Following Alex Salmonds’ description of Liz Truss’ grasp of economics as the most awful ‘mumbo-jumbo’, the environmentalist and supporter of Scotland’s right to autonomy, George Monbiot lets rip about her intellectual vacuity: “Trussonomics is a fanatical, fantastical creed, and the last thing Britain needs.” (Words highlighted in blue link to background information.)
Soon, the focus will return, and the collapse of many people’s economic prospects will dominate once more. As winter approaches, it will become clear that our politics is spectacularly lacking in answers. Why? Because the doctrine destroying our condition of life is the doctrine Liz Truss has promised to extend to new extremes. She is fanatically devoted to an ideology misleadingly called Thatcherism or Reaganism (as if they invented it), but more accurately described as neoliberalism.
This doctrine insists that politics submits to “the market”, which means, when translated, that democracy must submit to the power of money. Any impediment to the accumulation of wealth – such as public ownership, tax, regulation, trade unions and political protest – should be torn down, either quickly and noisily or slowly and stealthily. When consumer choice is unencumbered by political interference, the market is allowed to become a Great Winnower, sifting us into a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. The doctrine has religious, quasi-Calvinist aspects: in the kingdom of the market we can see who is deserving and who is undeserving through the grace bestowed upon them by the god of money. Any policy or protest that seeks to disrupt the formation of a natural order of rich and poor is an unwarranted stay upon the divine will of the invisible hand.
For 40 years or so, neoliberalism in the UK has been unchallengeable. For the Conservatives, especially those populating the current cabinet, the dogma cannot be shaken by mere evidence of harm, even when this includes the destitution of millions and the collapse of Earth systems. For Labour, it sets boundaries that cannot be crossed, for fear of punishment by the billionaire press. As our politics has turned further and further towards neoliberalism’s glittering certainties, any deviation from the doctrine is akin to blasphemy. But the countries in which the ideology has been most fiercely applied are those that have seen the steepest declines in both their economic and civic prospects.
Neoliberalism promised that it would generate growth. The benefits of this growth would trickle from the rich to the poor, enhancing everyone’s conditions of life. But growth, for better or worse, has been slower globally during the neoliberal era than during the years before Thatcher, Reagan and their many imitators came to power. And it has been overwhelmingly captured by the very rich. Far from ensuring that money trickles down, neoliberalism is the pump that shifts wealth from the poor to the rich. In the US, for example, during the 1960s and early 1970s, the greatest beneficiaries of economic growth were the poorest 20%. But from 1980 onwards, the proceeds of growth were transferred from the poorest people to the ultra-rich. Median income in the US rose at just one-third of the rate of GDP growth, while the income of the richest 1% rose at three times the rate. By comparison to the pre-neoliberal trend, the bottom 90% lost $47tn between 1975 and 2018. Between 1990 and 2020, the wealth of US billionaires, adjusted for inflation, increased roughly twelvefold. There’s a similar story in the UK. Of the poorest 10% of households, almost half now have more debts than assets.
None of this is accidental. Neoliberalism is sold to us as a means of enhancing freedom and choice, but in reality it’s about power. It shifts tax and regulation from those who are rich and powerful on to people who are poor and weak. The taxes the wealthy once paid have been transferred to those with far smaller resources. Look at Truss’s proposal for addressing the energy bills crisis. Instead of taxing the record profits of oil and gas companies, she’s using the taxes the rest of us pay to allow them to keep raking in monstrous sums. Even this policy, presented as a means of helping poor people with their bills, will, when combined with the new cuts in national insurance, ensure that the richest households receive twice as much help with their living costs as the poorest households.
The “plan for growth” on which Truss campaigned was pure neoliberal gospel: “cut taxes now, unshackle business from burdensome regulation, implement supply side reform … create new, low-tax, low-regulation ‘investment zones’”. Her key advisers are drawn from covertly funded neoliberal thinktanks. She will go as far as electoral politics allow in transferring wealth from the poor to the rich, attacking trade unions and protesters, opening the floodgates for pollution and greenhouse gases and dismembering the NHS. Already, her government has floated proposals to scrap England’s anti-obesity measures and to remove the cap on bankers’ bonuses, the purpose of which is to discourage the reckless gambles that caused the last financial crash.
After 40 years of this experiment, we can state with confidence that the economic success it proclaimed is illusory. Its buy-now-pay-later economics works by inflating asset values and household debt and burning through human relationships, conditions of employment and the living world. Now that there is little more to burn, Margaret Thatcher’s fire is reduced to embers, as is much of the world we knew. Yet Truss seeks only to breathe life into the coals. And this is when it gets really dangerous.
As neoliberalism wages war on social security and the public sector, impoverishes millions and destroys conditions of employment, its political consequences could be as disastrous as its economic consequences. In the 30 years following the second world war, almost everyone in politics recognised that preventing the resurgence of fascism meant ensuring everyone’s needs were met, through a strong social safety net and robust public services. But neoliberalism stripped these defences away, while shutting down choice in the name of choice. Thatcher proclaimed “there is no alternative” and Labour appears, ever since, to have agreed. Worse still, the dogma has at the same time promoted extreme self-interest and egocentricity. At its heart is a mathematically impossible promise: everyone can be No 1.
