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Condition Of Britain

Introducing the four pieces that follow, by Peter Wollen, Raymond Williams, Eric Hobsbawm and Ralph Miliband, commissioned by the Italian communist Giorgio Fanti for a special issue of Il contemporaneo on the state of Britain. Retranslated by NLR, they are published here for the first time in English.

Society: New and Old

How far did Britain’s class structure alter in the sixties, with the onset of the ‘affluent society’? As counterpoint to prevalent myths and pieties, Hobsbawm supplies a mordant panorama of shifting habits and customs against a backdrop of polarized class and cultural divergence.

Theatre and the Novel

Anatomization of the fifties and sixties generations of British novelists—Amis, Wain, Golding, Murdoch, Lessing—and playwrights: Osborne, Wesker, Delaney, Pinter, with new forms emerging from the conservatism of the early Cold War years across the crux of 1956.

The Bourgeois Nemesis

In 1964, NLR produced a set of texts aiming to explain the crisis-ridden state of post-war Britain by analysing the unique class compact that governed its longstanding capitalist regime. Behind the Nairn–Anderson theses stood an earlier formulation of these ideas, ‘La Nemesi borghese’, published by Nairn in the Italian Marxist journal Il Contemporaneo, appearing here for the first time in English.

The Meanings of Brexit

There has been remarkably little discussion of what Brexit means in theoretical terms for attempts to understand the limits of present-day national sovereignty and the character of the EU. In the first of two contributions on these questions, Cunliffe asks why UK politics has changed so little since ‘taking back control’.

Challenge from the Peripheries

Comparative study of Sinn Féin and the SNP, theoretically the two principal opponents of the continuation of the present form of the UK state. What headaches do they cause its ruling parties?

Two Atlantic Lefts

The legacies of the Sanders and Corbyn waves include new cohorts of democratic-socialist elected representatives. As a provisional synecdoche for the electoral turn, Caitlín Doherty examines the records to date of the Democrat ‘Squad’ on Capitol Hill and their Labour equivalents at Westminster.

Edgerton’s Britain

In The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, David Edgerton takes aim at narratives of Ukania’s secular decline that would foreground its extraverted economy and capitalist-aristocratic ruling class. How coherent is his alternative?

Transformatrix

Tom Hazeldine on Charles Moore, Herself Alone. Thatcher’s Conservatives wrestle with Europe, and with her, in the final volume of the authorized biography.

Roadmaps after Corbyn

Examination of the UK’s dominant political cultures, social liberalism and national conservatism, battling for hegemony within and between the major parties, and buffeted by economic storms. A sober reckoning with the lessons of Corbynism and hopes invested in an unreformable Labour Party.

Titmuss in His Time

Ben Jackson on John Stewart, Richard Titmuss: A Commitment to Welfare. Formation and trajectory of the LSE’s central theorist of social policy and the post-war welfare state.

Rebel Regions

A comparative engagement with Tom Hazeldine’s The Northern Question, setting the trajectory of England’s former industrial powerhouse against that of Belgium’s Wallonia. Rustbelt regions, embedded in national contexts beset by persistent geographical polarizations, yet stubbornly consequential for their political outcomes.

Ukania Perpetua?

Beset by simultaneous crises of class, state and nation, is the UK once again haunted by the spectre of decline? Perry Anderson presents an analysis spanning economy, polity, ideology, territory and diplomacy, testing how far the successive theses offered by NLR can be brought to bear on the present moment.

Irony Error

Julian Stallabrass on Dougie Wallace, East Ended. London’s denizens harshly satirized under the lens and flash-guns of a latter-day Cruikshank.

The Government of London

The capital of capital, or a melting-pot city of workers, historically governed from the left? Owen Hatherley unearths inspiration for present-day struggles from London’s municipal-socialist past.

Gilding Postwar Britain

John Merrick on David Edgerton, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation. Reversing accepted narratives of 20th-century decline, a revisionist account of the 1950s as the UK’s golden age.

Britain’s Decade of Crisis

Boris Johnson’s ‘Get Brexit Done’ victory set in the context of the multiple crises that have roiled the UK since its financial bubble burst in 2008—economic, social, regional, national, European—to which the new Tory ascendancy poses as solution.

Crosscurrents

After decades of hawkish neoliberalism, the British Labour Party has become the stage for an unprecedented experiment. To what extent has Corbyn’s leadership been able to transform Blair’s party into a vehicle for egalitarian renewal? Can his project survive the maelstrom of the UK’s Brexit crisis?

Brexitannia

Michael Rustin on Anthony Barnett, The Lure of Greatness. Post-imperial pathologies of the multinational kingdom as catalyst for Britain’s leap into the unknown.

The Corbyn Project

Given the imbalances of the UK economy—overblown financial sector, gaping current account, delirious levels of debt—what structural changes might a Corbyn government effect? Robin Blackburn discusses prospects and proposals for an egalitarian shift.

Finance and Power

Geoffrey Ingham on Tony Norfield, The City: London and the Global Power of Finance. A former banker’s Marxist account of the imperialist dynamics of international finance and the preponderance of the Square Mile as the bureau de change of the world.

Much to be Modest About

John Newsinger on John Bew, Citizen Clem. Hawkish celebration of Labourism’s post-war hero.

A Tory Tribune?

Francis Mulhern on Ferdinand Mount, English Voices: Lives, Landscapes, Laments. The literary and political sensibility of Britain’s most independent-minded Conservative thinker, aide to Margaret Thatcher, admirer of Virginia Woolf, and devotee of William Gladstone.

Revolt of the Rustbelt

The historical geography of Ukania’s referendum on the EU, pitting London and Scotland, along with Northern Ireland, against every region of England outside its pampered capital. The North as fulcrum of the victory for Leave, the accumulating reasons for its disaffection with the Westminster establishment, and the carry-through of its rebellion into the electoral upset of 2017.

