MICHAEL WILLIAMS has lectured in Politics and Public Policy at the University of Hertfordshire and other institutions including De Montfort University since 1995. Before then he spent twenty years as a civil servant in what is now the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions. He has published papers on privatisation and the role of management consultants in shaping public policy. Most recently he helped to edit a collection of essays on the political legacy of the 1960s entitled New Left, New Right and Beyond (1999), to which he contributed an essay on Eric Hobsbawm and Robert Skidelsky as historians and political intellectuals.

'This is an excellent history of British Politics in the twentieth century. It concentrates on the strategies politicians adopted to cope with Britain's retreat as a world and relative economic decline. It is excellent as a textbook for British politics courses, but can also be read as a lively history by the general reader.' - Paul Hirst, Professor of Social Theory, Birbeck College, University of London 'Covering developments in the British state and party politics from the Industrial Revolution right up until the present day, and focussing particularly on the breakdown and revitalisation in consensus between the 1970s and 1990s, this fascinating and innovative study is set to become a book which all students of British politics, undergraduate and postgraduate, will need to own.' - Professor Ben Pimlott, Goldsmiths College

• Preface Introduction Britain in Decline: Structural Change in British Capitalism since the Industrial Revolution The Impact of Democracy: From Parliamentary Politics to Party Politics Warfare and Welfare: The Road to 1945 and the Making of Postwar Consensus The Great Moving Right Show: The Mid 1970s Crisis and the Rise of Thatcherism Crisis on the Left: From Labourism to New Labour Whitehall's Managerial Revolution: Reconstructing Central Government Rolling Back the State: Privatisation and Deregulation Steering the Economy: Macro-Economic Management from the Gold Standard to EMU Getting and Spending: Public Expenditure and Welfare Twilight of Ukania: Territorial Politics in Britain Missed Chances: Britain and the European Union Towards Managerial Society Index