Back to the future? Financialisation,local statecraft,and situational analysis

Introduction

It is the middle of 1985. Just released is the film from which this commentary draws its title. Peak 1980s from the vantage point of 2025. In terms of mainstream fashion, this likely meant bleached jeans, double-breasted suits, fitness videos, fluorescent socks, leg warmers, mullet haircuts (with blonde highlights for the full look), and shoulder pads in dresses. A number of musical styles were the backdrop to this era, of course, including new wave synth, R&B, and soft rock. More established genres sat alongside newer styles, as reflected in the biggest selling artists of the year. Across the UK and the US, Dire Straits, Foreigner, Phil Collins, and REO Speedwagon rubbed shoulders with the Eurythmics, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Wham, and Whitney Houston. As cassette sales overtook those of vinyl, a few years before CD sales eclipsed both, MTV emerged, drawing upon and repacking the intersection of fashion and music for a growing and more international audience. The year also saw the hosting in London and Philadelphia of Live Aid, “first and foremost a media event of the highest order” (Ullestad, 1987: 71), the beginning of the “Save Africa” industry (Makura, 2023). It “both reflected and reinforced an ongoing shift in the legitimacy of charity and welfare, away from state-led welfare solutions” (Jones, 2017: 189). This event was very much in keeping with the wider politics of the time. The 1980s saw both the UK and the US shift rightward. In 1985, Margaret Thatcher was a couple of years into her second term of office as UK Prime Minister. In the US, Ronald Reagan secured his second Presidential term the year before. Both pursued programmes of neoliberalism, extolling the virtues of the market and private sector, shrinking their public sectors, undermining their labour unions, and in the process, overseeing significant economic and social change and the production of more unequal societies. In many ways, this period marked the beginning of a neoliberal path along which both countries continue despite the limits revealing themselves.

It was in this wider cultural and political environment that the 1985 Political Studies Association (PSA) conference took place at the University of Manchester. This remains the annual conference for the field of political studies that, according to its website, “examines how power is obtained, kept, lost, mobilised, divided, used and abused. It asks who gains and who loses from these processes and why.” One of the presenters amongst the hundreds that year was Jim Bulpitt from the University of Warwick. At this point a senior academic, he returned to one of the universities at which he had earlier studied to deliver a presentation entitled “The Discipline of the New Democracy: Mrs Thatcher’s Domestic Statecraft.” Subsequently Political Studies published this paper (Bulpitt, 1986). In this, and his earlier paper (Bulpitt, 1983), he defined statecraft as:

the art of winning elections and achieving some necessary degree of governing competence in office. It is not synonymous with, though it may be related to, pragmatism or expediency. It is concerned primarily to resolve the electoral and governing problems facing a party at any particular time. As a result it is concerned as much with the ‘how’ as the ‘what’ of politics. (Bulpitt, 1986: 20)

Bulpitt breaks statecraft down into four “dimensions”: “party management,” “a winning electoral strategy,” “political argument hegemony,” and “A governing competency” (Bulpitt, 1986: 21–22). The empirical study is on English national politics—with a capital P, where the focus is on governing administrations. It focuses on the history on the relations between those involved in the governing administration at Whitehall and others elsewhere. There is a division of labour. He calls this a “dual polity” between “high politics” and “low politics,” the former being under the purview of the centre and centring on matters of defence, economic, and taxation policy. The latter is the work done in other areas of policy by other government entities, including local government. His framework constituted a response to what he understood as “the overemphasiz[ing] of the role of ideas and ideology” (Ayres et al., 2018: 854) in the studying of UK territorial politics. As a result, its concern was as much with “the ‘how’ as the ‘what’ of politics” (Bulpitt, 1986: 21).

