The first crisis in British politics emerged in the late nineteenth-century as a combination of challenges from the labor movement, Irish nationalism, and the rising economic and political strength of Germany and the United States, all of which threatened Britain's "place in the world" (p. 1). A political consensus was achieved in the late 1920s, and was reflected in the policies of National Governments between 1931 and 1945. With the inter-war consensus destabilized by World War II, a new consensus based upon Keynesian economics, universal welfare services, and cooperation with the trades unions was consolidated by Labour in 1945 and affirmed by the Conservatives in 1951.
This post-war consensus in turn began to break down in the 1970s, victim of a series of political and economic failures that led to the ideological conflict of the Thatcher era. The newest consensus, embodied in the policies of John Major and Tony Blair, eschews ideology and is built upon managerialism and efficiency, "the disciplines implicit in the private sector professional ideal" (Nandy, 2002). Two extra-governmental issues have been crucial in defining the nature of British politics since the 1970s: the emergence of nationalistic movements in Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland; and debates over the British relationship to the European Economic Union/European Union.
In discussing the development of consensus within the political system, for instance, rarely is anyone other than a prime minister discussed or cited. Wilson, Thatcher, Major, and Blair are each made to represent the whole, or very nearly the whole, of their party positions. The emergence of a new managerial consensus in British politics took place. The June 2001 elections suggested that the consensus had indeed arrived.
As the French conservative newspaper Le Figaro observed after Blair's June landslide, "if he succeeds, it won't matter whether he is Labour or Tory-......
