No Such Thing As Society

by Andy McSmith

  Sugar diversified by striking a deal with Rupert Murdoch to construct the dishes needed to receive satellite television, but by the end of the 1980s Amstrad’s rapid growth had gone into reverse. Misfortune stimulated Sugar’s interest in politics. Noticing that Labour was proposing to increase tax for the highest paid, whereas the Conservatives proposed to remove all legal protection from the wages of the lowest paid, he came out openly for the Conservatives. He then heard that an up-and-coming Labour politician named Gordon Brown had said that businessmen who were backing the Tories had prospered in the recession while others suffered. This produced a furious riposte, which filled an entire page of the Sun:

  I don’t know who Gordon Brown is. Excuse my ignorance, but I don’t. Whoever he is, he has not done his homework . . . How he has the audacity to say that Amstrad, or Alan Sugar, has flourished in the recession is a complete mystery to me . . . the value of my shares collapsed from £500 million to £100 million more or less overnight. The salary I have been taking in the company is pretty meagre – about £170,000 . . . So this talk that I have prospered in the middle of recession is total nonsense.8

  Years later, after he had discovered who Gordon Brown was, he switched his support to the Labour Party and Brown awarded him a peerage.

  The business community forgave the government for piloting them into recession and continued to support the Conservatives, if only for lack of a suitable alternative, but other sections of society were not so forgiving. Though Mrs Thatcher was never again as unpopular as she had been in 1981, the reforming zeal that she brought back from the 1987 election made her new enemies among middle-class professionals, notably those who worked in health or education, as she tried to create a better managed NHS, restore traditional methods of teaching in schools and cut the cost of higher education, ending the old distinction between universities and polytechnics. She had never been liked by what could broadly be called the intelligentsia. Oxford University had already let Mrs Thatcher know what it thought of her in a famous incident in January 1985 when dons voted by 738 to 319 not to award her an honorary degree, making her the first Oxford-educated prime minister since the Second World War not to receive the honour. This rejection hurt her. In one rare, reflective moment she even thought that she may have brought it upon herself. ‘Many distinguished academics thought that Thatcherism in education meant a philistine subordination of scholarship to the immediate requirements of vocational training,’ she lamented, while insisting that actually it was ‘no part of my kind of Thatcherism’.9

  Her first priority on returning to office in 1987 was to attack what she saw as the rot in the state education system, especially the new ‘child-centred’ teaching techniques, the emphasis on stirring children’s imaginations rather than making them learn facts, and the blurring of subjects into wider entities like ‘humanities’. She believed that too many children were leaving school without a proper grasp of reading, writing and arithmetic. She was convinced, on slim evidence, that they were being indoctrinated by left-wing teachers. She told the 1987 Conservative annual conference:

  Too often, our children don’t get the education they need – the education they deserve. In the inner cities, where youngsters must have a decent education if they are to have a better future, that opportunity is all too often snatched from them by hard left education authorities and extremist teachers. Children who need to be able to count and multiply are learning anti-racist mathematics – whatever that may be. Children who need to be able to express themselves in clear English are being taught political slogans.10

  What she would really have liked to do was take schools out of the control of local authorities altogether so that each could run itself like an independent school. The government would issue parents with means-tested vouchers with which to buy places for their children, thereby creating a lively market in education which, she assumed, would drive up teaching standards. However, after her old mentor, Sir Keith Joseph, retired from the cabinet in May 1986, she was never able to find another education secretary who agreed with this idea. Joseph’s successor, Kenneth Baker, was not greatly interested in policy detail, but had a suave persuasiveness, which convinced her that once there was a policy, Baker was the man to sell it to the public. It was during his tenure that the state education system underwent the greatest upheaval since the introduction of comprehensives. The national curriculum, the Schools Examination, inset days, grant-maintained schools run directly by the Department of Education and other innovations all date from Baker’s time as education secretary. However, Baker – who complained in his memoirs about being surrounded by officials who were ‘rooted in “progressive” orthodoxies, in egalitarianism and in the comprehensive school system’11 – took the advice of these same officials far too compliantly for Thatcher’s taste. He was, for instance, content to accept recommendations from a History Working Group that emphasized enquiry and interpretation; to Thatcher, learning history was about facts and dates.

  In this short period, the intrigue and political manoeuvring that was part of everyday life in Thatcher’s cabinet centred on a man named John Moore, an ambitious Thatcherite whom she promoted in 1987 to replace Norman Fowler as secretary of state for health and social security. Moore was strikingly good looking, physically fit and had an interesting biography. His father was a factory worker turned publican. He had lived for a time in the USA, had an American wife and brought American corporate culture to the Commons. Nicholas Ridley, who knew Thatcher well, wrote (after she had lost her favourite, Cecil Parkinson, who was felled by a sex scandal), ‘her second choice of heir apparent was John Moore’.12 Inevitably, in this position Moore attracted dangerous enemies, some of whom, including the future prime minister John Major, wanted him out of the way so their own ambitions could be fulfilled, and others who were just plain jealous. ‘Are you aglow with excitement at the prospect of actually setting eyes on this legendary creature?’ Alan Clark heard a fellow Tory MP say. In his diary, Clark reflected: ‘Why is everyone so beastly? John was literally golden . . . He has gold kiss curls like a babyfood ad. He is athletic, he “trains” . . . ’ Clark’s verdict was that Moore was ‘shallow but amiable’.13

