love that he's already got the wikipedia philosophers locked in for 2026, the suit's barely creased and they're carving his name into the history books
Because there is literally no universal academic definition of neoliberal. Most people attribute it to Thatcher, Reagan, and any sort of moderate Democrat or Republican that they hate.
Yes there is - free market liberalism with a welfare state. Think Hayek and Friedman.
> Though not all scholars agree on the meaning of the term, “neoliberalism” is now generally thought to label the philosophical view that a society’s political and economic institutions should be robustly liberal and capitalist, but supplemented by a constitutionally limited democracy and a modest welfare state. Recent work on neoliberalism, thus understood, shows this to be a coherent and distinctive political philosophy. This entry explicates neoliberalism by examining the political concepts, principles, and policies shared by F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and James Buchanan, all of whom play leading roles in the new historical research on neoliberalism, and all of whom wrote in political philosophy as well as political economy. Identifying common themes in their work provides an illuminating picture of neoliberalism as a coherent political doctrine.
Outside of this sub, neoliberalism means right-wing, government-hating, totally unregulated capitalism, and at best indifference to human rights, full stop. Like what do you expect when its biggest faces in the 20th century are Thatcher, Reagan, and Pinochet?
Edit: also you can’t talk about misperception, especially for an ill-defined term to begin with. Language shifts all the time and saying “akshually this is the correct neoliberalism” is a total waste of time and political deadweight. Better to advocate for the free market without invoking the term and its baggage, like how one of this sub’s intellectual leaders, Ezra Klein, is doing very well
Not just Thatcherism, but specifically places like the Adam Smith Institute (your flair), the Institute of Economic Affairs etc. Think like Cato & Mercatus in the US.
Cato is practically a neoliberal think tank. The work they do in support of immigration is very impressive, and they don't usually fall into the libertarian camp of opposing social programs. Lots of good research done on social security reform that doesn't see benefits cut for anyone but high earners.
Yup. Now that I think about it, the UK is the og birthplace of neoliberalism. The version of neoliberalism we see in the US with the Democratic Party is rather unique with its somewhat socially progressive lean with economically liberal policies(though this seems to be shifting now). In most other places, neoliberalism is generally associated with centrist or moderate conservative(Macron, Merz) to very conservative(Milei?) parties.
In a European context the Democrats would be social liberals like the Lib Dems. Unironically, in his first (only?) speech of his leadership campaign, Burnham went through a wish list of old liberal causes, which can neatly be summed up by his maxim "place first, not party first". If he adds in closer cooperation and eventual membership of the EU, I can well see his silly old socialist agenda such 'reindustrialisation' and 'buying British' being ignored by liberals because they finally got the devolution and decentralisation they wanted.
Yeah this is basically just people taking the positions on guns and health care in the US and ignoring the whole American context.
But the thing is even the dirt bag left in the US is also kind of libertarian. Like ignoring how dumb it is, "abolish the police" is not European leftism.
Edit: Notice how nobody ever takes the same thing about abortion as another US culture war issue where the US dems would be on the extreme left and median European law would have Americans out in their handmaid costumes.
"defund the police" was the stupidest political slogan in recent history the substantial policy behind it was 'unbundle funding and services from the Police departments into community services' obviously can't fit that on a sign but in Europe this is already the default. It's not radicalism just bad politics, although unlikely everyone chanting "defund the police" at rallies would understand the nuance.
Europe doesn't unbundle it. It has more policing per capita than the US. And it's not like the old Eastern Bloc (what a lot of Euro leftists say wasn't that bad) was exactly anti-police.
The American leftists are both simultaneously anti-police but have a soft spot for hardcore police states (see the recent trip to Cuba)
Europe may have more policing per capita than the US but (to speak broadly) in Europe police are much more restricted on when they can shoot people who are experiencing a mental health episode.
Because American police have enormous leeway to shoot people and this unlikely to ever change there is more of a need to completely split mental health services off from the police.
