WHAT WE HAVE LOST
THE DISMANTLING OF GREAT BRITAIN
JAMES HAMILTONPATERSON
Head of Zeus, 360pp, £25
James Hamilton-paterson was born in 1941. It was a time, he remembers, when ‘I and my fellow Britons took for granted that nearly everything we bought or used or saw…was Britishmade by a British-owned company.’ In 1950 Britain retained one quarter of the world market in manufactures, but the country’s industrial might has dwindled dramatically since then. It now imports more than it exports. What has brought British industry so low? In What We Have Lost, a mixture of polemic and postwar history, Hamilton-paterson tackles this question.
Hamilton-paterson is a writer of wide gifts who has published novels, poetry and a history of the British aerospace industry, among other things. ‘It is hard to think of an economist who could craft such an elegantly readable account of postwar failure as this,’ wrote Frances Cairncross in Literary Review. Other reviewers echoed this sentiment. Gavin Jackson, writing in the
Financial Times, called it ‘engaging and racy’, particularly in its account of the decline of the British motorbike industry (HamiltonPaterson is a biker himself).
At the same time, these same reviewers questioned the book’s basic premise. ‘The past 40 years have been considerably better for the country than this mournful account might suggest,’ wrote Cairncross; Jackson compared What We Have
Lost unfavourably to David Edgerton’s magisterial recent Rise and Fall of the British Nation, which skewered the idea of ‘declinism’. And for Julian Glover, writing in the
Evening Standard, reading this book was ‘like hearing an elderly relative insist the old days were better. You know some things were, but that there is another side to the story too.’