Polly Toynbee and David Walker Guardian Books, 2017, PB, 326pp, £9.99, 978-1783351206
For 40 years or so, beginning with the rise of Thatcherism, the state has been in retreat in the UK, and especially in England. Private enterprise has been courted, praised and rewarded by governments both Conservative and Labour. Nationalised industries have been sold off to private bidders, many of them foreign; the NHS has been subject to endless reorganisations and reforms, all of them based on unevidenced pursuit of marketisation; schools have been torn from local government and ‘academised’; …