10 - The Battle for Britain – and Beyond

Summary

There is a strange paradox about trying to write a concluding chapter while the deepening crisis and conflicts of this conjuncture are still playing out in dramatic ways. The Battle for Britain has taken ever stranger turns as the Conservative Party flails around, trying on Prime Ministers as though in a hat shop. So this is certainly not an ending; rather, it is a chance to take stock of the issues and arguments developed in the book and consider some of the possible routes through the present troubles. In the first part I reflect on what I see as the main lines of argument in the book. I then turn to questions of where we are in the conjuncture, before asking whether we are lodged in what Gramsci called an ‘interregnum’ – a point at which ‘the old is dying and the new cannot be born’ (Gramsci, 1971: 276). The puzzle of the interregnum leads me into a slight detour through the strangeness of metaphors, conceptual and political. After that, I consider what ways forward are being imagined and offered, before exploring how the possibilities for thinking and acting otherwise might be mapped. I end by suggesting that the political-cultural struggles for the future might be viewed through three linked sets of practices – reimagining, repairing and rearticulating.

Battling for Britain

Over the course of this book, I have tried to draw out the ways in which ‘Britain’ – this complex social and spatial imaginary – has been the focus of multiple conflicts over its past, present and future. From claims about ‘our history’ to the fracturing unity of the ‘United Kingdom’, from the discovery of the ‘left behind’ to the intensification of borders and bordering; from deepening coercion to deepening inequalities, Britain appears in multiple guises and is always contested. These battles for Britain have taken place around different focal points, on many different terrains and have involved different and complexly interwoven temporalities. These sites have included:

• • The moment of Brexit (and the ensuing struggles to ‘make it happen’) which exacerbated fractures in the unitedness of the United Kingdom, particularly in the increasingly fraught relationships between the Westminster-London-English system of governing and the other nations, challenging both the constitutional formation and political-cultural imaginary of the nation-state.