In his obituary just over a decade after he spoke in Manchester, his contribution was termed a “landmark paper” (Kavanagh, 1999), coming after an earlier book in which he introduced his notion of statecraft (Bulpitt, 1983). The obituary proceeded to argue that Bulpitt’s “slim body of published work is likely to be read and quoted by students for decades to come.” Kavanagh (1999) appears to be right. Across several areas of study, we see mention of statecraft (if not an embracing of the full framework), after its initial ignoring by others in the field. From cyber security (Kello, 2013), to China’s use of its own history for economic returns (Mayer, 2018) to international diplomacy (Prantl and Goh, 2022), is to highlight three of a large and voluminous academic literature. Additionally, has been a generative dialogue amongst those in UK political science and public administration about the basis of Bulpitt’s (1983, 1986) initial work and its limits, often argued with reference to the existing national political administration (for the last example, see Critch, 2024). Finally, and central to this commentary, is a small but growing set of contributions focusing on local or sub-national statecraft. This is rarely in conversation with that academic literature out of international relations, political science, and public administration, and with patchy citation to, and use of, Bulpitt (1983, 1986; Cirolia and Harber, 2022; Kutz, 2017; McGuirk et al., 2021; Raco et al., 2022; Wu et al., 2024).

To this latter academic literature, we can now add Pike (2023) and Financialisation and Local Statecraft, an impressive and unique contribution to be read across disciplines. Comprising eight chapters, the book draws on a rigorous empirical base informed by a “multi-actor and multi-level approach” that “situates the agency of local statecrafters within their particular government and governance setting nationally and internationally” (Pike, 2023: 42). The book brings into play in its analysis a cosmopolitan range of scales, sites, and spaces. For example, it begins with a photo of Portsmouth Town Hall. This is a town rather off the map in academic studies, because of its location, its size, and a sense that there is not much about it from which others can learn (although see Fiorentino, 2023; Jones, 1998). Starting with it sets the tone for the book. It makes clear the enrolment of a range of cities and towns into the wider move towards the financialisation of local statecraft. It is not all about the larger English cities, such as Manchester (although they are clearly important in the reconfiguring of relations between the financial sector (in all its various forms) and English local governments).

It is 40 years after Bulpitt’s PSA conference presentation. I find myself writing this commentary from the city that was host to that conference. Much has changed in and around Manchester and the University of Manchester in the intervening decades (while, of course, much has remained unchanged, such as the inequalities that continue to characterise the city). This is in part a political change. For example, in the mid-1980s, the Conservative central government launched City Action Teams (CATs). This was an attempt at the centrally prescribed co-ordination locally of central government grants and programmes. This did not impress local elected leaders, however. They were ideologically diametrically opposed to all the changes emerging of Conservative central government. Then Manchester City Council leader, Graham Stringer, was clear. In the local newspaper, Manchester Evening News he dismissed the initiative as a “whitewashing exercise” and commented that: “I have been invited to a lunch on Friday to celebrate this venture. I won’t be there” (Spilsbury, 1985: 4). Over the subsequent 40 years, the position of the Council has changed quite dramatically, however: from municipal socialism to entrepreneurial urbanism, to perhaps most recently, the financialised city (Goulding et al., 2023; Silver et al., 2021). The last of these captures how the city embodies those wider trends of which writes Pike (2023). The built environment reflects these changes. An enlarged science park as part of a wider innovation district, lots of new corporate student accommodation, refurbished and renovated Victorian buildings, tall skyscrapers of over 40 floors across the skyline, and trams that permeate the centre. From a few hundred at the time of the 1985 PSA conference, the centre of the city is now home to almost 100,000 residents. While opinions differ on whether the last four decades amount to a success for the city, that it is not what it once was seems to be a given (Peck and Ward, 2002; Rose, 2024; Symons and Lewis, 2017). Manchester is now also home to an international airport (well, Greater Manchester is). Its name changed from the Ringway Airport to Manchester International Airport a decade before the PSA annual conference. However, at that point, less than a million passengers were passing through its one terminal per month. Fast forward 40 years and over 2 million passengers per month pass through the Airport’s three terminals, and the site is the centre of a redevelopment scheme, once known as Airport City and recently renamed MIX Manchester (Ward and Wiig, 2025). The Airport—courtesy of its ownership in part by the Manchester Airport Group (MAG)—appears in Pike (2023: 192) as part of a wider discussion over how “local governments retain ownership of airports collectively” as a means of “local assets generating revenue sources.” MAG is 35% by Manchester City Council (and 29% by the other, nine Greater Manchester local authorities), and owns Manchester, East Midlands and London Stanstead airports. In part, some of the processes embodied in these changes in the city centre and surrounding areas speak to the issues covered in Financialisation and Local Statecraft.

