No cooption – neoliberal leaders are willing to bend.

But more recent neoliberals, especially those in the political arena, seem more willing to make exceptions for policy programmes aimed at pulling up previously disadvantaged communities, or at ensuring the most desti- tute do not simply wither and perish. George Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act 2001 (Dillon & Rotherham, 2017) is an aptly named (if significantly badly designed) example of this. The law included provisions that would allocate extra resources to schools with significant proportions of disad- vantaged kids (including racial minorities). Tony Blair’s 2003 London Schools Challenge (Kidson & Norris, 2014) was aimed at supporting the improvement of previously underperforming secondary schools, which on the whole tended to be schools with above-average numbers of minority ethnic students, is another such example. This policy was explicitly aimed at narrowing the attainment gap between white and minority ethnic students. Even though they are by no means enthusiastic about them, neoliberal governments have also acquiesced to the need for welfare poli- cies that aid the unemployed, if only for a limited time after they lose their jobs, even though they have also actively cut the sums people receive over time. In many ways, the Universal Credit programme devised by Ian Duncan Smith (the UK’s Secretary for Work and Pensions between 2010 and 2016) is a prime example of this. It reflected an acceptance that the state could help those who are badly off financially, but their approach aimed to make such help as palatable to neoliberalism as possible. It folded together six different welfare benefits into one and placed a cap on what people can receive (in neoliberal shorthand: they ‘simplified’ the welfare programmes and therefore limited the ‘sprawling’ state). The chancellor of the British exchequer Rishi Sunak’s furlough scheme that saw the state pay 80% of furloughed workers’ wages during the pandemic is a significant recent example in this connection as well.

The grudging acceptance, displayed by more recent neoliberal politi- cians, of the need for at least some policies that support the “losers” may stem from the knowledge that society’s provenance is in fact much more complicated than the one described in our story above. To recast this character of neoliberal politics vis a vis the story we told at the start, we could say that recent neoliberals recognise, or at the least they believe it is an unalterable feature of the zeitgeist today to hold, that we do not simply show up on a virgin island as individuals without complex backstories and identities, rather we arrive as groups or as individuals whose identities, histories and propensities are inextricably intertwined with groups. The distribution of wealth and incomes we see today is just because some were more ingenious, or harder-working, than others in the marketplace. Rather, we ended up where we are because for centuries some people were forced to take part in the market only as resources to be traded, as opposed to as agents to trade. Or in many cases, they were simply kept out of the market altogether. Or because the rules of the markets have historically been rigged by those with power in ways that benefitted them and produced results heavily skewed towards them and their descendants. Or for a host of other reasons not congruent with the story told by classic neoliberal thought about the equitable origins of inequality. We never all had a chance to make it. We don’t all start at the same spot. Current neoliberal politics has shown itself capable of adapting, of interpreting neoliberal ideology in new ways that make it somewhat relevant to the ways that human understanding in the West has evolved. Regardless of whether such adaptability arose as a result of a sublimated cognitive disso- nance, or from a wily pragmatism, neoliberal policy-makers have shown themselves willing to stray from dogmatic free-market policies.