By Roger Boyd
I was in Middlesbrough, an industrial town in the North East of England. As the mixture of an insanely overvalued exchange rate (due to the gushing flows of North Sea oil revenues and absurdly high interest rates), pit closures, union busting and government spending cuts gutted much of the North. In Middlesbrough people joked that the song “Ghost Town” was about Middlesbrough.
Things have only become worse since then as Middlesbrough is now officially listed as the #1 local authority with the highest level of deprivation in the UK. Hartlepool, just down the road from Middlesbrough is #9. Like so many of the old industrial towns and cities in the past decades of neoliberalism. I was on the path out of the town, with my “O” and “A” levels leading me down the A1 motorway southwards.
I landed in the south west of London, at Kingston University in the “stockbroker belt”. A very, very different environment to the one that I had left. Taking a degree in Information System Design, one greatly appealing to my logical mind. I excelled at it, and graduated with a job in a software services company and then in IBM, in central London. I graduated with no debt because the much less rich than it is now nation of the United Kingdom could afford free tuition, a living expenses grant and even a grant for my travel expenses. I had gotten “on my bike”, actually the train, as Norman Tebbit was telling everyone to do in search of jobs, but not everyone was as single and mobile as me with the opportunity to use the education system for advancement. Nowadays, such a journey would involve paying GBP 9,790 per year (three years) of university fees plus having to pay for my own living expenses and transport costs; a probable debt in the region of GBP 70,000 (US$94,700) on graduation.
Norman Tebbit, a man from the working class who had got lucky and gleefully became a tool of the British establishment in lecturing those less fortunate and destroying the trades union movement. Without that A level in Sociology could I have become a Norman Tebbit? He was no stranger to obvious corruption; as Trade & Industry Secretary he privatized British Telecom only to become a paid director of the company just three years later while still being a member of parliament. In 1988 he showed what a disgusting individual he truly was by accusing critics of Apartheid South Africa of cowardice and “stinking hypocrisy”. A good little British racist, so perhaps I would not have become a Norman Tebbit.
In the 1980s the Conservatives smashed the Miner’s Union and privatized more than 40 state-owned businesses employing 600,000 workers between 1979 and 1990, turning many natural monopolies over to rentier financiers (many foreign) and reducing the income of the state. While residing over the mass destruction of British industry due to high interest rates and a massively over valued exchange rate (supported by the increasing inflows of oil and gas export revenues). The fossil fuel rents were squandered away on tax cuts for the rich and corporations. From 249,300 in 1979, the number of miners in the UK had been shrunk to just 60,000 in 1991, and all of 2,000 in 2000; gutting the strongest union in the UK. At the same time the “Big Bang” massive deregulation of the City of London was carried out in 1986; delivering much of the British financial system to foreign domination.
In the early 1990s I decided to take the advice of those that said technology-business hybrids would excel and took an MBA in Finance at the Stern School in New York in the United States. I had saved up some money, and the MBA fees were US$20,000 per annum (for two years). Two years (1992 to 1994) of living in a still relatively affordable New York that was still recovering from the 1987 crash and the early 1990s recession. Condos near the waterfront could be had for US$100,000 and high end restaurants were desperate for people to fill their tables.
I graduated with about US$60,000 (US$130,000 in 2025 money) of debt. Nowadays that Stern School MBA would cost about US$100,000 in annual fees, together with US$40,000 for living costs per year; with the same scale of prior savings, a person would graduate with about US$260,000 of debt. Twice as much as I did in 1994, in real terms.
In the UK in the early 1990s, the government insanely tried to link the value of the British Pound to that of a strengthening Deutsche Mark, resulting in a mini-depression as interest rates were raised to nosebleed levels before a 25% currency crash as the UK government at last understood that it could no longer support the over valued Pound. The same deflationary policies that were carried out in the post-WW1 period to benefit the rentiers at the expense of the working people.
