Neoliberalism Delivered Us Onto Caesar.

Before my father died in 2018, he spent the previous decade using the history of his life and working-class contemporaries as a political canvas to spur on social change. With the stories and memories from his long ago youth, my father painted vivid scenes about the dangers of unfettered capitalism. He warned his audience that neoliberalism would destroy humanity and democracy.

He correctly predicted that without a return to socialist politics- fascism and wealth inequality would destroy not just our society but civilisation itself. My father lived through two years of the first Trump Presidency. He despaired at how neoliberal politicians across the Western World bent the knee to the growing authoritarianism of the USA as if appeasing it would make it go away more quickly.

Below is an excerpt of Harry’s Last Stand. The book was published in 2014. But even then my Dad sensed a new age of fascism was on the horizon that would be as terrible if not worse than the one, he experienced as a young man in the 1930s and 1940s.

When I was a teen, our Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain appeased a tyrant and championed class division through his government’s legislation. Today, most politicians, regardless of the slant of their ideology, are in the business of appeasement, but now, instead of feeding the lust of tyrants, they bow to the monsters who rule the corporate world.

In September 1938, few understood that Chamberlain’s Munich Agreement irrevocably doomed us to war with Hitler. Ultimately, the failure of Western democratic institutions to act concurrently and decisively against the dictator doomed our world to a war that saw over 60 million casualties.

It is lamentable that lessons about the dangers of appeasement have not been learned. Modern political institutions are quick to build moral equivalents for wars against the tyrants of our political epoch if it suits our ideology or economic aims. Suez, the Falklands, Grenada, Panama and Iraq are prime examples of wars conducted and justified by drawing erroneous parallels to Hitler and his very real threat to democracy.

In this day and age, presidents and prime ministers say too often for the television cameras that they ‘will not appease dictators’. Perhaps not, but those who sit in Whitehall or rule at the White House are very apt to pacify presidents of hedge funds and corporate board directors by offering bailouts to banks too big to fail.

Governments have mollified giant corporations like McDonald’s and Walmart by subsiding their company’s paltry minimum wage payments with food stamp programmes. Politicians appease Google, Apple, Amazon, and other megaliths act like medieval city-states by not creating stringent, irrefutable tax codes that target those companies or wealthy individuals who seek to bury their wealth offshore.

In Canada and the US, the oil and gas lobby is given free rein by all political parties to overwrite environmental protection legislation when it comes to the extracting, refining and transportation of crude oil from the toxic Alberta tar sands.

In Britain, despite the documented dangers to wildlife, the water table and human beings, fracking has been given the green light to drill in environmentally and seismologically sensitive areas.

Each time governments offer tax breaks and environmental deregulation – without due diligence, proper oversight, reasonable checks and balances, or financial subsidies – to corporations whose sole objective is profit, social democracy is placed in jeopardy.

Every instance, every example, every precedent where governments have turned a blind eye to corporate maleficence or allowed their social services to be monetised and put into the absolute control of private enterprise repeats Chamberlain’s folly at Munich. There can be no peace or economic equality in our times if power is concentrated in the hands of oligarchs and giant corporations.

It is terrifying that in a world of 8 billion souls, fewer than a hundred men and women control half its wealth, thereby having an enormous influence on its politics. In Britain, wealth is similarly concentrated at the top because, according to Oxfam, five families control 20 per cent of this nation’s wealth.

The burden of the last financial crisis, like the economic catastrophe of my youth, was shouldered by the poor and the middle classes. It caused extreme hardship to the average taxpayer through job losses and a reduction in social services. Yet the wilful recklessness of the banks was never punished, nor did heads roll. No government sought to indict or persecute those responsible for a calamity that destroyed our economy and jeopardised our social safety net through feckless greed. Unless corrected, neoliberalism will return us to an age of dictators.

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