What is it about the 1970s that Mr Burnham so likes? His keynote speeches tell us he is fighting Margaret Thatcher and intends to reverse what remains of the 1980s reforms she introduced.
The 1970s brought us high inflation. The Labour government over spent and overborrowed, driving government borrowing rates up to an astonishing 15.5%. The government ran out of other peoples’ money to spend and had to go to the IMF to borrow money. The IMF imposed spending cuts on the government as part of the conditions for the loan. Is Mr Burnham keen to replay this sorry drama? The bond markets are warning him he is spending and taxing too much.
Labour put top rate income tax up to 83% or to 98% on savings income. This produced a Brain drain as it was called, as talented, entrepreneurial, successful people queued up to leave, including some of our best pop groups. Today we see a similar exodus of entrepreneurs and people with savings seeking to flee the high taxes.
During the miners strike under Mr Heath there was not enough energy to keep the lights on, so the government imposed a three day working week to cut the demand for power by business to avoid domestic power cuts. Will this government with its dangerous net zero policies have to introduce electricity rationing when the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow?
In the 1970s the large number of nationalised industries demonstrated we did not own them but they owned us. They needed large infusions of grant aid and support from taxpayers. They sacked a lot of their staff and delivered poor customer service. Is that to be the fate of Labour’s nationalisations?
Nationalised water regularly rationed supplies with hosepipe bans in the summer, and in 1976 in some regions had to cut off water supply to peoples homes. They needed to go to a standpipe in the street with a bucket. The industry tipped plenty of sewage into rivers and the sea and did not even bother to monitor and report it.
Nationalised BT often made people wait to get a phone line to their home, and for some required them to share a line with the neighbour. You could not then make a call when they were using the phone.
Strikes were common. The Labour government fell after a winter of discontent which had disrupted many pubic services including burying the dead.
In the 1970s we entered the European Community. Tariffs were taken off and there was a major industrial collapse as UK industry was not competitive enough to withstand the shock. The UK’s growth rate halved from the 3.4% we had achieved in the 20 years prior to joining.
September 17, 2026
You talk about a brain drain in the seventies. I have always taken the view that we are well rid of people who love their bank accounts more than their country.
September 17, 2026
What a funny attitude to have they probably, very sensibly, just feel that they can use and invest their money far better than the government can which is often rather better for the UK in general. Indeed governments are so wasteful and their expenditure so poorly directed it is hard not too.
Also leaving the UK (when if overtaxes, adopts the net zero lunacy and regulated to death) is often the only way to stop the government throttling the economy to death – so it can be a highly moral thing to do too.
September 17, 2026
Just voting once every few years for lower taxes and better public services does almost nothing. This as once elected the Government and MPs deliver the reverse higher taxes and worse public services with some counterproductive wars and daft religions like DEI, the Equality Act, the EU lunacy, Net Zero.
Since the 70s engineers and physicist etc. have delivered vast improvements in technology, medicine, production costs… such that we should all have become richer (transistors cost less than 1/ 1000,000,000 of what they did then – alas the state sector, the blob, wars and red tape has largely stolen and squandered all this efficiency.
September 17, 2026
Stephen, typical Socialist mindset
Envy of people who succeed , expectations that their endeavours should be stolen by government to finance the reckless. I left the uk in 77 for 22 years because of the antics of the liebour government and their union backers.
A Bond route is probably the only thing that will save us.
September 17, 2026
Some of the best people I know are public-school toffs. But, equally, cockney people I come across a lot in London. As well as middle-class grammar school people. I think if you’re really going to enjoy the UK, you got to be willing to get on with and enjoy people with diverse backgrounds, and when possible, keep politics out of it!
Then you can navigate this great country as if you’re Mr Pickwick, in the Pickwick Papers – or a character in any great English novel!
September 17, 2026
Do you feel the same about people who come here?
September 17, 2026
I’m afraid it’s the people who care about their bank accounts who have the potential to generate wealth. Very few are motivated to succeed for socialist ideals, and even fewer if the fruits of their labour are taken away from them to be given to the feckless. The many capable of becoming entrepreneurs will either move elsewhere to keep the gains of their investment, or more likely not bother at all.
The best government is the one that governs least and allows people to grow their businesses, and not be stifled by tax and bureaucracy.
Well done all you British people who have succeeded despite the assault of government over the past decades.
September 17, 2026
The UK is a GREAT country in every conceivable sense. The best! Money is useful but nothing more.
