A nation in crisis: division, conflict and capitalism in the United Kingdom
Neville Kirk
Bloomsbury Academic £21.99

NEVILLE KIRK, emeritus professor of Social and Labour History at Manchester Metropolitan University, takes a look at political events in Britain from late 2016 to July 2022.

Kirk covers economic crisis, struggles over Brexit, the elections of 2017 and 2019, and Scottish politics. He examines how the Conservative, Labour and Scottish National parties behaved in these years, using a wide range of source materials.

He makes his position clear from the start: “Some, including the present author, maintain that left-of-centre ‘radical Scottishness’ in the form of the movement for Scottish independence and its desire to create of [sic] a fairer and more egalitarian society, now constitutes the main challenger and possible alternative to hegemonic Conservatism.”

But talk of fairness and equality is cheap. Indeed, reaction easily uses these: Boris Johnson set up the Department for Levelling Up, and Theresa May talked of the Conservatives being “for the many.” Liberal rhetoric can be appropriated, precisely because it is so flabby.

When Kirk writes of “the catastrophe of Brexit” and of “the failed Scottish referendum of September 18 2014” he decries populism, always referring to it as “right-wing populism.”

In 2018 a leading SNP member, George Kerevan, pointed out that 500,000 voters had deserted his party between the 2015 and 2017 general elections. “Because,” he says “they lost faith in our ability to oppose Tory austerity and deliver a better life in concrete terms.”

The SNP indeed proved unable to protect Scotland from the effects of Conservative rule.
 
Kirk writes: “The Union, furthermore, was believed to afford preferential treatment to the people of Scotland, vis-a-vis other UK subjects, in terms of comparatively lower levels of taxation, higher levels of public spending per head of population and the running, without any immediate costs, of a high budget deficit.”

“Believed”? Surely this is a question a fair-minded historian should seek to answer. But he doesn’t because, as he knows, it is true.

As a report from the Centre for Economic Performance concluded, separation would leave Scotland considerably poorer. Separation would also make Scotland less influential.

Scotland’s population of 5.5 million is 8 per cent of the UK’s (and only 1.8 per cent of the EU population). How can anyone believe that Scotland would have more power as part of the EU than as part of the UK?

Kirk admits that the SNP played dirty in its attacks on the Labour Party: “Sturgeon was wrong in her claim that Jeremy Corbyn’s opposition to cheap immigrant labour carried ‘echoes’ of the racism of Nigel Farage.” The crucial point, conveniently bypassed by Sturgeon and the SNP, was that Corbyn viewed cheapness as an economic, class-based phenomenon rather than a racial one.

Kirk’s first forecast was that “Johnson’s practice and vision constituted the most obvious and popular way out of UK capitalism’s ongoing and most challenging combined crisis of modern times.” He admits that this conclusion “is no longer valid.”

He acknowledges that “the polls taken since 2014 — almost 90 of them — conclusively showed that there had been little, if any, consistent and significant change in support for an independent Scotland.”

Events since he wrote this book, mainly Sturgeon’s forced resignation and the SNP’s steady self-destruction, have proved him wrong too.

How many people in Scotland would now agree with him about “the proven efficiency and competence of SNP governments”?

This book is marred by the author’s wishful thinking, derived from his biases against British independence and support for Scottish separatism. It is an example of reaction in progressive clothing.