Big business has corrupted economics - Guardian UK
“Rachel Lomax is practically the definition of establishment: Cheltenham Ladies’ College followed by Cambridge and the LSE; principal private secretary to then-chancellor Nigel Lawson; deputy governor of the Bank of England for five years until 2008. Which makes what she said on Friday evening all the more startling.
This being a debate on the future of capitalism in the People’s Republic of Bristol, the audience were satisfyingly radical – but Lomax was just as bluntly and disarmingly political. The former Treasury mandarin made no bones about admitting that she had been part of a project of “dismantling a version of capitalism” and replacing it with “Anglo-American neo-liberalism”. You’d struggle to get scholars of Thatcherism to speak with such straightforwardness, but here it was coming from one of the era’s key backroom players.
And now this co-architect of Britain’s economic model as good as admitted that the system she had helped create was broken. But Lomax had one question: “Where is the revolutionary thinking?
You surely couldn’t ask for a better measure of the economic mess we’re in, that even members of the establishment are now calling for revolution….”
