Britain is a nation caught in history’s turning tide. The dismal condition of Gordon Brown’s Labour government has summoned up dark ghosts from the 1970s. David Cameron’s Conservatives are disinterring the Thatcherite thrift of the early 1980s. Both parties are reclaiming pasts they thought they had long ago left behind.
The dire state of Britain’s public finances and last week’s Budget plans for hefty new taxes on the rich have stirred memories of the economic chaos that toppled James Callaghan’s Labour government in 1979. The present bust has likewise fuelled expectations that Mr Brown will suffer Callaghan’s electoral fate.
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