After graduating in 1994, I moved north to Canada to marry my fiance in Toronto, only to find that a lunatic central banker was keeping interest far to high as he saw imaginary inflation at every corner. Later, I came to understand that this was a calculated move to engineer a government funding crisis that could be used as an excuse to slash central government social spending. The Liberals of Canada in the 1990s, that broke their election promises to reject the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the regressive Goods and Services Tax (GST), acted just like the “Corporate Democrats” of the Clinton administrations. They also deregulated the financial system, while the lying supposedly-progressive NDP leader of Ontario went back on his promise to provide the much cheaper state car insurance that Quebec enjoyed; setting back the NDP for two decades in the province. As in the US, neoliberalism was embedded in society in the 1990s, as any alternative was delegitimized by the implosion of the Soviet Union.
In the early 1990s, Canada was still very much a middle class friendly relatively homogeneous nation with affordable living and affordable houses; with what academics refer to as “embedded liberalism”. By 2000, neoliberalism was the new norm together with mass immigration. Thankfully, the country also stayed together by a hair’s breath with the vote on Quebec separation in 1995.
I got lucky working for one Canadian bank and then another and seeing my income grow as I worked with the Capital Markets groups as the “dot com” bubble accelerated through the 1990s. I had paid off my MBA debt by the end of the 1990s and bought a house, and benefitted from some of those tax-advantaged stock options. All the while I read books by authors such as Chomsky that detailed the reality of the world versus the propaganda on the television screens and in the newspapers. While Yugoslavia was dismembered and Eastern Europe turned into a capitalist paradise, with Russia turned over to capitalist kleptomania as the general population sank into poverty. My career survived the “dot com” crash, and I was able to view it from a comfortable position. With companies funding their own demand (“vendor financing”), profitless corporations worth billions/trillions, and companies increasing their capitalization simply by adding “.com”. Yes, that was the late 1990 and then it crashed in the new century.
In the UK, the British Clinton arrived in the shape of Tony Blair in 1997. The son of a university lecturer, who attended a private boys-only boarding school (Fettes College) and graduated from Oxford in 1975 with an upper second class honours degree in law; practising law until 1983 when he was elected as an MP . A classic social climber who rapidly shed any socialist tendencies and whose rapid career advancement was facilitated by the right-wing Labour leader Kinnock. After Kinnock resigned in 1992, John Smith took over the Labour leadership only to die of a heart attack two years later. A tragedy for his family and his country as it lead to the leadership of Blair and his becoming prime minister in 1997; more due to a general tiredness of the Conservatives than any real appeal. Blair had already dragged the Labour Party far to the right. Then 9/11 and an endless “war on terrorism”, torture, and an invasion of Iraq sold by the lies of Bush and Blair, fully supported by the British Conservatives and the US Democrats. With the Bush years also being ones of yet more tax cuts, the establishment of the authoritarian Homeland Security and extensive domestic spying upon US citizens.
The Canadian Liberal PM did the one good thing during his rein, he kept Canada out of the Iraq War. In the wake of the dot com bust, interest rates were very significantly lowered and the first stage of the two decade housing bubble in the English-speaking world triggered. Greatly aided by the massive deregulation of finance in the 1990s. My career improved further and I became a bank executive while also becoming single again. In 2006 the tired Liberals lost the Canadian election to the recently united right wing and the Harper years began in Canada. In 1999 the provincial election had brought the brutalist right-winger Mike Harris (1995 to 2002) to power in Ontario, and he spent his time slashing taxes and social services expenditures while downloading costs to the city of Toronto. Slashing infrastructure and health care spending, and implementing a workfare scheme designed to force people off the welfare rolls. After the defeat of Harris Conservatives in 2003, the victorious Liberals discovered a colossal fiscal hole that had been covered up prior to the election. Contrary to mainstream propaganda, its usually the right-wing parties that produce massive deficits and the progressives ones that espouse the “discipline” needed to reverse them; but hardly ever with the reversal of previous tax cuts, and always with cuts to social spending. And the Liberals were only nicer neoliberals, doing the same job as the US Democrats of consolidating oligarch gains made in previous years while also driving the privatization of part of the public energy utility, Ontario Hydro in 2015. Harper brought a Harris orientation to the federal level, only limited by his lack of an electoral majority during a chunk of his tenure; aggressively cutting corporate and personal taxes and aggressively denying climate change. By 2015 he was utterly hated by the majority of Canadians.
