BRIAN READE: 'Andy Burnham needs to drag us all back to the 1970s'

You'll be hearing a lot this summer about how Britain is heading back to the 1970s. That decade is all the rage as we swelter like it’s 1976 and memories are dredged up of a boiling summer when kids drove Chopper bikes across dried-up rivers and adults with crimson arms and blistered necks queued to get water from standpipes. Also, as Andy Burnham moves closer to Downing Street, doom-mongering Thatcherites are delivering siren warnings about him planning to drag us back to the Satanic Seventies with its three-day weeks, unburied corpses, and your dad using homing pigeons to let your mum know he was on his way home as it took six months to get a phone installed. In other words, the political climate, like the real one, is putting us on a burning road to 70s’ hell. Even though with music from Bowie and The Clash, epic films like The Godfather and Taxi Driver, and having to only pay 50p to watch football mavericks play the game for love not money, I found the 70s heavenly. Wetherspoons’ boss Tim Martin has compared Burnham’s imminent arrival to “the dreary socialist concoction that brought us to our knees when Labour was in power in the 1970s.” This from a leading advocate for Brexit which has left the economy on its backside. Sir Rocco Forte is concerned that Burnham’s elevation would mean “we’ll be back to the days of the closed shop and strikes in no time.” This from a sterling patriot who, after complaining that fewer tax breaks for non-doms made Britain less attractive, changed residence to Italy before Labour’s election victory. Tony Blair has criticised Burnham’s analysis that we’ve been on a destructive neo-liberal path for 40 years, warning him not to take us back to the dire 70s. This from someone who took us into the quagmire of Iraq and wanted us to back Donald Trump in his latest neo-liberal killing crusade in Iran. I think they’re all getting their knickers in a twist, though. The fact that Burnham has made ex-Blairite minister and big-tech lobbyist James Purnell his chief of staff, and is unsure about making Ed Miliband his chancellor in case he upsets business, implies he won’t be smashing the capitalist system any time soon. What he may want to do, however, is bring back some of the things we lost from the 70s after Thatcher turned Britain into a divided bear pit where only the strong and selfish survived. Would this country not be better if, like the 70s, we had stronger community values, a dependable NHS, affordable homes for first-time buyers, more council houses, better workers’ rights, more decent jobs in towns and cities outside London, and a nation not split between the written-off North and the prosperous South? The real reason the rich and the right-wing hate 1976 so much is that it was the year, according to the New Economics Foundation, when incomes in Britain were at their most equal. No politician will ever be able to take us back to those 1970s levels of equality, but if Burnham succeeds in making enough ordinary people feel better about their lives he may be able to stop the advance of populist frauds promising to take us back to an all-white, all Christian, crime-free 1950s paradise which never existed. Shoppers can save some money with a discount code