Burnham needs to look forward. (Derek Hudson/Getty)
Neoliberalism has the rather strange distinction of being declared dead for nearly as long as it has been alive. As far back as 1998, Marxism Today, the magazine that had done more than any other to shape the British Left’s ideas about Margaret Thatcher’s crusade, returned with a special one-off issue, seven years after it closed its doors.
Opening the issue was an expansive and historically astute essay by Eric Hobsbawm, in which the historian charts the ascendency of neoliberalism as a governing doctrine in Britain, a doctrine that had taken first Thatcher and then Tony Blair to No. 10. Forged in the crisis-ridden Seventies, neoliberalism served to insulate the workings of the market from political control. It also created new forms of individualism, which undercut the collective solidarity that has formed the basis of the old labor movement.
Yet by 1998, a year into Blair’s first term, things seemed to be changing. The late Nineties saw financial crises in the once-booming economies of East and South East Asia, while in Europe and the US, the market economy was now producing increasingly unequal societies, as manufacturing jobs were offshored and communities decimated.
The special issue’s cover gave some clue as to what the writers of Marxism Today thought of New Labour’s Thatcher tribute act. Splashed in lurid red, and set over an image of a distinctly awkward and toothy looking Blair, was a single word: “Wrong”. For Hobsbawm, seemingly the only person who couldn’t see the way the wind was blowing was the man in No. 10. “If there is any way of losing the next election,” he wrote, “it is by not recognizing that the age of neo-liberalism is over.”
We know how that went. Now, nearly three decades on, we have a prime minister who is finally saying what none have said before: that neoliberal orthodoxy has failed the country. Andy Burnham’s speech at the Labour party conference in Liverpool may have been mawkish and light on detail. But it was remarkably radical in its forthright rejection of Thatcherism, with the Prime Minister proclaiming that “Britain has been on the wrong path for a long time”, before listing a litany of neoliberal ills from privatization to austerity.
Whether Burnham will be successful in stopping the rot remains to be seen; so far, nothing that Labour has announced has signaled the level of ambition needed to fundamentally reshape Britain’s ailing and deindustrialized economy. It will take more than cheap buses and electoral reform to undo the damage of 40 years of Thatcherism. Neoliberalism, it must be remembered, entailed a radical overhaul of the state, the economy and even personal identity. To overturn it will require an equally ambitious project.
As Hobsbawm’s essay implies, neoliberalism easily outlived its obituarists. Just how did it last so long? The easy answer is that Thatcher won. Her electoral success may have been as much the product of events as it was of her skills as a politician — in 1983, for instance, she relied on the warm glow of Mark VIII torpedoes in the South Atlantic, and on a divided opposition split further by the formation of the SDP — but you can’t argue with three electoral triumphs. Besides, success, by its very nature, can force the opposition to fight on terrain of your choosing. So much so, in fact, that by the early 2000s the New Labour stalwart Peter Mandelson was moved to declare that “we are all Thatcherites now”.
But there was something deeper at work too. As Hobsbawm himself concedes, part of the success of Thatcherism was its strain of autonomy. It answered a previously unfulfilled wish on the part of the electorate, not least a desire to see fundamental changes made to a statist system that appeared both remote and unresponsive to their needs. In this way, Thatcher was able to draw on what a number of historians have called “popular individualism”.
This new individualism emerged during the Seventies in reaction to the hierarchies and inequalities of postwar Britain, and served to challenge them in more or less political terms. That decade saw the rise of new forms of mass politics in the feminist movement; in the growth of new forms of anti-racist organizing; and in radical forms of grassroots action within the previously hierarchical trade unions. Popular individualism also took more conservative guises, not least in the emergence of new modes of consumerism — think Habitat furniture, and the craze for dinner parties and DIY home improvements — as well as in the generalized and much remarked upon decline of social and political deference.
Importantly, these were not the products of Thatcherism; if anything, she was the product of them. Yet Thatcher herself skillfully exploited these forces, promising to give people a stake in the new system she was both formed from and was, in turn, creating. Nowhere is this clearer than housing. Thatcher’s Right to Buy scheme was part of the New Right’s promise to create a “property-owning democracy”, a foil for statist postwar social democracy. In the decade from 1980 alone, some 1.3 million council houses were sold at huge discounts.
In creating a new class of property owners, Thatcher struck a new political bargain with the electorate: give up the state-backed stability of the postwar decades, and in return enjoy home ownership and asset price inflation. All the while, Thatcher told a new story about ordinary life. The council tenant became an owner, even a landlord, while workers became shareholders. Dependence was now shameful; in place of an out-of-touch state, markets, we were told, would respond to what people actually wanted. In doing so, the relationship between citizen and the state was fundamentally refigured, while new voter blocs had a material stake in the order’s success. In this way, Thatcherism created not just a political settlement, but whole new political constituencies too.
