General Election 2019:Verso Reader

Free Ebook: essays from Melissa Benn, Danny Dorling, Maya Goodfellow, Frances Ryan, James Meek, George Monbiot, and more.

The timing of the election may be sudden, but the preparation for this contest has been a long time coming. Where do we locate the origins of the moment?

Austerity has continued to create new levels of poverty not seen this side of the second World War. Politicians have created scapegoats – immigrants, experts, the disabled – on whom to blame the current malaise in order to distract from the horrors of their incompetent malevolence. Children are too hungry to concentrate in the classroom, and there are not enough teachers. Nurses are overworked in out-of-date hospitals. The planet is burning and the police spend their time illegally dragging Extinction Rebellion protesters to the cells.

In the words of Jeremy Corbyn, this election is a once in a generation opportunity for genuine change. Over the past years our authors at Verso – experts in their fields, passionate advocates for change, leading commentators - have been looking at the causes of the crisis as well as developing some of the ideas and strategies that may become part of this necessary disruption. In this eBook we have collected an array of the key ideas, arguments and provocations to help you to think through the issues.

This collection is intended to be more than a manifesto. It aims to inform on the essential questions of the current conjuncture, and offers an abundance of potential solutions. Another future is possible.

Contributors include: Antonia Jennings (Economics for the Many), John Boughton (Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing), Richard Seymour (Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics), Aaron Bastani (Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto), Melissa Benn (Life Lessons: The Case for a National Education Service), Andrew Murray (The Fall and Rise of the British Left), Francesca Bria (Economics for the Many), Danny Dorling (Inequality and the 1%), Frances Ryan (Crippled: Austerity and the Demonization of Disabled People), Maya Goodfellow (Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats), James Meek (Dreams of Leaving and Remaining), George Monbiot (Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis), Ann Pettifor (The Case for the Green New Deal).