British Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s Socialist Fantasy World

Much is heard of socialism today. However, there are few real socialists in American politics. Most self-professed “socialists” are social democrats, redistributionists whose policies can succeed only in a capitalist system that generates sufficient wealth for them to seize and transfer. Sen. Bernie Sanders, long considered the legislative dean of America’s economic left, is a millionaire who owns three homes. He advocates taxing more of other people’s incomes, not confiscating all their property.

However, real socialists do participate in and even dominate politics in other nations, including the United Kingdom, from which America sprang. Andy Burnham recently took over as UK prime minister, effectively ousting an unpopular left-leaning centrist, Keir Starmer. At the recent Labor Party conference, Burnham expressed his determination to take his party and country hard left.

Like any number of revolutionaries, he appealed to his class background for credibility. He told his colleagues: “Ours is the same story of so many families, British families of my generation. A story of working-class aspiration. A desire to get on and give back, never pulling up the ladder. And a post-war Britain that backed them to do it.” He naturally wanted to bring back this world: “Imagine living in a Britain where people feel the country has their got back again. A Britain for everyone, no matter who we are or where we’re born. We would be unstoppable. And we will be.”

Obviously, the British people are able to govern themselves. They don’t need lectures from Americans. After all, it is Britannia that ultimately did much to pass on democracy to millions—hundreds of millions, actually—of people around the world today. That is not meant to sugarcoat coercive colonialism, which even by London too often brutalized subject peoples. However, British political and religious struggles ultimately helped birth parliamentary democracy, religious freedom, (classical) liberal economics, and much more.

Alas, Burnham appears ready to wage war against that heritage. For Burnham’s enemy is anyone who resisted the UK’s sharp collectivist turn after World War II. He told his audience that “Britain has been on the wrong path for a long time. Deindustrialization. Deregulation. Privatization. Austerity. Brexit. And what has it given us? A country run for vested interests. Not in the public interest. With power held in too few hands. And too many places left to drift. I am ready to do things my predecessors wouldn’t. I will make a break with the direction of the past 40 years and put Britain on a new path.”

By that, he means, return to real socialism, at least the variant that was dominant when Margaret Thatcher became prime minister in 1979. Although the UK was never communist, or anything approaching the Soviet Union and its European satellite states, it owned and otherwise controlled much of the economy. And the results were not pretty.

Burnham declared that “In 1945, we had the vision to win the peace. We had the bravery to make change. We built good homes, secure jobs, health and education for everyone. We gave Britain hope again. We made working-class aspiration feel real for families like mine. We built the common good. Or at least we did until the 1980s. Suddenly, the commonwealth we had created, this party, the wealth we had created for the many was seen as an opportunity for the few.”

Yet British socialism was never as idyllic as Burnham suggests. The Labor Party triumphed in the 1945 election. However, the Conservatives retook control in 1951, winning three straight contests. They triumphed again in 1970, and after two tumultuous Labor victories amid economic turmoil and political strife, lost power to Thatcher, who won three times. She was followed by another Conservative government, and then the “neo-liberal” Blair era, a moderate Labor interregnum of which Burnham evinces no memory whatsoever.

If Burnham perceived the pre-Thatcher time as one of “good homes, secure jobs, health and education for everyone,” he must be the only one. My father was in the U.S. Air Force and I spent my high school years of 1970–1973 living near Oxford. State regulation and union rules stultified the economy. Labor unions effectively ruled the Labor Party and often appeared to be as powerful as, if not more than, the government. Political conflict was deep and destructive. A coal strike resulted in mass electricity blackouts. Working people suffered more than the rich in an economic system in which the economic pie was shrinking, not expanding. I lived through this era, which forever darkened my view of supposedly “compassionate” socialism.

This is why the British people, most of them, other than Burnham’s family, anyway, turned to Thatcher. Reported the Christian Science Monitor’s Ryan Lenora Brown, it “was the deeply divided Britain that Thatcher and her Conservative Party took control of in May 1979—beleaguered and world-weary, its patience for government tanking and its economy on shaky ground.” As the Monitor’s Takashi Oka then detailed:

What could socialism deliver that would make this world desirable, let alone the best that is humanly achievable? Money is not everything, especially for Christians. However, money is necessary to meet basic human needs. Those with the least most depend on economic growth to raise their standard of living. The crisis for socialism is when government officials run out of people’s money to spend. That happened in 1979. And it is fast approaching in the UK today. Warned Liam Halligan of The Telegraph: “the slow-motion car-crash that’s been unfolding on the UK’s sovereign bond markets for at least the last 18 months—a disaster now gathering pace that will inevitably, unless we drastically change course, spark a fully blown market meltdown.” The people who would suffer the worst in such a financial wreck would be those who Burnham claims to represent.

Abstract statist ideologies, which force an entire population to live according to the dictates of the latest ruling elite, inevitably yield worse results than more liberal, freer systems. Burnham declared: “The British Right talk about ‘taking back control’. Never let them forget, they are the ones that gave it away in the first place.” However, he wouldn’t shift authority back to the British people. Rather, he would transfer it to yet another set of ambitious ideological imperialists. Which is decidedly not the way to make Britain “work for” its people again, as Burnham declared. He complained that the UK was “A country run for vested interests. Not in the public interest. With power held in too few hands. And too many places left to drift.” Yet he would reinforce, not reverse, that trend.

Collectivists pushing dirigiste policies will be with us always. Some will be on the right, some on the left, and all will typically promote themselves, not the great mass of people who would suffer from their proposals. So it is with today’s socialists who most loudly proclaim their solidarity with the people over whom they seek to rule.

Free markets are not perfect. No human institution is. However, they transcend socialist precepts. Economic liberty is a reality that generally empowers and enriches its participants, particularly the “least of these,” who are most at risk in systems which reward the politically influential with economic privilege. Socialism—real socialism, in which politicians control most economic policies and transactions—consistently fails to meet the most basic needs of those it ensnares.

While no economic system is “Christian,” some economic systems deliver results that no Christian should wish upon those around them. Andy Burnham’s reasonably seeks “To move beyond a decade of drift and division. To bring a spirit of unity and positivity back to our country. To unlock the working-class aspiration that is still there in every postcode in this great land.” However, this was not the world that he holds up as his beau ideal of a good society. Returning the UK to 1979 is no solution to today’s manifold policy challenges.