The Death of Consensus: 100 Years of British Political Nightmares
by Phil Tinline
Hurst, £20

CONCEALED within the pages of The Death of Consensus is a revelation that invites the reader to think about British political history not in terms of events, but processes.

While the author insists from the outset that “none of this is to suggest that history is somehow circular,” that is precisely what his analysis of the “nightmares” upon which a dominant consensus is constructed implies.

The historical logic Phil Tinline unpicks certainly feels Hegelian and, by making the continuities and ruptures explicit, each period he examines becomes a product of contradictions inherent or implicit in the preceding stage. He has discerned a dialectic.

The Death of Consensus examines prevailing ideas in three periods of British history where an established consensus formed upon the basis of diverse nightmares breaks down to give way to a radically new firmament of understanding upon which the status quo is based.

In the period from 1931-45, conflicting nightmares shaped largely along class lines of mass unemployment, profligate government of the kind that had sunk Germany in hyperinflation, and the totalitarian state envisaged in a range of cultural texts ultimately gave way in the furnace of war to a previously unthinkable Keynesian interventionist consensus.

From 1968-85, a consensus based on recognition of both the need for full employment and of unions as legitimate actors in Britain’s industrial relations broke down under geo-economic strains — sparking deep political polarisation, racist hostility to immigrants, and eventually Thatcher’s all-out neoliberal assault on the social contract and war against workers.

We are still living the consequences, even though the new post-Thatcher consensus of “market utopia” that coalesced around liberalisation, deregulation and globalisation itself began to break down after the 2008 crash.

The author traces some of the most consequential subsequent events — from the sovereign debt crisis and 2010 coalition to Brexit, a growing mood of anti-politics and elite betrayal, Covid, and the divisions tearing apart a deeply unrepresentative Conservative sect.

Although Tinline admits that a new consensus is yet to consolidate, he offers clues to the direction of travel — and to understanding the elusive ideology of “Blue Labour” — steered by a “post-liberal” empowered state pursuing levelling up in Britain’s neglected regions.

Hegel would have dismissed the idea that his logic of history could predict future events, and preferred to describe the dialectical process in terms of abstract-negative-concrete rather than the more familiar thesis-antithesis-synthesis.

But his understanding of dialectics — as contradictions between ideas — finds echoes in Tinline’s empirical observations, and its driving force, a prevailing spirit as manifested through culture (particularly philosophy and art), is clearly identifiable in The Death of Consensus.

To Hegel the goal of history was the consciousness of freedom, and while Tinline does not make such lofty claims, there is a sense that the nightmares from which consensus forms — such as the current fear of populist nationalism — have as their common denominator the threat they pose to liberty.

This book is a great political history, albeit what some academics might dismiss as “discourse analysis” based largely on the influential domestic texts that inform debates among the parliamentary elite.

To the extent that these capture the zeitgeist, that’s fair enough — but discourse is never the whole story and, as Dominic Cummings recognised so astutely, elites often miss the bigger picture.

Nonetheless, what distinguishes The Death of Consensus as a work of political analysis is precisely this heavy weight of contextual evidence that Tinline deploys to support his argument, grounded solidly in the personal experiences and motives of his protagonists.

These make his book a valuable tool for comprehending which way the momentum is swinging the pendulum of British politics — and why.

As the government under Liz Truss and Treasury orthodoxy cling blindly to the enduring right-wing nightmare of a bloated state threatening market freedoms, it seems clear that it is the left that has most to gain from understanding the dialectic that is at work.