Agreed, we don’t have the time to go there… However, Unity missed out the disassembly of non-state, non corporate capital. Rationalisation of local building societies was common in the 1970s, leading to familiar bodies like Alliance and Leicester, Nationwide, Halifax, Bradford and Bingley, which swallowed up smaller societies. Those societies were big, possibly too big, but they were owned by their members.

Following the first privatisations of state owned utilities, many (most?) building societies corporatised. According to the PR, this was in order for them to “compete”. Of the four that I mentioned, one, the Nationwide, is still owned by its members. And it works damned well.

Of course, I am of the opinion that it is impossible for a government (and most definitely a central government of a large state) to ensure “the hay and a barn” that the 1945 Attlee government promised. Many parts of Europe have come close, though whether that is sustainable is in doubt, but they have done so by using far less ideologically driven mechanisms like social insurance (that retain some of the price signals that allow healthcare to be rationed vaguely intelligently rather than centrally). Perhaps those sort of reforms could have been the direction of a “long term” Thatcher government but by the time she got in, it was already too late.

Of course, all this revisionism is filtered through the prism of First past the Post, which enables minority govt.s to push through generally unpopuar policies – so to argue that Thatcher’s agenda was driven by electoral imperatives rather begs the question – would a centre-left alliance under PR have taken the same aggressive stance? Maybe it could have played the long game?

Your figures are interesting.The ones I have suggest total spending on social protection at c.£170bn (2008) and income tax receipts (with an additional £105bn in N.I. around the same figure (2008), so it would seem social protection for older people takes around half the income tax take?