At first sight, Brown’s, Darling’s and King’s labelling and explanation of the financial turmoil of 2007–09 followed similar paths. The severity narratives of Brown and Darling were so similar in their progression towards ever-starker characterisations as to suggest a high level of coordination between the two. There was, however, a noteworthy inconsistency among the three actors’ severity narratives. Brown and Darling initially engaged in minimisation, stating from late 2007 and throughout 2008 that the United Kingdom was in a distinctly strong economic position to confront the financial crisis. King, on the other hand, did not engage in any such minimisation.

The three actors’ causality narratives, and the attendant task of accepting or denying blame, were fairly consistent. From the outset, they all emphasised global factors as the primary cause of the United Kingdom’s financial turmoil. Again, the causality narratives of Brown and Darling were similar to one another while King’s account diverged in a few small, but key ways. First, whereas Brown and Darling initially failed to admit flaws in their handling of the Northern Rock crisis, King in November 2007 absorbed minimal blame, claiming that, if he had his time again, he would have responded differently to Northern Rock’s predicament. Second, in late 2008, King began to eschew specifically identifying global factors or British financial institutions as causing the crisis. Instead, he described in vague tones that they were not alone in acting irresponsibly during the pre-2007 period of high world economic growth. This suggests that King was admitting, albeit indirectly, that he and other regulators—but more significantly, the Prime Minister and the Chancellor—had played a part in the escalation of the crisis. Third, King added another unique strand to his causality narrative by blaming not just international financial institutions or a lack of global financial regulation, but debtor economies such as the United Kingdom, which had complacently relied on easy credit.

It appeared that King’s blunt criticism prompted Brown and Darling to admit in February 2009 that there had been flaws in the regulatory system before the global financial crisis. The press, however, interpreted these admissions as cynical ‘road-to-Damascus’ conversions that were a reaction to King and a pre-emption of the late-March release of the Turner Review, an official government review on the state of the UK financial regulatory system before September 2007 and those most responsible for its creation. King’s late-2008 departure from the causality and blame narratives of Brown and Darling presented an interesting intra-regime framing contest. This contest contributed to the greater framing contest between the three actors: the Labour Government (along with the supposedly apolitical BOE Governor, who was likely to cooperate with the incumbent government), the opposition Conservative Party and the media.

To examine the larger framing contest, it is broken down into two distinct contests that have most influenced the political game over issues of responsibility: between the government and the opposition (parliamentary and extra-parliamentary); and the policy game over reform: between proponents of the status quo and change advocates (cf. Table 2.2 in Chapter 2).

Contests over policy framing can be separated into the domestic and international battlegrounds. Both stemmed from the causality narrative of the political actors Brown and Darling—and to a lesser extent the non-partisan technocrat King—who argued that the United Kingdom’s financial turmoil was caused primarily by global factors. The domestic policy-framing contest was over the injection of £300 billion into the financial system—Brown and Darling’s response to the global financial crisis. Brown and Darling depicted this sizeable and highly statist fiscal stimulus as absolutely necessary. More significantly, the framing contest centred on implications for existing British financial regulation policies. Brown and Darling had argued that the British regulatory structure was world class and revolutionary by British standards; that even this could not prevent the leviathan global financial crisis hitting British shores; and that policy implications should be minimal because Britain’s crisis was caused predominately by global problems. In terms of the crisis-framing typology of Chapter 2, Brown and Darling clearly adopted on the domestic battleground a type-2 frame in which the crisis was viewed as a ‘critical threat to the collective good embodied in the status quo’ and as such the status quo must be defended against critics.

As argued in Chapter 2, such a type-2 defence is typical of incumbents. For Brown and Darling, it was a logical frame to adopt. Labour, a long-serving government, was unpopular in the electorate and, like many long-serving governments, it appeared to aspire to short-term regime survival. By denying responsibility for the crisis for so long, however, the two political actors set up a ‘blame showdown’ in which they might escape political repercussions, but are more likely to suffer political damage (see Table 2.1, Chapter 2). In the international policy reform game, however, the government sidestepped the role of status quo defender and cast itself decisively as a change-oriented player.

