Turning points

 Steve Richards is on a tour promoting his latest book. He fetched up on Sunday Supplement yesterday and he and Vaughan Roderick had an interesting chat about turning-points in political history. Clearly both the Labour 1945 election win and that of Thatcher in 1979 stood out as such. However, both men in my opinion understated the effect that Thatcher-Major had. It not only shattered the post-war party consensus, undoing all the reforms of the 1945-1951 parliaments (apart from the NHS), but it went further back. It abolished practically all the wages councils initiated by Churchill in 1909, municipal housing initiatives (1919), bus regulation (1930) and trustee savings banks whose roots went back to the early 19th century. The Blair-Brown landslide of 1997 was hardly a turning-point because New Labour accepted so many of the tenets of Thatcherism.

Remarkably, this Conservative government is going back to the future on municipal responsibility for public transport by allowing Greater Manchester to take control of bus regulation again.