Corrupted Kingdom – Britain’s Disappearing integrity and how we can get it back Robert Barrington (2026) preview only
Our body politic is in many places either infected or at risk of infection, but this lies
beneath the surface. Our antibodies have until now been able to keep the infection
in check, but the infection is getting worse – and the defences are getting weaker.
It sounds pretty bad, and there is a risk that a book such as this will add to the doom
and gloom of the nation. That is by no means my intention. On the contrary, I hope
that by applying the lens of corruption analysis to institutions and events that are in
many cases already well known, we will get closer to understanding the problem
– and therefore be better placed to deal with it. My underlying approach is that
understanding and evidence are the basis of good policymaking. After all, if we
have a sound analysis of the problem, we are more likely to find solutions that are
fit for purpose. This brings to mind a saying from Einstein: ‘If I had an hour to
solve a problem, I’d spend fifty-five minutes thinking about the problem and five
minutes thinking about solutions.’ In this country, we do not spend enough time
thinking about whether corruption is a problem. If we were more aware, we might
appreciate that while corruption does not explain everything about contemporary
Britain, it can explain a great deal about political leadership, economic growth and
the decline of our key institutions. While researching this book, I have often been
asked what is going wrong with Britain – and whether corruption is the cause.
Many people share a sense that things are out of kilter and are unsure where
the country is heading. In fact, Britain may be experiencing what corruption
analysts call a ‘big bang’ moment: a point when a country can choose between
two paths – one that leads to more corruption or another that brings it under control.
I often encounter deep-state conspiracy theories about the City and the
Establishment. For example, that the outsourcing of so many public services to
the private sector is driven by a small cabal of politicians, financiers and business
leaders who want to feather their own nests irrespective of the quality of service
provided, and that this is enabled by the fact that so many were at the same
schools and universities together. The truth is both more complex and more
worrying. As I will demonstrate, there are many pockets of corruption in the UK,
sometimes barely kept in check by a set of weakened institutions. There is no
single group pulling the strings, but corruption can be damaging without being
coordinated. This comes against a background without being coordinated.
This comes against a background of some deep-rooted issues like increasing
inequality, economic stagnation and political instability, constituting a series of
social, economic and political threats to our national well-being.
These are prime conditions for corruption to thrive, which gives rise to an
uncomfortable reality: the corruption in this country may not yet have been
as damaging as in other countries, but we should not believe the UK is immune,
and there may be worse to come if corrective action is not taken.
Based on thousands of interviews and conversations with everyone from
ex-offenders to ex-prime ministers, this book explores the links between
important contemporary ideas such as chumocracy and Londongrad, as well as
high-profile issues like corruption in the Metropolitan Police and the monarchy.
Britain is complacent about corruption, but the threats are rising and the defences
are weakened. The rotten apples are starting to look like a rotting barrel.
As a country, we can avoid waking up to the silent spring. If we do not act,
we may move into illiberal democracy, state capture or systemic corruption.
But there is an alternative. We could use integrity and standards to refuel
Britain’s national well-being and international reputation.
The choice is ours to make.
The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism Matt McManus 2025
The Ukraine War and the Eurasian world order Glen Diesen (2024)
The
book answers the research question: To what extent does the Ukraine
War influence the world order? The book focuses primarily on the
West’s actions as it has been the collective hegemon and main
custodian of the world order over the past centuries. Subsequently,
it focuses on the West’s
failure to offer common rules to prevent and resolve conflict.
Instead,
the unipolar world order contributed to, instigated and prolonged the
Ukraine War. Exploring the war as a consequence of a collapsing world order
should not be interpreted as supporting or legitimising the war. To
answer this research question, the book first outlines the
theoretical assumptions
about world order and explores the rise of the Western-centric world
order, providing an overview of the foundations of world order. Thereafter,
it explores the rise and decline of the world order defined as liberal
hegemony after the Cold War, and the significance of NATO expansion
on the unravelling of the pan-European security architecture and a
common world order. In the second part of the book, the Ukrainian
crisis is
explored as a key battleground for determining the preservation or abandonment
of liberal hegemony. These chapters explore the rivalry for influence
between 1991 and 2014, the civil war between 2014 and 2022 following
the coup, and the Russian invasion from 2022. The final chapter outlines
how the emergence of a Eurasian world order has intensified because
of the Ukraine War. It is concluded that the world is entering a turbulent
time as the Ukraine War has ended liberal hegemony, yet a multipolar
Westphalian system has not yet asserted itself.
