Thatcherism and the origins of the 2007 crisis

The crisis of 2007 affected banks, financial institutions and retailers at a macro-economic level as well as individuals and families at a micro-economic level. Following the acceptance of a crisis the politics of blame began, with politicians, the media academics and the public assessing who (or what) generated the crisis and what could be done to alleviate it. Three broad narratives of blame have hitherto been purported; the first views the crisis as an international crisis, or whose roots stem from the United States, the second suggests that the policies of New Labour generated the crisis and the third traces the origins of the crisis back to Britain’s withdrawal from the ERM in 1992. In this article I present a fourth account which sees the crisis as stemming from the 1980s and the policies of Thatcherism. Specifically I argue that the ‘Right to Buy’ scheme and the Big Bang deregulation of 1986 shifted the labour-capital relationship decisively in favour of capital paving the way for the crisis of 2007. Through doing so I question contemporary policies introduced to try and alleviate the crisis, asking if they will create a new growth model or simply entrench/recreate the model developed in the 1980s.