Owen Jones on The Fall of the West

From the critically acclaimed author of Chavs, an excoriating take-down of Western hubris - and the book that reveals why we're really in the state we're in.

Born in Sheffield and raised in Stockport, Owen Jones is one of the UK's most prominent political thinkers and writers. He is the author of the critically acclaimed No. 1 bestsellers The Establishment: How They Get Away With It and Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class. He writes regularly for the Guardian, and has two weekly web series, The Owen Jones Show and The Owen Jones Podcast.

Owen joins us in York to talk about his new book, The Fall of the West: How They Really Lost It, which lays out the ways in which the West is in decline - and evidently so.

This new book explores how, amid the triumphalist sugar rush that came with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the West came to believe that its rule, its economic order, its moral values, would endure for ever - and how, over a quarter-century, this brittle self-mythologising narrative collapsed in on itself. From Afghanistan and Iraq, to the economic crash of 2008 and Gaza today, he takes us on a journey to show how the West went from scoring what it believed was its final victory, to being engulfed in an existential crisis of its own making.

Today, as the Atlantic alliance struggles to hold itself together, The Fall of the West exposes how a generation of Western elites bent on power and self-enrichment at any cost fatally overreached itself, and argues that, if we are to find the solutions to our age of crisis, we must first understand the real reasons for how the West lost it.