British austerity cuts aimed to permanently foreclose any future welfare state

Evidence

It is often noted that Thatcher herself regarded Tony Blair’s New Labour government as her finest achievement, as it operated within the parameters of the political form of neoliberalism that she had instituted. New Labour simply elaborated the same vision of modernization initiated by Thatcher eighteen years earlier (though with some slight softening up on the ideological front). The long march of this neoliberal revolution was carried further when David Cameron, as prime minister of the Conservative-Liberal coalition that came to power in 2010, then took up the baton by signaling Blair as his role model in his attempts to reposition the Tories as a compassionate party. Nonetheless, and despite these apparently warm-hearted claims, Cameron installed George Osborne in the Treasury, who was determined to follow Milton Friedman’s mantra of “creative destruction” by using the economic crisis to massively cut state funding. These cuts were strategically intended to effect an irreversible transformation of British society, which would prevent the future reestablishment of any form of welfare state in Britain, whichever political party were to subsequently come to power. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 974

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to reader’s Frankfurt School reading on rationality, state power, and postwar welfare capitalism; also to the earlier chapters’ diagnosis of the longue durée of the neoliberal project.