Description: "Since the 2007-9 financial crash and its aftershocks, international capitalism has once again been in crisis. In politics, social structure, the economy, culture and ideology, Western democracies seem to be fragmenting. Yet this crisis has been particularly marked in the UK, and its outcome is currently unclear. Based on a wealth of sources, Neville Kirk examines the systemic crisis currently facing the nations of the United Kingdom, by exploring how we ended up here. From 2010 and the politics of austerity, fall in living standards, crises in political leadership, Scottish nationalism, societal divisions and institutional fragmentation - to the present day consequences of the pandemic, inflation, polarised political parties, Brexit, the future of the Union, and cultural and ideological clashes around identity, class, race, gender and ethnicity in UK's past, present and future. By developing a thorough analysis of the UK's past and present crises, Kirk sheds light on how and what will determine whether the crisis is resolved, and in which 'old' conservative or 'new' radical ways"--
Brief description: Neville Kirk is Emeritus Professor of Social and Labour History at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. An expert in the field of labour history, he is on the steering committee of the international research group, 'Labour and Globalization' based at the University of Toronto, Canada, and is a member of the Advisory Boards of Labour History Review, The Society for the Study of Labour History, Labour History and International Labor and Working Class History. He is the Editor of Lives of the Left, a series of labour biographies and co-editor of the Dictionary of Labour Biography.