly of unreasonable outcomes is with delayed trains. Holding a connection may reduce how much people are delayed on average (particularly when most of the people to a destination would be on the train that may miss its connection) but operators pay compensation according to Delay Repay thresholds and evaluated on proportions of late services. This means they’re penalised for reducing overall delays by holding a connection more than a few minutes so they don’t.
I don’t think the answer is not having metrics. I think the answer is having better metrics, and to keep aiming to improve the metrics as well as the performance being evaluated. In an economy we can reasonably evaluate things like impact on unemployment, percentages in relative or absolute poverty, healthy lifespan, etc. Metrics and auditing can be useful. But only if they’re asking the right questions.