“Now, we are creatures of narrative, and a string of facts and figures, however important the facts and figures are — and, you know, I’m an empiricist, I believe in facts and figures — but those facts and figures have no power to displace a persuasive story. The only thing that can replace a story is a story. You cannot take away someone’s story without giving them a new one. And it’s not just stories in general that we are attuned to, but particular narrative structures. 

There are a number of basic plots that we use again and again, and in politics there is one basic plot which turns out to be tremendously powerful, and I call this “the restoration story.” It goes as follows. 

“Disorder afflicts the land, caused by powerful and nefarious forces working against the interests of humanity. But the hero will revolt against this disorder, fight those powerful forces against the odds, overthrow them and restore harmony to the land. 

 “You’ve heard this story before. It’s the Bible story. It’s the “Harry Potter” story. It’s the “Lord of the Rings” story. It’s the “Narnia” story.But it’s also the story that has accompanied almost every political and religious transformation going back millennia. In fact, we could go as far as to say that without a powerful new restoration story, a political and religious transformation might not be able to happen. It’s that important. 

“After laissez-faire economics triggered the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes sat down to write a new economics, and what he did was to tell a restoration story, and it went something like this: 

“Disorder afflicts the land! Caused by the powerful and nefarious forces of the economic elite, which have captured the world’s wealth. But the hero of the story, the enabling state, supported by working class and middle class people, will contest that disorder, will fight those powerful forces by redistributing wealth, and through spending public money on public goods will generate income and jobs, restoring harmony to the land. 

“Now like all good restoration stories, this one resonated across the political spectrum. Democrats and Republicans, Labour and Conservatives, left and right all became, broadly, Keynesian. Then, when Keynesianism ran into trouble in the 1970s, the neoliberals, people like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, came forward with their new restoration story, and it went something like this. 

“You’ll never guess what’s coming…. Disorder afflicts the land! Caused by the powerful and nefarious forces of the overmighty state, whose collectivizing tendencies crush freedom and individualism and opportunity. But the hero of the story, the entrepreneur, will fight those powerful forces, roll back the state, and through creating wealth and opportunity, restore harmony to the land. And that story, in the era of Reagan and Thatcher, also resonated across the political spectrum. Republicans and Democrats, Conservatives and Labour, they all became, broadly, neoliberal. Opposite stories with an identical narrative structure. 

 “Then, in 2008, the neoliberal story fell apart, and its opponents came forward with … nothing. No new restoration story! The best they had to offer was a watered-down neoliberalism or a microwaved Keynesianism. And that is why we’re stuck. 

“Without that new story, we are stuck with the old failed story that keeps on failing. Despair is the state we fall into when our imagination fails. When we have no story that explains the present and describes the future, hope evaporates. Political failure is at heart a failure of imagination. Without a restoration story that can tell us where we need to go, nothing is going to change, but with such a restoration story, almost everything can change. 

“The story we need to tell is a story which will appeal to as wide a range of people as possible, crossing political fault lines. It should resonate with deep needs and desires. It should be simple and intelligible, and it should be grounded in reality.