Too good to last?

23rd July 2007
By Martin Weale

‘Most of our people have never had it

 so good… What is beginning to worry some of us is, is it too good to be true?

Or perhaps I should say, is it

too good to last?’

—Harold Macmillan, 20th July 1957

Fifty years on from ‘never had it so good’, we can ask the same question about the British economy today. We have had 15 years of steady, but not spectacular, economic growth. The gap in living standards wit…