Jack Carolan

Liz Truss spent her childhood accompanying her father, a leftist University professor, on marches against the Thatcher government. It might be reductionist to suspect that one woman’s daddy issues have turned Britain into Europe’s leading political basket case, but we do have to wonder where this mindless devotion to Thatcherite dogma came from, and why, given the freely available data on the effects of neoliberalism on the global economy over the past forty-something years, Truss has remained so blindly devoted to this pernicious ideology. Margaret Thatcher pipped Ronald Reagan to the post by a year when she took power in Britain in 1979 and set about applying the theories of Friedmann, Hayek, Buchanan et al. in instituting a radical reshaping of western economies, piloted in Chile by the Pinochet administration. Thomas Piketty’s extensive research has since shown, incontrovertibly, that the subsequent tearing up of the Keynesian consensus, replaced by a system which facilitated the upward flow of wealth from Labour to owners through attacks on unions, the privatization of the commons, and a financialized economic locus that led to the 2008 debacle, was a con-trick. Neoliberalism has been masking its true nature all along with spurious articles of faith: the invisible hand of the market (a notion originating in Smith’s Wealth of Nations, taken out of context); “greed is good” social Darwinism; trickle-down economics, and other fairy tales that made sense to a lot of people in the 80’s and 90’s, who deep down, rooted for Gordon Gecko in Wall Street. It chimed with the times.