Thatcher, Attlee and Blair hold key lessons for Starmer’s ‘decade of national renewal’ says IPPR

• Only three post-war governments have genuinely reshaped the UK’s future, report finds

• Failure to learn lessons of their success would put trust in politics at risk and stoke fires of populism

• To transform the country, Starmer will need to move on from attacking previous government to attacking its underlying ideas

The government needs to learn key lessons from the past about how to transform the country if it is to succeed in delivering its promised ‘decade of national renewal’, a new report from IPPR argues today.

Failure to adopt the approach of previous transformative UK governments – of which the paper identifies three since the second world war – will leave the government unable to tackle the UK’s longstanding challenges, and open the door for the populist right, say the report’s authors.

The paper identifies three post-war administrations that its authors consider to have been genuinely transformative: those of Clement Attlee (Labour PM from 1945 to 1951), Margaret Thatcher (Conservative PM from 1979 to 1990) and Tony Blair (Labour PM from 1997-2007).

It defines as transformative a government that has clear strategic goals and drives towards them despite the buffeting of unexpected events – but understands both the constraints and the opportunities presented by the world they are operating in. Many post-war governments have failed to achieve this, the report points out.

The paper is the first in a series by IPPR, part of a new flagship research programme aimed at helping the government think about and deliver on its key strategic objectives.

It draws five lessons from the successes and failures of post-war governments:

• Recognise how the world is changing, then use that to change the country. A successful political project must respect constraints imposed by a changing world and harness the energy that such change releases to propel itself – as the Blair government did with globalisation.

• Don’t just blame the previous government, blame its out-of-date ideas – then introduce your own. The Thatcher and Attlee governments each told convincing stories about why the ideas of their predecessors had led the country to ruin. For the new government that means connecting the outdated ideas of the Cameron and Osborne era with the political and economic failure they spawned, before introducing its own new ones.

• A string of modest but strategic policies can add up to transformation if they all point in the same direction. This was the Thatcher government’s approach to trades union reform, the report said – a series of cautious but incremental changes resulted in a dramatic long-term reduction in worker power.

• Maintaining a voter coalition is not the same as building one from opposition. To win a mandate for a second full term – as Thatcher and Blair both did – means identifying key issues for the government’s core voters and being able to take credit for delivering on them.

• Transformative governments deliver enduring reforms that their successors don’t undo and even advance. For Attlee that was the NHS; for Blair it was the minimum wage. Building and winning support for new institutions can entrench change for the long term.

Dr Parth Patel, IPPR principal research fellow, said:

“The curse of most governments is to fall short of their promises to voters. History shows us that is because they set off without a clear idea of their strategic objectives and are blown off course by day-to-day imperatives and events.

“With confidence in democracy waning, and populists circling like sharks in the water, it has never been more important for a government to be able to deliver the transformation it has promised. The stakes are high for the Starmer government. Whether they succeed or fail, they will determine Britain’s future -- for better or for worse.”

ENDS

Dr Parth Patel and Harry Quilter-Pinner, two of the report’s co-authors, are available for interview

NOTES TO EDITORS

1. The IPPR paper, How to build a decade of national renewal: Five lessons from history, by Parth Patel, Phil Tinline and Harry Quilter-Pinner, is available for download at: https://www.ippr.org/articles/how-to-build-a-decade-of-national-renewal
   
2. About the authors:
   - Dr Parth Patel is IPPR principal research fellow and head of the organisation’s Decade of National Renewal programme
   - Phil Tinline is a writer and author of Death of Consensus: 100 years of British political nightmares
   - Harry Quilter-Pinner is IPPR interim executive director