The State We're In [antikvár]

Preface To The Vintage Edition When it was published in hardback, The State We're In struck more of a chord with a wider range of British readers than I ever imagined possible. There is plainly an untapped reservoir of concern about our country - and a hunger both for a different explanation of our predicament to that offered by conservative orthodoxies and for a different way forward. Inevitably the book also attracted its critics, but one of the heartening aspects of the last year is how well its claims have withstood the bombardment. The central propositions - that British society is fracturing, that investment is palpably too low and British democracy does suffer from structural Seformations - have held up. To argue differently is to invite ridicule. The best that critics can do is complain that other, more encouraging facts have been omitted from the analysis; that current pains are the necessary transitional costs that must be paid to move Britain from the the cul-de-sac in which the country was trapped in the late 1970s; that the future will be better than the present - and that the past was anyway unsustainable. The critics deserve a response, so I am using this preface for that purpose. Some new readers may prefer to read the book first to make their own judgements before assessing others' criticisms; others may want to be forwarned of the principal arguments. The first line of attack is that the book is somehow sympathetic to the condition Britain had reached in 1979 and that it wants to turn the clock back to a fantasy of a better yesterday. Not so, as I hope new readers will find for themselves. The State We're In accepts that there had to be change in the 1970s - indeed it points up that there had to be change - but what it fiercely contests is the direction which that change has taken and the theories and suppositions upon which it was based.