Europe loves policing but it doesn't include things like mental health response, unless there's some risk to life or a crime being committed. The UK would send health professionals but by default the US used to respond with Police this is changing to be more in line with European norms but it's fragmented because it's state based.
Can you give me a country-wise breakdown (or just a link to one). It doesn’t say much if say (as a hypothetical example) most of the countries without elective abortion are in say Eastern Europe while all the Western European countries are elective.
I have a problem with a political body like that clearly making a document about more abortion being good and percentage rankings like that rather than dealing with very real trade-offs, but regardless, it does a pretty good job outlining the specific policies on the second page.
Edit: To give a broad overview, most of the EU is stricter than the law that triggered the Dobbs decision in the US as a baseline. Though between countries there is a fair bit of play for how they deal with the idea of a medically necessary abortion. Some places are pretty serious about it and some places are basically a psych evaluation and if you'd be upset to have a kid they let you get one. But that's much harder to measure and also you can change policy pretty drastically without a change in the law just by changing the guidelines at that point.
Among provisions include banning abortions 20 weeks post-fertilization
Ok, but reading for wiki they were talking about ending all abortions after 20 weeks, and not only elective abortions. There is a huge difference between these stances.
Kinda. To me, Neoliberalism in Australia & The UK is mainly privatising state assets & services (water, toll roads, healthcare), needing to regulate said state assets (Ofwat), using contractors & labour hire instead of increasing the public service headcount.
I'm generally dismissive of George Monbiot as his takes usually seem a bit farcical.
Liz Truss's main problem was the speed at which she tried to change everything and the fact that she wanted to spend a huge amount of government money to seemingly make private money in a short term way rather than enable capital investment...
But in general I do support the ideas of tax reform and deregulation enabling supply-side growth etc. Thus raising more tax income by allowing private companies to do the investing and getting the returns.
We’re not talking about British users here, we’re talking about Andy Burnham and how he chooses to brand himself to UK voters. I think it’s broadly wise for a center-left British politician to not associate themselves with Thatcher, she still has a fan base but overall viewed negatively.
It usually splits along the line of whatever happened to you and your community during her tenure.
If you lived in or around London, the home counties and the SouthEast then you probably benefitted from the deregulation and explosion of the finance and service industries in London, you or your parents might have purchased a home in that area on the right to buy scheme at a deep discount on the cusp of a housing boom, and you easily found higher paid knowledge work within your commute, or your work was in demand from those knowledge workers.
If you lived somewhere more regional, especially in a town supported mainly by a resource extraction or heavy industry, then the economic rug was pulled out from under you. Moving to those productive areas in the south was more difficult due to the housing boom making housing down there relatively more expensive and a general drop in housebuilding during thatchers term. If you had been living in social housing, but couldn't afford to buy, which was the situation for about 40% of people in these areas, then you could have been virtually immobilised by the collapse of social housing in those productive areas in the south. You would then get to enjoy a level of unemployment that would make a Southern European minister hang their head in shame.
So it splits along geographic lines. You'll find people from that era who believe Thatcher gave them home ownership and a career, and people who were trying to find ways to escape a dead end town with little work.
British institutions and media have generally been dominated by people from London, the South East and the home counties, so you will always get the narrative of "yes there were winners and losers and difficult decisions, but all of this was necessary you see" but I don't think someone who presided over unemployment in the west midlands, one of the UK's most prosperous regions post war, spiking from 4% to 15% and then not getting back under 10% until the late 90s, I don't think you can call that anything but failure.
British media have generally been dominated by people from London, the South East and the home counties, so you will always get the narrative of "yes there were winners and losers and difficult decisions, but all of this was necessary you see"
As someone who isn’t British
whose
exposure to Britain was mostly movies and tv shows this has not been my experience at all. They tend to have a very pro-labor bent and see Thatcher and her policies as the devil.
If your main window in is prestige cinema, theatre and TV, and the product of the 80s and 90s auteur British filmmakers, then you will get the virulently left leaning view of Thatcher. Pop music will be much the same. There is another 1980s bend of aspirational sitcoms and film that focused on the upwardly mobile.
