The Downing Street Years, 1979-1990

by Margaret Thatcher

  Malcolm Rifkind now also fell back with a vengeance on the old counterproductive tactic of proving his Scottish virility by posturing as Scotland’s defender against Thatcherism. In March 1990, John Major delivered his first budget. Coming on the eve of the introduction of the community charge in England and Wales, it doubled from £8,000 to £16,000 the amount of savings a person could have and still not lose entitlement to community charge benefit. This reflected the argument — with which I had much sympathy — that too great a squeeze was being exerted on those who had been prudent enough to put aside some savings. Malcolm Rifkind raised no objection when this was announced to Cabinet before the budget. Nor did he make any special demands for Scotland. But the announcement provoked an outcry in Scotland where the community charge had been introduced one year earlier and where the critics accordingly wanted the community charge benefit change backdated. Under fire, Malcolm did not stand by John Major’s decision. He now entered into heavily leaked discussions with me and John to have the change made retrospective for Scotland. Very reluctantly, I agreed that a special payment should be made to those concerned in Scotland from within the Scottish Office budget. Having damaged the reception of John’s skilfully conceived budget, Malcolm then went on to revel publicly in Scotland in his ‘victory’. It was suggested that he had only secured these changes by threatening resignation. He also told the press that I had fallen into line with his better judgement. This childish behaviour did the Conservative cause in Scotland great harm and prompted letters of protest from outraged Scottish Tories.

  In May he entered into a public row with the British Steel Corporation over the future of the Ravenscraig steel plant, which should have been a matter for BSC to decide on commercial grounds, and even went so far — I was told — as to ask Scottish Conservative back-benchers to vote for a Labour Early Day Motion in the House of Commons on the subject. At the Scottish Party Conference the week before Malcolm also made some delphic remarks which were interpreted as suggesting that devolution was back on the agenda in Scotland. He was reverting to type.

  The pressure on me to get rid of Michael Forsyth mounted during the summer of 1990. He himself was becoming depressed at the constant difficulties with Malcolm Rifkind and the unrelenting campaign pursued against him and his supporters. In August my office was flooded with letters from friends and opponents of Michael, obviously being geared up by their respective factions. By now it was clear that the opposition to him had enlisted the Scottish Tory Party establishment including Willie Whitelaw, George Younger and the senior members of the voluntary party. I had my own troubles. It had been a brave attempt to bring the Scottish Tory Party into the latter half of the twentieth century and offer leadership and vision to people who had become all too used to losing or — even worse — winning on their opponents’ terms. In October 1990 I promoted Michael Forsyth to be a Minister of State at the Scottish Office with extended duties and replaced him as Chairman with (Lord) Russell Sanderson who relinquished his ministerial job at the Scottish Office. His appointment was taken as a sign that the attempt to extend Thatcherism to Scotland had come to an end. This combination of the Left and the traditional establishment of the Party to rebuff Thatcherism in Scotland was a prelude to the formation of the same alliance to oust me as leader of the Conservative Party a few weeks later — although I did not know it at the time.

  The balance sheet of Thatcherism in Scotland is a lopsided one: economically positive but politically negative. After a decade of Thatcherism, Scotland had been economically transformed for the better. People moved in large numbers from the older declining industries such as steel and shipbuilding to new industries with a future such as electronics and finance. Almost all the economic statistics — productivity, inward investment, self-employment — showed a marked improvement. As a result, Scottish living standards reached an all-time high, rising by 30 per cent from 1981 to 1989, outperforming most of the English regions.

  A slower start was made on reducing dependency and encouraging ownership. As late as 1979 only a third of Scots owned their own home. By the time I had left office this had risen to over half — thanks in part to the ‘Right to Buy’ scheme. And we had begun to enable still more local authority tenants to become home owners through ‘Rents to Mortgages’.

  Yet however valuable socially those initiatives were, they had little political impact. The 1992 election showed that the fall in Tory support had been halted; it had yet to be reversed. Some part of this unpopularity must be attributed to the national question on which the Tories are seen as an English party and on which I myself was apparently seen as a quintessential English figure.

  About the second point I could — and I can — do nothing. I am what I am and I have no intention of wearing tartan camouflage. Nor do I think that most Scots would like me, or any English politician, the better for doing so. The Tory Party is not, of course, an English party but a Unionist one. If it sometimes seems English to some Scots that is because the Union is inevitably dominated by England by reason of its greater population. The Scots, being an historic nation with a proud past, will inevitably resent some expressions of this fact from time to time. As a nation, they have an undoubted right to national self-determination; thus far they have exercised that right by joining and remaining in the Union. Should they determine on independence no English party or politician would stand in their way, however much we might regret their departure. What the Scots (nor indeed the English) cannot do, however, is to insist upon their own terms for remaining in the Union, regardless of the views of the others. If the rest of the United Kingdom does not favour devolved government, then the Scottish nation may seek to persuade the rest of us of its virtues; it may even succeed in doing so; but it cannot claim devolution as a right of nationhood inside the Union.

