In many ways neoliberalism is an extreme ideology, much like fascism and communism, but we very rarely recognise it as such. It hides behind the free-market, deregulation and privatisation, but in reality it’s quietly increasing isolation, inequality, poverty, disease and environmental threat.
In this episode, Richard Kemp speaks with Peter Beresford, author of The Antidote: How People-Powered Movements Can Renew Politics, Policy and Practice, about the problem neoliberalism poses, both in politics and in our everyday lives.
They discuss how neoliberalism has undermined democracy, the power of new social movements, and what can be done to create a better society for everyone.
Listen to the podcast here, or on your favourite podcast platform:
Peter Beresford OBE is Visiting Professor at the University of East Anglia and Co-Chair of Shaping Our Lives, the national disabled people’s organisation.
Scroll down for shownotes and transcript.
The Antidote by Peter Beresford is available on Policy Press for £19.99 here.
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SHOWNOTES
Timestamps:
2:03 – What is neoliberalism, what make it extreme and how has it clung on for so long?
5:06 – How was neoliberalism first sold to us?
8:13 – How does neoliberalism affect our day-to-day lives?
9:15 – How is the murder of Sarah Everard connected to neoliberalism?
18:50 – How did neoliberalism affect COVID-19 responses, and what policies went unscrutinised during the pandemic?
24:26 – What are new social movements and what are they doing differently?
34:46 – How has neoliberalism shaped digital space, particularly social media?
41:14 – How is neoliberalism related to slavery and white privilege?
43:53 – Is left-wing populism a danger?
47:16 – Why do we need radical changes, and what should these changes be?
53:35 – What actions can we, individually, take to move away from neoliberalism?
Transcript:
(Please note this transcript is autogenerated and may have minor inaccuracies.)
Richard Kemp: You’re listening to the Transforming Society podcast. I’m Richard Kemp, and on this episode I’m joined by Peter Beresford OBE, visiting Professor at the University of East Anglia and co-chair of Shaping Our Lives, the national disabled people’s organisation. Peter has long-term lived experience of welfare benefits and mental health services. He is also Emeritus Professor at Brunel University, London and the University of Essex, and honorary professor at Edgehill University.
Peter’s new book, ‘The Antidote: How People Powered Movements Can Renew Politics, Policy and Practice’, published by Policy Press, explores how neoliberal ideologies have undermined democracy, increasing isolation, inequality, poverty, disease and environmental threat. Neoliberalism has been with us for over 50 years, though for many of us, this ideology is nameless and unseen. It’s just the way things are and have always been.
First taking off in the 1970s through Thatcherism and Reaganomics, neoliberalism has quietly infiltrated every aspect of our lives, widening the inequality gap, reducing social safety nets, and separating us from each other and from ourselves. In his book, Peter shows how, inspired by new social movements, personal politics have become more inclusive and egalitarian and that they may offer a path to transformation.
Using international evidence and examples, he sets out the barriers we face and offers how we can bring an end to the destructive effects of unfettered neoliberal ideology, economics, policy and politics. Peter Beresford, welcome to the Transforming Society podcast.
Peter Beresford: Thanks very much. Good to be here.
RK: Thanks so much, Peter. The yeah, your book was such an eye opener for me. I mean, I thought I knew things about neoliberalism and how it affected at least my politics, at the very least. But you really, you really just kind of totally opened things up for me during this book. So thank thanks so much for writing it, first of all.
I’m really excited to dig in with you to, to, to to discuss this with you today. You say that neoliberalism is an extreme ideology, much like fascism or Soviet and Maoist communism. Can you explain, neoliberalism? What makes it extreme and how has it clung on for so far, more than 50 years?
PB: I think neoliberalism is full of contradictions, but the biggest, the biggest issue for me is I really don’t think most of us have any grasp that there is even neoliberalism out there. We read the daily papers, we read the version of news that’s presented us, and there is a pattern to it, but it’s not very often it actually tells us what this pattern has to do with, you know, why are we facing such difficulties from water companies that that basically leave detritus on our beaches?
It is to do with neoliberalism, but that often doesn’t get said. And so it goes on. Why did we have the disaster that we had a couple of years ago with Covid, about which we may speak more. It was about neoliberalism in this country. And so it goes on and neoliberalism, really, in essence, it’s quite a simple thing. What it means is that you encourage the market to have a free for all.
You reduce the regulation that there might be over the way the market works, the market being that we live in, in an exchange relationship with each other, which puts as a priority the collection of money capital by a very narrow, limited group. And, that’s how it was historically when we had liberalism in the 18th century. But neoliberalism is really about releasing the restrictions that have developed over time on capitalism.
What’s most interesting is that we spent the first half of the 20th century experiencing the very worst effects internationally of such market driven economics, shaping our lives. And we spent more time after it trying to change that. And because we went through two world wars, a terrible international depression, people had had enough and there was a political force for change.
And I’m not saying that change was good enough, but the change was to much more state intervention and state intervention is not what the market wants, because the market’s there to serve the interests of the people it serves. And that means that we have more and more people receiving less and less in redistribution. It’s negative and fewer and fewer receiving more.
That’s the pattern of neoliberalism. And and it is a pattern. We, you know, we we might decide it’s a good one. We might decide it’s a bad one, but it does have consequences. And those consequences are not about ensuring social justice. They really are, I think an extreme version of the distinction between freedom from and freedom to. Freedom from’s what people fought world wars to achieve, and hope for with the welfare state that we could live with each other in equity and towards social justice, freedom to is to be able to do whatever you want.
