The Tyranny Of Nostalgia Av Russell Jones

The performance of the British economy over the past fifty-odd years does not make for comforting reading. Indeed, the story is a depressing catalogue of misapprehensions, missteps, wasted opportunities, crises and humiliations, with all-too-familiar problems arising time and again and yet never being satisfactorily addressed.<BR><BR>All nations and their economic policymakers are to a certain extent prisoners of their history, but this seems to apply more to the UK than to other countries. 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. Nostalgia has led to wishful thinking, and this has been the underlying sentiment driving poorly thought through – sometimes even panicky – initiatives that were blindly borrowed from elsewhere, that flew in the face of experience, or that were drawn from theoretical and political extremes.<BR><BR>This book describes and interprets the economic and political history of the past half a century, examining the challenges confronted by successive governments and their Chancellors, the policies employed for good or ill, and – running through it all – the desperate search for a panacea that could arrest the nation’s relative decline and return the country to its supposed former glories.