Ill Fares the Land

Tony Judt wrote this short book in 2010, dictating much of it while paralysed by motor neurone disease, as an argument aimed at the young. His case is that the three decades after 1945 built something real: public provision, progressive taxation, a shared sense of collective purpose. The generation after 1980 dismantled it without understanding what it was for, and the language of social democracy was lost along with it. Not a policy programme so much as an attempt to make a moral vocabulary available again.