By 2007 Blair had outlived his welcome, but the damage that he had caused was extensive. With the marketization of education and healthcare that facilitated later looting, the maintenance of Thatcher’s anti-labour policies including zero hours contracts, the introduction of student tuition fees that have now escalated, no reversal of Thatcher’s extensive privatizations, and further deregulation, and of course the Iraq War. He had done his job to embed and normalize Thatcherism in the UK. There was also an intentional policy to allow mass immigration, just as a whole set of poorer nations had joined the EU. A disastrous policy that was also followed in Canada and the US; designed to provide lots of new cheap labour to employers irrespective of the social costs. Bush was also gone in 2008 after eight years of tax cuts and war, replaced with the “hopey changey” Obama.
And then the 2008 GFC, where the financial deregulation of previous years had facilitated widespread financial corruption and risk taking that blew up the world economy. In all three nations, instead of the banksters bearing the costs, the banksters were bailed out at the expense of the general population. The utter oligarch cynicism of this period and the media and political gaslighting was stunning, especially as I understood the massive socialized bankster bailout in detail. Interest rates were then lowered down to nearly zero, igniting the second part of the great Anglo housing bubble. I moved position to work with the retail and commercial banking areas, quickly finding levels of incompetence and inefficiency that were astonishing. Some areas had not much progressed from the 1980s era. Anyone who says that private business is intrinsically more efficient than the state should be called out for their bullshit. Without tough competition and government oversight private corporations can rapidly degrade into hives of political games playing and inefficiency just as much as any state organization; as with the highly concentrated Canadian bankster oligopoly. Add in corruption and profiteering and a corporation can be very bad news for society in general. At the same time, I was able to help my sister out in making sure that her two sons would not graduate from their bachelor degrees in debt.
I was tired of doing insanity “the same thing every day and expecting a different outcome” and started an online Master’s degree in Global Studies to give my brain something different to do and sometimes writing essays at 2am while still at work overseeing an implementation; graduating in 2013. I also starting writing a book “Energy & The Financial System” that was published in 2014. It was pretty obvious that my heart was no longer in the job irrespective of the munificent remuneration and when given a package I happily took it. At 50 years of age I looked into the future rather than being sad at the thought of fifteen more years of the same old shit. I took the opportunity to take another Master’s degree, in Economics for Transition, in the UK from 2014 to 2015. It was held in a very progressive “intentional community” that I quickly understood to be divorced from reality. A world of the “change from within” that utterly distrusted any state apparatus and celebrated the “perfect but failed” revolutions of supposed socialist anarchism while hating actually existing socialism. The very values of the failed “Occupy Wall Street” movement. Ironically, they could define what their perfect society would look like but could not say how we would get from “here” to “there”. The community itself was a beautiful and emotionally gratifying experience, but acted more as a distraction from the real world than an actual changer of that world. In 2015 I also self-published my book “Schizophrenic Society” about how we live in a social reality utterly disconnected from actual reality.
All the while the world outside got darker as the governments of the UK and Canada practised “austerity”, while Obama showed that he was just another oligarch tool with the destruction of Libya and Syria and his enjoyment at “becoming good at killing”, spending every Tuesday reviewing the black and brown people to be murdered by the US Empire.
Once back in Canada I joined the group" “350.org” only to find that this was just a classic bourgeois progressive organization which may provide its members with a “warm feeling” and a social network but certainly was never going to change climate policy. Later I found out that it had actually been started by a Rockefeller organization and that its leader, Bill McKibben, was very much captured by elite interests. They are still doing their job of sucking up the social energy for change and nullifying it within performative organizing. A climate equivalent of Bernie Saunders and AOC. British Labour had been replaced by the Conservatives in 2010, starting the over decade of disastrous policies of austerity and state looting together with continued mass immigration. In 2016 Obama was to be replaced with Trump after eight years of serving the oligarchy. In 2015 Canada had a chance to take a different direction, with the NDP leading in the polls. But sadly the leader that had got them there, Jack Layton died soon after the breakthrough result in the 2011 election. His successor, Tom Mulcair who was to the right of Layton utterly blew it in the 2015 election; a great loss for a Canada that was delivered to the vapidity of a neoliberal Trudeau who broke nearly all of his election promises; with the legalization of marijuana seemingly the only exception.
