There are two distinctive features of this book. It first seeks to provide an updated account of the political economic development of late capitalist Britain, drawing on Andrew Gamble's analytical framework most recently outlined in his 2009 book, The Spectre at the Feast: Capitalist Crisis and the Politics of Recession. Gamble helpfully seeks to analyse the 2007–8 Global Economic Crisis as a combined political and economic crisis, avoiding the twin traps of economic determinism and excessive political voluntarism, but was published before this led to the politics of austerity in the 2010s and beyond. Kirk secondly seeks to advance this from a Scottish standpoint, particularly by documenting the neoliberal failures of England-focused Conservative governments through austerity, Brexit, COVID-19 and beyond. It does so by proposing that—at the time that he wrote—the hegemonic social democratic Scottish nationalist politics north of the border might offer a more progressive way forward, not just for Scotland but the UK as a whole, undermining UK Conservative dominance through what he calls 'radical Scottishness'. The book starts at a specific point in the post 2007–8 and 2016 Brexit vote story: the unsuccessful attempt by Teresa May in 2017 to call a general election to gain a larger majority to see off the hard-Brexit faction in her governing party. The hung Parliament that resulted ended when Prime Minister Johnson manoeuvred the Labour opposition into agreeing to an election in which he secured an 80 seat majority sufficient to pursue a hard Brexit, the damage of which has been obscured by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was of course the subsequent Party Gate scandal that brought Johnson down, from which successive Conservative government never politically recovered in the run up to the 2024 general election. This general story is well told and the book usefully does so from a leftist Scottish nationalist perspective. However, although Kirk's book was published in 2024, it fails to take account of the weakening of the nationalists' Scottish radical hegemony in the wake of the resignation of Nicola Sturgeon, and the Conservative culture wars onslaught against trans recognition and equality. Subsequent to this, of course, Scottish nationalism has been seriously weakened by the recovery of the Labour Party in the 4 July 2024 UK general election. Labour centrism seems to have made, at least for the immediate post-2024 period, serious inroads into radical Scottishness. It was undoubtedly the case that the post-2015 Scottish Nationalist triumph in both UK parliament and Scottish Assembly elections, posed a significant leftist challenge to the neoliberal policies of subsequent Conservative governments, and that this also extended to its approach to poverty policy and other areas of social policy. However, from the point of view of readers of this journal, the book mainly provides a general political narrative of the period up to the fall of Boris Johnson, focusing only in passing on Scottish social policy issues. In addition, while Gamble's approach judiciously combined economic and political analysis, Kirk's narrative offers a more limited political empiricism focusing on the ebb and flow of UK level political conflicts during this period. In addition, his book has already become rather dated and does not deliver the promised Gamble-style synthesis of economic and political analysis. Having said that, within its limitations it does offer a useful detailed account from a leftist Scottish perspective of the extraordinary turbulent period after 2017 that led up to the 2024 general election, which might make useful background reading for students of UK and Scottish social policy.
Mick Carpenter (Tue,) studied this question.