Exploring Britain's relationship with Europe: financialisation, depoliticisation and government strategy 1970-1975

The proposed research will present a novel approach to integrate the study of British government strategy in terms of policy-making in the historical context of Euromarkets and recent developments of the Brexit vote. It will do so by combining a close reading of Marx's analysis on money with archival research and discourse analysis. This research seeks to add perspective to the deregulation of global finance in the caseof the Euromarkets and the impact this has had on the restructuring of British IPE, British industrial relations and the discourse of legitimacy. The analytical lens will aim at locating the British state within the workings of the capitalist mode of production and seek to identify government strategies of blame-avoidance as crisis management vis-a-vis disruptive responses to democratic contestation. The initial hypothesis is that the credit expansionism seen in the 1970s has created a wave of repercussion to British IPE felt today. By triangulating between official government documents on the Euromarkets and discourse in official press releases, this project will be theoretically supported and empirically substantiated in equal measure - constituting a reflexive relationship between theory and empirics. Given the importance of Euromarkets as the historical background to Brexit, a combined historical analysis of these two phenomena raises questions that have not yet been addressed. The combination of a theoretical analysis with empirical evidence as discussed above will provide a better understanding of the workings of British policy-making processes in relation to the management of industrial relations through financial and industrial regulation with efforts to seek legitimacy to stay in governmental power. This novel approach suggests an original contribution to the literature for a better understanding of contemporary British politics.