Freddie and the Dreamers were an English band famous for their string of hits between May 1963 and November 1965. Their secret weapon? The comic chaos of lead singer Freddie Garrity—just 5-foot-3 but bouncing wildly across the stage, arms and legs flailing in full showman mode.

Their biggest hit, If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody (1963), climbed to number 3 in the UK charts. But at the same time, another “Freddie” — were dreaming up a far darker hit. A tune that would take nearly 50 years to explode: the 2007 global financial meltdown. This crisis threw millions out of work and wreaked irreversible damage on economies and lives worldwide. Enter the University of Freiburg, a European research hub where Freddie (Friedrich) August Hayek began shaping his neoliberal economic theories.

By 1984, Hayek had been honoured by Queen Elizabeth II, on Margaret Thatcher’s recommendation, for his “services to economics.” The U.S. followed suit, awarding him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Revered by followers as one of the greatest modern economic thinkers, Hayek left a deep ideological footprint.

In his essay Why I Am Not a Conservative, Hayek slammed traditional ‘one nation’ conservatism. Post-WWII, this moderate wing embraced social consensus on issues like employment and housing. But Hayek dismissed it, warning, “conservatism is only as good as what it conserves.” His message was a call to shake up centre-right parties and reject old compromises.

Once a leftist, Hayek now fiercely opposed government economic planning as a threat to freedom and a barrier to free markets. In 1974, the Centre for Policy Studies was founded by Sir Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher to promote his free-market ideas—the birth of neoliberal politics, with Hayek as its first director.

In 1975, during a visit to the Conservative Research Department, Thatcher stunned party aides by slamming Hayek’s Constitution and Liberty on the table, declaring, “This is what we believe in.” Sir Keith Joseph later admitted he only fully embraced Conservatism after 1974, acknowledging the profound shift underway.

Over the next decade, ‘one nation’ conservatives were sidelined, replaced by Thatcher’s hardline neoliberals. Even when Michael Heseltine helped end Thatcher’s reign, the damage was done—a quiet Conservative coup with consequences far beyond party politics.

Across the Atlantic, Hayek’s influence took hold at the University of Chicago (1950-62), alongside economists like Robert Fogel and Milton Friedman. Fogel infamously argued that slave owners treated slavery as business and slaves were better off than northern industrial workers—a controversial, cold calculation based on plantation records.

Friedman advised Reagan and Thatcher, and even Chile’s brutal dictator Augusto Pinochet, whose regime tortured and killed thousands.

Together, Hayek, Fogel, and Friedman forged the backbone of neoliberal policies in the UK and USA post-1979. Their obsession with unregulated markets is summed up by Hayek’s chilling claim: “free choice is to be exercised more in the marketplace than in the ballot box.” For him, markets trumped democracy.

This toxic trio’s dogma ignored the realities of everyday life, laying the groundwork for today’s economic chaos—deregulated banks and stock markets running wild, greed supplanting productive industry, replaced by complex financial derivatives that serve only the wealthy elite.

When disaster struck, governments flung open the doors to bail out the rich—an obscure form of socialism for the privileged few—while workers faced global competition and widening inequality.

The UK’s “Big Bang” on October 27, 1986, symbolized this shift: deregulating financial markets, abolishing fixed commissions, and unleashing new financial products. Money flowed freely—home loans, credit, refinancing—but the nation stopped making things. Public assets were sold off in privatizations, effectively selling what we already owned back to us.

The 2011 U.S. Senate Levin-Coburn Report blamed the 2007 crash on risky financial products, conflicts of interest, and regulatory failure. Yet no government dared challenge the neoliberal orthodoxy laid down by Hayek, Friedman, and Fogel. Even Labour under Tony Blair embraced it, championing the same market-driven framework.

That worked—until the money ran out.

Now, as we face a new dawn, the question is: can we break free from this cycle? Can we truly change the rules instead of remixing the old hits? Because no one needs another version of If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody blaring through the modern day X Factor of economic folly.