And that sadly, seems to be where we’ve been heading for the last 50 years.
RK: And so when neoliberalism was kind of introduced to us, I suppose not necessarily in name of like here is an ideology, let’s start doing it. If it opens up the free market to allow unfettered greed to take, take, take and and increase the inequality gap as a result. How was that, how was that sold to us 50 odd years ago?
PB: It’s interesting, of course, isn’t it, to think about how did something which has so consistently shown its utter uselessness, you know, in terms of the promises that were offered us for things like privatisation of public services, of amenities and how it’s all consistently gone wrong. Well, I think partly it’s because this concept, neoliberalism, manages to hide itself away.
So we don’t actually know there is this organising principle. I think this is this is why we need to try and get a grasp of history. We it’s not surprising that politicians and policymakers, although it’s so easy now to to be critical of them and to say none of them are to be trusted, so on. And it worries me enormously if if one’s interested in preserving democracy.
But we’ve had a hard road. They tried to introduce something different after the Second World War, the welfare state. And not surprisingly, it wasn’t perfect. The the biggest problem, I think, as I’ve written elsewhere about the welfare state, was it was one group of people basically offering what they hope were decent prescriptions for another, better off people who’d had the chance to get some power, suggesting what would help more poor people and disadvantaged people to achieve, people who faced discrimination.
And not surprisingly, that was, that fell short. And it was accused consistently, especially by people who profited from the way things were before, of being patronising, paternalistic, and that catches, a real thing in us all, doesn’t it? You know, the idea that someone else is telling us what we should have, and then it didn’t, of course, work perfectly because nothing ever does.
And when it started to get problems, particularly operating in a global economic market, that was a market in the 70s, then it came under very heavy attack. But you have to remember that the attack that neoliberalism offered, it wasn’t that it was an attack that was created because things were going wrong. It had never gone away. People like Mrs. Thatcher had believed in neoliberalism, right from the word go from before it had to be neo.
And, people like Hayek were her Bible. But then we encountered difficulties. And that’s one of the things which has to be said about neoliberalism, that it’s always been skilled at controlling the media, controlling the press. And in it’s, it’s populism. Populism, meaning not that you really are handing over control, power and participation to the people, but that you are conning the people to believe that that’s what you’re offering when what you’re really doing is keeping a firm grip on power.
So the other thing that has to be said here, of course, which I haven’t mentioned because this, it is about international politics. The Soviet Union had failed. There was no longer a competition. And the marketeers could say, well, you tried the other way and it failed, turn back to us. And I think that had a big, subtle appeal too.
RK: This neoliberalism, how is it affecting us personally, not just politically, but in our in our homes, in our relationships, etc., etc.? How is it affecting us there?
PB: Well, yesterday I was doing some work, but my family and my extended family were at the seaside, but they couldn’t go to the seaside they wanted to go to, or the second seaside they wanted to go to. They went to another seaside because there was no swimming in the seaside they went to because the seaside was covered with what is normally called shit.
And it’s that bad. And we know that the water companies have consistently failed to ensure that the standards, which more generally have been maintained before, the economics that have been maintained before state, that is to say, we were sold privatisation as being cheaper and more efficient. It’s actually, of course, much more expensive and very inefficient. And that’s because it has to look in two ways at once provide a service, but also make a profit for its shareholders.
And of course, there tends to be some confusion about which comes first.
RK: You connect the appalling murder of Sarah Everard by an on duty police officer in 2021, with the problems and inequities of neoliberalism, and how we can understand and even liberate ourselves from from that. Can you explain this connection, please?
PB: I think it’s a very real and profound connection, no less real than the terrible murder by a policeman in America that was based on racist grounds. And I think it is, it is straight forward. We live in a in an economy that’s neoliberal, which not only encourages to be divided amongst ourselves, but is divisive. It does mean that people are expected to sort things out for themselves.
There is is really a de-emphasis on the supportive state. Now, I don’t believe that neoliberalism is actually against the state, because the state becomes increasingly important as a means of control. What have we been hearing about lately? All about rearming and conflict on an international scale, which costs enormous amounts of money. Of course, it does boost the economics of big arms dealers, too.
So we have a situation where there is likely to be more need for control, for policing and the rest of it. But then there is still the same old neoliberal principle that you don’t want to spend public money. So in fact, although the police have always been close to the state, the police have been defunded, insecure and made less efficient over the years.
And of course, the police, as institutions can be very powerful and also want to maintain and strengthen their alliances with the traditional state. And I think that’s some of what we’ve seen, we’ve also seen the intervention of new Managerialism, in police services, that does not go sadly with increased efficiency, increased accountability and the rest of it.
And I think that the way that money has come and gone from police services has we know it’s resulted in all sorts of problems in terms of maintaining a stable population of of police workers, to the detriment of the police service itself, but also it’s meant that people have been able to hide. People have not only been able to hide, but the very negative values sometimes associated with means of control, like police services have had a bit of a holiday.
They managed to maintain themselves. We know that from the terrible social media developments that took place in relation to the terrible incidents that you touched on, the police who had formed groups and were we’ve heard more since through the inquiry about the way in which many, many police people have, policemen, I should stress, have been found wanting in terms of their behavior to women, in terms of criminal, effectively criminal behavior.
