Post-neoliberalism? The strange case of the new English Freeports

Abstract

Neoliberalism has lost its hegemonic status in the global system but neoliberal ideas and practices persist. Post-Brexit UK offers a useful case study of how these operate in a post-hegemonic context. The UK government's vision of free trading ‘Global Britain' crashed against the reality of an increasingly geoeconomic world. Freeports were an initiative designed to boost trade and to develop poorer regions. This paper adapts Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis to analyse how the different Freeport discourses interact with material power as the policy develops. It divides this into three levels: national political discourse, national policy discourse and local political and policy discourse (with a case study of one Freeport). At the national level, the Brexiteers forged a discourse that combined neoliberalism, Brexit discourse and ‘levelling up’. When translated to policy this was significantly moderated due to legal commitments and geoeconomic pressures. At the local level, the policy was significantly reframed with little emphasis on trade and more on traditional local development concerns. The contradictions of the initial political discourse opened a space for other actors to reshape the policy. More broadly, this story suggests that global geoeconomic pressures may restrict the role of free trade zones in the developed world.