We posted this short YouTube video this evening:
Neoliberalism promised prosperity—but it's delivering obesity, anxiety, and inequality. Public services are failing, mental health is collapsing, and ultra-processed food dominates our lives. Is it time we faced the truth and built something better?
There is no audio version of this video.
This is the transcript:
Neoliberalism promises prosperity through free markets and small government, but what it's actually delivering is decline: physical, mental, and social.
Governments are spending more on healthcare, but people aren't getting better.
That's because neoliberal healthcare systems are treating symptoms and not causes.
The cause that they're not addressing is ultra-processed food.
Ultra-processed food dominates our diets, is cheap, profitable, and aggressively marketed. It's fueling rising rates of obesity, diabetes, and cancer.
And we call this option to buy those foods a choice, even though, actually, the option of health is disappearing as a consequence.
That's the type of illusion that neoliberalism sustains.
And the damage isn't just to our physical health.
Neoliberalism also creates anxiety through constant scarcity, and the damage is to our mental health.
Wages are stagnating.
Housing is becoming unaffordable, and public services are being cut.
Meanwhile, the wealth of a few is skyrocketing.
Politicians are still insisting that the neoliberal system works, but public services aren't failing; they're being starved of money by the neoliberal culture.
We're told the state can't afford to care, and yet apparently it can always find the money to clean up the mess that neoliberalism creates. We've normalised crisis management as policy, but inequality can never sustain well-being, and inequality is what we've got.
Neoliberalism is consuming our health, our hope, and our future. It's time to say it, and it's time to say it very clearly. We need to build something better.
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This summarises neoliberal from George Monbiot’s book:
“The coup in Chile was the experiment upon which Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan both drew when they came to power, respectively in 1979 and 1981. Pinochet’s economic program was devised and overseen by neoliberal economists from the University of Chicago, and enthusiastically supported by Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and the Neoliberal International. Released from the restraints of democracy, Pinochet’s economists were able to implement the entire neoliberal package: Chileans who resisted were imprisoned, tortured, or murdered. The nation’s resources were systematically plundered, especially its principal asset, its copper mines. Unrestrained by either democratic resistance or state regulation, American and European corporations were free to take what they wanted, often without payment. Redistributive taxes and progressive spending were terminated. Inequality skyrocketed. The inevitable result was a series of extreme economic crises, from which Chile has yet to recover. As the rich grew richer, the poor worked harder.” — The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism (& How It Came to Control Your Life) by George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison (2025) https://amzn.eu/d/4Aqoath
Thanks
David A Harvey’s “A Brief History of Neoliberalism” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005) makes a similar observation but places greater emphasis on the financial crisis in New York that began in 1975; anthropologist David Greaber offers a nice summary (full content linked at the end):
“The crisis began with the city teetering on the edge of fiscal default. After the federal government refused to provide a bailout and investment bankers refused to roll over the debt, New York was driven to technical bankruptcy. Creditors then proceeded to form what they called the Municipal Assistance Corporation, an entity independent of the city government and hence unaccountable to voters, that as a condition of rescuing the city began to remake its political landscape. One must bear in mind that at the time New York was a kind of enclave of social democracy in America. It had not only the most extensive rent control in the country but America’s most unionized workforce and most extensive public services and even maintained its only free public university. In the name of balancing the budget, the MAC broke the power of the municipal unions, slashed services, rolled back pensions and job security, offered enormous tax cuts to business and developers, and began to restructure the very shape of city government.
[…]
[T]he history of New York […] shows that, once the process of social triage is already accepted as a fait accompli, politicians can often quite readily win elections on law-and-order tickets, promising to protect middle and working-class citizens from the chaos and violence that such policies invariably unleash. In New York, the election of Rudy Giuliani in the 1990s was only the culmination of a long degeneration of politics into an obsession with violence and crime—essentially, with cleaning up the mess made in the 1970s. The pattern was to be reproduced worldwide, again and again, in city after city.”
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-neoliberalism
Thanks
Yes, the unelected nobody President Ford, accurately described by LB Johnson as unable to fart and chew gum at the same time, was ‘persuaded’ not to bail out New York. Another pointer perhaps to who ultimately benefitted from the defenestration of Nixon and why.
There’s an excellent review of that Monbiot/Hutchison pamphlet here
https://insider.iea.org.uk/p/book-review-the-secret-history-of
Please could we have less reference links to the likes of this neoliberalistic company, almost an oxymoron in itself.
Instead how about
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/455534/the-invisible-doctrine-by-hutchison-george-monbiot-and-peter/9781802062694
Hang on! Apparently neoliberalism is under threat! Well, according to this guy anyway…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZHE0xuhB4s&t=452s
Strap in for some nonsense, though.
Full disclosure: I have not yet watched through the whole thing (I have my limits to how much of this I can take in one go), so maybe I missed something insightful. I ha’e me doots, though.
He has spouted nonsense for Tufton Street for years.
It cannot be said enough. Bravo!
The only crisis is when the rich feel threatened – even by their own greed and short-termism.
Dear Richard,
I’ve long appreciated your work on tax justice, the Green New Deal, and your clear explanation that the UK, as a currency issuer, faces real resource limits—not financial ones. Your writing has been foundational in helping people understand that the government doesn’t need to “borrow” in its own currency.