And these, I think, are all things to associate with the uncertain position of the police, its increased symbiotic relationship with a regressive state, the uncertainty of its funding, and I think the kind of, kitchen culture that can be associated with an organisation that lacks proper control. And the, the curious and grievous thing that we’ve seen is that the murder of Sarah Everard, by an on duty policeman, both highlighted those problems, but also the solutions that people have been trying to develop.
When we saw the massive response from women’s groups and organisations following her murder, and the demonstration and then the appalling way in which it was dealt with, the violence used against those women, and then the way in which that activity by those women was vindicated subsequently by investigations. And what we’re seeing with that is the other half, the neglected half of the equation, which is it isn’t all about neoliberalism and that traffic to inequality, and injustice.
It’s also about this equally emergent and important and I think incredibly close to many of us, development of the new social movements. And the two things have been in a kind of very dynamic relationship with each other. And of course, neoliberalism has been very frightened, of, of the emergence of those movements. That’s why it talks about woke, a racist term in itself.
And it talks about people who seek to value all those developments as the blob or in other dismissive and despising ways, always as if it represents the tradition, the past, our history, our values, rather than actually what it is, is, a newcomer that’s been so damaging to the fabric of our society, not only at the broader level, but one of its stock in trades, I think.
Going back to your very first question. How’s it managed to last so long? Is how it it seems brilliantly skillful at dividing us, so I have the background as a mental health service user and being on benefits, two major targets. We know that disabled people are a major target. We know that refugees and asylum seekers, for all the good that they do us, all the benefits they bring us, all the values that they have…
This is a country of immigrants as we need to be reminded, the wonderful things my grandparents on one side were immigrants to this country fleeing, violence and fear. What a wonderful history we have and what this invader, because I think it as an invasive ideology has done, is divide us and try and make us believe with its untruths, that this is not where we’ve been. But, something awful.
RK: In your book, you reported about how the police officers who were in the same precinct as as as the murderer of Sarah Everard, that they referred to this police officer as, quote, the rapist, which is I mean, sent shivers down my spine reading, reading that that passage in your book and but just that it was so open within the confines of the police department, it was so open that that guy, like, don’t leave him with such and such because you never know it just kind of it made me wonder about that connection again.
Like is, is that like, oh yeah. Like he over there, that’s the nickname that we use for him. Don’t trust him. But kind of like is there a neoliberal connection there? Just like we know this problem over here that we if if we were working as a collective, we’d probably sort out, but instead we’re kind of just letting it continue.
And everyone, every man for themselves kind of thing. Is there a connection there between that and neoliberalism?
PB: I think there is a complex relationship there, and I think there are many people operating in the police service who have the same values that I hope that we would espouse in relation to and you see it routinely on the many television programs that follow up with the police and other public services. You see people absolutely committed to trying to do their proper job, which is to sort out and prevent crime.
But I do think that the way in which the service has gone, especially in its most powerful manifestation, the Metropolitan Police, has been in a different direction. And I think it’s it’s a salutary reminder, we should say to ourselves now, there has been an inquiry, an investigation which has been published, and what changes have been made in the police service, in the Metropolitan Police beyond a few peripheral ones so far?
And of course, the thing is that if you’re operating a neoliberal service, you do need the powers of control that it encourages you to need because it’s so divisive and damaging to the fabric of society. We hear it constantly, curiously, from left, right and center, from the most populist and right wing of political parties, as well as from progressive political parties, and organisations.
That things are very, very conflictful in our society that civil society is under threat. It’s a very wide message, and I have to say it is not under threat from traditional politics or traditional policymaking or the way we have done things and related to each other, but it does seem to be under threat from the new kinds of politics we’ve been getting, which are, in a very harsh and vicious way, populist and populist is, what populism means, is not that you hand over any power or there is any redistribution of power, but that pretense of empowering people to get their support so that you can have a free for all.
Sarah Everard was a tragedy, and a crime, of international proportions, and has been picked up by the United Nations internationally. And it isn’t just about white middle class women, but we haven’t just had it here about white middle class women. There was the parallel, appalling problem that took place and it was reported by the family.
This is what they said. They said speak up now is the time. The good people are the ones who should have voice. They’re the ones who should have power. And that was Mina Smallman campaigning following the murder of her two daughters, her two black daughters and the abusive behavior of two serving policemen who took photographs of the bodies.
And it was left, it to the families to find their murdered children, parallel with the awful case of Sarah. So these are systemic problems. They have to be systemic problems which relate to issues of race, issues of gender, and I’m sure it may be also too issues of sexuality. And they are about the kind of ill health of neoliberalism in our society.
RK: Countries with some of the most extreme neoliberal policies the UK, the USA, Brazil, for example, they had some of the worst responses to the Covid 19 pandemic. You say we in the UK were focused on NHS claps, Captain Tom, the partygate scandal while the then Tory government’s neoliberal policies went unscrutinised. What policies exactly were they that went unscrutinised and what effects did they have?
PB: Well, before we start with the policies, we have to look at Covid. And the whole issue of neoliberalism is it’s about the withdrawal of the state, a reluctance for state intervention, and so on and so on. And we knew what we were hearing from China, that there were problems and there was a categorical refusal to intervene on the part of the state.
The first issue we’re faced with here is as an issue of ideology, that neoliberalism is absolutely against interfering in the lives of people, because that could mean interfering in the lives of rich and powerful people in a democracy. And so there was a massive delay in taking advantage of the unbelievable benefit we had. We are an island, you know, we are an island.
