The Battle For Britain Crises Conflicts and The Conjuncture John Clarke Full Chapter
The Battle For Britain Crises Conflicts and The Conjuncture John Clarke Full Chapter
The Battle For Britain Crises Conflicts and The Conjuncture John Clarke Full Chapter
JOHN CLARKE
THE BATTLE
FOR BRITAIN
“Demonstrating the difference that conceptual nuance and historical
specificity make in reading present crises, this important book outlines
past contested conjunctural formations that continue to haunt and
hamstring our beliefs and practices today. Clarke insightfully critiques
simplistic explanations of how we got here – and of who ‘we’ even are in
the first place.”
John L. Jackson, Jr., author of
Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity
“John Clarke has done it again. With wit, verve and intellectual rigour,
he provides a highly original account of Brexit and the wider cultural
and political battles reshaping the UK. Masterfully using conjunctural
analysis to shine new light on current crises, conflicts and complexities,
The Battle for Britain makes essential reading for scholars and activists who
are working to counter reactionary politics and for those committed to
thinking politics otherwise.”
Jeff Maskovsky, City University of New York
THE BATTLE
FOR BRITAIN
Crises, Conflicts and the Conjuncture
John Clarke
First published in Great Britain in 2023 by
Bristol University Press
University of Bristol
1–9 Old Park Hill
Bristol
BS2 8BB
UK
t: +44 (0)117 374 6645
e: bup-[email protected]
Acknowledgements vi
References 197
Index 233
v
Acknowledgements
Books tend to take a long time to come together and involve a lot of
people in their making –and this one is no exception. It began as a short
and bad-tempered intervention during what was supposed to be a short
paper about expertise at an Interpretive Policy Analysis conference in Hull
in June 2016. I am very grateful to the panel organisers –Paul Stubbs and
Mislav Žitko –for allowing me to deviate from the planned presentation to
express my frustrations about both the events surrounding the Brexit vote
and the emerging explanations for it. It became a brief but impassioned
plea for a more conjunctural approach. This argument was picked up by
Kathrin Braun and became an article co-authored with Janet Newman in
Critical Policy Studies (Clarke and Newman, 2017). As Brexit’s fame grew,
invitations to speak and write increased. This book builds on much talking
and writing and I am grateful to the following:
• Jamie Peck, Marion Werner, Rebecca Lave and Brett Christophers for
the chance to imagine a dialogue with Doreen Massey (Clarke, 2018);
• Paul and Mislav for persisting with the question of expertise and putting
together a special issue of Innovation in which a collaborative argument
with Janet Newman for thinking conjuncturally about expertise,
knowledge and power appeared (Newman and Clarke, 2018);
• Jeremy Gilbert for the invitation to contribute to the special issue of New
Formations on ‘This Conjuncture’ (Clarke, 2019);
• Eleni Andreouli, David Kaposi and Paul Stenner for organising the Brexit
workshops at the Open University and accepting the piece that Janet
Newman and I wrote for the subsequent special issue of the Journal of
Community and Applied Social Psychology (Clarke and Newman, 2019);
• Eric Maigret and Laurent Martin for the invitation to the Chateau de
Cerisy-la-Salle to take part in a colloquium on Culture Studies beyond
Identity Politics and the resulting publication (Clarke, 2020d);
• Don Nonini and Ida Susser for their invitation to think about the turbulent
politics of scale and the ensuing publication, even though I missed the
workshop itself (Clarke, 2020b);
vi
Acknowledgements
• Sophie Bjork-James and Jeff Maskovsky for their invitation to take part in
the ‘angry politics’ workshops in Nashville and New York and to write
for the resulting book (Clarke, 2020e);
• Humboldt University’s Centre for British Studies for their invitation
to participate in a Brexit workshop and write about some of the issues
afterwards (Clarke, 2020c);
• Sally Davison and the editorial collective at Soundings for the invitation
to write about the new Johnson government (Clarke, 2020a);
• Ilker Corut and Joost Jongerden for their invitation to think and write
about nations and nationalisms in the context of Brexit (Clarke, 2021a);
• Ted Striphas and John Erni for organising a special issue of Cultural Studies
on COVID-19 and for accepting (and improving) my contribution
(Clarke, 2021b);
• Moritz Ege and Johannes Springer for the invitation to their anti-elitism
workshop in Göttingen and inclusion in the subsequent publication
(Clarke, forthcoming a); and
• Catherine Kellogg, Lois Harder and Steve Patten for the invitation to
contribute to a Festschrift for Janine Brodie on her retirement from the
University of Alberta (Clarke, forthcoming b).
vii
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viii
Introduction: The Battle for Britain
and Conjunctural Thinking
1
The Battle for Britain
understood as politics –into arguments about who ‘we’ are (the nation, the
people), about ‘our history’ (and how to memorialise or protect it), about how
Britain might be ‘Great’ again. This battle –or, more accurately, this series
of battles –is animated by the ways in which politics, culture and power are
inextricably entangled in the struggles over how the way forward might be
constructed –in the light of the proliferating crises, contradictions and conflicts.
What I offer here is an approach through conjunctural analysis –an approach
central to one version of Cultural Studies that has been important to my own
work over a long period and has become a focus of renewed interest in recent
years (for example, the double special issue of New Formations, published in
2019). My starting point is to treat a conjuncture as a distinctive configuration
of time and space: it is a spatio-temporal phenomenon. Conjunctures have
distinctive trajectories driven by the multiple social relations and dynamics
that are compressed and condensed within their specific temporal and spatial
frame. By condensed, I mean to convey the sense of being squeezed together
under pressure so that they entangle and interfere with one another. Such
dynamics drive a further multiplicity: the proliferation of crises, tensions,
antagonisms and conflicts which give the specific conjuncture its distinctive
character and trajectory. I will come back to this approach in more detail
but think there is some value in grounding this starting point in my own
encounter with conjunctural analysis.