I wanted to raise one point for discussion—about the Job Guarantee and immigration policy.
A Job Guarantee is arguably the most powerful automatic stabiliser available in a sovereign economy. But for it to work as a macro buffer stock, it needs to respond to domestic business cycles. If there’s an unlimited inflow of labour, especially from lower-wage regions, the JG risks becoming a magnet—not a stabiliser. It could then decouple from the economic cycle, lose its inflation-anchoring function, and face enormous political resistance.
To be clear, this isn’t about rejecting migration or embracing nationalist rhetoric. It’s about ensuring that the JG functions properly and commands public trust. Migration must be planned and sequenced, just like we plan energy use or public infrastructure. We can still have immigration—but it must be compatible with a stable macroeconomic framework.
I think we agree that policy must work in the real world. And in today’s political climate, a JG without residency-based eligibility risks being torn down before it gets off the ground.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. I think your influence could help make a JG not only economically sound, but politically viable too.
I wrote this some time ago.
“There is absolutely no necessary relationship between modern monetary theory and a jobs guarantee, or any other left of centre economic policy come to that. MMT describes how the economy works. But if it is assumed that the object of managing the economy is the creation of full employment then these issues are related in the sense that it is obvious that modern monetary theory does permit the government to pursue a policy of full employment at fair wages if that is its wish. In that sense the job guarantee and MMT are intimately related, and are logical partners in the process of managing the economy to fulfil the needs of society, but this does not, of course, prevent there being the provision of other aspects to a social safety net. Nor does this link prevent a government that does not want to deliver full employment using the ideas implicit in MMT; it will just simply need to be held to account for why it would wish to choose unemployment as a policy option rather than full employment.”
https://braveneweurope.com/richard-murphy-mythbuster-modern-monetary-theory
JG is a great iodea on a blackboard.
In realoty it is a non-starter – there aren’t the jobs to turn on an off. Lags mean the guarantee cannot be real. That is the problem.
As to messing with interest rates having long and variable lags there are extremely “credible identification strategies” that show that drum brakes slow down a car precisely as expected.
However we replaced drum brakes with modern carbon fibre disk brakes because the braking effect is superior, more precise and far more reliable over time.
We prefer to give poor people a job than rich people a bung, and operating that way stabilises the system faster, more accurately and to a measurably greater extent.
Why would you want to reject a clearly technically superior approach?
I like it.
Thank you and well said, Richard.
May I add desperation.
So far this year, nearly 50 people from overseas have been arrested for bringing drugs to Mauritius.
Last week, a thirty something British single mum and her six year old son were arrested. Both had drugs on them. They are being held in a house, not a prison. The impact on the child is being minimised. A cousin, not involved, is a social worker and aware of the case.
Half a dozen retired French couples have also been arrested. They are in prison.
All admit to acting as mules due to financial distress. Mauritius, for so long a land of emigrants, is stunned.
Neoliberalism comes at a considerable price.
Thank you Richard, pithy perfection, will share this neoliberalism in a nutshell 🙂
“Housing is becoming unaffordable, and public services are being cut.
Meanwhile, the wealth of a few is skyrocketing.”
Both symptoms. I apologise fro posting this link twice:
https://www.politico.eu/article/britain-crossroads-finance-industry-global-adjustment-trade-deficit-capital/
but it provides a rationale for for the two points ref housing & wealth & various other ills.
In the case of Monbiot, I think he does a fine job, but I prefer my demolitions (of neoliberalism) more structured & in language that cannot be dismissed; thus “Late Soviet Britain” Innes. (Monbiot ain’t an economist, Innes is & obvs our host on this site).
Ultimately, change will only come by an assault (metaphorically speaking) on the political bastion – the way forward had been pointed by events in New York. We cannot go on as we are.
“Governments are spending more on healthcare” while simultaneously spending less on Public Health, which is where prevention used to be centered. NHS is centrally funded, Public Health is local government funded, so 10+ years of local government funding cuts has meant 10+ years of Public Health initiatives cuts. Then there’s the question of how much NHS funding is going to private providers, with their jealously-guarded massive profits. Labour talks about investing in the NHS with no acknowledgement of the financial burden the last Labour government inflicted on the NHS (& schools, & ???) with PPP.
Additionally, governments’ (Conservative & Labour) insistance that Covid is over means that since 2021’s “Vax and relax” they have ignored the continuing toll of sickness on everyone, with the result for eg ~30% higher sickness rate in the NHS now than pre-2020, with all the knock-on effects on understaffed wards and patients unable to access healthcare in a timely manner. And, having ignored public health solutions to airborne infections like proper ventilation and filters (except for Parliament!) they continue to narrowly assess the cost-benefit value of vaccines, so the vast majority of us aren’t eligible for them.
Wes Streeting talks about the NHS moving to a preventative healthcare modes, while ignoring the inequality/poverty drivers of ill health as well as any talk of actual Public Health generally. Liberalism seems to me to also drive silo thinking in government departments, not the joined-up thinking we need to solve the complex and inter-linked problems we have in health, as in so many other areas.