In 1975, when I joined the civil service through a competitive exam as a direct entry principal, Andy Burnham was five.
Published: 3 September 2026
And, as Kemi Badenoch explained to him yesterday in her response to his nostalgic Commons statement, she wasn’t even born.
If he had done his homework, he might have learned some history that is very relevant today.
I had been assigned to the Department of Industry on the grounds that in the early 1970s I had worked as a middle manager in the Post Office in the Data Communications Department.
What I had learned there was about the waste of people in a nationalised industry without vision or accountability.
In those days, my main job was to explain to business why essential equipment for accessing computers would not be available to them for at least a year because we had a monopoly.
My head of department was a thoroughly decent man who was struggling vainly to modernise the unmodernisable.
I left in 1975 and found the civil service a vast improvement, but its realists were constrained by policies for which our prime minister seems to hanker.
He doesn’t display any grasp of how absolutely dreadful that period was.
It doesn’t seem to have occurred to him what went wrong in housing, for instance, was the immigration which Labour enthused about until very recently and the poison injected into society by a liberal stranglehold on the education system that elevated the rights of immigrants above those of natives.
I speak as an immigrant who was appalled at the money being poured into initiatives by the likes of Ken Livingstone to disseminate pro-republican propaganda.
In my job I could see how some militant Marxists ruled the trades union roost.
I was one of the millions struggling to lead a normal life during the utter chaos of the Winter of Discontent under James Callaghan’s crisis-ridden government.
Andy’s rose-coloured dreams are of an era when there was a council home for everyone and lots of excellent technical teaching leading to good jobs.
He hasn’t addressed the downside.
He was too young to take on board what we oldies went through, with a weak minority government struggling to control inflation, reduce the enormous public-sector deficit, prevent further escalation of unemployment and protect the pound by obeying the instructions of the International Monetary Fund to impose pay limits that strong unions rejected contemptuously and nihilistically.
Labour’s loss of control culminated in the blizzard of strikes in the Winter of Discontent, which went to such extremes that bodies were unburied and lorry loads of produce rotted alongside mountains of uncollected rubbish.
I was one of those deeply relieved on March 28, 1979 when the government fell, and, after the election, nail-biting as the war with the unions was, the panic diminished as Margaret Thatcher gained control of the “ungovernable sick man of Europe.”
And though there were some failures, on the whole privatisation transformed a sclerotic economy.
I fear Mr Burnham’s call for more state intervention and public ownership could sound the knell of economic doom.
