Back to the future?

To have been of working age during the ‘Winter of Discontent’, you would have to be at least 66 years old. Those who entered the labour market in 1978 are now about to draw their state pensions. Which means that the memory of those times is now largely held in folklore by the journalists who frequently cite it as the inevitable outcome of daring to challenge the economic status quo brought about by Thatcher’s 1980s deregulation drive.

Technically, I did live through 1978 – I was three. Given that my earliest proper memory is a news report of the death of John Lennon in 1980, I am not, therefore, going to claim special knowledge of this period. Like most other journalists, I have read about the history and politics of the period, but I can’t remember it.

I do know that the truth is a bit more complicated than the images that remain.

Yes, there was a localised strike in Liverpool by gravediggers which meant that there was a short period during which burials were delayed. This did not mean that the whole of the UK ‘could not ever bury the dead’. The strike lasted for just two weeks and the backlog was then dealt with swiftly.

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Yes, it’s absolutely true that a strike by bin collectors led to rubbish piling up in the streets – and most visibly in London’s Leicester Square. This lasted about eight weeks.

Both of these situations were clearly deeply unpleasant and turned voters against the unions, contributing to the victory of Thatcher in 1979. There are definitely lessons to be learned. But to learn them fully and properly, this history also needs to be understood as it was, not what it was turned into by the right-wing Thatcher-loving press.

Scare stories and folklore are often stronger than memories – which can be partial and subjective. However, I am not claiming that there should be (or even could be) a return to the kind of economics that is conjured up by those either nostalgic for, or horrified by, a return to 1970s-style politics.

But my real gripe is with the present and the absolute lack of political imagination created by the sense that there is a binary between 1970s union militancy and 1980s Thatcherite militancy.

The Thatcher revolution worked very well for a few. The short-term injection of capitalism that was the economic ‘Big Bang’, the selling off of national assets and council homes, did well for some areas, some people and some lives. But for the rest of us, and even for some of those immediate winners, it was a sugar rush that has had a very long crash.

The experiment should have come to an end in 2008 when the fragility of its model was exposed for all to see. Instead, its zombie corpse was reanimated by the austerity of Cameron and Osborne. And if you want to see the impact of the Coalition government’s unwillingness to intervene in the economy, look no further than today’s water and gas crises, which have both been supercharged by the private utilities failing to invest in storage infrastructure and the government’s failure to intervene to make them.

Ending the Thatcher settlement does not mean going backwards – it is essential to moving forwards.

Burnham’s desire to change an economy that does not work for far too many is not a regressive move – it is the only possible response to our broken economy and society.

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Yes, we will need a better sense of what that will look like, how it will differ from going backwards and what our new future will look like. It won’t be simple and it won’t be easy.

But it wasn’t simple or easy for Thatcher and her acolytes to cause the damage in the first place. She didn’t take Britain back to the pre-war settlement. She took it to a new place – a darker, meaner, crueller one for most of us. She had a vision and an ambition and she saw it through.

Let us be clear – it is that level of ambition that we need from Andy Burnham now. But it is that level of ambition that he hints at that is scaring those few loud, well-platformed voices who benefit from the broken and unequal economy she created. That’s why they want to tell you that Burnham doesn’t represent a brighter future but a return to the past.

Burnham is absolutely correct in saying that Britain took a wrong turn in the 1980s. We see the damage all around us. But everyone in Labour has to be clear that we are not going back to the 1970s – we are going forward to build the kind of economy that works for everyone in the 2020s and beyond. That must be the level of ambition, that must be the direction of travel and that must be the promise that Burnham will offer in his forthcoming ten-year plan.

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