The Path to Power m-2

by Margaret Thatcher

  Like many other members of OUCA, I had received lessons in public speaking from Conservative Central Office’s Mrs Stella Gatehouse. Her emphasis was on simplicity and clarity of expression and as little jargon as possible. In fact, at election meetings, when you never knew how long you would have to speak before the candidate arrived, a touch more long-windedness would have been very useful. Most valuable of all for me personally, however, was the experience of having to think on my feet when answering questions from a good-humoured but critical audience. I recall a point made by an elderly man at one such meeting that had a lasting effect on my views about welfare: ‘Just because I’ve saved a little bit of money of my own, “Assistance” won’t help me. If I’d spent everything, they would.’ It was an early warning of the hard choices that the new Welfare State would shortly place before politicians.

  Three weeks after polling day, by which time the overseas and service votes had been returned, I went to the election count at Sleaford. As we waited for the Grantham result, news trickled in of what was happening elsewhere. It was bad, and it became worse — a Labour landslide with Tory Cabinet ministers falling one after the other. Then our own candidate lost too. I was shocked and upset. I returned to Grantham to see more results coming through on the screen at the Picture House cinema. The prospect did not improve. I simply could not understand how the electorate could do this to Churchill. On my way back home I met a friend, someone who I had always thought was a staunch Conservative, and said how shocked I was by the terrible news. He was not shocked at all. In fact, he said he thought the news was rather good. Incomprehension deepened. At the time I felt that the British electorate’s treatment of the man who more than anyone else secured their liberty was shameful. But was it not Edmund Burke who said: ‘A perfect democracy is the most shameless thing in the world’? In retrospect, the election of the 1945–51 Labour Government seems the logical fulfilment of the collectivist spirit that came to dominate wartime Britain. It was to be about thirty-five years before this collectivism would run its course — shaping and distorting British society in the process, before it collapsed in 1979’s Winter of Discontent.

  At the time, it was clear to everyone that fundamental reassessment of Conservative principles and policies was required. We felt this as much in Oxford as anywhere else. It lay behind the preparation of a report of the OUCA Policy Sub-Committee which I co-authored in Michaelmas term 1945 with Michael Kinchin-Smith and Stanley Moss. The report contained no more profound insights than any other Tory undergraduate paper. And its two themes we have heard many times since — more policy research and better presentation.

  There may have been some merit in this recommendation. Perhaps the main problem as regards what we would now call the ‘image’ of the Conservative Party was that we seemed to have lost our way and, to the extent that our policies did have coherence, they seemed to be devised for the wealthy rather than for ordinary people. As our OUCA paper put it: ‘Conservative policy has come to mean in the eyes of the public little more than a series of administrative solutions to particular problems, correlated in certain fields by a few unreasoning prejudices and the selfish interests of the moneyed classes.’ The accusation was, of course, unfair. If the Conservatives had won in 1945 we would still have had a Welfare State — doubtless with less immediate public expenditure and certainly with greater scope for private and voluntary initiative. But the idea that Conservatism was simply that — conserving the interests of the status quo against change and reform — was immensely powerful at this time.

  In March 1946 I became Treasurer of OUCA and later that month went as one of the Oxford representatives to the Federation of University Conservative and Unionist Associations (FUCUA) Conference at the Waldorf Hotel in London. It was my first such conference and I enjoyed it hugely. When I spoke it was in support of more involvement by people from working-class backgrounds in university Conservative politics. I felt that we had to get away from the perception of Conservatism as both stuffy and frivolous. It was not so much that I wanted a classless society, as the socialists (somewhat disingenuously) said they did, but rather that I could not see that class was important. Everyone had something unique to offer in life and their responsibility was to develop those gifts — and heroes come from all backgrounds. As I put it to the FUCUA Conference: ‘We have heard all about this being the age of the common man — but do not forget the need for the uncommon man.’ Or, I suppose I might have added, ‘woman’.

  In October 1946 I was elected President of OUCA — the third woman to hold the position. I had done my final exams that summer and was now beginning the research project which constituted the fourth and last year of the Chemistry degree, so I had a little more time to spend on politics. For example, I attended my first Conservative Party Conference, held that year in Blackpool. I was immediately entranced. So often in Grantham and in Oxford it had felt unusual to be a Conservative. Now suddenly I was with hundreds of other people who believed as I did and who shared my insatiable appetite for talking politics.

  The Conference had a most extraordinary atmosphere. From my humble position as a ‘representative’, I had the sense that the Party leadership — with the notable exception of the Party Leader — had arrived at Blackpool prepared to reconcile itself and Conservatism to the permanence of socialism in Britain. A perceptive observer of the 1946 Conference, Bertrand de Jouvenal, wrote of our Front Bench: ‘These great, intelligent thoroughbreds, trained from their earliest years to prudent administration and courteous debate, were in their hearts not far from accepting as definitive their electoral defeat in 1945.’[4] This was decidedly not what the rank and file wanted to hear. Indeed, there was open dissent from the floor. A request on the first day for a general debate on questions of philosophy and policy was refused by the chairman. There was a lukewarm reaction to the consensus approach of speeches from the platform, though these became notably tougher the longer the Conference went on, as Shadow ministers perceived our discontent. My instincts were with the rank and file, though I had not yet fully digested the strong intellectual case against collectivism, as I was to do in the next few years.

