Preston england after the great recession; tracking the political and cultural consequences of the crisis (2012)

England after the Great
Recession
Tracking the Political and Cultural
Consequences of the Crisis

P.W. Preston


England after the Great Recession


Also by P. W. Preston:
NATIONAL PASTS IN EUROPE AND EAST ASIA (Routledge, 2010)
ARGUMENTS AND ACTIONS IN SOCIAL THEORY (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)
SINGAPORE IN THE GLOBAL SYSTEM: RELATIONSHIP, STRUCTURE AND CHANGE
(Routledge, 2007)
RELOCATING ENGLAND: ENGLISHNESS IN THE NEW EUROPE (Manchester
University Press, 2004)
UNDERSTANDING MODERN JAPAN: A POLITICAL ECONOMY OF DEVELOPMENT, CULTURE AND GLOBAL POWER (Sage, 2000)


England after the Great
Recession
Tracking the Political and Cultural
Consequences of the Crisis
P. W. Preston
Professor of Political Sociology, University of Birmingham, UK

Palgrave

macmillan

© P. W. Preston 2012
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 978-0-230-29087-7
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence
permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.
Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this
work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2012 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-33170-3
DOI 10.1057/9780230355675

ISBN 978-0-230-35567-5 (eBook)

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully
managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing
processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the
country of origin.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.


Contents
Preface

vi

Acknowledgements

vii

1

England: Place, Trajectory

2

War and Memory: Shifting Recollection down
the Generations

17

Changing Political Relationships: Europe and the

USA in the Early 21st Century

55

4

Freedom from ‘Britain’: A Comment on Recent
Elite-sponsored Political Cultural Identities

82

5

Cutting Scotland Loose: Soft Nationalism and
Independence-in-Europe

91

3

6
7
8

1

The Other Side of the Coin: Reading the Politics
of the 2008 Financial Tsunami

106

Downstream from the 2008–10 Crisis: Tracking the
Economic and Political Effects

123

England: Available Images, Imagined Futures

156

Bibliography

201

Index

215

v


Preface
The 2008–10 financial crisis has overthrown the settled conventional
wisdom embraced over the last thirty years in Washington and London,
the era of neo-liberalism. The crisis has had significant consequences
for economic and political thinking in practical politics, pragmatic
policy and abstract scholarly reflection. The model is now discredited.
A period of confusion will follow: it will involve debates in respect of
responsibility, debates in respect of policy lines and debates in respect of
explanations. A residual strand of neo-liberal thinking will be present,

but other lines will emerge as debate is likely to broaden; not just ‘fixing
the banks’ or ‘regulators’ or whatever, but a somewhat deeper discussion
of the design and consequences of debt-fuelled liberal market consumerism. The initial crisis of neo-liberalism passed yet the downstream
consequences continue to unfold. And within Britain, where both New
Labour and Conservative parties embraced these ideas, the model is
similarly discredited. It might be expected that the British polity will
reconfigure, with economic, social and political reform, but quite how
is anybody’s guess. In this text one aspect of these matters is pursued;
that is, the implications of the debacle for received political identities,
our sense of ourselves as members of an ordered collectivity and the
ways in which we might plot a route to the future. Given the disorder,
received thinking cannot other than be in question – so what changes
might be envisaged?

vi


Acknowledgements
Over the years I have had the marvellous opportunity of living and
working in a number of countries in Europe and East Asia. Most of this
text was written whilst I was based in Hong Kong. Living and working
in Hong Kong was a delight and I should like to offer my thanks for
their congenial company to my colleagues and students at the Chinese
University of Hong Kong.
As most of the pieces here were written whilst living and working
overseas, they offer something of an outsider’s view of the politics of the
United Kingdom; they were produced for various audiences, and save for
three short pieces all have been revised for inclusion in this text.

vii

1
England: Place, Trajectory

The 2008–10 financial crisis marked the end of a thirty-year political/
intellectual period; it had been the era of corporate/financial world
ascendency informed and legitimated by the doctrines of neo-liberalism
but as events unfolded both the politics and the arguments disintegrated.1 The first phase of the crisis in 2008 engulfed the financial sectors of the United States and the United Kingdom. These were the dual
centres of the financial tsunami which ran around the global system in
that year. Following emergency state action it was thought that the crisis
had been contained. Nonetheless these events had multiple impacts:
first, they outraged populations (who are funding taxpayer-led bail-outs);
second, they inclined incumbent political elites to at least consider taking
the opportunity afforded by crisis to re-balance the economic/political
system in favour of the state (that is, in particular, to re-regulate the
financial world); and third, they severely damaged the intellectual credibility of the neo-liberal package (no longer could any theorist point to
the ideal of the self-regulating market place as the vehicle for maximizing human benefits). The second phase of the crisis came in 2010. The
centre of gravity was mainland Europe where there was a tangled web
of interrelated problems: the private sector debts of banks, the costs to
various states of supporting domestic banks, ongoing problems of overlarge public expenditures (now compounded), and there were related
problems with some eurozone economies where sovereign debt was
called into question. Thus a crisis of private debt modulated into a crisis
of public debt and debates in respect of unsustainable debt shifted their
focus from the private to the public sphere. All this underscored the
epochal nature of the crisis and the need for fresh thinking.
The first phase of the crisis, which culminated in the dramas of late
2008, has abated. The finance industry came to the brink of collapse and
1