We could have stopped us going out to places like people going to football matches or people coming in who might be infected. We could have stopped that. We didn’t. We delayed and delayed and delayed with very weak neoliberal leadership. And that opened the floodgates. That’s just one of the expressions. But there were so many more. There was a reluctance to do anything about it.
There was also, of course, that issue, which we’ve seen repeated in many, many ways under neoliberalism, you forget what policy and politics and state expenditure and taxation are for. No, they are not just to help you make a living, they are to bring benefits to society. So the irony was that once we realised, having neglected against the advice of our Chief Health Officer, prevention for problems like Covid, which have been predicted, then when there were big costs, for example, for protective clothing and so on and so on and so on.
These were then given to totally ill equipped, profit orientated companies who didn’t deliver but cost us unbelievable amounts of money which are still unaccounted for. So that’s that’s the second thing. The third thing I think is, is, is how we have a very complex, if you get down to it, but the most one of the most advanced policies in the, in the UK in relation to privatisation and the dominance of the market, the dominance of capital and the international money market, so that much of the money you can’t even trace is social care. Social care is, in an ageing society, one of the most important policies.
It’s how we look after people who may not be able, in an ordinary way, to look after themselves, but needs some support, which happens to many of us when we get older. But also, if you are a disabled person or have learning difficulties or a long term condition, etcetera, etcetera, or a mental health service user, and our social care services have been inadequate, defective, not reaching the people they are for and not available for free at the point of delivery in the way that the NHS’ services are.
And so and NHS with a kind of a privatised background, as we have now, faced with the problems that it couldn’t really deal with, it responded in a, in a most incompetent and awful way. And what it was most concerned to do was to basically get rid of people out the NHS and expose people then in social care to enormous risk.
And the result was, I mean, I don’t have a definitive number for how many people, I’ve seen definitive numbers, which seem to be in a kind of quarter of a million area of people who died, many of whom were in the social care system or related to the social care system. We know that there were also other issues that meant people were particularly vulnerable in relation to age, impairment and also, ethnicity and income and so on.
But the biggest statistic I’ve never, ever seen mentioned, except by me, is that more people died of Covid, a disease which our Prime Minister thought wasn’t necessarily even real, then were killed on the home front in the Second World War. More people died by Covid than in the Blitz. Not only that, not only that, but almost as many died as were killed in action in the Second World War as a part of the military, I don’t think people under a national health service, under a Democratic government, really expected to sign up to a comparable casualty rate and a casualty rate, which, when you’ve seen documentaries since as many of us have, show the unbelievable effort that was being made by people, you know, in the, in the helping professions, people in social care as well as people in the NHS to try and mitigate the awfulness, the terrible risks they were running, which meant that many of them died and so on and so forth. And this because of what?
Because of some ideology that has yet in any context, to show its workability. But of course, it was a comfortable one for, I think, politicians who were signed up to it, who controlled the media and the reporting and could divvy up meaningless and silly stories to cover their appalling behavior.
RK: You said about new social movements earlier. While neoliberalism has flourished since the 1970s, so have new social movements, as you say. You say the new social movements have enabled us, individually and collectively to challenge our own understandings of human roles and relationships. And they’ve, resulted in broader political, social and legal change. What are new social movements and what are they doing differently from neoliberalism?
PB: Well, it’s not just that new social movements are doing things differently from neoliberalism, come at things in a different way, but they do things differently in the, to the traditional ways in which we did things. And that’s not to criticise those traditional things, because, you know, if we look back to the 19th century, and the challenge to liberalism, and the old Victorian England, which came from things like the labour movement and the trade union movement and the co-operative movement, they were all based essentially around the economy and labour and work.
And one of the sad things about them, not all of them, but of some of their expressions, of course, was that they maintained, as it were, their own kind of class distinctions between people, so that one of the one of the big enemies of organised labour was labour that could be used as black legs and to under- that’s an awful expression, but to undermine the solidarity of the workforce, which tended to be the least organised labour, the labour facing the biggest problems because it wasn’t skilled labour.
And of course, the economic market wants to have a pool of such labour, both to get rid of it when it didn’t need it, but also to undermine more organised labour. But where we are now is not centered on employment, the economy, on labour. But that’s not to say it puts it to one side. I think that there were elements of the past which were both wonderfully creative and bringing us together, but also divisive and damaging.
As I’ve tried to suggest, but I think the wonderful thing about the new social movements, which, you know, we can think of them in relation to, first of all, perhaps, returning to the States, the black civil rights movement, the modern feminist movement, the LGBTQIA movement, the Disabled People’s movement, not the not just movements based on identity though, also movements based on on on broader oppositions, environmental movements, for example, antiwar movements, anti nuclear war movements, these these are all, you know, movements on behalf of, of animal rights.
There’s a whole and I think what’s been important about them is they have not had a narrow economistic basis. They have had a commitment to challenging the way different groups have been treated. You know, I’m old, when I grew up, I grew up and I’ve put it in one of my books, if not that one, I grew up to, to laugh at anti-gay jokes as a child. You have to get rid of all the stuff. And why did we get rid of it? Because of these wonderful movements that developed. You know, I when I was doing an earlier piece of research, I’ll never forget meeting a man who had gone to prison for being gay. He had gone.
