The head of UK air traffic control is facing calls to resign after a technical issue caused hundreds of flights to be delayed or cancelled yesterday at the peak of summer holiday travel. Airline bosses have criticised Martin Rolfe’s management, and Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander has summoned him for a meeting about the disruption. Canada has followed France and Britain by announcing a plan to recognise Palestinian statehood. Prime Minister Mark Carney says the diplomatic move is partly contingent on the Palestinian Authority, which runs parts of the West Bank, reforming its governance and holding elections without Hamas. The world’s “oldest baby” has been born in Ohio from an embryo frozen in 1994. Lindsey and Tim Pierce adopted the fertilised egg, which was frozen before either of them had started primary school, last year, and Thaddeus Daniel Pierce was born on 26 July. “We didn’t go into it thinking we would break any records,” says Lindsey. “We just wanted to have a baby.”

Britain is in better shape than many think

The “hyperventilation” on the right over Britain’s supposed decline has to be seen to be believed, says Janan Ganesh in the FT. There is talk of total social breakdown, reversible only with “extreme measures”. Yet which countries of similar size and complexity are in better shape? France is even more indebted and reluctant to reform. Germany has been in recession for a couple of years. “This isn’t the 1970s, when the UK stood out as the European straggler.” Equally misguided is the idea that Britain is worse than it used to be. Crime has fallen significantly since the 1990s, however you parse the data, as it has around the world. “When was the UK’s last blackout? Or three-day week?” Growing up, I saw half a dozen National Front logos every day, etched into school desks and sprayed on concrete underpasses. “Give me 2025, thanks.”

The problem with nostalgia is that it’s an ever-moving target. People pick out their favourite bits – “the homogeneous culture of the 1950s, the industrial peace of the 1990s, the rampant growth of the pre-crash noughties” – and smush them all together into a single fictitious moment, a “Best Of” compilation from the last century. How can the present ever “win” against that? This gloominess can be self-fulfilling, as it gives people licence to “roll the dice” on the basis that things can’t get much worse. “Hence Brexit.” Yes, of course Britain needs reform. Welfare, the European Convention on Human Rights, the NHS – all need re-examining from first principles. But the reason voters drag their feet about big change is “precisely that things aren’t disastrous”. For now, at least, “Britain does not need turning upside down”.