Dr James Silverwood

This chapter contextualises the environmental legacy of Margaret Thatcher. Her originality as the first British prime minister to seriously consider ecological concerns is acknowledged as is the perpetuation and expansion of green industrial policy during her period in office. These arguably positive environmental achievements are juxtaposed with the recognition that a considerably better-funded and more pervasive brown industrial policy was implemented during her period in office. In identifying the longevity and parameters of green industrial policy in Britain, which scholarship has only recently begun to ascertain in depth and detail, the chapter contributes to those literatures that are increasingly identifying industrial policy as a critical aspect of neoliberal economic statecraft in Britain.

The aim of this chapter is to reappraise three perspectives that exist in relation to the Heath premiership and economic management. First, the chapter considers whether the Heath premiership betrayed the liberal economic ideas implicit within the Selsdon agenda (agreed upon by the Conservatives when in opposition) via a number of high profile U-turns in economic policy once in office. This common assertion is challenged via analysis of Competition and Credit Control (CCC), which is argued to have made a significant contribution to the erosion of the Keynesian consensus vis-à-vis economic management. Second, the chapter examines the Heath governments supposedly poor record in tacking inflation. comparing it to that of the Thatcher era. Third, the chapter scrutinises the macroeconomic objectives of the Heath administration contextualising its disappointing economic performance.

The aim of this chapter is to reappraise three perspectives that exist in relation to the Heath premiership and economic management. First, the chapter considers whether the Heath premiership betrayed the liberal economic ideas implicit within the Selsdon agenda (agreed upon by the Conservatives when in opposition) via a number of high profile U-turns in economic policy once in office. This common assertion is challenged via analysis of Competition and Credit Control (CCC), which is argued to have made a significant contribution to the erosion of the Keynesian consensus vis-à-vis economic management. Second, the chapter examines the Heath governments supposedly poor record in tacking inflation. comparing it to that of the Thatcher era. Third, the chapter scrutinises the macroeconomic objectives of the Heath administration contextualising its disappointing economic performance.

Beginning in the seventeenth century, UK governments have sought to ‘pick winners’ , making them one of the pioneers of industrial strategy. Unlike most other countries, whose industrial strategies tended to promote civilian manufacturing, UK industrial strategy has focused predominately on financial services and defence manufacturing. Broadly speaking the UK’s industrial strategy has dovetailed with three periods of statecraft concerned with the rise and fall of the British empire. This chapter briefly elucidates the dominant forms of industrial strategy in each era.

Ghana has been lauded by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as a model nation in SubSaharan Africa for its achievements in economic development and transition to democracy. However, the sustainability of Ghanaian economic development in recent years has begun to be suspected. In this chapter, we delve into the international political economy literature to recover a critical approach that offers a fresh perspective when considering questions of sustainability and emerging markets in the contemporary era. In particular, we apply dependent development concept, generated by Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, to deepen our understanding of how Ghana has followed an unsustainable developmental trajectory since the debt crisis of the 1980s, one that has maintained its financial dependency on multilateral and bilateral donors and led the country to the verge of another debt crisis four decades later.

Since becoming Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak has been variously described as pursuing a ‘furtive’, ‘surreptitious’ and ‘apologetic’ industrial strategy. Terms such as industrial policy and industrial strategy have been expunged from official speeches and policy documents, yet industrial intervention remains widespread. In adopting this approach, the article argues that Sunak has returned the UK to an industrial policy consensus established under Thatcherism. This consensus places in the foreground pro‐market rhetoric and policies suggesting that industrial strategy should be limited to the correction of market failure, while in the background the state actively intervenes to shape the structure of the economy by ‘picking winners’. In following this approach, Sunak has a legitimate claim to be the heir to Thatcher's legacy, although not in the manner that either its celebrants or critics believe.

Upon becoming Prime Minister, Theresa May installed industrial strategy as one of the principal planks of her economic policy. May's embrace of industrial strategy, with its tacit acceptance of a positive role for the state in steering and coordinating economic activity, initially appears to be a decisive break with an era dating back to Margaret Thatcher, in which government intervention was regarded as heresy. Whilst there are doubtless novel features, this article argues that continuity is the overriding theme of May's industrial strategy. First, despite the reluctance to confess it, like every UK government over the past forty years, May is proposing to intervene selectively to ‘pick winners’. Moreover, the strategy envisages extending assistance to industries which have been in receipt of substantial government resources since the 1970s. Likewise, the backing anticipated for industries identified in May's strategy is dwarfed by that given to those which are not, most notably the financial services sector. Far from radically rebalancing the structure of the UK economy, May's strategy seems destined to entrench the deindustrialisation with which its governments have grappled for almost a century.

Selective industrial policy in the United Kingdom is conventionally believed to have vanished prior to the global financial crisis. This article, in contrast, argues that industrial policy remained an intrinsic, if seldom acknowledged, element of neoliberal statecraft. The basis of this is a subterfuge, conceptualised here as a ‘dual industrial policy’, which we explore via an empirical focus on the Thatcher governments. Throughout this time, actions explicitly endorsed by governments as industrial policy generally corresponded with neoliberalism’s hostility to intervention. These conveniently distracted attention from a second set of policies which, although never codified by government as industrial policy, were intended to affect the allocation of resources between economic activity. Analysis of official government publications and expenditure reveals that industrial policy expenditure under Thatcher was far higher than customarily reported. The United Kingdom’s approach has important implications for debates about neoliberal resilience, especially neoliberalism’s capacity to conscript apparently contradictory ideas.