He was one of those people who’ve gone to prison for being gay. He was a lovely bloke. And, that was part of of which I think he was proud, and he hadn’t been crushed. He managed to live into the. But then, of course, I also have, because of the age I am, I, I met all those people involved challenged by struggling against AIDS and HIV, you know, the wonderful achievements of people in that movement and from those sexualities and, fantastic achievements.
So no wonder, neoliberalism gives people all the nasty, nasty and demeaning names it gives and denies their truths because they are a real challenge. And what’s more, they are a real challenge that affects all of us. However hard we might seek not to be affected in our routine day to day lives, you know, which are lived differently.
Okay, you can still do terrible things to women as men, and you can still oppress people as refugees. But there is more comeuppance. There never were concepts like hate crime. Women could be raped in marriage. All these things. As I’ve just said, you could go to prison merely for being gay. All these things have changed and they’ve changed because of those movements.
Now, just one last thing I should say. It’s said, “Oh, yeah, okay. But they’re all very individualistic. And they don’t encourage solidarity.” Yes they do, it’s a different kind of solidarity. It means that when you all want to fight someone, you all includes lesbians and gay people. Trans people, etcetera, etcetera. We did some work in, in my user led organisation to try and make sense of whether was it really true that moving away from the old economy based movements like trade unions to, new social movements had undermined solidarity?
No, it transformed it. And if you talk to people in trade unions now, I know, of course, trade unions come under terrible attack and they’ve been made more vulnerable, but they have taken on all that. They’ve been part of that process. There’s been a unification. It isn’t about a rivalry. It’s about the two coming together, women pushing their role in trades unions and political parties, of course, a very unfinished, piece of work.
But it’s going on and it affects our daily lives and most important, the most of all, it affects our children. By some accident of fate, we’ve got significantly more granddaughters than we’ve got grandsons, and they are not going to take the old shit that their grandparents had to take as women, I can tell you that.
RK: Good for them! So with these new social movements. Yeah. You said that. And they’re also there all sorts of movements, through race, through gender, through sexuality, through disability, all sorts of new social movements. Are they affecting the personal before they then later affect the political?
PB: Well, that’s such a good question. I mean, okay, so I use mental health services, and I remember that, I hadn’t really got a clue what was happening to me. And I, you know, I grew up in an age of reading books, I don’t ever remember reading a book to make sense of what was happening to me.
I was in too bad a way, and what enabled me to rethink what was happening to me and make sense of it and deal with it were two things, really. One, I think that my good fortune to have a long encounter with a really skilled NHS psychologist, and, and two by accident, finding out about a mental health service user organisation, that was a new social movement. And I remember going to this meeting there, and it was such an eye opener because you only understood it in one way what was happening to you, well you didn’t really understand it. But you went there and people were saying all these things about what was happening to them. And and then you could do the same.
You could be yourself. And, and of course, we, you know, we weren’t just mental health service users. They were, you know, I met I met women as women. I met I met people who were lesbians, I met gay men, I met black people, blah, blah. So that’s not to say that if we’re going to be more effective as an opposition, as new social movements, we don’t need to work more, not just on understanding, as I had to come to my own difficulties and oppression that I faced, but also recognising that other peoples may have something different that they have to deal with.
It’s not the same to be a man mental health service user as is to be a woman, or old or gay or whatever. So, you know, we need to find more. We need to do a lot more work. All of us. Both on recognising the need for people to become more empowered if they’re going to be able to be more active, which I think sometimes gets forgotten.
And that that is about building skills and confidence. But we also need to understand, okay, you know, you know, what’s your thing, but what do you know about this, that and the other? Mind you, I do remember through a mental health service user involvement activity, I met a person who was transitioning from being a man to a woman, and having a terrible time, and that, of course, that’s what stuck in my mind the knowledge that, you know, people would need support and support about, not these great big false issues that are erected by the right wing press and the haters of trans people.
But the issues that you face when you’re going through it, and all the bureaucracy of it and all that and and the pain it might create and the confusion that you might have. So I think that when things go wrong, I mean, what I say, what I’ve said in public is it was awful, I feel what happened to me, but I don’t regret it because of all the good things I learned as a result of it.
But of course, you can help other people go through a few less, maybe, if you can be there with that experience to draw on helpfully. And I think that all that’s what’s terribly important and is a preparation for the way that new social movements can work well to help people who are part of them and help work better with each other.
Just the last thing to say about that, in Shaping Our Lives, early days, we’ve always been across different groups of people who use long term care services, people, mental health service users, people with learning difficulties, never only one as many organisations have been. And also we always, because of our leadership and the workers we employ, but we’ve always been very keen on trying to address inequality issues of the more conventional sort.
But we we did we do we did begin to notice that some people would say things like those mental health service uses, they do better on benefits than we do or vice versa, you know, because the grass is always greener and we we recognise the need we needed to learn more ourselves about each other. And so I think it is important as part of that process to recognise, you know, that, there’s things we need to learn about ourselves and there’s things we need to learn about each other and things we need to learn about how we can be most effective and and also to have a confidence that word empowerment is a great word because it’s about transforming yourself to be able to be an actor more proactively in society. And it’s difficult to do that if you haven’t had the advantage of a helpful background or an education not just concerned with filling your head.
RK: You were saying earlier, Peter, about about social media as well. And I’m just wondering how how has neoliberalism shaped the digital public sphere, particularly through the divisiveness that we see on social media?
