The Tyranny of Nostalgia: Half a Century of British Economic Decline

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Jones does not engage in ranking Conservative versus Labour but there is a feeling that Labour emerges with greater distinction (and certainly less ignominy than the Tories). What of Brexit? The worlds I was creating, and the stories in them, were a starting point for what would become my present profession. I began my first novel 25 years ago, when I was not yet 22. I have been writing novels for more than half my lifetime. But I had already, before I began, been depending on storytelling to navigate an otherwise baffling world for more than half my lifetime before that. Gordon Brown is described as “ferociously intelligent, single-minded and possessed of a formidable work ethic – together with a volcanic temper”. By contrast, former Brexit secretary David Davis was “languid and one-dimensional – but always on message”.

The UK electorate was also poorly informed and misled: “The general level of ignorance across the population about the EU proved extraordinarily high.” Jones levels a whole series of criticisms of the work of Labour chancellors but the issues are generally less fundamental than the horror stories above. Just as the Conservatives receive praise for some of their supply-side reforms so Labour gain credit for benign curating in the decade after the 1997 change of government. Granting independence to the Bank of England is seen as a good move.We are growing terrified of the future. Soon we might merge with our technology, reprogramming our cells and adding computers to our neural circuitry, becoming in the process ever more adaptive to change, and less stressed by it – but for now this prospect offers scant reassurance. Instead we see upheaval and uncertainty ahead. At the same time, the tools we have evolved to deal with upheaval and uncertainty, and with the inevitability of our own mortality, are being undermined. Families are being scattered across the globe. Religion is being repurposed for political gain and consequently emptied of spirituality. Clan and tribe and nation are being challenged by hybridity. Jones has an especially good analysis of the Brexit referendum and its aftermath. He notes: “The problem for both policymakers and businesses in July 2016 was that although leave had won, there was limited understanding of what exiting the EU meant in practice.” I had always been a daydreamer, and I whiled away long hot summers in Lahore playing make-believe, by myself, or with my cousins. But I also began to do something strange. I became fascinated by atlases, with their gorgeous multicoloured maps, their different icons for settlements of different population sizes, their snaking, undulating contour lines. I became fascinated by almanacs, with their brief descriptions of countries: a snapshot of history, demographics, chief exports, climatic conditions. And I began to make countries of my own. Neither of these policies is likely to make a significant difference in the lives of Trump’s voters, but that’s not really the point,” Illing writes. “By pandering to fears and resentments, Trump both deepens the prejudices and satisfies his base.” The Leave campaign is characterised as “grounded in rose-tinted English exceptionalism [that] regularly spilled over into falsehoods, deceptions, prejudice and xenophobia”.

This began with the shortsighted monetarist and high-exchange-rate experiment of the first Thatcher government, in 1979-83. In evidence to a parliamentary select committee, the then chair of ICI, John Harvey Jones, said: “Twenty per cent of our customer base in the United Kingdom disappeared.” Faced with the results of its culpable neglect of manufacturing, the Thatcher government looked to Europe, the single market and Japanese inward investment to recoup. Another helpful aspect of the overall approach is the artful integration of the economics and the politics – with electoral cycles clearly a major consideration for policy decisions throughout. Yet another is the emphasis not just upon aggregate demand developments but, also, upon supply-side developments (with Mrs Thatcher being accorded due credit for her achievements on this score). Then, of course, came the 1970s – when the era of cheap oil abruptly ended and both inflation and unemployment soared as did industrial disputes – the latter escalation reaching its peak with the1978/79 “winter of discontent”. Quite correctly, though, the author observes that “the decade’s dreadful reputation can be overplayed” and his analysis is appropriately nuanced. For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial.Anybody seeking to acquaint (or, indeed, re-acquaint) themselves with how the UK economy has fared over the course of the past fifty years could do no better than read this book. Adopting a straightforward narrative approach, the author focuses upon British economic performance with an especial emphasis upon policy making – and, importantly, what went right and what went wrong in this connection. Surely all very dry stuff, you might think. Yet this book is anything but. Rather, it is highly readable account which takes the reader on an enthralling journey through the (relatively) recent past. In the case of my Fiat, Proietti Brothers of Islington have had to wait three weeks: a relatively small, personal anecdote of the frustrations of Brexit. So why did a famous verse I learned at school come to mind? I’ll tell you why: because the worst government of most people’s lifetimes is ploughing on, pretending that it can make a success of a manifest disaster. And the Labour opposition refuses to challenge it on the biggest self-inflicted crisis of our time, tamely ruling out the obvious need to rejoin the single market and restore freedom of movement to businesses and citizens.

