Andy Burnham said this week that he has made a ‘clear diagnosis of what has gone wrong’ in Britain since the 1980s, when he returned to Parliament after 10 years in the wilderness. Is his diagnosis correct? Yesterday I looked at Burnham’s claims about political centralisation and the privatisation of economic power, neither of which happened. What other claims did he make?

The country deindustrialised – mixed

Burnham claimed that Britain deindustrialised in the 1980s. Manufacturing as a share of GDP has indeed declined since 1979, falling from 28.5 per cent in 1979 to around 8.5 per cent today. But this was already the direction of travel: manufacturing output was 32 per cent of GDP in 1973. British manufacturing was already in serious trouble before Margaret Thatcher came to power: between 1973 and 1979, output fell by 7.6 per cent, while it rose by 19.6 per cent in France. In fact, some economic historians have argued that Thatcher’s reforms improved the relative performance of British manufacturing, so whether or not deindustrialisation was a deliberate ‘wrong turn’ or a natural consequence of globalisation is up for discussion.

Burnham at his worst turns into something of a Jim Royle, wagging his finger at the ghost of Maggie Thatcher

Burnham at his worst turns into something of a Jim Royle, wagging his finger at the ghost of Maggie Thatcher

Leaving the figures to one side, Burnham’s prescription for this change is the same as every other post-war government’s: a general economic rebalancing away from London and the South East. This was the thinking behind Clement Attlee’s 1945 Distribution of Industry Act, Ted........

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