A missed opportunity

I’m black and I’m pagan, I’m gay and I’m left and I’m free, I’m a non-fundamentalist environmentalist, Please don’t bother me.” And one of the finest examples of alliances of solidarity was during Thatcher’s vicious attack on the National Union of Mineworkers as the largest surviving organised labour union, and it almost brought her down: “Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners”, “Black People Support the Miners”, “Women Support the Miners” …

Manchester’s imposing Victorian town hall opened its doors and offered a critical communicative space for the people. We organised collectively from local groups to international movements, meeting in identity groups, forming theory from experience, rising up to become politically conscious and determined to change the world. It was the time of new social movements: women, Black, ‘dis’ability, LGBTQ, greens and peace protesters across the world rose in solidarity to strike out for social change around identity and culture, adding ‘White’ feminist thought and Black women’s wisdom on intersectionality to the class struggle. We had a hard time making sense of it all. We needed the security of compartments, fixed boundaries rather than these new intersecting, overlapping, overlaying, fluid complexities that defined an issue in relation to its opposite. This left us stuck when we considered ‘White’ women’s experience in relation to Black women’s or ‘dis’abled people’s, or sexual preference … let alone dealing with environmental issues and class. We often found ourselves ranking each other in terms of multiple, disjointed oppressions or even locking horns or running away from the pain of it all, as we did when we tried to form alliances around women’s action, Black and ‘White’, or where it intersected with class. We didn’t have the benefit of today’s insights into ‘White’ privilege and the role of stigma as a neoliberal class project within the complexity of intersectionality … but just as Paulo Freire transformed our understanding, we paved the way for these ideas to evolve.

A missed opportunity

Margaret Thatcher was leader of the Conservative Party in the UK from 1979 to 1990, and, during that short period of time, the face of the UK changed beyond recognition. The previous decade, 1968 to 1978, had been pivotal. Society was at its most equal. As Danny Dorling (2018b: 32) points out, this was a moment when we could have chosen to go down a different route, making different decisions based on values that reflect human and environmental flourishing, such as creating a sovereign wealth fund for future generations based on oil like Norway, or we could have been leaders in science and technology like Finland,

or could have been as environmentally conscious as the Danes. But, no, we allowed different choices to be made by the Thatcher government that led us to slide abruptly from being the second most equal country in Europe in 1978, when we had good comprehensive schools, good housing, full employment and a rapidly diminishing deference to the class system, to being the most unequal country in Europe by 2015 (Dorling, 2018b). Caught like rabbits in the headlights, spellbound, we were unable to come up with a critique or a counternarrative to the Thatcher proposal. Grace Blakeley refers to the powerful capitalist narratives laden with emotive language – freedom, creativity, dynamism – with the promise that working people would have more power over their lives (Blakeley, 2021: 49). The reality has been a concentration of power and wealth into the hands of the few defined by very different terms – inequality, corruption, crisis.

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated these trends, delivering super-corporations like Amazon monopoly shares over the retail sector and extraordinary profits, with Jeff Bezos’ wealth growing by $75 billion in 2020 alone. (Blakeley, 2021: 49)

There is a need to understand the nature of neoliberalism more fully. Slobodian challenges the story of the ‘new’ right, posturing to the poor by claiming to believe in the people, nationhood and culture while at the same time reaping the harvest of the injustices of poverty, inequality and discrimination that they planted in the first place. The market fundamentalism that defines neoliberal capitalism is evident in right-wing populist politics from the US to the UK to Austria as ‘mutant strains of neoliberalism’ (Slobodian, 2021: 67).

What we have witnessed in the last few years is not so much the clash of opposites as the public surfacing of a long-simmering dispute in the capitalist camp about what is necessary to keep the free market alive. As irony would have it, the conflict that split the so-called globalists from the populists erupted first in the 1990s – at the very moment when many claimed that neoliberal ideas had conquered the world. (Slobodian, 2021: 67)

Slobodian’s point is that history is now revealing not global capitalism beyond the nation state, but that new right populist politics is simply a front to cover the same neoliberal ideology that Hayek, who remains an icon on both sides of the neoliberal/populist divide, still promotes. The nation state is being rethought to restrict democracy in order to protect competition – in other words it is a project to save capitalism and exploit national and global economic inequality. The dominant narrative of caring for people, nationhood and cultural identity belies the harsh reality of neoliberal ideology across the world.