Unemployment

This book was originally published in 1981 at a time when mass unemployment had returned to the United Kingdom. Now reissued with a new Preface by the author’s literary executor, the essays in this volume discuss in detail the damage that was being done to the community and the economy at national and regional levels as a result of government policy. There are chapters on the political and economic aspects of the problem, on the comparison with the inter-war years, on youth unemployment and on unemployment in each of the regions worst affected. The collection as a whole provides an authoritative overview of a central political issue of the late 20th Century but one which still has resonance today as the post-Covid, post-Brexit UK economy teeters on the edge of recession.

Professor Sir Bernard Crick (1929-2008) was a British political theorist, and democratic socialist. As well as being a career academic he was the author of many books focused on democracy and socialism, and the editor of Hansard and the Political Quarterly. He was also an advisor to Neil Kinnock’s labour party in the 1980s, and also to the SDLP in Northern Ireland during the troubles. Working for his former student, Home Secretary David Blunkett, he created a cross party framework that ended in the Crick Report, which brought ’citizenship’ onto the National Curriculum He was knighted for this work. His doctoral thesis was published as The American Science of Politics (1958), and as well as George Orwell’s biography (1980), he authored In Defence of Politics(1962). Originally teaching at the London School of Economics, he then spent some time teaching at Harvard University, and was Professor of Politics at both Sheffield University and Birkbeck University.