Jim Tomlinson has written an interesting book, as much concerned with how U.K. governments have presented and conveyed economic information to the electorate as with the shifts in policy concerns over the years since 1945. The book has a broad chronological sweep, from the austerity of Stafford Cripps in the 1940s to that of George Osborne in 2010. Discussion over time highlights particular themes, such as modernization, growth, productivity, and globalization. The context in which such themes were addressed changed, notably in the shift away from an economy in which the manufacturing industry moved from producing one-third to one-tenth of national output. What also changed over time were the ambitions and capabilities of the institution of government. Curiously, the words and messages that are at the heart of this book proved unchanging. Where the Attlee governments were concerned with austerity, what that word meant in practice was remarkably different from its use by recent governments. The Attlee governments, which retained rationing, contained the annual increase in personal consumption to 1 percent, and sought to divert resources to the export market, were also the same governments that nationalized industries, funded their investment programs, and embarked upon a major public-housing building program—and all this with a national debt-to-GDP ratio of over 240 percent. This was not the austerity of 2010 onward.

One criticism that might be made of this book concerns semantics: that in a book about the message, more might have been said about the limited nature of the vocabulary of economics. Just as austerity of the 1940s is not that of the 2010s, nor is economic growth of the 1940s that of the 2010s. At face value this is obvious, but how well is such change reflected in the static vocabulary of economics? Jim Tomlinson correctly points to the important developments in the compiling, development, and use of national economic and industrial statistics, but as the industrial structure has shifted further away from its early postwar manufacturing policy base, so too has the ability to capture the economic value of output become more fragile. The service industry component of the national income accounts was always less secure than that for manufacturing, and as intangible investment has grown in relation to physical investment, so too has discontent with statistical measures of GDP and productivity increased. Tomlinson analyzes well the use that is made of the pursuit of economic growth, the need to modernize, and the relative decline of the United Kingdom in terms of the growth rates of others, but what also comes through clearly is that this active growth-promoting role for government is most credible in political terms in a manufacturing, fixed-capital-investment style economy. Once the proportion of fixed investment declines—when the talk is initially of human capital and then of intangible assets, and when globalization exploits the division of labor in production while gravity-trade models incline neighbors to trade increasingly with one another—then it becomes more difficult for government to demonstrate and explain what its positive economic role might be. If it has moved from being a large investing state to being a large post office transferring payments from current taxpayers to current recipients, then its capacity to influence the economy has also changed.

A further revealing feature of the book is the growing discernible discomfort of government with what precisely the function of economic growth might be. Anthony Crosland is shown in his The Future of Socialism (1956) already worrying that economic growth had weakened the ability of government to significantly affect the distribution of income. For Labour governments in particular, there appears an ambivalence about growth. While in the 1970s Peter Shore promoted the sale of surplus public housing stock, there is a nervousness in the Labour Party about such transfers of assets from public to private ownership. In general, the 1970s emerges as an important decade of change, not simply because of the shift in the nature of government, but also because of the move toward more market-based financial markets arising from the collapse of the fixed-exchange-rate system and the releasing of administrative controls on lending and the international movement of currencies. This provided both the background for the Thatcher governments’ promotion of the acquisition of capital assets as an important incentive for middle managers and another strand in the use of the vocabulary of microeconomics as a banner of individual liberty. Yet, this approach also contributed to asset prices moving away from median household income and to Labour governments in particular having recourse to a “Third Way” that emphasized the benefits of the market. Whatever Tony Blair actually meant when claiming that Labour's aim was to accept globalization and work with it, what was clear was the New Labour faith that economic growth would continue, lifting all with it. The slowing of economic growth after the financial crisis of 2008, the long-run stagnation of real income for many households in the United Kingdom and the United States, and the mutation of government into a noninvesting state left many on the left short of a script and a traditional constituency. While deindustrialization had played an important role in breaking historic political affiliations and changing expectations of what standard of living might be possible, the vocabulary of growth, of austerity, of modernization, and of productivity all sounded familiar. That the same terms were now used in a different context by a much-altered institution of government is a feature of this book of which more might have been made, but of which sufficient is said to more than stimulate the interest of the reader. A book that is suitable for both students and academics, this will rightly form the basis for much discussion and argument.