Thank God for the blessing to live here. And I salute the many, many amazing people I come across here all the time! (And from every conceivable class and background).
September 17, 2026
Good morning.
I know our kind host is a bit partisan, and I am no lover of the Labour Party and Socialism, but I do believe it is right that when recounting history that, the truth, the WHOLE truth, and noting but the truth be told. Not saying our kind host is not telling the truth, he is, but is it the WHOLE truth ?
I too am of an age where I can remember the blackouts and the piling up of rubbish. I also remember that, it was not just the Labour government that was responsible for our decline. Today I see much the same and, from that I can only conclude that the solution is to look to those who may have the answers to to the problems ‘others’ have placed us in.
I, unlike our latest PM, have learnt from history. And the course this nation is taking is just another swing of the pendulum which, once again, will swing back even harder than before.
There is hope. Just look at the people of Paddington.
Reply I criticised both the Labour and Heath government!
September 17, 2026
@Mark B – the debt mountain is a mountain. The Muppets look at other Countries with similar high liabilities but look away when they see theses countries and thier people are ‘earning’, earning big time. The debt to these Nations is just a minor cost that they can afford, becuase thet are earning.
This Century, the succssive UK Rulers have done their upmost to cancell the Nations’ and its People’ ability to earn they have gona as far as cancelling it and imeading its ability to ever find its way back.
That means the shock will be horrendous, unimaginably costly, and the last 28 year of Socialisum we have had to endure will just pale by by comparrison.
September 17, 2026
I was in a sink school when Labour had to go to the IMF with a begging bowl.
A few weeks earlier some of the girls had written to the Chancellor as part of a school project. They got a long hand written reply from the man himself. In some ways sweet and admirable, in other ways showing a complete lack of prioritisation, and dealing with trivia while messing up the important stuff.
still at least in those days first class letters were reliably delivered the next day, something we can only dream of now.
September 17, 2026
Only this week I had an important document to mail to Darlington from Wokingham. I told the Post Office staff member that it must arrive the next day so asked how much is the appropriate postage. She admitted that “First Class” wouldn’t necessarily get it there on time so I had to pay £9 for guaranteed delivery before 1pm.
September 17, 2026
To reply:- Heath all Labour Governments and indeed most of the Tory ones other than the only partial exception of Thatcher have been dire but the Labour ones have been even worse.
JR points out the moronic 98% income tax rates from Double First in Greats and IMF Denis Healey. Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals and morons can believe in them – like socialism. But Osborne attacked Landlords with over 100% taxes by disallowing interest deductions so taxing them on “income” they had not made. He did this by dishonestly claiming they were getting a tax break relative to owner occupiers. They also pay CGT on non real gains also an over 100% tax.
A proper Conservative government would have undone almost everything done by Heath, Wilson, Blair, Brown especially the dire equalities act, but they just built on all this socialism and EU endless further integrations. Churchill should have undone all the Attlee disasters. Cameron the Blair Brown disasters but nothing was done by this Climate Alarmist, Pro EU abandon ship, big state socialist.
September 17, 2026
@Lifelogic – a proper democratic Government let alone a Conservative one would in the first instance cancelled every bogus attempt by the privious one to enforce a Socialist Dictatorship on us. That is why so many of us are disalusioned with those that call themselves a Conservative Party what they preach and what they have proven they will do in practice are compltely at odds with reality.
Do people vote on promises or what has been proven they will do in practice?
September 17, 2026
I lived and worked hard through the 60s & 70s and if these muppets on both sides of the house think it was wonderland then think again, the only good thing that happened in the 70s is for then the end of the Liebour party, So all these miss guided brainwashed idiots who keep voting Liebour then think twice before you put these buffoons back into power at the next general election which cannot come soon enough because they don’t give a toss about the normal working people just themselves
September 17, 2026
Yes remember the 1970’s very well as I had by then finished my 5 year indentured apprenticeship, was saving up to get married and purchase our first house.
Inflation was rampant at about 25% and wages almost increased as much, House prices doubled in the 18 months between 1971 -1973, so many moved out of London to be able to afford a home in less expensive areas.
Could not afford children so did not have any until we could !
Made redundant twice in the 1960’s and 70’s as companies were encouraged to move to other areas with huge Government grants, South Wales being a popular move at the time.
By the age of 38 had been made redundant 4 times with Company closures and moves, but it did not stop me from searching and working.
Have seen first hand what Government manipulation of industry has done with grants and subsidies, it rarely works, and more often than not it fails rapidly.
