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A strange thing has happened in the British political scene since the financial crash of 2008. On the one hand, many mainstream economic commentators have begun to question the orthodoxy that prevailed prior to (and which was largely responsible for) the crash and its continuing fallout. This deeper analysis has occurred even as orthodox ideas have continued to dominate mainstream political debate and public understanding of how the economy works. By contrast, political commentators have for the most part failed to subject their own received wisdom to anything like the same degree of scrutiny. This is all the more surprising given that politics, like the economy, has experienced monumental disruptions and transformations during this period. The first thing I want to do here is to simply point out this strange divergence. The second is to offer a couple of possible explanations for why it might have occurred.
Let’s first be clear: I do not argue that economic orthodoxies do not persist in the mainstream media. They do. One only need pick up any edition of The Economist during the last seven years (barring a brief period of bewildered near-humility in the few months following September 2008) to see the persistent hold of “zombie neoliberalism”. However, in other quarters the sheer scale of the crisis has forced many commentators who take their jobs seriously to at least be open to alternative ideas. With disastrous public finances (which Osborne’s deficit fanaticism has barely touched), private indebtedness creeping back towards 2007 levels, rock bottom interest rates, and the high probability of another crash that will almost certainly be more serious than the last, we are in uncharted territory. Under these conditions, as the more astute economic observers have noted, the orthodoxy looks not only irrational but positively extremist.
