Business Rates (BR) are key to the interaction between national, devolved, regional and local institutions of government in the UK. A liability to the tax can make the difference between the life and death of a business, and the design and implementation of business rates interacts with areas of policy concern as disparate as devolution, planning, charity regulation and digitalisation. We examine how BR affect political struggles between the devolved governments and the UK government using a governmentality approach focused on counter conduct, extending the scant literature on this type of taxation. Our theoretical contribution is to analyse how resistance, represented by the Foucauldian concept of counter conduct, manifests within the complex and understudied context of BR. In particular, we show that counter conduct has spatial and territorial elements which have the potential to destabilise the entire business rates programme and ought to be taken much more seriously.

中文翻译：

---

权力下放、反行为和属地性：英国企业税率案例


商业利率 (BR) 是英国国家、权力下放、区域和地方政府机构之间互动的关键。纳税义务可能关系到企业的生死，而商业税率的设计和实施与权力下放、规划、慈善监管和数字化等不同的政策关注领域相互作用。我们使用专注于反行为的治理方法来研究 BR 如何影响权力下放政府和英国政府之间的政治斗争，扩展了有关此类税收的很少的文献。我们的理论贡献是分析以福柯反行为概念为代表的抵抗如何在复杂且未被充分研究的 BR 背景下表现出来。特别是，我们表明反行为具有空间和地域因素，有可能破坏整个商业利率计划的稳定，应该更加认真地对待。