2
Introduction
3
The Battle for Britain
This book will also pursue the puzzles of how historical blocs are put together
and come to present themselves as embodying ‘the people’ and promise a
way forward from our present troubles to the ‘sunlit uplands’ (a Winston
Churchill phrase, much borrowed by Boris Johnson and his Brexit fellow
travellers). Doing so demands paying attention to some of the changing
4
Introduction
For me, this has always been a critical point of analytical leverage. Williams
reminds us that dominant formations are always accompanied by others,
particularly the residual (what he described as the persistence of questions that
cannot be answered in the terms of the dominant) and the emergent, which he
identified as the rise of new questions and new demands that were, however,
always at risk of being absorbed –or incorporated –into the dominant. In the
present, we might distinguish, for example, between ‘residual’ attachments to
welfarism (and, indeed, statism) in the face of the destruction of the public
realm and ‘emergent’ movements concerned with the climate catastrophe,
or the claim that Black Lives Matter in the face of racist policing and penal
policies (in the US and elsewhere). This triangulation of the political-cultural
5
The Battle for Britain
6
Introduction
(see, for example, the critique of authoritarian populism and Policing the
Crisis by Jessop et al (1984); and Donaldson (2008), on ‘post-Marxist’ uses
of Gramsci). In return, we tended to resist what we saw as economistic,
functionalist and reductive versions of Marxist analysis that paid little
attention to things ranging from the complexities of state formation to the
significance of cultural forms and practices as sites of political struggle. By
the end of the 1970s, Cultural Studies was being stretched to think about
social relations beyond class –especially by feminist approaches to gender
and social reproduction (for example, Women Take Issue (Women’s Studies
Group, 1976)) and by work on racialised divisions and their centrality to
the British, as well as global, architectures of domination (The Empire Strikes
Back (CCCS, 1982)).
Yet Policing the Crisis is hardly a straightforward starting point for this book.
First, it was a profoundly collaborative effort of thinking and writing, and
I have argued elsewhere that conjunctural analysis was not an approach that
could be easily undertaken by a single researcher: ‘No one scholar can grasp
the multiplicity of forces, pressures, tendencies, tensions, antagonisms and
contradictions that make up a conjuncture’ (Clarke, 2017: 84). I continue to
believe this: as a result, this book is a necessarily thin version of a conjunctural
analysis, not least in the context of the pandemic which dislocated my plans
for collaborative working. Despite my gratitude to the people drawn into
conversations and comments on drafts, it cannot get anywhere near what a
fully collaborative process might have delivered.
Second, this book is profoundly argumentative: it takes issue with a range
of approaches, analyses and arguments in order to establish the case for
a conjunctural analysis. This sometimes takes the form of pointing to
misjudgements; for example, the tendency to ignore the role middle-
class voters played in the vote for Brexit in favour of simplifying –if not
tabloid-like –contrasts between the liberal/cosmopolitan middle classes and
the nationalist working class (sometimes as heroes, sometimes as villains).
But my arguments and interpretations more often take the form of what
someone (thankyou, Bob) once described as my contrarian or ‘yes, but’ style
of thinking: yes, that matters, but it’s not the only thing … we need to
understand how it co-exists and interacts with X, Y and Z. Conjunctural
analysis places a premium on thinking about multiplicities and how
heterogeneous processes, forces, possibilities come together in contradictory,
often uncomfortable, ways to make certain things possible. A more generous
way of framing this process is that it bears the marks of what David Scott
has called Stuart Hall’s style of ‘clarifying’ through conversation:
7
The Battle for Britain
So, quite a lot of the book is devoted to saying ‘yes, but’ and to teasing out
the important ways in which different dynamics are complexly entangled
in the conjuncture. At a recent Cultural Studies conference (https://blogs.
brighton.ac.uk/cmnh/2022/08/26/whats-happening-to-culture-studies-
online-event-14-16-september-2022/), I was among those castigated for
an excessive –and nostalgic –attachment to ‘complexity’ when the present
moment demanded a more streamlined clarity or simplicity of analysis. I am
old enough to think that this has always been the argument (at least since the
mid-1970s): the current crisis –whatever it may be –demands a clear and
timely response. I am not convinced on both empirical and analytic grounds
(clarity that is wrong is not helpful). Wendy Brown once argued for the
necessary ‘untimeliness’ of critical thinking and I think she is correct to insist
both that ‘critical theory cannot let itself be bound by political exigency’ and
that critique must ‘affirm life, affirm value and, above all affirm possibilities in
the present and the future’ (Brown, 2005: 15). I hope this book contributes
to that ambition, in however small a way.
8
Introduction
temporalities and are shaped by their different rhythms. The chapter begins
and ends with the longue durée of the environmental catastrophe –and its
rapidly quickening pace. The chapter also argues for attention to the long
and unfinished trajectory of the post-colonial and its interweaving with
the profoundly contested field of the social. Here differences, divisions and
inequalities of different sorts have been denaturalised and made politically
contestable –and resisted by ‘restorationist’ strategies. A quicker rhythm
is evident in the temporality of the successive transformations of the
‘UK economy’ from failed Fordism to failed neoliberalisation and into
the stagnations of rentier capitalism. Finally, political time is marked by
the shifting attempts to manage these fields, their intersections and their
accumulating crises, in which Brexit forms a distinctive rupture. Political
time, however, also involves the articulation of nostalgias of different kinds,
from Empire to Fordist relations of work and welfare.
9
The Battle for Britain
10
Introduction
11
The Battle for Britain
12
1
The Battle for Britain has taken place on the political-cultural terrain of the
nation as contending narratives about its past, present and future have tried
to claim the nation for themselves. These contentions crystallised around
Brexit, a moment which exemplified one dramatic trend –the revival of
nationalism –and posed one profound analytical problem: how do we locate
this nationalist revival in spatial terms? Do we attend to the varieties of
nationalism in play, looking at their distinctive formations and trajectories?
