Crisis and Stability: The Global Financial Crisis, British Broadsheet Press and the Politics of Ideational Reversion

By analysing UK media narrations surrounding the global financial crisis, this thesis presents a critical engagement with existing constructivist institutionalist literature. Through the application of a ‘dynamic tracing’ methodology to British broadsheet newspaper discourse from 2007-10, the thesis reveals three significant, and interconnected, dynamics. Firstly, it highlights the existence of ‘ideational reversion’, whereby after a short period of flux through late-2008 and early-2009, prominent discourses by and large returned to the pre-crisis status quo ante. By analysing the pre-crisis, crisis, and post-crisis discourse holistically, a notably higher degree of overall ideational stability is found than the existing literature suggests would be the case. Secondly, it is demonstrated that ideational disjuncture within media commentary was effectively ‘siloed’ in the financial sector, meaning that the perception of crisis did not challenge broader conceptualisations of the neo-liberal economy. Thirdly, the impact of such reversion and siloing was to provide a greater social source of legitimacy, or strategic advantage, to orthodox austerity narratives than to their Keynesian alternative. On the back of these observations, conceptual extensions are put forward that involve developing a greater focus on the ‘stickiness’ of pre-existing discourse through crisis periods

UK Regions and European Structural and Investment Funds

In advance of the referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union (EU), this Brief considers the distribution of EU ‘structural and investment funds’ to the UK’s constituent regions and nations. The regional dimension of the UK/EU relationship has received relatively little attention in the public debate around the implications of ‘Brexit’ with much of the attention focusing on whether the UK as a whole will be ‘better off’ or ‘worse off’ as a result of voting to exit or remain within the EU. Further, whilst the UK’s financial contribution to the EU has been widely debated there has been considerably less attention on the funding that the UK receives from the EU, and how that funding is distributed. Analysis of the regional distribution of EU structural and investment funds suggests that the possible implications of Brexit would vary across the UK’s constituent regions and nations, which experience significantly different economic and social inequalities and have a high degree of variation in their economic performance. The Brief highlights a series of key questions relating to the future of European structural and investment funds that require examination in advance of the referendum, and that policymakers would need to swiftly address should the UK vote to leave the European Union on June 23rd