ABSTRACT
This chapter completes the historical narrative of how the figure of the consumer has been practised by government in Britain since 1979. It brings this history up to the present, showing how the British government has continued to preside over a regime that was laid down in the early 1980s and allowed to operate, effectively unfettered, ever since. There has been neither an attempt to cap the sovereignty of the consumer nor an attempt to recognize debt as anything other than the correlate of appropriately modern attitudes. Household debt as a percentage of household disposable income has risen steadily from 100 per cent in the mid 1990s to 160 per cent in 2007.