  During his short period of ascendancy, Moore fired up Thatcher with the idea that all the ills of the NHS could be cured by injecting a powerful dose of free-market discipline. The first move was to induce people to buy private health care by making it partially tax deductible, which Moore introduced against resistance from the Treasury. Beyond that, he suggested two possibilities: either abolish the NHS and switch to universal health insurance, or retain the NHS but overhaul it to create an internal market. The latter idea had already been worked on by various think tanks and appealed to Thatcher as the less politically dangerous.

  The outcome was a reorganization that separated the ‘purchaser’ from the ‘provider’ within the NHS’ new ‘internal market’. The main ‘purchasers’ were GP practices, which were allocated budgets that they used to ‘buy’ hospital care for their patients. The hospitals became self-governing trusts, selling their services to GP practices and other primary care organizations. There was a veritable explosion in the number and the pay of NHS managers, as every trust needed its separate accounts department, personnel department, and so on. In five years, from 1985–91, the cost of administering the NHS rose, after inflation had been taken into account, by 23 per cent14 while the number of NHS managers multiplied from 510 to 12,420. Their combined salary bill rose from £25.7m to £383.8m. In that period, the number of nurses fell by 20,000 (though that was partly the result of nurses having their jobs redesignated). By the turn of the decade, the best-paid NHS managers were on six-figure salaries.

  John Moore did not survive in office long enough to see these reforms to fruition. The strain of being heir apparent, and of facing the formidable Robin Cook, in the Commons was too much. He lost his voice, in what seems to have been a sympathetic illness, and had his department cut in half before he was dropped from
the cabinet. The new health secretary, appointed in May 1988, was the more robust Kenneth Clarke. He was no Thatcherite. She would have kept him out of the government if she felt she could, but in her mind she bracketed him and Peter Walker as more dangerous outside than in. She also respected Clarke’s skills as a communicator, which were sorely needed because, after so many years in which the government had feasted on privatization, the public suspected that all these separate NHS trusts were being set up with a view to selling them to private interests, a suspicion that the Labour Party assiduously encouraged. Clarke also had to cope with a pay dispute with NHS ambulance drivers, a rare example of a strike during which public opinion was on the side of the strikers throughout.

  Aided by the clouds of political dust thrown up by the health reforms, the Labour Party’s political fortunes picked up in 1989, after the previous year’s low, and it began to score convincing wins in parliamentary by-elections. However, electoral success was not accompanied by any revival of intellectual confidence. The party threw overboard almost the entire political programme on which it had fought two general elections, conceding so much political ground to its opponents that, over time, it was difficult to tell what separated the two main parties. The first symbolic move was for Labour to abandon the policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament that it had adopted in a blaze of publicity at the start of the decade. Neil Kinnock, who had been a unilateralist all his political life, announced a change of mind during 1988, then apparently reneged when the giant TGWU threatened to give John Prescott its block vote in the deputy leadership contest. However, he returned to the fray and put a resolution to the 1988 party conference, which was only narrowly defeated. The unilateralist policy was dropped a year later.

  Labour’s next move was to cull many policy documents, removing almost anything that might increase public spending. Before the 1987 general election, Conservative researchers had gone through Labour policy documents adding up what they reckoned the many pledges would cost, and came up with a figure of £35 billion, which would have represented a substantial rise in taxes. Neil Kinnock put the powerful combination of John Smith and Gordon Brown in charge of the opposition Treasury team. Brown had just been elected the youngest member of the shadow cabinet, only four years after entering Parliament, and performed so effectively that the next year he topped the poll; in 1989 he was promoted to the trade and industry portfolio. In the comprehensive policy review that reached its first set of conclusions in 1989, only two clear spending commitments remained, which were to increase state pensions and child benefit. They stayed because Robin Cook, whose brief covered social security, had fought successfully for their inclusion. There was a rule, known as ‘Beckett’s Law’ – so named after Margaret Beckett, who had replaced Brown in the treasury team – that any other bid for public money would be dealt with ‘as resources allow’. Unfortunately for Labour, the two surviving commitments were expensive, and were used effectively and ruthlessly by the Conservatives during the 1992 election to convince the public that Labour was still the party of high tax. It was this experience that drove Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to make the extraordinary promise in 1997 that for two years they would respect every departmental spending limit left behind by the Conservatives.

  Another sign that the Labour Party was breaking from its roots as the political wing of the trade union movement was its renunciation of the trade union closed shop. In the early 1980s, Labour had successively committed to repealing each new piece of trade union legislation introduced by the Conservatives; but since then the mining and print unions had been broken, and others had been weakened. It was illegal under European law to make union membership a condition of employment. As early as August 1981, three former British Rail employees had won a £145,000 compensation award in a European court for being dismissed for not belonging to a union. This was not a problem for Labour then, because until 1983 the party was committed to pulling Britain out of the EU, but that policy had been dropped and Labour was now pro-EU.

