"Modernisation has been the keynote of British politics since the early 1960s. Failure by Labour and Conservative governments led to a crisis of confidence in the British political system by the mid-1970s. From this crisis emerged Thatcherism which laid the foundation for a new consensus embodied in New Labour." "Michael Williams charts this movement between crisis and consensus since the beginning of modern party politics and the onset of relative economic decline in the late nineteenth century. It illustrates the emergence of the new consensus through studies of six key policy areas including the reconstruction of the central state machine, the privatisation of large parts of the public sector, the rise and fall of monetarism and Britain's troubled relation with its European partners."--Jacket.