The right are having an absolute hissy fit about Andy Burnham's statement that "Britain took a series of wrong-turns in the 1980s".

One of the biggest tantrums came from the unelected peer David Frost. You know, the chief negotiator on Britain's catastrophically botched Brexit deal with the EU.

Frost claimed that anyone who thinks mistakes were made by the Thatcher government "simply does not understand what happened in Britain's recent history".

Here's some actual British history for you:

The Thatcher government flogged off England's water boards for an absolutely tiny fraction of their true value, and used public cash to clear all their debts before they did it.

Over the following decades the privatisation profiteers degraded the infrastructure to maximise profits; constructed zero new reservoirs despite England's growing population; dramatically hiked prices; extracted £65 billion in shareholder dividends; paid out obscene executive salaries and bonuses; racked up £72 billion in debts; and pumped hundreds of billions of litres of raw sewage into our rivers and coastal waters, because it's more profitable to do that, than to build and maintain adequate sewage treatment facilities.

The Thatcher government privatised UK energy generation and transmission.

This allowed private energy profiteers to gobble up the gains from Britain's (Scotland's) one-off North Sea oil and gas bonanza. Unlike Norway, which used their North Sea oil and gas wealth to build the world's richest Sovereign Wealth Fund (not bad for a country with a population about the same as Scotland's).

The Tory sell-off of Britain's fleet of nuclear reactors was even worse. The private profiteers who bought it for a fraction of its real value realised that they'd make more profit by selling it on to the government of France, than by running it themselves.

Hence, the government of France now owns and operates the UK's nuclear reactors, and Britain privatised away its own nuclear expertise to such an extent that the UK government now needs to bribe the governments of France and China to build our new nuclear plants for us!

The Thatcher government flogged off millions of units of social housing for a fraction of their true value (are we spotting the pattern yet?) and refused to invest in building replacements, with promises that destruction of the public housing sector would incentivise private house building.

The private house building boom didn't happen, because private developers had no real incentive to increase supply. It's simply easier and more profitable to restrict supply and rely on massive private lending to inflate property values, than to build loads of new houses.

By the 2010s British house-building had slumped to its lowest level since the 1920s, and some 40% of former council houses were being used for private profit extraction purposes by idle property-hoarders.

The Thatcher government deregulated the financial markets, which created a load of ever bigger economic crises, until basically the entire banking system collapsed into insolvency in 2008.

Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling decided to use unprecedented amounts of public cash to bail out the reckless gamblers, rather than allowing them to go bust, then Thatcher's ideological successors decided to use the fallout from the financial crisis as an excuse to launch all-out assaults on wages; public services; and the social security system, delivering the longest sustained stagnation in wages and living standards in British history.

Thatcherite de-industrialisation was bad enough, but it was severely exacerbated by the Tories' radical-right small state agenda, which left towns and cities across the UK to degenerate into blighted post-industrial wastelands.

Thatcher centralised political power in Westminster, and economic power in the city of London.

There's a reason that London and the Home Counties have been booming, while other regions of the UK have been badly left behind, and that reason is the deliberate centralisation of political and economic power in London.

Andy Burnham is absolutely right that Britain took a series of wrong turns in the 1980s, and right-wingers are utterly delusional if they think that the solution to Britain's economic woes is even more Thatcherite privatisation; de-industrialisation; financial deregulation; and centralisation of political and economic power. Not least because the UK has already flogged off so much more of the public realm than any other comparable developed economy. There's hardly anything left to sell off to the privatisation profiteers.

The right flogged off the family silver for pennies; watched the privatisation profiteers run down the infrastructure and bleed the country dry; and somehow consider this ideological bin fire a roaring success story that's beyond critique!

Even after their financial deregulations resulted in the 2008 economic meltdown; even after the government of France ended up owning our nuclear power systems; even after their social housing sell-off delivered the precise opposite of what they claimed it would; even when their centralisation of political and economic power created economic dead zones across the rest of the country; even when multiple privatised water companies are drowning in the unpayable debts they racked up, and teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.

They're such blind ideological fanatics that they don't just pretend that this is all a roaring success story; they claim that anyone who even dares say that 'some mistakes were made' is 'ignorant of British history'!