The media appears to have woken up to the fact that there is a right-wing, profoundly fascist threat to stability within the UK. Events over the weekend in Dover and Portsmouth have achieved this outcome. A few people in black have been noticed.

Rightly, politicians are condemning the actions of those who took part in these demonstrations, as do I, unreservedly.

So far, however, I have seen no indication that either the media or our politicians know how to respond to the underlying anger that fuels these demonstrations.

I am not denying that those who are attending them are angry, racist, and intensely agitated by the arrival of those they claim to be illegal immigrants into the UK, even though anyone has the legal right to claim asylum in this country, however they might arrive. The sentiments in question are real and ugly, as is what those who attend these protests suggest they desire. They promote the exact opposite of the actions that used to create a patriotic country made up of migrants who had found a way to assimilate into a community with others of differing backgrounds to create a community of common interest. This is what the UK is, and will be. There is no alternative without extreme violence.

That said, I strongly suspect the reasons behind this unrest are not what they are claimed to be, but the grievances are real, nonetheless. I think those grievances arise from the sense of alienation that vast numbers of people feel in this country, and many others, as a consequence of a political and economic system that has deliberately left them behind.

This is what neoliberalism chose to do. For those old enough to remember, the plan was clear from the start. When Thatcher reached office in 1979, her first goal was to destroy British industry and much of the country's resilience. She started by destroying our industrial base, and her totemic victory arrived when she defeated the miners. Mining might, and for environmental reasons should, have come to an end in the UK, but not in the way that she went about it. She waged a deliberate war on the working class, and the communities that hosted many of the industries in which working-class people then worked, and they have never recovered.

At the same time, having destroyed physical capital, she went out of her way to promote the illusion associated with the accumulation of financial wealth. House prices were deliberately inflated, but the construction of houses for those who needed them declined.

Share valuations were increased, not least through the promotion of privatisation.  The skimming off of resulting profits, rents and interest charges promoted the well-being of the City of London, but did nothing for those who had to suffer the resulting higher costs and declining services.

At the same time, the hatred of public services became visceral and has now become toxic. Everywhere, they are portrayed as inefficient and failing when that is not true when properly understood. Even the SNP has now fallen for this mantra.

And underpinning all this was one idea, which is that there is no such thing as society. Thatcher meant what she said on this issue: her belief was that each person was an isolated identity and their fate or fortune was entirely of their own creation. She felt that if some suffered misfortune, that was their own fault, whilst others accumulated the appearance of wealth from exploiting their situation.

The whole of this neoliberal era has been surrounded by the creation of rules intended to limit the role of government.

That is the purpose of fiscal rules.

It is the purpose of central bank independence, and the associated wholly artificial rules with regard to the control of inflation and inflation targeting.

The full funding rule, which demands that the government not fund itself from its central bank, which has always been a possibility, was designed solely to pass power over government funding and interest rates to the City of London.

Rules on so-called government debt ratios, largely based upon decidedly dodgy academic work, were meant to achieve similar outcomes.

The neoliberal era has been defined by the creation of artificial, unsustainable and indefensible growth in financial wealth that has arisen from exploitation and artificial constraints having been imposed upon government to prevent it acting on behalf of those in need.

The reason why we are in crisis now is quite simple. People have rumbled all the falsehoods that neoliberals have said, but still our politicians repeat them. John Healey talked yesterday about the need for Labour to base its economic policies on the principles of 'sound finance', meaning he is determined to uphold neoliberalism and not address this country's needs.

In Germany, as I explained yesterday, the constitutional debt brake is one of the biggest contributing factors to the rise of the AfD.

Across Europe, the foundations of fascism are to be found in the limits on government action embedded in the Maastricht Treaty of 1992.

In the USA, the paranoia about debt, and the continual need for votes to approve increasing debt limits, has provided the mechanism to prevent action required to relieve the suffering of many.

As a result, in all these countries, as well as in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and others who have followed the neoliberal way, and in the many other countries in the world on which the IMF and World Bank imposed these requirements through the impact of the Washington Consensus, the harm is very real and still too little told.

So what needs to be done?

The answer is obvious and is staring us in the face, and yet it would appear that almost no journalist or politician can see it.

We need to abandon neoliberalism. That is it.

We need to stop the stupid rules.

We need to end the focus on finance and its supposed constraints.

We need to put resources, people, their skills, their ambitions and hopes to use.

We have to do so within the limits of our planet.

The consequence would be obvious. We would stop talking about what we cannot do and start talking about what is possible, because so much is, but the mechanisms to put it in place are denied precisely because it is said that funding is not available, when that is completely stupid. There is no limit to the amount of money that we can create in our society if, and I stress the point, the goal is simply to put resources to use, and not to spend in ways where resources are unavailable.

The epoch of neoliberalism is over. It is very obviously failing in real time, right in front of us, but so powerful is the indoctrination that most with power cannot see it: they still think it butters their bread when the reality is that it is destroying the very systems that make the bread, let alone the butter, possible.

If we want to beat fascism, the answer is easy: scrap neoliberalism. I can put it no more clearly than that. There is no other way. Neoliberalism has brought us to our knees. Whilst few articulate it this way, if we are to tackle the issues we face and so defeat the far-right by addressing the grievances on which it is based, this is what we must do.

PDF of article