  Back in Oxford I had organized a very full programme of speakers. Lord Dunglass (Alec Douglas-Home) urged support for Ernest Bevin’s foreign policy — support we readily gave. Bob Boothby — a wonderful speaker, with great style — declaimed against the ‘revolutionary totalitarian absolutism of Moscow’. David Maxwell-Fyfe, whose daughter Pamela was at Oxford at the time, attacked nationalization and urged a property-owning democracy. Peter Thorneycroft put forward what seemed the very advanced views of the ‘Tory Reform’ wing in a debate with the University Labour Club at the Union. Lady (Mimi) Davidson told us how it felt to be the only Conservative woman Member of the House of Commons. Anthony Eden charmed and impressed us all over sherry. Each term we had a lively debate with the other political clubs at the Oxford Union, particularly the Labour Club, which at the time was very left wing and included some famous names like Anthony Crosland — who even in those days could condescend to a Duchess — and Tony Benn. Generally, however, OUCA met in the Taylorian Institute on a Friday evening, entertaining the speaker to dinner beforehand at the Randolph Hotel. So it was there that I first rubbed shoulders with the great figures of the Tory Party — and, in fact, I kept in touch with many of them over the years.

  Such activity, though, was insignificant as regards the overall position of the Conservative Party nationally. Looking back, one can see that there were two alternative strategies for the Party to have followed. Either it could have accommodated the collectivism of the times, though seeking to lessen its impact where possible, trying to slow down the leftward march through our institutions and to retain some scope for individual choice and free enterprise. Or it could have fought collectivism root and branch, seeking to persuade national opinion that 1945 represented a wrong turning from the country’s destined path. In fact, it sought to do both. Voices were raised in favour of a radical ons
laught against collectivism, but in opposition the predominant view was that pragmatism represented the best path back to government.

  The Party document which came nearest to embodying the pragmatic approach was The Industrial Charter, which appeared in May 1947. In a sense, it was no new departure: indeed, continuity and consensus were its underlying themes. Just as the wartime 1944 Employment Policy White Paper represented a compromise with Keynesianism — combining the emphasis on counter-cyclical public spending to sustain demand and employment with more orthodox observations about efficiency, competitiveness and mobility — so The Industrial Charter represented a compromise between corporatism and free enterprise. The Industrial Charter defended economic planning, industrial ‘partnership’ and workers’ ‘consultation’; but it continued to emphasize the need for fewer controls, fewer civil servants and modestly lower taxation. And this tension continued in the Conservative Party throughout the 1950s and sixties. The Industrial Charter gave us all something to say, and it kept the Party united. But such documents hardly made the pulse beat faster. Nor were they important in returning the Party to power. It was, in fact, the economic failures of the Labour Government — in particular the February 1947 fuel crisis and the devaluation of sterling in 1949 — rather than Conservative Party initiatives which turned the political tide in our favour.

  Documents like The Industrial Charter gingerly avoided the real battleground on which socialism ultimately had to be defeated. In the end, Churchill was right. Whether socialism needed a ‘Gestapo’ as it did in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, or just those banal and bureaucratic instruments of coercion, confiscatory taxation, nationalization and oppressive regulation employed in the West, ultimately depended only on the degree of socialism desired. In diminishing economic freedom, the socialists had embarked on a course which, if pursued to its ultimate destination, would mean the extinction of all freedom. I had no doubt myself about the truth of this proposition. But for some Tories it was always a difficult argument to take. The traditional economic liberalism which constituted so important a part of my political make-up — and which Edmund Burke himself embraced — was often alien and uncongenial to Conservatives from a more elevated social background. It was, after all, none other than Harold Macmillan who in 1938 proposed in his influential book The Middle Way to extend state control and planning over a wide range of production and services. Other Conservatives were inhospitable to theory of any kind. They took J.S. Mill’s appellation ‘the stupid party’ as a compliment. Not surprisingly, therefore, the most powerful critique of socialist planning and the socialist state which I read at this time, and to which I have returned so often since, F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, is dedicated famously ‘To the socialists of all parties’.

  I cannot claim that I fully grasped the implications of Hayek’s little masterpiece at this time. It was only in the mid-1970s, when Hayek’s works were right at the top of the reading list given me by Keith Joseph, that I really came to grips with the ideas he put forward. Only then did I consider his arguments from the point of view of the kind of state Conservatives find congenial — a limited government under a rule of law — rather than from the point of view of the kind of state we must avoid — a socialist state where bureaucrats rule by discretion. At this stage it was the (to my mind) unanswerable criticisms of socialism in The Road to Serfdom which had an impact. Hayek saw that Nazism — national socialism — had its roots in nineteenth-century German social planning. He showed that intervention by the state in one area of the economy or society gave rise to almost irresistible pressures to extend planning further into other sectors. He alerted us to the profound, indeed revolutionary, implications of state planning for Western civilization as it had grown up over the centuries.

