Strangely, it can be harder to break with a bi-partisan policy than one of your own. In the 1970s,
both main parties usually adhered to the belief that inflation must be held down by “prices and incomes policies”. (Wage and Price Controls - Trudeau and Stanfield 1974 - Transatlanticist Bureaucrats even then)
Government, business and trade unions, assisted by a specially created board of worthies, would adjudicate how people’s wages should be adjusted in the light of price rises.
This approach did nothing to stop inflation and handed political and industrial power to often militant trade union leaders. Mrs Thatcher understood, at least from 1974, what nonsense it was. She began to advocate quite different policies, such as “monetarism” and reform of trade union law, but she moved cautiously to avoid blaspheming against the bipartisan pieties of the age. The strikes of the Winter of Discontent of 1978-9 convinced enough voters that her new approach was right.
The equivalent bipartisan nonsense of today is not strictly economic, although it has dire economic effects. It
is net zero, (Enter Mark Carney) first legislated for by
Ed Miliband’s Climate Change Act of 2008. With the support of all but five Conservatives (the most important Tory to oppose it was Peter, now Lord, Lilley), it passed. Mr Miliband then set the 2050 target of reducing by 80 per cent the UK’s carbon emissions in excess of their 1990 level.
In 2019, the Conservative government, led by Theresa May, hardened that target to 100 per cent.