The environmental impacts of monetary policy received academic attention after the 2008 financial crisis and the 'market neutral' quantitative easing policies that followed. This article examines the Bank of England's Corporate Covid Financing Facility (CCFF) and the Asset Purchasing Facility (APF) between June 2020 and June 2021 to assess whether the Bank's response to the COVID-19 pandemic was aligned with the transition to sustainability. The data indicates that the Bank of England's monetary allocation schemes again served as a panacea for businesses with ecologically intensive business models and a Treasury committed to restoring the pre-existing growth model. Indeed, the Bank's QE schemes now represents an element of the crisis management governance that repeatedly 'locks in' the ecologically-calamitous economic trajectory at potential critical junctures. The Bank's shielding of its technocratic and depoliticised status has thus far inhibited any leadership role in tackling the climate crisis, despite its growing power as an actor of economic governance at times of crisis and purported enthusiasm to 'build back better'.

This article outlines the Conservative Party's approach to climate change from 2015 to 2022; focusing on its governing policy record and the wider political considerations that shaped it. During this time, the Conservatives' mixed performance reflected competing political incentives for its leaders and internal party division on the issue. A detailed exploration of Conservative climate policies allows for two broader contributions. European centre-right parties often face common strategic challenges, such as competition from the radical right, but the UK Conservative Party case study shows that responding to these challenges does not necessarily demand the abandonment of climate commitments. We also find evidence that in this period climate change embodied characteristics of both a positional and a valence issues.

The Scottish National Party (SNP) has emerged as one of the most successful national-regional parties in Europe. Yet the SNP was a fringe group for most of its history, with limited organization and electoral viability. What explains its ascent? Drawing on archival research and interviews with former party officials, this article argues that key developments that positioned the party for its current success took place in the 1970s, decades before its electoral climb. It was during this time the party established its organizational structure, social democratic ideology, and centre-left policy orientation, but without establishing the links to collateral organizations in Scottish society that had been crucial for winning elections. The article argues that it was, paradoxically, the absence of such linkages that served to accelerate the party's rise in the 2000s, as secularization and deindustrialization weakened the socio-economic foundations of the Scottish Conservative Party, with its close ties to the Church of Scotland, and, more significantly, of the Labour Party, which saw its trade union base deteriorate. Under these conditions, the SNP was uniquely positioned to capture unaligned voters, recruit party leaders, and take advantage of the new constitutional environment created by the establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999.

This paper examines three aspects of Brexit with regards to the NHS. First, we consider the influence of views regarding one of the most contentious issues in the referendum campaign: 's claim that the 'savings' from EU membership could alternatively be used to provide additional funding for the NHS. We find that views about NHS underfunding had a relatively small, but statistically significant, effect on leave voting even after controlling for a range of socio-demographic and economic variables. However, the magnitude of this effect is reduced and becomes insignificant when health-related and cultural controls are added. Second, we examine how NHS workers voted relative to others in employment, and find that a relatively high proportion was actually leave voters. Finally, we analyse whether individuals thought that Brexit would have a positive or negative impact on the NHS, as well as the reason or reasons for their view. We find that supporters of the Conservative party were by far the most likely to think that Brexit would be good for the NHS.

Between 2016 and 2021, in response to calls for a second Scottish independence referendum, two British Prime Ministers-Theresa May and Boris Johnson-adopted a holding position, at the core of which was the "now-is-not-the-time" argumentative scheme. As a particular expression of strategic ambiguity, this delay discourse was intended to fulfil a specific political function: to postpone the second plebiscite . As such, it marked a stark difference to the 2014 Scottish referendum campaign and provided the anti-independence camp with a new rhetorical resource. Having adopted the general orientation of the Discourse-Historical Approach to discourse analysis, and working with a dataset of May's and Johnson's public utterances on the second Scottish referendum, this article investigates how exactly this discourse of referendum delay was constructed in prime ministerial rhetoric. It concludes that some differences notwithstanding, the two PMs managed to create a largely consistent argumentative scheme.

