Andy Burnham likes to talk about his “political generation” and their failures in Government over recent decades. Few would disagree with that. Much more contentious is his belief that their cardinal sin was not undoing Thatcherism. The new Prime Minister argued outside No. 10 today that since the Eighties, political power has been centralized and economic power privatized. Now he wants to turn back the clock.

Burnham’s first claim, about political power, is absurd. Far from being centralized, in recent decades power has been devolved across the United Kingdom. Policies once determined in Whitehall are now decided in Holyrood for Scotland, Cardiff Bay for Wales, and by directly elected mayors in much of England. Burnham’s very ascent to No. 10 is a testament to this: he has become Prime Minister on the basis of serving for almost a decade as Mayor of Greater Manchester, a role that was first elected in 2017.

Denying the reality of Britain’s political model is a poor start for Burnham’s analysis of Britain. It also suggests that he doesn’t understand that many of the country’s current problems stem from the fact that the Government, which Burnham apparently believes is all-powerful, can’t seem to get anything done.

The new Prime Minister is on surer ground with his claims about the economy. In the Eighties, Margaret Thatcher created a new economic settlement, the fundamentals of which haven’t been undone in the decades since. Even under 13 years of New Labour — with Burnham as an MP for much of the time — the essentials of Thatcher’s economy remained. What’s more, privatization was a key element of that.

For many on the political Left, privatization has become a convenient bogeyman, helped by the appalling way in which some privatized industries — especially water companies — have been run. But glib criticisms four decades on miss the reason why it became embedded into the UK’s political economy: the government that did it kept getting re-elected, and the policy contributed to tripling the number of shareholders in Britain. New Labour didn’t dare mess with that record.

Does Burnham’s Manchesterism, sometimes described as “business-friendly socialism”, provide the blueprint for now changing course? It seems unlikely. The PM’s approach to building is instructive here. As mayor, he oversaw enormous loans to private companies in order to fund development in Greater Manchester. Many of the companies building the skyscrapers which now define the city center are foreign-owned, and the homes they built are intended to be rented out. Business-friendly? Certainly. Socialism? Only in the sense that some of the developers are ultimately owned by foreign states. Perhaps Burnham’s much greater power as Prime Minister means he will now do things differently.

For much of the last century, British politics has arguably gone through waves, each of around four decades, in which a new set of ideas about the economy and the state have dominated. In the immediate postwar years, there was a “consensus” between the two parties about a large role for the state in economic life. In the Eighties, Thatcher did more than anyone else to undo that settlement and create a new orthodoxy. If the time has come for another generation’s ideas to come to the fore, it’s going to take more substance than soundbites from our new Prime Minister.

---

Lee David Evans is an historian of the Conservative Party and the John Ramsden Fellow at the Mile End Institute at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of Coronations & Defenestration: Choosing (and losing) Tory Leaders and the co-host of the podcast Since Attlee & Churchill.

LeeDavidEvansUK

---