PB: Well, it’s it’s like everything, isn’t it? I mean, the first the first thing I thought of in relation to this was, of course, weapons, guns. It does depend who’s got them. And it does depend on who controls social media. And we have the launch of the book the other day in the House of Lords, and one of the speakers was speaking about artificial intelligence, and that’s what she said.
It really does depend on who owns artificial intelligence and what’s unbelievable about these, the companies that own social media is their hugeness. I mean, we’re talking about companies that are of almost unprecedented size and unaccountability. Companies that not only are very, very powerful, but companies that actually have been able to be involved in interfering in Democratic politics.
We saw that in the UK with Cambridge Analytica. They operated internationally. They and others have not only, taken on the role of shaping, overly shaping and controlling social media, but of using social media to gain our information, gain our acquiescence, and transform and undermine democracies because they’ve realized that you only need to get a few key constituencies or numbers to change the way the game works.
And I think that’s the key issue. It’s who owns social media. I mean, it may be that social media do have some inherent problems, we’ll need to do more to find out. In an earlier book that I was involved in with Sarah Carr, one of the contributions, about participatory social policy, which you published, one of the contributions came from an organisation of service users who operated through social media.
It was a way that people could get together. But in their discussion that they wrote, you know, that they said that one of the problems they couldn’t work out how to overcome was the way it ended up going in a divisive and nasty way. Now, I suspect, and I’ve spoken to them since they said that, and they kind of had to give up because they got to it was too much.
But I think that those things maybe are dealable with. But we’d need to find out how. Those are not the sort of problems that the massive social media companies that we know of are particularly preoccupied. What they’re preoccupied, I think, is with their overall power, their global power and the bottom line. And that’s the real problem. These are not services that are there as I know people imagined when we were first becoming computerous and there was the internet, and there was such hope and promise that we would now have alternative means of news that people could control.
Well, that’s not how human beings work. What happens is that very big corporations start to dominate, but we can still try and sidestep that and personally, I feel that in in our lives, the best way that we can sidestep that which social media may play a part in because it’s so important, they’re so important for many younger people, is it’s determinedly talking to each other and talking to each others that we might not normally come across or talk to.
Of course, the other thing is, I think that, and I realised that writing the book that we are increasingly in the kind of neoliberal society we are finding ourselves very limited, who we’ll have contact with, who we’ll have contact with in terms of where we can afford to live, the kind of schools that we will go to, whether it’s a private or a state school, the sort of employment we may have, whether we’re actually at work and meeting people, the way that social media work.
How many television programs have I seen where women have been abused by people manipulating social media to abuse women in a serial way, in an international, global way to make money out of women and, and and to deal with their emotional needs because the social media allow them to they’re not restricted from doing that. And then these are operations that our depleted police force tried to pick up on.
RK: You said you said, about how divisiveness was always social media’s intent, and it’s and it is also its result as well.
PB: It’s I think it’s the logic, it seems to be the logic of how it’s developed. And I mean, we do know that we hear and we learn more about the way in which social media is, is is used both for people to be nasty to other people, but also to do abusive and criminal things. Those could be restricted.
We shouldn’t have a fantasy that these sorts of things never, ever happened. When my my partner was a little girl at school, she, she received a poison pen letter. Probably from another little girl. Yes. She never found out who did it. But you could only do so much in those days, couldn’t you? Social media really releases the boundaries.
And if you’re concerned about challenging the cruelties that people can do to each other, it’s us that we’re talking about. Then you would have a social media that was different. You’d have to have better regulation, there’s a kind of a toing and a froing, including in right wing press like the Daily Mail, about the way social media undermines our children.
We’ve got to protect our children. We shouldn’t be having to protect our children from social media. Social media should be protecting us from it, and our children should live the lives they would like to live doing whatever they want to do that safeguards them. Afterall, we know these are not necessarily the first times that children have not been safe in our world.
You know, let’s be real about it. Victorian kids going up chimneys wasn’t necessarily the safest to have done so. It’s is about solutions for our age. And I know that there are lots of possibilities here. I talked to people who’ve got, children and grandchildren who are doing really interesting jobs. Those things are happening in our society in relation to new media and and all sorts of new activities, but they aren’t as much happening as they should be happening.
That’s because the preoccupation is not necessarily with who the service is meant to benefit, but how the service can profit. And that, you know, there should be no criticism in that the labour is worthy of their hire, fine. But, you know, we’re talking at a bigger level and and the thing that I haven’t said enough about in relation to neoliberalism, where it is a bit different to the past, of course, the past of the market and capitalism of, of liberalism has always been one, at its utter core, related to slavery, and white privilege. It’s not any kind of remarkable observation to say so. And that lingers.
RK: Can you can you connect those two things then please, with neoliberalism?
PB: Well, I think so, because we know that the whole point that the whole stated point of neoliberalism, apart from the dominance of the market, was to release the boundaries of the transfer of goods and services. Yeah, you can export stuff that’s been manufactured by low income workers in the Global South. But if you were a person and decides you’d like to export yourself tough cheese, you will then face every kind of possible risk to you and your family.
If you want to avert what might be a very, very difficult life or death in the society in which you’re in. So I think, I think, we know that white privilege is still powerful, internationally. It still shapes the way our economics work, what you can get away with and what you can’t. So I think it is very material in here.
