Rethinking capital mobility, re‐regulating financial markets

The globalisation hypothesis has altered many of the common-sense ‘truths’ around which the social world is organised.* In particular, globalisation is thought to restrict the parameters of the politically and economically possible. Indeed, the notion of constrained choice is so pronounced that we are increasingly confronted with the image of globalisation’s ‘logic of no alternative’; an image which is predicated on the assumption of perfect capital mobility. Capital is considered to be sufficiently rational to take advantage of enhanced exit options from the national economy in circumstances in which its interests are served by moving off-shore. Moreover, global markets are also assumed to have exploited contemporary technological developments to such an extent that they now clear instantaneously; consequently, allowing capital to further its interests wherever in the world new profit opportunities arise. Thus, we are presented with the fundamental ‘reality’ of globalisation as currently narrated throughout much of the west: unless the market can be allowed to restore a competitive global equilibrium, capital will exit high-wage, high-cost western economies and re-locate in lower-wage, lower-cost, newly industrialising economies. Under the auspices of ever more hostile wage competition from the newly industrialising economies, globalisation is commonly presumed to act as a trigger for an ‘inevitable’ job displacement effect as capital deserts the advanced industrialised economies

A folk theory of the EEC: popular Euroscepticism in the early 1980s

The 2016 EU Referendum has renewed the focus of historians and social scientists on Britain’s historical relationship with Europe as they aim to develop a better understanding of ‘the road to Brexit’. The development of Euroscepticism in Britain has often been approached from an elite perspective, with a focus on the conflicting ideas and arguments between politicians, political parties, and the media. This article builds on existing studies by focusing on popular attitudes to Europe during the early 1980s. We analyse responses to a ‘special directive’ issued by the Mass Observation Project in the autumn of 1982 to mark the ten-year anniversary of Britain joining the European Economic Community (EEC). Reading this previously overlooked material for categories, storylines, and other cultural resources, we identify four key grievances MO panellists shared as common-sense evaluations of Britain’s membership of the EEC. We argue these grievances constituted a wider folk theory of Euroscepticism circulating in British society six years prior to Margaret Thatcher’s Bruges speech and subsequent debates about further integration in the early 1990s. In developing this argument, we contribute a better understanding of the content and origins of popular Euroscepticism in the 1980s

The commentariat and discourse failure: language and atrocity in Cool Britannia

Recent terrorist events in the UK, such as the security alerts at British airports in August 2006 and the London bombings of July 2005 gained extensive media and academic analysis. This study contends, however, that much of the commentary demonstrated a wide degree of failure among government agencies, academic and analytic experts and the wider media, about the nature of the threat and continues to distort comprehension of the extant danger. The principal failure, this argument maintains, was, and continues to be, one of an asymmetry of comprehension that mistakes the still relatively limited means of violent jihadist radicals with limited political ends. The misapprehension often stems from the language that surrounds the idea of 'terrorism', which increasingly restricts debate to an intellectually redundant search for the 'root causes' that give rise to the politics of complacency. In recent times this outlook has consistently underestimated the level of the threat to the security of the UK. This article argues that a more realistic appreciation of the current security condition requires abandoning the prevailing view that the domestic threat is best prosecuted as a criminal conspiracy. It demands instead a total strategy to deal with a totalizing threat. The empirical evidence demonstrates the existence of a physical threat, not merely the political fear of threat. The implementation of a coherent set of social policies for confronting the threat at home recognizes that securing state borders and maintaining internal stability are the first tasks of government. Fundamentally, this requires a return to an understanding of the Hobbesian conditions for sovereignty, which, despite the delusions of post-Cold War cosmopolitan multiculturalism, never went away