Or do we look beyond the national examples to a more global account of
this phenomenon: is this an era of nationalism structured by international
or global realignments? Although most academic –and media –attention
has been focused on populism, I share Valluvan’s view of this as a period
of ‘nationalist populism’ (2019: 11; emphasis in original). Such nationalist
populisms have proliferated, connecting the British experience to many
elsewheres: Trump’s desire to make America Great again, Bolsanaro’s rise
to power in Brazil, Modi’s Hindu nationalism in India, Orbán’s Fidesz
governments in Hungary, the Law and Justice Party in Poland, not to mention
the rise of nationalist-populist movements, if not governments, across Europe,
from the AfD in Germany to the Rassemblement National in France. Across
these many settings, nationalism, populism, racism, authoritarianism and
more have been bundled together –or, more accurately, articulated –in
specific national forms. It remains important that Trumpism is not Orbánism
which is not Brexit, even though they (and other instances) are connected
in multiple material and symbolic ways. The chapter will argue that the
challenge is to think about nations and nationalisms transnationally and
conjuncturally. This forms the focus of the first section of the chapter.
This approach makes it possible to situate Brexit –and the wider Battle
for Britain –within these larger transnational conjunctural dynamics of the
national question rather than solely in terms of the UK’s relationship to
the EU (or some abstract ‘global capitalism’). How the UK as nation and
13
The Battle for Britain
nation-state came to occupy this place is the focus of the second section.
I suggest that processes of imagining the nation –and its Others –point to the
triangulations of the UK within shifting transnational relations that centre on
the spatial imaginaries of ‘Empire’, ‘America’ and ‘Europe’. There I pause for
a moment to think about the shape shifting formation that is the European
Union before turning to the multiple nations of the increasingly ‘disunited
Kingdom’ and the different nationalisms that are associated with them,
including those that helped to shape Brexit. Although the chapter focuses on
the spatial framing of the conjuncture, these features also have a distinctive
temporal character. Conjunctures are spatio-temporal formations, so while
this chapter foregrounds spatial dimensions and dynamics, it tries to keep
in view the temporal dynamics that are the focus of the following chapter.
14
Nations, Nationalisms and the Conjuncture
15
The Battle for Britain
economic and political system, whose effects persisted long after the formal
period of decolonisation. It is this sense of shifting global orders (rather than
a shift from the national to the global in any simple terms) that underpins
Gillian Hart’s project. She argues:
Hart identifies the first of these conjunctures as the Cold War Era, beginning
in the late 1940s, characterised by ‘projects of accumulation and hegemony,
with the latter understood not as consent but as a contested process’
(2020: 235) that connect the different trajectories of South Africa, India
and the US. She goes on to argue that the ways in which these projects fell
apart created the conditions which exploited the articulation of a neoliberal
counter-revolution linked to a variety of exclusionary nationalisms and
populist politics. These came to dominate the second conjuncture (from
the late 1970s to the present).
This is a hugely ambitious framing but one that rightly insists that
complex forms of connectedness –economic, political, cultural –constitute
relations between different places (regions, nations, localities) that cannot be
understood as separate container-spaces, nor collapsed into a ‘global’ world.
Although Hart’s focal points of attention (South Africa, India, the US) are
not the same as mine in this book, the dimensions and dynamics that she
sets out are formative for a world in which ‘Britain’ is, in significant ways,
constituted through its relations with other places: from the end of Empire to
its position in the Cold War era blocs (formally through NATO, less visibly
through other varieties of political and cultural anti-communism). Equally,
its shifting relations through the period of decolonisation to the search
for a ‘global role’, and its indebted –economically, politically, culturally,
militarily –relationship to the US, mark a shifting field of relations in which
the UK developed. This was paralleled by the flows of migration from Empire
to the UK that remade the ‘British’ population, unsettled cultural norms and
were repeatedly met by racist immigration policies and controls aiming to
preserve a ‘way of life’ and prevent it from being ‘swamped’ (in Thatcher’s
phrase). Finally, across these crisis-r idden and unstable conjunctures, the UK
negotiated its uneasy insertion into the emerging global capitalism through
its entry into the European Union –belatedly, and not without constant
anxiety and scepticism.
16
Nations, Nationalisms and the Conjuncture
This view raises the question of what has driven the nation and nationalism
to their central place in contemporary political mobilisations. In this
conjuncture –one shaped by the destabilisation of the old ‘settlements’ and
the unleashing of the dynamics of neoliberal globalisation –crises of both
the nation-form (Balibar, 1991) and the nation-state have come to the fore.
No longer ‘fit for purpose’, the nation-state had to be ‘re-tooled’, made ‘lean
and mean’, entrepreneurial and efficient, and turned into a ‘competition
state’ (Cerny, 1997) which could ensure that the nation was ‘open for
business’. Jessop (2000) describes this transition as involving the crisis of ‘the
national spatio-temporal fix’: the forms of social regulation that provided the
conditions for the earlier regime of capital accumulation (described by Jessop
as Atlantic Fordism). But, as I have already tried to indicate, the relations
that flow in and across these social formations are both more heterogeneous
and contradictory than can be grasped solely from the standpoint of capital
accumulation. An alternative view of this crisis of the nation-form and the
nation-state is offered by Akhil Gupta, whose exploration of the post-colonial
allows him to reveal the contingency of the connection between nation and
state in ‘this curiously hyphenated entity, the nation-state’ (1998: 316).
Gupta treats the destabilisation of that hyphenation of nation and state –as
a central dynamic of the late 20th century, pointing to the ways in which
it reveals the contingently constructed coupling of nation and state, such
that they can be more easily recognised (and contested, both analytically
and politically) as separate.
Shifting the frame to foreground colonialism and decolonisation changes
what is at stake in thinking about nations, states and their articulations.
We might then be able to think about the double dynamics in which the
tendencies of both the post-colonial moment and the neoliberal globalisation
of capital are entangled and have destabilising effects on both the nation and
the state. Arguments about the rescaling of government, governance and
the state; the proliferation of forms of anti-statism and the contemporary
resurgence of nationalism swirl around that unsettled hyphen and the problem
of how to reconstruct both its elements –and the form of their connection.
