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Dr. Kristian Niemitz is the Editorial Director and Head of Political Economy at the Institue of Economic Affairs
The day after the Banksy statue appeared on Waterloo Place, I gave a talk to a delegation of American students visiting the IEA, who had heard about this statue, and for some reason (my talk was about something completely unrelated), wanted to know what my take on it was.
At first, I struggled a bit to explain it. What exactly is wrong with that statue? Why would a classical liberal like me object to it?
The statue shows a man blinded by a flag walking over the edge of a cliff, which is quite clearly meant to be a critique of fanatical nationalism. Fanatical nationalism is a collectivist ideology, which any liberal individualist would naturally oppose. So, again, what’s wrong with the Banksy statue? Banksy may have the tedious, trendy opinions of the cultural establishment, but that doesn’t mean that he can never be right. Isn’t the message embodied in this statue a message liberals should applaud?
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In the end, I explained my take like this:
A critique of nationalism is valuable if you live in a nationalistic society. If this statue had popped up in 1914, it would have been a brilliant piece of art. But contemporary Britain is not a nationalistic society. Contemporary Britain is a society where nationalism is considered low-status and ‘cringe’, and where a performative anti-patriotism is fashionable. This is the country of Nish Kumar, Bob Vylan and James Felton, the country where, until quite recently, all the bookshops were full of fashionable BLM slop, and where it is controversial to say that the country’s wealth was not built on colonialist extraction. Against this backdrop, the Banksy statue serves no useful role. This is merely the cultural elite highlighting its own elite status. It is not “challenging” or “thought-provoking”, it is pure gloating and self-congratulation.
Whether you think a cultural or political message is useful or not does not just depend on whether or not you agree with it. If Banksy’s message is ‘fanatical nationalism is bad’, then I agree with that message. I also think it is a perfectly useless point to make in 2026.
I wonder why there aren’t more people of the centre-left who feel similarly about critiques of ‘neoliberalism’.
There’s a whole genre of books and articles that bash ‘market fundamentalism’, ‘neoliberal dogma’ and ‘trickle-down economics’. I obviously disagree with 99% of what the people who make those arguments are saying, but that is not what this article is about. In a previous life, I used to be a social democrat, and there has to be a parallel universe where there’s an alternative version of me who still is. Maybe he works for the Resolution Foundation. That alternative me would agree with a lot of the criticisms of neoliberalism. He would also think that neoliberalism-bashing is a perfectly useless genre in this day and age.
He would argue that critiques of neoliberalism were useful in the 1990s. The pendulum had swung too far in a pro-market direction. (Again, this is ‘alternative me’, not the actual me, speaking.) Capitalism was triumphant everywhere, coming even to Eastern Europe, China and Vietnam. In the West, a Thatcherite-Reaganite Anglo-Saxon capitalism was on the front foot, and European Social Democracy was in retreat. Globalisation was only accelerating those tendencies.
But he would also argue that we no longer live in that world today. Look at any polling on economic policy issues: there is barely an anti-capitalist policy, from nationalisation to price controls to wealth taxes, that does not enjoy the support of at least two thirds of the population. If governments were elected on that basis alone, Britain would be run by Zack Polanski, Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn. The book stores are full of anti-capitalist slop, and posting anti-capitalist slop on social media rarely fails to attract thousands and thousands of likes and retweets. The most high-profile economist of our time is Mariana Mazzucato, the most high-profile political influencer of our time is Hasan Piker.
In a world like this - do we really need yet another book or article on why neoliberalism is bad? I think that even if I were more sympathetic to the points being made in such books and articles, my answer would still be an emphatic no. If you’re a critic of neoliberalism - you’ve already won! Give it a rest!
Social democratic alternative me would argue that, yes, it is possible to have a naïve faith in markets - but in practice, hardly anyone does these days, except maybe for the five nerds from the libertarian student society. An infinitely bigger risk is that we underappreciate the benefits of markets, and harm ourselves by adopting some anti-market populist slop.
You don’t need to be a neoliberal to see that markets do have some benefits, which both majority opinion and elite opinion appear largely oblivious to. You don’t need to be a neoliberal to see the benefits of the price mechanism, of competition, or of supply-side responses to scarcity. If you do, that makes you more pro-market than the majority of the population, and of Britain’s cultural establishment. I’d worry more about that than about Britain’s twelve remaining neoliberals.
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