In presenting the findings of the AC to the public at the beginning of July 2015, Howard Davies expressed his ‘hope that within weeks, if not months, [ministers would] decide to go ahead [with expansion]’ (Davies, 2015a). But these hopes were soon dashed. Over four and a half years, two Prime Ministers and four governments later, his efforts to deliver an ‘evidence-based consensus’ were still being challenged in the courts. In February 2020, in a landmark judgement, the Court of Appeal ruled that the ANPS and its plans for a third runway at Heathrow were ‘illegal’ because the government had failed to take adequate account of the impact of aviation emissions from expansion on its commitments under the 2015 Paris Agreement and the UK target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050 (Carrington, 2020). The Conservative government, led by Boris Johnson, who was a strong opponent of Heathrow expansion when Mayor of London, made it clear that it would not appeal the ruling, and so it was left to Heathrow Airport Limited (HAL) to challenge the verdict (Xie and Baynes, 2020). The proposed third runway was effectively stalled.

This chapter analyses the complex and messy dynamics of politicisation, depoliticisation and repoliticisation, which punctuated the aftermath of the AC, as rival discourse coalitions competed for policy hegemony. In the post-Brexit context, we argue that successive Conservative governments struggled to perpetuate the dominant social logic of ‘predict and provide’, as they sought in the face of sustained political opposition to deliver airport expansion by depoliticising aviation's contribution to climate change, air pollution and noise. The chapter also shows how the opponents of expansion exploited and re-politicised the novel arenas and technologies, which were designed and developed by government to remove the issue of aviation expansion from the political domain. Here we explore how the February 2020 ruling of the Court of Appeal, and the successful legal challenge to the third runway, transformed the Planning Act (PA) (2008) and Climate Change Act (CCA) (2008) and the 2015 Paris Agreement into ‘counter-technologies’, effectively redefining the courts as a sphere of resistance. In exploiting the new technologies and spaces of planning and climate change policy, campaigners were able to use the law courts and the process of judicial review to challenge government and open up new spaces for citizen protest and political resistance.

‘Staying grounded’ captures one of the central concerns of this book: our critique and evaluation of the dominant discourses of airport expansion in the UK and across the globe, where the growth of the aviation industry, despite its accelerating contribution to rising carbon emissions, is universally supported and promoted by most governments and states. Our book has investigated the efforts by the UK state, the aviation industry and public authorities to sponsor the industry over many decades, often in the face of hostile protests and political campaigning, and lodged in this genealogical investigation is a quest to articulate and refine our normative alternatives to ‘binge flying’. But ‘staying grounded’ also alludes to our preferred approach in exploring these issues, as we have sought to analyse our objects of study by assembling detailed genealogies of the ways governments, parties and politicians, public authorities (including local councils), departments of state, the aviation industry, environmental groups, campaigners and citizens have problematised, argued about and fiercely contested where, when and if airport expansion should occur in any conjuncture.

For more than 25 years, we have adopted and developed a ‘slow’ approach in this research, benefitting from a longitudinal study that has gathered and interpreted the ‘common sense’ of actors expressed in this complex policy field (Almond and Connolly, 2020: 69). At times, we have also hovered above the fray at varying altitudes, seeking to show the various connections and differences between the multiple strands of the seven main problematisations of the UK airports issue since 1945, as well as the continuities and discontinuities in its evolution. This perspective has enabled us to deconstruct the dominant myths, narratives and fantasies underpinning the vicissitudes of UK aviation policy, and to propose alternative pathways and futures.

Our book has shown that the case of UK airport politics and policy, especially the future of Heathrow, is what John McDonnell calls an ‘iconic, totemic battleground of climate change’ (Johnson, 2018). It also illuminates a number of pressing issues in the present, including the role of government and their different technologies and techniques in addressing the dilemmas of large infrastructure projects, the paradoxes of depoliticisation, the role of courts and judicial review, the dialectics of protest, campaigning and policymaking, and the future trajectories and possibilities of new ways of travelling, working and enjoying.

