This paper argues that the crisis of post-politics has sparked an authoritarian turn in spatial planning in England. That, the proposed reform of the English planning system in 2020 is a defining moment, marking not only the failure of consensus-seeking politics in governing dissents, but also the rising authoritarian responses to fix it. This is manifest in the intensification of state control, strengthening of executive power and decline of democratic institutions, with a shift of emphasis from techno-managerial to Accepted ArticleThis article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved executive-punitive practices, and from seemingly consensual to openly antagonistic approaches. This drift to authoritarianism has been justified by invoking a 'state of exception' whereby the established rules and procedures are displaced by the appeal to 'exceptional' circumstances such as, emergencies, national securities, and global pandemics. We draw on a case study of shale gas 'fracking' in England to show how authoritarianism has crept into planning processes through, changes in legislation, reconfiguration of rules, rescaling of decision making, and shrinking of democratic spaces. We discuss the role of a 'political moment' in the politicization of fracking, arguing that the return of the political has engendered antagonistic and exclusionary practices, rather than the agonistic pluralism that planning scholars have called for. In managing planning conflicts, consent, compromise and cooption are increasingly complemented or replaced by discipline, control and explicit exclusion. Instead of denying, neutralizing or suppressing antagonism by calling for consensus, authoritarian politics exaggerates it by establishing frontiers between legitimate and non-legitimate voices of dissents. The paper concludes by emphasizing that the authoritarian turn can only offer a contingent and fleeting solution to the failure of post-political planning to deliver neoliberal pro-growth goals. It cannot eradicate the crisis of legitimacy in planning; nor can it foreclose the political struggle for fixing its meaning and purpose.Acknowledgments: This paper is based on a Doctoral research project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (Grant number: ES/P000762/1). We wish to thank, the ESRC for their support, Professor Anthony Zito for his contribution to the discussions on the issues covered in this paper, Professor Matt Sparke (the editor) and four anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

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The present energy crisis is one which is rooted in the contradictions of the neoliberalisation of energy. The UK is one of the pioneers of energy neoliberalisation and has been experimenting with different market arrangements since the 1980s, yet has found itself particularly exposed to the impacts of a global energy price shock. Through an analysis of policy documents, regulatory reports and historical energy policy literature, I identify how privatisation, regulatory experiments and market engineering under a neoliberal policy paradigm helped to create the conditions for the present crisis. Drawing on Hall's conception of policy paradigms, I argue that the neoliberal policy paradigm, for energy, is locked in a cycle of interventions at the second order to manage the contradictions of the third order priority of securing privatised energy markets and maintain legitimacy for the neoliberal energy system. The current energy crisis has led to the government making increasingly extreme second order interventions to stabilise the energy system to secure the interests of electricity capital and fossil capital. The present crisis, however, exposes the limits to a socio-ecological fix (for people, and for capital) within neoliberal hegemony.

The Labour Party's proposals on energy are arguably the most progressive feature of their programme, as they attempt to address climate breakdown. This article shows that a substantial part of the party's proposals are continuous with the attempts, in the later years of New Labour, to compensate for the various problems created by energy liberalisation under Thatcher and Blair, whilst still remaining within a broadly neoliberal paradigm. Current Labour policy takes these compensatory measures to their limit-a limit which is insufficient for the scale of the ecological crisis. The fundamental reluctance to challenge private ownership of energy means Labour are, at best, revanchists for a form of 'progressive' neoliberalism which is increasingly out of touch with the material reality and challenges the UK faces.