At the time you come to this module, Britain – indeed the wider world - faces an uncertain future. Our news feeds are full of reports from the ongoing wars in Palestine and the Ukraine; the US election is in the balance; and, despite the election of a new government, Britain looks set to continue along a part of austerity for many years to come. One might say, we are in crisis.
In this module we will work together to try and make some sense of this unsettling moment by exploring how Britain got here. We will see that there is nothing fundamentally exceptional about the times we are living through. In fact, the last 80-years of British life have been marked by crisis, struggle and reinvention: whether the struggle to establish a meaningful welfare safety net after WW2; Deindustrialisation and the long recessions of the 1970s and ‘80s; Neoliberalism, the global financial crisis, or austerity. These moments and processes have all shaped and reshaped the uneven geographies of economic and social difference and inequality across the UK.
Taking a political-economy perspective we will look at how British capitalism has changed across three eras: The post-war Keynesian era (1945-79) of mass production/consumption and the so-called ‘universal’ welfare state; the Neoliberal era (1979-2010) of privatisation, financialisation and welfare cutbacks; and the Austerity era (2010-?) of budget cuts and neoliberalism on steroids!
We will discuss the importance of political ideologies and material interests in remaking the ‘rules of the game’ for British Capitalism. We will explore the differential impacts these changes have had on different social groups, considering questions of inequality through the intersecting lenses of class, race and gender. And we will come to understand that far from inevitable, such changes are always subject to contestation and resistance.
In short, this module aims to provide a historical geography of the present by examining the geographies of inequality evident in Britain's economy, work, population, housing, welfare, and cities in the Keynesian, neo-liberal and austerity eras.
