ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that there are serious problems with the story of neoliberalism as an alien imposition that follows a popular control of industry and services– even though the story's iconography remains important to much of the British Left. It suggests that the particularly 'pure' form of British neoliberalism did not so much displace as depend on the mass psychology of wartime and post-war consensus, and form a continuum with it. Jamie Peck describes neoliberal doctrine as necessarily two-faced since it gestures towards anti-state purity in full knowledge of its own need for the impure 'capture and reuse of the state'. Nationalism is partisan, closed-minded, and so on;- it is a failure of inclusion. The term nationalism, then, means something like political action;- the interruption of the economy by an actually determining people. Political uncertainty, for neoliberals, is always a dystopian interference with the natural functioning of the market, and is always to be avoided.