It’s it’s certainly being explored by critics of the current arrangements. It’s not I don’t think on the dominant agenda to make such exploration and in fact, you will just be told off for being woke, or whatever, if you say so. I mean, in relation to the global policy there, there is, associated with mental health, which is a very much, a policy based on the psychiatric system and the dominance of psychiatry, the Western dominance of psychiatry.
I remember talking about this with somebody from the Global South who I think made a very helpful distinction to me and said there was there were basically three statuses. There was to be one of the colonising countries to be one of those nations, of which there were many, that were enslaved or have been enslaved, and there were those that managed to escape slavery and all had a different relationship with the way in which we have a globalising mental health movement, which is itself being challenged under the new social movement of mad studies, which rejects this kind of simplistic individualising, I think, white privilege based approach to mental health, and calls for a very different and more inclusive, and more socially related understanding of why we can go mad and why, for example, in my opinion, neoliberalism is something that increasingly drives many of us mad.
RK: On social media. I, just as a consumer of social media, can see that certainly, at the very least from my perspective, like right wing populism is absolutely rife on social media. We only need to look at even just like one example of the white supremacist riots that happened last summer in the UK, for example. Like all of that was turbocharged by people’s use of social media, just like normal regular people on social media, but also very powerful figures on social media as well.
I think even Elon Musk got involved if I remember rightly. So, just so, so dangerous. But I think in in your book, you were saying about how neoliberalism feeds these populisms and that also right wing populism is a danger. But I think also you said that left wing populism can also exert a danger as well, I suppose, like as as somebody who can easily see the dangers of right wing populism, that that part in your book kind of like, oh, it made me think like, oh, is left wing populism bad? I’d like to hear a bit about that.
PB: But I don’t think left left wing populism, tragically, is a is a is a problem that is much likely to befall us in this country. After all we had we had a candidate for Prime Minister, Jeremy Corbyn, who who said that if he were to be elected, we would have free internet. Now, if I could just say this, if I had absolutely no politics, that would have that would have brought my vote.
But it wasn’t populism. Populism is a pretense of participation. It’s a it’s it’s what happened the other day with Reform Party and its leader when he said, well, I wouldn’t be doing this stuff about welfare benefits, I would reinstate the winter heating allowance, etcetera, etcetera. Although those absolutely run totally counter to the ideology and logic of his party and his political history, anything in a storm, any port in a storm.
It’s fine to say that. Well, who’s going to you know, dear Mr.. You said what I haven’t I got you and I don’t think so. I mean, that’s one of the big things that we find now that it’s so difficult to hold organisations that are so big and powerful, including our politicians, to account. There are politicians who want to be held to account, who take their their role as a local MP, a constituency MP, seriously.
But that isn’t the state of play, I think that’s generally any more the situation in the UK. So I don’t think left wing populism is an issue in the UK. I think it is an issue internationally, but of course it’s the same deception. After all, we we would be including, I assume, far left politics, politics of of the kind that would be called communist as as left wing.
And they certainly have majored on populism. But populism does not mean control. It tends to mean the opposite of control. And as we’ve more recently heard, the leader of the Reform Party is now preaching the gospel of more prisons. And so, I think whatever, whatever, whatever works for that moment seems to be the politics and the pretense.
What interests me is that I think we live in such a badly educated, education in the real sense, society that so many of us can be conned by the old lies and then end up distrusting all politicians. When some politicians work really hard to do what’s right for a society and for its people and those who faced particular oppressions.
RK: You argue that, to move beyond neoliberalism, we need radical changes to how we communicate, how we educate, how we collaborate. What’s wrong with these systems currently? What might replace them? And how do we work towards doing that?
PB: I think that, we, we have to rethink what’s big and what’s small in our lives and in our society. We have to start small. We have to start with ourselves, with our families, with our children, with ourselves to start with. And it’s quite difficult to do these things. And there will there will be some people who are more equipped and supported to do so than others.
I just want to say, before we move on from what you last said, one of the one of the the kind of genius skills of neoliberalism beyond even what we might expect is that capacity to divide us. So actually, it’s done it to me, it actually makes me want to hate those people who were attacking what they thought were
Asylum seeker hotels were, in the past. Whereas what you know is that those people would probably be having a crap time getting absolutely nothing out of neoliberalism, being its victims. And then in some way, one being made to vote against all reality, against the EU, whatever its failings for Brexit and then still frequently having to kid yourself that it was a good idea that you did that because it’s actually it’s actually undermined you as a human being.
And I do not want to be part of that. And I think that that the other thing that I really want to stress, I sort of touched on it, okay. But neoliberalism always presents itself as the traditional, you know, that’s the real past we had. That’s the way Mr. Farage, with his pretense of being the saloon bar expert, the nice guy, all that stuff.
That’s that’s what he represents, the comfortable voice of the past, never existed, neoliberalism, except in the most fierce Victorian and failed 1920s times. And, what we’ve had since has been not a straightforward road, a difficult uphill road to make things better, which has worked. You tell me if you can still do some of the terrible things, or have them done to you as easily now as you could have done in the first half, or even sometimes towards the second half of the 20th century?
I said it the other day, you know, where you had a baby and you weren’t married, or you were a teenager and you were slagged off and you, you and your baby were institutionalised and removed from each other. I mean, what a thing. Or you, look at what’s going on now with television programs or you put a card in a window, which was unremarkable.
I’ve certainly seen them. No, no. No dogs, no gypsies, no coloreds. And maybe, if you’re very lucky, no Irish and, absolutely unremarkable. Or, as I said before, what was done to gay people, gay men. And so on and so on. You cannot get away with that now. There’s so many things. I’m not saying it’s sorted. I’m not saying that.
