Andy Burnham, he’s absolutely swinging the hammer, isn’t he — no polite throat‑clearing, straight in with “Britain is suffering from Thatcher’s legacy.”
And to be fair, that line is popping up across multiple outlets, so it’s not just me noticing it.
The key thing Burnham is doing here: he’s framing the last 40 years as one long consequence of Thatcherism — deindustrialisation, weakened unions, privatisation, centralisation in London, and the hollowing‑out of northern towns. That’s why his message lands with such force: he’s not blaming the last government; he’s blaming the entire economic settlement since 1979.
Burnham’s gone full throttle: blaming Thatcher for today’s housing and inequality mess, casting himself as Britain’s reset button, and breaking from Starmer with a bold, headline‑grabbing economic shake‑up.
Thatcher may have started the rot, but it’s successive governments that have steered Britain into the mess it’s now stuck in.
Thatcher stopped free school milk for children over seven in 1971 because the government was demanding spending cuts, and she chose to save money in education by ending universal milk provision.
Thatcher cut school milk because the Treasury demanded savings, the programme was costly, and she wanted to redirect the money into new school buildings and other education priorities.
Right to Buy wasn’t some warm‑and‑fuzzy housing gift — it was Thatcher’s cheeky way of shrinking council stock, boosting homeowners, and nudging Britain into a full‑blown property‑mad marketplace.
She might have been called the Iron Lady, but the only iron she should’ve been handling was the one on her ironing board.
She might’ve shaken up Britain, but blaming her for the internet and AI is like blaming the Hoover for the state of the carpet — the mess came from decades of governments who never kept up with the world they were building.
Now we’ve got feral kids roaming the streets with machetes — the fallout from decades of governments letting social support, youth services, and community policing crumble.
Now we’re in such a state that it feels like we need another Thatcher to Hoover up the mess she helped create — talk about cleaning up after your own DIY disaster.
It feels impossible to find a decent prime minister these days — not because “everyone’s gone woke”, but because decades of governments have dodged the hard choices and left the country running on political autopilot. They jumped off that moving aircraft years ago — and we’ve been left picking up the pieces while the cockpit’s still spinning.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 