Labour’s Betrayal: Thatcher’s Children Wear Red Roses

Thatcher’s Children: The Metamorphosis of Labour

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from man to pig again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” —George Orwell, Animal Farm

In British politics today, Orwell’s warning resonates with chilling precision. Starmer’s Betrayal: Thatcherism in Disguise…

We warned this would happen. We laid it out plainly—Starmer’s Labour is a project of restoration, not transformation. Restoration of elite control, of corporate dominance, of the Labour Party as an obedient servant to power. Chomsky saw it clearly, describing Starmer as the man tasked with neutralising the last remnants of a Labour movement that once dared to represent its working-class base. Corbyn’s Labour, with its 2017 manifesto that terrified the establishment, had to be crushed. Starmer was the executioner.

Now, in his own words, he embraces his true political lineage: Thatcherism. Writing in The Times, Starmer declares war on regulation, calling it “Japanese knotweed” strangling the economy. He pledges to hack it back, stripping away the protections that stand between ordinary people and corporate exploitation. He attacks government watchdogs, denounces “vexatious legal challenges,” and champions a “supply-side revolution”—the same neoliberal dogma that Liz Truss briefly resurrected before crashing the economy.

This isn’t mere blasphemy—it’s betrayal, a deliberate shoving of our collective memory of Thatcherism down the memory hole.

Weapons of Mass Destruction

Before he rewrites the history books and his acolytes on social media copy and paste their alternative truths let’s understand a little of Thatcher’s Britain.

Thatcher’s Britain wasn’t about economic policy—it was systematic class warfare. Her government orchestrated the greatest theft in British history, transferring public wealth into private hands: utilities, council houses, even school playing fields went under the hammer. But statistics of privatisation tell only part of the story. Thatcherism’s real legacy lies written in the ruins: boarded-up high streets, decimated mining communities, families shattered by engineered unemployment.

The miners’ strike of 1984-85 revealed Thatcherism’s iron fist in its clearest form. Police transformed into a paramilitary force, turning mining villages into occupied territories. Families starved while their coal stocks were labelled “the enemy within.” This wasn’t merely industrial dispute—it was class warfare from above, designed to break not just a strike, but the very spine of working-class solidarity.

Unemployment became Thatcher’s weapon of choice. Three million people were rendered jobless at its peak, while generations of manufacturing heritage were dismantled. The hollow promise of a “service economy” replaced industrial dignity, leaving only permanent insecurity in its wake. The only boats in this rising tide that were lifted were the yachts of the super-rich.

She didn’t just fray the social fabric—she deliberately unpicked it. The gap between rich and poor became a chasm, then an abyss. While the City of London boomed, industrial heartlands rotted. This wasn’t accidental; it was architectural. Thatcher’s project never aimed to create wealth—it sought to redistribute it upward, transforming Britain from a society of people into a marketplace of consumers.

Labour’s Metamorphosis

As Chomsky declared Chomsky of Starmer and his ‘raison d’être’:

“Starmer is carrying it forward, he’s returning the Labour Party to a party that’s reliably obedient to power. It’s very important to continue the elite program, pretty much across the spectrum, to destroy Corbyn and everything he stood for.

It was intolerable to the elite British opinion that there should be a Labour Party that actually responds to its constituents, a Labour party that is concerned with the interests of working people and works for their benefit.

That pursues the policies that won a Labour majority in 2017, terrifying the establishment, so that has to be killed.

It was killed with lots of fakery about antisemitism, deplorable attacks, others and Keith Starmer is carrying it forward.

“He’s returning the Labour Party to a party that’s reliably obedient to power, that will be Thatcher-lite in the style of Tony Blair and that won’t ruffle the feathers of either the United States or anyone who’s important in Britain”.

Now, in a twist that would make Orwell weep, Labour channels Thatcher’s ghost. Starmer’s metaphor of regulation as “Japanese knotweed” isn’t just rhetoric—it’s a manifesto. When Reeves champions deregulation and “fiscal responsibility,” she ventriloquises Thatcher, offering a genteel face on the same brutal logic.

Every “regulatory weed” Starmer targets grew from soil soaked with the lessons of deregulation’s disasters: the 2008 financial crash, Grenfell Tower’s inferno, our rivers transformed into open sewers. Yet his government speaks of “supply-side revolution” as if we hadn’t lived through its consequences, wrapping austerity in responsibility’s clothes, privatisation in efficiency’s rhetoric.

The Hollow Shell

What remains is Labour’s empty husk, its socialist heart replaced by a technocratic operating system. Rather than transforming an economic order that has produced record inequality and environmental devastation, it offers mere management—better optics, smoother rhetoric, same system.
This government had choices. With its mandate, it could have invested in people, jobs, and skills. It could have built a new city for the millennium, kindling hope and aspiration as Attlee once did. Instead, it traded its soul for corporate silver and BlackRock’s approval in their globalist conquest.

The tragedy isn’t just Labour’s abandoned mission—it’s that this betrayal comes when transformative politics is desperately needed. As climate crisis looms, as inequality soars, as young people face permanent precarity, we’re offered not change but restoration, not hope but managed decline.

The Final Transformation

As Thatcher’s children don red roses, Orwell’s warning becomes our reality. The faces change, but the system endures. In Westminster’s farmyard, Labour and Tory alike serve the same corporate masters—the pigs indistinguishable from the men they replaced.

Paul Knaggs

Editor, founder, Labour Heartlands, Citizen journalist. 𝙁𝙧𝙚𝙚𝙗𝙤𝙧𝙣 𝙀𝙣𝙜𝙡𝙞𝙨𝙝 𝙍𝙖𝙙𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡 𝙎𝙤𝙘𝙞𝙖𝙡𝙞𝙨𝙩. Fighting a constant struggle with dyslexia that’s overcome with a burning desire to speak out against the corrupt political system and the social injustices it creates. Advocate for Free speech and open, accountable, democracy. #GTTO