Our book

The Northern Star’s editors have co-authored a book:
Taking Control: Sovereignty and Democracy After Brexit 
(Polity Books, 2023).

In Taking Control we make the case for a new politics of national sovereignty through an analysis of Brexit and the political contradictions that characterise the UK in its wake.

Chapter 1 Nation-States v Member-States explains that the European Union is not a foreign superstate, as Eurosceptics characterise it, nor is it a benign internationalist project of pooling sovereignty as Europhiles like to believe. It is a process of state transformation in which the political classes of each member-state rule their own state through collaboration with the elites of other member-states, limiting both their freedom of action and their political accountability to their citizens in the process. It exposes the key political difference between a ‘member-state’ and a ‘nation-state’. In member-states there is a void where the strong relations of political representation between the rulers and the ruled that characterise nationhood once stood.

Chapter 2 Voiding National Sovereignty explains how and why political representation in Britain decayed from the 1970s onwards, creating the conditions for the transformation of the state described in Chapter 1, and the decay of nationhood in the UK.

Chapter 3 The Vote revisits the 2016 referendum analysing both the reasons for the vote to leave the EU and the histrionic reaction to it from the political and cultural elite. Comparing the reaction to the vote with the actual reasons people voted to leave reveals the elite’s repudiation of the very idea of political representation and accountability on which the existence of a nation is premised.

Chapter 4 Leaving the EU, Remaining in the Void is an analysis of the Brexit crisis that followed the referendum. The chapter explains why all of the major tendencies that fought over the Brexit process failed to address the underlying problem. Liberal and left Remainers could not overcome the ultimate authority of the people, expressed in the referendum; but Conservative Eurocsceptics and Brexit Party populists lacked the politics to revive democratic representation once Britain had left the EU. The Covid lockdowns and proxy war in Ukraine that immediately followed Brexit demonstrated the persistence of the political void characteristic of a member-state.

Chapter 5 Constituting the Nation proposes that the solution to the problems that led us into the European Union and then to Brexit is to reconstitute the political relations of nationhood. There is no way back to the old British nation but only forward to a new nation constructed out of the contradictions of member-statehood. In the conditions of the twenty-first century the promotion of national sovereignty as the authority of a state that enjoys strong relations of representation with its people is an inherently democratic and internationalist project. This project stands in direct contrast both to liberal cosmopolitanism and national populism.

Chapter 6 Taking Control: Towards A Democratic Britain identifies three contradictions that characterise post-Brexit Britain and proposes reforms to resolve them. This resolution would constitute a process of closing the political void and strengthening national sovereignty by strengthening the control of the British people over our collective political life. Specific proposals include rejecting ‘Global Britain’ in favour of a foreign policy that is focused on protecting the national sovereignty of both Britain and other nations; consolidating the Union by convincing voters in Northern Ireland to embrace a united Ireland, and voters in Scotland to reject both secession and devolution; and reforming our parliamentary system to facilitate the greater accountability of parliament and of the political parties who comprise it to the citizens who vote for them. The chapter and book concludes with reflections on the need for a new politics that sets out from a recognition of the failure of the political traditions of the twentieth century.

You can buy the book from the publisher here.