With a lead in the opinion polls that sometimes exceeds 20 percentage points, Labor is well ahead of the parliamentary election that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will probably call in the autumn.
Nevertheless, party leader Keir Starmer and other Labor leaders speak warmly of Thatcher, who was Conservative Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990.
Labor leader Keir Starmer is well placed to become Britain’s next prime minister. Photo: Jon Super / AP / NTB
In December, the centrist Starmer said Thatcher stood for “significant reform” in Britain, and in March foreign policy spokesman David Lammy followed up by calling her “a visionary leader”. Such comments are a clear illustration of the party’s rapid centrist orientation under Starmer – because during left-wing Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure as leader, they would have been completely unthinkable.
When Corbyn took aim at Thatcher during the 2019 election campaign, it was to accuse her government of “waging war on the country’s working class in the 1980s” and to warn that Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party would do the same. Corbyn’s Labor had a disastrous election and he resigned as party leader.
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Pragmatists
– Quoting Thatcher is a good way to signal that the party has been turned upside down. It shows a Labor that is far more pragmatic than ideologues, says researcher Sophie Stowers at the think tank UK in a Changing Europe.
When Labor last won elections, under Tony Blair in the 1990s and 2000s, they chose to retain many of Thatcher’s more controversial measures. Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown, even welcomed her on a visit to the Prime Minister’s residence.
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Today, the social democratic Labor will present itself as business-friendly, and not least as financially responsible. The latter stamp has traditionally belonged to the conservatives.
They also tentatively draw parallels between today’s Great Britain and the country Thatcher took over as the country’s first female prime minister in 1979.
Dissatisfaction
At the time, Britain had just ended the “winter of discontent”, a six-month period in which large parts of the workforce went on strike to get bigger pay rises to combat high inflation. Piles of full garbage bags marked the streets, corpses were left in storage because the diggers had stopped work.
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Today, the UK is in a cost of living crisis. High energy prices and soaring inflation have led to low growth, many strikes and increasing poverty. Other critics point out that this is also the after-effect of severe budget cuts introduced from 2010 by the Conservatives.
Labour’s fiscal policy spokeswoman Rachel Reeves played on this recently when she said Britain is at a tipping point similar to the late 1970s – when Thatcher gained support for her radical market liberal reforms.
In a column in the right-wing Sunday Telegraph newspaper last year, Starmer wrote that Thatcher had “tried to rouse Britain from its lethargic state by unleashing our natural enterprise”.
The British have struggled with sky-high inflation in recent years. Photo: Frank Augstein / AP / NTB
Loved and hated
The British right still loves “Iron Woman” for these reforms: the privatization of state-owned companies, the reduction of trade union influence and the deregulation of financial markets. She is equally hated on the left for what is seen as a lack of regard for the working class as large parts of Britain’s industrial sector were closed down, particularly the coal mines.
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British experts believe Labor is trying to make nuanced comments, considering how strong feelings many still have about Thatcher. Reeves did not mention Thatcher’s name. Starmer cited her alongside Blair and Clement Attlee. The latter was Labor Prime Minister from 1945 to 1951, and introduced, among other things, Britain’s much-loved public health system, the NHS.
The Labor leader also later stated that he was only emphasizing Thatcher’s determination, not that he agreed with her. Foreign policy minister Lammy added to Politico that “a lot can be said about the medicine Thatcher chose”.
– It is difficult to find anything that looks like tribute or approval of Thatcher’s legacy. They are very careful with their language, says political scientist Karl Pike at Queen Mary University in London.
Too much
It is still too much for the left. The left-leaning Momentum movement, which was Corbyn’s most ardent supporter, believed that today’s Labor leaders had “lost touch with the labor movement and Labour’s values”.
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– We want to reverse Thatcher’s disastrous settlement, not recreate it, they said of Reeves’ speech, which did not mention the former prime minister by name.
Labour’s former leader in Scotland, Richard Leonard, calls it a falsification of history.
– Thatcher did not renew the economy, she destroyed it, he says.
– Newly saved Thatcherites
The left-leaning, nationalist SNP has also been hit hard in its bid to retain its position as Scotland’s largest party.
Thatcher is extremely unpopular in Scotland for several reasons. SNP parliamentary leader Stephen Flynn called the Labor leadership “newly redeemed Thatcherites” before Easter.
Think tank researcher Stowers says that Labor risks alienating a number of voters. But at the same time:
– They have quite a lot of wiggle room.