2

England after the Great Recession

has been rescued by state intervention buttressed by taxpayer bail-outs
in turn secured by central bank sovereign debt issuance or ‘quantitative
easing’. In other words, rescuing the banks was a government action
and its success depends finally upon the political power/authority of
the state. The downstream consequences of these events continue to
unfold: there have been further impacts within the financial sector (talk
of regulatory reforms, lobby-group politics and further problems emerging in the guise of the European or phase two issues); there have been
further impacts within the real economy (disturbed patterns of investment in manufacturing and property, anxieties about employment and
continuing concerns about implications of crisis for pre-existing global
macro imbalances2); and there have been further impacts within the
political realm (incumbent parties punished by electorates,3 deeper
political failings uncovered, relating both to personnel and systems,4
and more generally the ways in which economic failure has impacted
the legitimacy of political systems).
The second phase of the crisis, however, which unfolded in early 2010,
continues to roll around the member states of the European Union. There
are numerous interlinked issues. In regard to urgent problems, commentators5 have noted, first, sovereign debt, in particular in Portugal, Ireland,
Greece and other Mediterranean countries (the so-called ‘PIIGS’), and
then, second, national and trans-European banks carrying state and private-sector debts, some related to member states’ sovereign debts, some
to involvement in the Anglo-American-style casino banking games and
others incurred through funding participation in wild property bubbles.
In regard to putative solutions, commentators have noted member state
confusion as to the ways in which states and Brussels should respond;
raised doubts about key political leaders6 marked the contested drift
towards fiscal conservatism; reported continuing debates about the

extent of regulatory reform and administrative oversight; and in the
later part of 2010 reported early data on the uneven economic and social
impacts of fiscal retrenchment.

The central concerns of the text
The downstream consequences of the 2008–10 debacle are running
through the economy, society and politics of the United Kingdom.
This is entirely unsurprising, and specialists are attending to various issues arising.7 This text, however, is concerned with the broad
political implications of the crisis. It marked the end of a politicalintellectual period and so three broad areas of concern (or central


England: Place/Trajectory

3

questions) are flagged: political – how will the core executive respond
in order to position the state within the global system (more status
quo or a more pragmatic focus on national interests or more European
Union?); intellectual – what might a domestic intellectual successor to
neo-liberalism look like (Thatcherism Mark IV or a Keynesian-inflected
pragmatism or a variant European social/Christian democracy?); and
cultural – how will the crisis impact the self-understandings of members
of the polity (a defensive nationalism, perhaps in the form of ‘little
Englanderism’, or an assertive pragmatism, or a cosmopolitan engagement oriented towards the outside world).
A number of lines of enquiry are open which might throw some light
on these questions: available lessons – the resources stored up in the historical experience of the polity, the diverse strands of tradition/culture
which constitute the polity’s collective memory, the sum total of the
myths, prejudices, official truths, taken-for-granted ideas, popular opinions, conserved artefacts and critical scholarship8; current system logics –
the constraints/opportunities afforded to elite actors by the structures
of power9 which constitute current regional and global systems; and

available agent resources – the various streams of self-conscious reflection
available to inform practice, both technical, the work of experts of one
sort or another, and interpretive-critical, the work of the denizens of
the public sphere.
Looking to the future it is possible to speculatively characterize a
number of possible political/intellectual projects (‘scenarios’). First, the
status quo affirmed, ‘the poodle option’,10 which would involve minimal
changes in the elite’s economic and political orientations, and is thus
a variant ‘dual parasitism’11 on the European Union cast as a free trade
area and on the USA as continuing post-bloc leader, where the key
agents/institutional bases for this orientation are the City, the defence/
security sector and the related core elements of the state, with some
supplementary ideological nostalgia. Second, a status quo evolution, ‘the
change-needed option’, which would be a species of muddling through
albeit involving changes in the elite’s economic and political orientations; centrally there would be a continuing focus on the European
Union as a free trade area but with less stress on American leadership,
although with no clear goal or model in view (overall, the stance would
be the consequence of the lessons of Prime Minister Blair’s wars in
respect of the incompetence of Whitehall/Westminster coupled with
a belated realization that the widespread international and domestic
recognition of the elite’s dependency upon the USA was not beneficial
to the general interests of the polity). The key agents/institutions for


