Just before becoming Britain’s prime minister in July, Andy Burnham revealed his father has late-stage dementia. Politically speaking, so does much of the Labour political class, including Burnham: its impressions of the 1970s and its lessons are foggy.
In northwest England, whence Burnham hails, political dementia is a transmissible disease, particularly regarding the legacy of the former prime minister Margaret Thatcher. Local mythology has it that Thatcher “deliberately” destroyed the economy of the entire area, simply because she was from “down south” and a Tory. Southerners and Conservatives are supposedly northern folks’ eternal sworn enemies, for reasons of innate anti-working-class snobbishness and greed; one of the region’s theaters recently staged a play about someone shooting Thatcher in the head.
Liverpool, the city of Andy’s birth, suffered a massive economic collapse in the 1970s and ’80s, in the process contracting the worst strain of Thatcher Derangement Syndrome. Once the second city of Empire, its formerly profitable docks fell into postwar decline alongside the Empire itself, particularly following Egypt’s seizure and long-term closure of the Suez Canal, something which, all things considered, it may have been more reasonable to blame Colonel Nasser for, not “Maggie,” as angry Liverpudlians habitually call her.
Then, from the 1970s to the ’90s, Liverpool’s dockers went on repeated strikes against necessary reforms which threatened workers’ former pay and conditions: the end result being that rival English ports like Felixstowe stepped in to modernize instead, leading to Liverpool’s business being “stolen” by the criminal south. That Felixstowe was on the southern coast, facilitating easier trade with the UK’s growing post-imperial markets of continental Europe, proved that even inanimate geography itself was anti-Liverpudlian.
Drunk on Self-Pity
It was always much easier for the strikers to blame a bogeywoman like Margaret Thatcher for their woes rather than impersonal geopolitical or socioeconomic forces, and certainly much easier than to blame themselves for their own self-defeating unionized actions.
Like Burnham, I am from the Merseyside area, and have observed many severe cases of Anti-Maggie Disease in action, such as that displayed by one Liverpudlian I knew who bitterly complained the Iron Lady had left him without employment in his own various seafaring trades. The fact that he kept on voluntarily quitting his jobs to sit in the pub all day drinking was immaterial to him; apparently it was Maggie who kept on buying him all his pints. (As he ended up on welfare, indirectly she sort of was).
That man was my own father, and Burnham’s equally Liverpudlian father Roy seems to possess a similar mindset. According to a tabloid family interview about the last time the younger Burnham ran to be Labour Party leader in 2015 (he failed that time, as he actually had to win people’s votes), his first knowledge of political matters came one day in 1979 when he spotted a car bumper sticker saying “Don’t blame me, I voted Labour!” Nine-year-old Andy turned to Roy, asked what it meant, and got a long explanation beginning: “Well, there’s this woman called Maggie Thatcher…”
My dad tried giving me “explanations” like that in the 1980s too, explanations for why he was always falling over onto the floor drunk. But around 30 years later, I finally grew up and stopped believing them. Unfortunately, the new prime minister has gone down a different path of parental influence, making such maudlin, self-pitying lies the basis of his platform for running the country.
Thatcher’s Gold
In his first major speech as PM, without ever mentioning her by name lest it cause her to rise from the grave like Candyman, Burnham laid into Thatcher’s legacy, promising to undo it all. “Britain took a series of wrong turns in the 1980s” (under Thatcherite tyranny), he said, when “political power was centralized and economic power was privatized.”
Cue outrage on the right, where commentators lined up to defend Thatcher’s economic achievements. One spoke of how, under her leadership, GDP climbed by 29.4 percent, thanks to public spending reductions and tax cuts, optimistically calculating that, if those trends continued, Britain’s economy could be £740 billion larger than it is. Others praised how inflation fell from 21.9 to 2.4 percent in only six years, while wages rose by one-third. Under Labour’s worst days in the 1970s, meanwhile, inflation had soared, as did the number of strikes, while rubbish piled up in the streets and the dead went unburied.
Thatcher’s many successes were real. The problem is that many of the problems faced by modern-day, post-Thatcherite Britain are very real too. Is the new PM correct to blame her for them? She was backstabbed out of office in 1990, dying in 2013 at age 87. Contrary to Burnham’s failing memory, much of her legacy has already been destroyed in the 36 years since her premiership. Thatcher was first elected PM in 1979; 36 years earlier would have been 1943. Andy Burnham blaming Maggie for what Britain is like in 2026 would have been like her blaming Winston Churchill for the sorry state of the country heading into the 1980s.
