Andy Burnham s antidote fallacy

The UK’s latest prime minister, Andy Burnham, has been putting out a consistent message on the major issues he wants his administration to focus on. In speech after speech, his views have been clear, if a little vague. Invariably, he has criticised Thatcherism, neoliberalism, de-industrialisation, privatisation of public services and deregulation. He has talked up re-industrialisation, devolution and constitutional reform, including the idea of the country adopting a written or codified constitution. In the book he wrote with the Mayor of the Liverpool City Region, Steve Rotherham, in 2024, all these issues are discussed and he goes further, calling for an elected second chamber to replace the House of Lords and proportional representation to replace the first past the post electoral system.

The Conservatives have already denounced his economic views by ludicrously suggesting they would take us back to the 1970’s. This simplistic view of the problems caused by Thatcher and subsequent prime ministerial agendas misses some much more fundamental issues with Burnham’s ideals. At the heart of this is the vagueness. We have no idea what re-industrialisation might look like. His call for public control of services might imply renationalisation but it probably doesn’t for all sectors. Public control could mean more regulation and politicians having more powers to hold private companies to account. There is an awful lot we simply don’t know and when the inevitable compromises hit home to suit the newspapers, the other parties, backbenchers and so on, his agenda might turn out to be very different from what he has in his mind’s eye.

The ‘antidote fallacy’, described by Karel Williams could help explain much about the Burnham agenda. The idea adds focus to macroeconomic policy in the UK’s democratic period.

“Since 1945, the syllogism which justifies every major British policy regime change is that if strategy (a) is a dismal failure, then the opposite strategy (b) will deliver policy objectives. The definition of strategy (b) is always blurred, rhetorical and imaginary so that policy never engages with specific national conditions or variations in a specific sector.” — Karel Williams in The Guardian, 24 December 2012.

Williams argues that this explains the ‘ill-considered’ nationalisations of the 1940’s, which they describe as an antidote to coal owners and a ‘balm for distressed sectors’ and subsequently the Thatcher de-regulations and privatisations of the 1980’s. Williams states that “the result is a 30-year policy cycle where initial failures are attributed to the incomplete revolution, before the undeniable gap between promise and outcome drives policy makers to embrace the antidote.” I mentioned that the Conservative argument that Burnham wants to take us back to the 1970’s is ludicrous. It��s not as if Thatcher’s policies took us all back to the 1930’s and slum housing or a lack of an NHS. The antidote fallacy isn’t a time machine.

Burnham has certainly identified many of the problems of Thatcherism (and it’s hard to disagree with the negative impact her policies have had on working class communities). Whether his vague set of antidotes will deliver a material benefit is yet to be seen but there’s something at the heart of the antidote fallacy that should interest us: the role of the state.

While the antidote fallacy regards macroeconomic policy, it assumes the role of the state in deciding this. Understandably, prime ministers, having manoeuvred themselves into position, have a stake in utilising the state to get things done. They wouldn’t have embarked on all the backstabbing, electioneering and ally-building if they didn’t think the state was useful. Thus, we never see a serious critique of the role of the state in our lives; what we see is a cycle regarding the level of state intrusion in the economy. Meanwhile the state’s intrusion into social matters is continuous.

Thatcher’s vision of rolling back the frontiers of the state in terms of economics was accompanied with police brutality for trade unionists, traveller communities and LGBTQ+ people. Since then, we’ve had Anti-Social Behaviour Orders under Blair, ever harsher prison sentences and in recent times legislative attacks on the people in terms of protest restrictions and tougher rules on migration. Burnham has not engaged with these matters in detail.

The antidote fallacy seems to be in play, almost right on cue. Burnham’s economic policy is certainly based on the idea that Thatcher got it drastically wrong. A fair conclusion—but the vagueness of his antidotes and his courting of the business community show what anarchism has always taught us: the state exists to manage capitalism and representative government of any colour will do just that. Real freedom, real democracy, real economic value is participatory; and for all the talk of devolution and constitutional change, we are likely to see reforms that embed the state ever more intrusively in our lives.

Andy Burnahm in Port Talbot, 28 August 2026. Photo: Simon Dawson / Number 10