Professional economist, Russel Jones’s The Tyranny of Nostalgia provides detailed ironic observation, with a catalogue of misapprehensions, missteps, wasted opportunities, crises and humiliations, with all too-familiar problems arising time and again and yet never being satisfactorily addressed.

All nations and their economic policymakers are to a certain extent prisoners of their history, and this applies more to the UK than to other countries. Nostalgia for the great days of the past has become tyrannical and is in some sense embodied in the form of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s famous “budget box”, made for William Gladstone in the 1850s and only passed over to a museum in 2010. Nostalgia has led to wishful thinking, and this has been the underlying sentiment driving poorly thought through – sometimes even panicky – initiatives that were blindly borrowed from elsewhere, that flew in the face of experience, or that were drawn from theoretical and political extremes.

Nostalgia interprets the economic and political history of the past half a century, examining the challenges confronted by successive governments and their Chancellors, the policies employed for good or ill, and running through it all – the desperate search of a panacea that could arrest the nation’s relative decline and return the country to its supposed former glories.

The so-called golden age in the 1950s and 1960s, when the Prime Minister Harold Macmillan reflected the country’s post-war boom in his “never had it so good” remark. Jones goes on to provide a fresh perspective on the 1970s, including the “Winter of Discontent” – to which many have attempted to draw comparisons in Britain today.

In the 1970s the real GDP growth average 2.25 per cent per year, and then Jones highlights Margaret Thatcher’s supply-side reforms in the 1980s, and then on to Sterling’s departure from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism on “Black Wednesday” in September 1992, through to Tony Blair government, the financial crisis and the Brexit referendum.

Jones also explains how prevailing economic and political conditions helped influence how particular strands of macroeconomic through successive prime ministers and their advisers and among the electorate.

The Tyranny of Nostalgia: Half a Century of British Economic Decline by Russell Jones, London Publishing Partnership £24.99.