As I argued in the previous chapter, conjunctural analysis is a spatio-temporal approach, exploring the particular configurations of time and place that make up a conjuncture. Somewhat artificially, I focused on the spatial dynamics and dimensions in the last chapter. Here I turn to the challenge of thinking about time. We can catch a glimpse of its complexity by considering the different stories that have been told about Brexit and the Battle for Britain. These narratives operate with different senses of time: some tell us about long histories (of decline or a fall from greatness); others offer fast-paced accounts of quickly moving events (stories of political calculation and manoeuvring). More rarely are these different senses of time brought together – as multiple temporalities (different orderings and experiences of time) that co-exist and interact. Felski, for example, has argued that time

Just as Chapter 1 argued that the space of the conjuncture is no simple matter (demanding thinking the nation transnationally), so this chapter will explore the multiple orderings and senses of time that are in play in the conjuncture. Thinking about temporalities, rather than time/times, is a way of trying to treat time as enmeshed in social, political-cultural and economic relations and processes and conflicts. Indeed, I will suggest, it is the intersections and entanglements of these different temporalities – the ways that they come to be condensed in the present – that gives the conjuncture its distinctive character. As a result, this chapter is organised around the notion of different temporalities. It will explore the different orderings of time that are associated with particular fields of relationships which have distinctive dynamics of crisis, contestations and (temporary) resolutions. These temporalities are, however, not entirely separate: each provides some of the conditions for the others and is affected in turn by their dynamics.

The Battle for Britain has taken place on the political-cultural terrain of the nation as contending narratives about its past, present and future have tried to claim the nation for themselves. These contentions crystallised around Brexit, a moment which exemplified one dramatic trend – the revival of nationalism – and posed one profound analytical problem: how do we locate this nationalist revival in spatial terms? Do we attend to the varieties of nationalism in play, looking at their distinctive formations and trajectories? Or do we look beyond the national examples to a more global account of this phenomenon: is this an era of nationalism structured by international or global realignments? Although most academic – and media – attention has been focused on populism, I share Valluvan's view of this as a period of ‘nationalist populism’ (2019: 11; emphasis in original). Such nationalist populisms have proliferated, connecting the British experience to many elsewheres: Trump's desire to make America Great again, Bolsanaro's rise to power in Brazil, Modi's Hindu nationalism in India, Orban's Fidesz governments in Hungary, the Law and Justice Party in Poland, not to mention the rise of nationalist-populist movements, if not governments, across Europe, from the AfD in Germany to the Rassemblement National in France. Across these many settings, nationalism, populism, racism, authoritarianism and more have been bundled together – or, more accurately, articulated – in specific national forms. It remains important that Trumpism is not Orbanism which is not Brexit, even though they (and other instances) are connected in multiple material and symbolic ways. The chapter will argue that the challenge is to think about nations and nationalisms transnationally and conjuncturally. This forms the focus of the first section of the chapter.

This approach makes it possible to situate Brexit – and the wider Battle for Britain – within these larger transnational conjunctural dynamics of the national question rather than solely in terms of the UK's relationship to the EU (or some abstract ‘global capitalism’). How the UK as nation and nation-state came to occupy this place is the focus of the second section.

The need to think conjuncturally is nowhere better demonstrated than in the moment of Brexit. Accounting for Brexit has tended to take simplifying forms, ranging from a focus on manoeuvring within the Conservative Party to the grand global explanations centred on neoliberal capitalism. In this chapter I explore three ways of locating and explaining Brexit as exemplifications of the problems of focusing on one dynamic. I address explanations that treat Brexit as one example of a wider global rise of populist politics, explanations that centre on the disruptive and dislocating effects of neoliberal globalisation, and finally, explanations that treat the Brexit vote as the reactions of the ‘left behind’ in the UK. Each of the lines of argument to be explored here – populism, neoliberalism and the ‘left behind’ – has provided organising narratives for the phenomenon of Brexit and its afterlife.

