Britain After the Five Crises

The period 2008-2022 has seen the British government/ state embroiled in a number of full-blown crises, each impacting the fundamental operations of the state and demanding, therefore, urgent responses from the government of the day: in the first case, the 2008 near-collapse and partial nationalization of the banking system consequent upon decades of irresponsible credit creation; in the second, the migration crisis of 2015 which saw waves of refugees moving through Europe, provoking anxious responses from EU governments and impacting domestic UK political debates; thus, third, the impact of the 2016 referendum in regard to membership of the European Union which the London-based elite supposed they would navigate easily before to their evident shock losing, an event itself precipitating further extraordinary Westminster manoeuvring; and then fourth, the domestic impacts of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, met with an initial casual sangfroid before the government, its actions informed by modelling made an abrupt shift to 'lockdown' with dramatic social and economic consequences. To these episodes, whose impacts run down to the present, could be added, fifth, the 2022 disaster in Ukraine/ Europe, where the UK response has been to support one set of combatants in a conflict where presently there is little sign of a means to the resolution of the violence. This book examines the crises and tracks how each developed (chronologies/ cascades); how state/government failings in one case were rehearsed in the others (linkages/contagions); more generally how these crises have been amplified by the decades-long celebration of globalization theory (hubris/ nemesis) and, finally, more speculatively, at how following the most recent crisis the future might unfold, hence the ideas of deglobalization and the new state concern for resilience.