During the Brexit referendum the Leave campaign claimed that the UK would be able to regain its sovereignty and ‘take back control’. Trade policy became a particular focus of the Conservative Government’s post-Brexit vision and underpinned the arguments in favour of leaving the customs union. This article evaluates the evolution of trade policymaking in the UK, from the Brexit referendum in 2016 until the Conservative defeat in the general election of 2024, and its consequences for democracy. It utilises two key insights from the framework of new constitutionalism to reveal the democratic deficiencies of the UK’s post-Brexit trade policy. In doing so, it argues that the governance of UK trade policymaking has failed to advance both parliamentary scrutiny and the scope for meaningful input from a range of stakeholders. In addition, the content of the new trade deals signed by the Conservative Government have further eroded democratic control, by undermining the prospects for a regulatory approach that can address the socio-economic and environmental challenges faced by the UK.
This article provides a critical appraisal of the Starmer government’s first two years in power and an overview of its policy agenda and political decision-making during this period. Our analysis is underpinned by the influential statecraft framework first set out by Jim Bulpitt. We make the following arguments. First, despite entering office with a landslide electoral victory, the new Labour government was ill-prepared for office, contributing to the absence of a clear political vision and effectively narrated policy agenda. Second, the absence of a clearly understood vision for the UK’s political economy has paved the way for ad hoc decision-making that has repeatedly undermined the Starmer government’s credibility.
The paper explores the intriguing, yet seriously under-researched issue of discursive shifts in the communication of the Liberal Democrats on Brexit and the United Kingdom’s (UK) relationship with the European Union (EU) since the 2016 in/out referendum. Through a critical discourse analysis of a large dataset of public pronouncements, the study investigates the party leaders’ evolving stance, from campaigning for a second referendum and revoking Article 50 to a more tempered position of acknowledging Brexit as a reality to pledging to rejoin the single market. Theoretically, the study builds on the concept of discursive shifts but extends their conceptualisation by foregrounding the phenomenon of temporal layering in political discourse. We argue that what we observe in the Liberal Democrats’ case is an accumulation of overlapping and at times contradictory articulations that remain discursively available. Yet, while such cumulative layering can be read as an attempt to maintain strategic responsiveness in a volatile and often hostile political environment, it also carries some risks. We highlight how it risks projecting an outward impression of clutter and ambiguity that might complicate the party’s ability to project a coherent message on the party’s stance towards the EU.
The Conservative Party governed the UK during 2010–2024; a period which included several flagship climate actions as well as rollbacks under austerity. To date, however, limited attention has been paid to how discourses and institutions co-evolve, and how narrative strategies shape the meaning and durability of legal commitments. This article examines the evolution of UK climate governance from 2010 to 2024 by introducing a new conceptual process of Discursive Institutional Dilution (DID). DID conceptualises institutional change as a cumulative process operating through shifts in political meaning rather than formal rule alteration The analysis identifies overlapping discursive configurations characterised by tensions between leadership, affordability, sovereignty, and pragmatism. From these patterns, four mechanisms of DID are derived inductively: fragmentation, rhetorical neglect, orphaning, and antagonistic reframing. The analysis situates these shifts within the crises of Brexit, COVID-19, and the Ukraine war, and examines the temporary ‘thickening’ of discourse during the Fridays for Future (FFF) and Extinction Rebellion (XR) movements. The findings show that climate institutions endure not through law alone but through meaning. Sustaining Net Zero therefore requires discursive renewal – embedding fairness, prosperity, and intergenerational justice at the core of policy narrative to resist populist reframing and ideological decay.
The aim of this article is to provide an overview of the Labour Party’s programmatic trajectory under Keir Starmer, a trajectory which helped set the parameters for the often-contentious policy choices in government. Though Starmer had fought the election to succeed Corbyn on a left-wing platform, this was soon abandoned. Policy evolution was mainly driven by strategic considerations, more specifically, by what came to be called ‘the Ming vase strategy’, defined in this article by two principles, opinion alignment and power accommodation. Together, these principles are conceptualised in the article as amounting to an ‘operating code’ which is then used to analyse and critically evaluate Starmer’s strategic choices in opposition and government. The application of this ‘operating code’ is seen as a major cause of the serious problems the new government experienced in its first year in office.