4

England after the Great Recession

this orientation are a weakened City, a weakened defence/security sector
and the related core elements of the state plus a softening ideological

supplement). And, third, domestic reform and international rebalancing, ‘the
quiet European option’, where this would involve significant changes in
the elite’s economic and political orientations, in particular a pragmatic
turn towards national development, where this would entail acknowledging that domestic politics and policy can only be framed within the
context of Europe. The agents/institutional bases are the state plus allies
in Europe (unacknowledged) with, thereafter, the nostalgia reduced,12
the City and defence/security weakened and the stress on the leadership role of the USA ended (unacknowledged). The future becomes
both more European and, when cast in the terms of domestic political
debate, more open.
In respect of the United Kingdom, the conclusions offered will be
downbeat: first, Britain is best described as oligarchic in political form,
that is, the polity is ordered by networks of elite power remote from the
general population, and this is unlikely to change; second, the polity is
formally governed around a core executive, and this too is remote from
the general population (it fails the simple test of Karl Popper13), and it
too is unlikely to change; and third, the project which these interlinked
elites pursue, and the manner in which it is theorized/legitimated, will
change (it is doing so, it has to – that is what ‘crisis’ means), and here
the scenarios sketched will identify a range of future possibilities, but
from these one alternative will be underscored and here the argument
will point to an increase in the salience of Europe. In summary, the
European Union is likely to become the ever more obvious framework
of domestic politics – a variant of scenario number three – but the pace
of change is likely to be snail-like, and the domestic elite/core executive will give ground both to Brussels and its own population only very
slowly.

Neo-liberalism: the thirty-year hegemony
The financial crisis of 2008–10 marked the end of a thirty-year period
within the Anglo-Saxon politico-cultural realm of political, policy and
intellectual confidence in respect of the fundamental logics of the global (non) system.14 The clarity revolved around the political tenets of

neo-liberalism, themselves an emphatic variant restatement of the fundamental claims of the long-established tradition of liberal economic
and political thinking. Liberal notions of political freedom were run
together with claims in respect of the benefits of liberal market systems


England: Place/Trajectory

5

such that in recent years the tag ‘market democracies’ appeared. In
some contexts the package was presented in political terms, thus the
familiar claims about ‘universal human rights’ (often directed at those
with whom the USA, or to a lesser extent the European Union member
states, disagreed), but, more pragmatically, the key to the package lay
in its economic practice, the expansion of Anglo-American-style competitive market capitalism, where such practice was in part informed
by, and in part legitimated by, the theoretical claims of mainstream
neo-liberal economics.15
Four key claims for the benefits of a competitive market system
were made by mainstream neo-liberal market theorists:16 first, to the
maximization of material wealth; second, to the maximization of moral
value; third, to the maximization of political freedom; and fourth, to the
maximization of knowledge. Thereafter these ideas were the basis for
an aggressive Western stance towards the rest of the world – in part, in
the long post-war period they served as a counterpart to more securityoriented cold war bloc-think and thereafter, following the events of
1989–91, they were an aspect of the triumphalism of the interregnum
during which the end of history was taken to have involved the achievement of the definitive priority of ‘market democracies’. Such hubristic
thinking dominated the last years of the twentieth century and ran
on into the early decade of the twenty-first; the USA and its allies and
partners affirmed the policy nostrums of deregulation, privatization
and the benefits of self-regulated liberal marketplace activity; they also

celebrated the model of liberal democracy (although in the event, the
former concerns have proved to be the greater preoccupation, the latter
somewhat optional17).
The initial extension of these ideas was accomplished through the
Bretton Woods system: the agreement established the governing institutions of the post-Second World War liberal market sphere; it was
dominated by the USA, acquiesced in by Europeans in the west of the
continent (in the ruins of the end of the war years they had little choice,
as was made clear by the USA) and constructed so as to block the participation of the state socialist countries (that is, the USSR and its allies,18
which pursued their own semi-autarchic strategies). Other countries
within the newly established ‘third world’ could declare for a nonaligned strategy but in practice they came to lean one way or another.
The system affirmed a set of rules governing economic activity, both
domestic, where the preference was for the corporate world, or support
to encourage the emergence of such a sphere, and international, where
preferences pointed towards free trade-style relations rather than closely


6

England after the Great Recession

regulated activity. There were many exceptions to these general rules
(so, for example, allies in Europe and East Asia were given extensive
help in reconstruction or development, with Keynesian-style planning
stressed); however, within the broader American-dominated sphere the
preference was for policy choices which favoured marketplaces and
avoided state direction (thus, for example, Latin America nationalist
developmentalism was liable to be mis-characterized as socialist, and
resisted and routinely subverted).
Nonetheless, during the 1970s this particular settlement came under
pressure: the USA suffered from the costs of the Vietnam War; the oil

