Building back better?

 Treasury minister Lucy Frazer was on dangerous ground in drawing a parallel between reconstruction after the second world war and the current situation under this government when she introduced Tuesday's debate on the Finance Bill. People with memories of those days and those born later who trouble to look at the parliamentary record will note a Conservative party of the 1950s which accepted the necessary reforms of the Attlee government, while reversing some of its excesses, like the nationalisation of steel. It did not sell off utilities, the National Grid or parts of the NHS, It did not fragment the railways. The Macmillan government also attempted to recover lost ground in Europe after Labour's big mistake in refusing to join the ECSC - it was not Macmillan's fault that he failed. It was so different from today.

I fear that the economic rebound from Brexit, both the event and the mishandling of the subsequent treaty with the EU, and also from the pandemic (mishandled by Johnson and company as no government of the 1940s or 1950s would have done) will be nothing like that from the end of the world war.