It was sold to the electorate on the grounds that we would be taking back control.

She became a bit of a media star in her protest against the closure.īrexit is a big theme throughout the book. This had been decided by an American Insurance and healthcare provider and no one in the area knew that this company was running an essential medical service. It was a shock announcement and there was no consultation or explanation given, other than it was no longer financially viable. They talk about various things, but he is there to hear about her protest of the closure of a doctor’s surgery. He starts though with his aunt who has lived in the same house in Harlow for fifty years. This is the question that Jason Cowley is hoping to answer in this book. How has this changed us as a country though?

Since then we have had all manner of things to contend with domestic terrorism, the Olympics, unnecessary wars, the financial crash of 2008, Brexit and most recently the pandemic. When I think back to the 1997 election when the inept Tory government was thrown out by the voters and the future seemed bright under the new Labour government we have come a long way. Most importantly, he also shows us the many ways in which there is genuine hope for the future. Through these vivid and often moving stories, Cowley offers a clear and compassionate analysis of how and why England became so divided and the United Kingdom so fragmented, and how we got to this cultural and political crossroads. He also examines the so-called Brexit murder in Harlow, the haunting repatriation of the fallen in the Iraq and Afghan wars through Wootton Bassett, the Lancashire woman who took on Gordon Brown, and the flight of the Bethnal Green girls to Islamic State, fleshing out the headlines with the very human stories behind them. And in doing so, Cowley shows the common threads that unite them, whether it is attitudes to class, nation, identity, belonging, immigration, or religion.

Cowley weaves together the seemingly disparate stories of the Chinese cockle-pickers who drowned in Morecambe Bay, the East End Imam who was tested during a summer of terror, the pensioner who campaigned against the closure of her GP’s surgery and Gareth Southgate’s transformation of English football culture. Spanning the years since the election of Tony Blair’s New Labour government to the aftermath of the Covid pandemic, the book investigates how England has changed and how those changes have affected us. In this compelling and essential book, Jason Cowley, editor-in-chief of the New Statesman, examines contemporary England through a handful of the key news stories from recent times to reveal what they tell us about the state of the nation and to answer the question Who Are We Now?

Who we are now