‘Neoliberal’ is an unthinking leftist insult. All it does is stifle debate | Will Hutton
Farewell to the 2010s. The decade was captured by an intellectually bankrupt right wing for all the wrong reasons, above all because of a fear of foreigners. Yet for all that, it did give us a measure of progress – from our smartphones to declining poverty, although even on that metric, Britain managed to buck a global trend. From the perspective of any British believer in Enlightenment values, good riddance to the dying decade.
Yet in 2009, matters did not look promising for the libertarian right. New Labour had been in power for 12 years and on all the key challenges of the day, the only effective policy responses were forms of collective action, whether on climate change or terrorism, the declining effectiveness of antibiotics or the power of multinationals. The financial crash of 2008 was the consequence of hyper-deregulation, following the palpably absurd rightwing faith that markets were magic. The future lay with the left, natural believers in the power of good government and international co-operation, in particular the EU. Thoughtful Tories openly pondered whether they could ever win a general election outright again.
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