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

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.