England After the Great Recession : Tracking the Political and Cultural Consequences of the Crisis

An exploration of the recent financial crisis which argues that the hitherto dominant intellectual and policy paradigm of neo-liberalism has been fatally weakened and will in due course be replaced. The implications of the crisis for politico-cultural identities and our sense of ourselves as members of an ordered society are explored. England after the Great Recession looks at the implications of the recent financial crisis and argues that the hitherto dominant intellectual and policy paradigm of neo-liberalism has been fatally weakened and will in due course be replaced. The crisis has had significant consequences for economic and political thinking, including practical politics, pragmatic policy and scholarly reflections. It is likely that a period of confusion will follow and that it will involve debates in respect of responsibility, policy lines and explanations. A residual strand of neo-liberal thinking will remain, but other lines of thinking will emerge as debate is likely to broaden from 'fixing the banks' to a deeper discussion of the design and consequences of debt fuelled liberal market consumerism. This model, embraced by New Labour and also the Conservatives has now been discredited. It might be expected that British polity will be reconfigured, with economic, social and political reform, but quite how is unclear. In this book the implications of the crisis for received politico-cultural identities and our sense of ourselves as members of an ordered collectivity are explored. Given the disorder, received identities are in question -- so what changes might be envisioned? Front Matter....Pages i-vii England: Place, Trajectory....Pages 1-16 War and Memory: Shifting Recollection down the Generations....Pages 17-54 Changing Political Relationships: Europe and the USA in the Early 21st Century....Pages 55-81 Freedom from ‘Britain’: A Comment on Recent Elite-sponsored Political Cultural Identities....Pages 82-90 Cutting Scotland Loose: Soft Nationalism and Independence-in-Europe....Pages 91-105 The Other Side of the Coin: Reading the Politics of the 2008 Financial Tsunami....Pages 106-122 Downstream from the 2008–10 Crisis: Tracking the Economic and Political Effects....Pages 123-155 England: Available Images, Imagined Futures....Pages 156-200 Back Matter....Pages 201-223