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William Watson: Conservatives should stay conservative 

Margaret Thatcher said that on a difficult ocean voyage you need stars to steer by — and they can't be shooting stars

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New U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham, who just spent nine years as mayor of Manchester, 19th-century cradle of free trade, says the Thatcherism of the 1980s and the decades that followed, including 15 years of Labour government, were a neoliberal mistake and Britain should go back to many of the policies of the 1970s — though presumably minus the general strikes, brown-outs and three-day weeks for which that decade is remembered. (Average U.K. working days lost to strikes through the 1970s were 18 times what they were last year.)

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