Andy Burnham makes his first comments outside No. 10 Downing St. in London on July 20, 2026, after becoming prime minister of the U.K. Burnham said the Thatcherism of the 1980s was a mistake and the country needs to go back to the policies of the previous decade. Photo by Dan Kitwood /Getty Images

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New U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham, who just spent nine years as mayor of Manchester, 19th-century cradle of free trade, says the Thatcherism of the 1980s and the decades that followed, including 15 years of Labour government, were a neoliberal mistake and Britain should go back to many of the policies of the 1970s — though presumably minus the general strikes, brown-outs and three-day weeks for which that decade is remembered. (Average U.K. working days lost to strikes through the 1970s were 18 times what they were last year.)

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In this country, some people argue that the message of lower taxes and smaller government no longer resonates with older Canadians, in whose golden years state pensions and government health care (however imperfect) figure importantly. Because seniors are more likely to vote than the young people whose growing support for the Conservatives was one of the big political stories of the past half decade, the party needs to reconsider its traditional playbook — so long as the boomers live, that is, after which it will have to reconsider again.

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If Thatcherism really is dead, if Canadians really are less open to smaller government, what’s a conservative party to do? Keep flogging ideas that for the moment may have lost purchase? Or see if something less conservative is to voters’ current taste?

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The answer depends on why the politician providing it got into politics.

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If you like dealing with people and fancy a career in government, you’ll try to figure out what menu a potential majority of voters would like and offer it to them. (If there are lots of competing parties, a plurality is all you need.)

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Purely transactional politics of this sort aren’t quite as immoral as they sound. We’re a democracy, after all. The people are supposed to get what they want. The whole people hardly ever does: few policies will please literally everyone. Pleasing some of the people some of the time may be all that’s possible. But members of successful electoral coalitions may get many of the things they want.

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There’s also the argument that countries need to change governments every so often, so responsible parties really do have an obligation to do what’s necessary to get into office, presumably by sailing closer to the prevailing electoral winds than they like. As the Carney government evolves, it’s clear the identity politics of the Trudeau years have not been swept from the stables, as they almost certainly would have been had the Conservatives won the 2025 election. Their failure to turf the Liberals becomes more and more costly the longer this undergrowth lasts.

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The alternative political approach is to hold fast to things you believe in, keep fighting even when your ideas fall from favour and try to get people to support what’s right for the country rather than whatever government largesse may be to their own temporary benefit. As Margaret Thatcher herself told the Fraser Institute in Toronto in 1993: “I find, as I have been interviewed in Canada … that all commentators seem to regard one as something of a phenomenon because one set out in politics with convictions. They don’t quite understand that. They say ‘Well, here we have pragmatism.’ To this I say, if you are embarking on a great voyage across the oceans, you have to have some stars to steer by, and the stars have to be constant. It’s no good steering by shooting stars.”