Chapter 5 turns to westward labor migration from the EU’s newly acceded Central and East European (CEE) states to the EU15 from 2004. Despite the EU’s promise full social inclusion, the migration followed an exclusionary cycle. Focusing on Britain, the chapter shows how migrants’ EU-mandated free entry and social rights provoked a welfare nationalist backlash that was amplified by the tabloid press and reflected in opinion polls and in growing support for the populist, anti-immigrant United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). Relying on government documents, the chapter shows how Britain’s social security bureaucracy progressively rescinded CEE labor migrants’ social rights while the government adopted exclusionary migration reforms, culminating in the 2016 Brexit vote that ended CEE migrants’ entry rights. The Brexit Settlement Scheme preserved residence rights for some on ethnically and economically discriminatory bases. Comparative case studies of CEE migration to Germany, Sweden, and Italy show that each followed the British model ‘part of the way,’ adopting more selective exclusionary policies that discriminated the poorer, younger and less-skilled. The conclusion explains why the EU failed in the effort to extend its egalitarian, inclusionary, European citizenship project eastward.

From Brexit to the rise of China, the deterioration of the special relationship with the United States and the return of war to Europe in Ukraine, this chapter will explore how the UK’s position in the world has faced both challenges and opportunities over the last fourteen years. The analysis will focus on how different Conservative premierships used or wasted these global changes, and how it has affected UK foreign policy and Britain as a whole (particularly Brexit’s influence on domestic policy and politics).

The fourteen years of Tory rule constitute a stunning missed opportunity to seize on one of Britain’s few internationally renowned assets – its creativity. The government did step in to save organisations from disaster during the pandemic; it did, early on, extend its successful system of tax credits from film and TV to other cultural forms. It did the beat drum for extending demographic opportunities, even if in its actions it did not follow through. What mattered at least as much as specific decisions in this latest Tory era, particularly the latter part under May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak, was the manner of government engagement. Many in the sector are demoralised, having to raise private funds while being disparaged by ministers.

Any fair evaluation of the Conservative effect (2010-14) must be cognisant of the context. Tom Egerton’s chapter will place the Conservative premierships in the six external shocks Britain faced, beginning with the Great Financial Crash and the Eurozone Crisis, before the impact of Brexit (and a debate over its external and structural causes), Covid, the Russo-Ukrainian War and the inflation crisis. How did each government succeed or fail in the face of compounding shocks? What opportunities and constraints emerged as a result? Only through an analysis of a decade of poly-crisis, and in the perspective of wider political change, can we make a conclusion on the question of ‘fourteen wasted years’.

International pressures, Brexit and the resurgence of nationalism have created new divides in the regions of the United Kingdom. Brendan O’Leary examines the impact of Conservative policy in Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales, focusing on how prime ministers have handled campaigns and support for Scottish independence, the ruling coalitions in Wales, and also the new post-Brexit framework and demographic pressures in Northern Ireland. The chapter ends with a dire overall evaluation of the condition of the union as a result of Conservative policy.

A sustained period of Conservative government would normally be expected to usher in constitutional stability. But the reverse was largely true for the period 2010-24. During these years constitutional controversies were rarely far from the news, partly thanks to deliberately planned changes, but mostly due to radically shifting conventions and political behaviour. Across the time period, the direction of change was also very far from consistent. The initial coalition years were marked primarily by pressures towards greater constitutional pluralism, though Liberal Democrat reform ambitions were often held back by Cameron’s Conservatives. Later, any prospect of calm under single-party government was soon punctured by the pressures of Brexit. This eventually brought into question almost every aspect of the UK’s constitutional arrangements, and inflicted painful splits within the Conservative Party over questions of governance. In particular, Boris Johnson’s populist approach was characterised by wholesale disregard for constitutional norms, and highlighted vulnerabilities in the UK’s key democratic arrangements which few would previously have anticipated. If one commonality can be discerned across this fourteen-year period of constitutional extremes, it is the largely unconservative nature of policy.

This chapter discusses the entanglement of Brexit with the subsequent pandemic and the war in Ukraine, both of which have been used to muddy Brexit’s economic impact. It first analyses the rhetoric of the Leave campaign and of those politicians advocating for and negotiating Brexit. Those negotiations are bound to continue while politicians are reluctant to acknowledge Brexit as unfinished business. It then contextualizes contemporary fears of unlimited immigration as an echo of postimperial anxieties about British identity. These also feature in literary responses to Brexit which make them condition-of-England novels rather than investigations of wider Anglo-European relations. Forging a dialogue between the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and the fallout from the fourteenth-century bubonic plague suggests that political leadership and economic steer are crucial in determining a country’s recovery. How the pandemic was handled in the UK, paired with the economic impact of Brexit, aggravated the global supply issues caused by the war in Ukraine. This was not an inevitable outcome.

