ABSTRACT
The 1980s has seen a radically conservative attempt to restructure British capitalism and to do so within the contexts of a restructured international economy. As infrastructural change has become more international in character, a resurgent nationalism has emerged partly as a political response to the perceived diminution of national identity, and the ‘trauma’ of loss of empire and incorporation into the European Economic Community. Not only British national identity has had to confront a crisis as new forms of multinational networking, based in part upon the new technologies for information processing, have created novel economic and cultural connections at and across sub-national (regional and local) and supra-national levels. National identity and selfsufficiency have become vulnerable to the new supremacy of global information flows, and the power of increasingly multinational grids of investment, production and marketing.1
