This chapter explores developments in the present conjuncture that have shaped the terrain on which the Battle for Britain is being fought. Building on the arguments about heterogeneous social relations and the possibilities for political mobilisation and demobilisation in the preceding chapters, I turn to the accumulating crises that have shaped the current dynamics of the conjuncture. In Chapter 2, I argued that the UK (and the Euro-Atlantic system) had taken shape around two different conjunctural formations. The first, formed in the post-war/Cold War period, was articulated around the end of colonialism, the rise of Atlantic Fordism and the political-cultural formations in which it was embedded (centred on imaginaries of work, family and welfare within a distinctive national framing). The post-war settlements connecting these different domains were, of course, under strain from their very beginning and the dynamics of the conjuncture centred on the proliferation of contradictions, conflicts and crises that culminated in the crisis of hegemony of the 1970s traced in Policing the Crisis (Hall et al, 2013).

I argued for treating 1979 as marking the transition from that conjuncture: a transition marked by a shift in the larger ‘life of the state’ and in its relationships to the whole social formation. The new settlements that were assembled then combined neoliberal desires with an authoritarian populism in ways that framed the following decades. That combination was constantly reworked as new challenges appeared and new economic, social and political-cultural concessions were extracted. Consent, as Jeremy Gilbert has argued, centred on consumption as the form in which promises of inclusion and progress were made (for example, Gilbert, 2015; Gilbert and Williams, 2022). But this fragile and conditional consent was always intimately interwoven with emerging forms of authoritarianism, expanding the state's coercive capacities in multiple ways.

The Battle for Britain has been taking place on the landscape of the accumulated contradictions, crises and antagonisms of this conjuncture. Just as Thatcherism promised to ‘set people free’, so the promised resolution of these continuing and deepening troubles was expressed in the fantastical claim that everything could be resolved by ‘taking back control’.