Introduction

In the period since the Second World War, and especially since the 1970s, the unity and meaning of the United Kingdom, virtually unchallenged for two hundred years, has come increasingly into question. One by one, the very forces and assumptions that helped to forge a sense of national identity and common unity, have disappeared. The spell was broken by the Suez debacle in 1956, which compelled the British people at last to begin the painful task of reassessing their sense of themselves and their position in the world. From the mid-1960s onwards, a growing awareness of national relative economic decline – of a progressive slippage of the nation down the international league table of living standards – fuelled the process, and stimulated a flood of jeremiads on the causes and consequences of Britain's economic failure (Manser 1971; Barnett 1972; Kramnick 1975; Allen 1976; Eatwell 1982; Pollard 1982; Roderick and Stephens 1982; Smith 1984), a literary genre that continued into the 1990s (Coates 1994; Hutton 1996; Clarke and Trebilcock 1997). A surge of Scottish and Welsh nationalism in the early 1970s, and the public debate on federalism and devolution this activated, merely compounded the sense of gloom surrounding the state and unity of the nation. Little wonder that political commentators talked of the ‘break up of Britain’ (Nairn 1981).