How Britain Broke the World: War, Greed and Blunders from Kosovo to Afghanistan, 1997-2022

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For librarians and administrators, your personal account also provides access to institutional account management. Bevan emerged at this time as an important figure on the Labour left and would remain its leader until his death in 1960. It's helpful if you can let us know the title or URL (address) of the page you were looking for, and if relevant the address of the page you found the link on. The first function of a book review should be, I believe, to give some idea of the contents and character of the book.

The book is already a bestseller; a recent event promoting it required a venue change, so great was the demand for tickets. The most astonishing irony is that the Taliban were not even popular in Helmand, but predictably gathered followers as the British dug in, and were later succeeded by an aggressive US force, from 2014.The seeds of the ideology that led to both the Iraq invasion and the end of the West’s nascent warm relationship with post-cold war Russia were both sown in the late 1990s in the Balkans. The late Cameron years marked a change from the Blair ideology of liberal interventionism (which ended in 2013 when Cameron’s bill for intervention in Syria resulted in the first British government defeat in parliament on a matter of war since 1782) to foreign policy driven by short-term economic gain. This masterwork of political analysis is less remarkable for any actual points it makes than for explaining what the author was up to for the three months it took her to resign from Parliament “with immediate effect”.

But here too, politicians are navigating an industrial sector in structural decline, a political left that is often skeptical about the virtues of economic growth, and a political right that is organized in part around hating foreigners. Post-Brexit, the UK has agreed an international treaty with the EU and within a year announced its intention to break it.The chapter on Boris Johnson is a dossier of corruption and amorality, which should be read by anyone who still believes that Alexander Boris de Pfeffel was fit for office. With barely 100 installed robots per 10,000 manufacturing workers in 2020, its average robot density was below that of Slovenia and Slovakia. By 1945, however, colonies were an expensive liability for Clement Attlee's newly elected Labour government. What later became known as “decolonization” was very often shortsighted, self-interested, and not infrequently bloody, as was especially the case in Malaysia (where the politics of anticommunism played a central role) and in Kenya. In the eighteenth century, especially after the territorial gains of the Seven Years’ War, there was a widespread bitterness that the country had branched off from its constitutional roots; and against this background the historian Gibbon wrote his six-volume Decline and Fall.

The Conservatives could hardly argue that any of these industries, barring electric power, was flourishing or that they could have done much differently. Brexit has also been responsible for a continued undermining of international law, by a supposed pillar of the rules-based international system. K. manufacturing industry has less technological automation than just about any other similarly rich country. Eventually the Wilson government became unpopular and was kept in power primarily by weakness and division in the Conservative Party. Our politicians seem most interested in their own careers, and much of the media only make things worse.

Break ranks with the man once described as the “conscience of liberal Britain”, and you risk being seen as a useful idiot not only by him, but by the 1. His books include The State We’re In, How Good We Can Be, The World We’re In and The Writing on the Wall. What we get is fact-based analysis, startling for the simple reason that so many of those facts land so disruptively, and startling for the consistency of the main trajectory, which is how poorly the UK has been served by its leaders in recent decades. Snell is very good at deftly exposing media stories that came floating out of occupied territories, that somehow stuck but which were profoundly if not completely wrong.