What is the story of the re-emergence of Britishness?
The wide-ranging and daunting list of areas which Brown has attempted to address begs the wider question of why he chose to embark on this journey in the first place. One of the most significant reasons is the damage that the Thatcherite revolution has inflicted on the beliefs and confidence of social democracy. This has resulted in New Labour’s core concepts (and later-day Brown’s too) of the economy and social justice being barely decipherable from the other mainstream political parties. They have all positioned themselves in the narrow centre ground of the post-Thatcherite/Blairite environment. Therefore, Brown’s account of Britishness is an attempt to combine a synthesis of the Labour story of Britain which reached its apex in the 1945-70 period with an embrace and advocacy of the post-Thatcherite view of the world. This uneasy and conflicting alliance mirrors the strange mix within New Labour itself: elements of social democratic policy within a wider neoliberal polity (26). Secon
