ABSTRACT
In the depths of the Second World War there was overwhelming popular support in Britain, especially in the armed forces, for the emerging concept of a post-war ‘welfare state’. This chapter identifies the massive changes that have occurred in the implicit and explicit orthodoxies that dominate British politics, primarily in the period since the early 1970s. Recently Wilson has argued that the post-war health and welfare legislation did indeed produce a political order which provided social stability for several decades after 1945. There has been very considerable debate about whether the period since the early to mid-1970s constitutes a break with this ‘post-war consensus’ in British politics. New Right, or ‘neo-liberal’ ideas have been shown to have a long history. There is now an extensive literature on the economic and social effects of the post-1979 Conservative administrations. One of its central characteristics was an explicit rejection of the search for consensus.
