Healthcare
Cartoon: What did we learn from Covid?
A note for regular readers: I’ve moved to Wednesday mornings here on DK!
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Cartoon: 'Cryogenic nursery'
In a case involving the accidental destruction of frozen embryos, the the Alabama Supreme Court disturbingly referred to the embryos as "extrauterine children" kept in a "cryogenic nursery." Needless to say, this is wreaking havoc on Alabama's IVF clinics and upending the plans of many would-be parents.
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Starmer admits spoke to Israeli president before torpedoing SNP Gaza motion. Sky deletes vid
Starmer’s admission too hot for Sky News to handle?
Keir Starmer admitted today that he had spoken to Israeli president Isaac Herzog before embarking on the parliamentary manoeuvres – including alleged threats to Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle, though Starmer has since denied it – that torpedoed the Scottish National Party’s motion calling for a full ceasefire in Gaza and condemning Israel’s war crimes.
Starmer quickly attempted to row back on his comment to Sky’s interviewer and tried to replace it with ‘to the people who are actually involved’ – which means the same thing, since Starmer certainly didn’t get the Palestinians’ ok to his betrayal – but the words were captured loud and clear:
The short clip was published by musician and pro-Palestinian campaigner Lowkey, but a fuller excerpt shows that it was not misleadingly edited:
It seems the admission was too explosive for the ‘mainstream’ broadcaster, since the clip appears to have been deleted.
Starmer may well deny ever saying this – after all, he denied saying Israel had the right to cut off food, water and fuel from the people of Gaza, even though he said that on camera too. He went on to say that Hoyle did the ‘right’ thing in caving to his bullying urging. Hoyle was, of course, breaking Parliamentary protocol and depriving the SNP of a vote on their motion, even though it was their ‘Opposition Day’, so that Starmer could replace their clear wording with a spineless, Israel-friendly version that gave the apartheid state a veto over any ceasefire and made the whole thing about Israel’s rights instead of Israel’s war crimes. Hoyle now rightly faces a no-confidence motion by SNP and Tory MPs.
Israel has murdered some 35,000 civilians in Gaza so far and maimed tens of thousands more, with 1.5 million on the verge of famine and dying from disease after the destruction of their healthcare system. The regime is on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice.
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Merseysiders protest government moves to replace skilled medics with less skilled
Demonstrations continue against Tory ‘downskilling’ of the NHS to increase profits
Members of the Merseyside Pensioners Association (MPA) joined health workers on Tuesday to protest outside a meeting of the Cheshire and Merseyside Integrated Care (ICS) board meeting against plans to cut NHS costs by reducing skill levels in the health service in a copy of unequal and heavily-privatised US healthcare.
The protest and meeting were held at the Floral Pavilion in Wirral’s New Brighton. The MPA joined a large crowd of Wirral Clinical Support workers and Unison members who have been demanding better pay. MPA members were protesting against the downskilling of medical professionals – a move under the so-called NHS Workforce Plan to replace doctors, midwives, nurses, anaesthetists and other highly-qualified workers with cheaper, less qualified staff to pad NHS staff numbers and reduce wage cost, allowing private health companies to provide services at greater profit.
One MPA campaigner told Skwawkbox:
Forcing or encouraging staff to work beyond their competencies is dangerous for patients and staff. NHS campaigners have been highlighting downskilling, professional deregulation, working beyond competencies and similar government moves for several years. It is not accidental, nor is it a response to “shortages of doctors”, “ageing population “, “bed blocking” or “underfunding” – these terms are all propaganda put out to justify the deliberate systematic destruction and withdrawal of the NHS to benefit big business & increase profit.
Some of us went into the meeting, raised questions about the difficulty and hostile processes involved in booking a GP appointment, the difficulty getting to see an actual GP rather than a Physician Associate [a position carrying out medical duties with only two years’ basic training] or other staff member and the lack of continuity that means we rarely see the same person twice.
We told the Board that we want to see fully-qualified medical professionals, that the right people with the right skills for the right job are fully-qualified doctors, anaesthetists etc. The Assistant CEO told us they have bought a new ‘cloud telephony’ service but that there won’t be any increase in GPs or Practitioners in GP surgeries, therefore we assume no increase in appointments either!