shocks introduced inflationary pressures; and what had been a successful pattern of development – in the West and elsewhere – came to be
dogged by low growth and high inflation. Celebrants of market liberalism argued successfully for a change in direction, and in the AngloSaxon sphere in particular governments made space for the corporate
world to assume a greater role in determining the direction of development of society. The neo-liberal project was thereby inaugurated.
Later, these ideological and policy dispositions were reinforced by the
1989–91 collapse of European state socialist systems and a period of liberal triumphalism ensued – claims to the dominance of the Washington
Consensus, claims to the ethico-political end of history and a drumbeat
of celebration of the inevitable and desirable process/goal of liberal
globalization.19 The project and package of ideas ran effectively for
some thirty years: political elites were committed – Washington, London
and elsewhere within the broad spread of allies, sometimes tagged the
Anglo-Saxon economies, sometimes the West; institutional mechanisms
were effective – in America, the Wall Street–Treasury–World Bank/IMF
nexus and as a secondary centre, in London, the City plus Westminster/
Whitehall; and thereafter, the influence of this grouping within international organizations – the IMF, World Bank, WTO and so on; and on
the face of it the results were good – a long run of economic growth (in the
metropolitan heartlands and in the policy-privileged area of East Asia),
further spurred by de-mobilizing labour representatives, that is, shifting
the political balance away from labour and towards industry and the
state;20 then, in later years, successful growth became a debt-fuelled
bubble economy with the paradoxical overall results of economic
growth, social inequality and broad popular acquiescence.
However, returning to the central claims, it is the case that the intellectual core of the neo-liberal project has been widely criticized.21 First, the
claims in respect of material production were essentially technical, that
is, liberal marketplace competition would determine prices and these


England: Place/Trajectory

7

signals would distribute knowledge and thus resources appropriately
(recently celebrated in the financial markets in the guise of the ‘efficient
markets hypothesis22), but economic activity is always and everywhere
lodged within social systems and these carry elaborate schedules of rules
of behaviour and any attempt to reduce these multiple social logics
to the model of instrumental rational calculation identified by liberal
market theorists as the key to market functioning is an error (an a priori
ideological commitment being preferred to the results of social scientific enquiry). The claim to maximize material wealth fails. Second, the
claims in respect of moral value were ethical/ideological. Liberals take
action and responsibility for action to reside with the individual person,
thus as the liberal market prioritizes individual action, so it fosters the
maximization of moral worth. But the autonomous individual of the
liberal imagination is a fiction because human beings are always and
everywhere embedded in dense networks of social relationships, and
these in turn carry elaborate schemes of right behaviour, where, in contrast, liberalism offers an incoherent package of subjective calculation
plus claims to rights within bureaucratically (managerially) ordered societies.23 The claim to maximize moral value fails. Third, a related claim
points to the liberal market system requiring only a minimum state, an
institution/organization able to enforce contracts, thereby minimizing
restrictions upon autonomous individuals. The system maximizes political freedom, but as persons are lodged not merely in society but also
within polities the claim to negative liberty entails affirming an asocial
model of humankind, that is, an ideal of isolation/autonomy in place
of acknowledging the thoroughgoing social nature of human life and
casting political life in terms of participation/membership. The claim
to maximize freedom fails. And fourth, the package is buttressed by
the claim to the status of a positive science, thus economic knowledge
is maximized. Here, first, the claim is a restricted one – knowledge of
economic life is maximized but not so much as to allow collective planning of economic activity. Knowledge of liberal markets is maximized,
not knowledge of the business of the social production of livelihood
(which would open up economic anthropology and sociology where
neither discipline is disposed to celebrate liberal markets as universal

models). Then here, second, the positivistic model of science invoked is
open to question, or more strongly, would be widely rejected amongst
philosophers of social science,24 matters noted in connection with the
2008 financial tsunami. The claim to maximize knowledge fails.
The core intellectual claims of the neo-liberal position fail; they are
unsustainable. These issues have long been debated amongst specialists


8

England after the Great Recession

but over the period 2008–10 the project experienced a very public
double failure. In the 2008 phase of crisis the project experienced acute
problems within certain parts of the financial system which spilled
out through the whole banking system into the productive economy
and thereafter, as a result of inevitable economic contraction, out into
the wider social world. The crisis was such as to require both national
state responses and coordinated action between the states with most at
risk in damaged financial sectors. States printed money (quantitative
easing), flooded the financial system with liquidity and collapse was
averted. The downstream consequences of the crisis – financial, economic, social and political – continue to unfold. In 2010 a second phase
of the crisis erupted in Europe: sovereign debt problems, over-exposed
banks and a political system seemingly unable to respond quickly to
pressures generated within the financial system.25
In regard to 2008 a number of key points can be made: first, the
failure was intellectual – the intellectual machineries of neo-liberalism
failed as they could neither explain the collapse nor provide policy
advice about repairs (but banks and their supporters did seek to defend
their position against calls for systemic reform); second, the failure was

political – thirty years of celebration of markets plus individualism plus
consumption led to bubble economies in America and Britain (and
the outrider neo-liberal spheres such as Ireland and Iceland) and then
collapse, so greed was not good, rather it was foolish; third, the failure
was institutional – the apparatus of financial neo-liberalism (the banks
and regulators in Wall Street and the City of London, plus their offshore bases and links to other institutional/regulatory environments in
Europe and East Asia) failed as there were simultaneous crises of liquidity and solvency in core banking organizations and the system came
close to collapse before being rescued by state action in America, Britain
and elsewhere (depending on the extent of buy-in to neo-liberal practice/ideology); fourth, a related failure was in legitimation – neo-liberal
theories had a role in legitimizing the liberal market-centred system
and as the apparatus failed, neo-liberalism could offer no statements in
support of the system (but some tried, arguing that the market would
have solved the problem if the state had not interfered or arguing that
market had not failed, rather the state had with insufficient regulation;
however, such arguments were widely derided); and fifth, the failure
was social – thirty years of buying into the celebration of the market
left American and British citizens in particular exposed when the crash
came with debt and unemployment; the absence of alternate models
was revealed – if not consumer individualism, then what?