Britain is rarely considered an exemplar of ‘state capitalism’. In contrast, we argue that Britain should be treated as the prototype project of state capitalism in the world economic system, the primary contribution of our paper been to outline the parameters of state capitalism in Britain across two historical periods. Turning the conceptual lens of state capitalism towards Britain raises some challenging issues for the wider literature. Recent scholarship has started to consider greater diversity in regimes of state capitalism and moved beyond the typical nation-state geographical imaginary of state capitalism. Similarly, our paper seeks to introduce a new spatiality to state capitalism with deeper sensitivity to multi-scalar relations. State capitalism in Britain has rarely been bound to the geographical limitations of the nation-state; instead, it has been a transnational project, centred variably on empire, Europe, and the global market – with industrial policy tailored to enable the British economy to exploit and/or service these various spaces by ‘making markets’. We emphasize the often-financialized nature of this industrial policy intervention arguing it is constitutive of a ‘financial state capitalism’.

This article focuses on the future of UK climate action in light of thedecision to withdraw from the EU. The UK's decision to leave the EU sentshockwaves through the UK and the EU political establishments and policy communities. Uncertainty marks the future of policy areas in which the UK previously demonstrated leadership. One area of ​​particular importance is that of UK climate action. In 2006, a decade ago to the referendum in which 52% of voters chose to leave the EU, the UK began a period of intense and ambitious climate policy development and adoption. This period of ambition drove both the UK and the EU into a position of global climate leadership.Brexit has the potential for significant impact on the UK's climate policy. However, political debates about the UK's post-Brexit future has largely been devoid of references to climate change. Drawing on the agenda-setting literature, this article deploys the multiple streams model to analyze the problems, politics and policies of Brexit-era UK climate action. This is an innovative utilization of the multiple streams model, which is primarily used to explore policy change retrospectively. The application allows for the addressment of key issues – whether Brexit signals a definitive break in UK climate action, whether there is still support for climate action in Brexit Britain , and the future institutional capacity for climate policy. It is concluded that the UK is sleep-walking into diminished climate actorness after it leaves the EU.

Following work on the green state, the environmental state has become a prominent analytical concept in recent decades commonly applied to understand the expanded role the state has taken in decarbonizing the national economy. This article demonstrates that there is yet further empirical value to be gleaned from this subject acknowledging that the environmental state’s recently more expanded role in securing the green transition is not without historical precedent. Specifically, we propose an additional function for the environmental state of ‘market creation’ – accepting the process by which environmental states operate ex post facto ownership positions in already-existing energy markets for fossil fuel commodities – but also identifying it can use its power and agency in an ex ante fashion to create entirely new markets for renewable energy. In historicizing the environmental state, we show that whilst ex ante actions to create markets for renewable energy are not necessarily new, it has yet to be identified conceptually, and through a case study of the United Kingdom (UK) and the creation of a new national market for renewable energy we seek to demonstrate the conceptual value of a proposed new function of market creation for the environmental state. Beginning in the 1989 Electricity Act, market creation by the UK environmental state has proceeded through various reforms such as the introduction of Renewable Obligation Certificates (RoC) in 2002 to Contracts for Difference (CfD) in 2013, continuing in efforts in the 2020s to create markets this time for low carbon hydrogen.

The English Premier League (EPL) has drawn the attention of scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds in recent years, yet its underlying economic model and the politics underpinning it remain underexplored within the literature. To address this gap, we situate the EPL within Minsky’s Financial Instability Hypothesis (FIH) to examine the unstable financial foundations upon which the sporting enterprise is built. As such, we contend that the EPL can be understood as a reflection of the broader pathology of British politics since the 1980s. By placing the EPL within the Minsky cycle, we demonstrate how the actors that make up the league skirt the boundaries of hedge, speculative and Ponzi financiers, as the over-leveraging of clubs becomes ever more contingent upon debt-based instruments and loss-leading broadcasters to preserve the league’s economic status. Contrary to the tendency to abstract the role of fans from the economics of football, we conclude that what prevents the league from reaching its own collapse in asset values—known as a Minsky moment—is them providing the ‘effective demand’ for football.

James Callaghan's speech at Ruskin College, Oxford in October 1976 is widely considered a pivotal moment in modern English educational policy. Whilst it is not our intention to challenge this fundamental point, the paper will critically interrogate some long-held assumptions about the motivation that led Callaghan to deliver his speech at Ruskin College. Specifically, the paper will argue that the Ruskin Speech, which spawned a subsequent great debate on education, was motivated by a desire to protect and support comprehensive education, rather than generate more fundamental and radical educational reform away from those principles. Where successive governments have referred back to the ideals espoused by the speech as justification for subsequent educational transformation away from comprehensive ideals, this has only served to imbue the Ruskin Speech and Great Debate with motivations that were not shared at the time by Callaghan and his Labour government.