As the phone hacking scandal unfolds and taints a whole political elite it becomes important to think through its exact political significance. On the most optimistic pole of interpretation some have claimed it as a British Spring, the UK equivalent of the revolutions in the Maghreb or the movements of the indignants in Spain and Greece. One important difference, however, makes this interpretation a mistake. Unlike these other moments the ‘public’ has not been an active agent in the Hackgate scandal, its role has been largely reduced to that of passive spectator. It would be an equal mistake, however, to claim this scandal changes nothing. The temptation to take such a world-weary ‘skeptical’ position might seem ‘radical’ but it is in fact a deeply conservative impulse that threatens to reinforce the neoliberal ‘end of history’ doctrine that change is impossible. At the very least Hackgate signifies that we are in a political situation that has changed quite fundamentally from the one that reigned before the 2008 financial crisis.

To explore this more fully we should position Hackgate as the latest in a series of scandals that have engulfed Britain’s ruling institutions over the last four or five years. In this sense, despite the unprecedented nature of recent events, there is still a certain sense of familiarity to proceedings. We have seen similar scenes around MPs expenses and, of course, with the public outrage directed towards bankers following the financial crisis. In addition we have witnessed not one but two media feeding frenzies around the repression of protestors. The first followed the police attack on the G20 protests and the murder of Ian Tomlinson, with the second erupting around the outing of Mark Kennedy, leading to the unprecedented unmasking of another five undercover police officers acting within the protest movement. The refusal of the Metropolitan Police to investigate the full extent of phone hacking is, then, the third scandal revealing the political character of contemporary policing.

The phone hacking scandal, and particularly the web of complicity revealed in its cover up, is undoubtedly more significant than some of these other scandals but positioning it amongst this series allows us to raises a question that has rarely been posed: Why now? Why are these serial scandals erupting now?

In answer to this question some have pointed to certain technological changes such as the popularity of camera phones or the advent of social media. In fact Paul Mason argues this position in a blogpost titled, Murdoch: The network defeats the hierarchy. There are some attractions to this argument but it seems totally inadequate to me. There is something much more epochal going on. It seems patently obvious that these scandals are part of a more general social and economic crisis sparked by the credit crunch of 2007-8. But while that much seems obvious the exact nature of the relation and so the political significance of the scandals is less clear.

To think through this question of “why now?” I want to raise the example of the Italian Mani Pulite or Clean Hands affair of the early 1990s. This political corruption scandal brought down the existing political system in Italy and destroyed every mainstream political party. The odd thing about the affair is that there had long been incredible levels of political corruption in Italy. Graft was endemic, mainstream parties such as the Christian Democrats and the Socialist Party had well-established links to the Mafia and the secret service had worked closely with neo-fascist terrorists to bomb their own citizens. This had all been an open secret since at least the Second World War. So why did the arrangement fall apart at that point in history? There are of course specificities to the events but broadly speaking we can attribute it to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the consequent collapse of the Italian Communist Party. The whole of post-war Italian politics is only understandable as a settlement arranged to prevent the Communist Party taking power. As soon as its raison d’être was removed the whole arrangement began to lose coherence. Practices that seemed tolerable as part of a wider settlement suddenly appeared as intolerable corruption.

In similar fashion Hackgate reveals the precise mechanisms of a network of corruption whose broad outlines were already understood. What we see, however, is not a distortion of an otherwise functional system but one instantiation of a system that can only operate through such corrupt mechanisms. What we are seeing, through its moment of decomposition, are the parochial arrangements through which neoliberalism was established in the UK.

Neoliberal governance has traits that are common right across the world yet its instantiation in each individual country has been shaped by the specificities of that country’s history. In each country a different (re)arrangement emerged between sections of the ruling class that would enable the imposition of neoliberal policies on populations that, on the whole, didn’t want them. Rupert Murdoch, and the tabloid culture he helped to establish, was central to this process in the UK, not least with the defeat of the print unions at Wapping. Other elements of that compact include a Thatcherite Conservative Party and a neoliberalised Labour Party, a highly politicised police force and, especially after the 1986 Big Bang deregulation of the stock market, the dominance of finance capital. It is no coincidence that each of these elements has been racked with scandal since the economic crash of 2008.

Neoliberalism, however, is more than the parochial arrangements of a specific national ruling class. Each semi-stable form of capitalism also needs some sort of settlement with the wider population, or at least a decisive section of it. As we have previously argued, in distinction to the post-war settlement that contained an explicit deal linking rising real wages to rising productivity, neoliberalism contained an implicit deal based on access to cheap credit. Despite the stagnation or decline of real wages since the late 1970s, the mechanisms of debt allowed living standards to be maintained. An accompaniment to this deal was the necessary abandonment of any pretence to collective control over the conditions of your life. It meant the end of democracy in any meaningful form and the reduction of politics to technocratic rule. The financial crisis broke the central component of this deal, access to cheap credit. Living standards can no longer be maintained and without it the parochial ruling arrangements in the UK have started to lose coherence.

Rather than a symptom of renewal, however, we should read these scandals as a symptom of neoliberalism’s undead zombie-like status. As we put it in Turbulence:

Neoliberalism is dead but it doesn’t seem to realise it. Although the project no longer ‘makes sense’, its logic keeps stumbling on, like a zombie in a 1970s splatter movie: ugly, persistent and dangerous. If no new middle ground is able to cohere sufficiently to replace it, this situation could last a while… all the major crises – economic, climate, food, energy – will remain unresolved; stagnation and long-term drift will set in (recall that the crisis of Fordism took longer than an entire decade, the 1970s, to be resolved). Such is the ‘unlife’ of a zombie, a body stripped of its goals, unable to adjust itself to the future, unable to make plans. A zombie can only act habitually, continuing to operate even as it decomposes. Isn’t this where we find ourselves today, in the world of zombie-liberalism? The body of neoliberalism staggers on, but without direction or teleology.

The scandals represent the zombie’s body decomposing even as it continues its habitual operation. The example of the Clean Hands scandal, however, shows that exposure of corruption is not enough to produce something better. A crisis can remain unresolved and that situation can settle down into a new semi-stable state. In Italy the collapse of the Christian Democrats and the Socialists lead to the emergence of the racist Northern League and Berlusconi’s Forza Italia. Italian politics since the scandal has been subordinated to Berlusconi’s attempts to escape the corruption charges arising from that time. A huge new compact of corruption has been established to achieve that goal.

The only way to avoid a similar outcome to our present situation is to spark mass political action such as that glimpsed in Greece, Spain, and the Maghreb, as well as the student movement in the UK. Any prospect of this reaching the level of social force needed to finish off neoliberalism is predicated on the hope that the embrace of tabloid and celebrity culture is a symptom of the powerless position neoliberalism places us in and not its cause. The collapse of neoliberal ideology and the revelation of the corrupt nature of contemporary policing and politics must be taken into account in any new invocation of the fairy dust that can spark social movements. But left on its own it is just as likely to collapse back into the sense of passive impotence that pervades our contemporary situation.