Reasonable history of UK post-war politics, but not fully convincing thesis
4 stars
Williamson's book provides a reasonable history of post-war politics, though "From Attlee..." is doing some heavy lifting -- because the book is focused on the UK's relationship with the rest of Europe, it barely touches even on the 60s, and only really gets going when accession became a serious option in the early 70s. After that it provides a reasonable overview of political history, and certainly filled in plenty of gaps in my knowledge. Where it falls down, in my opinion, is its thesis that Britain was a social democracy until that was overthrown by Thatcherism, that its politics is irreversably altered, and that explains the trajectory from the 1975 referendum to 2016. While the evidence for the first part of the thesis seems pretty good (though my understanding is that, for example, while Conservative governments pre-Thatcher continued to build council houses, their attitudes towards the purpose of such houses …
Williamson's book provides a reasonable history of post-war politics, though "From Attlee..." is doing some heavy lifting -- because the book is focused on the UK's relationship with the rest of Europe, it barely touches even on the 60s, and only really gets going when accession became a serious option in the early 70s. After that it provides a reasonable overview of political history, and certainly filled in plenty of gaps in my knowledge. Where it falls down, in my opinion, is its thesis that Britain was a social democracy until that was overthrown by Thatcherism, that its politics is irreversably altered, and that explains the trajectory from the 1975 referendum to 2016. While the evidence for the first part of the thesis seems pretty good (though my understanding is that, for example, while Conservative governments pre-Thatcher continued to build council houses, their attitudes towards the purpose of such houses had already diverged), it's much less clear to me that Brexit can be explained almost solely through this one factor. In particular, there seems to be next to no attempt (or, if I'm being honest, no attempt) to compare the trajectory of Britain with any other European countries. While it would certainly be possible to argue that Britain had gone further down the path away from social democracy, haven't most other European countries done something at least similar? And if they have, why hasn't Euroscepticism been more successful in those countries. Without this comparison, the superficially-appealing thesis just seems ungrounded. (rating rounded up from 3.5)