This provides one route to understanding how Brexit (and its contemporary
resonances in other places such as the US, Hungary and France) came to
centre on that impossible object of desire –the nation. This imagined
nation was invoked throughout the Brexit campaign and in its aftermath.
For example, in 2016 Theresa May, the new Prime Minister and leader of
the Conservative Party, addressed the Conservative Party Conference and
extolled the Britain-to-come:
17
The Battle for Britain
Brexit enabled the renewal of imperial fantasies –a Britain engaging with
the world as a sovereign power could both lead and benefit from a new
phase of Free Trade. These fantasies promised resolutions to the challenges
of the post-colonial (after all, we have ‘friends’ all over the world) and to
the problem of how to insert the UK into a global economy (in the lead,
of course).
Space and place were central to how the conjuncture was formed and
took shape. The nation-form and the nation-state had been destabilised and,
in Gramscian terms, efforts were made to create new equilibria –although
these continually remained unstable. At the same time, what has emerged
is not a denationalised ‘global world’ but one in which places have been
reworked, brought into new relationships with each other and into new
scalar configurations. So, the UK is not simply part of global capitalism
(whether this is understood as financialised capitalism, knowledge capitalism,
platform capitalism or surveillance capitalism –to name but four recent
categorisations: Thrift, 2005; Lapavitsas, 2013; Zuboff, 2019; Gilbert and
Williams, 2022). Rather it is part of those circuits and relationships while
having –like other places –distinctive national features and dynamics. So,
for example, Christophers’ work on rentier capitalism (2020) treats it as both
a general form of capital accumulation (with a global reach) and taking a
distinctive dominant role in the UK economy (sustained by a particular set
of political and cultural conditions). There are other ways in which space,
place and the unsettled nation-form are central to the conjuncture –and
the UK’s distinctive trajectory within it.
18
Nations, Nationalisms and the Conjuncture
the field of relationships that have produced and sustained the UK, there
are three particularly significant axes: relations with ‘America’, ‘Empire’
and ‘Europe’. They simultaneously involve significant material flows and
relationships and are the focus of potent spatial imaginaries –that is, they
are projections of ideas and affects about people, places and politics. As a
result, I call them America (rather than the United States) Empire (rather
than the Commonwealth) and Europe (rather than the European Union).
The material dynamics include networks along which people, capital,
goods, power, political and cultural influences and more have flowed. At
the same time, the spatial imaginaries of these places and their relationship
to the UK have proved potent animators of British political-cultural life,
carrying powerful emotional charges, not least in their capacity to combine
attraction and repulsion in unsettlingly ambivalent ways. Massey pointed
to the importance of such emotional charges in the formation of spatial
identities: ‘The politics associated with the rethinking of spatial identities
have been, and continue to be, equally emotionally fraught and liable to
touch deep feelings and desires not always immediately associated with
“the political”. Rethinking a politics of place, or nation, is an emotionally
charged issue’ (Massey, 2005: 6).
‘America’ (as the US) has, for instance, exerted a powerful attraction,
often expressed in images of the ‘special relationship’, beloved of UK
politicians. More generally, it has long represented a distinctively glossy
route to ‘modernity’, enacted through shared linguistic and popular cultural
repertoires. Yet America has also been a focus of repulsion (often expressed
in an assumption of British cultural superiority). It has been a focus of
anxiety: for example, about the US as the home of violence, especially
racialised violence (it was, for example, the source of the ‘mugging’ imagery
of the 1970s; Hall et al, 2013). America also offered a set of images about
the dead ends of modernity, expressed, for example, in the dystopias of both
‘mass culture’ and ‘consumer culture’. Such imaginaries, and their affective
dynamics, run alongside, and are entwined in unsettling ways with, more
material relationships. After 1945 the UK found itself occupying a position
of structural subordination to the US. It became economically dependent
(after the Marshall plan) and tied into US–UK flows of capital and consumer
goods, most recently in the dominance of US-based new technology
platforms (from Facebook to Amazon). This economic subordination was
paralleled by a military subordination, organised in part through NATO
and more directly visible in the UK’s ‘independent’ nuclear deterrent (based
on missiles bought or leased from the US). The UK’s willingness to join
in George W. Bush’s war in Iraq in pursuit of the supposed ‘weapons of
mass destruction’ came to symbolise this subordination. Meanwhile, British
popular culture was dominated by US production (despite occasional, but
much celebrated, ‘British invasions’). Nonetheless, the US was reinvented
19
The Battle for Britain
20
Nations, Nationalisms and the Conjuncture
21
The Battle for Britain
22
Nations, Nationalisms and the Conjuncture
attention was focused on the possibility of Greek debt default (or even
‘Grexit’), all the ‘PIGS’ were viewed as vulnerable (and indeed became the
PIIGS as anxieties grew about Ireland).
The PIGS mark one of the EU’s peripheries but it has others. There is
an Eastern periphery, where former Soviet bloc countries have developed
new (and differentiated) trajectories in relation to global and regional
formations (compare the Czech Republic and Hungary, for example),
but have all struggled to stabilise new national arrangements where the
promise of European ‘integration’ uncomfortably encounters both the
neoliberalisation of their economies and the reinvention of the nation. As
Hungary experimented with what Fidesz called ‘illiberal democracy’ and
Poland suspended or abolished aspects of democratic rights and the rule of
law, this terrain became a focus for European ‘anxieties’ about the future of
liberal democratic forms and processes.
Other European spaces have also become the focus of the strained dynamics
of ‘integration’. The region named for governmental/developmental
purposes as ‘South Eastern Europe’ centred on the former Republic of
Yugoslavia, sometimes known as the Balkans or Western Balkans (and the
politics of naming matter here as elsewhere: Kolstø, 2016). Blagojević (2009)
identifies the region as a distinctive ‘semi-periphery’ which has been the
focus of many projects aimed at economic, political and social ‘reform’ –
intended to make its countries fit to take their place in a ‘modern Europe’.
