These kinds of changes are often thought through the conceptual lens of ‘neoliberalism’. It’s worth describing what we might mean when we talk about neoliberalism, as the term – and imprecise uses of it – are all too quickly maligned. By neoliberalism, I mean a conscious, political project, undertaken to break the power of organised labour and develop new methods to extract profit from more and more of human social life, including from the legacy institutions of the welfare state. David Harvey describes it as the ‘gutting’ or ‘hollowing out’ of social programmes or social institutions.6 In its promise of breaking through the boredom of mid-twentieth century Fordism, it turns freedom in on itself. In promising freedom, it produces more coercion. As the philosopher, Byung-Chul Han puts it:

Neoliberalism represents a highly efficient, indeed an intelligent, system for exploiting freedom. Everything that belongs to practices and expressive forms of liberty – emotion, play and communication – comes to be exploited. It is inefficient to exploit people against their will. Allo-exploitation [exploitation carried out by other people] yields scant returns. Only when freedom is exploited are returns maximised.

Unlike in the US where private companies step in to fill the gap left by a welfare state never having really been built, in the UK, private companies deliver previously public services. The services remain free at the point of use (with the exception of dentistry), but many are run by private companies. The performance of the companies running these services is monitored by the body that would have originally provided the service themselves – national and local government, local NHS structures and so on. The process of outsourcing, of paying private companies to carry out the work of public services, accelerated in the 1980s with the introduction of ‘compulsory competitive tendering’. This legislation placed a requirement on public sector organisations to tender all contracts for service delivery, meaning that anyone could bid for them. The contract was awarded to the company that would provide the service the most cheaply. This duty was relaxed slightly in 1997 but by then outsourcing was established as the new normal. Now, £284 billion per year is spent buying goods and services from external suppliers. This is about a third of all of public expenditure21 and 13% of GDP.22