https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2025/04/16/who-will-be-our-mussolini/

[Jim Callaghan]

A year ago, I wrote about some of the – very negative – consequences of life without economic growth… at its simplest, that a win-win economy would be replaced by a zero sum game in which everyone has to scramble to get a slice of the pie. Not, of course, that things would be so simple in a complex western economy where huge discretionary social superstructures have been constructed atop an increasingly pressured material world. The two examples I gave were, first, the liberal penal system in which the death penalty was replaced (outside the USA) by ever shorter terms of imprisonment, and hard labour was replaced with community orders. But, as a growing inability to afford so vast and costly a system bites, calls for a return of both extreme forms of punishment will inevitably become mainstream. Second, public health systems like the UK’s massive National Health Service, will have no choice but to ration many treatments while withdrawing the most expensive treatments entirely – diseases that currently have a good treatment prognosis would become deadly again.

These were but two systemic impacts of a world without growth… and I raised them as a counter to the naïve belief in some quarters that it is possible to have a rational and fair “de-growth” in which we agree to accept the hardships involved in foregoing our current way of life in favour of a more sustainable but far less material one. Even if, absent some new and abundant energy source more energy-dense than fossil fuels, such an economy is our ultimate destination anyway. But simply that, starting from here, de-growth is likely to be red in tooth and claw as those with wealth and power throw everyone and everything under the bus in an attempt to hang onto their gains.

Indeed, an argument can be made that the wealth and power elites have been doing just this for the best part of half a century, but it is only becoming apparent now because the pressure put on those in the bottom half of the income and wealth distribution is reaching a breaking point. The whole point of the neoliberal turn in the late-1970s, for example, was to break the link between rising productivity and rising working class living standards which had prevailed through the post-war boom. In the aftermath of the depression of the early-1980s, the rich became obscenely wealthy even as the prosperity of the masses began to shrink. The deregulation of banking and finance in 1986 added to the benefits enjoyed by those at the top, even as it created the mountain of debt which collapsed in 2008. But even then, those with wealth and power were able to protect their own positions while forcing the masses to pay the price for the bailouts. And in the depressed years that followed, the old assumptions about hard work and getting a foot on the housing ladder became a chimera for younger generations… at least those whose parents lacked the means to hand wealth down.

Hard as the economic policies of Thatcher and Reagan had been, those of us who came of age at the time had still been able to find routes out of poverty. Hard work could still pay. And further education could still unlock a professional career. Meanwhile, those seeking to create their own jobs could even obtain government grants for entrepreneurs – one of the unforeseen consequences of this is that many of the groups which emerged as “Brit Pop” in the 1990s had bought their instruments and equipment and recorded their first albums using government grants. Gradually though, these routes became dead ends as government funds were withdrawn and austerity became the order of the day. This created what I refer to as “the thwarted bourgeoisie” – a generation of over-qualified and over-indebted university graduates with little prospect of securing genuine graduate employment or of earning anything like the salaries enjoyed by graduates two decades previously. It also produced the burgeoning precariat class in the bottom half of the income distribution, pinballing between an increasingly punitive social security system and part-time, zero-hours, and gig economy roles which often failed to meet the cost of essentials… fuelling the vast network of food banks which have become so commonplace that politicians now celebrate opening them.

This was happening even before western states chose self-harming approaches to what turned out to be an incredibly mild pandemic, and to a war in Ukraine largely prompted by their own neocon factions. Three years ago, we were promised that the war would be over, the Putin regime overthrown, and Europe would be prospering on the back of the energy and resources plundered from a balkanised Russia. Now, instead, Europe is de-industrialising because of the vastly higher cost of energy and resources from elsewhere in the world. Meanwhile, here in the UK a change of government has proved to be no change in government at all. The Labour (in name only) administration has more or less continued where the Conservative (in name only) administration left off… with a string of manifesto pledges already broken and with what barely passed as an economic policy already being rewritten for a third time in the face of global headwinds that expose the UK’s dangerously vulnerable situation. Far from being surprised that common mental illnesses have mushroomed among the young – one of the pretexts for the highly divisive proposals to cut social security payments to disabled people (which includes not paying social security at all to disabled people under 22 years of age) – it is a miracle that the numbers are so low.

A withdrawal into some version of despair seems to have been a common response since the Covid-19 world tour began. While poorer youngsters may have retreated into the depths of depression, a sizable number of affluent parents have simply funded their offspring’s retreat from the system entirely. And at the upper end of the age range, many of those with private pensions opted to take these early rather than attempt the soul-destroying and unending search for over-50s employment. But as the new government – building on its neoliberal predecessor – has made clear, there is no place in a declining Britain for anyone seeking to find a way out… work you must do, even if it offers no prospect of a living wage, even if it renders impossible the givens of a previous age, like owning a home or raising a family.