Populist discourses and politics, especially from the radical right, are becoming increasingly prominent in numerous national contexts across the world. This article examines the UK as a particularly relevant case for scholars of this wider trend, focusing on the 2023 Conservative Party Conference as a pivotal moment in the mainstreaming of radical right populist rhetoric. At this conference, key actors portrayed multiple groups – including trans people, migrants, and striking health workers – as threats to the nation, displacing blame for neoliberalism’s unequal distributive effects onto those already marginalised. Engaging queer, feminist, postcolonial, and other critical scholarship on radical right populism, this article offers an original framework for analysing the role of “common sense” in constructing the “common people”. Specifically, we develop and operationalise a queer typology of common-sense populist discourses as anti-elitism, moralism, economism, anti-collectivism, and futurism. In so doing, we shed new light on the gendered, racialised, sexualised, and classed logics at work in radical right populism, and illuminate the discursive mechanisms by which consent for neoliberal governance is secured through the targeting of the very groups most impacted by it.
The Starmer government’s constitutional reform agenda holds out the prospect of important changes to Britain’s political settlement, particularly for England and territorial governance. Therefore, this article addresses two key questions, namely how can we make sense of Starmer’s approach, and can we use constitutional reform to position Starmer within the Party’s traditions. First, this article sets out self-interest, Labour’s approaches to the constitution, the Westminster model and the British Political Tradition. From there, the paper outlines a history of Labour and the constitution, as well as New Labour’s constitutional reform agenda, thus setting the scene for the Starmer government. Here, the paper sets out how Labour’s approach under Starmer has developed, first in opposition and now in government, focusing on House of Lords reform, English devolution, expanding the electoral franchise, and intergovernmental forums. The final section writes in praise of Labour’s more limited approach. The conclusion stresses that Starmer is best understood as a cautious and conservative moderniser.
The current political moment in Britain is characterised by disaffection, affective polarisation, and populist mobilisation of these (dis)affections. How best to research these moody times? We argue that political studies could utilise Mass Observation (MO) more than it has done. An independent research organisation, MO has collected observations, diaries, and responses to ‘directives’ – sets of open-ended questions and tasks – from across the UK during two periods: 1937 to 1949, and 1981 to the present. These collections have been described as a ‘rare resource’ (Dalton 2020: 964) of ‘exceptional quality’ (Hay 2024: 482). We introduce MO, review existing uses of MO by scholars of British politics, locate MO in political studies’ methodological division of labour, and provide a guide for new users of the archive. We argue that MO provides distinctive access to public opinion, feeling, and behaviour in biographical context, historical context, and the context of everyday life.
This article examines Keir Starmer’s evolving approach to the European question, focusing on his policies towards the European Union (EU) and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Since becoming Labour leader in 2020, and particularly as prime minister, Starmer has adopted a pragmatic strategy designed to manage the tensions generated by Brexit. While ruling out rejoining, his government has pursued incremental sectoral cooperation with the EU. Simultaneously, Starmer has defended continued UK membership of the ECHR while signalling a desire to reform the way the treaty operates in practice. This must be understood in the context of domestic political pressures, notably the rise of Reform UK. Starmer’s strategy is designed to respond to the challenge from the right while at the same time resisting any further distance between the UK and Europe, minimising the de-Europeanisation dynamic that was widely expected following the UK’s departure from the EU. This cautious approach has echoes of Harold Wilson’s tactical management of the European question in the 1970s, an episode which is instructive for understanding the potential long-term consequences of Starmer's policies.
