Britain in Fragments

Paperback, 208 pages

English language

Published Jan. 24, 2023 by Manchester University Press.

ISBN:: 978-1-5261-6457-5

(1 review)

Britain today is falling apart. One of the most dominant states in world history finds itself confronted with growing demands for nationalist secessionism. Brexit has already secured its break from the European Union while looming Scottish independence promises to undermine the integrity of the British state. Meanwhile, class, gender, regional and generational inequalities are deepening while endemic racism has been re-invigorated. How has it come to this?

Britain in fragments traces how the historic pillars sustaining the democratic settlement have begun to crumble. This stability was constructed amid a century of imperial expansion abroad and working-class struggles for justice at home. The post-war welfare state was the apex of this historic arrangement; however, the ground beneath it began to shake as the processes of decolonisation and neoliberalism unfolded.

This book traces how successive Labour and Conservative governments have incrementally dismantled the democratic settlement. A bipartisan commitment to neoliberalism has culminated …

Britain today is falling apart. One of the most dominant states in world history finds itself confronted with growing demands for nationalist secessionism. Brexit has already secured its break from the European Union while looming Scottish independence promises to undermine the integrity of the British state. Meanwhile, class, gender, regional and generational inequalities are deepening while endemic racism has been re-invigorated. How has it come to this?

Britain in fragments traces how the historic pillars sustaining the democratic settlement have begun to crumble. This stability was constructed amid a century of imperial expansion abroad and working-class struggles for justice at home. The post-war welfare state was the apex of this historic arrangement; however, the ground beneath it began to shake as the processes of decolonisation and neoliberalism unfolded.

This book traces how successive Labour and Conservative governments have incrementally dismantled the democratic settlement. A bipartisan commitment to neoliberalism has culminated in a historic crisis of representation and legitimacy, opening the door to competing nationalist forces.

4 editions

pdotb reviewed Britain in Fragments by Satnam Virdee

Quite excellent

5 stars

While the endpoint of the book is Brexit, it does such a good job of tracing the way the proletariat has been split, first through offering voting rights, but only to certain segments of the working class, and then during the twentieth century, by leaning on racism, xenophobia, and nationalism. Also good on the way Labour has generally acted as a diversion from anything more radical, and the way that the shift to the right under New Labour opened up space for nationalism. In Scotland this manifested as the SNP who occupied a position left of centre, but still to the right of Old Labour, but in England this led to the rise of first the BNP and then, when they imploded, UKIP.