She argues that the region experiences a profoundly contradictory process
of modernisation as a ‘semi-other’ (that is simultaneously viewed as like, and
not like, the ‘West’). It is both required to ‘adjust’ to the core (and its norms)
and speed up the work of modernisation, yet the core constantly judges its
reforms as too slow and/or merely formal. In this dynamic, the places of the
semi-periphery are constantly vulnerable to instruction on how to become
‘European’, innovation (learning to become ‘modern’) and experimentation
(‘try this, it will be good for you’), while always being held responsible for
the failures of these initiatives (just not European enough).
The UK has historically occupied a rather different sort of peripheral
relation to the EU, often perceived as ‘in but not of ’ Europe. Its early efforts
to join what was then the EEC were viewed with some suspicion and
rebuffed accordingly. The suspicion centred on the UK’s perceived closeness
to the US and its likely role as the carrier of the disease of ‘Anglo-Saxon’
capitalism (Bresser-Pereira, 2012). This version of capitalism was felt to be
too lightly regulated, too focused on ‘shareholder value’ and, viewed from
an emerging European consensus on a ‘social dimension’, was thought to be
too anti-social. British membership involved the UK becoming subject to
forms of economic regulation from the EU, although as Hyman indicates,
the UK was also a powerful force in diluting some aspects of EU regulation,
particularly those affecting labour (such as the Working Time Directive).
23
The Battle for Britain
That passionate ‘defence of our sovereignty’ became one of the key themes
in the 2016 Referendum, although not in Cameron’s hands. Instead, the
Leave campaigns summoned up the spirit of an ‘island nation’ to great effect.
But which nation, exactly?
24
Nations, Nationalisms and the Conjuncture
Leave and 47 per cent for Remain; and the returns were similar in Wales.
Northern Ireland voted 56 per cent to Remain and 44 per cent to Leave,
while Scotland voted 62 per cent to Remain and 38 per cent to Leave
(Electoral Commission, 2016). These variations, their preconditions and their
consequences all point to important questions about the relationship between
nations and nationalisms within the assemblage of the United Kingdom.
At its simplest, England is the largest (in terms of territory and population)
of the four main elements of the UK. More significantly, it acts as the core of
the UK, working to draw the elements together under Westminster/London/
English rule. There is, it should be noted, no straightforward equivalence
between Westminster, London and England as significant differences and
sources of tensions exist within those framings (Cochrane, 2020). However,
this English dominance has been described by some scholars as the organising
principle of a dynamic of ‘internal colonialism’ (Hechter, 1975) through
which the ‘Celtic nations’ –Ireland, Scotland, Wales –became subjected to
forms of English rule. The concept of internal colonialism also illuminates
the double dynamic of internal and external colonialism that was essential
to the making of ‘Great Britain’ as a global power. Those different colonial
dynamics have historically intertwined, implicating the four nations in the
imperial project in distinctive ways (see, for example, Devine (2006) and
MacKenzie and Devine (2011) on Scotland and Empire).
Feelings of being subordinated –in economic, political and cultural
terms –to that Westminster-London-English nexus fuelled a variety of
nationalisms that have, from time to time, disrupted the projection of
a happily United Kingdom. Echoes of the processes and experiences
of subordination have persisted in political-cultural memory. The Highland
clearances and the Irish famine continue to be markers of the brutality of
English rule, while the economic power of English dominion, especially in
relation to land and property, has been a frequent theme of popular conflicts,
from arson attacks on English-owned second homes in Wales in the 1980s
to the persistence of quasi-feudal estates in Scotland. During the ‘Troubles’
in the North of Ireland from the 1960s to the 1990s, the British army (as
well as the civilian police) were identified by Nationalist political movements
as an ‘occupying army’. Most recently, the President of Ireland, writing as
the centenary of the 1922 Partition of Ireland between the Republic and
the North approached, called on the British to acknowledge the history
of British imperialism:
25
The Battle for Britain
26
Nations, Nationalisms and the Conjuncture
‘Fifty years on from now, Britain will still be the country of long
shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs,
dog lovers and pools fillers and, as George Orwell said, “Old maids
bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist” and, if we
get our way, Shakespeare will still be read even in school.’ (Major, 1993)
It should be noted, though, that the rural had also been attached to other
political-cultural framings and projects, from the demands of the Diggers
and the Levellers, through the anti-enclosure movements to mass trespass
to demand access to the countryside. More recently, counter-cultural
and environmental movements have articulated competing visions of the
countryside (for a richer view of this complexity, see Ware (2022)).
Elements of political and cultural liberalism form ‘the third broad pattern
of national sentiment which has become embedded within contemporary
English culture’ (Kenny, 2014: 125). This variant has been the focus of
recurring innovation, anxiety and argument for the Left in Britain, centred
on the question: to what extent is it possible to imagine a non-reactionary
Englishness as part of the struggle for progressive values? This question has
been the focus of creative cultural work such as the singer Billy Bragg’s
constant striving to articulate a new England or Jeremy Dellar’s reworkings
of English political and cultural moments from Peterloo to rave culture.
It has been a recurring theme in political writing and journalism, from
Nairn’s exploration of the ‘Break-Up of Britain’ (1977) to the efforts by
the Guardian journalist John Harris to find ways to talk about Englishness
differently (2019). This liberal or progressive strand has echoes of Simon
Featherstone’s (2008) examination of the changing –and contested –versions
of Englishness that animated popular culture during the transition from
Imperial power to a post-colonial nation. Featherstone argues that, in the
tangled threads of English narratives, there may yet be a possibility of crafting
a new –and more open –sense of Englishness: ‘through its engagements
with the most difficult and most productive consequences of its imperial
history and expressions of its regional tradition and modernity. It is in those
networks of difference and diversity that England and its Englishness can
best be understood and developed’ (2008: 182).
