Forres Enterprise Park – Highland SEZ 2024 – 30 x 24cm, acrylic, wire, on canvas
A bit of history to warn you of the next stage of the post-Brexit libertarian experiment. The same catastrophic mistakes of SEZs under Thatcher’s term are being turbocharged by Sunak’s 74 SEZs. In 1978, Tory MPs met in the Waterman’s Arms Pub, Geoffrey Howe was Shadow Chancellor for Thatcher. A neoliberal think tank published a paper on whether the UK should become a low-wage economy so it could compete with Hong Kong and Singapore. UK’s growth had dropped to 4% while Hong Kong’s was up by 16.9%. Howe said Hong Kong was the child of 2 parents, the UK and China. SEZs proved that you didn’t have to create new nations you could just carve-up old ones for libertarian experiments in Free Market hegemony. Howe noted that the successes of Hong Kong and Singapore showed that democracy was proving to be a major obstacle to economic growth in the UK, Howe and Thatcher set about removing democracy solely for the 1 percent’s benefit. Their zoning experiment was a disaster. Howe suggested that huge swathes of the UK could become Special Economic Zones by transforming inner cities into deregulated ‘Crown colonies’ free from the meddling of Big Govt. What happened next was a cruel exercise in corporate terrorism with 1% winners and 99% losers. Residents could opt in the SEZ by giving up their citizenship, becoming ‘sovereign individuals’ free from the constraints of rules of any kind, no meddling Big Govt intervention. SEZs would leave the EEC and recreate Hong Kong ‘inside inner Liverpool or inner Glasgow’. Tories deployed socialism in 1 zone and Neoliberalism in another, designated areas where ‘the Queens writ does not run’ would see taxation, labour laws, health and safety regs eliminated. Instead of offshore islands, decaying inner cities would see residents forced to improvise their own solutions under the moniker of ‘Crisis breeds entrepreneurs’. In the late 1970’s Tories envisaged the zone as an experimental laboratory of desperation and entrepreneurial zeal. The experiment would separate the wheat from the chaff. One commentator called the zone ‘a dagger aimed at the heart of socialism’. Thatcher rolled out 11 SEZs all exempted from local planning approval, free from taxation for 10 years with subsidies for businesses paid by the taxpayer.