We’re delighted to be working with Manchester University Press to host the launch of Satnam Virdee and Brendan McGeever’s BRITAIN IN FRAGMENTS – their new book analysing how government failures and a rise in nationalism has contributed to a rapidly fragmenting society. Satnam and Brendan will be in conversation with Jenny Hewitt.

About the book:

Britain today is falling apart. One of the most dominant states in world history finds itself confronted with growing demands for nationalist secessionism. Brexit has already secured its break from the European Union while looming Scottish independence promises to undermine the integrity of the British state. Meanwhile, class, gender, regional and generational inequalities are deepening while endemic racism has been re-invigorated. How has it come to this? Britain in Fragments traces how the historic pillars sustaining the democratic settlement have begun to crumble. This stability was constructed amid a century of imperial expansion abroad and working-class struggles for justice at home. The post-war welfare state was the apex of this historic arrangement; however, the ground beneath it began to shake as the processes of decolonisation and neoliberalism unfolded. This book traces how successive Labour and Conservative governments have incrementally dismantled the democratic settlement. A bipartisan commitment to neoliberalism has culminated in a historic crisis of representation and legitimacy, opening the door to competing nationalist forces.

About the authors:

Satnam Virdee is Professor of Sociology and Founding Director of the Centre for Research on Racism, Ethnicity and Nationalism (CRREN) at the University of Glasgow. A historical and political sociologist with substantive research interests in racism, class, and social movements as well as theories and histories of the making of the modern world, he is the author of 6 books (2 sole-authored and 4 co-authored) and more than 60 articles and essays.

Brendan McGeever is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Birkbeck, University of London. In 2019, he was selected as a ‘New Generation Thinker’ by the BBC and AHRC. His core areas of specialism are the study of racism, antisemitism, and anti-racism, historically and in the present day; the sociology of class; the study of the former Soviet Union, Marxism and Marxist theory. He is also the author of Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2019).