On Tuesday, Andy Burnham returned to the House of Commons after almost ten years in the wilderness, bringing with him ‘a clear diagnosis of what has gone wrong’ in the country.

Burnham’s claims about how the country has been governed since the 1980s do not stand up to scrutiny

Burnham’s claims about how the country has been governed since the 1980s do not stand up to scrutiny

According to Burnham, the problems started in the 1980s when a ‘series of wrong turns’ were made. The Prime Minister said that ‘political power was centralised, economic power privatised, the country deindustrialised, austerity followed, hollowing out councils and depriving them of the agency to act to reverse any of this’.

People who can remember Britain before the supposed wrong turns may find the recasting of the 1960s and 70s as a prelapsarian golden age surprising. People born after the Thatcher revolution have not lived through three-day weeks or corpses piling up as they went unburied due to strikes.

But leaving what happened in the 1970s to one side, Burnham’s claims about how the country has been governed since the 1980s simply do not stand up to scrutiny.

‘Political power was centralised’ – False

The 1980s were the final decade in which the four constituent parts of the United Kingdom were governed........

© The Spectator