A relatively unexplored aspect of UK austerity politics has been intense anti-regulatory pressures in the name of ‘freeing’ private capital to produce wealth, employment and tax revenues. Focusing on environmental, food, and workplace safety, this book examines the nature of ‘social protection’ and the dynamics of regulation, considering how the current crisis of ‘anti-regulation’ was reached and how it might be transcended. The starting point of this book is with what appears to be the contemporary paradox of regulation: on the one hand, most developed economies, not least the UK, are undergo ... More

A relatively unexplored aspect of UK austerity politics has been intense anti-regulatory pressures in the name of ‘freeing’ private capital to produce wealth, employment and tax revenues. Focusing on environmental, food, and workplace safety, this book examines the nature of ‘social protection’ and the dynamics of regulation, considering how the current crisis of ‘anti-regulation’ was reached and how it might be transcended. The starting point of this book is with what appears to be the contemporary paradox of regulation: on the one hand, most developed economies, not least the UK, are undergoing class-targeted hardship as a result of crises which many accept had as at least one cause failures of regulation; on the other hand, regulation in most of these economies is further undermined –as too expensive for a shrinking state, as burdens upon the only vehicle to economic recovery which is private sector economic activity. In short, the ‘possibility’ of corporate crime is negated while corporate harm is likely to proliferate, through a series of material and ideological initiatives from above around regulation and enforcement, through which is emerging a new phase of neo-liberalism, one in which states and corporations are at once more secure – but also, in their new inter-dependencies, potentially more vulnerable. Examining both the idea of regulation - its academic, political and popular representations – as well as the policies and practices of regulation, the possibilities of radically rethinking ‘regulation’, beyond liberal pluralism, are opened up.