The argument this series makes, in 26 steps. It is the same spine every module is built on, and no module states more of it than its own share.
From 1945 both main parties agreed on the same economy: full employment first, major industries owned by the state, and unions treated as partners.
It worked for twenty-five years. Unemployment was about 2%, the economy grew by about 3.5% a year, and household incomes rose steadily.
In the 1970s prices and unemployment rose together, which the accepted theory said could not happen.
Governments answered by agreeing pay limits with the unions, and by 1979 every such deal had broken.
In the winter of 1978 to 79 the last of those deals collapsed into the widest strikes since 1926.
A government that will not bargain over pay has one lever it can pull at once: reduce how much is spent in the economy.
Spending falls at once but pay and prices are set in advance, so firms sell less before they charge less, and they employ fewer people.
The government raised interest rates to 17% and published a four-year plan, expecting that being believed would make the adjustment quick and cheap.
High interest rates and new North Sea oil pushed the pound up by about a fifth against Britain's trading partners and by about a quarter against the German mark, so British goods sold abroad became more expensive and imports cheaper.
Inflation rose for a year before it fell, partly because the government's own first Budget raised VAT.
Output and jobs fell hardest in manufacturing, and unemployment roughly doubled as a share of the workforce.
In March 1981 the government raised taxes in the middle of the slump, to cut its borrowing so interest rates could come down.
Inflation fell to under 5% by 1983 and to its low point in 1986.
Output recovered from 1982 but unemployment stayed near its peak for four more years, so the cost was not the short one the plan assumed.
From 1980 five Acts removed the legal protection from being sued that unions had held since 1906, and from 1984 required a secret ballot before a strike, so striking cost more and union membership fell.
Selling a state industry raised performance only where the sale opened it to competitors or created a regulator, so the active ingredient was competition rather than the change of owner.
By 1990 inflation was back near 10%, where it had started.
Inflation fell across the whole rich world in these years, after America pushed its own interest rates above 20%, and Britain's inflation fell further than most while its unemployment stayed higher for longer.
Benefit rules were cut and tightened year by year, yet mass unemployment drove social security spending to a post-war record share of the economy, and it fell only when the boom cut the claimant count.
Over a million council homes were sold to their tenants at growing discounts and not replaced, so council housing shrank into a last resort while the state went on subsidising home ownership.
The controls on money were removed as well: exchange controls in 1979, then the rules that had rationed mortgage lending and sheltered the Stock Exchange, so banks and building societies competed to lend to ordinary households.
Households stopped saving and borrowed against their homes, the 1988 Budget cut taxes into the top of the boom, and the surge showed up in house prices before it reached the shops. Stopping it took interest rates of 15%.
For all the tax-cutting, taxes took a larger share of the economy in 1990 than in 1979, rearranged rather than reduced, while the boom swung the Budget into surplus and cut the debt ratio by a third.
The tax on the value of houses was replaced by a flat charge on every adult; millions refused to pay, collection cost far more than the rates had, and VAT rose from 15 to 17.5 per cent to pay for cutting every bill.
The decade's gains were shared upward: incomes near the top rose by more than half while the bottom barely moved, nearly half the value of the tax and benefit changes went to the richest tenth, and the rise in inequality never reversed.
The economy grew no faster in the 1980s than in the 1970s, about 2.6 per cent a year against 2.7, but factory productivity surged and Britain stopped losing ground to France and Germany.