Chapter
two theorises the concept of world
order. The modern world order originating with the Peace of
Westphalia is contrasted with the incentives of restoring a Pax
Romana system to transcend the international anarchy with hegemony
and universal values. The balance of power is also translated into a
geoeconomic “balance of dependence” to explore how the disruption
of the Industrial Revolution altered the mercantilist system. The
struggle for world order is theorised to represent a series of
dilemmas such as a balance of power versus hegemony, cultural
distinctiveness versus universalism, and order versus justice.
Chapter
three explores the rise of the
Western-centric world order. Military
superiority and control over the maritime transportation corridors enabled
the rise of a Western-centric world from the early 16th century,
which advanced further as the Industrial Revolution endowed the West
with economic statecraft from the late 18th century. The world order
was reformed
by liberal principles due to the American and French Revolutions, the
transformation of industrial capitalism, and the subsequent rise of ideologies
following the First World War. The influence of economic and political
liberalism on world order became a reflection of the international distribution
of power.
Chapter
four addresses Pax Americana, the new
world order of liberal hegemony.
After the Cold War, there were debates about the case for and against
constructing a world order based on unipolarity and liberalism visà -vis
restoring a balance of power. The hegemonic system lacked
sustainability as the U.S. became reliant on military
interventionism, exhausted its resources, failed to address domestic
problems, suffered from declining
legitimacy in the world, and inadvertently incentivised foreign powers
to rival the U.S. in terms of military power, geoeconomics and political
institutions.
Chapter
five analyses the decline of liberalism
as the organising principle of the world order. Liberal hegemony
replaced international law with the rules-based international order
and reinvented diplomacy as a subject-object civilising mission. The
excesses of political and economic liberalism undermined the
foundation for social cohesion, and a new authoritarian liberalism
made it increasingly difficult for the West to present itself as a
teacher of democracy. Cultural decline weakened soft power, the
military-industrial complex corrupted democracy and governance,
domestic political squabbles increasingly influenced foreign policy,
and the concept of global civil society became a tool of state power.
Chapter
six explores NATO expansion and the
collapse of pan-European security and a common world order. After the
Cold War, two rival models for world order emerged that influenced
the European security architecture. A Westphalian balance of power
system represented by an inclusive pan-European security architecture
was institutionalised with the establishment of the Organisation for
Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which was based on
indivisible security, sovereign equality, and a Europe without
dividing lines. Concurrently, liberal hegemony in Europe manifested
itself by expanding NATO, which implied abandoning the pan-European
security agreements based on the Helsinki Accords, the Charter of
Paris for a New Europe, and the OSCE. Many American and European
leaders cautioned that NATO expansionism would revive the East-West
division of Europe and possibly start another Cold War. Yet, the new
dividing lines also revived an ideological divide as all subsequent
tensions were largely interpreted through the heuristics of a wider
struggle between democracy and authoritarianism. Diplomacy
degenerated, arms treaties collapsed, and the security dilemma
intensified.
Chapter
seven analyses how Ukraine became a pawn
on the European chessboard
between 1991 and 2014. Ukraine was destined to become the centre
of a proxy conflict between a liberal hegemony and a Westphalian world
order as Ukraine is a divided country in a divided Europe.
Nationbuilding in post-Soviet Ukraine has been troubled by the lack
of unifying narratives and identity. The ethnic, cultural, and
linguistic connectivity between
Ukrainians and Russians became a double-edged sword as the closeness
eroded the distinctiveness required for full sovereignty. While Eastern
Ukrainians commonly defined relations with Russians as a “fraternal
bond,” Western Ukrainians tend to interpret the shared history as imperialism
that diluted and undermined the development of a distinctive Ukrainian
identity. Russia placed its support behind the Eastern Ukrainians and
the West backed the Western Ukrainian nationalists due to competing visions
of a regional order and world order in terms of the distribution of
power and values.
Chapter
eight outlines the Ukrainian Civil War
sparked by the Western-backed
coup in February 2014. Russia’s annexation of Crimea and support
for Donbas brought the liberal hegemonic order under great strain. Hegemony,
liberal values, and international law required a principled rejection
of Russia’s incursion. Yet, the hegemonic order was supported by backing
far-right nationalists that would purge the Russian-friendly elements
in society and set Ukraine on a path to war. The new government in
Kiev suppressed the Russian language, culture, and the Orthodox
Church while
it also purged the media and opposition parties, including the arrest
of the
opposition leader. Meanwhile, the West used the UN-approved Minsk Agreement
to buy time to arm and train Ukraine which was becoming a de facto
member of NATO.