  In 1988, Tony Blair was elected to the shadow cabinet, supplanting Gordon Brown as its youngest member. He was first made energy spokesman, to deal with the last great privatization, of the electricity industry, then in 1989 replaced Michael Meacher as shadow employment secretary. In one of his first Commons appearances in this new role, Blair was defending the new Social Charter proposed by the European Commission to protect employment rights across the EU, when a Tory MP interrupted to ask the short, lethal question – did Blair support the clause in the charter that protected a worker’s right not to join a union? Blair could only splutter: ‘If it has that meaning, it also has the meaning that one has a right to be a member of a trade union.’15 Thus caught out, Blair acted with great speed. After consulting the two people whose advice he most trusted even then – Alastair Campbell of the Daily Mirror and Peter Mandelson – and after forewarning some key union leaders, he delivered a statement to his Sedgefield constituency party on 17 December, which he dressed up as a ‘clarification’. He announced that Labour was supporting the Social Charter in its entirety, including the clause protecting individual workers against the closed shop.16 Calling this a ‘clarification’ was at best disingenuous; it was one of Tony Blair’s first major contributions to the future direction of the Labour Party and, appropriately, it involved a break in the link with the unions.

  More than ten years before they came to power, it was clear that Gordon Brown and Tony Blair were going to be dominant figures in the Labour Party. As early as December 1984, only twenty months after they had first entered the Commons, the Tory MP Alan Clark, who was struggling to get an Employment Bill through Parliament against well-led opposition, noted the presence across the gangway of ‘two very bright boys called Brown and Blair’.17 They were then sharing an office in the crowded premises of the Palace of Westminster, helping to write one another’s speeches, and were so close that the Labour Party staff called them ‘Pushmepullyou’, after the two-headed llama in Doctor Dolittle (1967). Both were treated with suspicion that grew into hostility by the Bennite left and those in the Labour Party for whom being faithful to their principles mattered more than winning elections. Neil Kinnock was sensitive to criticism from this quarter. He reacted angrily to being accused of ‘selling out’ for the sake of office. Brown, Blair and those who supported them were not so easily put off course. In 1990, the Sunday Times columnist, Robert Harris, who was well-connected to the Kinnock brigade, used the word ‘careerist’ to describe them, not as an insult but in praise. He wrote: ‘What we are witnessing in the Labour party at the moment is something one had despaired of ever seeing again: the return of the careerist. If that sounds pejorative, it is not meant to be. Ambition for power is the purest and most honest motive in politics’.18 He named the four most prominent careerists – Jack Straw, Robin Cook, Gordon Brown and ‘little baby-boom face himself, Tony Blair’ – who happened to be the quartet who moved into the four most important positions in the Labour government seven years later. Harris’ insight into Labour’s future came from his very close friend, Peter Mandelson. It was widely assumed that Brown would be the next Labour leader but one, with Blair running his leadership election campaign.19 It was not until after the 1992 general election that anyone, except possibly Cherie Blair, thought that the younger and less experienced half of ‘Pushmepullyou’ might be the first into 10 Downing Street.

  Another change that came over the Labour Party during the Kinnock years, possibly the one that excited most comment at the time and has clung longest in the public perception of what came to be known as ‘New Labour’, was the dramatic improvement in the party’s handling of the mass media. It began from a very low base. During the 1983 election, the party’s full-time staff laboured under the crippling disadvantage that they were expected to campaign around a manifesto that their employers on the National Executive Committee vehemently opposed. The result was aptly described by Ken Livingstone as ‘the worst campaign of any major political party in a Wester
n democracy in the post-war world’.20 When the disparate factions of the party met again, after their defeat, the one thing they agreed upon was that party policy, whatever it might be, would have to be better presented next time around.

  Peter Mandelson became the party’s director of communications in October 1985, coincidentally on his thirty-second birthday. With his arrival, the quality of the party’s presentation took a giant leap. There were sympathetic professionals in advertising and public relations who had been willing for some time to offer their services for nothing, if only there had been someone to act as their point of contact. Soon after Mandelson had taken office, they formed a shadow agency, in which professions whose services commanded large salaries on the open market produced well-designed leaflets and logos. The traditional logo, depicting a torch, was ditched in favour of a red rose. The usual red backdrops at press conferences were replaced by a soft grey.

  Mandelson also enlisted the help of Philip Gould, who was the first to introduce to British politics the marketing tool known as ‘focus group research’. Previously, when political parties hired polling organizations it was to conduct conventional polls in which a thousand people or so were asked to give a yes or no answer to questions about political issues. These polls routinely produced the finding that health was the issue that people cared about most, and that they trusted Labour more than the Conservatives to run the NHS – and yet, they voted Conservative, which suggested that opinion polls were an imperfect guide to winning elections. Focus-group polling involved questioning fewer people, but doing it during a lengthy discussion monitored by a professional pollster, which gave a more detailed picture of what they really thought.