These accounts focus on and amplify particular causes for Brexit and have helped to shape popular ‘common sense’ about what Brexit means. Given how Brexit has shaped the political and cultural landscape, the sheer weight of attention devoted to it is not surprising and nor is the effort that has gone into solidifying particular explanations into narratives of what this means for Britain, Europe, or even the world. Let me be clear: my argument here is not that there has been no rise of populism as a political formation, nor that neoliberalism has not reshaped the world in important ways. But to focus on such dynamics as the explanatory framing of Brexit precisely misses the conjunctural complexity that I have been drawing out in the preceding chapters – and with it the need to think of Brexit as a crucially overdetermined moment within the conjuncture.

Populism prevails?

In this chapter, I explore the contradictions, crises and conflicts associated with the 2019 Conservative government's attempts to manage the trajectory of the conjuncture. Building on the discussion of culture wars in the previous chapter, I turn to other elements of the governmental repertoire, with particular attention to the simultaneous expansion of coercive capacities and the centralisation of power in the hands of the ruling party. Just as culture wars were never ‘merely cultural’, so these strategies were both material and symbolic, evoking a variety of legitimating devices for their introduction, including the continuing deployment of the imaginary of ‘wealth’. I then consider these strategies in the light of the emerging fissures and fractures within the Party and within the wider ruling bloc. The problems of maintaining these two ‘unities in difference’ dominated the life of the Johnson government (2019– 22), culminating in the overthrow of Johnson by the parliamentary Conservative Party and his replacement in the summer of 2022 by Liz Truss. Her arrival and departure as party leader and prime minister coincided with the last phases of writing this book but have already contributed to the expanding proliferation of crises, contradictions and conflicts. The chapter ends with some reflections on the arrival of what might be called ‘zombie Thatcherism’ (to borrow from Jamie Peck).

Law and order politics (again)

In the UK, the public reactions to Brexit, political dislocations, COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter became entwined with campaigns of environmental activism and challenges to violence against women (particularly after the kidnapping, rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving Metropolitan Police officer). The aftermath of this case intersected with continuing investigations into undercover police spies, particularly those who had infiltrated social movements and, in some cases, formed relationships and had children with members of those movements (McFarlane, 2020). Indeed, the Metropolitan Police were rarely out of the headlines as policing problems, failures and disasters accumulated – from a series of highly publicised racialised stop and search actions to the policing of a vigil to commemorate Sarah Everard, which itself resulted in the sexualised trolling by police officers of one protester who was arrested at the vigil (see, inter alia, Rodger, 2021; Topping, 2021).

In the previous chapter I argued that the trajectory of the present conjuncture was forged by a distinctive – and accelerating – accumulation of crises, while insisting that crises are also the focus of political-cultural efforts to define them, give them meaning and make them matter to audiences. The pandemic was the focus of such definitional struggles from the beginning, as the government strove to use it to articulate versions of British exceptionalism (‘world beating’ responses) while others sought to draw attention to failures and hidden dynamics. Not for the first time in recent British history, crisis and questions of race became entangled. In the 1970s, the deepening crisis of hegemony was displaced into a projected crisis of ‘Law and Order’, embodied in the threat of young black men – ‘muggers’ – roaming city streets (Hall et al, 2013: 240– 242, 268– 271). The pandemic saw different articulations of crisis and race, as the racialised inequalities of the pandemic intersected potently with the global reaction to the murder of George Floyd. This chapter explores these connections and their relationships to both longer standing anti-racist campaigns (especially around policing) and to emerging challenges, particularly around the history of British colonialism and imperialism. It then examines the political responses to these emergent mobilisations, involving strategies of denial, deferral and deflection.

These political-cultural strategies to contain and deflect invoked a distinctive version of the ‘culture wars’ in which efforts were made to reframe the question of racism. Exploring this strategy opens a wider discussion of the significance of culture wars for an analysis that treats politics as the site of political-cultural articulations, in which discursive framings, historical narratives and potent symbolisations of the nation and its people occupied central places.

Who can't breathe?

As I suggested in the previous chapter, COVID-19 embodied many of the distinctive features of contemporary crises – formed in transnational processes and relations with spatially differentiated consequences (across and within countries) and inextricably linked to other crises, notably those of the current nation-state form. Its trajectory was both familiar and distinctive: it encountered national and international organisations illprepared for its demands; it flowed along well-worn routes of circulation, tracking deeply embedded structures of inequality (globally and within nations).

