BRITAIN IN FRAGMENTS Book launch with Satnam Virdee and Brendan McGeever

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 at the University of Glasgow. His research focuses on understanding the entangled histories of capitalism, class and racism across time and space. Accompanying this is a body of work analysing social movements and their efforts to challenge structural inequalities and deepen processes of democratisation and social justice. A historical social scientist employing both longue durée and conjunctural modes of analysis, he is the author of seven books including Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider (Palgrave 2014).

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

Doors: 18.30, event starts: 18.45

Tickets are free but do please register your interest in advance. BRITAIN IN FRAGMENTS will be available to purchase on the night and the authors will be happy to sign copies after the talk. If you would like a signed copy but cannot make the event, please contact us on 0161 274 3331 or [email protected] and we can arrange this for you.

Host or Publisher Blackwell's Bookshop Manchester