Sadly Mr Burnham and his youthful advisors and supporters do not have a clue about commerce, finance, history, taxation, or human nature, so the failures and errors of the past, will be repeated once again.
September 17, 2026
@Berkshire Alan – while it is possible to understand the Politcal Classes need to be ‘loved’ they do have an ego problem they think its is them personaly that gets things done. Then they want a one size fits all in every situation. If they were to stick to the frameworks, the release of people, remove the shackles, it would allow others to thrive and come through, most of the remidies needed will happen through that hated by the Socilist’s, the market place.
Governments seem to want to rule by being a Dictator and not having a Democracy serving all equaly
September 17, 2026
JR frequently writes revisionist histories, blaming everyone except the guilty for the economic problems of the Thatcher/Major era. The main reason was the oil price shock in 1974 when the price per barrel quadrupled, jumping from roughly $3 to nearly $12 a brrel
1975 had the highest inflation for 60 years at 24%. In 1976 the Labour government intervened and brought it down to 17%; but in 1977 it was still 16%. In 1978 it came down to single digits after temporary wage control agreements with the TUC
The unions, unhappy that their members were unable to put a loaf of bread on the table (the price of bread shot up 200% in 1980) or to send their kids to school wearing a pair of shoes, became much more militant. Millions of working hours were lost due to strikes.
Enter Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Within two years of the Iron Lady entering Downing Street, unemployment reached 3 million for the first time since the 1930’s.
The history books blame all this on the 1970’s oil price shock. However, Thatcher and her first Chancellor Geoffrey Howe were responsible for the unpopular and highly controversial tight monetary policies of the early 1980s. He drastically shifted the UK from direct taxation to indirect taxation (famously doubling VAT in his first budget) and pushed interest rates up sharply to break the double-digit inflation cycle, steering inflation down to 4.6% by 1982
Something similar is coming this winter. A litre of diesel near me was £2.01 yesterday. When the global oil stockpiles run out shortly, it might rise to as much as £4.50 a litre. Baddenoch and Farage will blame it all on Net Zero to deflect blame from their Big Oil donors, who will make record profits while the rest of us freeze this winter.
September 17, 2026
An interesting alternative perspective – I summarise – it was not our fault, it was external forces and greedy capitalists.
My view, as one who was there, is: yes, energy costs rose but the fundamentals were wrong. Governments of both hues fostered nationalisation of the means of production – not just energy, water post and telecoms and transport but vehicles,shipbuilding, aerospace, airlines etc. The market economy hardly existed and no one believed in it. Government controlled prices and incomes policy.
It was the Conservatives who executed the changes that were essential to move the country away decline and poverty encouraging wealth creation, competition and entrepreneurial endeavour. Profit was once again lauded. There was cost restructuring but this was the result of years of avoidance of reality, subsidising loss making nationalised businesses rather than confronting change. Rather than evolution we endured economic revolution. It worked and the world noticed and copied. Today the powerhouse economies are in SE Asia where they still believe in wealth creation and change and focus on global competitiveness. Don’t give me the cheap China argument, our true comparator in South Korea, a high tech high GDP/Capita high skilled powerhouse with which we should be comparing. Not the EU countries who are locked in a statist declining paradigm.
September 17, 2026
SG
Yes I was a Union shop steward in the late 1960’s early 1970’s so fully aware of work relationships between employers and employees.
Faults were on both sides, poor management, selfish owners, and idealist (sometimes communist inspired) unionists, both talking behind closed doors, but not sensibly with each other
Unrealistic expectations by both sides, with little common-sense, fexibility or thoughts for the long term.
Yes Thatcher shook it all up and made both sides understand the reality of their actions.
Some times short term pain gets long term benefits, and by and large that is what happened, union members gained more control over how their Union masters negotiated, and both Management and workers eventually learn’t the lesson that compromise was usually better than outright confrontation.
If employees wanted higher wages, then Companies had to be more productive and profitable, and both needed to work towards that end.
Sadly that lesson was not learn’t by state owned monopolies !
September 17, 2026
Better parts of the economy, and government subsidies, were being used to prop up failing industries. This was removed. This had to be done because past governments of all stripes would not do what was needed due to political expediency, so the underlining problems’ went unresolved. Our kind host highlights similar problems today as per then. The issue I have is, as was back in the 70’s, so too to today all political parties have had a hand in our on going demise.
September 18, 2026
‘The STRIKING unions, unhappy that their members were unable to put a loaf of bread on the table (the price of bread shot up 200% in 1980) or to send their kids to school wearing a pair of shoes, became much more militant. Millions of working hours were lost due to strikes.’
