Libby Purves: Why did Alistair Darling choose 1948?
[Libby Purves worked for some years for BBC Radio 4, as a reporter and a presenter on the Today programme and, since 1983, has presented Midweek.]
Why did he pick on 1948? When the Chancellor, Alistair Darling, in a curiously likeable interview, bluntly said that the economic downturn was “arguably the worst in 60 years”, why did he choose 60? He could have opted for 30, a far more common trope these days, and whipped us back to the 1970s Winter of Discontent. If he really wanted to frighten the bejasus out of us he could have said “worst in 70 years”, and plunged us into the hungry Thirties after Wall Street had crashed and Neville Chamberlain had reduced wages and the dole by 10 per cent, put tax up and heralded ten years of general misery. Or he could have declared it the worst downturn in 90 years, and fixed his beetling black gaze on 1918 when economic output fell by 25 per cent over three years and didn't recover till the Second World War.
But no. He chose 60, so it behoves us to peer back 60 years at Britain, 1948. As it happens this suits me rather well, because I have spent the past fortnight sorting through my late mother's papers and mementos. Sixty years ago she was newly married with a baby, living as a junior diplomat's wife amid the ruins of Warsaw, watching the restoration of ornate altarpieces and buying unnerving plaster reproductions of the fragment: gnarled chipped Slavic faces that lie in front of me as I write, accompanied by her Anti-Gas Certificate from the war years and various commendations from the Women's League of Health and Beauty and the Nottingham Art School.
Letters, documents and homely much-mended objects speak as loudly as any history. And the message is an oddly cheerful one: of austerity mixed with hope, of a nation quietly pleased with its own robustness in war and more than ready to construct an interesting and fair-minded future.
Of course, one reason Mr Darling may like to think of 1948 is that Labour - which in the 1970s was frankly part of the problem - 30 years earlier was in the ascendant under Attlee, and thrumming with vision...
Read entire article at Times
Why did he pick on 1948? When the Chancellor, Alistair Darling, in a curiously likeable interview, bluntly said that the economic downturn was “arguably the worst in 60 years”, why did he choose 60? He could have opted for 30, a far more common trope these days, and whipped us back to the 1970s Winter of Discontent. If he really wanted to frighten the bejasus out of us he could have said “worst in 70 years”, and plunged us into the hungry Thirties after Wall Street had crashed and Neville Chamberlain had reduced wages and the dole by 10 per cent, put tax up and heralded ten years of general misery. Or he could have declared it the worst downturn in 90 years, and fixed his beetling black gaze on 1918 when economic output fell by 25 per cent over three years and didn't recover till the Second World War.
But no. He chose 60, so it behoves us to peer back 60 years at Britain, 1948. As it happens this suits me rather well, because I have spent the past fortnight sorting through my late mother's papers and mementos. Sixty years ago she was newly married with a baby, living as a junior diplomat's wife amid the ruins of Warsaw, watching the restoration of ornate altarpieces and buying unnerving plaster reproductions of the fragment: gnarled chipped Slavic faces that lie in front of me as I write, accompanied by her Anti-Gas Certificate from the war years and various commendations from the Women's League of Health and Beauty and the Nottingham Art School.
Letters, documents and homely much-mended objects speak as loudly as any history. And the message is an oddly cheerful one: of austerity mixed with hope, of a nation quietly pleased with its own robustness in war and more than ready to construct an interesting and fair-minded future.
Of course, one reason Mr Darling may like to think of 1948 is that Labour - which in the 1970s was frankly part of the problem - 30 years earlier was in the ascendant under Attlee, and thrumming with vision...