This is a great review essay in the LRB:

….I grew up with the assumption that we were going forward – jerkily, and with long unexplained halts in cold places, but forward. Prewar had been better, in ways which couldn’t be recovered (so my own family thought). But somewhere ahead, as the train began again to crawl across the grey plain of the 1950s, there would be warmth, light, undreamed-of gadgets, houses with inside toilets for all, travel on airliners. It was only a few years ago that I looked out of the grimy train window – as it were, at a station dimly seen in the night – and it came to me that we had passed this place once already. Mrs Hamilton-Paterson was right: it was all going backwards. Bankers’ economics? Didn’t we leave that station seventy years ago? Tories telling the poor they should have fewer children? Obsession with the national debt? Keeping foreigners out unless they are millionaires? Welfare only for the workshy underclass? ‘After all our gains’, Britain is slithering back downhill through the past we once rejected.

Read the whole thing here.