So the response appears to be they’ll just move the deckchairs on the Titanic around in a different manner! A longwinded way of saying they had wasted money on a new phone service presumably so you can more easily be told there are no GP appointments. At the ICS Annual General Meeting/ICB meeting last year an actual GP pointed out that without more GPs/appointments, changing the telephone system wasn’t going to help.
A further campaign meeting will take place on Friday 23 Feb at Liverpool’s socialist bar, the Casa:
The government’s use of ‘associates’ instead of fully-qualified medics has already been linked by coroners to at least two avoidable deaths.
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Exclusive: Streeting uses NHS privatisation announcement to tout IDF-linked health firm
Health privatisation enthusiast ‘Labour’ health spokesman namechecks Israeli military-linked firm as glowing example of private involvement in NHS – and visited firm in Israel on LFI-paid junket
Image by ‘The Agitator‘
As the death toll of Israel’s genocide in Gaza climbed above 30,000 this week according to observers EuroMed Monitor, Wes Streeting used an Israeli private health data company as his shining example of successful ‘entrepreneurialism’ – ie privatisation – in the NHS as ‘a source close to Mr Streeting’ briefed the media about his plans to ‘throw open the doors’ of the NHS to more private corporate provision if Labour gets into government.
The ‘source’ told the i:
Labour will encourage the spread of new technologies so private sector “innovators” have a clearer route to get their product into the NHS…
The best example on the tech side of ‘opening the door to entrepreneurs’ is where you’ve got a company or innovator of a product which works really well on the NHS. There’s an example of some at home kidney tests made by Healthy.io which were first sold into the NHS in 2021
But the link – and the Labour trolling of those outraged by the Gaza slaughter – goes much further. Healthy.io is owned and run by Yonatan Adiri, former Chief Technology Officer for the whole of Israel and an adviser to then-Israeli PM Shimon Peres. Adiri’s interests are not limited to private healthcare tech. His published works include Terror in the Court: Counter-Terrorism and Judicial Power in the Israeli Case Study and Counter Terror Warfare: The Judicial Front (2008), written for the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism (2005).
Adiri’s interest in ‘counter-terror’ did not end in 2008. Just two months ago, shortly after the Hamas kibbutz raid, Adiri spoke to Bloomberg Technology ‘The importance of Intelligence in Israel-Hamas war’, comparing Hamas to ISIS and talking of the use of technology by intelligence services to defeat the Palestinian resistance organisation:
Skwawkbox did not find details of any involvement with Israeli spytech unit ‘Unite 8200’ – the cyberspy unit whose members reportedly paint an ‘X’ on their headsets for each Palestinian they help kill – in Adiri’s IDF service, but according to his bio page as a speaker for hire on allamericanspeakers.com, he remains a reserve captain in the ‘international operational negotiations unit’ and has acted as moderator at discussions held by the Israeli-government-sponsored Institute for National Security Studies on the use of drones and other technology for ‘national security’:
According to one article, Adiri acted for the IDF in negotiating a prisoner swap with Lebanese militia group Hezbollah.
Adiri also acted as senior national security ‘policy consultant’ for the Reut Institute, a right-wing Israeli think tank that now plays a key role in Israel’s attempts to counter the peaceful pro-Palestinian ‘Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions’ movement.
And while Adiri may not have been a member of Unit 8200, he is – since at least March 2023 – an ‘industry mentor’ for the ‘LEAP’ initiative:
The LEAP website says that:
Leap was created in partnership with 8200bio, an organization of 8200 alumni working to promote the Israeli healthtech ecosystem. The program does strive to bring exceptional 8200 alumni into the healthtech domain, but the program is open to entrepreneurs of any background, according to the criteria described above.
