Dr Matthew Sparkes: Why do we accept amplifying inequality?

“Inequality emerges as a system of effects. We feel inequality. It is not just something that is a relational comparison or something that we can map but actually emerges as an effect in our emotions, thoughts, and practices” ­– Dr Matthew Sparkes

 Dr Matthew Sparkes is an Assistant Professor in Sociology at the University of Cambridge and Fellow at Lucy Cavendish College. He has previously worked as a Teaching Associate in Research Methods at the Social Science Research Methods Programme (SSRMP) from 2019-2022 and as a Teaching Associate in Sociology in the Department of Sociology, Cambridge from 2014-2019. He obtained his PhD in Sociology and MPhil in Social Research at the University of York and his BA in Sociology from Leeds Metropolitan University.

Dr Sparkes’ research centres on the intersection between debt, social class, classification, and neoliberalism. Here he looks at the affective consequences of processes of social stratification and how credit provides a means for people to struggle against classification, and the ways in which neoliberalism keeps re-legitimising itself through discursive constructions of manufactured crisis.

In this interview, Dr Sparkes speaks with our Interview & Academics Officer, Emma J. B. Sunesen, about his academic inspirations, his work on social class, debt, and neoliberalism, and the role of stigma in debt-fuelled consumption.

What led you to pursue a career in academia?

It was completely unexpected. I probably found a profession that is well suited to me without first knowing that this is the direction that I would take. I fell in love with sociologic literature when I started my undergraduate degree. I just found that there was a natural fit with how I thought about the world, my critical engagement with politics and with my values. It was only after my undergraduate degree that I even contemplated doing a masters and a PhD. So, it wasn’t by any grand design, it was more spontaneous, as I moved through the different layers of sociological inquiry.

What attracted you to the study of class, debt, and neoliberalism?

I've always been fascinated by social class. Even when I was growing up, I always had this burning sense of injustice – how unfair the world was economically but also how different groups were stigmatised. I’ve always seen a disconnect between how the political realm spoke about social class, and how this obscured a lot of the structural questions around income and poverty.

When I started studying sociology, the literature on social classes really fascinated me. At the time, there was all these debates around the end of class, that class was no longer relevant, and that we somehow lived in these post-class societies. And then there was the cultural class literature around Bourdieu and their attempt to reposition class into the cultural sphere which could account for the lack of focus on class within politics. And I just found it really intriguing.

I started investigating debt because there were clear limitations in many of the cultural ideas about class that seemed to sideline the economic aspects. Such as questions of how people consume in the first place, how income filters through into a person’s capacity to consume, and how credit and debt is a feature of that. Here I saw two distinctions. On the one hand, you had the consumer credit literature that focused on debt without relating it to class theory. And on the other hand, you had the cultural class literature that was really steeped in this nuanced appreciation of how culture filters through into an understanding of class, but it didn't consider the aspect of credit and debt. So, I just saw a possibility for synthesis in those two areas. And then neoliberalism started to take centre stage as a critical sociological concept that tied the two things together and provided an overarching focus to why credit, debt and class are intertwined.

Who would you say is your biggest intellectual influences? And in what ways do you depart or build upon them?  

I think there are two central intellectual influences: Mike Savage in my earlier trajectory through sociology both at the undergraduate and masters’ level, and then Imogen Tyler whose work has come to be more aligned with my theoretical approach.

Mike Savage was one of the leading figures of the attempt to repurpose class using the Bourdieusian lens and to think through the continued relevance of class. In his earlier work he developed arguments on how class becomes embodied through cultural practices. He was really at the centre of the theoretical shift that established why class was still relevant despite the debates surrounding its end. Actually, he was my PhD supervisor for the first three or four months of my project before he left York to take up a post at the LSE.

