The 2008 financial crisis and the introduction of austerity policies produced a sense that the prevailing economic and policy programme in the United Kingdom (UK), termed neo-liberalism, had suddenly gone off the rails and a new paradigm would have to be grasped. We should begin by defining neo-liberalism. The term gained popularity largely among left-leaning academics in the 1970s ‘to describe and decry a late twentieth century effort by policy-makers, think-tank experts, and industrialists to condemn social democratic reforms and unapologetically implement free-market policies’ (Shermer, 2014). Neo-liberalism argues that a free-market will allow efficiency, economic growth, income distribution and technological progress to occur. Any state intervention to encourage these phenomena will worsen economic performance. According to some scholars, neoliberalism is commonly used as a catchphrase and a pejorative term, outpacing similar terms such as monetarism, neo-conservatism and market reform in scholarly writing (Boas and Gans-Morse, 2009).

The ‘Washington Consensus’, a term associated with the advent of neo-liberalism as an economic paradigm, refers to a set of broadly free market economic ideas supported by prominent economists and international organisations, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the European Union (EU) and the United States (USA). Essentially it advocates free trade, floating exchange rates, free markets and macro-economic stability. The ten principles originally stated by John Williamson in 1989 include policy recommendations covering low government borrowing, thereby avoiding large fiscal deficits relative to gross domestic product (GDP); redirection of public spending from subsidies towards broad-based provision of key pro-growth, pro-essential services such as primary education, primary health care and infrastructure investment; privatisation of state enterprises; deregulation/abolition of regulations that impede market entry or restrict competition; tax reform, including broadening the tax base and adopting moderate marginal tax rates; interest rates that are market-determined and positive (but moderate) in real terms; competitive exchange rates; and a legal security for property rights (Skidelsky and Fraccaroli, 2017).

Springer et al (2016) posit that the term neo-liberalism has become a means of identifying a seemingly ubiquitous set of market-oriented policies as being largely responsible for a wide range of social, political, ecological and economic problems. To view the term as merely a pejorative or radical political slogan, the authors argue, is ‘to reduce its capacity as an analytic frame.