Featherstone’s sense of the possibility of developing a more progressive
Englishness has been reinforced by a number of developments, notably the
longer histories of anti-colonialism and anti-racism, the emergence of a
post-colonial ‘culture of conviviality’ (Gilroy, 2005) and the development
of forms of ‘everyday multiculture’ (for example, Wilson, 2011; Neal et al,
27
The Battle for Britain
28
Nations, Nationalisms and the Conjuncture
and its celebration of a lost ‘way of life’. Throughout it, the Leave campaigns
conflated conceptions of nation as place (‘this scepter’d isle’), as people
(‘freedom loving’) and as polity (the ‘Mother of Parliaments’). Their promise
of ‘taking back control’ articulated overlapping images of what might be
restored by leaving the EU, condensed in the imagery of ‘sovereignty’.
Wellings argues that nationalism –and English nationalism in particular –
worked through ‘the legitimization of a particular location of sovereignty,
be that sovereignty vested in the people or the state or both’ (2012: 37). It
was precisely that doubling –and blurring –of the location of ‘sovereignty’
that came to be a matter of contention once sovereignty was being reclaimed
after the referendum: did it reside in Parliament, the government, or was it
simply the ‘Will of the People’ (Gordon, 2016)?
Sovereignty mattered. It mattered for the mobilisation of the Leave
vote, not least in the promise of collective agency (‘take back control’). It
also mattered for the political and governmental tangles that emerged as
successive governments attempted to make ‘Brexit mean Brexit’ in practice.
Extricating the UK from the EU involved translating potent imaginaries –of
space, scale and sovereignty –into institutional arrangements, relations and
practices (Clarke, 2020b). Indeed, making ‘Brexit’ happen involved troubles
of many different kinds: political, governmental, constitutional, social and
cultural, including the further fracturing of the UK. I will return to these
troubles in later chapters.
29
The Battle for Britain
for critiques of exclusivity. Second, places are not “given” –they are
always in open-ended process. They are in that sense “events”. Third,
they and their identity will always be contested (we could almost talk
about local-level struggles for hegemony).’ (Massey, nd)
30
Nations, Nationalisms and the Conjuncture
was something distinctive about the ways in which the contradictions, forces
and dynamics were articulated in and around the nation and nation-state.
Valluvan points to this specificity when he argues that we are seeing ‘the
nationalist overdetermination particular to the present historical conjuncture’
(2019: 15) or, in my terms, contemporary forms of nationalism may be
best understood as conjuncturally specific formations, rather than viewing
nationalism as a generic political orientation.
This chapter has explored one dimension of thinking conjuncturally. In
treating conjunctures as distinct configurations of ‘time-space’, I hope to
have clarified some of the current spatial dimension while keeping time
and the dynamics of change in view. Questions of time –and temporality –
become the focus of the following chapter (with spatial relations moving
into the background). A pointer towards this shift of focus is provided by
Goswami’s argument that ‘we need to think about the ways in which crisis
implies, and this is a phrase from Lefebvre (2013), a “conflictual explosion
of times”. There is a multiplicity and contradictory logic to the temporalities
that converge in a “crisis moment”’ (2020: 271).
31
2
Just as Chapter 1 argued that the space of the conjuncture is no simple matter
(demanding thinking the nation transnationally), so this chapter will explore
the multiple orderings and senses of time that are in play in the conjuncture.
Thinking about temporalities, rather than time/times, is a way of trying to
treat time as enmeshed in social, political-cultural and economic relations
and processes and conflicts. Indeed, I will suggest, it is the intersections and
entanglements of these different temporalities –the ways that they come
to be condensed in the present –that gives the conjuncture its distinctive
character. As a result, this chapter is organised around the notion of different
32
Turbulent Times
temporalities. It will explore the different orderings of time that are associated
with particular fields of relationships which have distinctive dynamics of crisis,
contestations and (temporary) resolutions. These temporalities are, however,
not entirely separate: each provides some of the conditions for the others
and is affected in turn by their dynamics. They both enable and interfere
with one another. They ensure that the ‘now’ of a particular conjuncture is
always multifaceted, condensing different temporalities and their dynamics
and intersections. Temporality matters in another way in the conjuncture,
too. It is the focus of political-cultural conflicts as different projects struggle
to ‘tell the time’, to construct persuasive and mobilising narratives, to tell
the right version of ‘our history’, to control the present and to lay claim
to the future.
Of course, this book, and this chapter, are not innocent in such
matters: they are also ways of ‘telling the time’. My attention to different
temporalities, my presentation of them and the stories I want to tell about
them are implicated in the political-cultural conflicts over time. With that
in mind, the chapter begins from the time of the ‘Anthropocene’ –the way
of naming climate change as a human product. The Anthropocene frames
the present moment in complex ways –materially and symbolically. From
there, the chapter moves to the long history of Empire and the shorter
history of decolonisation. These both shape the present conjuncture and
have become the focus of struggles over ‘our history’. I link the conflicts
over race, racialised inequalities and racism to the wider unsettling of the
field of the social in the post-war conjuncture –and underline their ongoing
significance for the current one.
The chapter then considers the social as a field of ‘neoliberal governance’ in
the current conjuncture: the focus of efforts to create the right sort of people
(and to discipline those who failed to ‘do the right thing’). I connect this
to an examination of the economic trajectory of this conjuncture, centred
on the failures and frustrations of the neoliberal dream, and exploring the
consolidation of rentier capitalism in the UK. From there, the chapter
moves to consider the quickening rhythms of national politics as efforts
have been made to manage, contain and exploit the accumulating crises,
contradictions and conflicts of the present. The chapter concludes with
some more general reflections on the significance of multiple temporalities
for thinking conjuncturally.
33
The Battle for Britain
the deep involvement of UK-based finance capital in the fossil fuel industry.
