Will Rachel Reeves’s Iron Age morph into a Golden Age?

Rachel Reeves seems to be promising us an initial Iron Age of misery which will mutate into a glorious Golden Age. How very classical of her.

It is true that some ancient Greeks saw it the other way round. They argued that it was early civilisation that was the Golden Age, inhabited by men who lived ageless and free from hardship, while Nature poured forth its fruits, harvested by men at leisure (comic poets greatly enjoyed imagining a world in which it rained wine and pease porridge, hot sausage slices rolled down rivers and inanimate objects jumped to obey orders: ‘Table, come here! Cup, go wash yourself! Fish, turn over and baste yourself with oil and salt!’). But, the story went, this Golden Age deteriorated over five stages into the violent Iron Age of the contemporary world, when men held ‘the law in their fists’, honoured criminals and scorned oaths, ‘exulting in misfortune with a face full of hate’, until Decency and Moral Disapproval, veiling their faces, abandoned mankind to join the immortals.

But Ms Reeves clearly could not associate the Tory party with a Golden Age and has decided to opt for the alternative classical model. In that account, Greeks like Herodotus, travelling about the known world exploring different cultures, came across what seemed to them savage, uncultured ways of life which they came to believe must have represented a primitive stage of civilisation before their own enlightened version emerged. Poets picked up the theme, talking of the time when mortals lived like lawless beasts in sunless caves on the mountains, without farming skills and living off human flesh, until sheer necessity – or, in this case, the Labour party – revealed to men the way to escape Tory barbarity into a polished, civilised existence.

All we have to do, then, is to hunker down under the time-honoured insecure, cold, poverty-stricken Iron Age of Labour as (almost) foreseen by Thomas Hobbes (1651) – ‘no industry, no culture… no arts, no letters… and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, British, and short’ – for the miracle to occur.