‘Well grubbed, old mole!’: The press, the Institute of Economic Affairs and the propagation of neo-liberalism in the UK

Julian Petley

doi:10.1177/14648849211015853

Abstract

This article considers how before and after the Tories came to power in 1979, The Times and the Daily and Sunday Telegraph consistently propagated ideas emanating from the free-market think-tank the Institute of Economic Affairs. It argues that this was part of a wider process in which the post-war Keynesian consensus came under fire from sections of both the media and the political class, and heralded an era in which neo-liberal ideas would come to constitute a new form of economic ‘common sense’. Given the dominance of this perspective, most of the mainstream media failed to anticipate the 2008 financial crisis and have repeatedly endorsed austerity as the only means of reducing the ensuing deficit.

Highlights

In the United Kingdom, there is currently mounting concern over a number of right-wing think-tanks, focussing in particular on their intimate links with members of the present Conservative government, their opaque funding (Evans et al, 2018; Geoghegan, 2021; Lawrence et al, 2020; Mason, 2019; Roach, 2019), and the prominence of their spokespeople in the mainstream broadcast media (Lewis and Cushion, 2019; Wren-Lewis, 2018a), which have been criticised for presenting them as disinterested researchers as Journalism 00(0)opposed to well-connected lobbyists
My concern here is with a particular aspect of the earlier history of one specific think tank, namely the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA),2 and with the role played by three British national newspapers, The Times and the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, in helping to propagate its free-market doctrines
In the literature on think-tanks the specific role of the press in spreading free-market ideas is discussed in only two chapters of Wayne Parsons’s The Power of the Financial Press (1989), which is anyway as much about the US as the UK, and in parts of Richard Cockett’s Thinking the Unthinkable (1995), and in this article I want to discuss in greater detail the way in which, from the 1960s to the 1980s, these papers consistently acted as a sounding board for the free-market ideas associated mainly with the IEA, providing them with a far wider audience than they would otherwise have gained

Summary

Introduction

In the United Kingdom, there is currently mounting concern over a number of right-wing think-tanks, focussing in particular on their intimate links with members of the present Conservative government, their opaque funding (Evans et al, 2018; Geoghegan, 2021; Lawrence et al, 2020; Mason, 2019; Roach, 2019), and the prominence of their spokespeople in the mainstream broadcast media (Lewis and Cushion, 2019; Wren-Lewis, 2018a), which have been criticised for presenting them as disinterested researchers as Journalism 00(0)opposed to well-connected lobbyists.

Results

Conclusion