The New Neoliberalism

If the ruling economic paradigm remains traceable to Mont Pèlerin, how to distinguish the present from the moment that brought Thatcher and Reagan to power? A periodization of neoliberalism, from anti-socialist insurgency, through centre-left stewardship, to the inchoate ideologies of the post-crash era.

Casting Off?

How to assess the latest set-back for the European Union: the vote to leave by its second-largest state? Complex determinants of the Brexit protest—party-political contingencies played out against topographies of class and sub-national disaffection—met by single-minded condemnation of it by the global elite.

The Famished Raj

John Newsinger on Janam Mukherjee, Hungry Bengal. Pathbreaking study of a forgotten colonial catastrophe that claimed millions of lives.

The Snuffer of Lamps

Alexander Zevin on Douglas Newton, The Darkest Days. Exploding the myth of Britain’s restraint during the countdown to war in 1914.

Duty

In diametric contrast, a sense of duty as the condition of an ethical life in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. No longer, however, dictated by tradition or convention, but designed as individual choice—in illusion or fulfillment—through the modest routines of daily life.

A Scottish Watershed

Analysis of Scotland’s independence referendum and the hollowing of Labour’s electoral hegemony north of the border, after its lead role in the Unionist establishment’s Project Fear. What tectonic shifts have brought the UK’s archaic, multinational-monarchical state to the fore, as focus for an unprecedented mass politicization?

Forever Orwell

Francis Mulhern on Rob Colls, George Orwell: English Rebel. The protean cult of Eric Blair finds its latest iteration.

The Gleaners

Clive Dilnot on Chris Killip, Seacoal. Scenes of industrial decay in 1980s Northumberland as images of a workless future.

The Family Firm

Tom Hazeldine on D R Thorpe, Supermac. Lengthy apologia for Harold Macmillan from a serial Tory biographer.

Blue Labour?

Anatomy of the UK’s new crossbreed government, and the uneven electoral geography that produced it. Amid the ruins of New Labour’s economic model and spreading Euro-turbulence, what prospects for resistance to austerity’s impending axe?

Good Riddance to New Labour

As the British general election approaches, a balance-sheet of New Labour’s thirteen years in office. The record of Blair and Brown—imperial wars abroad, subservience to the City at home—as so many reasons to cheer their downfall.

Class and Cabal

Tom Hazeldine on John Adamson, The Noble Revolt. The English Civil War re-staged as baronial rebellion, leaving socio-economic forces waiting in the wings.

Culture and Society, Then and Now

The idea of culture in Raymond Williams’s classic work, and discrepant readings of it, fifty years on. Gestation amid CP debates on the English tradition, hidden affinities with the Frankfurt School, and counterposition to the verities of today’s liberal multiculturalism.

Atlantic Ideologies

Kees van der Pijl on Walter Russell Mead, God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World. Traditions of pragmatic flexibility as explanation for the ascendancy of the Anglosphere—and basis for a coming realignment of US foreign policy?

Union on the Rocks?

Tom Nairn on Michael Fry, The Union. Revisiting the circumstances of the UK’s founding pact, amid non-celebrations of the 1707 Treaty of Union and a groundswell of support for Scottish independence.

Toryism After Blair

Susan Watkins on Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Strange Death of Tory England. Roles of déclassement, decolonization and Thatcherite revolution in the Conservative decline.

The New Furies

Tom Nairn on Tariq Ali, Rough Music. Britain’s subservient foreign policy and fawning political culture as indices of decline. Terror bombings and the returning furies of Blair’s war.

Imperial Margarine

Robin Blackburn on Niall Ferguson, Colossus and Empire. Rehabilitations of colonial rule for today’s proconsuls in Baghdad and Kabul.

The Third Crusade

Richard Gott on Anthony Seldon, Blair. As ‘Iraq’ joins ‘Munich’ and ‘Suez’ in the lexicon of British foreign-policy disasters, does the Labour Prime Minister have his own neo-imperial programme?

English Atrocities

John Newsinger on David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged and Caroline Elkins, Britain’s Gulag. Complementary accounts of British colonial crimes in Kenya. The throttling of a liberation movement by gallows and gaol, re-examined in the shadow of Abu Ghraib.

A Weightless Hegemony

Causes and consequences of Britain’s distinctive contribution to the repertoire of latter-day neoliberalism. The domestic and foreign record of the Blair regime, and its hybrid role in a shifting Atlantic order.

The Myth of Anglophone Succession

How far are the systems of British and American international power historically comparable? Can the imperium presided over by Clinton and Blair be regarded as essentially a sequel to the Victorian order guided by Palmerston or Salisbury, or does it represent something quite new—the first true hegemony in history?

Shock Therapy in the City

Geoffrey Ingham on Philip Augar, The Death of Gentlemanly Capitalism. How the investment banks of the City of London were taken over by foreign capital, and whether their fate was avoidable.

Mario and the Magician

British politics under the wand of Redemption, as the new leitmotif of the party system. Similarities and contrasts between the ex-imperial states of UK and France, as New Labour shuffles towards listless re-election.

Farewell Britannia: Break-Up or New Union?

Has the Northern Ireland Agreement injected a fatal shot of constitutionalism into the archaic Ukanian state? Responding to Pocock and Mulhern, Tom Nairn looks forward to a rearrangement of islander relations, but warns that without its own reconstitution England could become a fatally regressive anomaly in the archipelago.

Throttling Iraq

The bombing and starving of Iraq are nearing their tenth year. Catechisms and consequences of the Anglo-American blockade, as a defining memorial of the Clinton and Blair regimes.