ABSTRACT
This contribution offers an account of different forms of neoliberalism and focuses on the neoliberal regime shift that occurred under successive Conservative, Labour, and Conservative-Liberal Democratic coalition governments in the United Kingdom (UK) from the 1970s until late 2012. In this context, it relates neoliberalism to financialization and the expansion of a finance-dominated accumulation regime that superseded the flawed Fordism that developed in the UK in the first 30 years following the Second World War. Financialization is especially prominent in the UK because of the distinctive role of the City of London as the leading international financial center for international financial transactions. This has long given a hegemonic position to financial capital in the British power bloc and is reflected in the dominance of neoliberal policy paradigms at different sites in the state apparatus and political regime. While there was a brief period when the North Atlantic Financial Crisis was interpreted as a crisis of neoliberalism, massive state intervention has since created conditions for a return to neoliberal “business as usual” in the societies where neoliberal regime shifts occurred. This illustrates the relevance of Karl Deutsch’s dictum that power is the ability not to have to learn from one’s mistakes (Deutsch 1963, 110), and shows how the financial interests at the heart of neoliberalism have regained hegemony and/or dominance over the definition and resolution of the financial crisis in the UK.
