Inequality and instability in the British State

The ruling party does not change very often in the UK. Labour’s election victory this year is only the fourth occasion in half a century. Along with the deep historical roots of the UK’s political institutions and their archaic aesthetics, the infrequency of changes of government creates the impression of long-term stability. Yet recent decades have seen recurring invocations of ‘crisis’ take hold in British politics. The last decade in particular has been one in which the institutional framework and the very roots of the British Political Tradition itself have been contested.

The UK Union has been fundamentally challenged, with the Scottish Referendum, political instability in Northern Ireland following the collapse of devolved institutions, and rising English nationalism. The UK has left the European Union through a process that reignited questions about Britain’s place in the world, as well as testing the limits of Parliamentary procedure and creating new structural fissures in the electorate. Trust in politicians has plummeted to new lows with the emergence of virulent strains of populism and anti-politics. Voting behaviour is increasingly volatile, both through the decline of traditional party loyalties and more sizable swings in the overall electorate. And politicians themselves have shown an alarming willingness to subvert constitutional norms and international law in the name of short-term imperatives, notably to ‘get Brexit done’.

In a new Special Issue in the journal Parliamentary Affairs, we argue that the rise of political instability relates to the failure of British politicians – and of the British political tradition as a whole – to respond convincingly to the rise of structural inequality in our society and politics in recent decades.

It is widely recognised that economic inequality in the UK is higher than most developed economies and has risen sharply over the last 40 years. There is an increasing attitudinal gap between age cohorts, with age now among the key determinants of voting behaviour. Austerity in the 2010s tipped the scales of generational advantage towards older voters, cutting spending and investment in public goods that benefited younger generations.

Regional inequality has grown, leaving the UK among the most spatially unequal of the OECD countries. The ongoing post-Brexit political realignment is closely linked to the disadvantage experienced by particular places in the wake of British deindustrialisation. The post-industrial economic context has given rise to so-called ‘left behind’ places, whose disadvantage has been compounded by growing economic inequality and an increasingly threadbare and punitive welfare state.

At the same time, movements to tackle social inequality, such as Black Lives Matter and fourth wave feminism, have foregrounded a set of debates that call into question some of the most fundamental norms, assumptions, and institutions in society. The backlash against such movements has led to a newly dominant political cleavage around the existence, causes, and solutions to structural inequality. Political discourse has increasingly incorporated debates about the depth of UK social inequality, the degree to which inequalities are systemic, and the extent to which institutions, culture, and society as a whole need to change in response.

The change of government in 2024 is an important moment to take stock of the recent trajectory of British politics, and to consider the interplay between instability and inequality. The papers in a new special issue of Parliamentary Affairs offer a range of perspectives on such trends and the relationship between them.

The Asymmetric Power Model argues that systemic power inequalities continue to underpin UK politics and a highly centralised notion of the political process (Marsh et al, 2024). This is evident in research on how the intersection of inequalities on gender, religion, and ethnicity pervade party politics and affect the development of political careers (Hussain, 2024). It is also evident in the way that political parties seek to weaponise gender issues, while doing little to tackle the class-based gender inequalities that are reinforced through UK public policy (Sanders and Gains, 2024). At the same time, the highly centralised mode of governance continues to entrench spatial inequality, a narrow economic vision of devolution focused on city regions that is unlikely to tackle the rise of ‘territorially-based populism’ (Warner et al, 2024).

These inequalities can be viewed as key drivers of the instability that now characterises British politics. Over the last fourteen years, the Conservative Party, traditionally the party of continuity, has been a destabilising force as it has reoriented its statecraft in response to a new era of populism (Hayton, 2024). A key example is the Party’s changing strategy on the union, which has brought to the fore the destabilising disconnection between devolution and the British political tradition (Anderson and Brown Swan, 2024).

The interplay between inequality and instability creates injustice, incoherence, fragmentation, centralisation, short-termism, and many of the pathologies familiar to scholars of British politics. Yet instability also creates new contradictions and opportunities through which positive change can be seeded. The flux in British politics may in particular give rise to new strategies around systems thinking, place-based policy, evidence-informed government, and behavioural public policy (Cairney et al, 2024). One innovation that has received particular attention is deliberative mini publics, which have the potential to counteract the UK’s tendency towards incoherent constitutional reform (Coulter et al, 2024).

Nonetheless, the risk is that the longer instability persists, the more that politicians and voters will be tempted to close down the space in which inequalities might be challenged, and may even be tempted to embrace solutions that exacerbate inequality in the name of stability, not least through populist forces. Such options are fraught with danger, not only because of their inherent injustice, but because inequalities are always likely to be destabilising forces which undermine the political agreement that underpins the legitimacy of the British state.

Image credit: "The Houses of Parliament, London" by Daniele Dalledonne is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.