From
David Harvey's A
Brief History of Neoliberalism
Part
9 – General conditions and institutions behind the turn of the
British public opinion towards neoliberalism
The
construction of consent in Britain occurred in a very different way.
What happened in Kansas was quite different from what happened in
Yorkshire. The cultural and political traditions were very different.
In Britain, there is no Christian right to speak of to be mobilized
into a moral majority.
Corporate
power there was little inclined to support overt political activism
(its contributions to political parties were minimal), preferring
instead to exercise influence through the networks of class and
privilege that had long connected government, academia, the
judiciary, and the permanent Civil Service (which at that time still
maintained its tradition of independence) with the leaders of
industry and finance.
The
political situation was also radically different, given that the
Labour Party had largely been constructed as an instrument of
working-class power, beholden to strong and sometimes quite militant
trade unions. Britain had consequently developed a far more elaborate
and all-encompassing welfare state structure than would have ever
been dreamed of in the US.
The
commanding heights of the economy (coal, steel, automobiles) were
nationalized, and a large proportion of the housing stock was in the
public sector. And the Labour Party had, ever since the 1930s, built
significant redoubts of power in the arena of municipal governance,
with Herbert Morrison’s London County Council being in the vanguard
from the 1930s onwards.
Social
solidarities constructed through the union movement and municipal
governance were strongly in evidence. Even when the Conservative
Party took power for prolonged periods after the Second World War it
largely refrained from any attempt at dismantling the welfare state
it had inherited.
The
Labour government of the 1960s had refused to send troops to Vietnam,
thus saving the country from direct domestic traumas over
participation in an unpopular war. After the Second World War,
Britain had (albeit reluctantly and in some instances not without
violent struggle and considerable prodding from the US) agreed to
decolonization, and after the abortive Suez venture of 1956 gradually
(and again often reluctantly) shed much of the mantle of direct
imperial power.
The
withdrawal of its forces east of Suez in the 1960s was an important
signifier of this process. Thereafter, Britain largely participated
as a junior partner within NATO under the military shield of US
power. But Britain did continue to project a neocolonial presence
throughout much of what had been its empire, and in so doing
frequently tangled with other great powers (as, for example, in the
bloody Nigerian civil war when Biafra attempted to secede).
The
issue of Britain’s relations with and responsibilities towards its
ex-colonies was often fraught, both at home and abroad. Neocolonial
structures of commercial exploitation were often deepened rather than
eradicated. But migratory currents from the ex-colonies towards
Britain were beginning to bring the consequences of empire back home
in new ways.
The most
important residual of Britain’s imperial presence was the
continuing role of the City of London as a centre of international
finance. During the 1960s this became increasingly important as the
UK moved to protect and enhance the position of the City with respect
to the rising powers of globally oriented finance capital. This
created a series of important contradictions.
The
protection of finance capital (through interest rate manipulations)
more often than not conflicted with the needs of domestic
manufacturing capital (hence provoking a structural division within
the capitalist class) and sometimes inhibited the expansion of the
domestic market (by restricting credit). The commitment to a strong
pound undermined the export position of UK industry and helped create
balance of payments crises in the 1970s.
Contradictions
arose between the embedded liberalism constructed within and the free
market liberalism of London-based finance capital operating on the
world stage. The City of London, the financial centre, had long
favoured monetarist rather than Keynesian policies, and therefore
formed a bastion of resistance to embedded liberalism.
The
welfare state constructed in Britain after the Second World War was
never to everyone’s liking. Strong currents of criticism circulated
through the media (with the highly respected Financial Times in the
lead), which were increasingly subservient to financial interests.
Individualism, freedom, and liberty were depicted as opposed to the
stifling bureaucratic ineptitude of the state apparatus and
oppressive trade union power.
Such
criticisms become widespread in Britain during the 1960s and became
even more emphatic during the bleak years of economic stagnation
during the 1970s. People then feared that Britain was becoming ‘a
corporatist state, ground down to a gray mediocrity’.
The
undercurrent of thought represented by Hayek constituted a viable
opposition and had its advocates in the universities and even more
importantly dominated the work of the Institute of Economic Affairs
(founded in 1955), where Keith Joseph, later to be a key adviser to
Margaret Thatcher, rose to public prominence in the 1970s. The
foundation of the Centre for Policy Studies (1974) and the Adam Smith
Institute (1976), and the increasing commitment of the press to
neoliberalization during the 1970s, significantly affected the
climate of public opinion.
The
earlier rise of a significant youth movement (given to political
satire) and the arrival of a freewheeling pop culture in the
‘swinging London’ of the 1960s both mocked and challenged the
traditional structure of networked class relations.
Individualism
and freedom of expression became an issue and a left-leaning student
movement, influenced in many ways by the complexities of coming to
terms with Britain’s entrenched class system as well as with its
colonial heritage, became an active element within British politics,
much as it did elsewhere in the movement of ’68. Its
disrespectful attitude towards class privileges (whether of
aristocrats, politicians, or union bureaucrats) was to ground the
later radicalism of the postmodern turn. Scepticism about politics
was to prepare the way for suspicion of all metanarratives.
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