After Keir Starmer, things could only get better inside Labour. But Andy Burnham’s arrival as party leader and prime minister didn’t just clear that low bar. It was a cause for hope, especially for those of us in the trade union movement. That’s less because Burnham is streets ahead of his predecessor as a politician – although he is – and more about just how radically the new prime minister has framed his project for the country.

I’ve been active in the labour movement for almost four decades. In that time, I cannot count how many times I’ve heard talk of reversing the devastation wreaked by Margaret Thatcher. For socialists and grassroots trade union activists, this kind of political thinking is bread and butter. But not so much for a Labour prime minister.

Tony Blair, between torching the Middle East and taking a hammer to our civil liberties, infamously came to build upon Thatcher’s legacy rather than bury it. Gordon Brown and Starmer were more set against the Thatcherite fracturing of our society than Blair. But they both continued to inhabit the political cage she built: the idea that there is no alternative.

Before now, the only major party leader ideologically opposed to neoliberalism in a remotely serious way was Jeremy Corbyn, who drew........

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