This article is taken from the July 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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The story arc of this “secret history” is that the economist Friedrich Hayek invented an extreme form of capitalism known as neoliberalism in his 1944 book The Road to Serfdom which attracted some “fanatical disciples” who set up some think tanks which attracted some “wealthy backers” who pumped in so much money that the think tanks were able to brainwash politicians into abandoning social democracy, thereby leaving us with the red-in-tooth-and-claw, devil-take-the-hindmost, laissez- faire capitalism that enslaves us today.

This is the umpteenth book by the Guardian columnist George Monbiot, who has something of an obsession with free-market think tanks, and with my employer, the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), in particular. Written with the filmmaker Peter Hutchison, The Invisible Doctrine feels like a communiqué from a parallel universe. I would like to visit Monbiot’s Britain, a country where regulation has been slashed since Brexit, where the media are dedicated to giving people “an unremitting, visceral defence of capitalism”, and where the BBC presents the IEA as “an independent source of opinion”. 

It is only possible to believe this narrative if you filter out a great deal of information. You must first ignore the legion of think tanks, charities, pressure groups, trade unions, quangos and other special interests pushing relentlessly for a bigger state, and instead focus on a small band of free marketeers and their “rich backers”. 

But even among think tanks, the free market side is poorly resourced. The IEA had an income of £2.3 million in 2022. The left-wing Institute for Public Policy Research had £3.4 million. The New Economics Foundation, whose politics resemble those of Monbiot’s, had £3.5 million. The Resolution Foundation, which really was described as “independent” by the BBC until its chief executive was parachuted into a safe Labour seat, had £3.3 million. The Institute for Government had £5.4 million. The Tony Blair Institute received £26 million from a single donor (the tech entrepreneur Larry Ellison) and had an income of £100 million.

How did a handful of neoliberals come to dominate politics when the opposition is so overwhelming? The answer, of course, is that they didn’t. Although the authors portray Britain as a nightwatchman state, it is a country where 40 per cent of GDP is taken by the state in tax, £300 billion is spent on social security, 82 per cent of healthcare spending is by the state and 93 per cent of children are educated by the state. 

The green belt has doubled in size since 1979. Cannabis is still illegal and tobacco is being banned. Every major political party is committed to Net Zero and the Conservatives spent their last months in office trying to ban “no fault evictions” and regulate football. This is the second fact you must put to the back of your mind.

The third fact is that The Road to Serfdom was a critique of centrally-planned economies that has been vindicated by history, not a blueprint for extreme capitalism. Many libertarians consider Hayek to be a wet social democrat. “Probably nothing,” he wrote in The Road to Serfdom, “has done so much harm to the liberal cause as the wooden insistence of some liberals on certain rough rules of thumb, above all the principle of laissez-faire.” Although Monbiot and Hutchison claim that neoliberalism “tells us we are greedy and selfish”, Hayek explicitly said that his philosophy “does not assume, as if often asserted, that man is egoistic or selfish”.

This is a thin book, physically and intellectually. The authors show no interest in understanding why Keynesianism “ran into trouble in the 1970s” or why politicians (and voters) were looking for a different way of doing things. They garble Hayek’s work until it becomes a ludicrous caricature and then project an extraordinary amount of bad faith onto his adherents.

Between 1945 and 1960, they claim, with a characteristic lack of evidence, that the Hayekian movement went from being “an honest if extreme philosophy” to “a sophisticated con” and “a self-serving racket”. After complaining that free-market think tanks do not dox their donors, Monbiot and Hutchison assert that there must be “oligarchs and corporations” paying them to promote their “unreasonable demands”. 

In a peculiar twist, they suggest that the “oligarchs” do this not so much to enrich themselves as to get a kick out of making the poor poorer (in fact, the incomes of those in the bottom 20 per cent have doubled in real terms since 1979).

This sounds so conspiratorial that when the authors write a chapter about conspiracy theories they coin the term “conspiracy fictions” to distinguish other people’s conspiracy theories from their own “genuine conspiracies” involving Cambridge Analytica and the Koch brothers. The Koch brothers inevitably get their own chapter in which the authors propose two “likely reasons” for their donating to libertarian causes. The first is “immediate self-interest”; the second is “power”. The possibility that libertarians want to give money to libertarian organisations never seems to cross their minds.

The authors use the word “oligarch” freely, presumably because it brings Russia to mind, but it is only ever applied to the “rich backers” of “neoliberal ideologues”. They have nothing to say about the likes of Bill Gates, George Soros or Michael Bloomberg, let alone the heiress Aileen Getty who funds Just Stop Oil. 

The Charles Koch Foundation publishes all its grants in its annual tax returns, but Monbiot and Hutchison describe it as “dark money”. Like the Koch brothers’ donations, there is little that is secret in this “secret history”. Having no inside information, the authors rely not merely on publicly available material but on documents proudly published by “neoliberals”. 

Think Tank: The Story of the Adam Smith Institute, a book by the institute’s co-founder Madsen Pirie, is treated as if it were a leaked document, or a 240-page slip of the tongue, rather than the memoirs of a man who has been cheerfully boasting about his influence for the last 50 years. They describe it as a “rare glimpse” into a world that is “shrouded in secrecy”. 

There are several accounts of how free-market think tanks operate which the authors show no signs of having read, nor do they seem to have read the first volume of Hayek’s monumental biography published in 2022. Instead, they get their information second- and third-hand from the hall of mirrors that is anti-capitalist journalism until it has been distorted beyond recognition. They assert, for example, that Hayek advised the IEA’s founders “not to do any original thinking, but to ensure the Institute became a ‘second-hand dealer in ideas’”. 

This is virtually the opposite of what he said. It was journalists and intellectuals whom Hayek described as “second-hand dealers in ideas” and he advised the IEA’s founders to approach them with original thinking that would shift the climate of opinion, rather than waste time with politicians. 

To anyone familiar with Hayek, this was a famous conversation, but Monbiot and Hutchison mangle it because it does not fit their view of the IEA as a clandestine lobby group and because they sourced it from an Adam Curtis blog post.

Treading the familiar ground of left-wing polemicists, the authors claim that the NHS has been “systematically underfunded” and that the UK only has 2.5 hospital beds per 1,000 people, less than half the OECD average, as a result. An Observer article is cited as the source for this statistic. 

Had they gone to the original OECD report, they would have found that the UK spends well above average on healthcare and that many of the countries that spend less have more hospital beds, more doctors and more nurses. This would be food for thought for a thoughtful writer, but Monbiot and Hutchison feel the first statistic proves that neoliberals are trying to “kill” the NHS and move on. 

How can neoliberal economists be fanatical “ideologues” and cynical mercenaries at the same time? Why would anyone plotting a secret takeover spend so much time discussing their ideas on television and writing reports which explain in great deal what they intend to do? How can something so loudly trumped be an “invisible doctrine”?

I could go through this book line by line, pointing out all the errors and straw-man arguments, but what would be the point? This book is plainly not aimed at me and probably not at you either. There are assertions in it that I have never come across before but which the authors seem to think readers will take for granted. 

They claim, wrongly, that rates of economic growth were “much lower” in the UK and USA after 1980 than under Keynesianism and follow this up with the astonishing assertion that the main cause of economic growth in the Keynesian era was “post-colonial looting”. If you can swallow this, you may find the delusions and moral certainty of Monbiot and Hutchison in this book strangely comforting. But everyone else should file it under “conspiracy fiction”.