How did Britain come to this? The accidental logics of Britain’s neoliberal settlement | LSE Event

The post-war political settlement established by Clement Attlee’s government developed systems to tackle what William Beveridge identified as five giant evils of Britain in 1942: Want, Disease, Ignorance, Idleness, and Squalor. By 1979, these systems were failing. In the UK, from 1979, successive governments led by Margaret Thatcher aimed to tackle those failures in a neoliberal settlement based on rolling back the state and empowering markets. This strategy was based on two fundamental neoliberal ideas. First, the social responsibility of private enterprises is to maximise profits within rules of the game. Second, effective systems of governance can harness the attractions of market forces for services that violate the requirements for markets to be effective. In ’How Did Britain Come to This?’ Gwyn Bevan argues that the interaction of these two ideas created an accidental logic in which financialised enterprises have exploited rules of the game to maximise profits. To read, download or purcha