You missed an important word – I inserted it for you!
September 17, 2026
Anyone who thinks the 1970’s were good is living in cloud cuckoo land. It was miserable. Mortgage rates were in double digits. Any increase in the rate caused immediate financial stress. We had no money just lived from month to month. Fortunately property prices were low and 100% mortgages sometimes available. But repaying the mortgage was a mighty struggle. Labour’s financial incompetence was laid bare. Burnham’s desire to return to these times completely baffles me. He has not provided any plan giving detailed reasons for this dramatic policy change. Moreover, there’s been no consultation with the people or proper debate in Parliament. Are these ideas costed? He is certainly not following the mandate Labour got elected on. I suspect all this based on an ideological pipe dream residing in the heads of Mr Burnham and his acolytes because there is no justification for it whatsoever. Where is the plan for growth?
September 17, 2026
Maybe Uganda could help us again? Even the lunatic dictator Idi Amin recognised Britain’s economic plight in the mid-1970s and set up the ‘Save Britain Fund’. Ugandan’s donated money, vegetables and wheat to help us. Is this part of Mr Burnham’s fiscal policy?
September 17, 2026
A current parallel with the 1970s is a Labour government that was left a mess by the Conservatives, and which then proceeded to make things even worse.
The change brought about by Mrs Thatcher, which was a complete break from the ‘Butskellism’ (uni-party?) consensus of the post-war years, was in the teeth of opposition not just from Labour, but the great many ‘Wets’ in her own party, and to the horror of many in the City who had got used to the status quo, and done very well out of Nationalisation.
Mrs Badenoch faces all the same obstacles, although she does appear to be trying to do something about her own party, and the added difficulty that there are now two parties of the Right, so if she is to have a chance of winning, which is a prerequisite to changing anything, she will have to find a way round, or over Mr Farage, or even, dare I say it, find a way of working with him, if neither win a majority at the next election.
September 17, 2026
May be its because he never lived through. Never experienced the culmination of all Labours nationalisations coming home to roost. Never had to experience the full thrust of Labour miss-management forcing those industries they took charge of, through high costs low productivity be forced down the pan.
Then as now the Country and its People earn by being on the World stage, competing with the World. Labour, Socialism, seeks isolation thinking that Socialism alone will provide.
September 17, 2026
What a decade that was – so many preconceptions about life and business ripped away as Wilson and Callaghan allowed the unions to have the last say on all decisions, and morality took a hammering.
Even by 1974 factories were idle or should that be like ghost towns – you had to walk through once busy production areas to understand the difference labour were making. The talk was of how the country would never elect a woman as prime minister.
Happily, for me personally, I avoided the worst of the 70’s and worked abroad long enough for Thatcher to do her magic. In Germany I couldn’t escape the mocking of our car industry plagued by strikes and poor quality.
I fear this coming version of the political 70’s will be even worse, for with crippling debt and a host of ideological concepts biting I’m certain labour are trying to make it impossible for any party to resurrect our country, morals and potential.
I still recall with hope though, when I did return to the UK to work, the feeling of hope and enthusiasm for a better future that was building, but hope that we’d never have to endure such a period of utter disaster we’d faced under labour.
That was enough to turn me into a Thatcher supporter forever!
September 17, 2026
Great to see Mark Carney back in UK again – now there’s a man who knows a thing or two
September 17, 2026
Unite general secretary Sharon Graham called for a return to 1970s
RMT boss Mick Lynch calls for ‘return to 1970s’ as he demands unions in ‘every workplace’
The Chancellor has appointed Paul Nowak, the General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), to the Bank of England
The Chancellor has appointed Paul Nowak, the General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), to the Bank of England.
The Labour Party announced at the ‘TUC Conference’ that every worker has the right to work from home.
Labour holds No 10 drinks party for donors
The Unions of course do not have influence in the UK Government; they don’t have the Governments ear. They may be the Labour Parties biggest sponsor, donor, they may have sponsored directly and provide support to 200 MPs at the GE but they have no ‘influence’
September 17, 2026
The 1970s, for socialists, were a retrospective love-in on the advance of socialism following WW2, when they were in love with the USSR and the 1870-1918 revolutions in Russia and Germany when the socialists/communists overthrew the capitalists of freedom, enerprise and independence and imposed collectivisation and reduction of individual people to meat units in servitude to the state and its leading apparatchiks. Socialism has not changed. It has learned nothing from history and still blames its perpetual and guaranteed failures on others.