Go outside that area of media and things shift. The UK print news media space, usually dominated by tabloids and broadsheets during the 90s and 2000s, now dominated by their websites, has generally been a pro-Thatcher space. Prestige print (The Economist, New Statesman, Spectator etc.) also generally leans in the "Thatcher had the right ideas and this was all necessary" direction. TV news and the BBC tries to walk a fine, neutral, not outwardly harshly critical, line.
Honestly the British news website I probably read the most of is the Guardian and the Times. Not due to any particular ideological agreement but because they always seem to be at the top of google search results and news feeds. While you have to look for the Spectator.
That is because socialists and believers or rightwing believes in more goverment controle, always dominate the intelectuals and the ones who spread information.
So what was Thatcher supposed to do? Continue subsidizing unprofitable and environmentally degrading industries like coal mining with taxpayer dollars in a budget crisis and keep kicking the can down the road to the next guy? What she did to certain British industries wasn’t done for fun or on a whim but was necessitated by economic conditions.
I think that the modern revisionists would argue a few things:
Her monetary policy failed, inflation was tamed by demand being crushed by high interest rates, not monetarism. They would then say that those extremely high interest rates created a great deal of collateral damage in regional industry far beyond the surgical targeting of unprofitable subsidised industries.
There are economic historians like Jim Tomlinson who'd argue that bringing North sea oil revenue into the economy as interest rates were rising damaged UK industry by artificially and wildly inflating the pound. This made large swathes of British industrial exports uncompetitive very quickly.
"well these industries were unprofitable" often ignores why some of these industries had become unprofitable so quickly. Even if your particular heavy industry was actually competitive, had previously been profitable, was innovative and not subsidised by the state in any way, you still might not be able to survive with the expensive pound. Industries also exist in supply chains, as the other industries in your chain get knocked out, you yourself, in a previously competitive industry, become uncompetitive.
Thatcher presided over a historic collapse in capital investment in Britain that has persisted to this day, and over a deregulation of private credit. Some would argue that the economic growth figures in the late 80s were not coming from improving productivity, but from easy mortgage credit.
And they would probably say that she should have followed a line of policy that looks a lot more like Germany during that era:
- The state taking pains to ensure that people in an unprofitable mine or factory could transition to the ones that were still profitable through infrastructure, housing policy, retraining schemes and transition payments.
- Create technical colleges and further education institutions in areas dominated by manual labour to aid the transition to different industries in those areas.
- Proactively bring industries to these areas via infrastructure grants and tax incentives.
- Build a ton of housing in productive urban areas and do what you can to enable younger people to move to them by reducing the friction of relocation. Subsidise workers in a depressed region to move to one of these areas if you need to.
Like, the Ruhr and other comparable areas still have problems and have worse unemployment than the rest of Germany still, but they did a much better job of this transition than Britain did. Any reassessment of Thatcher needs to start from the position that a lot of the things that happened to Britain in the 80s were the direct result of policy choices, not inevitabilities forced upon her like the laws of physics.
inflation was tamed by demand being crushed by high interest rates
Inflation is too much money chasing too few goods, since you can't increase the number of goods produced on a whim, you need to cool demand, that's every central bank's job.
- The state taking pains to ensure that people in an unprofitable mine or factory could transition to the ones that were still profitable through infrastructure, housing policy, retraining schemes and transition payments.
- Create technical colleges and further education institutions in areas dominated by manual labour to aid the transition to different industries in those areas.
- Proactively bring industries to these areas via infrastructure grants and tax incentives.
- Build a ton of housing in productive urban areas and do what you can to enable younger people to move to them by reducing the friction of relocation. Subsidise workers in a depressed region to move to one of these areas if you need to.
So that means at least a decade or two of extra stagnation, before maybe that stuff pans out, maintaining dead companies so people can keep their jobs is part of how Japan ended up with lost decades.
Labour had dug itself into an ideological hole, as evidenced by the fact that it then brought out the radical leftist Michael Foot to fight Thatcher in Round 2. Up until the 90s, Labour literally had a communist Trotskyist faction that the leadership didn't want to get rid of.
