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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.

Britain After Nairn

How far can the path from Thatcher to Blair be written as a dynamic of Ukanian constitutional involution, or devolution? Francis Mulhern questions whether classes can be so quickly bundled off-stage. Is it possible to speak of nations—English, Scottish, Irish or any other—as political communities, without social or ideological dispositions?

Gaberlunzie’s Return

The historian of Machiavelli and Gibbon—New Zealand originator of a ‘new British history’ framed beyond Anglocentrism—looks at Tom Nairn’s After Britain. Is the United Kingdom really fated to disintegration, or absorption into Europe?

Treading Water?

McKibbin argues that New Labour's constitutional tensions are inherited from the Thatcherite project of centralizing power in order to promote a neoliberal political economy; and Labour's previous commitments to devolution. Tocqueville's view of constitutional inheritance and evolution is cited in opposition to Mair's model of a coherent Blairite strategy.

Revisiting the Blair Paradox

Responding to Peter Mair’s article in NLR 2, David Marquand suggests that Blair’s ambition to consolidate power as a ruler above partisan strife is less new than it seems. Baldwin’s regime in the thirties offers some surprising similarities.

The View from Enniskillen

Declan Kiberd on Francis Mulhern, The Present Lasts a Long Time. On the ferry across St George’s Channel, contemporary legacies of Raymond Williams, for cultural politics and national identity alike.

Corporate Populism and Partyless Democracy

Are there more tensions in New Labour’s constitutional reforms than Peter Mair’s model of a ‘partyless democracy’ allows? Anthony Barnett argues that the style of Blair’s government is actually closer to that of a large media corporation—bound to come to grief on the variegated realities of modern Ukania.

Partyless Democracy

New Labour’s rule in the UK is often held to offer a paradox: devolution of power to regions and cities, concentration of power in the central executive and support structures. Peter Mair suggests there is no contradiction—Blair’s project is a ‘consensual’ system above politics, gutted of traditional parties.

Ukania Under Blair

Great Britain has finally yielded a parliament to Scotland. But the Labour regime in London still clings convulsively to the totems of Ukania, in Tom Nairn’s savage updating of Robert Musil. New Labour’s eupeptic rhetoric of youth as a sure sign of a system being wheeled into the terminal ward.

Imperialism and the Rise and Decline of the British Economy, 1688-1989

“Historians seldom consider the metanarratives within which academic articles, monographs, models and analyses must eventually become embedded, if they are to inform public debate in modern societies. Yet, however micro the problems they tackle, their findings can always be situated within some ‘greater story’. Since the Second World . . .” read more

Medieval England: To Have and Have Not

“Given the generosity of ‘Closure Theory and Medieval England’, Scott Waugh’s review of my English Society in the Later Middle Ages, it may seem churlish to quarrel with some of his specific comments. Many of the criticisms which he makes of my work are extremely valid but I . . .” read more

Europa and Utopia: How Cultural History Deals with the Paradox of Modernity

“In the light of Luisa Passerini’s new book on the cultural and political discourse on Europe in Britain in the 1930s, it is tempting to draw a number of parallels between that decade and our own. The inter-war years, Passerini shows, were a period of much speculation and . . .” read more

Competition and Containment in Health Care

“The health care systems of the capitalist democracies have been subjected to radical transformation during the 1990s. This transformation has been rooted in the perceived need to control the cost of health care to the state and business, given factors such as the increasing range of effective services, . . .” read more