Oh dear, another Brexit obsessive… well, never mind.

Thatcher won in 1979 because she convinced the electorate that she had a plan. And she did. She and her allies had put in the hard work in opposition to assemble and promote a workable strategy – most notably, in taming the unions. There were no big surprises in the manifesto, unlike Theresa May’s ‘dementia tax’ that appeared out of nowhere.

She sold confidence to the voters, not hope.

Starmer and Reeves have not put in the spade work. So how can they convince the voters they have a workable plan?

1979 is surely a vastly better point of reference for the next referendum than 1997. It took place in the ruins of the post-war consensus. Thatcher might have been lucky to survive long enough to get radical in 1983 but she did recognise that the consensus had run its course. And boy did she get radical once she had the chance. She sold off more of the state than any other Government on Earth barring, possibly, Pinochet’s Chile and far outstripping Reagan’s US. She didn’t just tame the unions, she smashed them – leaving the British Labour market one of the most capital friendly in the developed world. She de-regulated finance and allowed it do essentially as it liked.
For all of his landslide in 97, Tony Blair accepted the new common sense that Thatcher had established – what, after all was his calling card as the coming man of Labour? The abolition of Clause 4. Even for people like me, it’s quite hard to fault him for that – Britain’s economy was scarcely a basket case at the time.
Fast forward to now and Thatcher’s chickens have come home to roost.
All our major firms and employers are not only privately owned but foreign owned. Wages are lower than in almost all comparable economies, which raises the benefit bill and erodes the tax base. There’s no Council housing to accommodate the low paid (and the stuff Thatcher sold is largely in the hands of private landlords charging twice the rent).
Smashed into a thousand pieces, the telecoms sector is still struggling to build the fibre-based internet that the GPO was planning for in the 80s (along with Japan and Korea) and had to abandon in order to be readied for sale. A privatised railway system has sucked all the relevant expertise into a maze of competing consultants, so that the most expensive high speed line in the world will reach neither of its planned termini. For all its faults, that would have been unimaginable under BR.
The schools are falling down because they weren’t rebuilt within their planned service lives. Private water companies are covering the nation and its rivers in sewage and still paying themselves handsome dividends and, apparently, no-one has the first idea how to stop them doing so. We have the highest fuel costs in the OECD because we’ve created a market mechanism that prices all energy at the cost of the most expensive unit. Deregulated building control looked the other way while an unknown number of tall buildings were effectively clad in petrol. And on, and on.
The post-Thatcher consensus is a dead duck.
And Starmer’s answer to all this is… the same but with fewer parties in Number 10.
The Labour party is fond of saying that the only thing that counts is power. Without that, you can’t change anything. It is cant. Saying it absolves them of the first task of parties in opposition – which is to change people’s conception of common sense.
They haven’t, they won’t. They tie themselves in knots to place themselves in the wheeltracks of the worst Government most people can remember.
But the truth is that the scale of change we need is not 1997, it’s not even 1979. It’s 1948.

Covid and Brexit……???
Why do you guys get this so wrong all of the time? By far the biggest problem the G7 faces is absolutely the consequence of money being far, far too cheap for much too long. QE is, as it was always going to be, a terrible disaster. The debt hangover facing Starmer is completely unfixable. He can’t borrow more and taxation is maxed and yet we’re STILL spending more than £100bn more than we earn annually.
This means cuts to health, education and welfare whilst, at the same time, military spending must increase.
He’s had it. He really has. If I were him, I would be doing everything in my power to lose the next election.

You could feel sorry for Starmer. Put in charge of Labour to make it electable again and (perhaps) put in charge of the Government to allow the Conservatives time to recharge.
Not just an administrator – more of a professional ‘insolvency practitioner’.

The ‘highly educated middle class’ have been ‘educated’ largely with propaganda unfortunately.. Sad 🙁

There is quite a lot of sense in this article, especially with regards to governments being able to click their fingers and solve every problem (especially, though the author didn’t say so) by spending public money.

However there are some really jarring notes. It is extraordinary that the one policy or proposal that he specifically advocates is the completion of HS2, presumably at pretty much any cost. I suppose this is a metropolitan elite project par excellence, of utter irrelevance to most people in the country except that they are paying the (unaffordable) bills. In addition, the characterisation of anyone not fully on board with the Net Zero agenda as an angry middle class motorist is simplistic rubbish, completely detached from reality.

I wonder when the free-market ideology of the Thatcher government stopped being something people talked about. Must have been Blair and Brown not contesting it in 1997.
Nah, she just got lucky as a net exporter of oil, indeed.

A good article except for the comment that Galtieri handed Mrs Thatcher ‘an easy military victory’.Galtieri would not have invaded if he thought Britain would win .And arguably Brown,Chamberlain,Macdonald, Theresa May,Sunak and Wilson might have done a peace deal instead of fighting.