In 2017 the UK population also had such an opportunity, snatched away from them by an utterly biased UK media (including the BBC), Israeli operatives, the UK establishment in general, and traitors within Labour Head Office.
Happier times of hope in 2017, with victory snatched away by the traitors in Labour head office. Then, the all out campaign within and without the Labour Party to destroy him and replace him with the establishment stooge Starmer. Sadly when a ruthless “Stalin” was required to crush the traitors in the Labour Party, we got a relatively amiable Corbyn; the window of opportunity for real change in the UK has now come and gone. On the right wing, the likes of Callaghan, Healey, Blair and Starmer have always been ruthless Stalinists in crushing any opposition.
From 2008 to 2016, Obama had also thrown away the genuine opportunity for change; repeating the lost opportunity of Clinton in 1992. The opportunities to stem the tide of neoliberalism, warmongering and Zionist apartheid had been lost. In Brazil in 2016, the US and Brazilian oligarchs and their courtiers colluded to destabilize the Brazilian political economy (Operation Car Wash) and then carry out a lawfare coup d’etat against President Rousseff, after which Lula was jailed on trumped up charges in 2018; the front runner to be her elected successor. While the new capitalist-celebrating and Zionist Christian churches swept across the country. All overseen by an Obama Whitehouse that had also utterly destroyed Libya, and was in the process of destroying Syria.
Seeking to gain a greater theoretical understanding and way to construct a framework of how the world works, I started a PhD in 2017 at the Balsillie School of International Affairs. With the help of some excellent professors I started to get my head around how to construct a framework which reflected my worldview. Four years later, in 2021, I completed and successfully defended my PhD thesis and became a Doctor of Philosophy. Then on to getting articles published (all of one!) and a book published, now thankfully in the production process.
In politics, the years of Trump, Trudeau and Johnson and “Russia, Russia, Russia”. Utter chaos and yet more giveaways to the rich. The one good thing that came from this trio was that the Trump win forestalled the beginning of the Ukraine War by about five years; providing much needed preparation space for Russia. And then came COVID, a convenient cover for a huge bailing out of the banking and corporate sector. The crisis had become apparent in late 2019, when even a relatively modest reversal of the mass money printing of the previous decade had lead to the “Repo Crisis”, only stopped from escalating into another GFC by the rapid emergency responses of the central bankers.
Once again, the housing bubble was ignited and colossal amounts of money and wealth transferred to the top 10% and most especially the top 1%, 0.1% and even 0.01%.; at each higher level the wealth became even more concentrated. In the second half of 2022, the US state once again tried a light pullback of the massive money printing and deficit spending and looked over the edge to catastrophe. The interest rate rises stopped, and the deficit spending was once again increased; the financial markets celebrated. With even more punch added to the punch bowl in 2024 in a failed attempt of the Democratic administration to win the presidential election. The ability of the oligarchy to keep the financial and economic plates spinning as the economy continues to deteriorate has shocked me.
And then Trump II, with yet more tax cuts for the rich, yet more deficit-funded military and state security spending, yet more corporate troughs for the rentiers, yet more cuts in social spending, and the destruction of the administrative and regulatory state. In Canada, Trudeau had managed to stumble through two minority governments due to opposition incompetence but in 2024 he was finally done for. Then the Liberals managed the fastest switcheroo possibly in Canadian political history and successfully sold a neoliberal oligarch tool as a “nationalist”; greatly helped by Trump’s anti-Canada antics and again the gross incompetence of the opposition parties. So Canada now has a smoother and more “classy” version of Trump, serving the oligarchy, Zionists and war mongers.
In my home province of Ontario, the tired-out Liberals, together with the utterly incompetent NDP (yep, them again) allowed the blatantly corrupt and right wing Doug Ford (brother of the crack-smoking ex mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford) to become the premier in 2018.