England: Place/Trajectory

9

In regard to 2010 a number of points can be made. First, the problems have been two-fold; both economic, that is, problems in regard
to finance within both the private spheres and public sectors of member countries, and political, that is, the lack of agreement, or speed in
action, of member state governments. Second, the financial crisis (both
private and sovereign debt issues) has spilled over into the more general
politics of the European Union. In general, mainland elites are committed to the project of ‘ever closer union’ (whilst populations are more

wary), but this is not the case with the British elite. So there is a disjunction between the views of insiders who read the euro as a core element
of the European project, and outsiders, in particular market players in
Wall Street and the City of London, who read the current problems in
terms of available economic theory (which seems to run in line with
their inclination to speculative profit-making and a strand of hostility
towards the European project).
In sum, the upshot of the 2008–10 debacle of neo-liberalism opens up
two general lines of reflection: first, how to conceptualize and organize
the business of livelihood – the decisive practical rejection of the claims
of neo-liberalism allows/invites a turn to other traditions of intellectual
reflection upon matters ‘economic’, thus, political economy, institutional economics, economic anthropology and economic sociology,
where the last pair in particular point to a core notion around which
strands of debate can revolve, that is, ‘the pursuit of livelihood’;26 and
second, how to conceptualize and organize the business of political
membership of ordered communities27 – the rejection of neo-liberalism
(with its atomistic individuals in pursuit of autonomously arising wants
which can be satisfied in a contractually ordered competitive consumer
marketplace) allows/invites a turn to other philosophical traditions –
ideas of authenticity28 – ideas of community29 – ideas of democracy.30

The United Kingdom – reading changing trajectories
The 2008 crisis had a double centre in Wall Street and the City of
London, the latter having in significant measure during the era of
neo-liberalism become an offshore base for the former, such that one
available joke tagged the City as Wall Street’s ‘Guantanamo Bay’, a place
where activities contrary to the demands of the US regulatory regime (or
illegal31) could be undertaken with impunity. The crisis undermined the
pro-market policy stance of the British state as decades of celebration of
the marketplace in general and recently, more particularly, the financial
marketplace, came to an abrupt halt. New Labour were ejected from

10

England after the Great Recession

power.32 They were replaced by a Liberal-Conservative coalition and
although their programme is still in process of formulation, two lines of
political/legislative reform can be seen: first, a measure of re-regulation
of the finance industry; and second, a measure of reduction in the fiscal role of the state within the economy/polity. And whilst the change
in party rule in Westminster is of little interest in itself, what is more
interesting – and cloudy – are the deeper responses of power holders
to the crisis, that is, new patterns of understanding and new lines of
policy-making.
This crisis implies a number of lines of reflection specific to the
situation of the United Kingdom: first, the British elite have embraced
neo-liberalism over the last thirty years – James Callaghan33 made the
first moves and thereafter they were pursued by Margaret Thatcher and
Blair/Brown34 down to 2008.35 It has failed and enquiry must turn to
consider a prospective domestic successor to neo-liberalism (political
stances, policy orientations, institutional mechanisms and the public
explanation/legitimation of these practices); second, the British elite
found consolation for loss of empire in the claim to the status of
number one ally to the USA – this was how they positioned Britain
within global system – but as the global system reconfigures, any simple
continuation of that role seems unlikely – a trend underscored by the
crisis – and enquiry must turn to consider a prospective replacement
of this role; third, the general population has enjoyed both the benefits
of the welfare state and the particular satisfactions of consumerism but
as the downstream consequences of the crisis unfold and fiscal conservatism takes hold – and as familiar post-Second World War patterns

of collective self-understanding are challenged – enquiry must turn to
consider likely future developments.
The issue of political cultural identity, the ways in which people
locate themselves within an ordered community, has been the subject
of a series of earlier texts. The focus of these texts has shifted: first, the
notion of Britain was considered;36 then, moving back, the business of
identity in general was debated;37 and thereafter, moving forwards, further work considered the implications of the growing importance of the
European Union for ideas of Englishness.38 But overall, these texts comprise an unfolding examination of the political culture of the denizens
of the United Kingdom – the core of the diagnosis is of an asymmetrical
distribution of power that makes the structure of the polity oligarchic;
the machineries of government are centralized (and the core executive
is not subject to any routine informed control) and the role of parliament is essentially decorative (and the electoral system – one aspect of


