How Starmer wants to reverse Thatcher’s legacy

Members of Labour’s frontbench have recently fallen over themselves to acclaim Margaret Thatcher. Hot on the heels of Rachel Reeves feting the Iron Lady’s determination to reverse Britain’s decline, David Lammy lauded the woman who defeated his party three times as a ‘visionary leader’. But like Mark Antony’s attitude to Julius Caesar, Reeves and Lammy come to bury Thatcher rather than to praise her.

Labour’s shadow ministers invoke the ‘Iron Lady’ because they know a certain kind of voter, one Labour needs to help it win power, still goes all of a quiver at the mere mention of her name. So, while they loudly applaud Thatcher’s radical ambition – to suggest Starmer’s party shares it – they quietly distance themselves from how she sought to realise it.

This appropriation of a Conservative icon is highly mischievous because a Starmer government will reverse key aspects of Thatcher’s free-market legacy to revive the soft corporatism of Jim Callaghan, the Labour leader she defeated in 1979.