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Corybn Versus Capitalism
We are now a little over a week out from the general election in the UK. The smart money is still on a Tory victory and an outright majority with which Boris Johnson can pursue his hard Brexit agenda. But nothing is certain. The high levels of voter registration amongst young people raises the possibility that Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party gets enough votes to gain power, perhaps relying on the support of the SNP. Indeed, it has been argued that some polls show that the UK is “a normal-sized polling error away from a Labour government”. Were that to happen subsequent events would amount to a real-life experiment in the extent to which a left-wing government could pursue a redistributive agenda in the context of a country that has, for decades, aggressively oriented its economic policies toward the accumulation of wealth into the hands of the few.
As such, the election represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity for the British people to choose the economic path they want their country to follow. For over forty years, the British political class embraced neoliberalism, a doctrine which holds that anything that stands in the way of the private accumulation of wealth must be destroyed. With the ascent to power of Margaret Thatcher, the British economy commenced its neoliberal transformation. National industries were placed in private hands, rules governing the operations of banks and financial markets…