  It is understandable that when I come out with these kind of hard truths many Scots should resent it. But it has nothing whatever to do with my being English. A lot of Englishmen resent it too.

  CHAPTER XXI

  Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life

  Family policy, the Arts, Broadcasting, Science and the Environment

  INDIVIDUALS AND COMMUNITIES

  The surge of prosperity — most of it soundly based but some of it unsustainable — which occurred from 1986 to 1989 had one paradoxical effect. Deprived for the moment at least of the opportunity to chastise the Government and blame free enterprise capitalism for failing to create jobs and raise living standards, the Left turned their attention to non-economic issues. The idea that the state was the engine of economic progress was discredited — and ever more so as the failures of communism became more widely known. But was the price of capitalist prosperity too high? Was it not resulting in a gross and offensive materialism, traffic congestion and pollution? Were not the attitudes required to get on in Thatcher’s Britain causing the weak to be marginalized, homelessness to grow, communities to break down? In short, was not the ‘quality of life’ being threatened?

  I found all this misguided and hypocritical. If socialism had produced economic success those same critics would have been celebrating in the streets. But socialism had failed. And it was the poorer, weaker members of society who had suffered worst as a result of that failure. More than that, however, socialism, in spite of the high-minded rhetoric in which its arguments were framed, had played on the worst aspects of human nature. It had literally demoralized communities and families, offering dependency in place of independence as well as subjecting traditional values to sustained derision. It was a cynical ploy for the Left to start talking as if they were old-fashioned Tories, fighting to preserve decency amid social disintegration.

  But nor could the arguments be ignored. Some Conservatives were always tempted to appease the Left’s social arguments — just as before I became leader they had appeased their economic arguments — on the grounds that we ourselves were very nearly as socialist in practice. These were the people who thought that the answer to every cri
ticism was for the state to spend and intervene more. I could not accept this. There was a case for the state to intervene in specific instances — for example to protect children in real danger from malign parents. The state must uphold the law and ensure that criminals were punished — an area in which I was deeply uneasy, for our streets were becoming more not less violent, in spite of large increases in police numbers and prison places. But the root cause of our contemporary social problems — to the extent that these did not reflect the timeless influence and bottomless resources of old-fashioned human wickedness — was that the state had been doing too much. A Conservative social policy had to recognize this. Society was made up of individuals and communities. If individuals were discouraged and communities disorientated by the state stepping in to take decisions which should properly be made by people, families and neighbourhoods then society’s problems would grow not diminish.

  This belief was what lay behind my remarks in an interview with a woman’s magazine — which caused a storm of abuse at the time — about there being ‘no such thing as society’. But they never quoted the rest. I went on to say:

  There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then to look after our neighbour.

  My meaning, clear at the time but subsequently distorted beyond recognition, was that society was not an abstraction, separate from the men and women who composed it, but a living structure of individuals, families, neighbours and voluntary associations. I expected great things from society in this sense because I believed that as economic wealth grew, individuals and voluntary groups should assume more responsibility for their neighbours’ misfortunes. The error to which I was objecting was the confusion of society with the state as the helper of first resort. Whenever I heard people complain that ‘society’ should not permit some particular misfortune, I would retort, ‘And what are you doing about it, then?’ Society for me was not an excuse, it was a source of obligation.

  I was an individualist in the sense that I believed that individuals are ultimately accountable for their actions and must behave like it. But I always refused to accept that there was some kind of conflict between this kind of individualism and social responsibility. I was reinforced in this view by the writings of conservative thinkers in the United States on the growth of an ‘underclass’ and the development of a dependency culture. If irresponsible behaviour does not involve penalty of some kind, irresponsibility will for a large number of people become the norm. More important still, the attitudes may be passed on to their children, setting them off in the wrong direction.

  I had great regard for the Victorians for many reasons — not least their civic spirit to which the increase in voluntary and charitable societies and the great buildings and endowments of our cities pay eloquent tribute. I never felt uneasy about praising ‘Victorian values’ or — the phrase I originally used — ‘Victorian virtues’, not least because they were by no means just Victorian. But the Victorians also had a way of talking which summed up what we were now rediscovering — they distinguished between the ‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving poor’. Both groups should be given help: but it must be help of very different kinds if public spending is not just going to reinforce the dependency culture. The problem with our welfare state was that — perhaps to some degree inevitably — we had failed to remember that distinction and so we provided the same ‘help’ to those who had genuinely fallen into difficulties and needed some support till they could get out of them, as to those who had simply lost the will or habit of work and self-improvement. The purpose of help must not be to allow people merely to live a half-life, but to restore their self-discipline and through that their self-esteem.

