Published in 1983, Brighton on the Rocks incorporates a collection of interviews, photographs and statistics, which are used to analyse how monetarism affected the economic policies that were pursued by the city’s local authorities in the 1980s.

When local councils imposed financial cuts from 1980 onwards, they argued that the cuts were necessary because of overspending. This text takes the view that monetarist policies are implicated in the decline in public services and critically evaluates the effects of monetarism on working people’s lives, organisations and throughout the welfare state. It poses the question as to whether a different kind of economics was needed that was geared to need rather than to monetarist philosophy?