The chapter is concerned with metaphor and focusses specifically on war metaphors in political discourses. The cognitive mechanisms at work in metaphor are described with an emphasis on frames as the unit of conceptual organisation that gets mapped in political metaphors. Recent experimental studies demonstrating the framing effects of metaphor are discussed. The war frame is described to include discussion of intertextuality as a means of accessing it. Three case studies are then presented exploring war metaphors in discourses of Covid-19, Brexit and immigration. Analogies with the first and second world wars in particular are highlighted and critiqued. The chapter defines and discusses extreme metaphors illustrated through examples in which immigrants are compared to animals and closes with a discussion of how readers may resist extreme metaphors.

How has Britain been transformed since the financial crisis of 2008?

This chapter explains how modern slavery figured in a revitalised vision of British global sovereignty as EU membership was under threat. The Coalition Government assembled an elite policy network and forged a bipartisan consensus in favour of the Modern Slavery Act 2015. Although primarily carceral, the act also required large corporations to disclose their efforts to rid their supply chains of slavery. Part of the Conservative government’s antislavery agenda, the Immigration Act 2016 pulled labour regulation further towards criminal law. As home secretary (2010–2016) and prime minister (2016–2019), Theresa May positioned the United Kingdom as a critical actor in the global antislavery governance network and fashioned the United Kingdom’s fight against modern slavery as a key plank in her vision of Global Britain. After May’s resignation, the pandemic, and Brexit, the Conservative government came to treat victims of modern slavery as if they were illegal migrants undeserving of human rights.

The point of departure of this chapter is the EU’s close cooperation with third countries, especially in the neighbourhood, which has erased a number of perceived boundaries between the EU and non-member states. Whereas within the EU, family members are largely considered to be the natural beneficiaries of the free movement of persons with ensuing residence and social rights, it is less clear whether the same undisputed status of a family also applies beyond the EU’s borders. The EU has concluded a number of association agreements with countries in its neighbourhood which comprise, to varying degrees, access to the EU’s internal market including the free movement of workers. The Polydor-doctrine of the Court of Justice of the EU has, however, established that similarly worded provisions in the EU Treaties and cooperation agreements concluded with third countries do not guarantee identical interpretation. With a focus on Turkey, the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom, the chapter analyses the conception of family and related rights in the EU’s cooperation instruments, with an aim to establish the extent to which non-EU families can be considered ‘EU families’.

Chapter 5 turns to westward labor migration from the EU’s newly acceded Central and East European (CEE) states to the EU15 from 2004. Despite the EU’s promise full social inclusion, the migration followed an exclusionary cycle. Focusing on Britain, the chapter shows how migrants’ EU-mandated free entry and social rights provoked a welfare nationalist backlash that was amplified by the tabloid press and reflected in opinion polls and in growing support for the populist, anti-immigrant United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). Relying on government documents, the chapter shows how Britain’s social security bureaucracy progressively rescinded CEE labor migrants’ social rights while the government adopted exclusionary migration reforms, culminating in the 2016 Brexit vote that ended CEE migrants’ entry rights. The Brexit Settlement Scheme preserved residence rights for some on ethnically and economically discriminatory bases. Comparative case studies of CEE migration to Germany, Sweden, and Italy show that each followed the British model ‘part of the way,’ adopting more selective exclusionary policies that discriminated the poorer, younger and less-skilled. The conclusion explains why the EU failed in the effort to extend its egalitarian, inclusionary, European citizenship project eastward.

A sustained period of Conservative government would normally be expected to usher in constitutional stability. But the reverse was largely true for the period 2010–24. During these years constitutional controversies were rarely far from the news, partly thanks to deliberately planned changes, but mostly due to radically shifting conventions and political behaviour. Across the time period, the direction of change was also very far from consistent. The initial coalition years were marked primarily by pressures towards greater constitutional pluralism, though Liberal Democrat reform ambitions were often held back by Cameron’s Conservatives. Later, any prospect of calm under single-party government was soon punctured by the pressures of Brexit. This eventually brought into question almost every aspect of the UK’s constitutional arrangements, and inflicted painful splits within the Conservative Party over questions of governance. In particular, Boris Johnson’s populist approach was characterised by wholesale disregard for constitutional norms, and highlighted vulnerabilities in the UK’s key democratic arrangements which few would previously have anticipated. If one commonality can be discerned across this fourteen-year period of constitutional extremes, it is the largely unconservative nature of policy.

Any fair evaluation of the Conservative effect (2010–14) must be cognisant of the context. Tom Egerton’s chapter will place the Conservative premierships in the six external shocks Britain faced, beginning with the Great Financial Crash and the Eurozone Crisis, before the impact of Brexit (and a debate over its external and structural causes), Covid, the Russo-Ukrainian War and the inflation crisis. How did each government succeed or fail in the face of compounding shocks? What opportunities and constraints emerged as a result? Only through an analysis of a decade of poly-crisis, and in the perspective of wider political change, can we make a conclusion on the question of ‘fourteen wasted years’.

