Private Island by James Meek – review
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/05/private-island-why-britain-now-belongs-to-someone-else-james-meek-review
Who owns Britain? And does the market now rule absolutely everything? Read this book to find out what's really been going on over the last 20 years
This is a book about the state of Britain today that began its life when James Meek visited Russia in 1991, soon after the Soviet collapse. "Watching the vultures come to feast on the carcass of the world's largest state-owned, planned economy," Meek writes, "I began to find the terms to question what had been done by politicians, economic theorists, lobbyists and business people in my own country." He believes that 1991 was a pivotal year – it was then that market ideology went global, capturing governments not only in post-communist countries but as far afield as New Zealand and Chile. As he drove off the ferry at Ostend in November of that year, heading east, he felt a seemingly irresistible force behind him: "a racing, expanding tide of victorious free marketism flickered at my wheels, a tide that has gone by many names – consumer capitalism, Reaganism, Thatcherism, neoliberalism, the Washington Consensus". Since then Putin has imposed a sort of order on the mafia economy of the 1990s, while western countries have been struggling with the mess left by the financial crisis. But neoliberal ideology has not been abandoned – far from it. The tide of the market has continued rising, flowing into pretty well every corner of society...
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