Like its partner 8200 Impact, 8200bio is run by former members of what 8200 Impact calls the ‘elite IDF Signal Intelligence and Cybersecurity unit’. Israeli newspaper Haaretz noted in 2020 that:
Nor did Wes Streeting simply pull the name Healthy.io out of a hat without knowing the company’s links. In May 2022, according to right-wing pressure group Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), Streeting visited Israel on LFI’s dime – and LFI said ahead of the trip that:
Streeting will also visit Healthy.io, a tech provider for the NHS and Boots.
Right-wing libel-merchant and ‘dauphin of phone hacking‘ Lee Harpin, writing for Jewish News rather than the Jewish Chronicle that he cost so much money in damages for smearing left-wingers, confirmed that the visit went ahead. Streeting told the NHS Confederation last spring that he had been ‘blown away’ by his trip.
Keir Starmer employs a Unit 8200 alumnus, Assaf Kaplan, to monitor members’ social media.
Wes Streeting has come out as an avid NHS privatiser – which will surprise no one who has been watching. That he chose to garnish his promise to ‘throw open the doors’ of the NHS to more private profit-taking by touting an Israeli – and Israeli military-linked – firm during Israel’s war crimes, mass slaughter of women, children, medics and teachers and the bombing of hospitals and schools, in Gaza makes the betrayal even worse.
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Belly Woman: Birth, Blood and Ebola: The Untold Story – review
In Belly Woman: Birth, Blood and Ebola: The Untold Story, Benjamin Black gives a first-hand account of the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone and the efforts of communities and healthcare workers to save the lives of pregnant women at risk. Black’s gripping exposé indicts the slow and inadequate response by international health agencies and argues for better-resourced healthcare systems, better reproductive healthcare for women and valuing local expertise to prevent future epidemics, writes Susannah Mayhew.
Belly Woman: Birth, Blood and Ebola: The Untold Story. Benjamin Black. Neem Tree Press. 2023.
Find this book: 
Belly Woman: Birth, Blood and Ebola, the Untold Story has the fluidity and compulsion of a novel while providing fascinating insights into frontline action and research on the effects of Ebola on pregnant women and how to protect them. Written by obstetrician gynaecologist and aid advisor Benjamin Black, the book arises from his years spent with Médecins Sans Frontiers (MSF) before, during and after the devastating Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone between 2014-2016. Structured in three parts, it first takes us through the desperate early months of epidemic response in which healthcare staff charted unknown territory as they managed the “mindboggling” (77) complexities of caring for pregnant women with Ebola. We then return to Sierra Leone a few months later to an improving situation in which Ebola in pregnancy could safely be managed, but local learning was ignored by international responders (who had eventually arrived). Finally, as the epidemic declines, we witness the ongoing post-Ebola tragedy of maternal death.
The book is both a powerful story of how medics of all nationalities strived to save lives against the odds and a deeply personal, sharply political book about the existing inadequacies of women’s reproductive healthcare which were tragically magnified during Ebola.
The book is both a powerful story of how medics of all nationalities strived to save lives against the odds and a deeply personal, sharply political book about the existing inadequacies of women’s reproductive healthcare which were tragically magnified during Ebola. The book swings back and forth in time as Black juxtaposes his London experiences of maternal care, particularly during Covid, with the raw accounts of actions in Sierra Leone. This sets the desperate inadequacies of facilities in Sierra Leone in stark relief against the smooth functioning, highly resourced facilities of the UK. It also highlights, in both situations, the dangerous consequences of arrogance when it drives decision-making by those in positions of political and medical power. The lived experiences of Black’s narrative provide a quietly damning judgement on the world’s response to Ebola and the ubiquitous failure to listen to and learn from those in the frontlines of crisis response – both medics and ordinary citizens.
The lived experiences of Black’s narrative provide a quietly damning judgement on the world’s response to Ebola and the ubiquitous failure to listen to and learn from those in the frontlines of crisis response – both medics and ordinary citizens.
