ABSTRACT
The following two chapters look at the state and crime in practice in relation to one state. This chapter is intended to describe and discuss the term state and its development within the UK context. For all that the term is used regularly in the state crime literature, it is used very casually and often without a full appreciation of what the component means when applied to a specific country. Rather than using the various approaches to assess examples from the UK, this chapter first discusses the genesis of the state and its development trajectory towards democratisation, before describing the loci of legitimate power within the state. The intention is to understand exactly what may be a state in terms of state crime and from where the actions and decisions derive that could be labelled state crime.