Chapter
nine explores the Russian invasion of
Ukraine in February 2022 and the proxy war that ensued. NATO’s
reluctance to prevent the war, the sabotage of peace negotiations
after the Russian invasion, and the continued escalations are
indicative of the failure of world order and what is at stake. NATO’s
objective to weaken Russia as a strategic rival and send a clear
signal to China could bring new energy to liberal hegemony, while a
Russian victory could restore a balance of power system. As the war
dragged on, the geostrategic objective of weakening Russia no longer
harmonised with the goal of “helping Ukraine,” and NATO began to
display its intent more overtly to “fight to the last Ukrainian.”
Chapter
ten analyses the emergence of the
Eurasian world order that intensified
because of the Ukraine War. Russia, China, and other Eurasian states
had already diversified their economic connectivity and aspired for a multipolar
system for several years as the international distribution of power
shifted. Yet, the war demonstrated the urgency of decoupling from the
economic dependence on the West and it collapsed the normative justification
of liberal hegemony. Irrespective of the military outcome, the war
revealed multipolar realities as the world outside NATO did not
accept the
West’s narrative, did not join sanctions, and instead accommodated Russia
economically and politically. Eurasian states are spearheading the transition
to a multi-polar Westphalian world order with Eurasian characteristics.
Western maritime powers lose their competitive advantage to
Eurasian land powers as new autonomous centres of power emerge that
reject liberal universalism in favour of civilisational
distinctiveness. It
is concluded that the world is entering a period of disorder as the
world is between liberal hegemony and multipolarity. States that
adapt to the multipolar realities will thrive and those that resist
the necessary adjustments
will contribute to war.
Stalingrad Vasily Grossman (2019)
How Westminster Worked – and why it doesn’t Ian Dunt (2023)
The
book starts with an interesting case-study of how a hapless MP who
just happened to be one Anthony Grayland selected a topic to make a
mark – the privatisation of prisons and the mess he then made of
it. Dunt then turns to the selection of MPs - the most important
moment in British democracy happens when no one’s watching. It’s
not the general election. The majority of votes at the election will
be completely ignored. It comes long before that, in a room filled
with party members, when they work out who is ultimately going to
become an MP.
It’s
called selection, and it’s the process by which candidates are
picked to stand for a party at election time. It involves the
headquarters of each political party – the Conservatives, Labour,
the Liberal Democrats and others. And it involves their constituency
parties – the local organisations and their memberships. No
one ever really talks about it. The British press spends far more
time covering
the Iowa caucus in the US than it does any of the pre-election procedures
in the UK. But this moment decides who sits on the benches in the
Commons or the chairs around the Cabinet table. It is the defining mechanism
for establishing the talent pool in Westminster, from which everyone,
up to and including the prime minister, will be chosen.
It
happens behind closed doors, away from prying eyes, on the basis of a
subsection of a subsection of a subsection of voters, with
weak-to-nonexistent democratic standards, according to a set of
incentives that bear no relation
to MPs’ constitutional role.
CHAPTER
1 The Vote
CHAPTER
2 The Members of Parliament
CHAPTER
3 The Power
CHAPTER
4 The Ministers
CHAPTER
5 The Treasury
CHAPTER
6 The Civil Service
CHAPTER
7 The Press
Interlude:
Evacuation
CHAPTER
8 The Commons
CHAPTER
9 The Law
CHAPTER
10 The Lords
Epilogue:
Solutions
The Real Economy – history and theory Jonathan Levy (2025)
WHAT
IS the economy? My aim in this book is to provide an answer to this
question,
for the purpose of better studying the economy, its history, and its
politics.
The larger hope is that the chapters herein might contribute to a
much-needed
discussion in the social sciences and humanities about the
subject
at hand, what the economy really is.
Why
pose the question? Are there not already economists, economic
historians,
economic anthropologists, economic sociologists, practitioners
of
political economy or law and economics, or normative theorists of
economic
justice and democracy? What is it they are doing if they are not
already
studying the economy? And if that is what they are up to, must there
not
already exist robust accounts (if not exactly shared ones) of what
the
economy
is—a “market sector,” a “general equilibrium,” a domain of
“materiality”
or “material subsistence,” the “gross domestic product,” or
some
other construction?
There
are not—or at least not, in my view, adequate accounts. Long
preoccupied
with honing methods, the core of the discipline of economics
risks
losing sight of the economy. Preoccupied with either appropriating or
criticizing
the methods of economics, other disciplines have failed to
articulate
an alternative conception of the economy. Therefore, no discipline
in
the humanities or social sciences today has a convincing theory of
the
economy.
The absence is the motivating concern that lies at the heart of this
book.
