Two Decades in British Politics

by Bill Jones (Editor), Lynton Robins (Editor)

• Used

  Paperback
  1992

  $3.25

  In September 1990 a Conference was held at Holly Royde College, Manchester University, to celebrate twenty-one years of the Politics Association. The theme of the conference was a retrospective analysis of various developments in British politics and political education since that founding year. The two founding fathers of the Association, Derek Heater and Bernard Crick, addressed the conference together with - three of its distinguished former presidents, Fred Ridley, David Butler and Dennis Kavanagh; a current vice-president, Peter Hennessy; and the current President, John Slater. This book has grown out of the papers delivered at that conference, supplemented by those of other academics who have been associated with the Politics Association in various ways. Also included is the text of a speech delivered by Alan Howarth, MP, in his capacity as Education Minister at a House of Commons reception held in honour of the Politics Association on the 4th July 1990. By happy chance the lifetime of the Politics Association coincides with two extremely eventful decades in British history. It includes the last decade of the, by then, fragmenting postwar consensus and the following Thatcher decade of so-called conviction-led politics. Two Decades in British Politics, therefore, offers a timely opportunity to reassess the continuities and changes in the governments led by Harold Wilson, Edward Heath, James Callaghan and Margaret Thatcher. Was 1979 the political watershed it has been widely upheld to be by numerous academics and commentators? Or was it simply another undistinguished step in the politics of Britain's economic decline?