The spectre of price controls is back to spook Sunak – and Thatcherite myths won’t save him
E ven if you don’t call it “price control” (and Downing Street would prefer that you don’t), asking supermarkets to limit the cost of basic goods is an extraordinary thing for a Conservative government to contemplate.
It may not happen. If it does, it will be voluntary, say ministers – just a nudge to retailers, so they keep the cost of living down. Definitely not the sort of thing that was last attempted 50 years ago, under a weak Tory prime minister struggling to control inflation, while grappling with strikes and sliding towards election defeat. Nothing like that at all.
Rishi Sunak is unlike Ted Heath in all the ways that Britain in 2023 and 1973 are different places. The comparison reveals little, except for a familiar neurosis among those Tory MPs who will be quick to conjure spectres from the 70s if Whitehall really does start setting the price of milk.
There is no decade more ghastly in the Conservative imagination than the one that ended with Margaret Thatcher’s election victory. It is inscribed in party folklore as a parable of national decline, written by a bloated state to dictation from Bolshevik trade unions. (Heath’s eagerness for Britain to join the European Economic Community confirms his villainy.) The picture is made darker so the light of redemption in the 80s, by way of privatisation, deregulation and tax cuts, may shine brighter.
Every party-political narrative is a myth made from half-truth and fantasy. The Conservative morality tale of Thatcherism as national liberation from suffocation by socialism is no different. The most important aspect of the story, given its ongoing salience in Tory ideology, is how long ago it all happened.
Rishi Sunak was not yet born when Thatcher entered Downing Street. As
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