In this short commentary, I hope to situate Pike (2023) in relation to those other contributions in urban and regional studies that work with the notion of statecraft. His analysis is by some way the most serious and significant attempt to work with both the gestures and the mechanics of Bulpitt’s (1983, 1986) initial formulation. Through his sole-authored monograph, and related work he has done with others (O’Brien and Pike, 2018; O’Brien et al., 2019; Pike et al., 2019), Pike makes an important contribution to debates over how “actors seek temporarily to cohere and stabilise its structures, imaginaries, strategies, and projects in particular geographical and temporal settings” (Pike, 2023: 20). That said, my argument is that the analysis stops short of revealing the details of the work done by the rather abstract notion of “financialisation” in terms of urban politics, and here I mean with a large and small “P.” The book is stronger on breadth rather than depth, leaving more questions to ask (and to answer) over the nature of the crafting performed by the crafters, which is of course precisely what a generative text does!

In what senses an emerging “statecraft turn” in urban and regional studies?

Sole-authored monographs do not appear out of thin air, of course. They are years in the making, as presentations and other publications pre-empt their emergence. Thus, it is with Pike (2023). His joint authored Financialising City Statecraft and Infrastructure (Pike et al., 2019) sets some important intellectual groundwork for Financialisation and Local Statecraft. This latter work focused on the changing ways in which some UK local governments had begun to finance their new and retrofitted infrastructure. Both books situate their analysis of the changing relationship since 2010 between English local governments and the financial markets in the context of the foundational work on statecraft in Bulpitt (1983, 1986). Given its four “dimensions”: “party management,” “a winning electoral strategy,” “political argument hegemony,” and “A governing competency” (Bulpitt, 1986: 21–22), and its emphasis as much on “the ‘how’ as the ‘what’ of politics” (Bulpitt, 1986: 21), why and how to render it of use to study the changing connections and relations between English local governments and the financial markets? For “recovering statecraft” (Pike et al., 2019: 80) is something that is an objective of both books. In building his argument, Pike (2023: 16) introduces and discusses a relatively a small but growing academic literature on urban and regional studies, arguing it requires “further specification and theorisation.” Much of this work places the emphasis on statecraft, emphasising the practices involved in crafting, making a nod to a post-structural ontology (Cirolia and Harber, 2022; Lauermann, 2016; McGuirk et al., 2022). That is, as Jessop (2007: 37) notes when writing about Foucault and statecraft, “to study governmentality in its generic sense is to study the historical constitution of different state forms in and through changing practices of government without assuming that the state has a universal or general essence.” As McGuirk et al. (2022: 1745) put it, the analysis emphasises the state “operates through practices; ‘not as an actual structure, but as the powerful metaphysical effect of practices, that make such structures appear to exist’ (Mitchell, 1991: 94) . . . [With] . . . a conception of states as emergent and capable of adapting and adopting diverse practices as they seek to govern.” They focus on smart cities in a range of Australian cities, and are attentive both to the crafting, and to the crafters, involved in this strand of public policy. Also in this intellectual vein, Cirolia and Harber (2022) distinguish their framing from others using the notion of statecraft through invoking “the urban state,” signalling a move away from a focus on local government. For example, the “urban state, here, is the full range of institutions and relationships between them that exercise power at the urban scale and together manage the functioning of urban systems” (Cirolia and Harber, 2022: 2437). They draw on three cities in urban Africa, using the example of transport. The mentioning of Bulpitt (1983, 1986) occurs only in passing. The exception in the fledgling academic literature to date is Ayres et al. (2018). Their approach is squarely Bulpittian. Adhering closely to the initial framework, they analyse the English devolution tendencies through governing codes, political resources, and governing strategies. In explaining their adherence to Bulpitt (1983, 1986), they argue the following: “His framework has great contemporary relevance in that it offers a historically grounded framework to capture the challenges and changes in centre–periphery relations in England.” While, then, it appears this is not a view shared by all in this emerging field of study, it is the one informing the approach taken by Pike (2023).