Part one of the book plunges us into the thick of the epidemic as local and international staff struggle to the point of frustrated exhaustion to deal with the pace and scale of an epidemic which “should never have exploded […] It had all happened in slow motion and was totally predictable”, yet the world ignored it – “I felt like we were screaming into a vacuum.” (166). Black gives us rich insight into the extent of grass-roots medical efforts in responding to the disease and gathering hitherto undocumented data on the impact of Ebola on pregnancy. He reveals a world in which “[r]oulette, not medicine, became the order of the day” (40) with staff operating in an ethical “no-man’s land” (65). They faced daily dilemmas: what do you do with a pregnant woman in critical condition who might have Ebola but without immediate obstetrics intervention would not survive the time it took to get the Ebola test-result back? Frontline doctors kept their own notes and shared their own learning, creating some of the first (and only) research on how Ebola affects pregnant women and their unborn foetuses, and how to manage such pregnancies safely.
Frontline doctors kept their own notes and shared their own learning, creating some of the first (and only) research on how Ebola affects pregnant women and their unborn foetuses
The slowness and inadequacy of the international response to the West Africa Ebola epidemic is well known, but the book still shocks with its detail of the nature and consequences of the wider response. Seven months after the first officially diagnosed case the international “cavalry” arrive, prompted by concerns of a risk to global health security, and ironically but predictably “in synchronicity with declining transmission” (210). In Part Two Black describes the shameful in-fighting between international responders desperate to make their mark and claim territory. He and his colleagues in the field joked darkly of “Ebola tourists”, the “EOAs (Experts On Arrival)” (181) and the “hot-headed rigidity and lack of pragmatism” of the UK military response (215) all of whom sometimes put patients at risk despite available lessons that could have avoided this.
The WHO ignored local learning and produced guidelines for the Ministry of Health that directly undermined the management of pregnant women post-Ebola, and failed again to listen when frontline MSF doctors voiced their concerns.
Even in the final throes of the epidemic (Part Three), when so much should have been learned, there are distressing illustrations of the power of arrogance. The WHO ignored local learning and produced guidelines for the Ministry of Health that directly undermined the management of pregnant women post-Ebola, and failed again to listen when frontline MSF doctors voiced their concerns. This lead directly to unnecessary deaths before the guidelines were finally repealed – truly, “Egos can kill” (324). This approach that discounts local knowledge has been seen repeatedly, including in Democratic Republic of Congo’s biggest Ebola outbreak just two years later despite attempts to improve feedback from communities, and in the UK’s own Covid response as lessons were “forgotten, wilfully ignored or recycled for the next emergency” (239). The damage that ignoring important lessons can do is agonisingly exposed in the many unnecessary deaths of pregnant women that Black describes. He notes that though experimental drugs and vaccines were promising, they could not “replace basic hygiene, health promotion and community engagement” (167) – and to achieve this trust in health workers is key.
Trust in healthcare cannot be built by a ‘revolving door’ of international medical health workers and ‘experts’; it is built through local health staff working tirelessly on the ground
Although not explicit in the book, the breakdown of trust has longstanding repercussions that echo through the book’s narratives of both Ebola and UK Covid responses. Trust in healthcare cannot be built by a “revolving door” (9) of international medical health workers and “experts”; it is built through local health staff working tirelessly on the ground: “As the outside world, with all its resources and capability, held back in fear and self-protectionism, these individuals stood firm, and […] played a part in saving us all.” (159). Yet, these people were largely ignored when the world was congratulating itself on saving the day (329), though some, like Black’s trusted local colleague Morris, gave their lives.
During the epidemic, pregnancy was seen as an explosive risk […] but afterwards, maternal mortality and morbidity – like much of women’s health – were too often invisible
The question of how to tackle the underlying “protracted health crisis” (113) of high maternal mortality rates haunts the third part of the book. Black and his colleagues were acutely aware that, “[t]he end of Ebola was not the end of the emergency, just as the start had never been the beginning.” (316). During the epidemic, pregnancy was seen as an explosive risk (a potential “Ebola bomb” ch.25), but afterwards, maternal mortality and morbidity – like much of women’s health – were too often invisible so “if you didn’t look for it, you didn’t see it, and if you didn’t see it then there was no emergency” (254). This meant that even MSF’s hierarchy failed to acknowledge the absolute necessity of supporting family planning as a critical preventive measure for high-risk pregnancy and maternal death.
