There’s no future without a numbing dose of nostalgia

Welcome to Camberwick Green, but with an upgraded cottage hospital, a swanky rebuilt station and super-fast broadban

As even poetry-haters know, Philip Larkin had no doubt about the greatest of all post-war years. At least, that is, if you can turn a deaf ear to his irony. “So life was never better than/ In nineteen sixty-three,” he tells us in “Annus Mirabilis”. Although “rather late” for the solitary poet, that was when “Sexual intercourse began… Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ And the Beatles’ first LP”.

Please Please Me (the pressing from the beat combo in question) reached the record shops on 22 March 1963. It headed the charts until displaced by its successor, With the Beatles, released on 22 November 1963. Forgive this visit to vinyl Valhalla. But events in Dallas on that day should serve as a reminder that both private memory and shared history run on separate tracks that seldom cross and hardly ever merge. An age of gold and an age of lead may occupy the same slot on the calendar. My nostalgia is your nightmare, and vice versa.

Headline history and political rhetoric alike erase this incommensurable quality of the past. To you, the dead of the late 1970s lay unburied amid mountains of garbage in the rat-infested streets as Trotskyist unions bankrupted a basket-case country; to me, free-spirited rebels thrashed out a mighty three‑chord soundtrack to cultural enrichment, sexual liberation and fresh opportunities to learn, to play, to think, to love. The present and its biases always remodel the past, and only the best historians can capture the cross-hatched contradictions of disputed events. One of those is David Kynaston, who in a series of fine-grained, densely textured chronicles has tracked the British experience since 1945. Collectively entitled Tales of a New Jerusalem, his volumes have inspired a pre-election festival of ideas and debates at the Southbank Centre in London.

Over three weekends before the poll, Changing Britain will put migration and music, football and food, in the frame along with a score of other themes. I’m looking forward to the tours of epoch-defining architectural highlights on a 1962 Routemaster Bus. Apart from its innate fascination, and the welcome nod to Kynaston’s omnivorous curiosity about all our yesterdays, the festival will confirm that visions of the future always feed on stories from the past.

This week, the manifestos of the UK-wide political parties have shown that they not only wish to unveil a bullet-point list of policies. They also have to trace – in that mouldiest cliché of punditry – a “narrative”. Each tries to tell a cohesive story about who we are and where we’ve been. Kynaston’s year-by-year banquet of trends, fads and shifts can cast these verbose yarns in a revealing light. I wanted to ask the patrons of these albatross-like documents – ungainly, burdensome and usually ill-omened – one question. If you had to choose a single British year since 1945 that encapsulated your ideals and hopes, which would it be? I doubt whether any answer would involve a Larkin-esque meditation on sexual awakening. Although, given Nick Clegg’s record, you never know...

Scanning the manifestos, I sought to deduce where their historical centre of gravity rested. In every case, the fulcrum lies somewhere in the post-war past. Futurist platitudes aside, our parties feel safer with retro styling. Ukip, for instance, one would expect to find securely anchored in the 1950s. That’s indeed the case, although we can be more specific. With its Churchillian quotes (“We are with Europe, but not of it”), its worship of English-speaking peoples (the “Anglosphere”), its religion of “heritage” and pledge to “encourage pride in Britain again”, Ukip’s manifesto happily dwells in that “New Elizabethan” moment around the coronation in 1953.

Winston’s back in No 10, if a little gaga these days, while the nation’s smokestacks and ciggies puff away in unison. As for some Ten-Pound Pom with a skilled job in Ballarat in the bag, sun-kissed Australia and its “points-based system” of immigration shine as the faraway utopia. At home, Ukip’s cross-class retrogression both lauds the “800th anniversary of Magna Carta” and yearns to “invest in coal”, with an expansion of “deep, open-cast and drift mining”. Let’s get that winding gear humming again. “Our history is the envy of the world,” the manifesto trumpets. “Ukip will keep it that way.” If you can unravel the mind-bending epistemology behind that promise, let me know.

