Description
Building on Bob Jessop’s work, our paper scrutinises UK parliamentary debates on the UK-Australia free trade agreement (FTA) to trace the economic imaginaries that animate trade as a new policy field within UK politics. Within the debates, we identify an overarching economic imaginary that reifies: (1) values of “free trade”, “international cooperation”, “democracy”, “high standards”, “animal welfare” and “climate action”; (2) the extraordinary agency of the Secretary of State for International Trade and the Government in shaping trade deals; (3) removing trade barriers, providing legal guarantees for non-trade public policy goals, and carrying out economic impact assessments as appropriate techniques of government on trade; and (4) democratic, accountable and transparent procedures in trade decision-making. These elements remain however imprecise and political actors contest UK trade agreements via three competing economic imaginaries which we call “Competitive Britain”, “State-Led Britain” and “Liberal Britain in a Rules-based World”. We argue that UK-Australia took its particular shape because a particular set of actors with a particular economic imaginary, namely “Competitive Britain”, were in key power positions allowing them to deploy their vision via free trade discourses, government institutions and economistic governing techniques that are contingent, but not fundamentally contested in UK trade policy post-Brexit.
