A Reversion to a Dickensian Variety of Capitalism. Jayati Ghosh Since her death, many eulogies of Thatcher have spoken of her as a revolutionary. Thatcherism (along with the associated Reaganomics) is seen as a radical transformative agenda that changed the face of economy and society. But seen from the developing world decades later, much of this agenda appears familiar, in the form of structural adjustment policies that have been forced upon different countries at different times by international institutions. Given the broad contemporaneity of these strategies, it is a moot point who “inspired” whom, or just how original those ideas were. First, and possibly the most well-known: the attack on organised labour and the resulting drastic reduction in workers’ bargaining power.
Second, financial deregulation and significant increases in the lobbying and political power of financial agents. Third, the triumph of private gain over social good and the aggressive delegitimisation of public provision. Was Thatcherism then all that new? The woman who wrecked Great Britain. Despite their quaint maintenance of a monarchy, British politics are less respectful than ours, and the prime minister is afforded much less regal deference than our president — though by the end of her reign Thatcher was always using the royal “we” — so the death of Thatcher has and will be debated in the United Kingdom much more critically than the death of her comrade-in-arms against the postwar liberal consensus Ronald Reagan was in the United States.
The more cowardly American press, though, calls her time in office “controversial” and then moves on to the much more comfortable territory of her extraordinary ambition, forceful personality and skill with a cutting remark. (Our weird class of privileged British expat media leeches have also guided the discussion of the Iron Lady along those lines.) It would be a crime to allow hagiography and personality to distract from what made her so deeply despised: She ruined Britain.
At the same time, Britain became much less equal. The march of the neoliberals | Politics. We are living through an extraordinary political situation: the end of the debt-fuelled boom, the banking crisis of 2007-10, the defeat of New Labour and the rise to power of a Conservative-Liberal Democratic coalition. What sort of crisis is this? Is it a serious wobble in the trickle-down, win-win, end-of-boom-and-bust economic model that has dominated global capitalism?
Does it presage business as usual, the deepening of present trends, or the mobilisation of social forces for a radical change of direction? Is this the start of a new conjuncture? My argument is that the present situation is another unresolved rupture of that conjuncture which we can define as "the long march of the Neoliberal Revolution". Neoliberalism is grounded in the "free, possessive individual", with the state cast as tyrannical and oppressive. The formation of a Conservative-Liberal Democratic coalition in May 2010 was fully in line with the dominant political logic of realignment. The protests are growing. Human Revenue Stream. Against the tide of history: the Skye Bridge, nationalised in 2004 The privatisations are joining up. First it was gas. Then telecoms, oil, electricity, public housing, water, the railways, the airports. There are moves afoot to obliterate the concept of the council house; NHS hospitals are to be privately run, built and managed; now David Cameron wants to get private companies and foreign governments to ‘invest’ in Britain’s roads.
What does it all mean? The episodic character of privatisation – one sector being sold, then a pause, then another – has hidden a meta-privatisation that’s passed the halfway point. The commodity that makes water and roads and airports valuable to an investor, foreign or otherwise, is the people who have no choice but to use them.
And that investment does come, and things get shinier. By packaging British citizens up and selling them, sector by sector, to investors, the government makes it possible to keep traditional taxes low or even cut them. City's influence over Conservatives laid bare by research into donations | Politics. The influence of the City over the Conservatives has been laid bare by new research showing that more than half of the Tory party's donations since the general election have come from individuals and businesses working in finance. Hedge funds, financiers and private equity firms contributed more than a quarter of all the Tories' private donations – which this year poured in at a rate equal to £1m a month – the study by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has found.
The figures show an increase in the proportion of party funds coming from the financial sector, raising fears that the City's financial influence over the Tories is on the rise as key pieces of legislation are discussed by the coalition government. They come amid growing concerns that some parts of the financial sector, described by Labour leader Ed Miliband this week as "asset strippers" or "predator financiers", are profiting from financial instability. Durable change a long way off for UK’s scandal-ridden banking system. By Prem Sikka, University of Essex July 8th, 2012 The role of Barclays bank in manipulating the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor) continues to dominate international financial media.
The bank has already attracted fines from regulators in the UK and theUSA. But further revelations are likely as US Senate Committees are flexing their muscles, the UK parliament has launched an inquiry and the UK’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) has announced a criminal investigation. Barclays has a dark history. In February 2012, the UK government introduced retrospective legislation to halt two tax avoidance schemes that would have enabled Barclays to avoid around £500 million in corporate taxes. Here are a few examples. The UK experienced a secondary banking crash in the mid-1970s. In the 1980s, the financial sector sold around 8.5 million endowment policies, which were linked to repayment of mortgages. The 1990s saw the precipice bonds scandal. There are two main drivers of the financial scandals. The Roots of Extremism: The English Defence League and the Counter-Jihad Challenge.