To elaborate an account that is adequate, my strategy has been
essentially
to start over again from the beginning, asking some of the most
fundamental
questions, in search of the most basic building blocks.
The
path will, occasionally, wind. The topics and themes of the book are
various,
as is the mode of exposition, which span historical narrative,
empirical
description, exegesis, and abstract theorizing. The chapters
include
a range of what might seem disparate topics: the economics of
ancient
Egyptian pyramid building; the meaning of “radical uncertainty”;
theories
of corporate personality leading up to the US Supreme Court case
Citizens
United (2010); Keynes’s notion of “demand” in The General
Theory
of Employment, Interest, and Money; debates in psychoanalysis
about
the correct understanding of desire; the nineteenth-century
intellectual
discovery of “altruism”; the Chinese demand for holding
American
silver in the sixteenth century and US treasury bills in the
twentyfirst; economic theories of capital; the story of Thorstein
Veblen’s firing
from
the University of Chicago. However, throughout there is an
overarching
focus on the nature of the economy, and what developing an
account
of the economy might mean for the writing of history (my home
discipline)
and for other forms of social scientific and humanistic inquiry.
I
should note that I arrived at the theme of the real economy only
while
writing
what became roughly the first half of the book. A historian very
much
of my generation, which came of age after the global financial crisis
of
2007–2008, my initial concern was with articulating a theory of
capitalism
and an account of its history. Soon,
however, I discovered that
in
fact I could not escape grappling with the problem of the economy—its
underspecified
conceptual existence. Doing so, I kept finding myself
repeatedly
turning back to an earlier moment in the history of economic
thought.
The
book returns in spirit to the era, roughly stretching from the 1890s
to
the
1930s, which first gave birth to the discipline of economics. I say
“spirit”
because I make no attempt at any direct act of simple retrieval—to
suggest
that some old master, or some old book, got the matter right long
ago
and for all time. Rather, from this period I have taken inspiration
from
the
economic “Vision,” as the economist Joseph Schumpeter once put
it. By
Vision,
Schumpeter meant a general orientation to the world that inevitably
precedes
analysis. In economic analysis, “to posit to ourselves any problems
at all,” he wrote, “we should first have to visualize a distinct
set of coherent phenomenon as a worthwhile object of our analytic
efforts.”
In
Schumpeter’s generation, what many economists were trying to
visualize was the economy. This moment—after Marx made the last
great contribution to “political economy” but before the triumph
of “neoclassical” economics following World War II—was one of
“methodological pluralism.” Before
the discipline of economics found its bearings in neoclassicism,
fierce debates raged, as many different visions of economics and of
the economy circulated and competed with one another.
In
my encounter with these “years of high theory,” as one perceptive chronicler
characterized them, the economics of Keynes and Veblen have loomed
the largest.5 Both
Veblen and Keynes were economic theorists. Keynes
entitled his most important books Treatise on Money and The General
Theory, and Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class and The Theory
of Business Enterprise. Writing
before neoclassicals transformed economic
theory into an entirely mathematical affair, when theorizing both preferred
verbal exposition (Veblen nearly exclusively). Veblen and Keynes figure
in the book most. But so do the economic Visions of a great many twentieth-century
economic theorists, even if they do not often crack the text
or even the notes. They cross diverse institutionalist,
post-Keynesian, Marxist,
Austrian, French Regulation, and even neoclassical traditions—from
Irving Fisher to John Hicks, Joseph Schumpeter, Frank Knight, Joan Robinson,
Albert Hirschman, Nicholas Kaldor, and others. If in different ways,
all first cultivated or sought to carry forward the rich legacies of
pre–World
War II economic theory.
By
revisiting traditions of literary economic theorizing that, if not
completely lost, have long been overshadowed in the discipline of
economics, and have not often been considered outside of it, my goal
is to articulate a theory of the economy that is open to rich
empirical study from multiple disciplinary and methodological
perspectives, across the social sciences and humanities. Perhaps the
effort will be of interest to contemporary economists, working in any
tradition. My ambition is to convince non-economists in the
interpretive social sciences and humanities that there are traditions
in economic theory of ecumenical interest, no less than traditions
in, say, philosophy, social theory, cultural theory, or political
theory. Of course, I also wish to convince historians that it is
worth conceptualizing the economy in the ways outlined here. In the
chapters, I flesh out this concept and put it to work by constructing
historical narratives informed by it. Finally, while I believe this
effort can help sharpen capitalism
as a category of analysis, for it to succeed the theorization of the economy
must be more generally valuable, beyond capitalism—including for
understanding what kind of economy existed before capitalism, and
what
it would mean for an economy to come after it.
