Margaret Thatcher wouldn't think much of Keir Starmer's stance on private school fees – John McLellan

Labour’s apparent pitch of ‘the SNP without independence’ and ‘Tories without the toffs’ is unlikely to lead to great electoral success in Scotland

Well heavens to Betsy, a Labour leader praising Margaret Thatcher? Whatever next? Will Nicola Sturgeon admit she didn’t really believe independence was possible but didn’t have a better idea, or Boris Johnson that backing Brexit was a personal punt?

Doubtful to say the least, but with Sir Keir Starmer writing in the Sunday Telegraph that Lady Thatcher “sought to drag Britain out of its stupor by setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism”, anything is possible. With an instant left-wing pile-on, he was quick to insist he was just pointing out she had a clear vision and a plan, not that he agreed with it, but likening an era in which Labour held power for all but three years out of 15 as a period of paralysis is hardly the most ringing endorsement of his party’s history in power, even if he is right.

In prefixing his comment with an observation “that politics must act in service of the British people”, this was an acceptance that the market reforms, the denationalisation, the closure of inefficient state-owned industries and the creation of a property-owning, shareholding democracy was a service.

Margaret Thatcher pictured after being elected as Conservative leader in 1975 (Picture: Hilaria McCarthy/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Iraq aside, it was both the abandonment of mass nationalisation and the maintenance of a Conservative economic programme in 1997 which earned Tony Blair the undying enmity of the hard left, but was also the platform for three successive election victories. Had it not been for Gordon Brown’s dithering after he succeeded in 2007, it could easily have been four. Moderate Labour supporters must therefore wonder how the party managed to unlearn the lessons of the 90s, and make such dramatic gestures from their leader necessary to sway wavering Conservative voters.

But one difference between Mr Blair and Sir Keir ─ and perhaps the proximity in time helped ─ is that Labour’s most successful Prime Minister would have been savvy enough not to write that sentence in a Conservative-supporting newspaper, even if, as is alleged, encouraged to do so by one of the architects of New Labour, Lord Mandelson.

No one under 62 was old enough to vote in the 1979 election which brought Margaret Thatcher to power, but socialists and nationalists have needed to keep her memory alive as the bogeywoman with whom to scare the children and young followers. Humza Yousaf, aged four when she resigned in 1989, was quick out the blocks on social media. “Starmer praising Thatcher is an insult to those communities in Scotland, and across the UK, who still bear the scars of her disastrous policies,” he wrote, presumably not having spent much time in Bilston or up to speed on the much-needed housing plans for the former Monktonhall Colliery site. If communities are indeed still “scarred” by decisions taken nearly 40 years ago, it doesn’t reflect well on the party which has controlled Scotland for the past 16. Nor would his Green party partners be that keen on coking coal from Polkemmet keeping the Ravenscraig steelworks fired up.

It's ironic too, that the collapse of mass industrial employment and the gradual weakening of Labour’s hold on workers, through the unions, were the foundations of the transformation of the SNP from a fringe party enjoying occasional success to total domination of Labour’s old fiefdoms.

Despite Labour’s gains in Scotland, and its spectacular success at the Rutherglen by-election, it’s still quite difficult to pin down exactly what the party under Sir Keir and Anas Sarwar represents. Call it fence-sitting, compromise, or just paralysis, North Sea oil and gas and gender recognition reform are just two key issues where what passes for Scottish Labour’s positions is hard to tell. A pitch of “we’re the same as the SNP, just without the independence stuff”, and “Tories without the toffs” won’t be enough to properly knock nationalists off their pedestal.

The Starmer article highlighted Blair, Thatcher and Clement Atlee as politicians with a plan and, while not wanting to reveal too much to the enemy is understandable, it’s hard for voters to get excited about a vision they can’t see or share. The only firm policy the party seems keen to promote is ironically one which could prove the undoing of, until recently, the only Labour MP in Scotland, Ian Murray in Edinburgh South: the assault on private schools by imposing VAT on fees.

Affecting some 25 per cent of all Edinburgh families, the impact on his constituency could be huge. A recent survey for the Scottish Council of Independent Schools revealed 55 per cent of parents will struggle to pay the fees immediately or soon after the extra 20 per cent is charged, which means children pulled out of schools. Many more parents with children at state primaries who would have considered a private secondary will no longer do so. The demand on state schools will be overwhelming, particularly in Mr Murray’s constituency where all secondaries are either over or approaching capacity.

Dominated by comfortable suburbs like Morningside, Merchiston and The Grange, middle-class voters fearful of the impact of independence have voted tactically to keep the SNP at bay, but despite a commonly held view that it includes most of the constituency’s natural Conservatives, a glance at the recent general election results shows the Conservative vote has held up reasonably well. Until the post-referendum buyers’ remorse election of 2015, the seat was a Lib Dem target and in 2010 Mr Murray only won by 316 votes. With the danger of independence receding, there is a chance the private school VAT plan would put off enough voters to turn the seat into a four-way marginal.

VAT on school fees is an attack on the very aspiration which Lady Thatcher did so much to foster, and at the dawn of the Conservative revolution in 1979, one unexpected casualty was her ardent supporter Teddy Taylor, in Cathcart. How bitter it would be for Mr Murray if his own party’s failure to grasp that aspiration doesn’t stop at entrepreneurship was responsible for him following suit.