England: Place/Trajectory

11

any claim to ‘democracy’ – is systemically corrupt), with the general
population demobilized with their patterns of life under-girded by the
welfare state and their attention directed to the spheres of mass popular
culture and the realms of consumption. And now, this text returns to
these concerns and looks at the implications of the 2008–10 debacle
of the neo-liberal project of market democracy, arguing, in respect of
the United Kingdom, the crisis has been such that it cannot but have
implications for the ways in which elite and mass conceive their polity
and its possible futures.
The materials gathered in this text address this agenda under three
broad headings:
• available lessons – legacies – resources stored up within the trajectory

taken by Britain – (if men make their own history but not as they
choose, then what is the scope for choosing?);
• current system logics – the implications for the British core executive
of the changing location of the polity within trans-state flows of
power – that is, the processes of global re-balancing, including the
rise of the BRICs, the deepening importance of the European Union
and the slow relative decline of the USA; and
• available agent group resources – the ideas available for the reconstruction of England – institutional machineries and ideas and agents.
The text is constructed as a number of interlinked discussions. First – any
re-imagining of the polity will need to draw on established ideas/
practices. These point to the realm of collective memory and the idea
of the national past – the ways in which memories are carried down
the generations and the more particular issue of the national past, those
elite-dominated ideas which offer the polity a tale of where it came from,
how it is configured and where, by implication, it is going. These matters
are pursued in Chapter 2. Second – any re-imagining of the polity will
have to locate it within wider international patterns. Here elite concerns
for the United States and for the European Union are considered; residual
concerns for empire in the guise of the Commonwealth are not important except insofar as they evidence a deep-seated strand of nostalgia
within the polity. Links with the United States have undergone a series
of shifts in recent years as the 1989–91 to 2008–10 period has unfolded –
hubris has led to an inevitable fall. The American debacle (economic and
military) has had consequences for the situation and self-understandings
of an elite who have understood themselves to be the number one ally
in Europe. The second major link is with the European Union – an elite


12

England after the Great Recession

response to the debacle of civil war – cast in economic terms but always
serving a political goal. The record of the continent and the European
Union is remarkable, but the British contribution is minimal – seemingly
a search for a loose free trade area, all the while accompanied by mediacarried denigration. For the British elite the 2008–10 crises may have
made Europe both more important and more unstable/uncertain. These
matters are pursued in Chapter 3. In a related fashion, any re-imagining
of the polity will in part be informed by elite ideas (as the political
structure of the polity is a species of soft oligarchy) – some debates are
under way, and sections of the elite have offered an unsophisticated
celebration of Britain and Britishness, while others have reacted negatively to the rise of nationalism within Scotland. These are discussed in
Chapters 4 and 5. Third the 2008–10 financial crisis has undermined the
persuasiveness (such as it was) of these responses – political economists
argue that economics and politics are two sides of the same coin, that
being the case, the crisis can be expected to have a spread of political
consequences – it can be argued that the line of travel of response can
only be for domestic reform and a greater role for Europe. These matters
are pursued in Chapters 6 and 7. And then, continuing, any re-imagining of the polity will be informed by (in addition to elite ideas) those
resources carried within received culture (both ideas and ideas embedded
in practice) – ideas of England and Englishness are available, and these
matters are pursued in Chapter 8.
The conclusions are downbeat. The British polity is a soft oligarchy. The
crucial interlinked power holders inhabit a nexus which binds Whitehall,
the corporate world and the armed forces/monarchy. Internationally,
these same power holders are firmly linked to Washington via finance,
security and ideology. The 2008–10 financial debacle has disturbed
these networks of power. Looking to the future, three scenarios can be
described: first, an affirmation of the status quo ante – the British elite
opt for what they know and what they know is subordination to the
model of the USA and the demands of its state machinery; second, an

acknowledgment of the need for a change in direction, with none specified, a species of muddling through; and third, a more self-conscious but
veiled choice for Europe, granting that the Union is the immediate given
frame for domestic politics and the model for internal reforms. However,
any change is likely to be carefully managed by the elite and as a consequence is likely to be the minimum necessary to maintain those patterns
of power which sustain the polity as a whole. The system is well insulated
from popular pressures but the scale of the debacle – in particular in relation to the important financial sector – is such that some rebalancing of


England: Place/Trajectory

13

forces within the elite is likely. Further, wider changes are not ruled out
but are unlikely to significantly disturb – at least in the short term – the
current status quo.