Then repeated wins due to repeated gross opposition incompetence in 2022 and 2024; the result has been yet more cuts to social spending, more tax cuts, and blatant corruption that goes mostly unpunished. While buying himself a personal jet paid by for the state, now being sold due to the public backlash. He can remain as the Ontario premier until 2030 without the need for an election.
In the UK, Corbyn had been destroyed so that he could not take up the mantle of the floundering Conservatives. Instead, the oligarch tool Starmer leading a conservative Labour government; just like Callaghan in the 1970s and Blair in the 2000s, but even more conservative. Oh, and I forgot climate change as nothing in reality has been done about it in the past four decades since it entered mainstream political discussions. Instead, greenhouse gas emissions have significantly increased and both hard (“climate change is not happening, its just natural cycles”) and soft (“climate change is happening but we can fix it with <insert bullshit>”) climate denial rampant.
In the “Anglo” world of the UK, US, Australia and New Zealand there is little or no hope for any kind of positive moves away from increasing oligarch dominance. This has now also increasingly become the case in the rest of the West; Europe, Japan and South Korea. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have also underlined the inability of their ruling classes to develop develop their economies in ways that benefit the majority.
In the “Anglo” world it is questionable whether or not anyone could now follow the path that I took, given the crushing student debt levels, the removal of so many of the entry level jobs and the “career ladder” that no longer exists. And of course, house prices far above those that allow for even the median earner to put together the down payment in places such as Toronto, Vancouver, London, New York and Sydney etc. The “bank of mum and dad” has become so much more important to a young person’s success these days, as well as family connections. It does sicken me to hear so many of those in my age group complain about the younger generations without accepting how society was so much more supportive and full of opportunity in our younger years.
In the Anglo world, the younger generations report unprecedented levels of anxiety and unhappiness, while the older generations are still quite comfortable. Things such as the UK “triple lock” on pensions while benefits for the rest are cut helps with that, together with good defined benefits private pensions earned in previous decades (many times now no longer available to younger generations) and incredibly large gains from increases in house prices and financial markets. There are of course poor older people, and it is class not age that is the greatest economic and financial differentiator, but we live in perhaps the first time when pensioners are having better lives than those entering the workforce. Previously, there was a “U” shaped curve of happiness by age, the young and the old were the happiest with a dip for the middle-aged. Now, the left part of that curve has collapsed with happiness rising monotonically with age from young to old. The “mid-life crisis” has been replaced with the “young-life crisis”. Overall happiness has not markedly improved on average since the 1960s, with one group worse off (the young) and another better off (the old). In the book The Spirit Level, Wilkinson and Pickett show that above about US$20,000 per capita GDP it is much more factors such as social inequality, social services and community that drive feelings of happiness instead of more income and wealth. Even the rich are less happy in deeply unequal societies.
To find real hope on a large scale we must visit countries outside the Anglo world, and even Europe. Places such as China, and significant parts of South East Asia, where generations have enjoyed rising living standards for decades and the state is much more significantly focused on the national interest and the interests of the majority of the population. And where, as Hudson would put it, the oligarchy are still builders rather than rentiers. That is not to say that these nations are in any way perfect, but their populations have much more hope for the future. And even here, the younger generations are generally not as happy as the older generations; the world has become a much tougher place to start a successful career, buy a house and start a family.
In Thailand, the GDP per capita is now US$26,000 at PPP, tripling since 1990. With free basic healthcare, and universal coverage planned by 2030. Public university tuition is heavily subsidized, at around US$400 at the bachelors level (the university in Chiang Mai has 30,000 students), and extensive investments being made in new infrastructure (e.g. high speed rail). Later this year I will visit Vietnam (GDP per capita US$19,650 at PPP) and Malaysia (GDP per capita US$43,000 at PPP); both with extensive public healthcare systems and with free/heavily subsidized university programs and large infrastructure investments. And either this year or next a tour of China (GDP per capita US$31,600), now that Canadians can visit visa free for 30 days.
I consider myself to be blessed that I have been able to spend now over a decade focused on learning, researching and writing; with no real worries about being able to do the same in the future. My objective standard of living is appreciably lower than previously, but I am both less stressed and more happy. I would be very interested to hear in the comments about what others experiences have been living through the times of neoliberalism.
