The corporation’s claims to the public and to neutrality are crucial for the British state and its power across the globe.
The desire to see neoliberalism as the ’70s ruination of an earlier public consensus, is a desire to which state-backed capital is all too willing to direct us.
The nostalgic appeal to ‘the spirit of 45’ is embedded in a long myth of ‘public services’ propagated by the culture of Britain’s unwritten constitution.
The British media's sidelining of Scotland and its referendum is part of a history in which questions of nationality are smothered by the UK establishment. Today, it is increasingly clear that popular sovereignty is incompatible with the UK state. Yet avoidance is still the name of the 'British' g
Throughout its history, the stature of the BBC has depended upon an active suppression of nationality - silencing popular sovereignty through the transmission of British state ideology. Only by nationalisation can the deep changes be made that would enable the institution to provide a truly public
The desperate construction of cultural Britishness observable in this summer's Jubilee and Olympics is just another attempt to conflate British identity with an idealised vision of England. The motivation for those in power is clear: to disguise the gaping constitutional issues that threaten the U
A peculiarly British paralysis is the inheritance of a Burkean experience of time - we incur debts now in return for the promise of an ever-receding future. Yet a sense of immediacy is returning as part of a 'post-British' era.
The British media are now defensively acknowledging a post-imperial constitutional threat they have been silencing for decades.
Hello from 2050. ‘The markets’ have not failed – but non-productive speculation has, and the perpetual-growth model of economics is long gone. Since 2025, tremendous amounts of public funding has subsidised
In this response to Jean-Paul Gagnon on the nation-state, Michael Gardiner argues that cultural homogeneity is unnecessary as a property of nationhood. Rather, participatory citizenship is what is at stake. Resorting to the term 'country-state' would open the gates to half-formed ethnicism and eth
This essay traces the cultural embodiment of the British state in ‘English Literature’ in the period from 1790 to 1810, its uses and abuses, and the demise of this seminal metaphor for the ‘nationless nation’ which began in the 1970’s. The latter period saw a post-imperial unravelling of the cultu