September 17, 2026
The UK had one of the most robust and in most situations largest and most profitable industrial bases in the World. Ship building, Coal, Steel, Aircraft manufacture and Auto industry. The auto industry was at one stage responsible for 52% of the World export Market, a great earner for the UK. The enphasis on ‘earner’
Then along came the Socialist Labour Party sponsored and some would say and run by the Unions. They saw the success of UK Industry and seem to just think lets get some of the ‘glory’ from the efforts of others we the workers(what ever that means) are now the Rulers. So they Nationalised every thing they could grasp, even though as now with the UK Parliament none of them had the experience, the acumen, the management ability to ’cause’ industry to grow and earn – it was just about the glory of ‘self’ knowing better than 100’s of years experience.
This then led to the accumulation of problems. The Unions, Labours Boss wanted their people to have more money. Nothing wrong with that, but it wasn’t money from earnings it was money from the taxpayer – they as they are now just the puppets. Progressively things collapsed, strikes were called, then a 3 day week and so on. The demand kept growing for the ever burdened Taxpayer to keep coughing up more money. These demands led to UK Products pricing themselves out of the Market Place aggravated by a continuous fall in productivity. Facilities had to close, they the Unions and their Labour Party killed these once proud extremely profitable industries.
In less than a generation a Socialist Cabal had destroyed 100’s of years growth and wealth out of what can only be suggested as jealousy.
Those were horrendous times.
The drum call to return to the 70’s is misplaced we are already there. Then as now industry has been obliterated, there is nothing to cause it to be conjured up, the entrepreneurs have been forced out, start-up have been blocked. Petty nastiness is everwhere in persuit of resetting the World. Taxes are to high, the cost of the State is astronomical and even the basics of energy costs are 4 times greater than our competitors
September 17, 2026
Britain was the sick man of Europe ” Some observers consider this era to have started with the devaluation of the pound in 1967, culminating with the so-called Winter of Discontent of 1978–79″ .
Margaret Thatcher, grounded in basic economic instinct from her vital experience in her father’s grocery shop, knew the importance of not living beyond one’s means at the micro and macro / country level unlike Labour s PM (pilloried by the press misquoted) “Crisis, What Crisis?”
I left basket case Britain after qualifying for my chosen profession to work in a Third world country with my young family while the opportunity was there to save money which was impossible in Britain at any level. Just think about that.
I returned after common sense and some sanity descended on the country after years of reality in denial.
Today we rely on our hard earned Pension and Savings but at the mercy of the same 1970s thinking Labour government despite all the advantages of hindsight, Super Computers, AI the World Wide Web and cumulative advantages of economic progress who waste that instead.
Tragic stupidity off the scale.
September 17, 2026
@Ukret123 – all Margaret Thatcher did was create a budget, the type the majority of households do each day. To spend you first must earn. If you need to spend more you go about earning more. Even when borrowing is required you ensure there is earnings to cover the payments. It is the real meaning of budgeting.
Only a Muppet would spend what they dont have, while they also cancel the means to earn
September 18, 2026
I’ve Budgeted professionally and in my sleep all my life because being a Fully Paid up member of the so called post war ” Baby Boomers ” counter culture label we were stony dirt poor broke and like millions of us especially after the nonsense 1970s a song “Money’s Too Tight (to Mention)” summed it up.
Deja Vu.
September 17, 2026
Speciality Steel UK is being nationalised. Chiltern trains is being nationalised. Seems Labour really do want to take us back to the 70’s.
September 17, 2026
It’s a silly remark anyway.You can’t hang on to the past with social changes which have overtaken in the last 50 years.Times were hard for some,but I bought my first detached house for £9,500 got a job in Coronary Care Unit,got married and always had a good meal.
If you were a miner though it was tough and Margaret Thatcher wasn’t popular.
September 17, 2026
the leaks of the powerpoint from the no 10 policy team, which sky news have, make interesting reading.
looks like we are more doomed than we thought we were.
September 17, 2026
Recently it was alleged the 3rd highest income tax payer had left the UK. It was also alleged he had paid £330m in the previous year. Expect a rising number of similar high earners giving up and taking their tax contribution with them.
September 17, 2026
Trump is also, unintentionally, strengthening those trying to persuade the UK to return to the EU. 2 reasons.
1) They argue the UK is safer in the EU with hostile leaders such as Trump and Putin around
2) Canada is now becoming an associate member
‘Who needs friends when you got enemies such as Trump’ goes their argument