This chapter explores developments in the present conjuncture that have shaped the terrain on which the Battle for Britain is being fought. Building on the arguments about heterogeneous social relations and the possibilities for political mobilisation and demobilisation in the preceding chapters, I turn to the accumulating crises that have shaped the current dynamics of the conjuncture. In Chapter 2, I argued that the UK (and the Euro-Atlantic system) had taken shape around two different conjunctural formations. The first, formed in the post-war/Cold War period, was articulated around the end of colonialism, the rise of Atlantic Fordism and the political-cultural formations in which it was embedded (centred on imaginaries of work, family and welfare within a distinctive national framing). The post-war settlements connecting these different domains were, of course, under strain from their very beginning and the dynamics of the conjuncture centred on the proliferation of contradictions, conflicts and crises that culminated in the crisis of hegemony of the 1970s traced in Policing the Crisis (Hall et al, 2013).

I argued for treating 1979 as marking the transition from that conjuncture: a transition marked by a shift in the larger ‘life of the state’ and in its relationships to the whole social formation. The new settlements that were assembled then combined neoliberal desires with an authoritarian populism in ways that framed the following decades. That combination was constantly reworked as new challenges appeared and new economic, social and political-cultural concessions were extracted. Consent, as Jeremy Gilbert has argued, centred on consumption as the form in which promises of inclusion and progress were made (for example, Gilbert, 2015; Gilbert and Williams, 2022). But this fragile and conditional consent was always intimately interwoven with emerging forms of authoritarianism, expanding the state's coercive capacities in multiple ways.

The Battle for Britain has been taking place on the landscape of the accumulated contradictions, crises and antagonisms of this conjuncture. Just as Thatcherism promised to ‘set people free’, so the promised resolution of these continuing and deepening troubles was expressed in the fantastical claim that everything could be resolved by ‘taking back control’.

There is a strange paradox about trying to write a concluding chapter while the deepening crisis and conflicts of this conjuncture are still playing out in dramatic ways. The Battle for Britain has taken ever stranger turns as the Conservative Party flails around, trying on Prime Ministers as though in a hat shop. So this is certainly not an ending; rather, it is a chance to take stock of the issues and arguments developed in the book and consider some of the possible routes through the present troubles. In the first part I reflect on what I see as the main lines of argument in the book. I then turn to questions of where we are in the conjuncture, before asking whether we are lodged in what Gramsci called an ‘interregnum’ – a point at which ‘the old is dying and the new cannot be born’ (Gramsci, 1971: 276). The puzzle of the interregnum leads me into a slight detour through the strangeness of metaphors, conceptual and political. After that, I consider what ways forward are being imagined and offered, before exploring how the possibilities for thinking and acting otherwise might be mapped. I end by suggesting that the political-cultural struggles for the future might be viewed through three linked sets of practices – reimagining, repairing and rearticulating.

Battling for Britain

Over the course of this book, I have tried to draw out the ways in which ‘Britain’ – this complex social and spatial imaginary – has been the focus of multiple conflicts over its past, present and future. From claims about ‘our history’ to the fracturing unity of the ‘United Kingdom’, from the discovery of the ‘left behind’ to the intensification of borders and bordering; from deepening coercion to deepening inequalities, Britain appears in multiple guises and is always contested. These battles for Britain have taken place around different focal points, on many different terrains and have involved different and complexly interwoven temporalities. These sites have included:

• • The moment of Brexit (and the ensuing struggles to ‘make it happen’) which exacerbated fractures in the unitedness of the United Kingdom, particularly in the increasingly fraught relationships between the Westminster-London-English system of governing and the other nations, challenging both the constitutional formation and political-cultural imaginary of the nation-state.

