ABSTRACT
Brexit has reopened and repoliticised the debate about future growth models for the UK economy. This contribution argues that this debate is built around historically specific path dependencies that reflect the particular character of public debate about British political economy, while also suggesting that the debate around Brexit takes place at a very distinctive moment in the history of democratic capitalism in Europe. This combination gives the renewed politicisation a specific and perhaps perverse character. The paper considers how we should approach debates about growth models, paying particular attention to the importance of the politics of support. It suggests that recent debate about growth models has been largely subsumed within the politics of Brexit, which has politicised that debate, albeit through the emergent political economy frames that Brexit has provoked. The paper explores the ways in which the demise of three key props of European democratic capitalism – a sustained period of economic growth, a governing philosophy that subordinated the market to wider social purposes and strong political parties – play out in the context of Brexit and the search for a new politics of support.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributor
Ben Rosamond is Professor of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen and co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of the Politics of Brexit (Routledge, 2018).
ORCID
Ben Rosamond http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1487-7703
Notes
1 The obvious exception in terms of mainstream party politics was Labour in the run-up to the 1983 General Election, when the party’s official policy was to withdraw from the European Communities – a position that reflected its broader commitment to a nation-state socialist version of the enterprise state (see below).