If you really want to find a convenient, decades-old political scarecrow to blame for Britain’s present afflictions, you would do far better targeting Tony Blair. He first became PM in 1997, 29 years ago now, and left in 2007, 19 years (and approximately 19,000 PMs) ago. He also sounds like ancient history, the difference being that the changes he made to national government, unlike many of Thatcher’s, still endure, with little to no serious attempt having ever been made to undo them.
Permanent Revolution
When Thatcher was asked in 2002 what her greatest achievement was, she quipped “New Labour,” viewing the Blair-era party as sensibly sticking to her own 1980s economic prescriptions, such as keeping formerly state-owned enterprises and utilities privatized rather than renationalizing them and remaining perfectly happy with the capitalistic accumulation of vast private wealth (particularly in Peter Mandelson’s case).
Accepting Thatcher’s broad economic settlement, Blair focused on unravelling Thatcher’s many social achievements instead. Under Thatcher, in 1988 Britain introduced “Section 28,” banning queer propaganda in schools; Blair repealed it in 2003, laying the ground for a world in which British schoolchildren can be read gay story-books by mentally ill men in dresses, grooming them for a life of transgenderism. Most significantly, Thatcher also kept a lid on immigration, famously fearing that voters might feel “swamped” by it otherwise; under Blair, by contrast, the floodgates were thrown open, reportedly in order to spitefully “rub the right’s noses in diversity.”
Tax rises or cuts can always be undone; demographic transformation and social engineering cannot, hence Blair’s “settlement” (which most voters didn’t even truly realize they were voting for) has proved much more durable than Thatcher’s. Bolstered by New Labour signing Britain up to various international treaties on things like human rights, backed up by corresponding domestic legislation, Blair essentially sought to make his 1997 election permanent, no matter which one of his later avatars occupied the role of PM afterwards.
It’s All a Blair
If Blair, leaving office in 2007, had been asked to name his own greatest achievement, he could have copied Thatcher and said the “New Conservatives.” Once the (fake) Conservatives finally regained power from Tony’s Labour successors in 2010, the new Tory PM, David Cameron, privately referred to Blair as “The Master,” not only continuing his liberalizing social policies but expanding them—legalizing gay marriage, throwing the borders open even wider, and making his party into “continuity Blairites” in all but name. In a Doctor Who sense, Blair really has been The Master: an evil alien being who keeps on regenerating into new semi-human form every time he is vanquished.
Even if the post-Blair pseudo-Conservative governments had wanted to reverse Blair’s policies, they might have found themselves completely unable to. If one of Thatcher’s key political achievements was centralizing power in Whitehall, which enabled her to implement the policies people had voted for, one of Blair’s key unspoken feats was giving it all away again to unelected bureaucrats, endless human rights courts, and obscure self-governing committees, all of which he ensured were staffed with yet more Mini-Master clones, thereby thwarting anyone non-Blair-brained who came after him.
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As historian and constitutional expert David Starkey has observed, this has made the UK into a post-democratic technocracy in disguise, such that anyone who tries to pull the levers of state “power” to do something other than endlessly increase public welfare spending, boost mass immigration, celebrate diversity, or hurtle headlong over a cliff towards Net Zero, will quickly find such levers are attached to thin air.
Examining the main problems the UK faces now, from looming national bankruptcy to two-tier policing, from DEI disgraces to broken borders, from a welfare culture to democratic deficiency, Tony Blair, not Margaret Thatcher, lies behind them all. So why doesn’t Andy Burnham decry the former and promise to undo Tony’s own malign legacy, rather than pledging to undo the only remaining functioning aspects of Thatcher’s inheritance which Blair left alone? Probably because Andy Burnham was a core member of Tony Blair’s New Labour from 2005 onwards, meaning he bears responsibility for causing all these terrible problems himself. Just like 1980s Liverpool dockers or my own alcoholic father, he’ll never face up and admit the fact.
Burnham’s political awakening began with a car bumper-sticker. And his career may well end with a political car-crash. For which, inevitably, he will then try to blame Margaret Thatcher. He should try facing up to who has really been in the driver’s seat.
