Colin Kidd

Postmodern Britain lies well beyond Orwell’s imagining, a country where superannuated teenagers in certain walks of middle-class life, including journalism and politics, stay in a condition of more or less permanent adolescence from puberty to retirement. Surely it’s time for the authentically middle-aged – we know who we are: square, clapped out, disillusioned and cardiganed – to take charge before the inheritance is squandered?

In the quest to capture the middle ground that wins elections in a first-past-the-post system, the party of the left inevitably finds itself in an unacknowledged relationship of co-dependence with the party of the right. So much the better, surely, if that enemy on the right is not messianically capitalist?

Unacknowledged both by Leavers and Remainers, EU membership has served to disguise the messy contradictions of Britain’s multinational state. The uninhibited restoration of parliamentary sovereignty – in this context, the brute expression of English dominance – is no solution. In recent decades, the EU has helped to ease tensions at national borders as well as serving as a safety net for devolution. Some kind of substitute – or, more likely, an array of alternatives – will be required, if Brexit is not to bring about the disintegration of our anomalous early modern hodgepodge.

Last June’s​ xenophobic campaign and the Brexit vote that followed have left Scots – even the most unionist – estranged from the idea of Britain. In the months before the independence referendum of 2014, a large body of undecided Scots, while alienated from the Englishness of Toryism, the Home Counties and the City, still felt torn between a sense of solidarity with...

It is hard​ to imagine Clement Attlee, the most effective champion of ordinary working people in Labour’s history, thriving in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. Not only was he a conventional public school product – enormously proud of his Haileybury connection – and an unquestioning British patriot of military mien and experience, he had very limited patience for...