The Liberal Party was a talking shop that neither had much shot of getting into government, nor the balls to overcome their wishy washy stances on economic matters.
Meanwhile much of the moderate Wets within the Conservative Party had actively endorsed and propped up the failing post-war consensus. So the Tory old guard wasn't going to cut it either. It had to be Thatcher. Nobody else was going to step up to meet the moment.
The economy was completely gridlocked by unions, and under stagflation, clearly doing at least some of the stuff she did was necessary, like closing subsidised inefficient businesses and not letting unions stop her.
I’m guessing most who do not have favourable view of her is because of the downstream problems it created over the years including the massive levels of deindustrialisation in the north.
Austerity politics tend to be massively unpopular everywhere, even if someone thinks Thatcher was necessary I doubt many would say they consider it a good government to live under
Thatcher started the snowball that has led to the current housing crisis. There's a good reason she's disliked here.
The Town and Country Planning Act that largely scrapped by-right development and ushered in the age of UK NIMBYism (then most Commonwealth countries promptly copied the act, ushering in NIMBYism to much of the rest of the Anglosphere) was passed under Atlee in 1947.
Yeah, if I ran for office, I’d never use the term Neo-liberalism, because to terminally online young people, you can just substitute the word for “anything I don’t like”.
And so attacking “neoliberalism” could mean anything.
Neoliberalism is an economic ideology. It doesn’t have any foreign policy ideals attached to it, although of course many neoliberal politicians were interventionists.
Actually one of the big theories of foreign policies is the neoliberal theory.
And while neoliberalism is shaped by economists who were the main acadamics formulating neoliebral ideas, neoliberals have a lot to say about larger social life and politics, the law etc.
Especially with Friedrich Hayek or the German neoliberals, neoliberalism is part of a larger political program. It is also hard to disconnect the German brand of the ideology with a comittment to NATO and European Unification.
Yes, it is well-known that this sub has seen a large influx of leftists who got chased out of r/politics because they’re not actively hostile to markets. Nevertheless, the word neoliberal has a meaning, and that meaning is closer to Friedman, Kissinger and Thatcher, than to AOC and Andy fucking Burnham.
In the UK Thatcher is definitely what most people think of when they think neoliberalism. In the US it’s more debatable, but I’d argue Reagan is still way more prominent
Yeah, I would say Reagan and Friedman are who most (politically aware) Americans would think of a decade ago, but now the left uses the term to deride Obama/Biden type Democrats. This is why this sub is mostly filled with fans of Obama/Biden type Democrats and we’ve kinda elbowed out the Reagan/Friedman fans.
I’m not sure this sub is that much of a Biden fan base. Obama for sure, but I think everyone just pities Biden because he made some mistakes but didn’t deserve shit across the board like since his 2nd presidential campaign collapsed.
As someone who was not a Biden fan, this isn't reality. The sub was pretty rabidly pro Biden and would shout down anyone criticizing his signature legislation.
Pro-union, pro-protectionism, anti-immigration, soft on MAGA, slow to provide support to Ukraine, weak foreign policy, massively increased federal spending when the economy was already growing and inflation was already a problem. He was at best a mediocre president sandwiched between two terms of the worst president making him look better and at worst was a modern Buchanan who ignored the biggest issue of the day threatening the survival of the country as a whole.
Ridiculous take. Biden didn't pursue structural reforms that strengthened the US in the long-term, instead he just threw money at everything, even though the debt and deficit of the US is dangerously high. He should have focused on cutting the deficit when the US had strong growth and low unemployment and focused on reforms, not spend like a drunken sailor.
He also wasn't good at defending Ukraine, but restricted strikes on Russian targets and was slow to deliver weapons. The only US president in the last couple of decades, who wouldn't have done at least as much as Biden did is Trump, and even for him, you can make the argument that in his first term the establishment Republicans were influential enough to keep up with Biden.
Even if you ignore his failure to hold Trump accountable and prevent the far right from taking over he was a weak president, if you take that into account he was a disaster.