As my project progressed, I started to question some of the ideas that were implicit in Bourdieusian-inspired cultural theories. For example, the assumption that cultural consumption mainly follows dispositions and primary socialisation, and it therefore becomes an unconscious reflection of their class position. I felt it was a limited view of how culture works, and that instead people are actively engaged in struggles about how they’re perceived and their position in cultural hierarchies. As a result, Imogen Tyler became central to how I started articulating the role of credit in fostering forms of cultural consumption that challenge the assumption that it’s passive and imposed. Her ideas about social class have become crucial to not only the work that I’ve carried out so far but also my current work that explores the consequences of different forms of classification practices within credit markets and their implications for people's life chances. In essence, we’re not just passively reproducing class position but there’s an on-going struggle against these really powerful forces that are arrayed against us and the political ramifications of these classifications.

“So, the very notion of equality of opportunity is a complete illusion. Because from that notion, we then end up with inequality of outcome, inequality of wealth, inequality in positions and resources, and then the system obviously keeps amplifying those advantages and disadvantages”

Throughout your work you utilise the Marxist concept of ‘exploitation’ and ‘secondary exploitation’. What is the relevance of Marx and Marxism today?

The point about secondary forms of exploitation is crucial because it opens the space to think about forms of exploitation that move away from the productive sphere. This is a theoretical correction within Marxism in recognition that finance has become a dominant feature of Western societies. And as a result, it directs attention towards the credit system and how credit can be used to extract wealth from individuals. These secondary forms of exploitation in the financial sector feeds into primary forms of exploitation because it adds an extra layer of extraction from people’s salaries. So, there is an overarching critical lens that I think is difficult to challenge or to dispute.

For me, the limitation in the Marxist literature on financialisation is that it falls back on a familiar normative assumption that these processes were instigated as a top-down reorganisation of society by an economic elite. It sits uneasy with me the idea that we’re somehow all dupes to our structural circumstances, that people are at the end of these coercive forces and have very little capacity to either resist or understand them. People have a very complex relationship with these systems of inequality. Some people want to buy a house, some people want to consume, some working-class people want to vote for conservative parties – and the idea implied in Marxism is that they’re acting under a structure of coercion and false consciousness. However, it’s a problematic way to think about how culture functions, that is, the idea that these cultural elements are part of this grand plan of the ruling class to extract wealth.

I think the overarching theme of processes of extraction and dispossession can be very useful for thinking about how financial architecture is constructed and how people experience it when they fall into financial difficulties. But I think its limitations lies within its conceptualization of culture.  

As you’ve mentioned, in the 1990s, we witnessed an abandonment of the concept of class with Lipset and Clark concluding that “class is an exceedingly outmoded concept” (1991: p. 397), and Tony Blair announcing that “the class war is over” (1999). While this thesis has been widely contested, I still want to ask you: why (or why not) does social class continue to be a useful analytical framework through which to understand social stratification? 

I think there's two clear advantages of using social class. First, there’s various benefits to the structural perspective. Here the Marxist framework is useful for thinking about how one group can tilt the structures of society to benefits their interest, and often at the expense of other groups. And within occupational class analysis we’ve created empirical mapping of how people move between different positions within society, and in relation to their parents, which is useful for challenging dominant narratives that society is fluid and meritocratic.

And the second benefit goes back to this idea emerging in Tyler’s work that there are also discursive processes of classification that have an impact on people’s lives. So, from this angle, class offers a perspective in thinking through broader classificatory dynamics. This is thinking through: What kinds of classifications circulate within society? What impact do they have on individuals? How do they reinforce inequality? What policies are supported because of that? And how do people who are experiencing these negative classifications resist them? And that then opens possibilities for thinking about political resistance and how we can create movements that can challenge those forms of oppression.

So, they're the two clear reasons why class analysis might still be relevant.

“Ultimately, for me, is the question of why we’re continuously seeing these expanding levels of inequality. Why is it that people on the brunt end of these political and economic structures are not supported but stigmatised? For me, class analysis shines a light on these detrimental implications of inequality with a vision to close those gaps”

Imogen Tyler argues that: “if inequality is the problem that class names, then equality is axiomatic to the sociology of class” (2015). To which extent do you agree with her that the purpose of class analysis is to address the “effects of class-based inequalities”. Are we striving towards equality, and if so, what form of equality?

