We’re all social democrats now as Rishi Sunak joins the global rush to dump Thatcherite verities

theguardian.com:

Rishi Sunak has discovered the power of social democracy. His ambitious and far-reaching package to address the cost of living crisis is in social democracy’s best traditions – a readiness to tax windfall profits that have resulted from nothing more than unearned and unexpected good luck, borrowing on top and then directing the proceeds to alleviate a fall in living standards, especially among the poorest and most vulnerable, which they did nothing to deserve.

It is, as that titan of Tory thinking Richard Drax MP pronounced, another step towards big state socialism and the sooner the government abandons such alien ideas, echoed the Daily Mail, the better. But they work, are morally and socially right and are popular.

It is a sea change, happening in varying forms across all western democracies. Mr Sunak may protest that he remains a tax-cutting chancellor committed to Thatcherite small-state principles but, whatever else, he is intelligent. It can’t have escaped his attention that all this government’s successes come from doing the opposite – the furlough scheme, the clever procurement process encouraging vaccine development and now seriously addressing the cost of living crisis. “Conservative” reactions in all these instances were useless – and would have led to political dead-ends.

Equally, when attending the IMF and World Bank meetings or a G7 summit, he will have observed that, internationally, there is no political appetite nor intellectual weight behind Thatcherite doctrines. In matters of security, climate change, dealing with an ageing society, addressing inequality, public health or innovation, the right, especially in Britain, has no answers beyond the barren and child-like cries for tax cuts and deregulation. In