From Brexit to COVID-19: The Johnson Government, Executive Centralisation and Authoritarian Populism

Many commentators have suggested that the first 18 months of the Johnson government were characterised by a propensity to centralise power. However, few accounts have situated the administration in the historical context of the British state or systematically examined these centralising tendencies. This article attempts to address these omissions. First, through a critical assessment of the literature on authoritarian neoliberalism, the concept of ‘executive centralisation’ is developed within the context of the British state. Second, the article applies this revised framework to the early stages of the Johnson government. While a dominant executive is a long-standing feature of the British political system, it is argued that Johnson has pursued a multifaceted centralisation strategy facilitated by the context of Brexit and COVID-19. In identifying the role of consent in this process, the article augments scholarship on ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ as a moment in neoliberal governance characterised by the ascendance of coercive governing strategies.

“Teaching the poor of the Irish nation”: The Endeavours of the Protestant “Sons of Erin” to Educate Their Catholic “Brethren” in the Age of Catholic Agitation, 1800–1850

In Ireland, the Protestant missionary impetus of the early 19th century, known as the 'Second Reformation', coincided with Daniel O’Connell’s movement for the emancipation of Catholics and the Repeal of the Union which concurrently met with resounding success. As the Irish nationalist movement was becoming more and more catholicised, The Irish Society for Promoting the Education of the Native Irish through the Medium of Their Own Language promoted access to the Bible in “the pure Gaelic language and the Irish character” for both the spiritual salvation of “the [poorer] sons of Erin” and “the political repose and moral amelioration of Ireland.” Even if the Second Reformation has often been considered as an attempt at anglicising the Irish through conversion, a reassessment of the reciprocal influences of Protestant missions and Irish nationalism is timely. Therefore, this paper, relying on a wide range of archival material, intends to examine how the discourse of this Protestant society disrupted the status quo of Irish and British identities. Was the Society’s redefinition of Irish identity, which combined a shared Irish culture with loyalty to the British state, perceived by O’Connell’s nationalist movement as a threat or an opportunity? This exploration of the relationship between Christianity and nationalism highlights the complex ties that can be found between several layered identities and disrupts the binaries of the vernacular being promoted by the champions of independence and of native languages being erased by the advocates of imperial rule.

Literature as Speculative Thought

This chapter spells out the conceptual stakes of the reformist literary mode by turning to British state theory’s ‘Hegelian moment’. Hegel’s state theory converges on an understanding of the state as an aspect of social life (Sittlichkeit), making it possible to think about the state’s institutional structures as a moment in the actualization of social life rather than as a Foucauldian assemblage of administrative means external to social life. Britain’s Hegelian moment makes visible a reformist idiom in which the state appears as an aspirational figure that makes it possible to imagine the transition from capitalist society (Hegel’s bürgerliche Gesellschaft) towards a more egalitarian socio-political order. This transformation is imagined through close engagement with existing social forms rather than through a complete revolutionary overhaul of existing social arrangements. The chapter ends by asking why Britain’s Hegelian moment ended around 1914 and what were its more immediate afterlives.

The “Pull Factor” Problematization in the Emergence of Everyday Bordering in the UK Welfare State

The “everyday bordering” concept has provided key insights into the effects of diverse bordering practices upon social life, placing the bordering of the welfare state among wider state interventions in an autochthonous politics of belonging. Sociological contributions have also introduced new explanations as to why states pursue such measures, positing that neoliberal states seek legitimacy through increasing activities to (re)affirm borders within this politics of belonging, compensating for a failure to govern the economy in the interests of citizens. To what extent is this visible in the state-led emergence of (everyday) borders around welfare in the United Kingdom, often cited as a key national case? This article draws from 20 elite interviews to contribute to genealogical accounts of the emergence of everyday bordering through identifying the developing “problematizations” connected to this kind of bordering activity, as the British state began to distinctly involve welfare-state actors in bordering policies in the 1990s and early 2000s. This evidence underlines how these policies were tied to a “pull factor” problematization of control failure, where the state needed to reduce various “pull factors” purportedly attracting unwanted migrants in order to control immigration per se, with little evidence that legitimacy issues tied to perceived declining economic governability informed these developments in this period. These findings can inform future genealogical analyses that trace the emergence of everyday bordering.

Conclusion

This chapter reiterates the key arguments and findings of the book. The British state pursued financial liberalization in the 1970s and 1980s in an attempt to reconcile the demands of domestic civil society with the suffocating, impersonal pressures of the global economic crisis on Britain’s balances with the rest of the world. Financialization was an accidental result, not an intended outcome. In addition, this chapter explores how the four liberalizations examined here impacted upon the trajectory of financialization in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Britain’s liberalization of its financial sector boosted global capital mobility, and thus created powerful pressures on other states to follow suit, contributing to a dynamic of competitive deregulation that spread around the world. Further, the arm’s-length, depoliticized design of the 1986 FSA generated an institutional path dependency, whereby future British systems of financial governance would take a similarly light-touch form. This meant that London would incubate a series of banking scandals in the 1990s, as well as being home to some of the riskiest financial practices exposed by the 2008 crisis. Finally, the growing financial flows unleashed by the liberalizations of the 1970s and 1980s were increasingly channelled into the housing market, resulting in Britain’s particular dynamic of housing-centric financialization.

