The Domestic Origins of Depoliticisation in the Area of British Economic Policy

Abstract

This article seeks to build on Peter Burnham's analysis of New Labour's depoliticisation statecraft as set out in an earlier volume of this journal. While Burnham provides a convincing account of how this new governing strategy differed from earlier 'politicised' methods of governance, we know less about why such change took place. Burnham makes a start by suggesting that developments in the international financial system go some way to explaining this shift. The main argument of this article is that this account of change needs to be supplemented by a focus on domestic factors. It is asserted below that politicised strategies failed in part because state managers governed within a strategically selective context which penalised the deployment of more activist and discretionary policy instruments in industrial affairs. Instead, this context was more favourable to the depoliticisation techniques which have emerged in the 1980s and the 1990s.

Planning for a Future of Asset-based Welfare? New Labour, Financialized Economic Agency and the Housing Market

“…The more that the Treasury has been allowed to extend its reach, the more that the policy-making process as a whole takes on the appearance of a single web with the Treasury at its centre (e.g., Buller and Flinders, 2005). The outcome might well be more consistency across different policy outputs, but it is also likely that all policies will be inflected with a clear stamp of Treasury preference.…”

Depoliticising Monetary Policy: The Minimum Lending Rate Experiment in Britain in the 1970s

“…This enables a more nuanced analysis of the last 100 years or so of the British political economy to be produced -one that is even comfortable with periods of governing where there may be no obvious dominant form (for instance, Thatcherism). This approach also allows sufficient attention to be given to the tensions implicit within a dominant form and to explaining change via analysis of the playing out of internal contradictions between policy instruments and institutional context (Buller and Flinders 2005;Burnham 2006).…”

Depoliticisation: Principles, Tactics and Tools

“…It complements the authors' research on the inter-relationship between depoliticisation and context, agency and structure (Buller and Flinders, 2005) and the impact of depoliticisation strategies on established frameworks of representative (Buller and Flinders, 2006) by seeking to achieve a degree of definitional clarity and precision through the construction of a multi-level framework. This will allow scholars in a range of disciplines to distinguish between different types of depoliticisation tactics, account for the rise and fall of particular tactics across time and space, while also understanding the adoption of specific tactics and tools by politicians and the manner in which various forms of depoliticisation may interact and complement each other.…”