This paper introduces the concept of techno neo-statism to define and interpret Keir Starmer’s statecraft during Labour’s first year in government. Techno neo-statism seeks to harness innovations in artificial intelligence (AI) and digital technologies to strategically revive and finetune state capacity so that it can drive public sector and economic productivity while protecting the ‘national interest’ from perceived threats and insecurities. Three prevalent strands demonstrate our argument: The emphasis on an active state that guarantees a baseline level of security; the call for a streamlined state capable of delivering active government with fewer resources; and a belief that digital and AI governance can resolve the tension between these two objectives. Significantly, we argue that techno neo-statism constitutes an attempt to address aspects of the UK’s ‘crisis of governance’ through technical interventions aimed at restoring state capacity in the policymaking process. However, in the absence of corresponding institutional reforms to an increasingly incoherent system of governance, techno neo-statism is unlikely to improve the UK’s ailing public sector.
Recent research shows that right-wing parties across Europe increasingly eference sexual-liberal values alongside restrictive positions on immigration. This article examines when and why such appeals emerge in the UK by analysing homonativism: the strategic alignment of sexual-liberal discourse with nativist exclusion in party politics. Using amixed-method design, the study combines party positioning data from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey with original manifesto analysis of the Conservative Party, UKIP, and Reform UK across UK general elections from 2001 to 2024. Distinguishing between latent ideological positioning, activated issue salience, and explicit mobilisation allows the analysis to capture variation in how parties engage with sexuality and immigration over time. The findings show that despite high public acceptance of LGBTQ rights and sustained politicisation of immigration, explicit homonativist mobilisation has been rare in UK party politics. Only UKIP briefly fused sexualliberal and nativist appeals in the 2017 election. The Conservatives maintained liberal positioning on sexuality but avoided discursive linkage, while Reform UK prioritised immigration and sovereignty while largely excluding sexuality, instead politicising transgender rights as a separate issue. These patterns indicate that homonativism in the UK functions as a contingent and selective electoral strategy rather than a stable ideological orientation. The article contributes to debates on the populist radical right, strategic liberalism, and party competition by demonstrating the value of analysing party positioning and issue salience in tandem.
The 2024 UK General Election produced the most ethnically diverse Parliament in history, with approximately 14 per cent of MPs from minority backgrounds, closely reflecting the electorate. Yet support for the Labour Party among some ethnic minority communities, particularly South Asian Muslims, has begun to wane. Drawing on a longitudinal ethnographic study of interviews in Bradford across the 2015 and 2024 General Elections, this article examines why these shifts appear to be accelerating under Keir Starmer’s leadership and how perceptions of representation shape political behaviour. The findings show that descriptive and symbolic representation, namely, visible diversity without substantive advocacy, alone do not secure voter loyalty: voters remain aligned with political parties only when they perceive the party acts in their material and political interests. These patterns indicate an emerging ethnic dealignment, analogous to the class dealignment that transformed British politics in the late twentieth century. While Labour retains strong support among Black Britons and other minorities, disaffection among South Asian Muslims, shaped largely by the party’s stance on Gaza, exposes new vulnerabilities. Placing these developments within a broader framework of political dealignment, the article demonstrates how ethnic diversity is reshaping the social foundations of centre-left politics in Britain, with lessons for parties across Europe.
This article explores the dilemmas at the heart of the economic strategy of Keir Starmer’s government by tracking developments in British (centre-)left political economy since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. It first traces the emergence of a shared narrative of political economy circulating among the UK and transatlantic centre-left, as well as some further left and right, over the 2010s and into the early 2020s. Identifying the core diagnoses and prescriptions contained within this narrative, this article situates them in economic, ideological, and political developments since 2008. It then traces the fragmentation of this economic imaginary from 2022. In combination with an unhappy transition to office, this fragmentation has generated a deeply confused and internally contradictory economic strategy in the UK Labour government. This paper then explains this process by placing ideological and political developments in their material and external contexts. A worsening macroeconomic and geopolitical context actively decomposed the constituent parts of the narrative and challenged some of its assumptions; in turn, this revived submerged disagreements within the governing party. The paper consequently argues that while these tensions can be explained partly by ideological closure, they derive to a significant and probably greater extent from institutional and material factors, especially questions of statecraft and the UK’s misfiring growth regime in an increasingly gloomy global context. The paper ends, however, by cautioning against an overbearing determinism. It indicates the remaining arenas for political agency open to the government, should it prove able and willing to act.
