Housing the historical bloc: Civil society contestation of authoritarian neoliberalism in England

Abstract

Neoliberalisation, particularly since the financial crisis, has been associated with significant housing crises. Rising prices and rents have benefitted asset owners, whilst squeezing younger generations out of the ‘property owning democracy’. As the tensions between these two groups grow, states are seeking further reforms to urban planning to deliver greater levels of private house-building, as a policy fix which also serves the interests of capital. To deliver further neoliberal reforms, though, states are increasingly turning towards more authoritarian practices to manage growing dissent to neoliberal rule. Drawing on Gramsci and theoretical insights from the major crises of the 1970s, this paper analyses how authoritarian practices, statist and populist, are derived from the administrative and legitimation crises that followed the financial crash of 2007/8. It focuses on a particular administrative crisis – housing in England – to show how increasingly coercive urban planning practices were advocated for at national level, which in turn revealed tensions within the ‘historical bloc’ of the neoliberal order. In the English case the government has struggled to cohere the consent of capital and civil society, with key class fractions of the historical bloc divided over planning reform. I argue that the contestations have nonetheless shifted political common sense towards reducing deliberative and democratic practices, shifting accountability from those with structural power to those with much more marginal power.