{"id":329096,"date":"2026-07-19T07:50:49","date_gmt":"2026-07-19T07:50:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=329096"},"modified":"2026-07-21T06:56:01","modified_gmt":"2026-07-21T06:56:01","slug":"burnham-thinks-nationalisation-will-cure-britain-hes-in-for-a-very-nasty-shock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=329096","title":{"rendered":"Burnham Thinks Nationalisation Will Cure Britain. He\u2019s in For a Very Nasty Shock"},"content":{"rendered":"

Will Jones \u2013 The Daily Sceptic July 18, 2026<\/strong><\/h1>\n

New Labour leader Andy Burnham has claimed that nationalisation \u2013 taking Britain back to the pre-Thatcher 1970s \u2013 will cure the country\u2019s ills. He\u2019s in for a very nasty shock, says Tim Wallace in the Telegraph<\/em>. Here\u2019s an excerpt<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Grieving families, unable to bury their dead as gravediggers downed tools. Factories forced into a three-day week after a strike by miners. Hospitals blockaded by protesting NHS workers, ending all but emergency care.<\/p>\n

In the minds of some, these were Britain\u2019s glory days, the pre-Thatcher 1970s for which Andy Burnham pines.<\/p>\n

The new leader of the Labour Party and Britain\u2019s next Prime Minister has lamented a \u201cseries of wrong turns in the 1980s\u201d \u2013 his teenage years \u2013 which, he believes, sent the country on the path to ruin.<\/p>\n

\u201cPolitical power was centralised and economic power was privatised,\u201d he said in his coronation speech as Labour leader on Friday.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe country surrendered control of the essentials, housing, water, energy, transport and left people exposed to higher costs.\u201d<\/p>\n

He lumps the Thatcher years and everything that followed, Tory or Labour, as \u201cfour decades of the neoliberalism that began in the 1980s [which] have not been kind to the places that built our party\u201d.<\/p>\n

His solution is \u201ccontrol\u201d \u2013 more state ownership, more diktats from politicians.<\/p>\n

Yet a survey of the 1970s and the following years suggest that was hardly a paradise for most Britons.<\/p>\n

It is no coincidence that the years before Thatcher\u2019s privatisations began, and when close to one worker in every three was employed by the state, strikes were at their peak.<\/p>\n

In an average month in the 1970s, more than one million working days were lost to industrial action \u2013 hence the extraordinary disruption to ordinary life in the \u201cwinter of discontent\u201d and other painful episodes of that fraught decade.<\/p>\n

The peak came in September of 1979, four months after Margaret Thatcher\u2019s first great General Election victory, when workers downed tools for a total of more than 11 million days.<\/p>\n

The combination of privatisations, limits on union power and a smaller state meant strikers were never again able to wreak such havoc on ordinary people\u2019s lives again.<\/p>\n

Even with the long miners\u2019 strikes, the 1980s only saw 600,000 days lost to industrial action in a typical month. In the 1990s and subsequent decades, the figure was crushed to around 50,000.<\/p>\n

Union tactics not only cut off businesses and families from the essentials like power and healthcare. The combination of strikes plus turmoil in oil markets resulted in catastrophic inflation.<\/p>\n

Inflation peaked at 25% in 1975, more than twice the pace of the recent cost of living crisis that followed the pandemic lockdown.<\/p>\n

Rising prices were more pervasive 50 years ago, too, staying in double digits for half the decade, and never falling below 5%.<\/p>\n

Worth reading in full<\/a>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Donate to The Daily Sceptic<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was tried nearly fifty years ago and it failed then. Despite this, prime minister in waiting Andy Burnham plans to resurrect nationalisation as a remedy for Britain\u2019s woes. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":328571,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[61,58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-329096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-Commentary","category-Current_Affairs"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=329096"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329096\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":329097,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329096\/revisions\/329097"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/328571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=329096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=329096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=329096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}