Never Again: Britain 1945-1951

"Authoritative, powerfully engaging, and highly readable - winner of England's most prestigious prize for nonfiction, the NCR Award - Never Again is the definitive history of a crucial moment in twentieth-century England: the years 1945 to 1951, when Britain established a welfare state even as it withdrew from the Empire." "After the ordeal of World War II, world-class historian Peter Hennessy notes, the British "were driven not merely by the pressing need to turn rubble into factories and homes and roads, but...to ensure that never again would slump and economic depression be allowed to distil the social poison that made fascism possible." With this mandate, the Labour administration under Clement Attlee established the National Health Service; nationalized the Bank of England, the railroad, and the steel, coal, gas and electric industries; and constructed the welfare state - an ambitious undertaking of social change "on a scale and a duration never surpassed in the nation's history."" "Yet successive financial crises, the Cold War threat and the need for rearmament, new foreign competition for its industries, the country's ambivalence toward union with Europe and its refusal to acknowledge its diminished status as a world power - all sent Britain's economy into decline, with many of the goals of social reform left unrealized."