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The claims of neoliberalism are based on utopian assumptions; the supply-side revolution has failed accordingly, and we are living with the systemic consequences of that failure.

When you explore the neoclassical economics at the root of the UK’s neoliberal reforms, it has far more in common with Leninism than with the political economic doctrines of the post-war era. Anglo Keynesianism, German Ordoliberalism and the Swedish Rehn-Meidner models all accepted the realities of radical uncertainty and the incompleteness of human rationality. The affinities between the economic libertarianism of the last forty years and Leninism are rooted in their common dependence on a closed system, machine model of the political economy. Both depend on a hyper-rational conception of human motivation: a perfect utilitarian rationality versus a perfect social rationality.

For neoliberals, the state must be subordinated to market mechanisms

The more neoliberals embrace their materialist utopia as an infallible science, the higher the tide of unanticipated consequences and systemic failure

The Johnson Cabinet is only the most extreme version of successive Conservative cabinets unable or unwilling to believe the evidence of their own eyes: that neoliberalism does not work in the terms by which it is justified

What is problematic for this Cabinet however is that there is no majority social base for their actual project, which is the completion of the supply-side revolution, the creation of a free trade, deregulated, offshore (i.e. tax haven) Britain and the shrinking of the state towards the utopian night-watchman minimum

the UK economy has succumbed to a dominant business model in which financial extraction via the maximisation of shareholder value has completely undermined the culture of investment and with it the productive and innovative capacity of the private sector

The leaders of the real, productive economy in the UK oppose Brexit in principle and dread ‘No Deal’ as a wilful act of economic self sabotage. The leaders of the financially extractive economy and those who benefit from the really-existing-supply-side-revolution demand Brexit as an opportunity to escape EU regulations that have acted as a brake on their worst excesses.

That the extreme economic purpose of Brexit has been successfully conflated with an act of national liberation from tyranny is a product of a skilful charismatic politics, a polarised social media landscape nevertheless driven by conventional media skewed ever further to the right.

As the Soviets found, when the popular legitimacy of your actual project is lost, the culture of lies and populist scapegoating becomes your only option. Brexit has offered a cornucopia

As in Leninism, the promised withering away of the state under neoliberalism is ultimately a religious utopia: it promises to return us to an Edenic state of nature before the Fall. In the Brezhnev era, the Leninist doctrine became an alibi for the abuses of massively centralised power;  in the neoliberal version the state will likewise fail to wither anywhere. Instead, it will become more completely captured by business and financial interests, with unprecedented abuses of public policy and money to follow.

both in Britain and in the rest of Europe politics is increasingly structured by a divide between “winners” and “losers” of globalisation and this has led to issues of cultural and national identity becoming more salient politically.

between the general elections of 2015 and 2017 Labour and SNP voters, on the one hand, and Conservative voters, on the other, became more polarised with respect to one another along the cultural dimension (see the diagrams above). However, this was almost entirely due to a shift amongst Conservative voters towards the “closed” pole of this dimension and (in Scotland) a similar shift by the SNP towards the “open” pole

The Brexit referendum was most likely the catalyst for a strategic re-positioning by the Conservative Party. By championing a “red, white and blue” Brexit and by dismissing “citizens of the world” as “citizens of nowhere”, Theresa May moved the Tories towards the “closed” end of the political spectrum, occupying much of the territory that UKIP had occupied in 2017. The appeal was partly successful insofar as the Tories tended to gain votes in constituencies in which the Leave vote exceeded 63%, even if they lost the votes of “open” Remainers who had voted for the party in 2015. Labour meanwhile sought to reframe the debate away from “open”/”closed” issues such as Brexit, giving centre stage to economic issues, framing the struggle as one between “the many” and “the few”. Even though they had limited success in this respect, they managed to win over many young, well-educated, middle class Remainers at the “open” end of the spectrum.

the SNP successfully “framed” the issue of independence as one about freedom from London-imposed economic austerity and inequality. If Labour could similarly frame Brexit as “project about neoliberal deregulation… Thatcherism on steroids”, as David Lammy suggests, it may be possible to reconcile the two competing Labour narratives, but it would require the kind of deft leadership that the SNP showed during and after the independence referendum

For the Tories the task of holding together is likely to be even more complicated as the gap between “open” pro-European Tories and the hardline Eurosceptics of the European Reform Group seems unbridgeable