Not ‘Rolling Back the State’

Abstract

One of the premises of rising neoliberalism from the 1980s had been the claim of Ronald Reagan that government is the problem not the solution, readily endorsed, in parallel, by Margaret Thatcher on coming into government. Drawing on a range of international examples this paper shows that this was utterly uninformed, that deregulation of finance in the US led to the worst financial crisis in 2008 since 1929 and that Thatcher's scrapping of the 1970s Labour governments' industrial policy instruments led to major de-industrialisation in the UK which influenced the 'No' vote in the 2016 referendum on whether Britain should remain in the European Union. While the US nonetheless pursued an industrial policy by stealth which promoted a range of advanced technology corporations and that Germany, embodying liberal market principles after WW2, recently has endorsed the case for not only a German but also European industrial policy and led in advocating a European Green New Deal modelled on the Roosevelt New Deal which recovered the US from The Depression of the early 1930s and convinced Truman to support the Marshall Aid programme that also recovered Western Europe after the cataclysm of WW2.