What We Have Lost review – how Great Britain stopped being great

James Hamilton-Paterson’s survey of the decline of industry, from motorbikes to aerospace, combines nostalgia with rage

Why can’t Britain make things any more? It’s almost a rhetorical question now, but keeps getting asked as one great manufacturing industry after another seemingly sinks into decline. George Osborne once promised a manufacturing revival that would supposedly see Britain “carried aloft by a march of the makers” yet we have slipped below France in the league tables for manufacturing output. Household names from Cadbury chocolate to Boots the chemist have been snapped up by foreign owners. The loss felt so keenly in former steel, shipbuilding or fishing communities isn’t just of jobs but of pride and prestige, a feeling the Leave campaign shrewdly tapped into with its promise to make Britannia once again rule the waves.

And at first glance What We Have Lost looks, with its red white and blue cover, like just another jingoistic addition to the nostalgic Brexiter canon. Yet it’s a much more complicated beast than that. Author James Hamilton-Paterson wastes no time before attacking the “hastily taken, ill-informed and unthought-through decision to leave the European Union after 44 years”, for a start. Similar scorn is reserved for the Keep Calm and Carry On brand of rose-tinted wartime nostalgia; born in 1941, the author associates skies “noisy with Spitfires, Hurricanes and Lancasters” with fear and loss rather than cheery blitz spirit.

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from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2SjaNVU

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