British Socialism

Britain is Broken: What it means and where are we going? Sunday National, 29 August 2025 Gerry Hassan Britain is in crisis. Doom and gloom are everywhere. The right see this as an existential mess where everything they detest can be torn down. Meanwhile what passes for the centre-left shifts ever rightward to appease the increasingly emboldened right. The UK has been in crisis before. The early 1960s saw widespread debate about national decline and the UK’s inability to economically modernise. The late 1970s and early 1980s witnessed similar discussions about the UK’s laggard economic performance and how to remove

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A Tour Inside Gordon Brown’s Britain Gerry Hassan Scottish Review, November 25th 2020 Gordon Brown in recent times has increasingly recognised that something is wrong, even rotten, in the state of Britain, regularly talking about ‘a dysfunctional UK’. This is part of Brown’s continual manoeuvres post-2014 to have a say in the future of Britain’s constitutional arrangements and to make the case that the status quo increasingly ill-serves the nations and regions of the UK. Thus it comes as no surprise that he has taken pen to paper and written a substantial New Statesman essay that makes his case of

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Robert Owen and New Lanark: A vision of society relevant to Scotland 2020 Gerry Hassan Scottish Review, October 28th 2020 It's hard to be hopeful in these stressful times. It is not unreasonable to suggest that there is a widespread and corrosive sentiment at large in the UK - and much of the West - that the current unsatisfactory state of the world is the best we can do (minus a tweak or two) - and that fundamental change for the betterment of humanity and the world isn’t really possible. Our collective past should teach us not to listen to

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