2. Financialisation and the Property-Owning Autocracy

UK policy-makers’ interventionist response to the financial crisis might suggest that the hold of neoliberal ideology over elites’ understanding of and prescriptions for the economy had loosened. However, we need to understand the defining role of the process of ‘financialisation’, and the integral function of the housing market, within the pre-crisis growth model. Interventions by policy elites have predominantly served to support financialisation and the housing market. The austerity agenda pursued most forcefully since 2010 is designed to protect and advance financialisation, by further undermining the legitimacy of fiscal policy interventions—even though the resurrection of the pre-crisis growth model has required significant and novel fiscal manoeuvres by central government. Austerity has also justified an intensification of the compulsion for individuals to engage with finance.