Think, here, of “Essex man”. A term coined by Simon Heffer in The Telegraph in 1990, it described a kind of voter who had become increasingly influential over the past decade. As Heffer put it, Essex man was “young, industrious, mildly brutish and culturally barren”, a nouveau riche ex-Cockney working in the get-rich-quick City and now voting Conservative. To really hammer the point home, the image accompanying Heffer’s story showed an Essex Man standing squat and square in front of his shiny motor and his newly purchased ex-council house.
Yet if Hobsbawm was premature in his diagnosis of neoliberalism’s death — its demographic roots were far too deep for any single crisis to upend — Burnham’s seems belated. Since 2008, if not earlier, it has been clear that the old Thatcherite settlement is broken. Nothing has so far replaced it. No one seems to have either the will or the vision to forge a new economic consensus.
Perhaps this is why both the Right and the Left seem so haunted by the past. Burnham’s conference speech was brimming with nostalgic references to the stability of the Fifties and Sixties, when workers could earn a decent wage, and when ordinary people could feel confident that their lives were getting better. That postwar settlement produced the NHS; strong trade unions built on the foundations of solid industrial employment; and steady, even historically unprecedented, levels of economic growth.
For the Right, on the other hand, the golden age came in the Eighties, when Britain got its act together and the country reclaimed its confidence. Forget the miners’ strike and the dole queues: this was the decade when you could make it big, when wealth was made and flaunted, when Britain and its people were liberated from the albatross of national decline. All this happened before the advent of mass immigration. For much of the Right today, it is Blairism that is the wound, with the “Blairite revolution” ushering in a new statism of quangos and red tape while the world’s poor were allowed free entry.
Of course, there is a grain of truth here. Some people really did do well in the Eighties, and Blair really did produce a complex para-state system of regulations and subsidies that the energy historian Arthur Downing has called “Zombie neoliberalism”. But there is much missing, too. If anything, Thatcher was a response to the crises of the late Seventies, which saw the start of what the economic historian Robert Brenner has called the “long downturn”. Increasing international competition had, by then, begun putting a heavy downward pressure on profits, while the financialization of the global economy saw assets sweated even as investments dwindled.
Thatcher’s sell-off of state-owned enterprises, alongside a program of austerity and a steep rise in unemployment, bought some relief from the increasingly grim economic picture. But as Harold Macmillan put it, there’s only so much family silver to be hawked before the cupboards are finally bare. Another dose of Thatcherite medicine, with a bonfire of the quangos and a new free-market push, would therefore only deepen the malaise.
Likewise, the image of the relatively stable and prosperous postwar compact may play well against our increasingly precarious present — but there is no returning to postwar years. As the chancellor John Healey remarked in his own conference speech, “without growth, there is no social democracy”, a comment more apt than perhaps Healey himself knew. The political and economic conditions that confront the Chancellor and his boss are far more constrained than those faced by any of their predecessors. Britain’s economy, as economists like Brett Christophers have shown, is increasingly a rentier economy, with essential infrastructure converted into assets optimized for stable returns with minimal capital expenditure. For their part, climate and energy-induced inflation will only make these problems more acute.
Burnham therefore faces an unenviable task. A decade of austerity has failed to kickstart growth. The country’s privatized infrastructure is decaying, while industrial policy and nationalism are returning on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet if there’s clearly a broad public appetite for the state to do something about energy prices, water, rail and rents, Burnham’s politics must be based on more than fine words alone. The vacuum created by the fracturing of the neoliberal consensus must, instead, be filled by a democratic, ambitious and municipal-minded Left.
In this, there are lessons to be learned from the Thatcherite experience: to truly secure its revolution, a renewed Left must create its own political constituencies. A good start would be to relieve some of the pressure on renters. A wave of council house building — prompting a cultural shift that sees such accommodation as more than a last resort — would not only allow hundreds of thousands of people to live more stable and comfortable lives. It would also create a coalition of voters with a material stake in the system, just as Thatcher’s owner-occupiers once did. The same might be said of quality public transport; stable and clean energy; and indeed Burnham’s much-vaunted national care service.
At any rate, the stakes could not be higher. Failure from the Left now would leave the doors open to a Right intent on dismantling the last vestiges of the state, selling it off to whichever private contractor or crypto billionaire happened to be around at the time. God knows what Marxism Today would have to say about that.