I saw a chart this week that measures how Britain feels about the economy. The line has fallen about as far down as the page allows.
As low as 1979. The worst reading in nearly fifty years of asking the question.
You can probably feel it without the chart. Most people think things only get worse from here. That’s the narrative we are living with.
But there’s a Howard Marks line I go to. He’s the Warren Buffett you might never have heard of. People, he says, usually expect the future to be like the recent past, and underestimate the potential for change.
That’s the whole trouble with a mood. It feels like a reading of the future when it’s only a reading of right now.
Let’s go back to 1979 for a moment. Not as nostalgia. As a worked example of how wrong a national mood can be.
In 1979 the consensus was that Britain was finished. Managed decline. The only real argument was about how gently to lower the country into the ground. But what came next didn’t look like the past at all.
The striking part isn’t the politics of it. It’s that, through the 1980s, Britain began to catch up rather than fall further behind.
Thatcher is still a divisive figure. For many things got worse in the 1980s before they got better for a great many more.
I’m not asking anyone to love the woman. Only to notice the shape of the thing.
Because she wasn’t the obvious answer. She wasn’t especially liked, even inside her own party. She was the last one standing, turned to more in hope than expectation, by people who’d run out of ideas.
It didn’t look like a turning point at the time. It looked like a gamble nobody wanted to take until there was nothing left to lose.
And then what was won got spent. Not in one act of vandalism. In a long series of small ones, by governments who were certain they knew better but left the place a little worse than they found it.
It is always darkest before dawn. We know this. We have the proverb because we keep having to be reminded. Something in us simply can’t hold the big picture when the headline is loud enough.
That’s the real subject, and Marks named it. We overweight what’s in front of us.
The latest crisis fills the whole windscreen, and the longer view disappears behind it. Which is why, sitting here at a fifty-year low, the next “Maggie moment” is surely coming.
Who will it be? I will wager none of the names we already know. The turning point rarely announces itself.
In 1979 it arrived as a woman her own party didn’t much fancy. It will arrive next as something we can’t quite picture, because the gloom is doing its usual job of making itself look permanent.
And while you wait for that dawn, the actual years go by. That's the cost nobody invoices you for. Not a worse return more the dinner half-enjoyed with the news on, the holiday booked smaller than it needed to be. The decision put off until things feel safer, which they never quite do. A decent stretch of a good life spent bracing for a blow that mostly never lands.
Here's the part I'd say to your face – don’t be that person.
Your plan is sound; you don't have to feel hopeful for it to do its job. Do not wait for the news to improve before you start enjoying what you've got. Nobody is coming to tell you it's safe. Nobody ever will.
Just before the 1979 general election Thatcher told the BBC: “I can’t bear Britain in decline. I just can’t.” and she went and did something about it.
With optimism at a fifty-year low, and the loudest voices sure they can see the future (when all they see is the mood) – dawn is approaching.
Colour me optimistic. In a weird sort of way….