Our sense of history shapes how we think about who we are. One of the distinguishing features of the left in Britain is that it holds to a remorselessly bleak and miserabilist view of our recent political history--one in which Margaret Thatcher's election in 1979 marked the start of a still-continuing fall from political grace made evident by the triumph of a free market get-what-you-can neoliberal ideology, dizzying levels of inequality, social decay,...