Thirty years on

Timothy Garton Ash writes about Harold Wilson's resignation today in the Guardian. I recommend it especially to anyone nostalgic for 'old Labour' or for Britain in the 1970s. "Britain was in much worse shape than it is today. "The past 12 years," wrote the Times on the occasion of Wilson's departure, "have been a period of palpable decline for the United Kingdom: absolute decline in respect of external relations and relative decline in respect of living standards." Later that year, the sterling crisis became so acute that the British government had to go begging to the IMF for a stand-by facility. The previous year, inflation had exceeded 24% and the Wall Street Journal ran the headline "Goodbye Great Britain" .... Britain was "the sick man of Europe"."

"So when the media have finally claimed Blair's scalp .... perhaps we can see ourselves for what we are: a not too badly governed, reasonably prosperous, moderately secure, not too bitterly divided society, facing all the problems of a dangerous world .... but facing them with a degree of confidence unimaginable 30 years ago."

Nicely put - sorry about this lazy cut-and-paste blog but the sun's shinning, there's a test match on the wireless (too mean to get Sky TV) and nothing much in the news....