England: Place, Trajectory

Abstract

The 2008–10 financial crisis marked the end of a thirty-year political/intellectual period; it had been the era of corporate/financial world ascendency informed and legitimated by the doctrines of neo-liberalism but as events unfolded both the politics and the arguments disintegrated.¹ The first phase of the crisis in 2008 engulfed the financial sectors of the United States and the United Kingdom. These were the dual centres of the financial tsunami which ran around the global system in that year. Following emergency state action it was thought that the crisis had been contained. Nonetheless these events had multiple impacts: first, they outraged populations (who are funding taxpayer-led bail-outs); second, they inclined incumbent political elites to at least consider taking the opportunity afforded by crisis to re-balance the economic/political system in favour of the state (that is, in particular, to re-regulate the financial world); and third, they severely damaged the intellectual credibility of the neo-liberal package (no longer could any theorist point to the ideal of the self-regulating market place as the vehicle for maximizing human benefits). The second phase of the crisis came in 2010. The centre of gravity was mainland Europe where there was a tangled web of interrelated problems: the private sector debts of banks, the costs to various states of supporting domestic banks, ongoing problems of overlarge public expenditures (now compounded), and there were related problems with some eurozone economies where sovereign debt was called into question. Thus a crisis of private debt modulated into a crisis of public debt and debates in respect of unsustainable debt shifted their focus from the private to the public sphere. All this underscored the epochal nature of the crisis and the need for fresh thinking.