"Neoliberalism has dominated economic thought since the late 20th century, characterised by deregulation, privatisation and a focus on market-driven solutions. This framework led to systemic failures, particularly evident in the lead-up to the COVID event.

Financial markets were on the brink of collapse immediately prior to COVID. Quantitative easing (QE) had been put in overdrive following the financial crisis of 2008. QE was used as a tool to prop up a failing system.

What we saw following the 2008 crash was ordinary people being pushed further to the edge. We witnessed more than a decade of ‘austerity’ in the UK, a neoliberal assault on the living conditions of ordinary people carried out under the guise of reining in public debt following the bank bail outs.

During that period, a leading UN poverty expert compared the Conservative government’s welfare policies to the creation of 19th-century workhouses and warned that, unless austerity is ended, the UK’s poorest people face lives that are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. Philip Alston, the UN rapporteur on extreme poverty, accused ministers of being in a state of denial about the impact of policies. He accused them of the “systematic immiseration of a significant part of the British population”.

In a 2019 report, the Institute for Public Policy Research think tank laid the blame for more than 130,000 deaths in the UK since 2012 at the door of government policies. It claimed that these deaths could have been prevented if improvements in public health policy had not stalled as a direct result of austerity cuts.

And in a report on poverty in the UK by Professor David Gordon of the University of Bristol, it was found that almost 18 million could not afford adequate housing conditions, 12 million were too poor to engage in common social activities, one in three could not afford to heat their homes adequately in winter and four million children and adults were not properly fed (Britain’s population is estimated at around 66 million).

Meanwhile, The Equality Trust in 2018 reported that the ‘austerity years’ were just fine for the richest 1,000 people in the UK. They had increased their wealth by £66 billion in one year alone (2017-2018), by £274 billion in five years (2013-2018) and had increased their total wealth to £724 billion – significantly more than the poorest 40% of households combined (£567 billion)." https://off-guardian.org/2025/01/23/uk-circling-the-drain-crisis-what-crisis/