Nevertheless the strike left a lasting legacy of anger, bitterness and social division. At a time when unemployment was still rising ineluctably, it dramatised the human suffering in those parts of the country which felt themselves thrown on the scrap heap while London and the south of England boomed. Challenged politically by what she called ‘Mr Scargill’s insurrection’, Mrs Thatcher did not seem to care, but concentrated all her attention on defeating the ‘enemy within’, who in turn became a focus of admiration for all other deprived and alienated groups who loathed her Government. In the long run the defeat of the NUM marked her decisive victory not just over the miners but over the unions and the left as a whole. When all is said it was a necessary victory; but it was a flawed and bitterly contested one, which highlighted the negative side of Thatcherism as vividly as the positive.
Livingstone and local government
Scargill’s counterpart in local government was Ken Livingstone – the provocatively left-wing thirty-six-year-old leader of the Greater London Council. Livingstone was the figurehead for a number of local council leaders around the country determined to defy the Tory Government. But the Government’s protracted showdown with Livingstone was in some respects the mirror image of its confrontation with Scargill. ‘Red Ken’, too, was defeated in the end. But whereas Scargill’s blatant contempt for democracy dissipated public sympathy for the miners’ cause, Livingstone by skilful public relations contrived to make corrupt and extravagant municipal socialism appear a great deal more popular than it really was and successfully cast Mrs Thatcher as the enemy of democracy for abolishing it. The GLC and six other metropolitan councils outside London were finally wound up in 1986, removing another focus of opposition to the Government’s centralising hegemony. But the abolition of London-wide local government was another messy operation which left a sour taste in the mouth and an uneasy democratic void which was not filled for fifteen years. When London government was eventually restored by Tony Blair the voters promptly showed what they thought by twice electing Livingstone as Mayor. The fact that Lady Thatcher barely mentioned the abolition of the GLC in her memoirs suggests that she felt in retrospect not very proud of it herself.
Scrapping the metropolitan councils, however, was just one part of a wider assault on local government which ran all through Mrs Thatcher’s three administrations, starting with Michael Heseltine’s efforts to control local spending in her first term and ending with the fiasco of the poll tax in her third. The second term began with the new Environment Secretary introducing legislation to place a statutory ceiling on the amounts that local authorities could raise from the rates. This, though targeted at allegedly spendthrift Labour councils, seriously infringed what had hitherto been a hallowed Conservative principle, the autonomy of local government, and was vehemently opposed by a phalanx of senior party figures in both the Commons and the Lords. Whatever the case for each of these measures, the determination with which Mrs Thatcher pursued them suggests an extraordinary degree of hostility to local government.
Margaret Thatcher grew up in local government. She always claimed that she ‘owed everything’ to her father; and Alfred Roberts’ whole life was local politics. Whatever was the case in her father’s day, however, she believed by the 1970s that local government had become inefficient, extravagant and unrepresentative. As successive governments piled more and more functions and responsibilities on to them, she thought that local authorities had become both too big and intrinsically socialistic, providing all sorts of previously undreamed-of services and bleeding the ratepayers – not usually the same people as the recipients – to pay for them. Increasingly, as Prime Minister, she saw local authorities (of whatever colour) as obstacles blocking the implementation of Thatcherite policies of privatisation, deregulation and consumer choice. Hence the thrust of her Government’s policies across the whole range of service provision was to take responsibility away from local authorities to give it instead to other agencies, private enterprise or central government. It has been calculated that more than fifty separate Acts of Parliament between 1979 and 1989 directly reduced the powers of local government; and the process continued after 1990.21
In this way, by an accumulation of ad hoc policies over ten years, Mrs Thatcher undermined the vitality and the very purpose of local government. The Government claimed that it was returning power to individuals and consumers, breaking the power of town-hall empires of self-serving local politicians and politicised council officers, particularly in housing and education. Undoubtedly there were abuses, particularly in London, and it was unquestionably true that Labour councils in deprived inner cities fostered an anti-business ethos and a culture of benefit dependency which actually perpetuated poverty. That said, however, the practical effect of her policies was to use the abuse of local government as an excuse to diminish it still further, concentrating power ever more centrally on Whitehall. This contradicted the historic Tory tradition of backing the local against the central power. With the rise of socialism in the twentieth century, fear of the overmighty state had become an even stronger article of Conservative faith. Tory councils in the 1960s and 1970s had seen themselves as bastions of liberty against the creeping interference of Whitehall. But the Tory Government of the 1980s, finding itself opposed by some high-profile socialist authorities in the cities, reversed this tradition. Behind her libertarian rhetoric, Mrs Thatcher’s instinct to impose her views was authoritarian, interventionist and essentially centralising.
In diminishing the autonomy of local government she damaged many of the values which Conservatives – herself included – had always stood for: local pride, local responsibility, dispersed power, and a tradition of active local government. Mrs Thatcher often seemed to proceed on the assumption that there would never be another Labour Government. But it was not only shire Tories who were alarmed that their Government was destroying something precious: Tory radicals who were the strongest supporters of free-market economic policies were even more suspicious of the state gathering to itself ever greater power. If Mrs Thatcher thought she was serving democracy by weakening local government, she should have been reminded of Friedrich Hayek’s warning in The Road to Serfdom: ‘Nowhere has democracy worked well without a great measure of local self-government, providing a school of political training for the people at large as much as for their future leaders.’22 Principle aside, this was a factor of direct practical relevance to the Conservative party, whose local organisation was largely based in local government.With so few significant powers left to local councils by the end of the 1980s, fewer able and public-spirited people came forward to serve on them, while activism at the grass roots of the party shrivelled. Thus, when the triumphs of her General Election victories had passed away she left her successors a much weakened – and ageing – power base.