Notes
1. A general economic history of the post-Second World War period in the West
would draw a distinction between the early 1950–1960s Bretton Woods era
and the later 1980s-onwards neo-liberal era. In this vein the later period
can be tagged the era of neo-liberalism; it was a political project – a mix of
ideas (about ‘markets’), institutions (‘minimum/regulatory state’), players
(the corporate world in general and the financial world more particularly)
and practice (the Reagan/Thatcher years). In the case of the UK the inauguration of the neo-liberal era can be dated to the late 1970s, with Denis
Healey turning back from the airport to deal with an economic crisis or Jim
Callaghan telling his supporters that the days of easy Keynesian stimulus
spending were over. And the demise of the system can be dated to the period
2008–10: crucial institutions are discredited (the finance sector and the
regulatory state), key players revealed as foolish or venal or both (in markets
and the state) and the ideas undermined (core claims of market liberalism

are discredited – and commentators make jokes about ‘physics envy’) – but
this does not mean that the power of the celebrants of market liberalism is
instantly voided. It is not, hence the downstream processes of reconstruction
will be drawn out – in historical context, it took thirty-odd years to build the
neo-liberal edifice. It will take similar periods of time to replace it.
2. Now a long-running area of anxiety – see Martin Wolf, ‘Faltering in a Sea of
Debt’, Financial Times, 19 April 2011.
3. Obviously enough – the Anglo-Saxon world saw governing parties on both
sides of the Atlantic thrown out of office – G. W. Bush in the midst of the
autumn crisis of 2008, Gordon Brown slightly later.
4. For example, for discussions about the alleged incompetence of key policy
players see, for example, Anatole Kaletsky (2010) who excoriates the performance of Henry Paulson (pp. 128 et seq) and notes the, in retrospect,
bizarre belief sets of Alan Greenspan (p. 7), or the weak efforts of regulatory
bodies on both sides of the Atlantic or, in regard to the United Kingdom, the
extraordinary revelations about the behaviour of parliamentarians (see Daily
Telegraph, autumn months 2009).
5. Here – and throughout the text – ‘commentators’ signals those specialist journalists (and sometimes academics and officials) writing in the mainstream
European press whose contacts with government and corporate circles make
their work well-informed – Financial Times, The Economist, Der Spiegel, Le
Monde, The Guardian, The Independent, and other sources mentioned directly.
Interesting material also turns up in non-newspaper sources such as the
London Review of Books, New York Review of Books and New Left Review.
6. For example, Wolfgang Munchau in the Financial Times has been a vocal
critic of the German and French leaders.
7. In the early autumn run-up to the Chancellor’s ‘autumn spending review’
the mainstream United Kingdom newspapers were full of experts of one sort


14

8.

9.
10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

England after the Great Recession
or another predicting problems in regard to spending cuts, politicians of
one sort or another predicting various sorts of trouble and unionists of one
sort or another predicting waves of strikes and public protests; but these are
not the concern of this text, rather the focus is on the ways in which the
elite situate themselves, intellectually and politically – or, in brief, how they
formulate a novel project for the polity.
This points to the territory of the arts and humanities – history, philosophy and most directly, cultural studies, those disciplines concerned with
the ways practical experience is sedimented in culture and passed on to
be worked and reworked by successor generations. See, for example, Inglis
(1993).
An idea taken from Strange (1988).
The characterization of the United Kingdom state/government as an
American ‘poodle’ is well-established – and recognized by the elite – see
House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee (2010), paragraphs 184–96,

especially para 192 – but more interestingly, Perry Anderson extends the
criticism (but not this particular terminology) to the generality of the member states of the European Union – see Anderson (2009), pp. 67–77.
See Preston (1994b); the tag pointed to the ways in which the British elite
positioned themselves. However, it might be that the links to the USA are
the key – hence New Labour’s neo-liberalism and Atlanticism (see Lee [2009];
Harvie [2010]). What is noticeable in commentary in 2010 is that the Blair
era is now written out of the story – the early promises of New Labour
included ‘putting Britain at the heart of Europe’ (it never happened – instead
there were varieties of pro-Americanism from Brown and late Blair).
One might run this the other way – more nostalgia as cover for a turn
towards Europe plus the passage of time and generations makes the Second
World War (a key element in the UK’s national past) increasingly a matter of history and theme parks and reconstructions and the like – that is,
it becomes nostalgia at secondhand, figuring less in both personal and
political identities. Recall A. P. Cohen in Self-Consciousness: An Alternative
Anthropology of Identity (1994) – rituals are not descriptions of reality; rather
they are social conventions with reference to which social interactions are
ordered (see, for example, p. 92).
Popper distinguished ‘democratic’ and ‘totalitarian’ polities in terms of
whether or not their governments could be changed without bloodshed –
the role of competitive elections – but in contemporary Britain, whilst it is
possible for the population to change its politicians, the core executive and
deeper networks of power are beyond its reach.
International relations theorists, mainstream economists and others happily speak of ‘the global system’ – this is an error; the concept of ‘system’
implies an integrated collection of parts – but this does not describe the
pattern of economy, society and polity. Rather the contemporary pattern is
the contingent out-turn of a multiplicity of particular, historically embedded
processes – the pattern is contingent – hence the formulation ‘global (non)
system’. However as the neologism is unattractive the phrase ‘global system’
will continue to appear.
There is a slippery issue here – neo-liberal economics describes an ideal

model – but it is used to inform policy (for example, ‘efficient markets’ and the


England: Place/Trajectory

16.
17.

18.

19.

20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.

26.
27.
28.
29.
30.