In this chapter, I explore a different focus of the turbulence and troubles of this conjuncture – the state. Many of the crises discussed earlier in the book have been threaded through the apparatuses and agencies of the state, not least as a result of the ways that the UK state has been – and continues to be – occupied and remade by the dominant bloc. From the policing of dissent and disorder to the management of migration; from pandemic governance to the regulation of public utilities; from the cost of living to the environmental crisis, the array of emerging crises and dominant efforts to manage them are intimately interwoven with the state. If, as Gramsci suggested, the ‘life of the state can be conceived as a series of unstable equilibria’, then this is a profoundly unsettled moment in the life of the UK state. These crises have different trajectories and temporalities (as I argued in Chapter 2). They have also involved different social forces and mobilisations. But they have consistently coalesced in and around the state, such that we might talk of a crisis of the state itself.

I will suggest that the current crisis of the British state has three distinctive, although interconnected, aspects. First, there is a crisis of capacity involving the state's ability to manage social, political, environmental and economic disorders. Second, there is a crisis of legitimacy that condenses varieties of anti-state scepticism alongside a deepening popular mistrust of politics, politicians or what is sometimes called ‘the political class’. Third, this crisis of legitimacy is linked to a crisis of authority, in which the dominant bloc has found it harder to command popular support for its projects, policies and promises. As a result, I suggest, the state is ‘not what it used to be’ and needs to be considered in more carefully conjunctural terms (rather than assuming that there is a persistent and coherent entity called the state or even The State). In this chapter I consider each in turn, and end by asking what it means to ‘perform like a state’.

I started work on this book in 2018, driven by multiple frustrations. Since then, the UK has had four Prime Ministers, left the European Union (with some details still to be sorted out), experienced a sterling crisis, entered a period of unprecedented economic hardship, joined in a global pandemic and was – fleetingly – described as “the best country in the world to be a black person” (Kemi Badenoch, MP). There have been various stories told about this political and social turbulence and its alarming acceleration in mid-2022. Some centre on the fractious fortunes of the Conservative Party. Others have pointed to the dislocations of Brexit, following the referendum over whether to remain in the EU (2016). A different story identifies the global financial crisis of 2008 (and its after-effects, including austerity politics) as the point of entry. Meanwhile, other accounts have traced the origins of our present troubles to the liberalisation of global trade, inaugurated by the Reagan– Thatcher alliance in 1979– 1980 and often described as the beginning of ‘neoliberal globalisation’. In this book, I explore how all of these moments – and more – came together and were condensed in our current conflicts. Rather than focusing on one story, I suggest that it is vital to examine the ways in which these stories are entangled both with each other and with still longer histories to make these different moments possible.

I examine how these different moments are connected with, and contribute to, a wider ‘Battle for Britain’, one that is distinctively marked by the rise of political-cultural movements committed to British/English nationalism. I stress political-cultural since these conflicts extend well beyond what is conventionally understood as politics – into arguments about who ‘we’ are (the nation, the people), about ‘our history’ (and how to memorialise or protect it), about how Britain might be ‘Great’ again.

Class became central to debates about Brexit (and the wider conjuncture) in several ways. As we saw in the last chapter, one argument was that Brexit was a ‘working-class revolt’. This chapter explores some of the problems associated with this claim before arguing for a more relational understanding of social divisions. The argument ignores evidence about the substantial contributions of the middle classes to the Brexit result. At the same time, there are conceptual questions about the remaking of the working class in deindustrialised times and the contemporaneous remaking of the middle classes. There is a particular issue about the increasing visibility of ideas of the ‘white working class’ and the chapter explores the conditions for this imagery in the long trajectory from colonialism to post-colonialism. This points to questions of how to understand the articulations of class and other social relations such as racialised and gendered divisions in the current conjuncture – and their shifting social and political salience (Williams, 2021). In hard times, there is a recurring tendency for critical thinking to revert to a focus on class, as if the arguments about how class is articulated with other social relations had never taken place. As a result, the final part of the chapter directs attention back to the multiplicity of social relations in the current social formation.

Rediscovering the working class

In the aftermath of Brexit, the working class was ‘rediscovered’ as both a social group and a political force. Researchers who had been studying workingclass communities argued that people who had been ignored and disdained by Westminster (and politics more generally) had seized the unexpected opportunity provided by the referendum to make themselves heard: