Why did he pick on 1948? When the Chancellor, Alistair Darling, in a curiously likeable interview, bluntly said that the economic downturn was “arguably the worst in 60 years”, why did he choose 60? He could have opted for 30, a far more common trope these days, and whipped us back to the 1970s Winter of Discontent. If he really wanted to frighten the bejasus out of us he could have said “worst in 70 years”, and plunged us into the hungry Thirties after Wall Street had crashed and Neville Chamberlain had reduced wages and the dole by 10 per cent, put tax up and heralded ten years of general misery. Or he could have declared it the worst downturn in 90 years, and fixed his beetling black gaze on 1918 when economic output fell by 25 per cent over three years and didn't recover till the Second World War.

But no. He chose 60, so it behoves us to peer back 60 years at Britain, 1948. As it happens this suits me rather well, because I have spent the past fortnight sorting through my late mother's papers and mementos. Sixty years ago she was newly married with a baby, living as a junior diplomat's wife amid the ruins of Warsaw, watching the restoration of ornate altarpieces and buying unnerving plaster reproductions of the fragment: gnarled chipped Slavic faces that lie in front of me as I write, accompanied by her Anti-Gas Certificate from the war years and various commendations from the Women's League of Health and Beauty and the Nottingham Art School.

Letters, documents and homely much-mended objects speak as loudly as any history. And the message is an oddly cheerful one: of austerity mixed with hope, of a nation quietly pleased with its own robustness in war and more than ready to construct an interesting and fair-minded future.

Of course, one reason Mr Darling may like to think of 1948 is that Labour - which in the 1970s was frankly part of the problem - 30 years earlier was in the ascendant under Attlee, and thrumming with vision. The railways were nationalised from midnight on January 1; the National Health Service was born in high summer (despite equally visionary protests from the British Medical Assocation which said that doctors would “become paid servants without a say...run by an army of civil servants”. A large majority of doctors voted against it until heavily reassured by ministers).

The disreputable anomaly of plural voting was abolished - previously university graduates could vote in two places, and business owners had an extra vote at their place of work. The Commons abolished capital punishment for a five-year trial period (though the Lords overruled that weeks later). Red tape on the manufacturing of cutlery, fountain pens and soap-making equipment was cut back by a young political star called Harold Wilson at the Board of Trade, and the Ministry of Supply cautiously relaxed controls on cocoa and bottle-tops.

Rationing of footwear, flour, jam and furnishing cloth ended (it took another year for the rest of the wardrobe to catch up, necessitating a great deal of female inventiveness with curtain and upholstery fabrics), though some food stayed on the ration till 1954. The BBC did its first broadcast from Downing Street. The transistor was invented, paving the way for the trouser-pocket radio. There was even an austerity London Olympics, to general acclaim and no neurosis about the dearth of British golds.

Babies boomed, more of them legitimate than in any year since the war, and Princess Elizabeth joined in with baby Charles Philip Arthur George. Middlesex County Council announced a new kind of school called a comprehensive. Foreign Secretary Bevin proposed a Western Union, which later grew into Nato.

The Empire Windrush docked, with its hopeful Caribbean passengers. The Land Rover was unveiled, pride of the British motor industry. A naturalised Briton T.S.Eliot got the Nobel Prize for literature, despite upsetting many with The Waste Land. Orwell was in the Hebrides, gloomily writing 1984, while on a neighbouring island Ealing films made Whisky Galore. Four comedians who became the Goons were meeting in London pubs to try out funny voices. The Squadronaires rocked. London theatre had its best year since the war, no doubt assisted by all that unrationed upholstery fabric for costumes.

Olivier filmed Hamlet and won five Oscars, but the Times reviewer was dreadfully upset by the textual omissions: “A very pretty film, Sir Laurence, but you must not call it Shakespeare. Alas, Poor Hamlet!”

Actually, the more you focus on that one year, with its oatsy first-term Government and its burgeoning shoestring creativity, the more visible is the tension between postwar energy and nervous social conservatism. It was in 1948 that the BBC suddenly felt it necessary to issue its hilarious guide to taste and decency in light entertainment: a ban on mentioning lavatories, honeymoon couples, commercial travellers, fig leaves, drunkenness or “ladies' underwear, eg winter draws on”. Oh, and no jokes about the Bible, with the sole and mystifying exception of Noah.

Meanwhile, the producers of Dick Barton Special Agent were issued in January with 12 rules that would have horrified James Bond (created five years later). For Dick it was no sex, no swearing, no lying, and violence must be “restricted to clean socks on the jaw”. This nannying, remember, was being imposed on a nation fresh out of a savage war, with its massive social and marital disruptions. Like the anxious enforcers of political and multicultural correctness today, authorities clearly felt a need to put the lid on certain feelings that they knew to exist, to be strong, and likely to win.

I rather warm to 1948. Britain was climbing out of a hole, not of its own making, recovering from bereavement and fear with a certain dash and inventiveness. The late journalist Peter Black wrote: “In that period immediately after the war every day seemed to restore some lost amenity. One didn't need much money because there wasn't much to buy. My wife came home one day with a pound of beef sausages that looked, smelled and tasted something like beef sausages; we exulted over her find as though she'd discovered a cache of whisky.”

Maybe, in a weird Scottish, dog-whistling way, Mr Darling was urging us towards a cheery 1948 mindset when he plucked his “60 years” line out of the chilly northern air. It would be fun to think so.

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