Technomoral Politics in Conservative Britain

For Erica Bornstein and Aradhana Sharma writing about contemporary India, ‘technomoral politics’ refer to the way individuals and organisations translate moral projects into technical and implementable policies or laws, or justify technocratic acts as ‘moral imperatives’. In Britain, by contrast, technomoral governance takes different forms. Rather than the (hyper-)moralisation of political programmes, policies and laws are typically advanced through less emotive, more bureaucratic language of management and administration, and seemingly neutral discourses of economics, efficiency, ‘common sense’, ‘value for money’ and ‘responsibility to taxpayers’. This article examines these processes in the context of the UK. Drawing on case studies of three post-2010 Conservative government flagship policy initiatives (austerity, social impact bonds and student loans), I explore how these programmes were advanced and the rationalities that underpinned them. These initiatives, I conclude, herald a new phase in the development of technomoral governance, one based on technomoral logics of financialisation and the private capture of public assets.