A Kingdom United: The History And Future Of The Union w/ Phil Tinline

How has the Union fared in our recent history and what is its future? Does the UK still have a place in the post-Brexit world? How can we draw on past economic crises to help us emerge from this current one? And is historical disunity threatening our future union or are centuries old bonds and shared culture and collective experience strong enough to see us forge together to a new and ultimately better future? Phil Tinline, Jenni Russell, Helen Thompson and Ali Ansari will be at Chalke Valley History Festival to answer all these questions and more.

About Phil Tinline’s The Death of Consensus

The Times Politics Book of the Year 2022 | Selected as one of the New Statesman’s ‘Best Books of 2022’

Over Britain’s first century of mass democracy, politics has lurched from crisis to crisis. How does this history of political agony illuminate our current age of upheaval?

To find out, journalist Phil Tinline takes us back to two past eras when the ruling consensus broke down, and the future filled with ominous possibilities – until, finally, a new settlement was born. How did the Great Depression’s spectres of fascism, bombing and mass unemployment force politicians to think the unthinkable, and pave the way to post-war Britain? How was Thatcher’s road to victory made possible by a decade of nightmares: of hyperinflation, military coups and communist dictatorship? And why, since the Crash in 2008, have new political threats and divisions forced us to change course once again?

Tinline brings to life those times, past and present, when the great compromise holding democracy together has come apart; when the political class has been forced to make a choice of nightmares. This lively, original account of panic and chaos reveals how apparent catastrophes can clear the path to a new era. The Death of Consensus will make you see British democracy differently.

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