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

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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. Instead 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.” This was also the period of deregulation in the City of London – the so-called ‘Big Bang’ – that was to leave the banking system more vulnerable when the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis blew in from Wall Street. We should be glad for these opportunities. The future is too important to be left to professional politicians. And it is too important to be left to technologists either. Other imaginations from other human perspectives must stake competing claims. Radical, politically engaged fiction is required. This fiction need not focus on dystopias or utopias, though some of it probably will. Rather it needs to peer with all the madness and insight and unexpectedness and wisdom we can muster into where we might desirably go, as individuals, families, societies, cultures, nations, earthlings, organisms. This does not require setting fiction in the future. But it does require a radical political engagement with the future.

In particular I turned to fantasy. I read The Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis. The idea of children passing through a wardrobe into a strange and magical land seemed entirely plausible to me. I read the Middle-earth novels of JRR Tolkien. The importance (and intricate navigation) of clan, family, history, honour and formality, even as practised by hobbits or elves, must have been a useful education to this until recently California boy now finding his way in Pakistan. It is sometimes said that there is a trade-off between sovereignty and influence. By being a member of the EU, the UK pooled some of its sovereignty but magnified its European and global influence by sitting around the EU table. Jones writes: “Engagement with the EU had helped amplify Britain’s voice on the global stage. Brexit would muffle it, perhaps to the point of inaudibility.” For many years opinion polling has reflected an oft-peddled myth that Conservative governments have been better at running the UK economy than their Labour counterparts. In his recently published treatise on the economic decline of the nation, The Tyranny of Nostalgia: Half a Century of British Economic Decline, macroeconomist Russell Jones seeks to debunk this misapprehension and set out a highly critical appraisal of Brexit. The charge sheet of Tory incompetence PDF / EPUB File Name: The_Tyranny_of_Nostalgia_-_Russell_Jones.pdf, The_Tyranny_of_Nostalgia_-_Russell_Jones.epubNo 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”.

David Cameron is dismissed as “a weak and unconvincing advocate of UK membership” who “regularly resorted to lazy platitudes about EU regulations and its supposed overbearing influence on UK life”. Professor Diane Coyle, Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge and author of GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History Pew says those numbers are more than double what they were in 1994. What’s happening now is more than just a disagreement about political issues, it’s the belief that opponents are a grievous threat to America. No more! There is supply-chain chaos all over the land, although our prime minister recently gave the game away about the hole in his absurd championing of Brexit by admitting that Northern Ireland, as a member of the UK and the European single market, enjoys the best of both worlds. 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.”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. Now, although the economy is in a bad way, and affected by the consequences of Brexit at almost every turn – a dramatic rise in import prices is a direct consequence of Brexit, and explains why our inflation rate is stubbornly higher than that of our European neighbours – I do not for one moment wish to overdo the valley of death analogy. Nevertheless, it came to mind because there is something ineffably stubborn and crass about the refusal of our two major parties to recognise the scale of the disaster and conduct – or, in Labour’s case, advocate – an about-turn. 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. 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.”