United Kingdom
by Adrian Bingham
Polity £12.99

THE convulsions being induced in the United Kingdom by its latest Conservative psychodrama are a timely example of the underlying theme woven throughout this book.

They are a dramatic illustration of the secular decline of a country badly failed by its political establishment, so limited in their vision they have been unable or unwilling to fashion a narrative about a collective future compelling enough to escape an omnipresent past.

The absence of that narrative, while largely survivable as the country grasped temporary lifelines to mitigate the loss of empire — Commonwealth trade, the EU, Cold War alliances — may now have created the conditions for a terminal fever to consume a prostrate patient.

Adrian Bingham’s concise history of the UK is a neat, descriptive summary of six main themes by which to understand how we got here.

It dwells little on factors of class and offers few pointers about where we are going, but its novelty lies in the approach the historian has taken to provide a skilful analytical framework that will enrich further study.

Eschewing  a chronological methodology, Bingham argues that comprehending the present requires us to understand how different types of change, from the geopolitical to the local, have shaped our everyday experience against the backdrop of the incurable addiction of politicians to former glories.

A key motif is how Britain’s imperial legacy remains a narrative ball and chain holding us back, and hence the tiresome persistence of unworkable futures based upon barren fictions — the latest being “Global Britain” and “Britannia Unchained.”

The words of the former US secretary of state Dean Acheson in 1962 that the UK had “lost an empire and not yet found a role” echo noisily from the pages, as relevant now as ever.

As are the observations, the author points out, of the historian Hugh Thomas, who in 1959 published The Establishment, a polemic despairing of how the UK was stuck in the past.
 
Bingham writes: “It is hard not to think that the Hugh Thomas of 1959... would be bemused to find that 60 years after his scathing critique of the ‘Establishment,’ the UK elected an Etonian prime minister, steeped in Classics and the language of Churchill, sceptical of Europe, and full of the glories of Global Britain.”
 
There is a disturbing circularity about Britain’s decline, a form of costume drama time loop so inescapable it could almost be the stuff of fantasy were its consequences not so real for its long-suffering people.

Blind elite faith that we can overcome “declinism” by harking back to something long gone is simply making it worse.

Although Bingham does not make prescriptions for how to drag ourselves out from under the dead weight of our past, the clear implications of his book are that radical, root-and-branch reform of the institutions, procedures — and narratives — of British society is our only hope.