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Between 1990 and 2020, the United Kingdom experienced the tension between unparalleled social change and a pragmatic political culture which sought continuity, compromise and gradualism. Thatcher’s legacy was slowly digested, Blair’s ‘New Labour’ thoroughly scrutinized, and the decision was made after forty-seven years to leave the European Union. The UK’s long-established major institutions—monarchy, parliament, and the union between England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland—were sorely tested. Yesterday provides the first fully documented history of this pivotal time in Great Britain.

Was the UK in decline? Brian Harrison points to Britain’s unsuccessful adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan and its relative economic decline, underfunded hospitals, sink schools, over-filled prisons, and terrorism of both Irish and Islamic varieties. Yet there were successes. Harrison shows how the UK’s participatory institutions outmanoeuvred terrorism and precariously surmounted regional, intergenerational, ethnic and social-class tensions. This vibrant, creative society saw major improvements in time, place and recruitment for work, as well as growth and innovation in conservation, digitization, tourism, consumerism, sport and the arts. Some changes were revolutionary: in family life and relations between the generations, and in the ever-changing electronic media. And if religious observance was in decline, immigrants were introducing new faiths and even a revived religious fervour while attitudes to health and death were changing fast.

A panoramic and wide-ranging analysis by a scholar at the height of his powers, Yesterday paints an evocative, richly textured portrait of a people who were shedding their complacency and insularity and bracing themselves to face a very different but promising future.