Nostalgia for the great days of the past has become tyrannical - and is in some sense embodied in the form of the Chancellor of the Exchequer's famous 'budget box', made for William Gladstone in the 1850s and only passed over to a museum in 2010. Professor Diane Coyle, Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge and author of GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History The importance of clan, family, history, honour and formality were a useful education to this California boy finding his way in Pakistan’ … The Lord of the Rings. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar This powerful and elegant account of the twists and turns in British macroeconomic policy should be essential reading for students and practitioners alike. Russell Jones’s analysis of the past half a century of British economic life – and particularly of the run-up to Brexit and of its subsequent implementation and its disastrous consequences – is absolutely stunning.”This powerful and elegant account of the twists and turns in British macroeconomic policy should be essential reading for students and practitioners alike. Russell Jones's analysis of the past half a century of British economic life – and particularly of the run-up to Brexit and of its subsequent implementation and its disastrous consequences – is absolutely stunning. — William Keegan, senior economics commentator for The Observer

Russell’s brilliant book does us all a favour, … giving us an excellent economic history of Britain since the gloss peeled off the Keynesian welfare state in the 1970s. He shows us how each administration was effectively handed a set of problems to solve, how they each tried to solve them in the shadow of the prior administration’s failures, and how that process always produced the next set of problems.” Much on TV is set in a past where characters can still plausibly be all white’ … Mad Men. Photograph: AMC/LionsgateInstead of looking toward a better future, as most politicians do when they’re on the campaign trail, President Trump has used a nostalgia campaign to anchor his discourse “to a mythological past, so that voters are thinking less about the future and more about what they think they lost.” In 1849 Thomas Carlyle described economics as ‘the dismal science’ and certainly it would be fair to describe Jones’ book as ‘downbeat’. Indeed, the subtitle of the book is Half a Century of British Economic Decline. That said, the author is very good at sharing his views of individuals and institutions in a few pithy words. In recent years the civil service has come in for criticism from the Tory party. In contrast, Jones credits the service with “remarkable fertility of imagination … [it] performed nothing short of miracles. Its accomplishments during the GFC and in the aftermath of Brexit, for example, were extraordinary”. Why are we so strongly attracted to nostalgia today? In part, I think, because the pace of change is accelerating. Despite our close relationship with technology, at this point in our evolution human beings are still animals, and animals struggle to adapt to change that occurs too rapidly. Given enough time, polar bears might migrate off the Arctic ice, evolve darker coats, find a different diet and thrive in a new, warmer climate. But if the ice on which they depend disappears in a few decades, they are likely to die. Our adaptive capacity is far greater, but we too experience change as stress. The world my grandparents grew up in would not have been that strange to their grandparents. Yes, the few cars on the roads would have been striking, as would the few houses lit by electricity. But the world my children are growing up in is far more disconcerting to my parents: a world of wirelessly connected digital devices, roboticised factories, genetically modified crops and daily flights from Lahore to Rio de Janeiro, to Sydney. Why does it work? First of all, there are some ways the past really was better for Americans than it is now. In 1970, 90 percent of 30-year-olds in America were better off than their parents were at that age. In 2010, only 50 percent could make the same claim.