The period described as the Anthropocene marks the geological time frame
within which human activity has had a significant effect on the planet’s
climate and ecosystems. For some, this dates from around 8000 BC while
others highlight its intensifying effects in the last two centuries:
The ‘last few hundred years’ identified by Bonneuil and Fressoz points to
a more familiar epochal framing: this is the era of capitalism. Indeed, for
some commentators, this framing demands a different way of naming the
period: the Capitalocene (for example, Moore, 2016). In this view, capital
consumes nature, wantonly, carelessly, in its pursuit of constant growth and
has driven the planet to the point of collapse. This points to a more specific
dynamic and agency (in contrast to the Anthropocene’s generalised man/
humanity) focused on the accumulative and exploitative logics of capitalism.
It also makes more visible the speeding-up of environmental devastation
that has accompanied capitalism’s global expansion. There are other ways
of naming this epoch, for example, the Plantationocene (Davis et al, 2019)
or the Chthulucene (Haraway, 2015): each focuses on different relationships
and dynamics between the social and the material. All these framings
point to crucial conditions of the conjuncture, even as they operate over
much longer time scales. These conditions are active in the conjuncture in
particular forms and combinations, not least in how the future of the planet
has emerged as a focal point, with a new pace and intensity that demands
attention and mobilises new forces.
Haunted by Empire
The concept of the Plantationocene points to another significant longue
durée temporality (Braudel, 1958; Braudel and Wallerstein, 2009) that
shapes the conjuncture: that of colonialism and the ‘unfinished business’ of
decolonisation. As Deborah Thomas (2019) has argued, it was colonialism,
34
Turbulent Times
specifically in the form of slavery, that implanted the ‘plantation logic’ at the
heart of European capitalism and its version of globalisation. Despite attempts
to make slavery disappear through a ‘mercantilist’ framing of British imperial
history (recycled in Brexiteering claims about Britain as a global trading
nation), this logic still echoes into the present. It underpins relations between
Britain and its former colonies, sometimes in the recurrent enthusiasm for
repatriation (sending people of colour ‘back to where they came from’) or the
persistent arguments for reparations (to repay the debts of slavery). It is brought
to the fore by movements challenging the celebratory memorialisation of
the country’s colonial past in statues and naming practices, exemplified in
Edward Colston’s place in Bristol (Beebeejaun, 2021). It circulates through
the elaborately racialised categorisation of places, names, body types, cultural
competences and languages that run through official and popular discourses
and practices in this society (see Fortier (2021) on citizenship’s articulation
with such formations).
Decolonisation has taken different trajectories in the places connected
by that global system: settler-slave societies, such as the US or Brazil,
are different in terms of what Omi and Winant (1986) call their ‘racial
formation’ from the old colonial metropoles in Europe or their colonies in
the global South. Consequently, specific places in these fields of relations
have different trajectories through anti-colonial struggles to the emergent
forms of decolonisation. I am not going to try to tell that long and violent
story here, but do want to highlight several issues. First, both the business
of slavery and the formal abolition of slavery provided a significant financial
foundation for the development of industrial capitalism in Britain. Notably,
the prices paid by the British government to ‘emancipate’ the slaves enabled
their owners to invest both in lavish lifestyles and in new economic activity
(Hall et al, 2016; Hall, 2020). In such ways, ‘British capitalism’ was always
what Cedric Robinson (1983) called ‘racial capitalism’. Second, racially
subordinated labour never stopped being ‘cheap labour’ across the whole arc
of colonisation and decolonisation: whether in slavery, indentured labour
(the preferred system for replacing slaves), or as migrant labour in the period
that followed the Second World War (Williams, 2021). This links to a third
point about the articulation of those colonial relations through metropolitan
states and their organisation of social reproduction. Bhambra (2022) has
shown how a view of the British state as profoundly structured by colonial
relations can enable a new understanding of the relations between colonies,
state forms, systems of citizenship and the economic and social relations of
welfare. She argues that ‘the territorial boundaries of the British state, as well
as its organisational structure, have never been congruent with what many
see as the imagined nation and, at times, the imaginary of the nation-state
has also extended include territories beyond the island or islands’ (2022: 5).
Her work, along with a growing number of others (for example, Shilliam,
35
The Battle for Britain
36
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
on a feather, so that by means of another shaft containing levers and
a tumbling ball, the box on reversing was carried from one bevel-
wheel to the opposite one.”[54] This planer was in regular use as late
as 1859. The driving and reversing mechanism described above is
almost exactly that used on Clement’s great planer, built a dozen
years later. Fox is said to have also invented a screw-cutting
machine, an automatic gear cutter and a self-acting lathe, but the
evidence in regard to their dates is uncertain.
[54] Ibid., p. 315.
Like many of the owners of that time Murray lived directly opposite
his works and he installed in his house a steam heating apparatus
which excited much wonder and which must have been one of the
first in use. He built the first locomotive which was put to successful
commercial use. Trevithick had invented a steam road-engine with a
single steam cylinder and a large flywheel, which had attracted
considerable attention, but was wholly impracticable. It was
important, however, as it had one of the first high-pressure engines,
working above atmospheric pressure. In 1811 Blenkinsop of Leeds,
taking his idea from Trevithick, had a number of locomotives built to
operate a railway from the Middletown collieries to Leeds, a distance
of 3¹⁄₂ miles. Blenkinsop was not a mechanic and the work was
designed and executed by Matthew Murray. Murray used two steam
cylinders instead of one, driving onto the same shaft with cranks set
at right angles, and therefore introduced one of the most important
features of modern locomotive design. These engines were in daily
use for many years and were inspected by George Stephenson
when he began his development of the locomotive. Murray’s design
formed the basis from which he started. The engines, however, were
operated by a cog-wheel driving onto a continuous rack laid along
the road bed. It was not until a number of years later that Hedley and
Stephenson established the fact that the wheel friction of smooth
drivers would furnish adequate tractive power. The old Blenkinsop
engines, as they were called, hauled about thirty coal wagons at a
speed of 3¹⁄₄ miles an hour.