This chapter traces Ireland as a foundational zone of influence and creative disruption in the British imagination. Ireland’s political status has been altered by the Anglo-Irish relationship across centuries, while Britain, in turn, has been shaped by its interaction with the otherness of its closest island neighbour. Twelfth-century texts demonstrate that Ireland has acted as a foil to Britain’s imperial imagination, and it continued to do so throughout the subsequent literary and political history. The chapter discusses depictions of Ireland from Gerald of Wales to Edmund Spenser to William Shakespeare. Then it turns to examine the influence of Irish literature on the British imaginary. The enduring influence of Maria Edgeworth, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Samuel Beckett, and Seamus Heaney allows Britain to see itself through Irish eyes. Often, they reveal the occlusions and silences that exist within Britain’s self-imaginings. With Brexit shadowing the contemporary relationship between Britain, Ireland, and, of course, Europe, this dialogical Anglo-Irish relationship, whereby Ireland both reflects and distorts Britain’s image, becomes all the more significant.

The pro-Brexit campaign leading up to the 2016 referendum in the UK and in its aftermath was accompanied and driven by a narrative that was hostile to immigration and its cultural implications. Language played a role, with Leave campaigners criticising the presence of multiple languages in UK society and government agencies embarking on an 'English first' campaign that linked community languages to lack of integration and social incoherence. At the same time some arguments in support of foreign language learning embraced the Brexit narrative claiming that language skills will help post-Brexit Britain gain global influence. The chapter surveys different strands of UK language policy and concludes with an assessment of latest Census figures on language pointing to the increase in multilingualism.

Cities are contact zones characterised by conviviality of cultures. They have been described as the ideal setting for multilingual utopias, where institutional spaces emerge that cultivate multilingualism. In the context of globalisation and super-diversity, cities can redefine themselves as post-national spaces. Neoliberalism embraces diversity for its profitablity value; it is opposed by notions of the right to the city and local citizenship. Critical social and sociolinguistic theory embraces definitions of identity, community and language that recognise the dynamics of multiple components in individuals' repertoires of features and networks of practice. Traditional notions of identity, belonging, commuity and language give way to an appreciation of the fluidity of forms of belonging and networking practice. Diasporas are understood as translocal networks of practice with multiple expressions of belonging. Manchester as an early industrial city offers an interesting setting to observe the evolution of diaspora communities and their alignment with fluid language practices.

This chapter considers relations between the European Union and other European States. The European Economic Area establishes something close to a single market, with non-EU States transposing swathes of EU law into their national law. A customs union with Turkey in non-agricultural goods requires Turkey to align its laws with EU laws relating to external trade and free movement of goods. A hybrid regime exists with the United Kingdom. Northern Ireland aligns its external trade and free movement of goods law with EU law. A free trade agreement exists for the rest of the United Kingdom which abolishes tariffs on movement of goods but allows regulatory barriers. A free trade agreement also operates with Ukraine under which it aligns its laws with EU law in free movement of goods, most of free movement for services, environmental, labour and competition law. A limited free trade agreement exists with Switzerland, alongside a number of agreements in which Switzerland aligns its laws with EU law in return for access to the EU market or territory. The chapter also considers the ‘Brussels effect’ under which non-EU States and industries voluntarily adopt EU law to access the EU market.

From 1764 to 1776, there was a political crisis regarding the authority of the British Parliament over America. Yet the British case for parliamentary sovereignty was not particularly clear, and by 1774, most Americans argued that Parliament had no authority over internal affairs in America. Even English politicians and lawyers, such William Pitt the Elder and Lord Camden, argued that Parliament had no ability to tax the American colonies. In 1776, the American colonies declared their independence and a war of independence ensued, that Britain lost. But what could explain this disagreement over sovereignty? This chapter looks to several factors for explanation. These include the fact of Britain’s uncodified Constitution, which rendered it unclear which laws were in any case ‘constitutional’. There was also disagreement as to how the British Constitution applied in the colonies. Many Americans asserted that only a shared monarch connected American colonies legally to Britain and to each other, and that colonial assemblies were comparable to Parliament. There was, however, no acceptance of this in Britain, where the doctrine of undivided and unlimited sovereignty was increasingly employed by those in power.