Britain experienced continual crises from the 1970s to Brexit in 2016. Neville Kirk’s new publication British Society and its Three Crises: From 1970s Globalisation, to the Financial Crash of 2007-8 and the onset of Brexit in 2016 is an innovative and comprehensive study which pays special attention to three combined crises: the development of neo-liberal globalisation from the 1970s; the financial crash and its systemic effects from 2007 to 2009; and the ‘present crisis’ beginning in 2010. In this blog post, author Neville Kirk introduces this new work and the three systemic crises it focuses on.
We currently live in a period often described, since 2022, as one of ‘permacrisis’. The last few years have certainly seen aspects of the ‘present crisis’ become more intensive, extensive and interlocked. This has been reflected in the experiences and often divisive debates and conflicts around Brexit, the Coronavirus pandemic, the poor state of the economy and people’s wellbeing, worsening inequality, very threatening climate change, nationalism and the future state of the United Kingdom. Party-political volatility and fragmentation, industrial conflict and social, political and cultural divisions around race, ethnicity, class, gender and lifestyle are also manifest. The country’s past history and its present position in and attitudes towards the wider world, moreover, are hotly contested. In sum, we are living through a multi-faceted or combined, systemic crisis affecting most parts of our lives and our society.
This crisis, furthermore, shows no sign of easing or ending. The country is widely declared to be ‘broken’ and in need of urgent repair or transformation. But the main political parties arguably are not in a fit state to accomplish either of these two things. The crony-ridden and deeply divided Conservative party, for so long the dominant political force in the UK, is both incompetent and rapidly losing support. The reconfigured Labour Party, under Keir Starmer, will probably win the 2024 general election, but it is daily abandoning any trace of radicalism and even its traditional reformism. Voluntarily imprisoned within the conservative paradigm of neo-classical financial orthodoxy and ‘responsibility’, the Labour Party will be hard pressed to ‘paper over the cracks’, never mind introduce the fundamental changes needed to regenerate the country. In all likelihood, the ‘present crisis’ will persist and the prevailing mix of feelings – loss, abandonment, bewilderment, resignation, cynicism, anger, conflict, despair and division -will continue to dominate the public mood.
My recent book, A Nation in Crisis: Division Conflict and Capitalism in the United Kingdom (Bloomsbury, 2023) focussed upon the worsening crisis between 2017 and 2022. My new study, British Society and Its Three Crises: From 1970s Globalisation to the Financial Crash of 2007-8 and the Onset of Brexit in 2016, is a companion volume, published by Liverpool University Press in March 2024.
This new book adopts a longer-term historical perspective than the previous one in relation to crisis and crises in Britain. (The Brexit experience shifts my main focus from Britain to the UK.) It demonstrates that Britain’s history from the 1970s onwards has, albeit with a relatively stable and largely prosperous twenty-year period from1987 to 2007, been crisis-ridden. The current ‘permacrisis’ is by no means unique. Some of these crises have been largely confined to one or more aspects of the social system, for example, the economy or politics, but at other times, in the manner of the present crisis, have covered a number of diverse, but closely related, economic, social, political, cultural and ideological features. In sum, they too have been systemic, in that they have affected the social system as a whole, or at least most parts of it.
My new study concentrates upon three such systemic crises. These are the decline of managed capitalism or Keynesianism and the onset of conservative globalisation and neo-liberalism from the 1970s onwards, of which the radical-reactionary Thatcherite revolution was such a key component; the ‘global’, but overwhelmingly Western financial crash and its manifestations in the UK from 2007 to 2009; and the origins of the present crisis dating from the implementation of the political economy of austerity from 2010 onwards and including the EU referendum of June 2016.
In adopting this historical approach to the study of crisis, my book avoids the exaggerated ‘presentism’ and lack of historical awareness characteristic of many ‘instant’, media-based and some sociological accounts. It argues that a historical approach can help us to deepen and widen our knowledge and understanding of past and present crises, their links, points of comparison and relevant aspects of continuity and change over time.
It is based upon a wide range of primary and secondary sources. It owes a particular debt to the important studies of crisis offered by the distinguished political scientist, Andrew Gamble, and the equally eminent economic historian, Adam Tooze, and seeks to build upon their work. The same applies to the fruitful concepts of hegemony and legitimation pioneered by the political philosophers, the Italian Antonion Gramsci and the German, Jurgen Habermas.The ideas of these scholars are woven into the six chapters of this study in which the various aspects of crisis-economic, ideological, social, cultural and political- take pride of place. The penultimate chapter considers the particular political case of Scotland because it is central to ongoing key debates about the Union, independence, self-determination and potentially radical ways out of the crisis. The final chapter brings to bear many of the main themes and concerns of the book on the crucial period of the June 2016 EU Referendum and its after effects.
It also sets out to be accessible, clear and helpful to our understanding of modern Britain and, at relevant points, the wider capitalist system. It should appeal not only to undergraduates and postgraduates, teachers and researchers, but also general readers interested in a historical approach to politics, economics, society, culture. Finally, it brings more up-to-date my longstanding teaching and research interests in these matters. The Conclusion asks the reader to consider three core arguments. First, that despite the acute and chronic nature of crises in modern Britain and the UK and the challenges made to particular aspects of the hegemony of the ruling elite and capitalist ‘commonsense’, the establishment, while sometimes divided and chaotic, has so far managed to survive them mainly by traditional peaceful and constitutional means. A strong and united ‘revolutionary subject’ is conspicuous largely by its absence. Second, Britain and the UK, nevertheless, are by no means the stable, tolerant, peaceable and harmonious societies, at ‘ease with themselves’ and role models for other countries, still ‘imagined’ by Boris Johnson and other leading members and apologists of ‘British greatness’. Third, the future remains highly uncertain. Only when the current impasse, or Gramsci’s notion of ‘interregnum’, is broken and the crisis further unfolds, will we have a better idea of whether conservatism, right-wing reactionary populism, the mildest form of Labourism or the left-of-centre radicalism and civic nationalism evident in Scotland and Northern Ireland, is to become the dominant, as opposed to the subordinate or residual, force.
Neville Kirk is Emeritus Professor of Labour and Social History at Manchester Metropolitan University. His publications include Labour and Society in Britain and the USA (1994), Comrades and Cousins (2003), Custom and Conflict in ‘The Land of the Gael’ (2007, 2009) and Labour and the Politics of Empire (2011, 2014). He is editor of Liverpool University Press’s series Studies in Labour History and a member of the executive committee of the UK Society for the Study of Labour History.
Find out more about British Society and its Three Crises on the Liverpool University Press website.
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