Reimagining Europe As a Space of Competition: Three Models of British Political Economy in the Post-Crisis EU

For some three decades starting in the 1950s, party political and public debate was organized around more or less distinct solution sets to a variety of diagnoses of UK decline. One of the striking features of British politics since the 1980s has been the depoliticization of this debate, at least within party politics. Typically, this is understood in terms of the triumph of a broadly Thatcherite diagnosis/prognosis that has narrowed severely the range of macroeconomic policy choice in British politics. This narrowing of the range of what is deemed to be technically and normatively possible is evidenced by the convergence in macroeconomic positions of the main parties, the cross-party commitment to austerity politics and an apparent incapacity to think beyond the revival of the ‘privatized Keynesian’ pathologies of the Anglo-American growth model. This paper explores an additional and, it is argued, crucial dimension of the party political stasis on the UK’s economic future. One aspect of the old decline debate, that remains unresolved, is the question of the spatial coordinates of the UK economy and in particular the matter of how and whether ‘Europe’ should be the UK’s primary ‘space of competition’. By examining current three party political strategies for post-crisis growth – Conservative, Labour and UKIP – the paper shows (a) how the spatial question is both depoliticized and de-Europeanized and (b) how either the outright rejection of or the failure to imaginatively narrate Europe as the UK’s space of competition circumscribes the range of relevant policy choice.