SUCKING IN THE SEVENTIES: Burnham sets out 1970s vision for Britain.

Andy Burnham has revealed a 1970s-style vision for Britain, saying his appointment as Labour leader was “the most significant change” in politics in the past 40 years.

In a speech on Friday, Mr Burnham said the country had taken “a series of wrong turns in the 1980s”, adding that he wanted “more power to reindustrialise”, and the public ownership of utilities and council houses.

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Mr Burnham promised to end the post-Thatcher consensus on privatisation and central government control, arguing that while politicians had called for the public to “take back control… they were the ones who gave it away in the first place”.

He said: “We must recognise that this generation of politicians – myself included – have failed to challenge a political culture and an economic model that simply doesn’t work well enough for ordinary people.

“Four decades of the neoliberalism that began in the 1980s have not been kind to the places that built our party, nor to the communities across the UK in rural and coastal areas. So we pledge today to them to be better.”

Drawing on his experience defending Hillsborough disaster victims, he said political power had been used “viciously against them to protect vested interests”, while “economic power [was] cruelly stripped with the deindustrialisation of the 1980s”.

His pitch was also an implicit rejection of the New Labour years, when Mr Burnham made his early political career in the Cabinets of Sir Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

What could go wrong?

The past may be, as L. P. Hartley wrote, another country, but it’s rarely as foreign as Britain in the 1970s. Viewed from the United Kingdom of 2005, the day before yesterday is a banana republic without the weather. Inflation was up over 25 percent, marginal tax rates were up over 90 percent, and the only thing heading in the other direction was the pound, which nosedived so suddenly in 1976 that the chancellor of the exchequer, en route to an International Monetary Fund meeting, was summoned back from the departure lounge at Heathrow to try to talk his currency back up to sub-basement level. Her Majesty’s government had itself applied for a $4 billion loan from the IMF. Were the Britain of thirty years ago to re-emerge Brigadoon-like from the mists, it would be one of those basket cases that Bono hectors Bush about debt forgiveness for.

Such great Britons as the era could muster—Roger Moore, Michael Caine—had decamped to Switzerland and Beverly Hills. As if to underline the national decline, every flailing industry flew the moth-eaten flag: British Steel, British Coal, British Leyland. They were all owned by the state—even the last, which was the national automobile manufacturer. The government had taken all the famous British car marques—Austin, Morris, Rover, Jaguar, Triumph—and merged them into one. That’s right: the government made your car. Or, rather, a man called Red Robbo did, when he was in the mood, which wasn’t terribly often. He was the local union man at the Leyland plant in Birmingham, though he seemed to spend more time outside the gate, picketing. In Britain union leaders were household names, mainly because they were responsible for everything your household lacked. In the seventies if you opened The Times (when the print unions weren’t on strike) or watched the BBC news (when the miners weren’t on strike and the government hadn’t ordered the TV to close down mid-evening to conserve electricity), it was a parade of eminences from strange, unlovely acronyms such as ASLEF and SOGAT and NATSOPA and NACODS being received by the prime minister as if they were heads of state, which in a sense they were. Britain’s system of government in the seventies was summed up in the phrase “beer and sandwiches at Number Ten”—which meant the union leaders showing up at Downing Street to discuss what it would take to persuade them not to go on strike, and being plied with the aforementioned refreshments by a prime minister reduced to the proprietor of a seedy pub, with the cabinet as his barmaids. The beer and sandwiches went only so far, and would usually be followed a day or two later by chaotic scenes on the evening news of big, burly blokes striking for their right to continue enjoying the soft, pampering workweek of the more effete Ottoman sultans.

The man who presided over the death throes of this ramshackle realm was James Callaghan, prime minister from 1976 to 1979, and an instructive study for all those obituarists of President Ronald Reagan who were so anxious last June to attribute his success to a genial disposition, sense of humor, charming smile, tilt of the head, etc. If you want to know what Reaganesque affability without political will or philosophy boils down to, look at Callaghan. He was famously avuncular; he was known as Sunny Jim. But by the time he and his Labour government left office, the sunniness had decayed into torpid complacency. His most famous words were “Crisis? What crisis?”—which he never actually said, but were put in his mouth by an enterprising headline writer from Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun. And they fit so well that they stuck.

— “The Chap on Duty: James Callaghan (1912-2005).” Mark Steyn in – a very different and much more lively iteration of – the Atlantic, June 1st 2005.