Brown and Darling seized the political opportunity afforded to them by the exogenous-causality narrative and declared that the most important policy outcome of the global financial crisis should be the complete restructuring of the global regulation of finances. They unified and strengthened their type-3 rhetoric (focusing blame and attacking the status quo) by deploying historical analogies that affirmed the benefits of global financial re-regulation, notably the reference to the creation of the Bretton Woods system. In their declaration to the public that they and their Labour cabinet colleagues were best credentialled to achieve such global regulatory reform, Brown and Darling adopted, on the international battleground, type-3 frames, which regarded the crisis as ‘a critical opportunity to expose deficiencies in the status quo ex ante’ (see Chapter 2).

Adding to this intricate combination of type-2 and type-3 frames, the defence of the government’s open and globalised economic approach by each of the three main UK actors placed the Conservative opposition in a difficult political position. As The Guardian’s Economics Editor Larry Elliot suggested, the government’s defence of its marketist approach, combined with its calls to re-regulate the global economy, put the Conservative Party in an awkward position because the ‘Conservative Party [has] obviously much more of a [marketist] deregulatory bent than Labour in historic terms’ (Elliot 2008b). Labour used its centrist ‘third way’ ideology as a means of wedging the Conservative Party on its key policy proposals—maintaining open and globalised markets and re-regulating the global economy.

Brown and Darling’s multilayered framing strategy—a type-2 frame defending the domestic status quo; a type-3 frame portraying the government as a change-oriented player; and a defence of marketism and global re-regulation—seemed set for success. The fact that the press and public largely agreed with Brown and Darling’s claims that global factors were the primary cause of Britain’s financial turmoil appeared to have made the international framing contest one that put the incumbents in an advantageous political position.

Nonetheless, the framing contest most important for the political fortunes of the government and their parliamentary opposition was the domestic one. While the press agreed that global factors were primarily responsible for the United Kingdom’s financial turmoil, they reacted vehemently against Brown and Darling’s long-time denial of responsibility for the crisis. The later concessions by the Prime Minister and the Chancellor that they were responsible for some flaws in the British regulatory structure further damaged their government’s popularity (UK Polling Report 2009). This development fits with the claims of Boin et al. (2005:86–7) that actors who belatedly admit responsibility for a crisis suffer far more damage than those who absorb minimal blame early in the crisis. While the three actors’ assertions that the domestic financial turmoil was caused primarily by global factors was supported by the press and public, Brown and Darling’s long-time denial of culpability for the emergence of the crisis and their defence of the status quo domestic financial regulation was overwhelmingly rejected by the electorate. This left them in March 2009 far behind in the polls with just more than a year before the compulsory date for the next national election.

For King, it appears as though he suffered only minor damage to his credibility. This appears to be a result of two factors: his acceptance of minimal blame for the Northern Rock and the British financial crisis in general; and the general view that he is not technically a political player. King was not required to engage as much as Brown or Darling in the key task of managing the public’s expectations about the crisis; as such, he could instead focus on providing technical explanations and solutions for Britain’s financial crisis. This is not to say that King is apolitical. The Governor of the BOE became politicised by his own doing—specifically, by implying that endogenous actors were responsible for the crisis and, more significantly, by publicly halting the government’s plans for a further fiscal stimulus. King’s divergence from his previous line of crisis rhetoric—which had been fairly concordant with that of the Prime Minister and the Chancellor—was hardly inspired by political motives. He was up for reappointment to the second of a maximum two-term tenure in January 2008, which he duly received regardless of his ‘inconvenient’ stance on the issue of responsibility for the financial crisis.

A general observation that can be drawn from the UK case study, and that might even apply to all case studies in this volume, is that financial crises, by nature, appear to require governments to talk up and support the national economy in the incubation period of the crisis, at the expense of locking themselves into a specific frame. If key government actors are aware that financial turmoil is likely to hit their nation’s economy, they are likely to downplay the severity in an attempt to maintain consumer confidence and curb the damage of a potential crisis. If they do not do this, they can easily be blamed for exacerbating any financial crisis that hits the nation.

The response to the British manifestation of the global financial crisis comports with the proposition that long-serving governments find it difficult to convince the public that they are fit to make the changes necessary to prevent another crisis in the future. The findings from this chapter, however, suggest that the chances of long-serving governments flourishing in a financial crisis are made even more remote by their necessary but risky obligation to talk up the national economy in the incubation period of the crisis.