𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Does anyone else have the sense we are heading back fast towards the 1970s? There was a great deal about that decade to like: Roger Moore as James Bond. Abba. Some truly amazing clothes (don’t think Abba – rather Bond girl Barbara Bach in The Spy Who Loved Me.) Amazing films – The Godfather, Chinatown, the start of Star Wars and the last of the great screwball comedies, What’s Up Doc. But the politics? Not so much.

After a 10-year sojourn in the United States, my family returned to the UK in 1975, and the place was an absolute mess. Strikes, soaring inflation, a sterling crisis, Britain referred to as the “sick man of Europe” – and we’re heading there non-stop once again. Starmer has been the worst Prime Minister we’ve ever had, but all Andy Burnham seems to be able to come up with is renationalisation. I wonder how that will end up? If only someone had tried it before…

Meanwhile, Wes Streeting (and Burnham, as Streeting knows only too well) wants to steer us back to the EU. I was a Remainer and, like Streeting, think leaving was a big mistake, but that boat has sailed. For a start, the UK would never be allowed back in without signing up to the Euro and good luck getting past the electorate with that.

Meanwhile, just as in the 1970s, the wealthy are leaving the country, there’s a brain drain, and aspiration is jeered at. But what Labour does not understand is that this is not really the way the British think.

What Labour is really, unwittingly, doing is creating the conditions that will produce the next Margaret Thatcher, and I sincerely hope it will be the current leader of the Conservative Party, for whom things are certainly looking up.

But the country had to go through a great deal of pain before it produced the Iron Lady, and history is clearly repeating itself. But we must cling to this: this will all be over in a couple of years. And not a moment too soon.