Twilight of Ukania: Territorial Politics in Britain

Abstract

Chapters 3 to 5 sought to chart the creation of one consensus during the 1940s and its eventual breakdown in the mid-1970s crisis, to be replaced ultimately with a new form of consensus during the 1990s, while Chapters 6 to 9 sought to chart that process in rather more detail through a closer examination of four key policy areas involving the role of the state – the reconstruction of the central government machine, the privatisation of large parts of the public sector, the management of the economy, and the control of public expenditure and reform of the welfare state. This chapter and the next examine two other elements in the cumulative crisis of the mid-1970s – the emergence of strong national movements in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and British entry into what was then called the European Economic Community. Both of these developments form part of the story of Britain’s relative economic decline in so far as that decline eventually posed challenges to the British state and the British national identity that had emerged during the eighteenth century – the first from within that state and the second from an emerging supranational formation from which Britain found that it could no longer stand aside.