John Clarke 
The Battle for Britain 
Crises, Conflicts and the Conjuncture

This book addresses the social, political and economic turbulence in which the UK is embroiled. Drawing on Cultural Studies, it explores proliferating crises and conflicts, from the multiplying varieties of social dissent through the stagnation of rentier capitalism to the looming climate catastrophe.
Examining arguments about Brexit, class and ‘race’, and the changing character of the state, the book is underpinned by a transnational and relational conception of the UK. It traces the entangled dynamics of time and space that have shaped the current conjuncture.
Questioning whether increasingly anti-democratic and authoritarian strategies can provide a resolution to these troubles, it explores how the accumulating crises and conflicts have produced a deepening ‘crisis of authority’ that forms the terrain of the Battle for Britain.

Table of Content

Introduction: The Battle for Britain and Conjunctural Thinking
1. Nations, Nationalisms and the Conjuncture
2. Turbulent Times: The Making of the Present
Pause for Thought 1
3. Accounting for Brexit
4. Thinking Relationally: Class and Its Others
5. Building Blocs: Towards a Politics of Articulation
Pause for Thought 2
6. An Accumulation of Crises
7. ‘The Best Country in the World’: Race, Culture, History
8. Holding It Together? The Coercive Turn and the Crises of Party and Bloc
9. Unstable Equilibria: The Life of the State
10. The Battle for Britain – and Beyond

About the author

John Clarke is a Professor Emeritus at The Open University and a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellow. His research and writing have explored the contemporary transformations of nation, state and welfare.