Britain is the biggest Covid-19 disaster in Europe because it’s the place where neoliberalism progressed furthest.

For decades, state capacity has been systematically dismantled – between 1980 and 1996 it alone accounted for 40% of all privatisations in the OECD.

Neoliberal reforms to the NHS:

- downgrading public health
- introducing the internal market
- incentivising outsourcing, including hospital cleaning
- treating spare capacity as waste
- privatising supply chain
- enormous PFI debt burdens

What did they think would happen?

Britain has had a succession of governments – Tory and Labour – which dismantled the state’s ability to act on the public’s behalf. What we’re seeing now is not just the incompetence of individual politicians, it’s the logical outcome of an entire ideological project.