The fourteen years of Tory rule constitute a stunning missed opportunity to seize on one of Britain’s few internationally renowned assets – its creativity. The government did step in to save organisations from disaster during the pandemic; it did, early on, extend its successful system of tax credits from film and TV to other cultural forms. It did the beat drum for extending demographic opportunities, even if in its actions it did not follow through. What mattered at least as much as specific decisions in this latest Tory era, particularly the latter part under May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak, was the manner of government engagement. Many in the sector are demoralised, having to raise private funds while being disparaged by ministers.

From Brexit to the rise of China, the deterioration of the special relationship with the United States and the return of war to Europe in Ukraine, this chapter will explore how the UK’s position in the world has faced both challenges and opportunities over the last fourteen years. The analysis will focus on how different Conservative premierships used or wasted these global changes, and how it has affected UK foreign policy and Britain as a whole (particularly Brexit’s influence on domestic policy and politics).

International pressures, Brexit and the resurgence of nationalism have created new divides in the regions of the United Kingdom. Brendan O’Leary examines the impact of Conservative policy in Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales, focusing on how prime ministers have handled campaigns and support for Scottish independence, the ruling coalitions in Wales, and also the new post-Brexit framework and demographic pressures in Northern Ireland. The chapter ends with a dire overall evaluation of the condition of the union as a result of Conservative policy.

This chapter discusses the entanglement of Brexit with the subsequent pandemic and the war in Ukraine, both of which have been used to muddy Brexit’s economic impact. It first analyses the rhetoric of the Leave campaign and of those politicians advocating for and negotiating Brexit. Those negotiations are bound to continue while politicians are reluctant to acknowledge Brexit as unfinished business. It then contextualizes contemporary fears of unlimited immigration as an echo of postimperial anxieties about British identity. These also feature in literary responses to Brexit which make them condition-of-England novels rather than investigations of wider Anglo-European relations. Forging a dialogue between the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and the fallout from the fourteenth-century bubonic plague suggests that political leadership and economic steer are crucial in determining a country’s recovery. How the pandemic was handled in the UK, paired with the economic impact of Brexit, aggravated the global supply issues caused by the war in Ukraine. This was not an inevitable outcome.

This chapter traces Ireland as a foundational zone of influence and creative disruption in the British imagination. Ireland’s political status has been altered by the Anglo-Irish relationship across centuries, while Britain, in turn, has been shaped by its interaction with the otherness of its closest island neighbour. Twelfth-century texts demonstrate that Ireland has acted as a foil to Britain’s imperial imagination, and it continued to do so throughout the subsequent literary and political history. The chapter discusses depictions of Ireland from Gerald of Wales to Edmund Spenser to William Shakespeare. Then it turns to examine the influence of Irish literature on the British imaginary. The enduring influence of Maria Edgeworth, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Samuel Beckett, and Seamus Heaney allows Britain to see itself through Irish eyes. Often, they reveal the occlusions and silences that exist within Britain’s self-imaginings. With Brexit shadowing the contemporary relationship between Britain, Ireland, and, of course, Europe, this dialogical Anglo-Irish relationship, whereby Ireland both reflects and distorts Britain’s image, becomes all the more significant.

The pro-Brexit campaign leading up to the 2016 referendum in the UK and in its aftermath was accompanied and driven by a narrative that was hostile to immigration and its cultural implications. Language played a role, with Leave campaigners criticising the presence of multiple languages in UK society and government agencies embarking on an 'English first' campaign that linked community languages to lack of integration and social incoherence. At the same time some arguments in support of foreign language learning embraced the Brexit narrative claiming that language skills will help post-Brexit Britain gain global influence. The chapter surveys different strands of UK language policy and concludes with an assessment of latest Census figures on language pointing to the increase in multilingualism.

Cities are contact zones characterised by conviviality of cultures. They have been described as the ideal setting for multilingual utopias, where institutional spaces emerge that cultivate multilingualism. In the context of globalisation and super-diversity, cities can redefine themselves as post-national spaces. Neoliberalism embraces diversity for its profitablity value; it is opposed by notions of the right to the city and local citizenship. Critical social and sociolinguistic theory embraces definitions of identity, community and language that recognise the dynamics of multiple components in individuals' repertoires of features and networks of practice. Traditional notions of identity, belonging, commuity and language give way to an appreciation of the fluidity of forms of belonging and networking practice. Diasporas are understood as translocal networks of practice with multiple expressions of belonging. Manchester as an early industrial city offers an interesting setting to observe the evolution of diaspora communities and their alignment with fluid language practices.