Are the Tories, and/or Blue Labour neo-liberals? No. That so many label them as such is a sign that the term is used not as a category, and aid to analysis, but simply as abuse, much as the term “fascist” has been used to describe individuals and organisations who quite clearly are no such thing. Its an indication of the degradation of Marxist, or even just socialist politics, to where it resolves, essentially, not into any kind of political science, but just moralistic, and emotional outbursts. Marx referred to a similar degradation in economics and in socialism, in the latter part of the 19th century as vulgar economics, and vulgar socialism.
What characterises neoliberalism (in itself a vague and pretty useless term), which I prefer to call conservative social-democracy, is a recognition of the role of big capital, and policies that serve the interests of the ruling-class, a ruling-class that, today, is comprised of owners of fictitious-capital, and who exercise control over that big capital, not via their private ownership of it, but via their ownership of shares – as well as via the state, which acts in their interests. If the Tories, or Blue Labour were, indeed, neo-liberals, neither of them would have been advocating Brexit, and both of them, now, would be taking advantage of its obvious failure, and unpopularity amongst the vast majority of the electorate to reverse it as quickly as possible! But, they are not doing so, which, in itself, shows that they are not neo-liberals.
The only mainstream parties, currently, that are neo-liberal are the Liberal Democrats, Greens, SNP, and Plaid Cymru. They are the only ones – if you ignore the, so far, irrelevant Rejoin The EU Party – that have an overtly neo-liberal agenda of rejoining the neo-liberal EU on its current basis. If, as a neo-liberal must do, you seek to advance the interests of the ruling class, by advancing the interests of large-scale, socialised, industrial capital, which provides the revenues – interest/dividends – of that ruling class, as well as providing it with the capital gains from the rising asset prices associated with it, you must advocate for the EU, and a reversal of Brexit. The above parties do that, but the Tories and Blue Labour do not. The latter, therefore, are not neo-liberals, they are much worse, a reactionary throw back to a period before even social-democracy emerged in the 19th century.
What the Tories are, is a manifestation of the ideas, not of neo-liberalism, but of 18th century Liberalism, of the ideas of the Libertarians/anarcho-capitalists, of whom Hayek was the frontrunner, chosen by Thatcher, in the 1980's, and to whom the likes of Rees-Mogg look, today. Thatcher was the point of transition from the mildly progressive social-democracy of post-war Buttskellism, which coexisted within a spectrum with conservative social-democracy, that ended in crisis in the 1970's, and broke down under Callaghan, into the period where conservative social-democracy had to contend, in the 1980's, not with a challenge to its Left, but from the Right, and battled it out, inside the Conservative Party, with the Classical Liberal/Libertarian, petty-bourgeois nationalists that represented the increased social weight of the petty-bourgeoisie, which make up its membership, and core vote.
They take seriously all of that nonsense contained in the small business myth, and need to limit and even break up the large monopolies, and so on, to return to some golden era of small business dynamism, and free market competition. They were strengthened by the fact that, since the 1980's, the size of the petty-bourgeoisie grew by 50%, reversing the trend seen over the previous 200 years, of them being squeezed out of existence. There is also a return to some of those ideas in the US, again, today, with proposals for breaking up the large tech monopolies, reminiscent of the reactionary ideas at the end of the 19th century, of “anti-trust” legislation. The reality is that its highpoint, recently, came and went with Truss's government.
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