Rewiring Britain

Rollicking family saga on the greed-is-good life. And neoliberal logic

Jul 21, 2026

New UK prime minister Andy Burnham gets to work. Image: With AI help

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The Big Story:

Britain’s new prime minister, its seventh in 10 years, has taken charge after a forceful repudiation of “40 years of neoliberalism” and with the promise of a new economic and political model for the country.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham wants to steer the British ship of state in a new direction, turning away from 1980s policies that resulted in the wholesale privatisation of public services and de-industrialisation.

What chance of rewiring Britain, the world’s fifth largest economy?

Neoliberalism has deep roots, droves of powerful backers and a dense network of free market think tanks scattered across the world.

More context, fewer walls

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This Week’s Books:

A satirical novel set in the Thatcher years.
Two books that explain how neoliberalism began and where it’s headed.

Here’s another relevant free-to-read post from the archives :

Deaths at Davos

Rashmee Roshan Lall

Jan 19

Read full story

What a Carve Up!

By: Jonathan Coe

Publisher: Viking

Year: 1994

This is a black comedy about how Britain changed when the Thatcher era kicked off neoliberalism.

The nation’s policy priorities are increasingly dictated by elite interests. The Winshaw family have their fingers in every pie in Britain and beyond. Mark Winshaw sells arms to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Thomas is a banker who makes money appear out of thin air by stock market speculation. Henry is a Labour politician who becomes a fervent admirer of Thatcher. Dorothy builds a ready-meal empire by overruling her soft-hearted sustainable farmer husband and going into battery-farming and other practices that prioritise profit over animal welfare. Roddy is an art dealer who isn’t really interested in art. Hilary is a newspaper columnist who churns out polarising pieces that eschew facts in favour of toxic opinions. She goes on to become that 1990s entity, the celebrity novelist.

The themes in this novel are big and just as pervasive today as neoliberalism. For, free markets are still considered untouchable. Animal abuse has not gone away. Arms are still being sold to tyrants. Influencers, including columnists, continue to whip up rage using selective (or alternative) facts.

But this is no political tome. It’s a fun read, a panoramic story with comic interludes and multiple narrative modes including tabloid articles, juvenile diaries and TV interview transcripts.

This fast-moving family saga is very relevant. Look around. Wherever in the world you are, you know a Winshaw, or at least know of one!

Choice quotes:
[Hilary Winshaw was] paid a yearly fee equivalent to six times the salary of a qualified school-teacher and eight times that of a staff nurse in the National Health Service.
And so they sit at home, getting fat on the proceedings and here we all are. Our businesses are failing, our jobs disappearing, our countryside choking, our hospitals crumbling, our homes being repossessed, our bodies being poisoned, our minds shutting down, the whole bloody spirit of the country crushed and fighting for breath. I hate the Winshaws, Fiona. Just look what they’ve done to us.
[the only kind of] values anybody seems to care about are the ones that can be added up on a balance sheet.
I’ve decided to take a strong line with the word ‘hospital’. This word is no longer permitted at discussions: from now on we call them ‘provider units’.

A Brief History of Neoliberalism

By: David Harvey

Publisher: OUP

Year: 2005

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Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right

By: Quinn Slobodian

Publisher: Zone books

Year: 2025

I’m placing these two books side by side for a reason. The second begins at the point the first concludes. Together, the two build a clear picture of neoliberalism and what it entails.

A Brief History of Neoliberalism is by City University of New York Professor David Harvey. A distinguished Marxist geographer and economic theorist, Harvey offers a concise guide to the neoliberal policy framework and its implementation around the world. He starts by explaining how Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and former US Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker turned an “obscure doctrine” into a “central economic doctrine”. He traces the roots of neoliberal thought to the 1947 gathering of academic economists, historians and philosophers around Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek. The influential Mont Pelerin Society (MPS), named after the Swiss spa where they met, came into being.

He writes about “the first experiment with neoliberal state formation”, in Chile after Pinochet’s 1973 coup. It was promoted by Chilean business elites and backed by US corporations, the CIA, and US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. It violently repressed left-wing social movements and dismantled places such as health centres in poor neighbourhoods. In the long-term, neoliberalism left Chile with high levels of inequality.

Harvey argues that rising income inequality is not an unintended consequence of neoliberal programmes but an explicit goal. The rich became richer 30 years into the neoliberal agenda because the programme is meant to benefit the economic elite via “accumulation by dispossession…[which is to say, by] privatization and commodification”.

History professor Quinn Slobodian picks up the story in 2006. He starts with a speech by Charles Murray, longtime member of the MPS, at the 25th anniversary of the international hub for neoliberal think tanks, the Atlas Economic Research Foundation. Murray predicts that Atlas’s 50th anniversary in 2031 would be hailing science. For, science is the only tool that can confirm “ineradicable group differences” such as between men and women, black vs white or even Dutch vs Italians. Shattering the so-called “Equality Premise” would make affirmative action untenable and force a “return to a hierarchy of gender, race, and cultural difference they imagined to be rooted in genetics as well as tradition”.

Slobodian writes that neoliberals did not rest easy after the end of the Cold War and the defeat of Communism. They saw the environmental movement as a potent new threat because it too would prompt state action. In fact, Milton Friedman, fierce champion of free-market capitalism, saw ecological protection and the “special interests” of disabled people and minorities as the growth areas for postcommunist statism. Interestingly, at the first meeting of the MPS after the fall of the Berlin Wall, its president, Italian economist Antonio Martino declared that “socialism is dead, statism is not”. For neoliberals, the three biggest threats after Communism are: environmentalism, state spending and European integration.

Meanwhile, right-wing neoliberals have been joining or, in some cases had founded, new populist parties. “But these,” Slobodian writes, “did not reject the dynamic of market competition; they deepened it. ‘Closed borders’ libertarians continued to demand free movement for capital and goods; they simply drew a hard line against certain kinds of people…the demand for an ethnostate was better understood as the demand for an ‘ethno-economy’.”

The Back Story:

Neoliberal think tanks advocate for free market capitalism, deregulation, privatisation and reduced government spending. Some spread “misinformation” and “disinformation” about climate change.1
After the implementation of neoliberal policies in the US in the late 1970s, the share of national income of the top 1% of income earners soared to more than 20%.2
In the UK, the top 1% have more than doubled their share of the national income from 6.5% in 1982.3