That's a great question. Often us sociologists get wrapped up in the critical implications of society and the consequences of inequality and we spend so little time thinking about what society might look like or should look like. What is the purpose of this critical analysis? What might society look like, so it is more beneficial for humans? I think there’s a way of centring that question, which is: why do we accept amplifying inequality? Why do we live in a society where inequality is taken as a given, and where the best you can do as an individual is to strive to get into the highest positions that you can within this system? Right, it does not even challenge the fact that the system is unequal or that some people have better rewards than others. And that notion that inequality is not only an accepted part of capitalism but also some would argue a beneficial aspect. There’s lots of political actors and scholars that align themselves with neoliberal economic principles who suggests that inequality is beneficial because it spurs human development. There is a book by Richard North, published by the Institute of Economic Affairs, called: Rich is Beautiful. It has the opposite argument to me, which is that equality is worse than letting inequality rip. North believes the idea of creating a society in which people are equal either materially or in terms of opportunity is worse than letting inequality rip because it would hinder what he sees as this natural human tendency to strive towards improvement and competition. 

So, at the heart of the question of what’s the most beneficial way to organise a society is a more fundamental questions about value and about how we see human nature. I, of course, think that inequality is hugely detrimental to people. The constant striving and competition in education, occupations, housing, and the sort are so detrimental to everyone. There are many studies that showcase why inequality can be detrimental, even among affluent people, such as the Wilkinson and Pickett book ‘The Spirit Level’. Ultimately, for me, is the question of why we’re continuously seeing these expanding levels of inequality. Why is it that people on the brunt end of these political and economic structures are not supported but stigmatised? For me, class analysis shines a light on these detrimental implications of inequality with a vision to close those gaps. I think there’s a fundamental tension in our political system that class analysis is seeking to challenge. But there are of course others that take a very different view of human nature. Does that answer the question?

In part, yes. So, in short, what you are arguing is that we are striving towards minimising inequality rather than striving towards equality of outcome or equality of opportunity?

In the past, political parties – such as the UK Labour Party – centred their objectives on equality of outcome, which sought to minimise or even eradicate the unequal rewards that capitalism bestowed so some people couldn’t accumulate vast wealth and then utilise it to protect their positions and the positions of their families. But from the 1990s, on the back of many of these debates about the irrelevance of class and class analysis, we witnessed a shift to equality of opportunity, in which we should strive to minimise the differences in people’s starting conditions (such as educational quality), so that everyone has an equal chance to progress. But of course, it’s flawed in a system where there are huge differences in types of school, and where some people have the capacity to spend vast amounts of money on private education to bestow upon their children advantages that they can cash in later, whether that's attending a particular university or accessing elite occupational spheres. So, the very notion of equality of opportunity is a complete illusion. Because from that, we then end up with inequality of outcome, inequality of wealth, inequality in housing, inequality in positions and resources, and then the system obviously keeps amplifying those advantages and disadvantages. And we’re now at the point where inherited wealth is becoming one of the most important factors determining access to homeownership. While I think that the idea of equality is very important, it is not very well-defined and there is not much political will to challenge the underlying logics of the system. Do I believe in resisting the ever-encroaching amplification of inequality, and the aim of minimising, and even reversing, not only the inequality of opportunities but also the inequality of outcomes? Of course, that would be a great start. But – I don't know about you – I don't see much movement in that area. So, I think, exposing those processes and continuously trying to show how society benefits some individuals as opposed to others is a useful endeavour. But it’s not enough; and I think we’d have a false sense if we assume we’re moving in the opposite direction.

In your book chapter “‘I just felt responsible for my debts’: debt stigma and class(ificatory) exploitation” in ‘Debt and Austerity’ (2020), you support Tyler and Slater (2018) in viewing stigma as intimately related to neoliberal modes of governmentality. Do you care to elaborate on this relationship between stigma, classification, and neoliberalism?

