It is generally accepted that Britain was held together during the second world war by a spirit of national democratic `consensus'. But whose interests did the consensus serve? And how did it unravel in the years immediately after victory?

This well observed and powerfully argued book overturns many of our assumptions about the national spirit of 1939-45. It shows that the current return to right-wing politics in Britain was prefigured by ideologies of change during and immediately after the war.