Thursday 21 May 2026 5:10 am  |  Updated:  Wednesday 20 May 2026 4:22 pm

Burnham’s ‘neoliberalism’ critique is just Thatcher karaoke

By: Kristian Niemietz

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The British economy today is a million miles away from “neoliberalism”, even if we lack a catchy name to describe what has replaced it, says Kristian Niemietz

For some countries, we have well-developed national stereotypes and associations. Everyone has an idea in their mind of what counts as “typically French”, “typically Italian” or “typically German”. These ideas may not be true, but they feel true, because they are familiar.

For other – usually smaller – countries, we lack well-defined stereotypes and associations. For those, we sometimes use a heuristic: we treat them as extensions of a larger neighbour we feel more familiar with. You will hear tourists in Portugal saying ‘Gracias’, but you will never hear a tourist in Spain accidentally use a Portuguese word. People mistake Dutch for German, but never German for Dutch. We generically refer to Asian takeaway restaurants as “Chinese”, even if they are run by people who have never been to China. And so on.

We sometimes do something quite similar for political eras and ideologies. The last........

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