An extraordinary account, by @pmdfoster, of the addled thinking, allergy to detail & half-baked appeals to the "Blitz Spirit" that bedeviled attempts to ramp up ventilator production. It's a reminder of why bad history matters, & a microcosm of recent British politics. [1/5]
2. At the core of @pmdfoster's story stands a vague folk-memory of World War 2. Factories would turn out ventilators as they had once built the Spitfires that threw back the Luftwaffe. In Matt Hancock's lyric vision, Britons would prove themselves heirs to the wartime generation. 
3. It sometimes feels like British politics only has one reference point - World War 2 - but no idea of how it was actually won. Operations like D-Day, built on years of meticulous planning, are reduced to a crude parable for the power of positive thinking newstatesman.com/world/europe/2…
4. As @pmdfoster points out, the same allergy to detail - swept aside by blustering appeals to the War - bedeviled the Brexit process. Again, bad history made for bad policy, turning a war of detail into a protective shield against planning & preparation.
5. And so we end up in the situation @pmdfoster describes here: factories are to "build ventilators", but no one knows what kind, for what purpose, or to what design. So too few get built. In an irony of history, Britain's finest hour is becoming its most destructive myth. [ENDS]
