The irony of Laura Kuenssberg presenting cheap flights, mobile phones and online shopping as some kind of fair exchange for forty years of neoliberalism, privatisation and globalisation is hard to miss. Britain didn’t go wrong because we lacked mobile phones and online shopping. We went wrong because we sold the country off. I’ll call out Burnham as quickly as any other politician when he deserves it. But on this, he’s right: Britain took a wrecking ball to itself in the 1980s. Power was centralised, industry hollowed out, public assets sold off and whole communities were left carrying the bill for decades. He could have added that the same economic model marched straight through the Blair years and every government that followed. That would have been the full truth. Instead Kuenssberg reaches for the establishment’s oldest response to decline: shut up and eat your gruel, you don’t know how lucky you are. “But we got cheap flights, mobile phones, home working and online shopping.” That is a spectacularly thin defence of forty years of economic vandalism. A cheaper holiday and next-day delivery are no compensation for selling off council housing, privatising the utilities, closing industry and handing essential infrastructure to shareholders. And those mobile phones rather prove the point. Britain consumes them, but doesn't make them. The model became brutally simple: shift manufacturing to Asia and India where production is cheaper, import the finished goods, and let retailers squeeze the maximum margin from the difference. We kept the shopping. We exported the factories, the apprenticeships, the skilled jobs and much of the productive wealth that went with them. The bitter irony is that British science helped lay the foundations of the communications revolution, yet Britain surrendered much of the productive capacity that could have turned innovation into skilled employment, exports and national wealth. We became very good at buying what other countries make. Cheap flights weren’t invented by Thatcherism either. Freddie Laker was flying passengers cheaply across the Atlantic in the 1970s. And online shopping may be convenient, but convenience does not replace the wages, shops and local economies lost when high streets are hollowed out. A mobile phone is a consumer product. A council house is security. Cheap flights are convenient. Publicly owned energy is economic power. Online shopping saves an afternoon. Ownership decides who receives the wealth for generations. Those things are not remotely equivalent. Meanwhile, we sold off the family silver, squandered the great windfall of North Sea oil and gas, and built an economy of soaring rents, grotesque inequality and household bills that would once have caused a political revolt. Selling off the country’s assets and running essential services for private profit was never a recipe for making the majority richer. Britain remains one of the richest countries on Earth. So if that wealth isn’t showing up in secure homes, decent wages, affordable energy, functioning public services and a better life for the working class, where exactly is it going? Someone is taking the cream. Everyone else gets the gruel, the bill, and then a lecture about living within their means. We know the disease because we live with the symptoms every day. The question Burnham now has to answer is the only one that matters: where is the cure? Where is the vision to rebuild public ownership, council housing, secure work and an economy that serves the country rather than strips it for parts?