The free market trumped?
Margaret Thatcher’s dream of free trade and privatisation is in trouble, says David Dimbleby
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As Donald Trump imposes tariffs and then lifts them with gay abandon, the US president appears to be rejecting globalisation. Where that leaves Britain, we don’t yet know.
What we do know is that we’re in turmoil, and that the most influential political idea of the last 80 years – the free market – is in flux. But how did that revolutionary idea take hold in Britain, changing its course so that it now defines every part of our lives?
David Dimbleby. Getty
Today, the French and the Chinese own our infrastructure. The majority of our water companies are run and owned by faceless foreign conglomerates that pump sewage into our precious rivers. I travel to London on a train owned by a French company. How did we end up here? The dream of the free market is in trouble.
In my new Radio 4 series Invisible Hands, we trace the history of the free market, from the origins of marketisation during the postwar period through the era of privatisation and the “Big Bang” deregulation of financial markets during the mid-1980s and onwards. It’s a colourful tale, with a cast of eccentric characters, many of whom I have interviewed during my broadcasting career.
As you will hear, nothing is inevitable. Behind every big idea, there are people who have a brainwave and pursue it, relentlessly. Their ideas were deemed wacky at the time, but they fuelled the Thatcherite revolution.
The US president appears to be rejecting globalisation
Take the politician Sir Keith Joseph. His colleagues called him “Mad Monk” – “mad” because they didn’t understand what he was on about and “monk” because he was ascetic and always preaching his ideas. On a seaside holiday, he was seen paddling in the waves, reading a government white paper while his children were playing.
Then there’s the fighter pilot Antony Fisher, who was flying alongside his brother Basil in the Battle of Britain when Basil was shot down in a dogfight. Fisher could only watch as Basil’s parachute caught fire and he fell to his death. That steeled him to fight for individual freedom.
Margaret Thatcher Bettmann/Getty Images
Inspired by the free-market thinker Friedrich Hayek, Fisher – who later bought a chicken farm but couldn’t bear the constant intervention by the Egg Marketing Board and went on to pioneer battery farming – set up one of the first modern think tanks, the Institute of Economic Affairs. Together with Keith Joseph, he persuaded Margaret Thatcher’s government to abandon the old way of running Britain and changed the course of the world.
But what would our chicken farmer or our Mad Monk make of it now? The dream of Britain energised by the free market is fading fast. Having depended on the concept of free trade between the major industrial nations, Trump has put an end to it.
While the so-called special relationship has always been questionable, we don’t really know what Trump thinks of Britain, except that he enjoys the chance to schmooze the King and build another golf course. We have to pretend he loves us and that we respect him, but we know it’s not true. There has never been a more vapid – and, therefore, a more pernicious – president.
Here at home, Brexit has so far delivered none of the benefits its disciples promised. Our water companies were privatised because the dream of the free market was that everyone could own a bit of Britain. Now, while polluting our waterways, they raise prices on customers as shareholders get richer. But is there really an alternative? The free market, the genie those wizards unleashed, cannot be put back in the bottle.
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For centuries we were able to use our political influence to protect our own home industries and our national wealth. After the Second World War, governments thought they could keep us prosperous, that the man in Whitehall knew best. He did not. But did the chicken farmer? We are once again adrift in a perilous world and now we have lost our trust in the economic theory that sustains us.
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