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Andy Burnham’s recollections of Britain in the 1970s must be pretty hazy. He was nine when the decade ended. Kemi Badenoch, born in 1980, can remember nothing. Lacking first-hand experience, the Conservative leader evokes the turmoil of a bygone era with cautionary zeal borrowed from an older generation. In a speech last week, she accused the new prime minister of pining for “endless strikes, rubbish not being collected, bodies not being buried, inflation at 25% and a chancellor going cap-in-hand to the IMF”.
This is more incantation than argument, a ritual fondling of beads on the Tory rosary. It is a symptom of a leader under stress, affirming her faith in Our Lady Margaret Thatcher and warding off socialist devils. Burnham has done nothing to support the claim that his government is a 70s tribute act, unless you count the appointment of a man named Healey as chancellor and the imposition of price controls on buses.
What the prime minister has done is trace Britain’s present malaise to choices made in the Thatcher era. From the threshold of No 10 he delivered the verdict on that legacy: “Political power was centralised, economic power privatised, large parts of the country de-industrialised, and they still haven’t recovered.” That statement has become the foundation stone for an edifice of neuralgic conservative commentary, bemoaning Britain’s capture by anti-market, pro-state fanatics.
The right of British politics seems to be disoriented by the appearance of a Labour prime minister whose message isn’t crafted as a preemptive flinch at the accusation that he might come from the left, believe some leftish things and gamble on them being popular. Nigel Farage is playing it safe with the predictable but flimsy complaint that Burnham lacks a mandate. The Reform UK leader knows that isn’t how British politics works and, given that his personal ratings are on a downward drift, he doesn’t want a general election anyway.
Badenoch’s reach back to the Seventies is a default setting in the absence of better ideas. It isn’t totally irrational, given the hint of nostalgia in Burnham’s tone. His ascendancy to No 10 relied on him being acceptable to a coalition of disputatious Labour factions. Lamentation over the death of a proletarian way of life, killed by Thatcher’s hand, is a hymn the party can sing in harmony. The new leader is a skilled choirmaster – in contrast to his predecessor, who knew the words but couldn’t carry a tune.
But Burnham has also just spent nine years as mayor of Manchester, leaving it an enterprising capitalist city. He argues that its success is a function of pragmatic partnership between government and business, and that this model can be replicated on a national scale. It is hardly wild dogma to suggest that a strategically minded state can guide the hand of the market. The prime minister believes devolving power will give that hand a defter feel for local needs.
Conservatives might disagree, but it takes wilful denial, or maybe intellectual laziness, to pretend that Burnham’s Manchester blueprint is retro-socialism, plain and simple. The prime minister could hardly be more explicit in rejecting the 20th-century central planner’s adage that “the gentleman in Whitehall knows best”.
It is normal for oppositions to take time to get the measure of a new prime minister, and vice versa. Leaders need to make a few mistakes before their weaknesses form a pattern that can be woven into an effective political attack. Keir Starmer was a slippery target in opposition. But in government he made life easy for his enemies by shedding what modest popularity he had accrued almost immediately. Badenoch didn’t have to develop an argument against a prime minister who struggled to explain what he was trying to do and was easily bullied into doing something else.
The Tories were bystanders while Starmer’s government self-immolated, mostly to the benefit of Reform UK and the Greens. Badenoch’s personal ratings have picked up over the past year, reflecting perhaps growing squeamishness on the right about Farage as a prospective prime minister. But the Conservative vote share has yet to climb as high as the giddy depths it fell to in July 2024, when the party suffered its worst ever general election defeat.
Disillusionment with Labour rule has done nothing to revive public interest in a Conservative alternative. Badenoch has done nothing to make her party interesting. She wasted her first year fretting perversely that the Tories had been too leftwing in office, thereby endorsing the case for defection to Reform UK.
She then switched to a focus on fiscal parsimony, hoping to occupy electoral terrain between public wariness of Labour’s tax-and-spend instincts and suspicion that Farage was a bit spivvy where money is concerned. But having scoped out a desirable patch of political real estate, Badenoch isn’t building anything. She has no theory of public service reform. To read her speeches is to inhabit a parallel universe where the obvious causes of dissatisfaction with the state are chronic overfunding and infestation by militant leftwing civil servants.
It is a vacuous analysis, coloured by excessive consumption of radical US conservative content online. British politics has always been shaped by trends across the Atlantic, but the radicalisation of the British right through exposure to Maga influence (both cultural and financial) in recent years amounts to cognitive surrender. Political fandom has usurped judgment; craving validation from a foreign power takes precedence over loyalty to the national interest.
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A Labour prime minister has the excuse of realpolitik, being obliged to show deference to a despotic US president who despises democratic allies but remains indispensable when it comes to their defence needs. Even then, Starmer found the courage to distance himself from Donald Trump’s disastrous military adventure in Iran. Not so, Badenoch. She turned squeamish only when she realised how far her initial gung-ho instincts had carried her from British mainstream opinion.
What British conservatives either fail to observe or refuse to acknowledge in their mindless orbit around Planet Trump is that Maga politics contains more heresies against the sacred Thatcherite creed than anything Burnham proposes. The US president hates free trade. He admires single-party regimes where a supreme ruler directs economic activity. He imposes arbitrary tariffs. He uses his office to extort money from private companies or coerce them into giving equity stakes to his government. And he acquired the power to do all of this by skilfully manipulating economic and social grievances caused by deindustrialisation – the alienation and dislocation felt by working-class communities that felt their security and dignity washed away by cold global market tides.
It is the same trend that Burnham identifies as a cause of British discontent and economic stagnation. The difference is that the UK prime minister talks about healing wounds, while Trump keeps them salted with partisan spite. It should be obvious to anyone who cares about democracy and the rule of law which model is preferable. Maybe the new prime minister’s methods will not work. Perhaps his prescriptions are flawed. At least his diagnosis belongs in 2026. It is the leader of the opposition, craving reenactment of a battle that was won before she was born, who is stuck in the wrong century.
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Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
