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”. Our reaction is predictable. The kind of futures we would like to inhabit seem unlikely to occur. The futures that we suspect are likely to occur, meanwhile, fill us with anxiety. And so we are left stranded: unstable in the present, being dragged from the past, resistant to the future. We become profoundly angry, vulnerable to the dangerous calls of charlatans and bigots and xenophobes. We become depressed. And in our depression we become more dangerous, too. A suicide bomber is someone killing themself, after all. For anyone looking to mine evidence, Russell Jones provides an incredibly rich seam. One can start with the inflationary ‘barber boom’ of the early 1970s and move on to the false tilt at monetarism on the early 1980s. A consequence of the latter and the general shift to neo-liberal economics under Margaret Thatcher and her chancellors heralded the deindustrialisation of that period and paved the way toward unprecedented inequality. To that we can add squandering of the legacy of North Sea oil and the failure to channel revenues into a UK sovereign wealth fund – as the Norwegians have done so successfully. 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. The complex and persistent woes of British economic developments over the past fifty years are covered in fascinating detail by Russell Jones in this joyously readable book. The book works brilliantly both for those that have, like me, shared Jones’s path through the world of high finance and for those that haven’t but want to try and understand the role of individual politicians and policymakers, and the circumstances surrounding their vain attempts to steer the UK to a more fruitful pasture.”

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 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). Professor Diane Coyle, Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge and author of GDP: A Brief but Affectionate HistoryOne especially helpful aspect of the author’s approach is to identify the principal tenets of the dominant paradigm of economic thinking – or “economic orthodoxy” – which prevailed at any one time and demonstrating how this drove the policy debate and resulting policy decisions. Thus, we witness the downfall of naïve Keynesianism in the face of the onset of “stagflation”, the (brief) ascent of monetarism and all the subsequent thinking regarding how GDP growth could be maximised while the volatility of economic growth and inflation is simultaneously minimised. No author, of course, can end a book of this sort without drawing out key lessons – the fruits of experience, as it were – from the UK’s macroeconomic experience of the past half-century. Jones proves no exception to this rule, pulling together in succinct form and number (confining himself to a round ten) “the morals of the story”. All of these “morals” seem eminently sensible, with the author remarking (and reflecting his description of himself as “a globe-trotting professional economist” in the preface) that “most, or perhaps all, of my ten lessons would apply to any economy, not just to that of the UK”. 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. We are all creators of fictions, and we all have a role to play in imagining our way out of the nostalgic traps strewn around us. But there are special opportunities open to those of us who create fiction for a living, and above all to those of us who are writers, because we are freer to create what we wish, without requiring funding for our projects, as a film-maker might. We are the startups of the storytelling world, the crazy solo inventors in the R&D department of humanity’s narrative imagination. The UK electorate was also poorly informed and misled: “The general level of ignorance across the population about the EU proved extraordinarily high.”

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.

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https://lpp-books.sumupstore.com/product/the-tyranny-of-nostalgia-half-a-century-of-british-economic-decline 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.

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.” Does a grandchild living half a world away offer a grandparent the same likelihood of experiencing a love that transcends the self as does a grandchild living next door? Does a religious discourse focused on conflicts with other religions, and indeed on conflicts among subgroupings within that religion, offer the same likelihood of solace in the face of the temporariness of existence? Does a tribe interbreeding with other tribes offer the same possibility of an eternal identity into which one’s individual identity can be subsumed? We are becoming unmoored just as the currents around us are growing swifter.What should certainly make Keir Starmer sit up and take notice is that 46% of the so-called red-wall voters with whom he is so obsessed say Brexit was a mistake. But the study finds that although the Labour lead was 26% when voters were surveyed, it would have been 28% if Labour had had the courage to say Brexit was a mistake. For at least half a century, British economic policy has been inept and capricious, with politicians of all parties labouring under the delusion that the country is still a major economic power. For much of that time Russell Jones has had a ringside seat observing their many mistakes and misfortunes. It is hard to read his clear-sighted and highly readable account and remain optimistic about the UK economy’s next 50 years.” Well, the understanding is less limited now. The only sympathy I have with most Brexiters is that, as Jones implies, they simply had no idea of what they were in for. Plainly, now, most people do, and rightly don’t like it. Stories helped me unite parts of my existence that might otherwise have seemed irrevocably split by geography and time. And stories helped me find a future in which I, such a mongrel, could be comfortable. I do not inhabit an island in the Indian Ocean with a population as diverse as that of London, nor a nation composed of bits of Pakistan and California. But I have over the last three decades lived first in America, then in Britain, then in Pakistan. And I do spend many weeks in America and Britain each year, and many weeks in other places, and correspond on most days with friends and colleagues on multiple continents. My life might be peculiar, but it suits me. It flows directly from those first worlds I imagined as a child. Without my stories, without the journey and direction implicit in them, I might never have found it. Perhaps I would not even have looked. Much on TV is set in a past where characters can still plausibly be all white’ … Mad Men. Photograph: AMC/Lionsgate