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Britain has got richer in the past six decades, but other countries have got richer faster and enjoy a more stable economy
Hard though it is now to credit it, when the Queen came to the throne 60 years ago, the UK was the third-biggest economy in the world after the US and the Soviet Union. With Germany recovering from the physical damage caused by the second world war, Britain was Europe's powerhouse.
Since then there have been booms and busts. Two long periods of growth have culminated in deep and painful recessions. Governments of both left and right have tried to modernise and reinvigorate the economy: the three-day week, the winter of discontent, Black Wednesday and the (unfinished) great recession of the past five years have shown how difficult this has been.
Throughout it all, Britain has got richer. While there are surveys questioning whether we are happier on the occasion of the Queen's diamond jubilee than we were when she came to the throne, living standards have more than tripled since 1952.
The consumer luxuries of the age when Harold Macmillan said we had never had it so good have become the necessities of today. Nor is it simply in material terms that Britain is better off. Today's babies can expect to live for about 10 years longer than the baby boomers of six decades ago. They will be fitter and healthier as well.
Yet, the real story of the past 60 years has been of potential squandered. Britain has grown richer, but other countries have grown richer faster. What's more, the economy has become more unbalanced and its foundations shakier.
The hollowing out of the UK's industrial base has been a feature of the past 60 years, as has the widening regional disparity between north and south that has accompanied the drift towards an economy dominated by financial services, and the City of London in particular. For the first half of the reign of Elizabeth II, Britain became a more equal country. After 1980 the gap between rich and poor widened.
The reign started with Sir Winston Churchill back in Downing Street and RA (RAB) Butler as chancellor. With the last vestiges of rationing on their way out, the early and mid-1950s saw the transition from socialist planning to Keynesian demand management. The governments of Churchill, Eden and Macmillan bought into the idea of a mixed economy and full employment. Strong growth, low inflation and a buoyant jobs market marked the start of the new Elizabethan age.
Yet during the 1950s there was growing concern that Britain's economic performance was markedly inferior to that of her continental rivals as they recovered from the ravages of war.
As a result, the next 10 years were spent searching for a new growth model. In the early 1960s there were half-hearted attempts to import the indicative planning used by the French government to direct its economy from the centre, leading to the creation of the tripartite National Economic Development Council in 1962. This was followed by Harold Wilson's equally nebulous "white heat", the idea that the power of science and technology could be harnessed to raise the growth rate.
Wilson set up a new ministry, the Department of Economic Affairs, to implement a national plan, which had the ambitious target of expanding the economy by 25% in six years. However the plan was made stillborn by the deflationary measures deemed necessary to avoid a devaluation of sterling, which happened anyway in November 1967.
Despite the difficulties, the first 15 years of the Queen's reign were as good as it got for a very long time. The next quarter of a century saw two ferocious boom-busts in the housing market, the highest inflation in peacetime, the longest dole queues since the 1930s' great depression, widespread industrial unrest, two major sterling crises and the abandonment of Keynesian demand management for the rigours of monetarism.
Until recently, the worst five-year period since 1952 was from the silver jubilee year of 1977 to 1981, which encompassed the austerity measures imposed on Britain by the IMF and the wipeout of manufacturing in a two-year recession after Thatcher's arrival in Downing Street.
Growth during that period averaged barely 1% a year, but it was followed by a strong upswing generated by lower oil prices, a cheaper currency and financial deregulation.
If the past 60 years are split into five-year chunks, the fastest growth was the 3.2% a year on average between 1982 and 1986, the period that straddled the Falklands war and the big bang deregulation of the City.
The boom got out of hand in 1987 and 1988, leading to the house price crash of 1989 and 1990. Britain's ill-fated entry into the European exchange rate mechanism intensified the recessionary pressures, and it was only when the pound was blown out of the ERM on Black Wednesday in September 1992 that recovery began.
This proved to be much longer than anybody who had been accustomed to the gyrations of the economy over the previous quarter-century imagined. It was, as Sir Mervyn King put it, the time of the "great moderation". Unemployment fell and for more than 15 years there was not a single quarter of negative output.
During the near-decade from 1997 to 2006, when Tony Blair was prime minister and Gordon Brown chancellor, the expansion looked particularly impressive. In the first five years of Blair's premiership, growth averaged 3.1% per annum, and slipped back only slightly to 2.8% a year between 2001 and 2006.
Brown's claim that Labour had abolished "Tory boom and bust" came from the sense that at last – after all the false starts – Britain had finally cracked the mystery of sustained non-inflationary growth.
It hadn't, of course. The boom was concentrated over too narrow a spectrum of industries and was far too dependent on financial leverage, consumer debt and property speculation. Years 56 to 60 of the Queen's reign have been the grimmest for her subjects since she came to the throne. Growth has averaged just 0.2% a year and real living standards have fallen.
On the latest estimates it will take until 2014 for economic output to get back to where it was in 2008 and until 2017 for living standards to return to the levels they were at when Blair ordered British troops into Iraq in 2003.
The past five years have been a reality check. The Queen once famously asked economists why none of them saw the crash coming. As she celebrates her diamond jubilee, she should be asking her prime minister how a nation that has not run a manufacturing trade surplus since Michael Foot was leader of the opposition, where North Sea oil has come and nearly gone, and where consumer debt hit saturation point some years ago is going to earn a living in the years ahead.
Macmillan's "never had it so good" speech was actually a warning that the prosperity might not last. How right he was.