There is an urgent need to rethink humanitarian approaches in light of Black’s insights, to humbly learn from and work with frontline responders to strengthen health systems and protect the health of all women and young children.
Following Ebola, Sierra Leone overtook Sudan and Chad to suffer the highest maternal mortality rate in the world. The colonial and neo-colonial legacy of aid-dependent, resource-poor health systems unable to respond to major shocks like Ebola undoubtedly contributed to this protracted health crisis, but arguably the superiority mindset of many international responders compounded and perpetuated it. There is an urgent need to rethink humanitarian approaches in light of Black’s insights, to humbly learn from and work with frontline responders to strengthen health systems and protect the health of all women and young children. In making this case, Belly Woman is an extraordinary book – a visceral, harrowing but ultimately life-affirming read.
This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The LSE RB blog may receive a small commission if you choose to make a purchase through the above Amazon affiliate link. This is entirely independent of the coverage of the book on LSE Review of Books.
Image Credit: Samenwerkende Hulporganisaties on Flickr.
Labour ‘tells councillors’ not to talk to 89yo woman colleague who blew NHS whistle
Misogyny and control-freakery of Starmer regime on show again in Birmingham
Labour has banned Birmingham councillors from talking to 89yo Cllr Barbara Dring, who has been suspended by the party after blowing the whistle on the planned closure of her local health centre. Cllr Dring was bullied by MPs, who called her a liar and gossip for warning residents of a closure that was confirmed this week, forcing locals to travel more than two miles for treatment.
Cllr Dring posted the news to her Facebook page, accusing the party of ‘the worst form of bullying’:
The news drew a furious reaction from locals and fellow health campaigners:
Labour’s sorry history of misogyny, bullying and cover-ups continues.
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89yo councillor ‘bullied’ by right-wing MPs, for opposing NHS closure, suspended by Labour
Barbara Dring has been suspended on the same day her whistleblowing about planned NHS closure – denounced as ‘lies’ by local right-wing MPs – was confirmed correct
Barbara Dring, the 89-year-old Birmingham councillor ‘bullied’ and labelled a liar by right-wing Labour MPs for warning that a vital local health centre was about to be closed, has been suspended by the party – for talking to third parties about local issues.
Cllr Dring and a local health campaigner warned in the summer that Warren Farm health centre faced closure, forcing local people to travel miles for treatment – and was dismissed as a liar by MPs Khalid Mahmood and Paulette Hamilton. The situation prompted campaigner Lorraine Donnally to put in a formal complaint to Labour. Cllr Dring was briefly hospitalised with a suspected stroke that her supporters believe was a reaction to the stress of the situation.
Today, local newspapers confirmed that the centre will be closed and its services moved more than two miles away.
On the same day, the party suspended Cllr Dring, apparently for whistleblowing. At the same time, it has also suspended Des Hughes, the only other Labour councillor in Oscott ward – leaving Labour with no representation in an area with two Tory councillors.
One local told Skwawkbox that Labour has ‘shot itself in the foot’:
They’re idiots. There are two Tory councillors there and under the new boundaries the ward will fall into the Erdington constituency that Paulette Hamilton will be trying to win, without local council representation. They’ve really shot themselves in the foot.
Others were even more plainspoken. Ms Donnally, the health campaigner who complained to Labour about the behaviour of the local MPs, wrote on Facebook to link the suspensions to the health centre closure – and her comments about the party’s ‘disgusting’ conduct were echoed by other locals:
Birmingham City Council’s Labour chief whip Ray Goodwin is reportedly under investigation by the party over his conduct in the position but has not been suspended – yet Labour has suspended two councillors fighting to keep open a crucial important health facility.
Khalid Mahmood’s awful record as Birmingham Perry Barr MP includes wrongfully sacking former staffer Elaina Cohen for blowing the whistle on ‘criminal’ and ‘sadistic’ abuse of vulnerable domestic violence victims by another Mahmood staffer who was also his lover. Sworn testimony by one of the victims to an employment tribunal in the wrongful dismissal case was not challenged by either Mahmood or his legal team.
