The Bad Old Days, English Style

During Blogcritics’ freewheeling first days, I wrote a piece reviewing Steven Hayward’s first volume of The Age of Reagan. Hayward’s book focused not as much on Reagan’s days prior to the presidency as it did on the state of America in the 1960s and ’70s. To sum it up the rough shape that America and its economy was in during that period, I titled my review “The Bad Old Days, Revisited“.

But England was in even worse shape during that period, as Mark Steyn describes in his obituary for “Sunny” James Callaghan, Britain’s Prime Minister during the late 1970s:

The past may be, as L. P. Hartley wrote, another country, but it