When a book vindicates your memory: Revisiting Ill Fares the Land — Part 5

I’m taking a step back in this piece to write about why Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land is an important book for me personally, as well as being an astute and penetrating analysis of, well, the ills that bedevil us here in the UK, across Europe, and in the US as well.

It was simply the first book I read that described and explained what had been, for along time, a total mystery to me. So much a mystery, in fact, that I suspected occasionally that my memory was wrong and that I had somehow imagined the Britain in which I grew up.

Judt was born in the decade before me. With the Second World War still fresh in the memories of his elders and the first great progressive strides taken by Labour to create a fairer and more equal society, he was in that first tranche of beneficiaries of a new, more caring Britain.

I, too, benefited from all the new welfare state had to offer, from health provision, educational opportunities, free dentistry, free glasses — I was a short-sighted kid — and nationalised utilities and transport systems. Growing up, it really felt that Britain, for all the slightly drab clothes and limited food and musty train carriages that reminded us daily of the battle against fascism won so recently, was a country to be proud of.

We knew Thatcher threatened this when she was elected. We knew she wanted to poison this well of hope and progress in the name of profit and greed. The early years of her…