This article examines the policy and ideological orientation of Keir Starmer’s Labour government following its landslide victory at the 2024 UK General Election. Through a comparative analysis with five recent centre-left governments: Norway, New Zealand, Germany, Spain and Australia, the article assesses whether Starmer’s Labour represents a new or distinctive form of Social Democracy. Using Manifesto Project data and thematic analysis of Labour’s 2024 Change manifesto data, this paper maps Starmer’s Labour positioning within the broader centre-left. In our analysis, Starmer’s Labour reflects a cautious, technocratic form of ‘labourism’, aligning most closely with the Australian and New Zealand Labour parties. While Starmer’s Labour is interventionist in some policy domains, it stops short of the more redistributive and expansive ambitions as seen in some of its sister centre-left parties. While there are emerging features of a ‘new era’ of social democracy, especially in climate and public ownership policies, these are moderated by economic orthodoxy and political caution. This reflects a contemporary centre-left characterised by different forms of ‘minimal social democracy’, shaped by pressures from long-standing neoliberal constraints.
The past decade has seen uncharacteristically high levels of political instability in Britain. There have been four elections and six Prime Ministers since 2015. In the June 2016 Brexit referendum, the triumph of the “exit” option was widely interpreted as a populist revolt against elites in London and Brussels that benefited the Conservative Party. Many commentators saw it as a political shock that triggered a realignment process in British party politics in which working class and older voters abandoned the Labour Party in favour of the Conservatives. In turn, these changes were related to a shifting geography of Conservative electoral support, with the party making inroads into the north, and in particular in the traditional “red wall” constituencies that have long supported Labour. The first two post-Brexit elections in 2017 and 2019 provide an opportunity for us to evaluate the ability of a new methodology to add insight into spatially differentiated unfolding realignment processes. In this article, we utilize recently-developed Multiscale Geographically Weighted Regression (MGWR) techniques to measure the extent to which the socio-economic and cultural bases of Conservative support was shifting in line with the expectations of existing literature claiming to document a political realignment triggered by the Brexit vote. Our MGWR analysis suggests that the impact on the level of Conservative support from older age voters, high agricultural employment, and the presence of EU migrants was strongly differentiated over English regions. Looking at evidence of several indicators drawn from the literature on the putative Conservative realignment in the 2017–2019 period, we show evidence of some consolidation of realignment processes in 2019, particularly in the Midlands and the North. The 2024 election saw the re-fragmentation of the UK electorate (especially with the rise of Farage’s Reform UK party absorbing some of the Conservative gains in the 2017-19 period) and it remains to be seen if the Conservatives can remobilize “Leave” voters in future elections. We are grateful to this journal’s reviewers for their careful reading and constructive commentary on our original submission.
The paper explores the national interest turn in the rhetoric associated with UK foreign aid policy under Conservative governments between 2016 and 2024. The ‘national interest’ has figured prominently in the literature on donor motivations for aid, which has shown how different interpretations of the concept may co-exist, and undermine each other through their impacts on aid allocation and effectiveness. The paper identifies three framings of the national interest put forward by Conservative governments: An ‘enlightened’ narrative relatively aligned with global poverty reduction; one focused on enhancing British leadership and influence by ‘taking back control’; and the final narrative emphasising trade, investments, and UK job creation. The three narratives represent policy progression between successive Conservative governments, who were constantly faced with the need to adapt their messaging on aid to changing political circumstances. However, this constant reframing of the national interest around foreign aid led to significant ambiguity. Furthermore, the latter two narratives and their implementation (such as the merger between the Foreign Office and DFID) carried a number of inconsistencies, partially undermining the national interest which they claimed to serve.