This, surely, brings into question the government itself. For decades, the illusion of democracy (in which you can have any government you want so long as it is neoliberal) has been used to disguise the fact that western states have operated in the interests of global corporations, and particularly global banking and financial corporations – bodies, that is, who act as rentiers, speculating in unproductive assets rather than investing in the productive capacity which might, just, have mitigated the approaching disaster. The idea that “they” have a plan seems disproven by the gross stupidity of the policies they have been pursuing… then again, perhaps plundering Russia’s resources was their last hope.

In the UK, this has already raised concerns about the rapid loss of legitimacy and the growing conditions for widespread urban violence. Legitimacy concerns the ease with which a state can govern, along with the relative cost of governance. In the somewhat repressively conservative Britain of the 1950s, governance was easy and cheap simply because there was widespread buy-in. The post-war boom, driven by the UK’s switch from coal to oil as its primary energy, meant that finding good quality work was easy, and prosperity was rising. This was the period when a semi-skilled worker could buy a house, raise a family, and enjoy an annual holiday by the sea – something wholly unattainable for most younger Britons today. It was a society that was also highly cohesive, with most people signing up to common law norms, while ceding to authority on the relatively few occasions when it intruded. And the upshot of this was that the cost of governance was low – the state didn’t need authoritarian surveillance or paramilitary police because the people mostly policed themselves. This began to break down in the face of the oil shocks and inflation of the 1970s, when an “aristocracy of labour” began to act in its own interests rather than those of the wider nation. And, of course, the neoliberal response included further fragmentation and necessitated more authoritarian surveillance and more paramilitary policing – the 1980s began with the sound of policemen’s batons cracking the skulls of pickets and ended with police vehicles being driven at speed into peaceful protests. And while the debt-based boom of the 1990s and early-2000s bought a period of civil peace, under the Blair administration both authoritarian rule and paramilitary policing – together with state censorship – continued to grow.

In 2025, Britain has fragmented along every imaginable faultline – divided by gender, race, religion, generation, and (although mentioning it is verboten) class. And as a consequence, across ex-industrial, rundown seaside and smalltown rural Britain, order has begun to break down. The police – once promoted as being “of the people” – are increasingly seen as hostile outsiders… seldom dealing with the routine criminality that affects ordinary people but enthusiastically imposing the unwanted rules of their authoritarian paymasters. All the while, people find themselves taxed more and served less, with local infrastructure falling apart and local services inaccessible. Corporate power has strangled small businesses so that, beyond the few remaining pockets of prosperity adjacent to government and the top-tier universities, well-paying employment is no more than a pipe dream.

Divided and unequal societies don’t stay that way for long though. And while the fear of urban violence is being voiced more often these days, an equally unpleasant possibility may also arise. This is that the neoliberal Our Democracy™ could be replaced by a dictatorship rather than a return to a more representative social democracy. This was revealed in a survey conducted for Channel Four earlier this year, which claimed that half (52%) of Britain’s 13-28 year olds are in favour of dictatorship while a third believe things would be better if the military took over.

The all too predictable response of the neoliberal media was to shoot the messenger. The survey was to be taken with a pinch of salt (i.e., ignored) because they couldn’t possibly mean it. And, perhaps, faced with the real prospect of a dictatorship or military rule, they might well recoil. But this is to ignore the very real faults with the existing system in which the only difference voting makes is to the colour of rosette that your oppressors and exploiters happen to wear during the election campaign. In policy terms, promises are quickly broken and things remain on the same downward course they have followed for decades.

Economically, borrowing has become the only means by which anaemic levels of GDP growth can continue in a process known as bezzle:

“This is often the most damaging consequence of rising debt because this fictitious wealth creates distortions in economic behavior both as it is created and, much more importantly, as it is destroyed. When this fictitious wealth is eventually destroyed, the process can occur either quickly, in the form of a financial crisis, or slowly in the form of lost decades of stagnation and low growth.”

Almost all of the debt since 2008 has gone into unproductive asset speculation, where it counts as GDP growth but adds almost nothing to the real economy. And, as we are currently finding out, debt isn’t free. A large part of the government debt used to furlough the population during the lockdowns is due to be repaid this year. And, as any MMT fanatic will tell you, government doesn’t have to repay its debt, it merely needs to roll it over in the same way you or I might have rolled over a credit card debt. But what if – and this is the underlying global weakness today – there are not enough liquid US dollars in the world, and what if fearful investors no longer want to hold less safe currencies like the euro or the UK pound?

Not only is the UK government not addressing the concerns facing Gen Z as it reaches maturity, but it also faces economic headwinds which will force it to make matters worse. To continue to attract the foreign investment which is now essential to avoiding a meltdown, interest rates will have to stay high, taxes will have to rise further, and austerity cuts will have to be more widespread. To paraphrase the US major in Vietnam, ‘It became necessary to destroy the economy to save it.’ Or, to be more precise, the ruling elites are about to risk everything – including a military takeover – in a vain attempt to hold onto their wealth and power.