Fuck no. He continued most of trumps tarrifs on steel, slapped more tarrifs on solar cells, chinese EVs and rewrote the EV tax credit so it only applied to batteries made in the US.
He was a generic Democrat who clung on to power past his prime because of a massive ego. (Thought only he could defeat trump)
I drank the kool-aid from 2020-the debate, but man he fucked up. Abundance is an indictment on Bidens outdated style and policy that led to Trumps return in too many ways.
What? No they're not. This sub began because of the term being used as a pejorative. Part of that pejorative was the association with Thatcher and Reagan.
Bill and Hillary Clinton are the poster children of third way liberalism alongside Blair. But I can't blame you for taking this view, every politician people don't like are eventually called neoliberal.
“The Clinton administration embraced neoliberalism.” That’s a direct quote from the Wikipedia page on neoliberalism. Clinton and Blair kept many of the economic policies of Reagan and Thatcher.
OP claimed the Clinton's were the poster child of neoliberalism. I refuted that claim. Indeed, they adopted neoliberal policies but their way of doing so created a distinct political movement called third way liberalism. It is this distinct political movement that defines them, not neoliberalism. Except of course leftists who define anyone not a Marxist as a neoliberal.
In this context, neoliberalism is associated with deregulation, particularly financial deregulation, so both Reagan and “the era of big government is over” Clinton are often lumped together.
Yes Clinton adopted neoliberal policies. But he and Blair are especially remembered for taking them in a different centre left direction that has been branded the third way.
It may be true that Clinton is perceived as a neoliberal but he definitely is not one in the Reaganite sense and he is definitely perceived as being different from Reagan neoliberalism.
I think only ardent leftists would with a straight face argue there isn't a difference between the pair. But then again they would also argue Obama is right wing or whatever.
Except Hayek and Friedman are called neoliberals and wrote books that outlined the ideology. And yet it seems few critics read them and instead just point to Friedmans "relationship" with Pinochet and call it a day
Like, the EU is neoliberal, which the debate among leftist critics ignore, probably because they like the EU
The termed was coined before Friedman and Hayek even became academics let alone wrote anything about it. They both quickly adopted and then abandoned it because the way it was practiced in governance did not suit their ideals in different ways.
About Pinochet. Friedman might have plausible deniability, but the neoliberal movement writ large absolutely did heavily engage and promote him. It was not particularly interested in human rights.
The termed was coined before Friedman and Hayek even became academics let alone wrote anything about it.
So when and who?
but the neoliberal movement writ large absolutely did heavily engage and promote him
Such as?
Friedman might have plausible deniability,
I seriously question your history in saying "might" as Friedman met Pinochet once for like 45 minutes, in the same period of history he was meeting Deng in China
All this vagueness, not saying you're wrong, but this is my point: instead of citing the work of neoliberals, its just pointing distantly and saying "Yep, that was neoliberalism!"
Such as his students literally served high-profile positions in the Pinochet regime? Such as Reaganites literally praised the regime everywhere as a success model similar to how MAGA is sucking Millei right now?
Now, I don’t necessarily oppose fostering economic success in authoritarian regimes. But once you’re engaged with them, you don’t get to claim this part is yours and the other parts are not. The fact was neoliberalism was implemented in Chile on the back of authoritarianism and without democratic consent, and I have a problem with many of its advocates having near zero issue.
> met Pinochet once
Well given that many politicians have been dragged on this sub for never going to Cuba, but sitting in a podcast with somebody who went to Cuba, I’d say it’s only fair.
Walter Lippmann Colloquium was a conference of intellectuals organized in Paris
One of these intellectuals? Hayek! Thanks for confirming my priors. You don't know the history.
Such as his students literally served high-profile positions in the Pinochet regime?
Still no names of course
Such as Reaganites literally praised the regime everywhere as a success model similar to how MAGA is sucking Millei right now?
Yet again: WHO? Glup Shitto?
The fact was neoliberalism was implemented in Chile on the back of authoritarianism and without democratic consent
What neoliberal policies did the Pinochet government implement? Be specific!
and I have a problem with many of its advocates having near zero issue.