Their recent work on that question is a really, important contribution. So, what Tyler and Slater are arguing is that the great insight of Goffman was to recognise that stigma is seen as something that's deeply discrediting. It's something that happens on a personal level that can have massively detrimental impact on people's psychology. So, there's great insight to that. But Goffman doesn’t centre the issue of stigma in social structures. He simply fails to recognise that the way society is structured both on a material and discursive (cultural) level can contribute to stigma and that feeling of inferiority in relation to societal expectations. We’re all told that we should talk about our mental health issues, and that’ll make it better. Well, Tyler and Slater argue that this perspective neglects the structural causes of mental health since talking doesn’t change the fact that you’re in a precarious contract or that your income doesn’t meet your repayments. Just talking isn’t going to solve those structural issues. By placing stigma into broader political circuits, it highlights that stigma has a source, that there's someone producing those stigma narratives. They suggest that we look not only at who is producing that stigma, but what political economic objectives are being supported because of that stigma. So, what they're trying to do is to centre stigma as a classificatory form of power that is used to support neoliberal political objectives. And I believe this can be a very useful theoretical lens for us to think through the consequences of how neoliberalism functions. It is a useful framework for us to realise how stigma against welfare benefit claimants is utilised to support policies that are aligned with neoliberalism, including welfare retraction, minimisation of tax policy, and fiscal consolidation. So that's the connection between how stigmatising discourses have become a source of power in fostering neoliberal policies and economic objectives.

“I think that the danger of falling on purely cultural (individual) explanations as to why poverty exists is to support those who want to protect their wealth and advantages. But of course, there is a danger of falling on the other side, which is that structure causes everything and people are just unwittingly reproducing inequality without knowing it (…) structure does materialise in people's lives and gives people agency. Sometimes it reinforces those systems but other times it can be used to resist them”.

In the same book chapter, you argue and problematises that structural explanations for inequality and poverty have been replaced by individual behavioural explanations blaming ‘personal failure’ and that this stigmatises people of lower socio-economic backgrounds. Yet, one might argue that prescriptive structural explanations take away agency from people in that they assume that no matter their individual choices, their circumstances determine their fate. Overly reductive structural conclusions may feel equally as stigmatising as individual behavioural explanations by falling into the trap of suggesting that outcomes are predetermined. How do you balance individual agency with structure?   

I think that this goes to the very heart of class analysis. If we think of it from the perspective of a Marxist analysis, we see the idea that the working class are alienated but will end up in collective resistance once they realise their exploitation. It suggests that people should behave in a particular way because of their structural location. When we think of cultural understandings of class, they can fall into a similar position for thinking people should think in a certain way based upon their cultural socialisation. However, if we consider the other side of the argument, individual behavioural explanations suggest people are to blame for their circumstances. Poverty is a result of not taking advantage of free education or good housing conditions. So, if you find yourself in a precarious position that's not anyone's fault but your own. That's what is being challenged in structural explanations.

But we can go too far in suggesting it's all about structure and people are just unwittingly reproducing their structural location without really being mindful that they're doing it. That's where I think the danger is. One of the things that I’ve tried to do is highlight the mechanisms through which people seek to challenge those broader structures and their position within them. This is one of the reasons why I focus on credit and debt because it offers a means through which people can try to alter their cultural practices and attempt to resist the impact of broader structural limitations on their lives. 

I think the question of agency and structure is always one of the areas of class analysis which is the hardest to pin down. We have these model about how people should behave or why they should behave in a certain way. But often people don’t fit those models and there’s a broader recognition of that now. Jeffery, Thomas and Devine wrote a piece that summarises four responses. One is that people can internalise these broader structures and discourses and feel this sense of guilt and/or shame. Another response is that people internalise these discourses but then deflect and direct those onto other people rather than themselves. The work of Sheldrick and McDonald highlights this point that people in very marginalised positions disidentify and deflect the welfare benefits classification onto others, saying ‘that’s not me, but more those people over there’. A third response is that people construct alternative value systems within these broader cultural systems. These people can’t get any value by aligning themselves with dominant cultural principles because they do not have the capacity to do so. Instead, they construct alternative values within their community. The research by Lisa McKenzie and Bev Skeggs highlights this. The fourth response is that people collectivise to challenge it. We’ve seen that across the country now where people are collectivising to resist low wages and attacks on pensions.

