The invention of neoliberalism

a woman could legally own a bank account or take out a mortgage in her own name without a male guarantor.

How do values influence people and change lives? Here is a thought from Will Hutton:

The good society is one in which, through argument and deliberation, we create law and justice as a moral system enshrining human dignity and accept mutual responsibilities – and then live by its injunctions across the board. (Hutton, 2015: 44)

Let’s hold this in mind as we explore a paradigm shift.

The invention of neoliberalism

During those post-war years, when the welfare state was addressing the common good, there was a plot going on. It was as simple as that! A group of men decided to promote a very different way of seeing the world to counter the socialism of the welfare state, and the seeds of this idea led to a very different way of being in the world. I want to pay attention to this; it gives a clue as to just how easy it is to influence people to change their minds – and it emphasises the importance of critiquing democracy through the lens of values. Social justice values provide a system of checks and balances which deepen, not weaken, democracy.

A political story of corruption on the part of the rich …

In 1947, hidden away in the little village of Mont Pelerin in Switzerland, a group of 40 men plotted a very different story based on very different values: one that would replace cooperation and compassion with competition and exploitation. They became known as the Mont Pelerin Society and their ideology became known as neoliberalism, and it was an extremely strange idea indeed. In fact, it was so strange that they knew better than to put it into the public domain until the time was right. People had always been told that the market served society. How could a small group of men convince the world that profit comes before people and the planet? It was the antithesis of the welfare state! Nevertheless, they gave it a go, prepared to wait for the right opportunity before going public. What an enormous challenge to convince people to see life upside down: the market ruling people, the rich deserving even more riches, and the poor and the planet paying for this greed and excess!

Despite a global economic recession which brought a crisis in welfare spending in 1973, the equal society created by the values of the welfare state continued along its social justice path. Not many people realise that equality peaked in 1978, when Britain was the second most equal country to Sweden in Europe (Dorling, 2018b). It was a wonderful achievement and opened up many possibilities for a society that could be inclusive and happy. But, in 1979, the Mont Pelerin Society’s ‘Big Chance’ appeared. Margaret Thatcher entered the political stage as Conservative prime minister, and this was to be a defining moment in British and world history.

She really liked the ideas of the Mont Pelerin Society and their story of individualism. The key plot was the free market, uncontrolled and driven by profit. She came up with popular slogans, repeated over and over again until they got inside people’s heads: ‘there’s no such thing as society, only individuals and their families’, ‘it’s good to be greedy’, ‘profit comes before people’, ‘the rich need to get richer and the poor need to tighten their belts’, ‘wealth will trickle down’! Nothing trickled!

This story was the first Big Lie! The rich got even richer (and much more greedy) and the poor were dismissed as work-shy welfare scroungers! Make people poorer and pillage the Earth in the name of profit was the moral of the story. ‘There is no alternative’, we were told, and it was such a compelling story, we all shut up and just got on with it. Community ties were weakened and individualism was the order of the day.

Two years later, in 1981, Ronald Reagan became President of the US. He liked this story, too. Thatcher and Reagan became pals, but, more importantly, together they became the most powerful leaders in the Western world. It was such a good story, it went viral. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank joined in, and others, like Pinochet in Chile, also wanted to be part of it. We began to see global structural adjustment programmes emerge, with the IMF creating a debt trap by forcing poor countries to pay back loans. This, of course, made the poorest of the world suffer dreadfully. But it made the rich richer than ever, justified as the deserving rich and the undeserving poor. This, of course was another Big Lie. Profit gets generated by workers at ground level, but it is projected upwards into the pockets of the privileged. Inequality within and between countries soared.