Metro mayors heading a combined authority represent the most recent innovation in English devolution. City-region devolution has been a key way in which successive Conservative governments have sought to boost local economic growth against a background of local authority austerity, and now form a part of the Johnson government's 'levelling up' agenda. However, the perspective of voters is often overlooked in these debates. City-region devolution is a top-down innovation, with a focus on city-region economics rather than democratic renewal or engagement, and there is so far very little academic literature on identifying the drivers of public support for mayoral combined authorities. This study draws on survey responses of voters in the Liverpool City Region and explores a number of potential drivers of support for the Liverpool City Region combined authority, including party support, English, British and European identity, left-right and other value positions, and the role of place in driving support. It finds that support for devolution to the Liverpool City Region is driven by whether one lives in the centre or periphery of the city region, support for the Labour Party, left-wing, socially liberal and European identities, as well as being female and older. This paper also lays the groundwork for further research into drivers of public support for city-region devolution in England.

Scotland is a leading example of the international institutional turn in feminism since the late twentieth century. Feminist activists played a leading role in shaping a new Scottish Parliament in the 1980s and 1990s, which has influenced the politics of devolution since 1999. This article appraises this experience using a combination of feminist texts drawn from across the time period as well as autobiographies and biographies of prominent Scottish female politicians. The findings demonstrate that Scottish feminine political leadership has been strongly moulded by a rejection of Westminster's archaic and conflictual politics, which are understood to be masculine. Feminists' experiences of organising in the Women's Liberation Movement pointed to the importance of institution building and pragmatically working towards shared goals across traditional divisions. Scottish feminists' emphasis on consensus decision making and achieving objectives across party lines, especially on subjects gender-coded as women's issues, has moulded a centre-left framing for Scottish women's leadership that rejects both conservatism and left-wing radicalism. The achievement of aspirations surrounding increased women's representation and leadership has perhaps come at the cost of the larger earlier ambitions for a more inclusive parliament accountable to the Women's Liberation Movement and working-class communities. These findings suggest that there are inherent limitations to institution building feminism based on elite networks.

This paper explores the growing divide between Scotland and England, a schism that was beginning to take form with Scottish devolution and which has grown exponentially since the Independence Referendum of 2014. The central argument presented in the paper is that renewed impetus for national distinction and self-determination in Scotland is best understood as one facet of a much wider popular disenchantment and growing restiveness with the trajectory of contemporary UK politics, culture and society that has found an outlet via a resurgent nationalist discourse and institutional framework. Analysis here is approached via the application of an original biosocial theory with the aim of presenting further insights into the underlying processes driving contemporary political instability. Moreover, it is argued that this scenario can be understood, and may shed light upon, the wider rise in nationalist and populist sentiment that is contributing to increasing political turbulence across Europe and beyond.

Popular dissatisfaction with representative democracy has encouraged governments and legislatures worldwide to experiment with democratic innovations. However, despite calls for a 'systemic' approach to the study of democratic engagement and participation, empirical knowledge is limited about the diffusion of democratic innovations within civil society, and, in particular, about the connective mechanisms that bring the 'voice' of citizens to the 'ears' of political elites. This article responds to this gap, presenting original empirical research examining the UK House of Commons' e-petitions system. This research maps public engagement with parliamentary e-petitions across a range of expressive spaces, and highlights the facilitative role of non-institutional intermediaries. However, it also underlines the predominant role of institutional actors in structuring public participation, and shows that effective transmission between the informal public and formal political spheres remains contingent on both 'designed-in powers' of institutional coupling and 'developed practices' of public engagement. Through this analysis, the article makes an important contribution to debates concerning democratic innovations, political participation, and institutional design.

This exploration of UK fiscal rules and the establishment of an independent UK fiscal watchdog focuses on the practical enactment of rules-based fiscal policy to analyse the politics of technocratic economic governance. Analysing UK macroeconomic policy rules and their operation unearths numerous dimensions of the politics of technocratic fiscal policy-making. Firstly, policy rules are marshalled for partisan purposes. Secondly, a politics of economic ideas surrounds the invention, revision and interpretation of fiscal rules. Thirdly, technocratic economic governance entails a 'politics of method', selecting methodological approaches necessarily built on particular political economic assumptions. Finally, a 'politics of numbers' sees politicians cooking the books to present their economic record favourably against fiscal yardsticks. Successive governments have altered UK fiscal rules, informed by different political economic principles. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) sees itself as a technocratic and apolitical institution, yet its operational work entails contrasting accounts of the economy and policy. The scale of discretion and judgement inherent in operating fiscal rules is under-appreciated. This article finds technocratic economic governance to be a much more social and political process than many advocates of economic rules-based policy acknowledge. It engenders new forms of distinctive fiscal politics within elite statecraft and expert technocracy.