  I was also impressed by the writing of the American theologian and social scientist Michael Novak who put into new and striking language what I had always believed about individuals and communities. Mr Novak stressed the fact that what he called ‘democratic capitalism’ was a moral and social, not just an economic system, that it encouraged a range of virtues and that it depended upon co-operation not just ‘going it alone’. These were important insights which, along with our thinking about the effects of the dependency culture, provided the intellectual basis for my approach to those great questions brought together in political parlance as ‘the quality of life’.

  THE FAMILY

  The fact that the arguments deployed against the kind of economy and society which my policies were designed to foster were muddled and half-baked did not, of course, detract from the fact that there were social ills and that in some respects these were becoming more serious. I have mentioned the rise in crime. The Home Office and liberal opinion more generally were inclined to cast doubt on this. Certainly, it was possible to point to similar trends throughout the West and to worse criminality in American cities. It was also arguable that the rise in the number of recorded crimes reflected a greater willingness to report crimes — rape for example — which would previously have not come to the attention of the police. But I was never greatly impressed by arguments which minimized the extent and significance of crime. I shared the view of the general public that more must be done to apprehend and punish those who committed it. I believed that while it was right that those who did not really need to go to prison should be punished in other ways, violent criminals must be given exemplary sentences. In this regard the measure we introduced in which I took greatest satisfaction was the provision in the 1988 Criminal Justice Act which empowered the Attorney-General to appeal against overlenient sentences passed by the Crown Court.

  The fact that the level of crime rose in times of recession and of prosperity alike gave the lie to the notion that poverty explained — or even justified — criminal behaviour. Arguably, the opposite might have been true: greater prosperity led to more opportunities to steal. In any case, the rise in violent crime could not in any sense be regarded as an economic phenomenon. Nor could the alarming levels of juvenile delinquency. These had their origins deeper in society.

  I became increasingly convinced during the last two or three years of my time in office that, though there were crucially important limits to what politicians could do in this area, we could only get to the roots of crime and much else besides by concentrating on strengthening the traditional family. The statistics told their own story. One in four children were born to unmarried parents. No fewer than one in five children experienced a parental divorce before they were sixteen. Of course, family breakdown and single parenthood did not mean that juvenile delinquency would inevitably follow: grandparents, friends and neighbours can in some circumstances help lone mothers to cope quite well. But all the evidence — statistical and anecdotal — pointed to the breakdown of families as the starting point for a range of social ills of which getting into trouble with the police was only one. Boys who lack the guidance of a father are more likely to suffer social problems of all kinds. Single parents are more likely to live in relative poverty and poorer housing. Children can be traumatized by divorce far more than their parents realize. Children from unstable family backgrounds are more likely to have learning difficulties. They are at greater risk of abuse in the home from men who are not the real father. They are also more likely to run away to our cities and join the ranks of the young homeless where, in turn, they fall prey to all kinds of evil.

  The most important — and most difficult — aspect of what needed to be done was to reduce the positive incentives to irresponsible conduct. Young girls were tempted to become pregnant because that brought them a council flat and an income from the state. My advisers and I were considering whether there was some way of providing less attractive — but correspondingly more secure and supervised — housing for these young people. I had seen some excellent hostels of this sort run by the churches. Similarly, young people who ran away from home to sleep on the streets needed help. But I firmly re
sisted the argument that poverty was the basic cause — rather than the result — of their plight and felt that it was the voluntary bodies which could provide not just hostel places (which were often in surplus) but guidance and friendship of the sort the state never could.[82]

  We were feeling our way towards a new ethos for welfare policy: one comprising the discouragement of state dependency and the encouragement of self-reliance; greater use of voluntary bodies including religious and charitable organizations like the Salvation Army; and, most controversially, built-in incentives towards decent and responsible behaviour. We might then reduce the problem over the next generation rather than increase it, as the last generation had done. But our attempts to rethink welfare along these lines met a number of objections. Some were strictly practical and we had to respect them. Others, though, were rooted in the attitude that it was not for the state to make moral distinctions in its social policy. Indeed, when I raised such points I was sometimes amused to detect ill-concealed expressions of disapproval on the faces of civil servants under the veneer of official politeness.

  In spite of all the difficulties, by the time I left office my advisers and I were assembling a package of measures to strengthen the traditional family whose disintegration was the common source of so much suffering. We had not the slightest illusion that the effects of what could be done would be more than marginal. Nor, in a sense, would I have wanted them to be. For while the stability of the family is a condition for social order and economic progress the independence of the family is also a powerful check on the authority of the state. There are limits beyond which ‘family policy’ should not seek to go.