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The post-war boom ran out of steam in the early 1970s as the coalition of political groups that had sustained the economic and social progress fractured and the corporate world, trade unions and the state dissolved their hitherto successful corporate-style habits of cooperation such that what had been a contested compromise was no longer a compromise as contestation came to the fore. The 1970s experience of stagflation created a political space for new players and the long building forces of the New Right took their chance, secured power and unrolled their neo-liberal project and the public sphere was filled with novel celebrations of enterprise, profit-making and calls for individual self-responsibility. Formal politics were drawn into the ambit of the corporate world both in terms of policy stances (privatization, deregulation and so on) and in terms of style thus politicians became celebrity figures, parties vote-getting machines. The established British elite prospered, other social groups managed as best they could and the general population bought into debt-fuelled consumerism, an engagement that was to deepen through most of the remaining years of the century.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137023834_8

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