Seeing Britain Through a Dark Time

n his third Budget, the Chancellor of the Exchequer felt able to tell the House of Commons: “We have finished the story of Bleak House, and are sitting down this afternoon to the story of Great Expectations.” The Chancellor was Neville Chamberlain, and the year was 1934. It is because George Osborne was not able to say the same in his third Budget, in March, that gloom sits upon the nation like this summer’s grey clouds. The persistence of our economic difficulties is even more striking than their severity. It is now five years since trouble visibly started, and nearly four since the world banking system almost collapsed. Hundreds of billions have been spent on rescues, bail-outs, quantitative easings. Yet it feels as if we have hardly got anywhere. That, even more than Lords reform, gay marriage and so on, is the background to the unease of the Coalition.