Become a paid subscriber today to receive an invite to the next Arguably drinks in Westminster on Thursday 29 October, when George Eaton, David Lawrence and Martha Dacombe will discuss the Burnham government’s first Budget.
Back in 1987, a young Labour MP warned in the London Review of Books of the “tremendous danger” in believing that Thatcherism “is somehow now invincible, that it has established a new consensus and that all the rest of us can do is debate alternatives within its framework”.
That Labour MP was Tony Blair. In the 39 years since he wrote those words, every UK prime minister has dwelt in the shadow of Thatcher’s revolution: her privatisations, deregulation, tax cuts and trade union reforms. “I always thought my job was to build on some of the things she had done rather than reverse them,” Blair later remarked. What made Andy Burnham’s Labour conference speech unashamedly radical was his insistence that he would.
His address was at once anti-Thatcherite and Thatcher-esque, its ideological self-confidence mirroring that of the woman who once declared: “The Old Testament prophets didn’t go out into the highways saying, ‘Brothers, I want consensus.’ They said, ‘This is my faith and my vision! This is what I passionately believe!’”
While Thatcher rolled back the frontiers of the state – the UK accounted for 40% of the total value of all assets privatised across the OECD between 1980 and 1996 – Burnham wants to roll them forward: to expand public control or ownership of housing, energy, water and social care. In short, his mission is to transform Britain into a fully-fledged European-style social democracy.
But in a fraught economic and geopolitical era, that ambition faces formidable obstacles. In this post I’ll explore what Burnham’s speech got right and the areas where greater radicalism is needed – most obviously on economic growth, the factor on which his success may hinge.