Nostalgia has held too much sway in politics

ANEW poll finds that most of us think the best of days are behind us, with more than a third of Britons believing life in the 1960s and 1970s was better than today. I have only hazy memories of the 1960s, mostly involving Mary, Mungo and Midge, a cartoon girl and her pet dog and mouse, created for the BBC in 1969. Mary lived in an unimaginably modern tower block with – wait for it – a lift. Even at that tender age, I shared Mary’s excitement that she was part of something new.

The 1970s however, remain in my head as one long, hard sludge of brown and orange, punctuated by the 1976 heatwave, seaside holidays and the arrival of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister in 1979. That was my political awakening. So you won’t find me romanticising this time in history, or any time since then. Unless you count a brief period in the mid-1990s, just before New Labour ousted Sir John Major’s discredited Conservative government.

I remember learning to text my friends on my recently-acquired mobile phone and catching the Eurostar to Paris for the first time, in 1996. As I walked down the platform I felt as excited at the promise as I did when I avidly watched Mary, Mungo and Midge navigate that tower block and its lift.

The flickering hope that things ‘really would get better’, to paraphrase New Labour’s then-anthem, soon passed.

I fail to understand why so many people polled by Times Radio yearn for long-gone halcyon days; the over-70s are most likely to think the decade that brought us The Beatles, flower power and free love was truly swinging, while the under-30s consider the turn of the millennium as the very best of times.

Meanwhile, 16 per cent of people would prefer to live in the 1950s, with just four per cent wanting to go back to the war years and post-war austerity of the 1940s.

All this insight could be a harmless sociological diversion from the very real 21st century problems we face. However, such yearning for the past is cynically manipulated by politicians, from all parties.

Nostalgia has held far too much sway in politics in recent years.

I’d wager that half the people who backed Boris Johnson’s Brexit vow “To Take Back Control” did so because they fondly imagined that giving us UK passports and making it almost impossible to set up home in another European country again would somehow restore the British Empire. Anyone who wished for those ‘glory’ days would surely find their dream is now well and truly tarnished, in more ways than one.

And sadly, for some voters, Johnson represented a time when Great Britain really did consider itself to be great, his patrician appeal speaking more to traditional communities – such as Red Wall constituencies – than well-educated liberal urban types.

Labour is certainly not immune to such manipulative tactics. Much of the appeal generated by former leader Jeremy Corbyn was rooted in resurrecting an unfeasible dream of a truly socialist past.

The current Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, certainly knows how to mine the nostalgia seam too. Whilst his well-chronicled childhood determination to play the flute, piano, violin and er, recorder, is admirable, his dedication to joining an orchestra in spite of his workingclass background speaks little to the vast majority of today’s youth. Yet it doesn’t stop him banging on about it.

He reminds me of those people who bewail the days when kids played out on the street until their mothers called them in, shared their bathwater and had only two pairs of shoes. Why go back to such times, when most women didn’t study past O-levels or work outside the home, domestic violence was hushed up and sexual education confined to rumour?

Half of the people polled by the radio station think they will never again live their best life and 56 per cent think the year 2050 will be worse than today. Only 17 per cent think it will be better.

Young people are more upbeat: a quarter of 18 to 29-year-olds think things will be better in the next 25 years, compared with only 12 per cent of those over the age of 70.

Whatever the definition of my best life was – in terms of personal growth, probably the three years I spent at university in the late 1980s – I don’t want some politician telling me that they have found a time machine which will transport me back.

I want them to allow me to live my best life now, and look forward to even better times to come, rather than being forced to constantly spiral backwards. The past should remain another country, off limits to those who seek to manipulate it for their own ends.