The Pandemic in Britain: COVID 19, British Exceptionalism and Neoliberalism

Offers a political and sociological critique of the UK government’s response to the coronavirus outbreak, interpreting the inadequacies of policy as the results of neoliberal ideology, protection of corporate interests, Brexit nationalism, and peculiarities of a model of capitalism based on international trade and labour market precarity. This book offers a political analysis and sociological critique of the UK government’s response to the novel coronavirus outbreak, interpreting the inadequacies of government policy with regard to COVID-19 as the results of neoliberal ideology, the protection of corporate interests, Brexit nationalism, and the peculiarities of a British model of capitalism based on international trade and labour market precarity. Arguing that institutionalized corporate-capitalist control of state and science generates new and growing public health risks, and that consumer-driven individualism has eroded community life and the protections this might offer against pandemics, the author contends that the UK government’s catastrophic response to the COVID-19 pandemic was the result of peculiarly British socioeconomic and political phenomena. The Pandemic in Britain will appeal to scholars of sociology, philosophy and politics with interests in the COVID-19 pandemic as well as neoliberal ideology and its manifestation in political life.