  Nor did Hayek mince his words about the monopolistic tendencies of the planned society which professional groups and trade unions would inevitably seek to exploit. Each demand for security, whether of employment, income or social position, implied the exclusion from such benefits of those outside the particular privileged group — and would generate demands for countervailing privileges from the excluded groups. Eventually, in such a situation everyone will lose. Perhaps because he did not come from a British Conservative background and did not in fact ever consider himself a Conservative at all, Hayek had none of the inhibitions which characterized the agonized social conscience of the English upper classes when it came to speaking bluntly about such things.

  Hayek was unusual and unpopular, but he was not quite alone in root and branch criticism of socialism. I also read at this time and later the polemical journalist Colm Brogan’s writings. Where Hayek deployed philosophy, Brogan relied on withering irony and mordant wit. In 1943 in Who Are ‘The People’? Brogan wrote the unthinkable — namely that it was precisely the ‘progressive’ Left which had created the circumstances for Hitler’s rise to power and been most thoroughly duped by him. The progressives did not by and large come from, and had little real claim to represent, the ‘working class’. They applied the most blatant and culpable double standards when it came to the Soviet Union. The real interest which they represented was that of a burgeoning bureaucracy determined to exploit every opportunity to increase its numbers and enlarge its power. In Our New Masters, which appeared in 1947, Brogan widened his attack on socialism. He refused to see the 1945 election result as anything other than a collective loss of common sense.

  [The people] have been deceived, most certainly, but they wanted to be deceived… they have voted against that modest expectation in life which is all that a sober public man can ever strive for. They have voted to eat their cake and have it, to save it for a rainy day and to give it away. They have voted for high wages and low production and a world of plenty. They have voted like the courtiers of King Canute who planted his seat before the encroaching waves and commanded them to retire by authority of the royal and unimpeachable will. The people are able to fill the seat with the sovereign of their own choosing. Nobody denies their right. But the tide keeps coming in.

  Brogan therefore saw the disillusionment with Labour, which was already manifest at the time he wrote, as being the socialists’ inevitable nemesis for raising so wildly expectations which no one — let alone they with the wrong policy prescriptions — could fulfil. As Brogan said in a classic attack: ‘Wherever Sir Stafford Cripps has tried to increase wealth and happiness, grass never grows again.’

  But Brogan also saw socialism as a force for disorder and disintegration, a kind of poison threatening to corrupt the whole body politic, and the Labour Party as ‘a feeble and querulous thing, equally unfit to govern because of the intemperance of its mind and the childish unreality of its view of life’. They were sentiments which many of us felt, but which it generally seemed imprudent to express with quite such vigour.

  The tension between these two possible approaches to resisting collectivism — gradualist and radical — would be played out throughout my time in active Conservative politics. But the specific issues which meant most to me in these early post-war years concerned foreign rather than domestic affairs.

  I was in Blackpool visiting my sister (who had gone there from the Birmingham Orthopaedic Hospital) when I learned from the radio news on that fateful 6 August 1945 that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. It had been known for some time that we were on the eve of a breakthrough in the technology of weapons of mass destruction. My own academic study and the fascination exerted on me by issues relating to the practical application of science probably meant that I was better informed than most about the developments lying behind the manufacture of the atomic bomb. The following year I was able to read (and largely understand) the very full account contained in Atomic Energy for Military Purposes published by the United States. Yet — cliché as it may be — I was immediately aware on hearing the preliminary reports of Hiroshima that with the advent of the A-bomb ‘somehow the world had changed’. Or as Churchill himself would put it in his majestic m
emoirs The Second World War: ‘Here then was a speedy end to the Second World War, and perhaps to much else besides.’

  The full scientific, strategic and political implications of the nuclear weapon would take some years to assess; moreover, like the science involved, they would continue to change and develop. But the direct human and environmental consequences of the use of atomic weapons were more quickly grasped. In the winter of 1946 I read the American journalist John Hersey’s report on Hiroshima, first submitted to the New Yorker and subsequently published as a Penguin Special. Oddly enough, even more affecting than the accounts of the hideous injuries, the fire, the fall-out and the radiation sickness was the bitter-sweet image of weeds and wild flowers sprouting through the ashes — their growth unnaturally stimulated by radiation from the bomb.

  Yet neither on that first evening reflecting on the matter in the train home from Blackpool, nor later when I read accounts and saw the pictures of the overwhelming devastation, did I have any doubt about the rightness of the decision to use the bomb. I considered it justified primarily because it would avoid the losses inevitable if Allied forces were to take by assault the main islands of Japan. The Japanese still had 2½ million men under arms. We had already seen the fanatical resistance which they had put up during the Battle of Okinawa. Only the scale of the Allies’ technological military superiority, demonstrated first at Hiroshima and then at Nagasaki, could persuade the Japanese leadership that resistance was hopeless. And so one week after Hiroshima, and after a second bomb had been dropped on Nagasaki, the Japanese surrendered.