I think that the danger of falling on purely cultural (individual) explanations as to why poverty exists is to support those who want to protect their wealth and advantages. But of course, there is a danger of falling on the other side, which is that structure causes everything and people are just unwittingly reproducing inequality without knowing it. I think that the approach I just set out is a more subtle reflection of how structure does materialise in people's lives and gives people agency. Sometimes it reinforces those systems but other times it can be used to resist them.

In your article “Borrowed identities” (2019), you examine how unsecured credit influence class-making by enabling the struggle against perceived classification. People borrow money to “imitate” those of higher socio-economic positions and thereby alter their social positioning. Why are people propelled to “borrow” their identities? And to which extent is it a rewarding strategy?

This article was my attempt to highlight how people’s access to credit plays a part in their cultural consumption. One of the ideas that underpin this article is that inequality emerges as a system of effects. We feel inequality. It is not just something that is a relational comparison or something that we can map but actually emerges as an effect in our emotions, thoughts, and practices. Our feelings of inequality are not only influenced by our immediate surroundings but also those broader societal systems of classification. And so, I was thinking through how the effects of inequality might lead people to see credit as a way of challenging cultural and discursive classifications. It’s not just about emulation, it’s about struggling with their societal position and their attempt to overcome that in some way. I witnessed people who used credit to counteract those feelings of deficit by using credit to momentarily minimise social and cultural differences. And then there were people whose credit use changed their sense of self, fostering a feeling of social mobility. And for me that challenged dispositional understandings of cultural practices. Actually, people have very complex reasons as to why they might consume. And I think that's where inequality really gets under the skin. And this goes back to the question earlier about why we want to minimise inequality, well, my research partially highlights the effects of inequality and how detrimental it can be for people when debt-fuelled consumption is undertaken to alleviate these feelings. And, of course, can find themselves in very difficult financial situations as a result.

In the same article you write that: “Individuals are provided with credit as a means to ameliorate anxiety and feelings of deficit; but find themselves entangled in complex liens of debt, which allow secondary forms of exploitation to occur” (2019: 1430). At face value I would imagine many would see credit-fuelled consumption as an individual and free choice. How does exploitation come into the picture?  

While people may feel a sense of empowerment for using credit, some can cumulate large amounts of credit-debt. Once someone cannot pay their debt, banks practices shift to collecting the money owed. And at that point, they are the root end of very extractive processes in which the focus of those creditors no longer is to lend you money but to get back the money that you’ve borrowed, plus the charges for missing payment and the interest for lending the money. And in those spaces, people must find solutions to solve these precarious situations, where increasing amounts of their economic capital are being taken to pay for past consumption. And that’s where the notion of secondary forms of exploitation becomes quite useful because there is a ‘double extraction’. There’s one extraction from not being paid what they should be, and a secondary extraction because creditors are now taking aspects of their productive labour to repay past consumption.

Due to climate change conspicuous consumption is increasingly frowned upon. How do you think it will impact social differentiation?

I think that is a really important question, and at the moment I don’t quite know how that will play out. And if I'm honest, the climate crisis is something that is becoming centre stage in many research areas. And some sociologists, including myself, have not quite fully aligned our research with the implications of the climate crisis.

I suppose that while there’s more societal scrutiny associated with conspicuous displays of wealth, we still live in consumer societies. There’s perhaps an increasing capacity to have status through consumption that might align with climate principles, so it might be the case that ethical forms of consumption are taking precedent in cultural classification schemes. So, right now I don't see the climate crises as a severing consumer culture.

In your article ‘The political Economy of Household Debt & the Keynesian Policy Paradigm’ (2021), you and Wood challenge the prevailing constructivist and critical assumptions that the debt-driven growth model of the neoliberal paradigm is exclusive to neoliberalism, arguing that its foundation was laid during late Keynesianism. First, do you care to explain for those of our readers unfamiliar with financial terms, what it means for an economy to be debt-driven? Second, how does your theory impact the way we evaluate Keynesianism as it played out in Britain?