31.

32.

15

‘rational actor’ – see George Soros and other commentators on the financial
crisis). It is also claimed to be scientific, that is, reliable. Unfortunately it has
turned out to be nonsense. The system itself, that is industrial capitalism, may
be experiencing problems but it endures – many would say its practical logic
is better grasped by using the tools of political economy, a very different intellectual/moral strategy for making sense of the business of human livelihood.
Preston (1994a), p. 95.
A familiar point made most recently in regard to the variable nature of the
responses of the governing classes of the European Union and United States
to the events of the 2011 ‘Arab Spring’ (matters tracked through April 2011
in The Independent).
In other words, the eastern state socialist bloc. As regards China, the civil war
and the split between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic
of China (ROC, that is, Taiwan) complicated matters.
It should be noted that there were many critics – in political economy,
development theory or those associated with ideas of the developmental
state – but the orthodox consensus was powerful (on American nationalism,
see Lieven [2004]).
The strong state and free economy line (Andrew Gamble) – or authoritarian
populism (the Stuart Hall line).
On this see Preston (1994a), Chapter 5.
See Cooper (2008).
MacIntyre (1985).
On this see Preston (2009), which argues for an interpretive critical understanding of the nature and possibilities of social science.
For a gloomy running commentary see Wolfgang Munchau in the Financial
Times; and – pointing up the political aspects of these problems – for a cheerful running commentary see contributors to the Daily Telegraph.
A sketch of such a discussion is drawn in Preston (1994a), Chapter 5.
This points to the domaine assumptions of politics/policy – how polities are
conceived – a vast area, and the territory of political philosophers/theorists.
For example, notions associated with existentialism and the stress on personal moral choices – not simply utilitarian calculation.

For example, Alasdair MacIntyre (1985) rejects liberalism’s autonomous individual and points to the business of living well within a community.
For example, C. B. Macpherson has rejected the claims to maximize utilitarian power lodged by liberalism and has argued instead for a return to a richer
notion of human power, available within traditions of democracy.
More is needed on this – an intellectual route in is provided by Christopher
Harvie (2010, pp. 24–7) via the notion of ‘illegalism’ – the intersection of
criminal activity with sharp business practice – sourced to Mack and Kerner
(1975). In regard to the crisis, recall Bernie Madoff’s massive Ponzi fraud or,
as reported in the Financial Times (16 July 2010), Goldman Sachs being fined
half a billion dollars over the Abacus affair by the Securities and Exchange
Commission, with opinion reported as thinking they had got off lightly. The
Daily Telegraph of the same date ran a sub-heading ‘Goldman’s Reputation Is
Dirt but Brand Is Still Strong’.
It is likely that responsibility for the debacle will be debated over the next
few years – early responses by commentators and scholars place Gordon


16

33.
34.

35.

36.
37.
38.

England after the Great Recession
Brown and his ally Ed Balls at the centre of the problems – they bought into
both neo-liberal economics and Atlanticism, and they blocked involvement

with the European Union, in particular participation in the launch of the
euro currency (Harvie 2010; Lee 2009; Peston 2008).
See Marquand (2008), pp. 260–74.
Arguments were evident in the mainstream press over the period to the
effect that Brown’s economics were in significant measure determined by
Ed Balls.
Peston (2008) records that inequality – one way of measuring the enthusiasm of elites for the marketplace – declined slightly under John Major. It rose
under Mrs Thatcher of course, and also climbed sharply under Blair/Brown.
Preston (1994b).
Preston (1997).
Preston (2004).


2
War and Memory: Shifting
Recollection down the
Generations1

Three ideas can frame discussions of memory. First, the idea of collective
memory, which points to the various ways in which events in the past are
selected, lodged in the present and made available for reworking in the future.
Collective memory is not unitary, rather it presents itself in diverse strands,
each the product of a discrete social location, family or community or organization or state or whatever. Second, the idea of the national past, which points
to the arena of common political identity and tells a community where it
came from, who it is and where ideally it might hope to be in the future. It
is another subtle construct, a contested compromise between the demands of
the elites and the various recollections of the masses. And the third idea, the
most fundamental, and now familiar, is that the past is no simple record of
events, rather it is a social construction, the outturn of subtle social processes
whereby materials are taken from the flow of events and refashioned as statements about history. One strand of work is carried in memoirs. Such work

offers a quite particular view of the past; informal, idiosyncratic and personal;
it offers later generations a distinctive route into that past, a species of direct
access, a prompt perhaps for other more systematic work. And at the present
time, as the circumstances in which Europeans find themselves change (thus,
most generally, macro-changes in global political economic relations with the
relative decline of the USA and the concomitant rise of East Asia), there are
pressures to revisit and re-imagine received understandings, and in this task
memoirs allow present generations to access the often engaging non-official
past, providing thereby a useful resource in thinking about possible futures.
In recent years in Britain there has been some general public discussion of the nature of war: debate has focused on interventions in the
Middle East; in all this one position has been clearly articulated by
17