Keir Starmer is looking more like a Tory but does he care?

It is unlikely he would have made the remarks he made recently about Margaret Thatcher to the people he met on those visits.

A quick recap.

In a column in the Daily Telegraph, the UK Labour leader said Thatcher effected “meaningful change”, helped free the UK from a "stupor" and set loose the UK's natural entrepreneurialism.

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What the Labour leader says in a column targeted at Daily Telegraph readers is not necessarily what he will say to working class voters in Glasgow.

Margaret Thatcher was obviously popular with many people, she wouldn’t have won three elections otherwise.

Many people did well out of the Thatcher years and what she laid the foundations for.

Keir Starmer wants the support of those people and the modern-day equivalent of those people to ensure he becomes Prime Minister after the next election, and he is unashamedly pursuing them.

But with his comments, he risks alienating what would once have been termed ‘traditional’ Labour voters.

It is a risk he is prepared to take.

Previously he said: “ If that sounds conservative, then let me tell you: I don’t care.”

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It could be argued he is taking a section of the electorate who desperately want the Tories out for granted.

Warning: That didn’t work out too well in the past.

For Starmer to praise Thatcher, even with the caveat he didn’t agree with her, ignores the massive impact her years in power had on many parts of the country.

In Glasgow, it can be argued that many of the most stubborn problems facing people can be traced back to the days of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister.

Glasgow City Council has just this month declared a housing emergency.

This is multi-faceted and has been made worse by the number of asylum seekers not given the support they need.

The main problem, however, is there is not enough social housing for those who want it or need it, whether they have always lived here or newly arrived.

When the council transferred its housing stock to GHA more than 20 years ago, much of the ex-council homes were in poor condition and had to be demolished.

Before that, the best council housing was sold off under Thatcher’s ‘right to buy’ and not replaced.

Right to buy disincentivised social house building.

The city’s drugs deaths crisis has been well publicised and no more so than in the pages of this newspaper.

Again, the heroin epidemic can be traced back to the early 1980s, when a generation of young people succumbed to a drug that would ruin their lives and the lives of their families.

During that time heroin ripped through working class housing schemes where unemployment was rife and despair ever-present as young people saw the opportunities afforded to previous generations disappear.

Glasgow has a well-documented lower than average life expectancy.

It’s also true people in the city have a lower than average healthy life expectancy.

That means people here are more likely to get a serious illness at an earlier stage than others, often during their working age, meaning they have to give up work in their 50s or early 60s.

Again, during the 1980s there was an explosion of people on long-term sickness benefits as folk with hitherto manageable conditions struggled to get back into work after redundancy.

It led to worsening health and working lives cut short.

The poverty of that era endured and was passed down generations as did the accompanying poverty-related ill health in a vicious circle many people struggled to escape.

Of course, it may be too simple to say that all these problems are solely the fault of Margaret Thatcher and her governments alone.

But it can be argued that her 11 years in Downing Street were instrumental in creating conditions to allow these problems to explode in the way they did, causing so much damage that the repercussions are felt more than 30 years after she left Downing Street.

Keir Starmer will have his reasons for saying what he said about Thatcher and some people will agree with him.

If her legacy, in terms of unleashing entrepreneurialism, is still alive today, then so too is the suffering among those where entire communities were abandoned.

Starmer seems to have decided that highlighting the positives some people take from Thatcher’s legacy will serve him better than focussing on the devastation.

It has probably made life a little bit more uncomfortable for Labour activists in Scotland trying to sell him as the next Prime Minister on the doorsteps.

If Thatcher is still revered among the Telegraph readers Keir Starmer wants to woo, she is still reviled by many in places like Glasgow, who will find the Labour leader's comments hard to stomach.

Perception is important in politics and it looks like Starmer is closer to the those Telegraph readers than working class Scots.