Popular Capitalism? Privatization and Demutualization in the 1980s and 1990s

While Margaret Thatcher publicly promoted a Puritan emphasis on thrift, hard work, and asceticism, the outcome of her policies stood in stark contrast to this side of her rhetoric. Her way of selling off nationalized industries allowed the British to have a heavily subsidized flutter on the stock market and increased the shareholder population to ten million investors. Reality, however, was a far cry from Thatcher’s slogan of a ‘share-owning democracy’, not least because the continued growth of large financial institutions meant that small shareholders had very little influence on corporate governance. Millions of people merely ‘stagged’ the privatization issues, meaning that they sold for a quick and easy profit in early trading. ‘Investors’ new and old applied the same short-term logic during the demutualization of major building societies like Halifax or Northern Rock during the 1990s, when ‘carpet-bagging’ became a national sport. Carpetbaggers opened accounts in societies ripe for demutualization not in order to save for a house, but to make a quick profit from selling their accounts once they were converted into shares due to the building society becoming a public company. This chapter places centre stage prominent carpetbaggers such as the former royal butler, Michael Hardern, who during the late 1990s campaigned to become a board member of all remaining building societies. The extent of ‘stagging’ and ‘carpet-bagging’ shows that popular capitalism was less an economic enfranchisement of the nation, and more an expressive culture of self-referential speculation, personal enrichment, and stock market gambling.