How Can We Rebuild A Nation In Britain?

Join Philip Cunliffe and Emily Jones to explore the national interest from contemporary and historical perspectives, asking what it might me

The national interest has been conspicuously absent from British politics for decades. While governments of both Left and Right prioritised frictionless trade and stronger global alliances, domestic industries disappeared, along with many of the social and political institutions around which British national life had been built.

Today, amid growing concern about energy costs, broken supply chains, failing defence and industrial capacity, politicians are once again invoking the national interest. But what does it mean, and who gets to define it? After decades of decline, is there still a ‘British people’ with the solidarity and sense of common interests needed to assert shared priorities?

Britain has faced such questions before. In 1945, a Labour government set out to build a ‘New Jerusalem’ from the rubble of six years of total war. A century earlier, Disraeli, later mythologised as the founder of One Nation Conservatism, famously described a country divided into ‘two nations’, rich and poor. Both traditions emphasised national unity and obligations across class divisions.

Can these national stories and traditions offer inspiration today, or is it the responsibility of every generation to imagine the nation anew?

Philip Cunliffe and Emily Jones explore the national interest from contemporary and historical perspectives, asking what it might mean for British people to think and act as a nation once again.

Philip Cunliffe is an author, academic and podcaster known for his work in international relations, particularly in the areas of sovereignty, international order, conflict management and global politics. He is an Associate Professor of International Relations at the Department of Risk and Disaster Reduction at University College London.

Author of The National Interest: Politics After Globalization (Polity, 2025) and Taking Control: Sovereignty and Democracy After Brexit (Polity, 2023, co-authored with George Hoare, Lee Jones, and Peter Ramsay)

Emily Jones is an author and academic at University of Manchester who has written and reviewed for the Financial Times, the New Statesman, and History Today, and provided various radio commentary, including for BBC Radio 4, ABC Australia, and ORF Austria. The Disraeli Myth: The Making of a Conservative Tradition, provides an authoritative account of the afterlives of Benjamin Disraeli and the highly significant construction of a socially minded brand of Conservatism following his death in 1881.