This article considers the selection of Keir Starmer as the new Leader of the Labour Party within the context of the Stark model for explaining leadership election outcomes. The article seeks to achieve three objectives. First, to provide an overview of the nomination stages and the candidates who contested the Labour Party leadership election. Second, to provide an analysis of the underlying academic assumptions of the Stark model on leadership selection and to assess its value as an explanatory model. Third, to use opinion-polling evidence to consider the selection of Starmer in relation to the criteria of the Stark model-i.e. that party leadership (s)electorates are influenced by the following hierarchy of strategic goals: acceptability or select the candidate most likely to unify the party; electability or select the candidate most likely to expand the vote base of the party; and competence or select the candidate most likely to be able to implement their policy objectives.

Entrenched inequalities in political participation have made the questions of who participates and when, why, or how some of the most frequently asked and researched in political science. Building on existing comparative research, this article focuses on civic education in English secondary schools and, in particular, the ability of related interventions to close participation gaps normally seen by sex, ethnicity and socio-economic status. Analysing original survey data collected from more than 350 students in 17 maintained secondary schools located in six regions of England, this article evaluates the impact of four types of civic education (curricula lessons; open classroom climate; participatory activities; and political contact) on three participatory outcomes (expressive political behaviours; voting intentions; and anticipated high-intensity participation). Descriptive and inferential analyses suggest (a) cumulative quantities of civic education are positively associated with youth political participation; (b) open classroom climate may close known inequalities in young people's expressive and electoral participation whilst political contact with politicians and political institutions may widen those inequalities; and (c) civic education may currently accelerate inequalities in young people's political ambition. These findings raise important and immediate challenges for policy-makers who are concerned with improving young people's civic engagement in England and elsewhere.

Brexit has caused a chasmic divide in the UK. Voters and Parliament are divided, as are the UK's major political parties. Such divisions may not be so surprising, however, given that Brexit crosses traditional party lines. Preferences to leave or remain do not fit neatly onto the traditional Left/Right dimension. Instead, the idea that European integration constitutes a new dimension in party competition has been gaining ground. This article creates a typology of Brexit 'clusters' through a discourse analysis of Conservative and Labour MPs, building an intricate picture of the archetypal positions of parliamentarians during the cacophonous Brexit period. Six clusters of MPs are found, crossing party lines and indicating that a Europe-related dimension is taking hold in British politics. Proposals for future research using the typology are also put forward.

This paper highlights the findings from qualitative research into the electoral decision-making processes of working-class Conservative voters from a constituency in northern England. Through focussing specifically upon their primary concerns during the 2019 election, the piece expands upon existing quantitative research. Survey studies have highlighted leadership concerns and Brexit as the primary factors that have driven voters away from Labour and towards the Conservative Party. It is argued here that leadership, Brexit, and economic management were closely intertwined, with party leaders at the centre of broader thinking for these participants. Perceptions of the party leaders were foremost in these deliberations and this has clearly impacted upon the interviewees' thinking on a range of political matters. Additionally, the interviews asked what might influence the participants' future electoral choices. Here, the data suggest a sense of limited, qualified attachment to the Conservative Party and a desire to see the Labour Party move towards what the respondents perceive as a centrist ideological position. The final section considers what these findings may mean for the major parties in future electoral contests. It is suggested that the presidential focus has worked for Johnson so far due to his abilities as a communicator, but the government will have a difficult hill to climb in this parliament if they are to retain the loyalty of these voters in future.

All four UK and devolved governments performed a 'U-turn' on their COVID-19 school exams replacement policies. After cancelling exams, they sought teacher estimates on their grades, but supported an algorithm to standardise the results. When the results produced a public outcry over unfair consequences, they initially defended their decision but reverted quickly to teacher assessment. We explain these developments by comparing two 'windows of opportunity' overseen by four separate governments, in which the definition of the problem, feasibility of each solution, and motive of policymakers to select one over the other lurched dramatically within a week of the exams results. These experiences highlight the confluence of events and choices and the timing and order of choice. A policy solution that had been rejected during the first window, and would have been criticised heavily if chosen first, became a lifeline during the second. As such, while it is important to understand , we focus on .