What does it mean for an economy to be debt-driven? Well, it means that more resources are directed towards the financial sector as a way of fostering growth. This could be through corporate debt, through facilitating shareholder value models of corporate governance, by encouraging the financial sector to flourish or it could be in the high finance activities of the City of London or in New York, for instance. What we argue here is that household debt became a key channel for growth within Britain. We moved away from seeing production as the main source of growth and shifted attention towards encouraging people to become financially leveraged, whether that was through homeownership, and seeing growth through house prices, or whether it was through consumer culture by fostering the capacity of people to consume via credit.

What we argue in this article is that the shift toward neoliberalism had much longer antecedents than what is assumed within critical and constructivist literature. Why is that important? What we argue is that people’s consumption of both housing and consumer goods was already starting to have major implications at a political level for how policies were being developed from the 1950s. There’s an article in The Economist in 1959 called ‘Farewell to the 50s’ which acknowledged higher levels of consumption were having a de-proletarianizing effect. Here credit is recognised as the mechanism that will foster consumer mentalities and challenge collective class mobilisation.

We argue the gradual dissemination of credit in the Keynesian era, started to have social and political effects that laid the foundations for neoliberalism to be implemented from the 1980s. Instead of viewing financialization as a structural development that occurred with the onset of neoliberalism in the 1980s, we outline how the long-term dissemination of household debt meant there was bottom-up consent for neoliberal policies associated with low taxes, increasing ownership, and fiscal conservativism. It laid the foundations for neoliberalism by making it broadly accepted by the population.

I found it particularly interesting that you and Wood make the case that in the absence of wider welfare provisions, housing and credit policies seems to have an immense influence on political support in Britain. If political support depends upon liberalised access to credit to fuel consumption and homeownership what does that tell us about the likelihood of the transition to a green economy? Can we only gather political support for green growth as opposed to no-growth?

Yeah, I mean, that is a project waiting to be tackled. It hits the nail on the head. I mean, do you see anywhere in our political dialogue discourse that challenge debt-driven growth, the notion of homeownership, or access to credit? There is of course a tension in the present moment because the Bank of England is making it more expensive to obtain credit to tackle high inflation. But that doesn’t indicate for me that they are shifting away from debt as the source of our growth. If anything, it only highlights how political contentious it is to restrict access to credit, and the publics capacity to access homeownership; something Liz Truss found to her cost.

Our whole economic system is built upon people purchasing homes, consuming goods, services, clothes, cars, whatever it is. And now, the green elements of that are on the periphery. There are aspects of green growth found in left-of-centre parties, including the recent Inflation Reduction Act implemented by the Democrats. In the UK, we seem far from developing a plan that moves away from financial regimes of accumulation and debt driven growth models. There's still an emphasis on finance as a mechanism for supporting growth, but it is also aligned with neoliberal principles that centres markets as the solution to the climate crisis.

In your collaborative article with Ausserladscheider and Wood ‘The manufactured crisis of COVID-Keynesianism in Britain, Germany, and the USA’ (2022), you make the case that the adoption of Keynesian policies in response to COVID does not herald a new economic paradigm but that neoliberal practices will persist. How does the neoliberal paradigm keep legitimising itself?

It’s a good point, right? Our starting point is that neoliberalism isn't just an accepted political programme. It requires constant legitimization. Prior to Covid, the 2008 crisis was the biggest threat that existed to neoliberalism as a political project. There were people on the left who declared neoliberalism dead. We saw similar debates in the Covid period, due to the implementation of policies traditionally associated with Keynesianism. And what we observe is that in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, there was a discursive construction of the Keynesian response to legitimise a return to neoliberalism. Instead of portraying the crisis as stemming from within the financial sector, which expanded under an inclusionary impulse to incorporate more individuals into credit and debt markets, it was reformulated by pro-neoliberal economic and political actors as a crisis of welfare and sovereign debt, in which the solution was welfare retraction and austerity.   

