Eleonora's description of Britain as a Ken Loach movie, rather than the American Dream, directly challenges the imaginaries of Northern meritocracy discussed in this book. We need to go back to Maria's discussion of precarity to find a similar critique (Chapter 3). Eliza's reflection on the privatization of British life, in Chapter 3, also approximates a critique of Northern meritocracy (an imaginary which, nonetheless, she partly endorsed).

When I conducted the interviews for this book, only a minority of participants engaged in explicit critiques of British meritocracy. Eleonora, like Maria, had long-term experiences of insecure work, albeit in a high-status sector (she was an experienced, but still precarious, freelance journalist). She also had a political biography that allowed her to access a different imaginary. Her critique of “social inequalities” and “privatization” (and her reference to Ken Loach) need to be situated in a longer biography of militant journalism and left-wing activism. Similarly, Maria mentioned that she supported the Labour Party in Britain. She did not speak about her political experiences or sympathies in Italy, but her discussion of British precarity revealed exposure to (and investment in) postwar discourses about the welfare state as a safeguard to workers’ collective rights (Littler, 2017). The word she used for precarity (precariato) also indicates that, in Italy, Maria had some familiarity with the critique of anti-austerity movements to the growing precarization of the Italian labour market and welfare.