The UK is apparently nostalgic … for the 1970s?

"If all that’s holding the United Kingdom back is the country’s mood, then the arrival of Andy Burnham as prime minister might improve its prospects. Briefly. If the remedy also requires some particle of coherence and clarity about what the government needs to do, the prognosis is grim. The contradictions and absurdities that he’s ventured so far are remarkable even by the standards of modern British politics.

"To start with the most bewildering, Burnham is apparently nostalgic … for the 1970s? He was alive in 1979, when Margaret Thatcher came to power — but nine years old at the time, perhaps not paying close attention. A slightly older cohort recalls the immediate pre-Thatcher years as an unparalleled disaster, which helps explain why her party won that election and the three that followed.

"The nadir was the 'winter of discontent': strikes in response to the Labour government’s efforts to curb inflation, shortages of food and fuel, trash piled 10 feet deep in London’s squares (Leicester Square was known as Fester Square; you could smell it from Downing Street), more strikes, pickets blockading hospitals, corpses stored here and there while gravediggers pressed for better terms, more strikes. Returning from a little downtime in Barbados, Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan sealed his party’s fate by saying he was puzzled by all the talk of crisis.

"This was apparently the golden time that preceded the unforced errors of the 1980s and the following decades, when a global plague of market fundamentalism brought the country low and destroyed the dreams of working families.

"Admittedly, despising Thatcher and her works will always be an article of faith for the British left. Burnham is hardly unusual in this respect. What’s more surprising, especially for a leader who says he means to unite the country and overcome factionalism in his party, is to extend much the same contempt to the pragmatic centre-leftists led by Tony Blair, who resuscitated Labour after two decades of humiliating defeat and set the country on a more moderate, popular, social-democratic course. It isn’t just Thatcherism that Burnham aims to reverse, but 'four decades of neoliberalism.'

"Bring back council estates, cheap buses and organised labor. Nationalise a few industries. Maybe reopen some mines (though, obviously, people wouldn’t be allowed to burn the coal)."

~ Clive Crook from his column 'Andy Burnham’s ’70s Show Will Need a Little Work' [hat tip Samizdata]

"Since you [also] mentioned the 1980s, @andyburnham, here’s a reminder of what was achieved: 

• Top rate of income tax: 83% → 40% 

• Savings income taxed at up to 98% in 1979 — surcharge abolished 

• Basic rate: 33% → 25% 

• Inflation: 21.9% peak (1980) → 2.4% (1986) 

• Days lost to strikes: 29.5 million (1979) → 1.9 million (1990) 

• Real take-home pay for the average earner: up by a third 

• Right to Buy: over a million council tenants became homeowners 

• Home ownership: 55% → 67% 

• Individual shareholders: 3 million → 11 million — one in four adults 

• Foreign holidays: roughly doubled 

• Homes with a telephone: two-thirds → nearly nine in ten 

• Pensioners’ average incomes: up around 30% in real terms 

• Infant mortality: down almost 40% 

• Real GDP: up by almost a third 

• GDP per head outgrew France, Germany and Italy in the 1980s 

• Manufacturing productivity: slowest growth in the G7 in the 1970s → fastest in the 1980s 

• Self-employed: 1.9 million → 3.5 million 

• Nissan to Sunderland, Toyota to Derby, Honda to Swindon 

• Britain became a net oil exporter 

• London restored as the world’s financial capital in 1986 

• Budget surpluses three years running — Britain repaid debt, 1987–90 

• National debt: 47% of GDP → 28% 

• State spending: ~45% of GDP → ~39% 

• The civil service: 732,000 → 565,000 

• Corporation tax: 52% → 35%; the small firms’ rate: 42% → 25% 

• Personal tax allowances: up more than 25% in real terms 

• Higher rates of income tax: nine → one 

• Death duties: fourteen rates → one 

• Exchange controls scrapped after 40 years 

• 40+ nationalised businesses privatised — 600,000 employees moved to the private sector 

• The 33 big state industries: took ~£500m from taxpayers in 1980 → paid £8.4bn to the Exchequer by 1987 

• British Steel: world-record loss-maker (1980/81) → £733m profit (1989/90) 

• BT, 1984: the largest share offer the world had ever seen 

• “Tell Sid” broke the record again in 1986 

• British Airways: nationalised loss-maker → profitable, private, “the world’s favourite airline” 

• The Channel Tunnel launched and entirely privately financed.

"Over to you."

~ Eamonn Butler, Adam Smith Institute

"[L]iving standards stalled not because of neoliberalism but because Britain stopped being a free market economy, drifting into a more heavily controlled and interventionist system well before the pandemic accelerated the trend."

~ Is Britain Actually Neoliberal? The Spectator's Michael Simmons - INSTITUTE OF ECONOMIC AFFAIRS

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