The tendency to see British politics as an expression of a deeply entrenched, long-gone past has not helped us understand how much has changed in recent times. We have just witnessed the latest failed Conservative attempt to break with the Cameron-Osborne paradigm to which we have now returned. Labour, too, is tempted to return to the pre-2015 era. But there is no going back, and new realities need new politics.
The transformation of the Tories into a May-Johnson-Truss Brexit Party was an extraordinary rejection of the New Labour/Cameronian consensus. But more than this, it triggered a whole new understanding of the state of the nation. On the one hand there was a radical revivalism, a depiction of Britain as an innovation superpower, ready to unshackle itself from Europe and assume its proper place in the world. It was implied that Margaret Thatcher had reversed the historic decline of the United Kingdom.
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