PREDICTIONS FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF SUBNATIONAL STRUCTURES IN THE BRITISH MODEL OF REGIONAL POLICY

Abstract

This article analyzes the dynamics of decentralization (devolution) processes in the United Kingdom. The author’s aim is to demonstrate that the conservative doctrine of centralized state governance (consistently implemented between 2010 and 2024), combined with the effects of Brexit (in the form of the cessation of the European Union’s influence on the shape of British regional policy) has had a profound, comprehensive, and unequivocally destructive impact on devolution, reducing its overall development dynamics and, in some areas, halting or even partially reversing it, as well as causing confusion (both among the authorities and communities) in the regions affected by it regarding the prospects for their further political development. This state of affairs did not change after the last British Parliamentary elections, as the victorious Labour Party focused on nationwide economic and social problems, relegating issues affecting individual regions to the background. The interpenetration of bottom-up centrifugal tendencies, top-down recentralisation concepts and Brexit was shown using systemic and comparative methods, which made it possible not only to illustrate specific patterns but also to reflect their diversity in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The leading research method, however, was the scenario one, which allowed for determining the most likely directions of political development for all areas comprising the Celtic fringe.