This article examines United Kingdom (UK) parliamentary debates on the adoption of its first post-Brexit, from-scratch free trade agreement (FTA), with Australia. Building on Jessop’s cultural political economy framework, we identify and analyse the economic imaginaries animating UK post-Brexit trade policy debates at this time. We find that an imaginary of what we term ‘competitive free trade’ shaped the UK Government’s approach to the UK–Australia FTA. Meanwhile, the Opposition, much of the House of Lords, and a small number of Conservative Members of Parliament endorsed an alternative ‘embedded free trade’ imaginary. Our analysis suggests that the UK government successfully used the context of an unsettled domestic institutional environment for trade policy post-Brexit in order to negotiate and ratify an FTA with Australia that reflected its competitive free trade imaginary. The article offers an account of UK post-Brexit trade policy that highlights how material, political, and ideational dimensions co-constitute each other in the political economy of trade, and how particular economic imaginaries become reified and dominant at certain junctures.

In the face of limited carbon budgets, negative emissions technologies (NETs) offer hopes of removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. It is difficult to determine whether the prospect of NETs is significantly deterring or delaying timely action to cut emissions. This paper sets out a novel theoretical perspective to this challenge, enabling analysis that accounts for interactions between technologies, society and political and economic power. The paper argues that, seen in this light, the scope of NETs to substitute for mitigation may be easily exaggerated, and thus that the risk of harm from mitigation deterrence should be taken seriously.