When the corporate banks from Wall Street to Canary Wharf came tumbling down in 2008/9 many commentators were proclaiming that the neoliberal project had reached its endgame. It was none other than the Nobel Prizewinning economist Joseph Stiglitz who noted at the time that:
Today, there is a mismatch between social and private returns. Unless they are closely aligned, the market system cannot work well. Neo-liberal market fundamentalism was always a political doctrine serving certain interests. It was never supported by economic theory. Nor, it should now be clear, is it supported by historical experience. Learning this lesson may be the silver lining in the cloud now hanging over the global economy. (Stiglitz 2008: 2)
However, far from heralding a new settlement, with the instigation of a dual-track policy of bailouts of the banks and austerity, as Belzer and Wayne (2017) note, since 2008 we have seen the ‘greatest theft from the public in our entire history’. And far from witnessing its demise, we have seen an intensification of neoliberalism, with the consequences most acutely felt by those least able to resist its impacts, resulting, among other things, in a rapid rise in poverty and inequality. A report by Oxfam, for example, estimates that between 2010 and 2020, 25% of British children will be living in poverty and an additional ‘1.5 million working-age adults are expected to fall into poverty, bringing the total to 17.5 per cent of this group’ (Oxfam 2013: 2). Other effects of austerity are a significant rise in suicide rates, particularly among older males and disabled people (Antonakakis and Collins 2015; MacKenzie 2015).
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