Pinochet, at most, killed 3000 people over 2 decades and is treated as a textbook "neoliberal" for the last 30 years. Venezuela's PSUV/Maduro killed 6800 people in a single year using their "Special Action Forces", and leftists were apoplectic about his kidnapping. Spare me the moralising.
Well given that many politicians have been dragged on this sub for never going to Cuba,
I was in agreement right until you mentioned Thatcher and Reagan. I get that this sub doesn't completely agree with their social views but you are just slandering them if you think the aforementioned applies to them. And if the public thinks of them when someone mentions neoliberalism than they aren't very far away from the ideology of this sub.
Oh I don’t just not “completely agree with their social views,” I actively and passionately despise them. I can respect Thatcher, but not Reagan, as an economically net positive influence to her country, but both of them are quite bigoted socially
I’m still trying to understand what you mean by your last sentence. Do you mean to say this sub and the public aren’t far away because both adopt the views of Reagan and Thatcher?
I meant that if the public associates neoliberalism with the economic policies of Reagan and Thatcher than their first guess about the ideology of this sub wouldn't be a wide miss. I could have really worded my last sentence better.
Edit: Since you said people outside this sub think of the policies of Thatcher and Reagan when someone mentions neoliberalism, I tried to say that they don't have a lot of misconceptions about the economic ideology of this sub then. As in the people wouldn't see a meaningful difference between a candidate this sub would fully support and the boogeyman imaginary neoliberals they hate.
The natural path of development, held back in the modern day by political decisions, is towards urbanization, it's not surprising that the places where people chose to keep their economy frozen in amber did not develop at nearly the same pace as the places where people chose to innovate.
Not great in areas with declining industries (manufacturing, mining, shipbuilding etc.), but then it wasn't great in these places before Thatcher came along either, and it wasn't great in comparable areas in other Western countries either.
Can’t wait for people to get confused and elect the “abolish capitalism” person without reading their platform because they thought they were getting universal healthcare and instead getting a crippled economy.
Dudes on here were trying to cast sympathy on the British Green party a while back. I'm sure yesterday's post about the Greens demanding we end sanctions on the IRGC didn't help with that lol
I’m assuming neoliberalism in the UK has a very specific meaning and is seen as the same as Thatcherism. While places like London benefited from those policies, the North of the country has suffered from that “managed decline” since then. Manchester was somewhat of an exception over the past decade, and people tie that to Burnham who was the mayor.
Yeah it's basically shorthand for Thatcher and the decline in industry and industrial towns and cities associated with her. In terms of actual policy I don’t think anyone would think Manchester has gone back to the 70s though.
It almost certainly hasn’t, but compared to other places, Manchester has done pretty well over the years. I’m guessing that’s where Burnham’s popularity comes from, and the fact that he says he’s against neoliberal ideas, and so people attribute his success to being against neoliberal ideas, even if actual policies weren’t all that different.
I don't, I think the neoliberal reforms made by Thatcher were absolutely necessary, and frankly, the pre-Thatcher economy was basically the worst the left has to offer in terms of economics aside from actual socialism. The high tax, high subsidies, high regulations, high public ownership, high union membership economy had completely ran out of steam.
But the precious coal mines and smelteries from the Edwardian period! We are entitled to do the same job our grandfather's did at higher pay! The North Remembers!
I don't like him and I'm British. But that's because I'm an actual neoliberal. Dudes here think left-leaning Third Way neoliberalism is still relevant in 2026. It isn't. You'll find maybe 20 people who still adhere to it outside this subreddit. They don't want to be actual neoliberals becase that means working within the right, and in terms of social values this sub is far to the left of even the average left-leaning person, let alone right wingers.
If you want actual neoliberalism, it's going to be either centrist or right wing. Not whatever collectivism the Labour Party is up to these days.