Do the Tories want to plant their patch of paradise much later, say in the devil-take-the-hindmost heyday of the Blessed Margaret? Far from it. The Conservative manifesto downplays the 1980s zenith of Thatcherism. Even our long-forgotten friend the “Big Society” stages a robust comeback, with its “vision of a more engaged nation, one in which we take more responsibility for ourselves and our neighbours”. However, the patrician smack of firm government rings out again, as “We have a plan for every stage of your life” from cradle to grave.

The shiny modernism of the “northern powerhouse”, the Midlands’ “engine of growth”, big-ticket railways and roads: all call back over the Thatcher years to a past age of paternalistic toffs with grand designs, served by sleek Whitehall mandarins. Meanwhile, it’s a bleak world of crazy villains out there, and “our outstanding intelligence and security agencies” must “have the powers they need to keep us safe”. This cocktail of top-down intervention, Kipling-esque appeals to “the British character” and discreet derring-do should no doubt be shaken and not stirred. There’s a late-Harold Macmillan, early-Bond movie flavour to this Tory reverie, at once dynamic and genteel. It’s 1962, but would Commander Bond turn up to hand out prizes at the Big Society Awards?

Now turn to Labour. If you hoped its offer might take a cue from more recent history, think again. With New Labour still toxic and Old another tainted brand, its manifesto too plants a flag on the sunlit uplands of the optimistic 1960s. As in that decade, hi-tech progressivism holds out white-coated arms to a softer sense of feel-good solidarity. Thus “Labour’s plan for national renewal will bring about real, meaningful change that each person will be able to feel in their daily life”. “Scientific discovery and technological innovation” drive economic growth, and Harold Wilson’s white heat of technology now has a digital dimension: “We are just at the start of the internet revolution.” Yet the communitarian shades of a Richard Hoggart or Raymond Williams still find a syntactically contorted voice: “The common life we share is who we are as a country.” Both precision-welded and home-baked, Labour’s blueprint smacks of a seminar at a plate-glass university in a cathedral city, around 1966.

Indeed, a trawl of the UK-wide manifestos suggests that their architects would feel much happier in the first half of the 70-year arc since 1945. Current challenges – globalised trade, climate change, asymmetrical warfare, new patterns of migration – do raise their scary heads. Yet these fearsome hydras have to be “properly controlled” so that we can return to the cosy parish of our post-war glory years. Welcome to Camberwick Green, but with an upgraded cottage hospital, a swanky rebuilt station and super-fast broadband.

As for the Liberal Democrats, they do edge into the 1970s, even if the manifesto sounds as if it were written in a suburban folk club shortly before punk struck. Its habitués worry that chart success and psychedelic trickery have compromised their purity. So it’s back to an acoustic dream of “a freer, greener, more liberal country” with a late-hippie tinge, and the “five green laws” underpinned by a “national well-being strategy”. Gentle visions of folkie Eden shimmer through the cloud of aromatic smoke. Strummed chords rise to a plangent climax for, here in 1973, “there is real change on the horizon. All you have to do is vote for it”.

The sharpest shock of the old, however, comes from the Green Party. At the outset of its tract, you think you can detect exactly when its Tardis has landed. “Imagine a political system that puts the public first. Imagine an economy that gives everyone their fair share…” John Lennon, summer 1971? Not exactly. True, the Greens have mastered the protest-song lyrics of that era: “It’s hard to be a citizen when life tells you that you are a consumer … It’s hard to think of the common good.” All together now for the chorus: “We live in a price-tag society – and if you can’t pay the price, too bad.”

The real anthem, though, arrives at the finale. There the Greens foresee the bliss of 2019 in a sneak preview of their utopia. The ideal citizen leaves work “on the dot” of 5pm – no ambition or initiative here – to take the electric bus home. She picks up her “giggling” kid from the free nursery and drops in at “gran’s new council house for a cup of tea”. Daughter and friend skip off to the park’s “new play area”, promising “to pick up some milk at the Post Office”. Mum now has time to plan a fortnight’s camping holiday in Cornwall, with cheap train tickets and a branch -line “that gets you practically to the campside gate”. Techno-tweaks aside, this is pure Enid Blyton. Merry romps via a pre-Beeching rail network punctuate low-key, small-scale community life. At least the Greens flesh out their homely dreams with vintage detail. Vote for them, and we can party like it’s 1959.