And I am saying that they’ve tried to make things worse and look what’s been done to trans people, the way in which that’s been made, an issue of hostility. I mean, it’s shocking and still, outlets like The Daily Telegraph will do it on their front pages in a hostile, hating way. But they will. It won’t win because I think we as human beings, it may be an uncomfortable journey for some of us, and some of us may have less support to understand because of the weakness of our education.
I mean, all this stuff. Ever since Mrs. Thatcher, we’ve actually seen it when we were living for a long time in London, you know, people where we lived would send their children to there, people who lived there would send their children to where we were, you know, because the grass must be greener. The same old school.
And what we did see, though, was when the Greater London Council was destroyed, the wonderful school our eldest couple of kids went to, that was that was it ended. It was great. And, schools got more and more beleaguered and less and less resourced. So there is no inconsistency with the kind of broader arguments and the detail of damage that, neoliberalism does up front in policy terms as we’ve seen them here.
But we we can keep fighting against it by how we continue to fight and relate to each other and by how we continue as we are doing, and we’ve seen some real positives lately. I’m not saying they’ve been translated into true political victories, but they’re not done yet. You know, there has been reversals for the old neoliberal policies, in relation to welfare benefits.
And the prospects are not straightforward. There’s been talk of co-production in welfare benefits for the future, which are being closely looked at. There are certainly some people in Parliament who want to see that happen.
RK: Co-production is when the, can you explain co-production please, Peter?
PB: What real co-production means is when the people something’s for and the people who will provide it get together and are both equipped on as good as equal terms as they can manage to produce what’s needed together, not produce it for shareholders or produce it for profit, or something else. But, or produce it for some other ideology or produce it because, you know, I’m posh and I went to public school and I know best, it’s to do it together, because that’s, not being cheapskate, that is a bit how it was in 1945 onwards. They meant well, but they obviously couldn’t get it all right, although there were people who did get it right. People like a Aneurin Bevan who what they knew was perhaps because of his own lived experience, because that’s what’s so important here he was a came from an ordinary Welsh family.
And they knew they knew what should people be have a right to expect, but what anybody would have a right to expect. So both as a minister of health but also no less as Minister of Housing. What Aneurin Bevan said when people said you’re having French windows in a council house, what’s going on? You know, why are you making it so nice?
He said, because that’s what I would like. And that’s what he did. And we have that stock of housing still, although of course much of it’s been lost to the market.
RK: So to those who are listening, who are wondering how how we can get involved with, hopefully the downfall of neoliberalism, the but yeah, like you were saying about communication, education, collaboration, what can those listening, what actions can they take?
PB: Well, I suppose the things that I’ve done, let’s hope that the first thing it doesn’t happen is something goes really wrong for them so they have to find out to save themselves, which is what my situation was. But I think it’s, and it’s different generationally, we know that. Young people now routinely do very different things. They don’t read those newspapers that now have like a 20th of the readership, literally a 20th or a 50th of the readership they used to have.
Even The Sun’s falling to bits. They use different kinds of means of communication, and they use them in their own ways. And as I seek to use social media that might want its own agenda for me, I’ve got another agenda for it. And we should see ourselves as actors and try and join up in our own ways, over our own enthusiasms and our own interests and enthusiasms and interests and and rights and justice.
These are all connected with each other. And the conversations I know so much, younger people are different. And, you know, you speak, you speak as we do. We’ve seen this from like, like a young granddaughter who’s now gone to college and when she was at school and she she wrote something in that book I wrote earlier and she said, how come?
She said that the list of what girls can’t do at school is about this long, and the list of what boys can’t do is about, you know, kids, people are getting there, and the rest of us can catch up by listening to our families, listening to each other, listening across issues of ethnicity and gender. Of course, one of the bad things that neoliberalism does, it doesn’t just divide, is it literally separates us in different schools, in different housing, in different parts of the city.
So we have to try and find ways around that. It’s not going to be easy, but we can certainly do it, and we can be masters and mistresses of our own fate. And we can stop. We can just in a sort of a way, we could do what Mr. Trump tells us to do. We could just assume what they’re saying. That’s not going to be the truth. Let’s find out our own truths.
RK: Thanks so much, Peter, for coming on the Transformed Society podcast today. I really loved discussing your book with you, exploring the themes within it.
PB: Thank you, it’s great to here, having had this opportunity to be honest.
RK: Thank you. In the moment, I’m going to let people know where to find your book. But first, is there is there anywhere we can find you online?
PB: I mean, I use X and I use, Bluesky. I’m not very good with all the others, although I use them. I don’t mind having a, whatsit on the. You could use my my one for Essex.
RK: Yeah, if you prefer. If you prefer to tell the listeners that your email address is the best place to contact me, then that’s fine.
PB: It’s a good place to. I do respond to emails. Yeah. So that’s pberes@essex.ac.uk.
RK: We can also I presumably we could also google Peter Beresford Essex and we’ll find it that way too, just in case?
PB: Or you can Google me at UEA which is where I’m still employed at UEA.
RK: Ah, grand. Thank you Peter.
PB: Pleasure.
RK: ‘The Antidote: How People Powered Movements Can Renew Politics, Policy and Practice’ is published by Policy Press. You can find out more about the book by going to policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk and also transformingsociety.co.uk.