The right-winger has also been accused by Bangladeshi media of accepting a bribe from a convicted Bangladeshi fugitive seeking help with his asylum case – and by Elaina Cohen of accepting cash from the Kuwait embassy. He has denied any wrongdoing.
At no point has Keir Starmer or his sidekick David Evans taken action against Mahmood, even to suspend him to protect alleged victims while Mahmood was on Starmer’s front bench. The whistleblower’s emails to Starmer and Evan, as well as Mahmood’s own sworn testimony, make clear that Starmer and Evans were fully aware of the allegations and covered them up.
Bullying, smears and cover-ups have been exposed as rife on the part of the Labour right.
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Abby Innes introduces Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail
In an excerpt from the introduction to her new book, Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail, Associate Professor of Political Economy at LSE’s European Institute Abby Innes considers how factors including the rise of neoliberalism have destabilised Britain’s governing institutions.
Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail. Abby Innes. Cambridge University Press. 2023.
Find this book:
Why has Great Britain, historically one of the strongest democracies in the world, become so unstable? What changed? This book demonstrates that a major part of the answer lies in the transformation of its state. It shows how Britain championed radical economic liberalisation only to weaken and ultimately break its own governing institutions. This history has direct parallels not just in the United States but across all the advanced capitalist economies that adopted neoliberal reforms. The shattering of the British state over the last forty years was driven by the idea that markets are always more efficient than the state: the private sector morally and functionally superior to the public sector. But as this book shows, this claim was ill-founded, based as it was on the most abstract materialist utopia of the twentieth century. The neoliberal revolution in Great Britain and Northern Ireland – the United Kingdom – has failed accordingly, and we are living with the systemic consequences of that failure.
Britain championed radical economic liberalisation only to weaken and ultimately break its own governing institutions.
The rise of nationalist populism in some of the world’s richest countries has brought forward many urgent analyses of contemporary capitalism. What this book offers, by contrast, is the explanation of a dark historical joke. It explores for the first time how the Leninist and neoliberal revolutions fail for many of the same reasons. Leninism and neoliberalism may have been utterly opposed in their political values, but when we grasp the kinship between their forms of economic argument and their practical strategies for government, we may better understand the causes of state failure in both systems, as well as their calamitous results.
Comparing the neoclassical and Soviet economic utopias, [w]hat emerges are mirror images – two visions of a perfectly efficient economy and an essentially stateless future.
Britain’s neoliberal policies have their roots in neoclassical economics, and Part I begins by comparing the neoclassical and Soviet economic utopias. What emerges are mirror images – two visions of a perfectly efficient economy and an essentially stateless future. These affinities are rooted in their common dependence on a machine model of the political economy and hence, by necessity, the shared adoption of a hyper-rational conception of human motivation: a perfect utilitarian rationality versus a perfect social rationality. As the later policy chapters demonstrate, these theoretical similarities produce real institutional effects: a clear institutional isomorphism between neoliberal systems of government and Soviet central planning.
When it comes to the mechanics of government, both systems justify a near identical methodology of quantification, forecasting, target setting and output-planning, albeit administrative and service output-planning in the neoliberal case and economy-wide outputs in the Soviet. Since the world in practice is dynamic and synergistic, however, it follows that the state’s increasing reliance on methods that presume rational calculation within an unvarying underlying universal order can only lead to a continuous misfit between governmental theory and reality. These techniques will tend to fail around any task characterised by uncertainty, intricacy, interdependence and evolution, which are precisely the qualities of most of the tasks uploaded to the modern democratic state.
In neoliberalism, the state has been more gradually stripped of its capacity for economic government
The Soviet and neoliberal conceptions of the political economy as a mechanism ruled by predetermined laws of economic behaviour were used to promote pure systems of economic coordination, be that by the state or the market. Leninism, as it evolved into Stalinist command planning, dictated the near-complete subordination of markets to the central plan. In neoliberalism, the state has been more gradually stripped of its capacity for economic government and, over time, for prudential, strategic action, as its offices, authority and revenues are subordinated to market-like mechanisms. Both Soviet and neoliberal political elites proved wildly over-optimistic about the integrity of their doctrines, even as they demonised the alternatives.
