FORMATION OF THE POST-CRASH ECONOMICS SOCIETY AT MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY

That this House congratulates the economics undergraduates at the University of Manchester who have formed the Post-Crash Economics Society, which aims to combat the orthodox neoliberal globalised free market teaching which has been churned out by many universities over the last 40 years and has been accepted and embraced by the leadership of the main political parties; notes that this neoliberal free market model has resulted in a massive increase in wealth for the richest one per cent of the population, while the vast majority of people have seen their incomes, terms of employment, public services and standard of living eroded; and hopes that students studying economics at other universities will follow the example of the Manchester undergraduates and challenge their own universities to acknowledge the failure and instability of unregulated free markets which resulted in the 2008 financial crisis, and which would have caused even more misery and destruction of jobs and businesses if the Government had not stepped in and nationalised parts of the financial sector, and the Bank of England had not injected vast sums of money into the economy through quantitative easing.