Structural Adjustment: The Global Experiment Behind UK Austerity
High streets collapsing. Councils running out of money. Factories and mills disappearing across towns in the North of England.
For years we’ve been told austerity was an unfortunate necessity after the financial crisis. But the policies behind it didn’t appear out of nowhere. They were developed decades earlier and applied across the Global South through programmes designed by institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
These policies were known as Structural Adjustment Programmes.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, countries facing debt crises were required to implement sweeping economic reforms: cutting public spending, privatising state industries, removing trade protections, and devaluing their currencies. The package of ideas behind these reforms became known as the Washington Consensus.
In this video I explain:
Where structural adjustment programmes came from
Why they were introduced in the first place
What they did to the economies they were applied to
And how the logic behind them eventually shaped austerity policies in countries like the UK
If you want to understand where modern austerity really comes from, you have to start with the global experiment that came before it.
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