Charles Moore, a member of the House of Lords, is the authorized biographer of Margaret Thatcher and a columnist for the Daily Telegraph.
Britons this week endured the inauguration of Labour’s Andy Burnham as their country’s seventh prime minister in a decade. He is the first ever to assail without qualification the legacy of Margaret Thatcher, the Conservative prime minister from 1979 to 1990.
Burnham, 56, says she initiated “40 years of neoliberalism.” He complained in his first speech on the job that, in the 1980s, “political power was centralized, economic power privatized.” Much of the country “deindustrialized.” He claims to offer something different — to make politics “more collaborative.”
It might sound surprising that no prime minister has previously said this, because, in the nearly 36 years since Mrs. Thatcher left office, Britain has had 15 years of Labour government. Why were those left-of-center governments shy of attacking the darling of the right?
The main answer is that Tony Blair, who led Labour for 10 of those 15 years, believed his party must understand her economic and electoral success if it was to be a credible rival to the Tories. Only by admiring and digesting Mrs. Thatcher’s achievement could Labour gain power. Blair may have been right — after all, he, like her, won three times in a row.
Burnham has reached 10 Downing Street not by a general election but by a bloodless coup against his hapless predecessor, Sir Keir Starmer. To succeed, therefore, he had to appeal only to the party’s members who chose him, not to the British people who elected the Parliament from which the government was formed. Most Labour activists hate Mrs. Thatcher, so Burnham’s rhetoric must have seemed to him an easy win.
The question the new prime minister has set himself, however, is how to revive an ailing economy with anti-Thatcher policies. By the middle of her 11½ years in office, Mrs. Thatcher’s Britain was achieving annual growth rates of over 3 percent, reaching 5 percent in 1988. Despite the bust that followed that boom in the early 1990s, the economic success of successive governments that pursued broadly Thatcherite politics continued until the financial crisis of 2008-09.
She never used — indeed, perhaps had never heard — the term “neoliberalism.” What she thought she was doing was removing the shackles of government from the British people. That benefit outlived her.
Since 2008-09, more indebted and interventionist governments have presided over weak, even miserable, levels of growth. Current projections for this year, under Labour, suggest a rate of 0.9 percent. In Mrs. Thatcher’s last year in office, British government debt represented roughly 28 percent of gross domestic product. Today, that figure is 94.9 percent. The 1990 budget deficit was 1.1 percent of GDP. In 2026, it is expected to hit 4.3 percent.
Burnham also complains about privatization, a Thatcher invention. There were severe problems with some monopoly utilities, particularly water, thanks to that undertaking. But Mrs. Thatcher successfully privatized more than 40 companies, including telecoms, airways, ports and gas, earning huge sums for the Treasury, spreading popular share ownership and creating, in most cases, better competition. Her example was copied all over the world, and few privatizations have been reversed since. The ascendancy of Thatcherism, closely mirrored by that of her friend Ronald Reagan in his two-term presidency, seemed, even by many of her critics, to have been earned.
Above all, perhaps, Mrs. Thatcher tackled the overweening political power of organized labor in Britain, bringing democracy to union processes and removing their leaders’ grip on economic policy. In 1979, Britain lost more than 29 million working days to strikes; by 1990, only 1.9 million were squandered. The chief reason she won office in the first place was that voters feared the Labour government of the day was crushing the British economy with high taxes — the top rate of income tax was 83 percent, brought down to 40 percent by 1988 — and its inability to quell workplace strife. Inflation was above 13 percent in 1979. Ten years later, it was roughly half that.
What will Andy Burnham propose instead? He has thus far tried simultaneously to reassure bond markets about his respect for fiscal rules and to attack the cost of living by government interventions. He temporarily removed the purchase tax on electricity consumption and imposed a ceiling on bus fares. Both should make the standard measure of price inflation turn out lower than expected without addressing the deficit or underlying inflationary pressures.
As the former mayor of Greater Manchester, Britain’s second-biggest metropolitan area, Burnham has popularized the word “Manchesterism.” This advocates a closer cooperation between government and private investment and attacks over-centralization as the curse of British governance. He promises to set up a version of 10 Downing Street in Manchester — though in a unitary state like Britain, it’s hard to see how restless prime ministerial train travel, three hours each way, will bring economic salvation.
That requires a coherent account of how prosperity in modern society is best created. In rejecting the achievements of the ’80s, Burnham seems to be harking back to the ’70s. Only 9 years old when Mrs. Thatcher won her first general election, he is a child of her era. He may not remember that the ’70s were, economically, the worst postwar decade of the last century for Britain.
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