In the gap between great expectations and low delivery, humiliation and resentment grow. In these conditions, it is easy for demagogues to blame the frustration of people’s hopes on scapegoats: women, asylum seekers, Muslims, Jews, black and brown people, disabled people, LGBTQ people, unions, the left, protesters. History shows that when political choice is lacking and people see no prospect of relief, they become highly susceptible to the transfer of blame. The transfer – attacking refugees and fomenting culture wars – is already well under way. Truss’s techniques of distraction open the door to fascism. I no longer find it impossible to see the far right swarming into the policy vacuum left by Conservative indifference and Labour timidity, and taking power in this country.
We need real, inspiring alternatives, positive visions of a better world, rather than competing modifications of the disastrous ideology that got us into this mess. We need hope.
NOTE: George Joshua Richard Monbiot is a British writer known for his environmental and political activism.[2][3] He writes a weekly column for The Guardian, and is the author of a number of books, including Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain (2000), Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding (2013) and Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics in the Age of Crisis (2017).
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Grouse Beater 
Good piece by George Monbiot.
England is lost to neo-fascism. They don’t give it that name but that’s what it is anyway. It’s a Weimar Monarchy, with a fetish for the military which sees enemies within and without (EU, Jockistan, Chines, Russians …).
The UK itself is an economic basket case and a virtual pariah state, trampling over international treaties (EU Withdrawal Agreement, Good Friday Agreement, Northern Ireland Protocol) and internal laws (devolution/internal market bill) as well as erasing human rights (Rwanda deportations, right to protest curtailed)
Scotland will, and is being, dragged down the same road as part of the British state. Check out the lifting of one or two protesters at the various dead Queen state propaganda events last week for expressing anti-Monarchy sentiment.
We have our own neoliberal FM who is largely responsible for this intolerance via the proposed GRA reform and the Hate Crime enactment. In addition the Scottish Parliament has passed laws to prevent gatherings outside the building that houses it.
It’s up to us – the people – to get out of Britland and ensure that we elect our own progressive and balanced government, responsible to us.
The south-east Asians eventually kicked out the French and Americans but then got lumbered with some of the most insane government witnessed in the 20th century.
We need to make sure that we don’t end up with our own Pol Pot and Kymer Tartan regime in the event of Independence.
This is good, Brian thought so as well. It explained neoliberalism to me, it was a hazy subject to me and still haven’t read anything that you recommended to me, I’m afraid.x
Instead of windfall taxes, we need to ensue in an independent Scotland that these companies that are allowed to exploit our communal wealth pay decent taxes to begin with, with incentives, of course.
As part of the constitution, I would have all publicly-owned assets, existing at the time of independence and any added thereafter, being ring-fenced against future sale. It should be made a criminal offence against the people for the sell-off of assets that belong to all being exploited by the few for excessive gain. Thatcherism has been an unmitigated disaster for the majority, as was foreseen. Labour/Tory/Lib Dem coalition/successive Tory governments have all colluded in the rip-off, following Thatcherism.
Even the SNP, which pays lip service to equality, is a neoliberal party these days, and it should not be allowed to stand by while our resources are sold off cheaply to the lowest bidder. It is time for the SNP to make a stand on this, and on many other issues. Its wanton cowardice in the face of adversity and its collaboration with the Tories are quite despicable. The parliamentary party appears to be populated by people with a very tenuous grasp on reality, those who are craven cowards in the face of hard evidence and fact and those who see the party as the vehicle to their own, personal comfy existence while the majority struggle to keep their heads above water.
Mr Monbiot is right: neoliberal capitalism cannot possibly work for the many. It is time that we returned to a ‘post war footing’ to try and alleviate the worst of this economic disaster. Nothing else is going to work. If we don’t, the Tories can use all the repressive measures they like, but they won’t be able to stop a universal uprising of people pushed beyond their endurance – and trying to bribe the middle-class won’t work either. It never has when push comes to shove and they are in the way of people’s anger.
Reblogged this on Ramblings of a now 60+ Female.
Been a fan of George Monbiot for a few years now. This is one of his best. He belongs to a rare group of journalists that still hold truth and integrity at their core.
Lyndon LaRouche foresaw this economic collapse some 40 years ago. And promoted solutions to the UK/US unipolar system. But instead the US jailed him. Dissent wasn’t allowed then neither.
His surviving wife, Helga Zep LaRouche, Harley Schlanger and others, continue Lyndon’s teachings through the LaRouche Organisation/Schiller Institute.
Many countries have already adopted Larouche’s economic policies and many more are showing interest in them.
US/UK/EU/Japan have been invited to join, but they have declined. It would seem they don’t want to relinquish their control. Preferring economic ruin instead….