How Keir Starmer is sticking to Margaret Thatcher's flawed ideology that only helps wealthy elite

Michael Forsyth – for it was he, now Baron Forsyth of Drumlean – began to ask me searching questions, in my capacity as SRC treasurer, about what the council’s officers were up to, with the modest amount of public money we received; and although I was able to provide him with answers, I remember being slightly shocked by his apparent assumption that we were all up to no good, making expensive rail trips to London for sheer pleasure, rather than for tedious National Union of Student meetings, or some soggy and rainswept demonstration.

Over the next few months, I met a few more of the group of Tories to which the young Mr Forsyth seemed to belong; and I soon began to recognise, if never fully to understand, their profound and mocking hostility to the postwar settlement in which we had all grown up, with its emphasis on a new international order based on human rights and equality, its generous state provision in some areas including higher education, and its assumption that some areas of the nation’s life and economy were sacrosanct public goods, to be kept free of commercial motives and pressures.

READ MORE: Norman Tebbit: Ex-Tory Cabinet minister under former prime minister Margaret Thatcher dies aged 94

A lavishly funded cause

From the outset, it seemed clear to me that their politics was based on the demonstrably false assumption that human beings are motivated almost entirely by individualistic self-interest, that they value nothing unless they have personally paid for it, and that all the more altruistic, convivial, collaborative and creative aspects of humanity should therefore be sidelined, in constructing political and economic systems. Yet within a few years, these young proto-Thatcherites and their disruptive ideas – badged as radical, but often simply reactionary – had taken control of the Conservative party, and then of the UK Government.

Their strength, of course, lay not in the quality of their thinking, but in the popularity of their ideas about deregulation and the rolling back of the state with those who already had wealth, and wanted to be free to make more. Their cause was therefore lavishly funded from the outset; and their greatest success – as Margaret Thatcher herself pointed out – was not their triumph over more moderate forms of Conservatism, but their huge impact on the politics of the Labour party, which – under Tony Blair and since – simply absorbed many of their ideas, tropes and values.

READ MORE: ‘No such thing as society’: How tech giants are making Thatcher’s dream come true

So fast-forward, if you will, to the world this ideology has created for us, and which we inhabit today; a world not only destabilised at global level by a growing culture of contempt towards the universal values on which the postwar generation tried to found a rule-based international order, but apparently trapped, at UK level, in a Groundhog Day of ideological attachment to a Thatcherite revolution which, it is now widely acknowledged, did not fundamentally revive the UK economy, but instead profoundly weakened it.

READ MORE: The UK stepped back as the rest of Europe stepped up, it is time for Scotland to rejoin the mainstream

Labour’s performative cruelty

This is a UK, after all, in which Labour politicians still apparently think it clever, as a badge of political strength and economic wisdom, to stage acts of performative cruelty against some of the weakest in society. It’s a country crippled by chronic under-investment in its people and infrastructure, where politicians both Labour and Tory still prate about reducing public spending, and avoiding taxes on ever-increasing accumulations of wealth. And it’s a society surrounded and weighed down by the wreckage of a whole raft of failed privatisations of public utilities – energy, railways, England’s water – where we still, in defiance of all evidence, see further involvement of private health care companies constantly touted as the way forward for the NHS.

We are living, in other words, in an age of almost unique ideological stalemate, when the consensus of the last four decades and more has clearly failed, socially, environmentally, and in terms of global security; but where all other political ideologies have been so successfully marginalised that we have nowhere else to turn – except, of course, to the professional hate-mongers of the far-right, always ready to supply malign and practically useless myths of “belonging”, to replace more progressive and effective forms of solidarity.

At the height of the Industrial Revolution, and again after the Depression of the 1930s, it was the power of organised labour, and its emergent political wing in the Labour party and the US Democrats, that eventually provided a progressive counter-force in society, demanding a more just and sustainable future.

Green-democratic revolution

Today, though, the ideological chaos and evident confusion of the Starmer government suggests that that powerful progressive alliance no longer exists in any meaningful form; and that any positive moves the UK Government makes, in terms of workers’ rights or public spending, may well be undermined by their lack of of any new macroeconomic strategy, and their weirdly uncritical addiction to the idea of “growth”, at any price.

For now, it seems that the scale of the green-democratic revolution we need, to give us a chance of a better future, is simply beyond us, certainly at UK level. And despite the conventional British aversion to ‘ideology’, and the insistence of our politicians on foregrounding practical bread-and-butter issues, the lesson of the last 50 years is that, whether we are aware of it or not, the prevailing ideological orthodoxy determines almost everything about the limits and framing of our politics, and that if we truly want change, then a radical revision of that ideological framework is not a luxury but an indispensable first step, in moving our society forward again, at last.