Murray’s most important inventions were connected with the flax
industry and for these he obtained a gold medal from the Society of
Arts. At the time they were developed, the flax trade was dying. Their
effect was to establish the British linen trade on a permanent and
secure foundation. All the machine tools used in his establishment
were designed and built by himself and among these was the planer
which was unquestionably one of the earliest built. He made similar
articles for other firms and started a branch of engineering for which
Leeds became famous. He was a frank, open-hearted man, and one
who contributed greatly to the industrial supremacy of England.
Joseph Clement was born in Westmoreland in 1779.[56] His father
was a weaver, a man of little education but of mental ability, a great
lover of nature and something of a mechanic. Joseph Clement
himself had only the merest elements of reading and writing. He
started in life as a thatcher and slater, but picked up the rudiments of
mechanics at the village blacksmith shop. Being grateful to the
blacksmith, he repaid him by making for him a lathe which was a
pretty creditable machine. On this he himself made flutes and fifes
for sale and also a microscope for his father to use in his nature
studies. As early as 1804 he began to work on screw cutting and
made a set of die-stocks, although he had never seen any. He
worked in several small country shops, then in Carlisle and in
Glasgow, where he took lessons in drawing from a Peter Nicholson
and became one of the most skillful draftsmen in England. Later he
went to Aberdeen and was earning three guineas ($15) a week
designing and fitting up power looms. By the end of 1813 he had
saved £100. With this he went to London, meaning sooner or later to
set up for himself. He first worked for an Alexander Galloway, a ward
politician and tradesman who owned a small shop. Galloway was a
slovenly manager and left things to run themselves. When Clement
started in he found the tools so poor that he could not do good work
with them, and immediately set to work truing them up, to the
surprise of his shopmates who had settled down to the slipshod
standards of the shop. Seeing that Clement was capable of the
highest grade work, one of his shopmates told him to go to Bramah’s
where such workmanship would be appreciated.
[56] The best information on Clement comes from Smiles’ “Industrial
Biography,” Chap. XIII.
He saw Bramah and engaged to work for him for a month on trial.
The result was so satisfactory that he signed an agreement for five
years, dated April 1, 1814, under which he became chief draftsman
and superintendent of the Pimlico works. Clement threw himself
eagerly into the new work and took great satisfaction in the high
quality of work which was the standard in Bramah’s establishment.
Bramah was greatly pleased with him and told him, “If I had secured
your services five years since I would now have been a richer man
by many thousands of pounds.” Bramah died, however, within a year
and his two sons returning from college took charge of the business.
They soon became jealous of Clement’s influence and by mutual
consent the agreement signed with their father was terminated.
Clement immediately went to Maudslay & Field’s as chief draftsman
and assisted in the development of the early marine engines which
they were building at that time. In 1817 he started in for himself in a
small shop in Newington, with a capital of £500 and his work there
until his death in 1844 is of great importance.
Figure 18. Matthew Murray
Figure 19. Richard Roberts
Since M. Camus has treated of no other curve than the epicycloid, it would
appear that he considered it to supersede all others for the figure of the teeth of
wheels and pinions. And the editor must candidly acknowledge that he entertained
the same opinion until after the greater part of the foregoing sheets were printed
off; but on critically examining the properties of the involute with a view to the
better explaining of its application to the formation of the teeth of wheels and
pinions, the editor has discovered advantages which had before escaped his
notice, owing, perhaps, to his prejudice in favor of the epicycloid, from having,
during a long life, heard it extolled above all other curves; a prejudice strengthened
too by the supremacy given to it by De la Hire, Doctor Robison, Sir David
Brewster, Dr. Thomas Young, Mr. Thomas Reid, Mr. Buchannan, and many others,
who have, indeed, described the involute as a curve by which equable motion
might be communicated from wheel to wheel, but scarce any of whom have held it
up as equally eligible with the epicycloid; and owing also to his perfect conviction,
resulting from strict research, that a wheel and pinion, or two wheels, accurately
formed according to the epicycloidal curve, would work with the least possible
degree of friction, and with the greatest durability.
But the editor had not sufficiently adverted to the case where one wheel or
pinion drives, at the same time, two or more wheels or pinions of different
diameters, for which purpose the epicycloid is not perfectly applicable, because
the form of the tooth of the driving wheel cannot be generated by a circle equal to
the radius of more than one of the driven wheels or pinions. In considering this
case, he found that the involute satisfies all the conditions of perfect figure, for
wheels of any sizes, to work smoothly in wheels of any other sizes; although,
perhaps, not equal to the epicycloid for pinions of few leaves.
So far as the writer knows this is the first real appreciation of the
value of the involute curve for tooth outlines, and Hawkins should be
given a credit which he has not received,[64] especially as he points
the way, for the first time, to the possibility of a set of gears any one
of which will gear correctly with any other of the set. It was thought at
that time that there should be two diameters of describing circles
used in each pair of gears, each equal to the pitch radius of the
opposite wheel or pinion. This gave radial flanks for all teeth, but
made the faces different for each pair. The use of a single size of
describing circle throughout an entire set of cycloidal gears, whereby
they could be made to gear together in any combination, was not
known until a little later.
[64] John Isaac Hawkins was a member of the Institution of Civil
Engineers. He was the son of a watch and clock maker and was born at
Taunton, Somersetshire, in 1772. At an early age he went to the United
States and “entered college at Jersey, Pennsylvania, as a student of
medicine,” but did not follow it up. He was a fine musician and had a
marked aptitude for mechanics. He returned to England, traveled a great
deal on the Continent, and acquired a wide experience. He was consulted
frequently on all kinds of engineering activities, one of them being the
attempt, in 1808, to drive a tunnel under the Thames. For many years he
practiced in London as a patent agent and consulting engineer. He went to
the United States again in the prosecution of some of his inventions, and
died in Elizabeth, N. J., in 1865. From a Memoir in the “Transactions of the
Institution of Civil Engineers,” Vol. XXV, p. 512. 1865.