Competition and Credit Control

This chapter explores the 1971 Competition and Credit Control financial liberalization, which saw the British state relinquish most of its direct controls over credit creation and instead rely on interest rates to govern lending. In the 1960s, Britain’s worsening trade performance had resulted in a series of currency crises, to which Harold Wilson’s government responded in 1967 by devaluing sterling. In aid of devaluation, the government enacted a series of contractionary measures. An important element of this disciplining strategy was the tightening of monetary policy through state-imposed lending ceilings. However, people proved resistant to this reduction in their living standards, and thus endeavoured to combat income losses by extending their bank borrowing. Further, due to falling profitability, companies faced a liquidity crisis that threatened to derail the export recovery. As such, the state authorities sought to use the lending ceilings to both restrict credit to persons and extend credit to companies. This hybrid disciplining/palliation strategy was extremely difficult to operate with the blunt monetary instruments at hand. In addition, the lending ceilings were becoming increasingly politicized. Consequently, the Treasury and Bank sought to discover a better system of monetary governance. It was the Bank that designed the uniquely arm’s-length CCC proposals. Yet these proposals were accepted by the Treasury and government in significant part because they appeared to offer a depoliticized mechanism through which the state could redistribute credit resources from persons to companies in aid of augmenting Britain’s world market competitiveness in a moment of intensifying crisis.

Framing Financialization and the State

In the age of financialization, it appears that financial elites dominate both the economy and politics. Indeed, much of the academic literature on the state’s role in propelling financialization argues that states liberated finance precisely due to the political power of finance capital and the influence of pro-finance, neoliberal ideas. This chapter, however, argues that during the 1970s and 1980s, when the most important financial liberalizations were passed, British policymakers were not directly dominated by an ascendant class of financiers. Rather, they found themselves indirectly dominated by the pressures of the global profitability crisis upon Britain’s economic balances with the rest of the world. This chapter theorizes this form of impersonal domination through an interpretation of Marx’s value theory. When the market-dependent agents of capitalist society interact through money-mediated commodity exchange, they unleash a dominating, competitive logic that sets them against one another in a race to raise labour productivity while pushing the economy into crises of falling profitability. Within this system, policymakers must simultaneously respond to the impersonal pressures of world market competition and maintain domestic legitimacy. In order to balance these contradictory imperatives, especially during crises, policymakers employ strategies of depoliticized discipline and palliation—the former seeking to impose competitive discipline on the domestic economy in a politically insulated manner, and the latter seeking to delay competitive market pressures so as to protect governing legitimacy. This chapter argues that the policies of financial liberalization pursued by the British state in this era can be understood through this lens.

‘An Eye for an Aye’: linguistic and political backlash and conformity in eighteenth-century Scots

This study examines the effect of political change on the use of written Scots during the eighteenth century. In particular, it compares a cross-section of texts from literate Scottish society, with works from certain politically-active authors, who identified strongly as pro- or anti-Union following the creation of the British state in 1707. The proportion of Scots to English lexemes in their writing is explored using conditional inference trees and random forests, in a small, purpose-built corpus. Use of Scots is shown to differ between the two groups, with specific extralinguistic factors encouraging or suppressing the presence of written Scots. Frequency of Scots is also found to be influenced by the political ideology of the politicised authors. These results are linked to the Scottish political scene during the eighteenth century, as well as general processes of change over time.

Historical memory and european regionalism: the scottish case

The region's past together with the historical memory of the people inhabiting it, undoubtedly carries lessons for the present and the future, both for the British state in particular, and for the rest of Europe as a whole. Studying the issues of historical memory helps to rethink the mechanisms of the formation of historical consciousness. It is also important when studying the role of various social strata in this process, which can include both professional historians and politicians, decision makers people on whom decision-making process depends to one degree or another. Among the set of functions that historical knowledge performs, the most significant one can be singled out an attempt to "reconcile" the present and the past of the people as a nation. In the light of the current European agenda, a change in ideas about the status of historical memory and a searching of approaches to understanding the issues raised by the regionalization processes require a new look at the process of interaction between these spheres of public life. This article examines the issues of Scottish historical memory in the context of regionalization processes in Europe: what in this case is the history of Scotland rather a common European tradition or a particular British case? Is it possible to look at the problem differently when both paths are not mutually exclusive?