Alan Finlayson @ProfAFinlayson - Twitter Profile

1 day ago

Again, an awful lot of gaslighting re: "neoliberalism", denying the existence of a ~50yr policy/governance agenda on the basis of "the state spends a lot of money". Public spending as %-of-GDP isn't high because we've had a period of Leftwing hegemony. (Outside of the arts, the academy & the social/cultural policy sphere, that's obvious nonsense). Rather, it's high because: 👉Demographic pressures have pushed up the 2 massive spending outlays, health & pensions – a problem common to the vast majority of Western democracies 👉UK growth/productivity has been stagnant for ~18yrs, since The City of London collapsed under the weight of its own poor investments, while spending pressures have continued to grow apace 👉We have a growing (& expensive) debt pile as a result of the taxpayer twice being forced to bail out the private sector to the tune of several hundred £BN – 1st during GFC, 2nd during Covid lockdown 👉We have huge revenue pressures from "sticking plaster" subsidies covering up the underlying issue of chronic low investment, e.g. housing benefits ballooning while municipal capex on housebuilding shrinks; or tax credits/UC top-ups disguising stagnant real wages; or increasing day-to-day NHS spending after years of squeezed capital budgets/social care sector collapse Neoliberalism is defined by privatisation, the embrace of globalisation/free trade, monetarist central banking, the emasculation of the labour movement, & the transformation of the state from a prime actor in national production/investment into a post-hoc fiscal distributor. It has been consciously driven by market-liberal true believers (some even self-identifying as "neoliberals") – on the Right by Hayekian/Friedmanite think tanks, business groups & various Conservative ideologues, and on the Left by Third Way modernisers (see Blair) and their intellectual forebears in Marxism Today's revisionism, the Democratic Left etc. etc. Pretending none of this happened (because 'muh the state still spends £££') is pure sophistry. They want us to believe they didn't sell off airlines, steelmakers, coal mines, energy generators, water companies, car manufacturers, banks, bus/train contracts & millions of council houses. That they didn't deregulate financial services to get their 'Big Bang'. That they didn't abolish rent controls, or capital/exchange controls, or wage boards, or price commissions. That they didn't outsource core services and state capacity to corporate providers. That they didn't impose some of the most draconian/restrictive trade union laws in the democratic West. That they didn't cede monetary policy to an independent central bank, or cede trade/migration policy to an unelected, supranational, continental bureaucracy. That they didn't squeeze public investment or prioritise tax cuts over infrastructure spending. That they didn't eschew industrial policy and take a lax approach to deindustrialisation because the future was services & the "knowledge economy". This isn't simpy an accumulation of random policy titbits, but is the outcome of a coherent intellectual project that has consistently rebalanced the labour/capital relationship in the latter's favour. These people are conning you.

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Alan Finlayson

@ProfAFinlayson

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