What went wrong with Britain?

Steven Kettell is a Reader in Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick. He is a founder and co-executive editor of the journal British Politics. Peter Kerr is an Associate Professor in Politics at the University of Birmingham. He is a founder and co-executive editor of the journal British Politics.Daniela Tepe is a Senior Lecturer in Political Economy at the University of Liverpool. Her recent publications include The Fault Lines of Inequality and the Politics of Financialization (2022).

• Introduction: what went wrong with Britain? – Steven Kettell, Peter Kerr and Daniela Tepe1 Talking the country up, talking the country down – Matthew Watson2 Missing the crisis? – James Morrison3 Covid, Brexit and the emergence of national populism – Owen Worth4 The UK’s chronic territorial condition – Jonathan Bradbury5 The crisis in our NHS pre- and post-Covid – Allyson M. Pollock, James Lancaster and Louisa Harding Edgar6 Who cares about care? – Juanita Elias, Ruth Pearson and Shirin M. Rai7 Social care or social harm? – Tamsin Bowers-Brown, Andrew Brierley and Alexander Nunn8 Cracks in the food system – Claire Thompson, Dianna Smith and Laura Hamilton9 What happened to all the anti-racists? – John Narayan10 Gender, austerity and crisis in an age of catastrophe – Frankie Rogan and Emma Foster11 The Conservatives and the climate crisis – Neil Carter12 The politics of debt and perpetual crisis – Johnna Montgomerie13 Brexit and the crisis of British democracy – Jonathan Hopkin14 Fighting back? – David Bailey15 Security in Britain today – Lee Jarvis and Michael Lister16 What’s wrong with Britain and what’s Britain got to do with it? – Colin HayIndex

CHOICE Recommended, Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals.‘Passionate, provocative and timely – an excoriating across-the-board audit from an impressive line-up of experts and an indispensable resource for anyone who cares about our country and hopes to see it change for the better.’Tim Bale, author of The Conservative Party after Brexit‘Inspired, as the authors admit, by frustration and despair, this book nevertheless provides important and acute analytical assessments of what went wrong under the Conservatives.’Anand Menon, co-author of Brexit and British Politics‘A uniquely comprehensive guide to the ruins that are collapsing all around us. The evidence collected in the book is so powerful that, as its conclusion argues, we now have only one course of action: to end the domination of a financial oligarchy whose extreme wealth is founded on the tragedies described so systematically here.’David Whyte, author of Ecocide: Kill the Corporation Before It Kills Us'Everything you would expect is here and quite a bit more. Matthew Watson charts the collapse of the Conservative Party – under Johnson of course, but also his successors – into populist crowing about British exceptionalism to mask governmental incompetence, most infamously during the Covid pandemic. James Morrison catalogues the years of denial about the UK’s structural and ever-widening levels of inequality, rooted in “moralising neoliberal narratives that individualise responsibility for poverty.” Claire Thompson, Dianna Smith and Laura Hamilton highlight Britain’s food poverty – among the worst in Europe. The chapter on the NHS is particularly telling.'Mike Phipps, Labour Hub