British Politics最新文献

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'.

In its 2019 manifesto, Boris Johnson's Conservative Party pledged a Constitution, Democracy and Rights Commission, 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.

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.

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 some 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.