In May 1979, Margaret Thatcher walked into Downing Street with a promise to take apart the Britain that Labour had built in the post-war years.

It was a Britain where the public owned the water, the gas and the electricity while heavy industries burned British coal all day and night. British manufacturing still mattered, whether it was making slippers and dressing gowns or developing the silicon chip. A Britain where the trade unions could bring the country to a halt and where jobs threatened by new technology or foreign competition were to be protected, whatever the price.

Few believed Thatcher would succeed. But within eighteen years, that world had disappeared. Opening with the Morecambe and Wise Christmas special of 1977 and ending on the morning of New Labour’s 1997 landslide, Everything Must Go goes in search of the moment the Old Labour Britain disappeared and a new Britain came to be.

Anthony Broxton tells the story through the newspapers, the sitcoms and the soaps of the time, before anyone really knew how it was going to end. Along the way he finds a party torn between nostalgia and ambition and a working class being remade by the market and deindustrialisation.

Today, as the settlement Thatcher built is fought over once more, Everything Must Go shows how we got here in the first place.