A history of two turbulent decades
BREXIT AND ITS CONSEQUENCES have made it easy for people to complain that the UK is in a mess. What is more difficult is to identify exactly what has gone wrong – and how to understand Brexit in relation to the country’s difficulties. While some would like to imagine they began with the decision to hold a referendum on membership of the EU, others accept that Brexit was a symptom rather than a cause of deeper, underlying problems. The question of the relationship between Brexit and democracy is especially fraught – should we understand it as a “populist” threat to democracy or as an expression of it?
In Haywire Andrew Hindmoor, a professor of politics at the University of Sheffield, tells a story of how the UK has lost its way over the past twentyfive years. But he never really articulates a convincing or even a coherent argument about why it did so. Hindmoor lays his narrative out in thirty-six short chapters, grouped into seven parts, at the centre of which is the global financial crisis of 2008. His account is full of detail – including the cost of the Eurostar tickets bought for the two officials to deliver the Article 50 letter to Brussels in 2017 – but it often feels as though he is simply narrating a series of events, rather than illuminating the dynamic behind them.
This is really – though the author never quite says it – the story of the unravelling of the neoliberal period in British history that began with Margaret Thatcher and continued under a New Labour government that essentially accepted the basic parameters of Thatcherite economics while simultaneously investing in public services. Brexit can be understood as a rejection of that model – not least because joining the common market had been a central part of the project of renewal that Thatcher had promised. (She was one of the Yes campaign’s leading figures in 1975.) But Hindmoor does not quite frame the story in this way. He uses the term “neoliberalism” as a synonym for “Thatcherism” and prefers to think of Tony Blair as a social democrat. In this view, just as Blair had split the difference between “Old Labour socialism” and Thatcherism, David Cameron then split the difference between Blairism and Thatcherism by combining austerity with Blair’s social liberalism.
Hindmoor’s analysis of these developments is remarkably parochial. Neoliberalism is not, of course, an exclusively British phenomenon, even if the UK has played a key role in its development. In particular, from the election of Thatcher in 1979 and Ronald Reagan a year later to the political shocks of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the UK and the US have followed rem