In our article we empirically examine how and to what extent pro-neoliberal actors are constructing a crisis of Covid-Keynesian measures to reposition neoliberalism as the solution. So, the reason why we call it a ‘manufactured crisis’ is because we see politicians in Germany, the UK, and the US, are challenging Covid politics by suggesting they're causing government debt to rise, which is causing rising inflation. They subsequently position neoliberal policies of welfare retraction, fiscal conservatism, and low taxes as the solution to their manufactured crises of COVID Keynesianism.

The latent finding of our article is that in moments of crises state intervention is encouraged and increasingly accepted by the public. Once the crisis is stabilised, we can observe attempts by pro-neoliberal actors to re-legitimise neoliberal policies and shift policymaking back to neoliberal principles. So, there must be a process of legitimization. And crisis construction can be one very useful mechanism that can be deployed to legitimise the return to neoliberal policies.

“It reveals that political parties cannot just impose policies and expect people to accept them; there must be a process of discursive legitimisation to create bottom-up consent”.

Your work is at large a critique of neoliberalism and those in power that individualises the causes of inequality by blaming it on personal failure. What would be your concrete policy recommendations based upon your own research:

(a)    If we ignore real-politic and voter consequences from policies?

(b)   If we consider the socio-political consequences of policies?

I think we've got some good recent examples of how when policies are implemented or proposed without the political groundwork being put in to legitimise those policies and explain why they are needed, then people will tend to fall back on the status quo. Obviously, political positions shift, and people change their view on certain policies. For example, the very idea of the state intervening to support is much more accepted now in social surveys due to COVID. But when policies are implemented without seeking to legitimise them first, then chaos can ensure. The recent example of Kwasi Kwarteng and Liz Truss, where they implemented policies without trying to legitimise them first, is a case in point. It reveals that political parties cannot just impose policies and expect people to accept them; there must be a process of discursive legitimisation to create bottom-up consent. And I think pro-neoliberal actors grasp that much better than political and economic actors on the left. They have sophisticated discursive repertories, including ones associated with stigma, they can deploy to continuously re-legitimise neoliberalism.

That said, we are emerging into an interesting space: neoliberal policies are no longer seen as a solution to every problem. As we observed during the financial crisis, the Covid crisis, and the climate crisis, there is broader acceptance of state intervention. Furthermore, the state of various public services in the UK, including the NHS, are leading people to question the consequences of austerity and fiscal consolidation, particularly when pursued over many years.  It clearly does not improve people’s life. And all these critiques can filter through to a legitimization of alternative economic ideas and policies. But first we must do the groundwork for there be a basis upon which those alternative ideas can be accepted. And pro-neoliberal actors recognised that as far back as the 1970s. You know, Milton Friedman said that only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change and that our job is to make sure that when the next crisis arrives our ideas are waiting as the solution. I still don’t think that the left is in a good position for showcasing why a different kind of economic model even in the face of multiple crisis. But I do think that they are closer than ever.

“We have to start articulating how people’s lives can become better through climate policies and not through debt and debt-driven growth, which is ultimately how people at the moment see their lives improving”.

I wonder if you have any concrete policy recommendations if you don’t have to consider the political landscape and voter consequences?

Well, I think that we must challenge the notion that debt is the basis of our growth. I think we need to recognise that the destruction of nature is tied to debt-driven growth models because they foster consumption at unsustainable levels. For me the only solution is for the state to become much more embedded in providing the means for people to live meaningful lives so they can accept less consumption, less travelling, and so on. We have to start articulating how people’s lives can become better through climate policies and not through debt and debt-driven growth, which is ultimately how people at the moment see their lives improving. If you want to get an education, you must get debt. If you want to become a homeowner, you must take debt. If you want to buy a car, you must take on debt. Debt is how many people see improvements in their lives and our political system is geared towards those objectives. The only way that we can counteract that narrative is through the articulation and implementation of green policies that enhance people’s wellbeing and livelihoods.