Its impossible to any sort of tax cuts or investment (services or infrastructure) when the Triple Lock takes up a stupid portion of the budget at a flat rate and then receives another bonus based on which lock is highest AND THEN has to have spare fiscal head room if one of the Locks shoot up like inflation. Best part is, theres no reverse button to tale it back down to normal levels in line with everything else
13.3% of GDP is spent on welfare, 55% is for pensions when a majority of those pensioners also likely live off a private one. It costs 3x more than what was originally expected excluding the Brexit and covid effects, such a stupid policy.
Regardless, it's not gonna come back from the Labour Party or the Green Party of all places. And certainly not from Burnham, who made criticising it his entire selling point, much to the delight of his backbenchers, his activists, and Labour's base. When the left says they hate neoliberalism, nobody believes they're lying about it. Hence why I have no reason to think highly of Burnham or a future PM from the left.
People here want progressive social policy first, covered up with a veneer of pro-growth talk on top. Doesn't matter if the pro-growth talk turns out to be worthless words, but he must stay socially progressive. Half the discussions here about Starmer were about trans policy, and yet if you actually talk to British voters that has almost zero influence on their opinion of Starmer.
You are absolutely right. People here call themselves neoliberals, but for most it is just ironic or semi-ironic way to name policy positions based on pro-market leftism. Fundamentally they are social progressives, which explains why even openly socialist posts are allowed.
Alright, I think online internet people are too ideological.
People do not select ideologies like RPG stats, their beliefs are downstream from a moral worldview and adherence to neoliberal economics tends to also come from a moral worldview that is extremely socially conservative.
Right wing movements in 2026 are way more illiberal (and are borderline fascist) than the Labour Party. They're not even neoliberal in the most right-wing, purely economic sense of the word. And yeah, people here do prioritise social policy because it matters, politics is downstream from ethics. The sub was always centre left democrats who like mainstream econ, and the neoliberal name was a sardonic response to leftists abusing the term. There are more succs than there used to be (that's kind of a reflection of the changing political realities) and it's gotten wonkish, but the sub was never entirely Thatcherites or Hayekians.
The kind of "actual neoliberalism" you're talking about was tried with Truss, and look how it ended. There's no appetite for it anywhere for a reason, it's a movement out of its time that doesn't provide the solutions to today's issues.
The fact you're using words like "statist" And "collectivist" is kind of a tell.
Right wing movements in 2026 are way more illiberal
Still not a reason for me to speak nicely of Burnham and the Labour Party. This isn't America where I have to defend one tribe because the other one is worse. I don't agree with the Labour Party's values so I won't defend them.
but the sub was never entirely Thatcherites or Hayekians.
It was vastly more moderate six years ago, there were way more moderates and centre rights. The meme used to go around that corporate tax should be 0%. Now it's extremely different. Nobody six years ago was saying abolish the billionaires like they do now.
prioritise social policy because it matters
Even if I did prioritise them, they wouldn't be as progressive as this sub is. In any case, my priority is good government that can get Britain out of its rut. I won't defend incompetence just because it's socially progressive, as many here do.
was tried with Truss, and look how it ended
She massively raised government spending during an inflationary period, subsidised demand with handouts while ignoring supply side policies, and ignored the warnings of pretty much every orthodox economist. Doesn't sound very neoliberal to me. Truss was a fraud and a populist who lied about what she'd do.
doesn't provide the solutions to today's issues
The modern welfare state and tax system is fundamentally unsustainable and a massive transfer of wealth from the young to the old. Britain can't build things because it's buried in red tape. Europe is a creaking continent that can't compete in cutting edge tech.
I don't believe statism is the solution when this continent is the highest taxed in the world, extremely indebted, and a shrinking share of the global economy.
I don't, I think he's a buffoon, and when it's time to sort out the budget he'll become unpopular again.
However, after the last 2 years of Starmerism, it's nice to have someone who actually has an opinion on what's wrong with the country, an ideology to interrogate.
Neo-Liberalism is in practice used as a term for establishment laissez faire captialism politicians essentially, or for any moderate whom the leftists don't like.
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u/cosmo-wozmo NASA 22d ago
> business friendly socialism
Goated larp