In his first speech as Labour leader, Andy Burnham promised to deliver the “most significant change moment in our politics for 40 years”. Days later, on the steps of No. 10, he pinpointed a “series of wrong turns” taken in the 1980s, including the deindustrialisation of “large parts of the country” that “still haven't recovered”. Under Margaret Thatcher, the new PM said, “political power was centralised and economic power was privatised”; now we need a “circuit breaker” and a “new model”.
Undoing Thatcher’s ‘damage’
Many of the “familiar and formidable” problems Burnham faces can indeed be traced “back to the deindustrialisation associated with Thatcherism”, said Bill Keegan, senior economics commentator at The Observer. Placing reindustrialisation “as a central part of his economic strategy” would help Burnham “go some way to undoing the damage Thatcher wrought”.
There was lower growth in the 1980s than the 1970s, said Andrew Fisher, Labour’s director of policy under Jeremy Corbyn, in The i Paper. And any “proceeds of growth” were only felt at the top of society: “inequality increased by a third, homelessness grew and unemployment soared above three million. And that was just the immediate impact” of Thatcher’s “disastrous policies”: their legacy still haunts us today in “stagnant growth, higher utility bills, and in deep inequality consolidated by a grossly unfair tax system”.
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To address all this, the new PM needs to set a clear direction from the top of government, said Jonathan Freeland in The Guardian. And, ironically, his “model” here has to be Thatcher. During her time in power, “even the most junior official, when confronted with a policy choice, knew what the boss wanted”: “crudely, less state, more market”. Burnham’s Day One attack on centralised political power and privatised economic power “effectively tells Whitehall” that this PM wants “the opposite”: “political power devolved, and a more active economic state, unafraid of public ownership”.
Playing ‘buzzword bingo’
In laying the ills of modern Britain on “40 years of neoliberalism”, Burnham is playing “fashionable buzzword bingo: deregulation, privatisation, austerity, financialisation, trickle-down economics”, said Kristian Niemietz of the free-market think tank Institute of Economic Affairs on City A.M. And he could not be “more wrong”: the UK economy today is “a million miles away from ‘neoliberalism’”. There may be “a sensible centre-left answer” to our economic challenges “but Burnham’s 1980s karaoke will not get us there”.
What we’re really faced with now is a “grotesque blend of the worst of Thatcherism with the worst of Blairism: bad aspects of ‘neoliberalism’ coexisting with bad aspects of bureaucratic statism”, said Jonny Ball in UnHerd. Our key utilities and critical industries are in the hands of profiteers, we’re “addicted to imported cheap labour” and our local and national management structures have amalgamated into a “public-private partnership blob”. Any “genuine saviour” will have “to topple” this “mongrel system we currently inhabit”.
And while the Left hope a “charismatic mayor with a warm smile” can “exorcise Thatcher’s ghost”, they shouldn’t lose sight of “the Reformist Right” that’s still praying “it will one day complete her unfinished revolution”.
