Stanley, L. orcid.org/0000-0003-3882-8682, Wamsley, D. and Ward, J. (2025) Money, territory, decarbonisation: the looming crisis of British politics. British Politics. ISSN 1746-918X
Abstract
From the 2008 crash to the cost-of-living, the UK has seemingly spent the past two decades lurching from one crisis to the next. While the field of British politics has made strong contributions in analysing these developments, this article shows the benefits of a different perspective. To do so, we draw on the under-acknowledged but vital scholarly tradition of British political economy, which provides tools to understand the underlying forces and contradictions that drive British political and economic development over the long term—thereby producing a different conception of crisis to that implied in the frames of reference of the British politics literature. Developing this political economy approach, our thesis is that British politics faces unique challenges compared to other Western liberal democracies due to the peculiarities of its long-term political and economic development. We support this argument by focussing on three central challenges that all states face but that are especially acute for the UK: fiscal capacity, territorial integrity, and decarbonisation. Analysing how these challenges are likely to overlap and compound one another, we conclude the article by sketching out future scenarios for renewed legitimation crises of the British state.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2025 The Author(s). Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
Keywords: | British politics; crisis; political economy; decarbonisation; fiscal politics; Scottish nationalism |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Politics and International Relations (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 21 Feb 2025 12:41 |
Last Modified: | 28 Mar 2025 16:17 |
Status: | Published online |
Publisher: | Palgrave Macmillan |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1057/s41293-025-00280-x |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:223213 |