E-Books →The Tyranny of Nostalgia Half a Century of British Economic Decline

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.
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.