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Glen O'Hara looks at modern British politicsfrom 'top' to 'bottom' - from Prime Ministers' relationship with US Presidents and the Cabinet room, to individual neighbourhoods and schools. In doing so, he fuses the new political history of the everyday and the humdrum with high political accounts involving economic and social advisers, top politicians and senior civil servants. Post-war Britain emerges as a country that experienced increasingly tense relations between governors and the governed. The electorate demanded ever wider access to fairly-provided and universally-available social services; elites looked to other European and American countries for how this search for quality might be mounted. However, new solutions became ever more complex, and increasingly likely to conflict with one another or involve unintended additional effects. Drawing on new archival findings from across the United Kingdom, among personal and political papers as much as the files of national and international governance, O'Hara uses the new economics of organization, management and complexity to draw a compelling picture of the post-war settlement as it came under strain during the 1950s and 1960s.
