One pictures Mr Andy Burnham, freshly installed or about to be installed in the highest office, furrowing his brow in that manner of a man who has just discovered the source of all our woes and is determined not to let mere chronology get in the way. Margaret Thatcher resigned in 1990, it is now 2026. Yet here we are, being solemnly informed that the ghost of the grocer’s daughter from Grantham still haunts the council estates and former pit villages, rattling her neoliberal chains and preventing Britain from achieving its true socialist destiny. One almost admires the stamina of the grudge. Most political enmities fade after a decade or two; this one has been lovingly pickled for thirty-six years, like some particularly sour Labour heirloom.
Mr Burnham’s project, we are told, is to take Britain 'back' – a deliciously vague direction that always sounds progressive when uttered by those who have run out of forward ideas. Back, presumably, to the golden age before the woman he so dislikes dared suggest that the state was not an infinitely patient nanny and that industries might occasionally have to compete or perish. The 1970s, that decade of warm beer, cold houses, and even colder economic reality, exerts a curious magnetism on a certain stripe of Labour romantic. One is reminded of those ageing rock stars who insist their best work was done before the pesky business of commercial success interfered. 'The Winter of Discontent', when the dead went unburied and the rubbish piled up like a municipal performance art piece, is recast in the Burnham mind as a sort of egalitarian idyll rudely interrupted by efficiency.
Let us be clear about what Thatcher actually did, before the revisionists turn her into a cartoon vampire. Britain in 1979 was the sick man of Europe, a nation where the unions could bring down governments, where the top tax rate reached a confiscatory 98 per cent, and where nationalised industries operated with all the dynamism of a Soviet tractor factory. The lady was not for turning, as she famously said, and the country turned with her. She curbed the overweening power of the trade unions, not out of sadistic glee but because the alternative was national paralysis. She privatised clapped-out state monopolies, injecting competition and, more importantly, capital into creaking enterprises. She cut taxes, broadened ownership through council house sales, and helped transform a nation of renters and strikers into one where aspiration was not treated as a bourgeois vice. By the time she left office, Britain had become the most vibrant large economy in the European Community – a phrase that now sounds quaint, like referring to Concorde as modern transport.
These were not abstract ideological victories. Millions of ordinary families gained assets and agency. North Sea oil revenues were not merely squandered on benefits; they coincided with a structural shift away from the delusion that government could indefinitely prop up uncompetitive industries. Inflation was tamed. Enterprise was no longer viewed as something slightly distasteful that happened in the Home Counties. One need not admire every aspect of the Thatcher era – the social dislocations in certain regions were real and painful – to recognise that the medicine, however bitter, arrested a terminal decline. To blame the lingering problems of 2026 on a prime minister who has been out of power for more than a generation is rather like a middle-aged man attributing his expanding waistline to the dietary choices of his long-deceased grandmother.
Yet Mr Burnham appears determined to prescribe the old remedies: more public ownership, a grand return to council house building on the post-war scale, regional 'power shifts' that usually mean shifting blame northward while keeping the Treasury levers firmly in Whitehall, and a general suspicion of markets that have the cheek to demand results. It is the politics of nostalgia dressed up as compassion. One wonders whether he has noticed that the 1970s model – heavy state intervention, protected industries, muscular unionism – produced not equality but shared misery, with the poorest suffering most from shortages, blackouts, and economic stagnation. The post-Thatcher settlement, for all its imperfections, delivered growth, jobs, and rising living standards that benefited far more people than any Labour government managed before, or since.
The sardonic comedy here lies in the timing. Britain in 2026 already labours under high public debt, feeble growth, strained public services, and the familiar temptation to solve problems by spending other people’s money. Burnham’s solution is to accelerate down the very path that contributed to these difficulties: more borrowing, more regulation, more faith in the benevolence of the state. It is as if, having watched a patient recover from a serious illness thanks to rigorous treatment, the new doctor declares the cure itself was the disease and proposes a return to leeches and bloodletting. The markets, that amoral Greek chorus, will not be amused. Bond yields have a way of expressing disapproval more eloquently than any opposition speech.
One should not underestimate the seductive power of the anti-Thatcher sermon in certain constituencies. It offers a simple morality tale: virtuous workers betrayed by a heartless Iron Lady and her neoliberal spawn. It absolves subsequent Labour and Conservative administrations of their own contributions to fiscal incontinence, regulatory bloat, and energy policy follies. It flatters the audience that their struggles are someone else’s fault, preferably a dead Conservative woman. Yet premierships are not sustained by folk memory or conference hall cheers. They are tested by delivery – by whether the lights stay on, the economy grows, and people feel their children might have better prospects than they did. Reversing the Thatcherite emphasis on incentives, competition, and limited government is not bold leadership; it is a form of historical cosplay with real-world costs.
The warning to Mr Burnham is therefore blunt, if delivered in the driest of tones. Your fantasy of 1970s restoration will prove terminally fatal to your premiership before it has even begun, because Britain has already tried it and did not enjoy the experience. Voters may flirt with nostalgia at by-elections, but they tend to punish governments that deliver 1970s outcomes in the 21st century: stagnant wages, creaking infrastructure, and that special sense of national decline once memorably described as 'the British disease.' Thatcher’s lesson was that economic progress requires uncomfortable choices – letting failing enterprises fail, encouraging work over dependency, and recognising that wealth must be created before it can be distributed. Ignore it at your peril. The electorate, unlike certain Labour orators, has a long memory but a short tolerance for recycled failure.
In the end, one suspects history will be less kind to the Burnham project than his supporters hope. Thirty-six years after Thatcher’s resignation, Britain’s problems – low productivity, demographic pressures, geopolitical uncertainty – demand fresh thinking, not a reheated 1970s menu. To govern is to choose. Mr Burnham has chosen the past. The future, one fears, will return the compliment by choosing someone else.