Politics is about symbolism as well as action: our leaders need to show as well as tell. So when Sir Keir Starmer recently removed a portrait of Lady Thatcher from his study in Downing Street, the story was newsworthy because of what it might mean. The prime minister knew that perfectly well. It was a decision which may not have been important, but which was also not unimportant.

Perhaps Starmer does not like the 2009 painting by Essex portraitist Richard Stone. Perhaps he saw it as an effort-free move to win approval from the left of the Labour Party. Perhaps, some Conservatives might imagine, he is uncomfortable under the Iron Lady’s seemingly withering stare. The timing of the portrait’s relocation, however, has a certain piquancy as it comes at a moment in politics when Starmer has arrived at a conclusion strikingly similar to the one Thatcher reached nearly 50 years ago, but to which his solution is almost diametrically opposite.

That sense of deep-seated and apparently overwhelming national malaise is powerfully reminiscent of the mood in Britain in the mid-1970s

“Broken Britain” has become a midwitted cliché over the past few years, but Starmer brought the theme to its zenith last week in his back-to-school speech in Downing Street’s rose garden. Reiterating the familiar message that the last government had left a “£22 billion black hole in the nation’s finances”, he argued that this was not merely a matter of money but that the financial shortfall was indicative of something more profound: “not just an economic black hole, a societal black hole”.

That sense of deep-seated and apparently overwhelming national malaise is powerfully reminiscent of the mood in Britain in the mid-1970s, when Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party. After the failure of the Heath government and two largely inconclusive general elections in 1974, a Labour administration with a majority of only three seats struggled against inflation, rising unemployment, widespread industrial action and ongoing violence in Northern Ireland.

The prime minister, Harold Wilson, not yet 60, looked exhausted and intellectually bankrupt, and across the political spectrum there was a demoralising feeling that nothing worked. That summer, the recently retired commander-in-chief of Allied Forces Northern Europe, General Sir Walter Walker, was quoted on the front page of the Evening Standard saying gloomily “Perhaps the country might choose rule by the gun in preference to anarchy”.

Thatcher came to the leadership of her party determined that the post-war economic and social consensus had failed and that Britain needed to change. She was certain of the prescription: freedom.

“Our problem is not that we have too little socialism. It is that we have too much,” she told the party conference in Blackpool in October 1975. “A man’s right to work as he will to spend what he earns to own property to have the State as servant and not as master these are the British inheritance. They are the essence of a free economy. And on that freedom all our other freedoms depend… we want a free economy, not only because it guarantees our liberties, but also because it is the best way of creating wealth and prosperity for the whole country.”

This was a dramatic but intoxicating and ambitious doctrine, which stressed responsibility, industry and self-sufficiency, but also hummed with a sense of optimism. The country was mired in crisis, certainly, and the road out of that crisis would be long and hard, but the resources to make that journey lay wholly within the hands of the people if given as much liberty as possible. Britain could do it.

Starmer’s plan could hardly be more different. Stripped of the lowbrow jargon of “the change I’m determined to deliver”, “difficult decisions”, “big asks” and “actions not words”, the prime minister’s speech showed that he thinks we need not less government but more. He pointed to Great British Energy, a publicly owned body which will enable the state to intervene in the energy market; and to a proposed National Wealth Fund which will collect and then distribute largesse on the state’s behalf, or “mobilise the UK’s deep pools of institutional capital” in the government’s framing.

There will be more powers for regulators to strengthen state supervision, and, of course, there will be higher taxes. Starmer and his chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, have been consistent in arguing, sometimes in veiled terms, for dirigisme, maintaining that more government involvement is not only more effective but somehow more virtuous.

The popularity of Boris Johnson’s contradictory 2019 election offering demonstrated that a constituency undoubtedly exists which will agree with Sir Keir Starmer. But it is a superficial and inadequate analysis of political trends to think that the current architecture of the British state needs just a little more attention and additional resources. The solution to the challenges in the NHS is not another £100 million or even £1 billion, it is the fundamental rethinking of capabilities, priorities and execution and the integration of revolutionary technology. Other public services will need equally radical approaches.

The underlying approach of the Labour government to Britain’s polycrisis is in some ways deeply conservative and conventional. Starmer believes that government simply needs to perform better than it has done, with earnest, serious-faced adults at the controls.

Thatcher’s prescription, adapted half a century later, may be much nearer the mark. She was right that freedom is an inherent good, but also that it is what drives a successful economy, on which everything else relies. Whether a new Conservative leader emerges with that zeal to trust the British people remains to be seen. At least Sir Keir Starmer will not have to feel Thatcher’s likeness looming over him as he goes about his government of service.