New Labour and Post-Thatcherism

"It is not the presence of markets we should object to. Markets are just an amoral mechanism to distribute goods and services, whose powers to create wealth are only matched by the resulting injustice, thriving as they do on innovation and destruction in equal measure. They work because they never take prisoners in the quest to create winners and losers. In the relentless pursuit of profit they know no boundaries, whether social, moral or environmental.

Our beef is with neoliberalism and its British incarnation of Thatcherism: the ideological belief that markets are always preferable to the state or other social institutions. For the notion of the social demands a limit on the role of the market. There are places where profits should not and must not be secured."

Neal Lawson