This article explores the importance of constructions of temporality within the UK government's discourse on the COVID-19 coronavirus crisis across the first six months of 2020. Drawing on over 120 official texts, it traces the emergence of discontinuous, linear, and cyclical conceptions of time in representations of the virus' pasts, presents, and futures. Three arguments are made. First, constructions of temporality were fundamental to the social, political, and historical positioning of the virus. Second, these constructions were constitutively important in producing, explaining, justifying and celebrating the UK government's response to the virus. And, third, tensions and inconsistencies between these constructions of temporality highlight the contingent, and constructed, character of official discourse, pulling into question the inevitability of the UK's response and opening opportunity for critical intervention.

The article seeks to assess to what extent the Trump presidency damaged the Anglo-American special relationship. By drawing on a theoretical framework that is broader than much of the existing literature, this article argues that the Trump presidency inflicted largely short-term damage on the special relationship. Though common interests, common sentiments and mutual utility between the US and the UK were weakened in the Trump era, the institutionalized underpinnings of the special relationship were sufficiently robust to withstand the corrosive effects of the 'Trump doctrine'. While President Biden cannot undo the negative impact of Brexit on the UK's utility to the US, the early period of his presidency has witnessed the special relationship's rapid recovery from most of the damage inflicted by the Trump presidency.

In its 2019 manifesto, Boris Johnson's Conservative Party pledged a , to consider far-reaching constitutional change. This appeared to signal a radical departure from UK precedent in approaching constitutional reform. In this paper, we examine the Johnson government's initial proposals and subsequent actions, placing them in comparative context and contrasting them with UK precedent. We show that the government's explicit pledge to appoint a single Commission to develop the reforms along with its emphasis on restoring public trust in politics through the constitutional reform process, reflected several internationally recognized principles and models for constitutional reform. In practice, however, the government abandoned these potentially radical procedural ambitions, and instead appointed several issue-specific elite-led reviews. We argue that the government's procedural approach has so far closely followed recent UK precedent, and that the Commission turned out to be an opportunity not taken rather than the radical departure that initially seemed possible.

In 2021, the UK and devolved governments tried to avoid the school exams fiasco of 2020. Their immediate marker of success was to prevent a similar U-turn on their COVID-19 school exams replacement policies. They still cancelled the traditional exam format, and sought teacher assessments to determine their grades, but this time without using an algorithm to standardise the results. The outcomes produced concerns about inequity, since the unequal exam results are similar to those experienced in 2020. However, we did not witness the same sense of acute political crisis. We explain these developments by explaining this year's 'windows of opportunity' overseen by four separate governments, in which the definition of the problem, feasibility of each solution, and motive of policymakers to select one, connects strongly to the previous U-turn. A policy solution that had been rejected during the first window became a lifeline during the second and a likely choice during the third. This action solved an immediate crisis despite exacerbating the problem that ministers had previously sought to avoid ('grade inflation'). It produced another year of stark education inequity, but also ensured that inequity went from part of an acute political crisis to its usual status as a chronic low-attention policy problem.

Universal Basic Income (UBI) is often presented as desirable in theory, but unsaleable electorally. Policymakers fear intuitive, 'values'-based opposition from socially conservative voters, whom the policy would benefit materially, but who might regard it as 'giving others something for nothing'. We provide evidence from 'red wall' constituencies in Wales and the Midlands and North of England that indicates this presumption of voters is wrong. In Study 1, we find high levels of support for the policy, with different narrative framings more effective for different groups based on their material interests. In Study 2, we used a novel 'adversarial collaboration' method to show that simple narratives can strongly increase support for UBI even among respondents who initially see themselves as fundamentally opposed. The generated narratives stressed positive, material consequences of introducing UBI, rather than conformity with abstract values. This indicates that policymakers should exercise caution over 'values'-based explanations for preferences.

Although comparatively rare, political resignations are essential for the health of democracy and political institutions. Protagonists risk their political careers when resigning but can hold governments to account and make real the Nolan principles of public life. In July 2022, an unprecedented 62 resignations ended Boris Johnson's time as British prime minister to be replaced first by Liz Truss and then, 44 days later, by Rishi Sunak, the second minister to resign. An inductive, qualitative, content analysis of the resignation letters elucidates the reasons for the resignations and highlights the ethical dilemmas that confronted would be resignees. Events lessened the effectiveness of government, triggered fears for the electoral prospects of the Conservative Party and separately challenged individuals' personal integrity. Considerations that prevented resignees acting earlier-promises that things would change, competing loyalties, fear of reprisal, love of job, attachment to status and allegiance to ideological faction-may partially explain why much of government remained in post in July.