Series: Michael White's political briefing During yesterday's session of PM's question time the Tory MP Andrew Mackay innocently asked Gordon Brown when exactly he thought the "age of irresponsibility" had begun. Before the prime minister could explain a Labour wit cried loudly "1979" - the year Margaret Thatcher took power. It is crucial to Labour's myth-encrusted narrative that everything went wrong after Thatcher deliberately set about smashing the postwar "Butskellite" settlement: cradle-to-grave welfare, Keynesian demand management and full-ish employment, as formulated by Labour chancellor Hugh Gaitskell and Conservative Rab Butler. Leftwingers routinely add that Brown and Tony Blair's crime was to embrace too much Thatcherism when Labour finally regained power in 1997. Tories counter claim that what Labour really did...
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