For all their political antipathy, what binds Leninists and neoliberals together is their shared fantasy of an infallible ‘governing science’ – of scientific management writ large. The result is that Britain has reproduced Soviet governmental failures, only now in capitalist form. When we understand the isomorphism between Soviet and neoliberal statecraft, we can see more clearly why their states share pathologies that span from administrative rigidity to rising costs, from rent-seeking enterprises to corporate state capture, from their flawed analytical monocultures to the demoralisation of the state’s personnel and, ultimately, a crisis in the legitimacy of the governing system itself. This time around, however, the crisis is of liberal democracy.
The book’s policy chapters in Part II explore how the neoliberal revolution has transformed the British state’s core functions in the political economy: in administration, welfare, tax and regulation and the management of future public risk.
After setting out the philosophical foundations of these ideologies, the book’s policy chapters in Part II explore how the neoliberal revolution has transformed the British state’s core functions in the political economy: in administration, welfare, tax and regulation and the management of future public risk. In Part III I examine the political consequences of these changes, and demonstrate how Britain’s exit from the European Union has played out as an institutionally fatal confrontation between economic libertarianism and reality. The final chapter considers how the neoliberal revolution, like its Leninist counterpart, has failed within the terms by which it was justified and instead induced a profound crisis not only of political and economic development but also of political culture.
Under ‘late’ neoliberalism we can see a similar moment of political hiatus, as neoliberal governments likewise resort to nationalism and the politics of cultural reaction to forestall public disillusionment and a shift in paradigm.
I use different periods of Soviet history as an analytical benchmark throughout the book, but the Brezhnev years (1964–1982) were those of the fullest systemic entropy: the period of ossification, self-dealing and directionless political churn. Under ‘late’ neoliberalism we can see a similar moment of political hiatus, as neoliberal governments likewise resort to nationalism and the politics of cultural reaction to forestall public disillusionment and a shift in paradigm. I use the United Kingdom as the case study because it was both a pioneer of these reforms and, in many respects, has gone furthest with them. If neoliberalism as a doctrine had been analytically well-founded, it was in the United Kingdom, with its comparatively long and strong liberal traditions, that we should have seen its most positive outcomes.
By the early 2020s the Conservative government of Boris Johnson had sought to criminalise peaceful protest, to constrain media independence and to insulate the political executive from parliamentary and public scrutiny.
To be clear, Britain’s neoliberals were never totalitarians of the Soviet variety. They never used revolutionary violence to create a one-party state, deployed ubiquitous intelligence agencies to enforce repression or used systems of mass incarceration and murder for political ends. Britain’s neoliberal consensus has nevertheless favoured a one-doctrine state, and the violent suppression of specific, typically economy-related, protests has been a periodic feature of its politics since 1979. Britain’s neoliberal governments have also developed an increasingly callous attitude to social hardship and suffering. Most troubling of all is that the more neoliberalism has been implemented, the more the country has been driven to the end of its democratic road. By the early 2020s the Conservative government of Boris Johnson had sought to criminalise peaceful protest, to constrain media independence and to insulate the political executive from parliamentary and public scrutiny. In short, it had abused its authority to disable legitimate political opposition. What I hope to explain is why any regime that commits itself to neoliberal economics must travel in this direction or abandon this ideology.
What follows is an argument about the collapse of the empiricist political centre and its replacement by utopian radicalism. Specifically, this is a story of how the pioneering and socially progressive philosophy of liberalism is being discredited by utopian economics and the practically clientelist methods of government that follow from it, just as the politics of social solidarity essential to a civilised world was undermined by the violence and corruption of the Soviet experiment. As the old Soviet joke had it, ‘Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man. Communism is its exact opposite.’ There are, of course, many challenges distinct to neoliberalism and I pay attention to them, but my purpose here is to see what we can learn about the political economy of the neoliberal state when we look at it through the lens of comparative materialist utopias.
Note: This excerpt from the introduction to Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail by Abby Innes is copyrighted to Cambridge University Press and the author, and is reproduced here with their permission.
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