Spies, moles and ‘wimmin’
Behind the open political challenges of Scargill and Livingstone, Mrs Thatcher believed that her Government – and the country – also faced a persistent threat from a variegated coalition of left-wing dissidents, subversives and fellow-travellers, all more or less knowingly serving the interests of the Soviet Union, which must be countered by all means necessary in the cause of Freedom. Believing that she was engaged in a life-or-death struggle with the forces of evil both at home and abroad, she took very seriously anything which could be seen as a threat to national defence or the armed forces. Of Mrs Thatcher’s recent predecessors, Harold Wilson was the one whose obsession with security most nearly matched her own; but he was worried much of the time that the security services were spying on him. Mrs Thatcher, by contrast, had no doubt that she and they were fighting the same global enemy, and she welcomed enthusiastically all the help MI5 and MI6 could give her. She read all the intelligence reports with close attention, and after the Falklands became the first Prime Minister to attend meetings of the Joint Intelligence Committee, now located in the Cabinet Office.
It cannot really be said that the women’s ‘pea
ce camp’ at Greenham Common posed a serious threat to national security. The 1983 election had delivered a resounding defeat to nuclear unilateralism, which was quite clearly a massive vote-loser for the Labour party. Nevertheless CND continued to march and campaign vigorously against nuclear weapons, while a few hundred heroically determined women kept up their stubborn vigil outside the US base in Oxfordshire where the first cruise missiles arrived at the end of the year, making occasional attempts to breach the perimeter before they were ejected. Their protest was ramshackle, eccentric, idealistic and very British, but essentially futile. In the Commons Mrs Thatcher worried that ‘such protests tend to give the impression to the Soviet Union that this country has neither the capacity nor the resolve to defend itself or to keep defence expenditure at a sufficient level to deter’.23 Fighting for Freedom with a capital F, she was not so keen to see that freedom exercised. But in fact nothing burnished her Iron Lady image more effectively than the contrast between herself, with her immaculate hair and powerful suits, and the woolly-hatted feminists and mystical tree-huggers of the peace camp. She gloried in the contrast, confident that on this issue at least Middle England identified overwhelmingly with her.
Yet the women of the peace camp and other CND supporters were subjected to continual surveillance and harassment by the police and MI5. Not only was the camp itself frequently raided and broken up, but activists’ phones were tapped, their mail was opened and several suffered mysterious break-ins at their homes – leaving aside the unsolved murder of an elderly rose-grower of strong unilateralist convictions named Hilda Murrell. Nor was it only nuclear dissidents who were targeted. MI5 infiltrated NUM headquarters during the miners’ strike and made unprecedented use of bugging and phone-tapping to track the deployment of pickets. In 1985 it emerged that MI5 had also been asked to vet senior figures in the BBC; in January 1987 the police actually raided the Glasgow offices of the BBC and confiscated material relating to a series of programmes the Government did not like. The centralisation of policing during the miners’ strike; persistent allegations that the RUC and the security forces were operating a shoot-to-kill policy in Northern Ireland; the removal of union rights from workers at GCHQ; and a new readiness to use the Official Secrets Act to pursue civil servants who leaked embarrassing documents – all created a disturbing sense of an authoritarian government using unprecedentedly heavy-handed methods to suppress what it regarded as dangerous dissent.
The Government also appeared needlessly authoritarian by its efforts to block publication of the memoirs of a retired MI5 officer, Peter Wright. There is no question that the book, Spycatcher, was a serious breach of the confidentiality expected of secret-service personnel; the Government was thoroughly entitled to ban it, as it had done many less sensational books before. The problem was that Wright was now living in Australia and he published his book there, as well as in Ireland and America, whence its contents quickly became available in Britain; extracts even appeared in the British press.Trying to stop its publication now was a classic case of shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted. Nevertheless Mrs Thatcher was determined to pursue Spycatcher – ‘irrespective of the outcome’ – in order to assert the principle that former spies could not with impunity write about their experiences.24 In vain. Both the Supreme Court of New South Wales and eventually the House of Lords ruled that it was too late to keep secret what everyone who was interested had already read. The Government’s persistence long after the cause was lost merely made it appear stubborn and vindictive.
Faith in the City
Mrs Thatcher did not see enemies only in the shadows. She believed that the very pillars of the Establishment were against her. She considered that the whole professional class – the upper middle-class liberal intelligentsia and the distinguished generation of public servants which had dominated Whitehall since 1945 – was riddled with a sort of pale-pink socialism which was scarcely less corrosive than outright Trotskyism. Of course she made exceptions of individuals: but her instinctive preconception was that the whole traditional governing elite was made up predominantly of quislings and appeasers.
This liberal Establishment had several centres, only one of which – the Civil Service – was under her direct control. Over her decade in office she made a systematic effort, by a mixture of patronage and example, to mould the Whitehall village to her view of the world, and to a considerable extent succeeded. Four other centres of influence, however, remained more or less independent and overwhelmingly resistant to the Thatcherite gospel: the churches (particularly the Church of England); the universities; the broadcasters (particularly the BBC); and the arts community. Together these overlapping elites comprised what used to be called the political nation; nowadays sociologists classify them as ‘opinion formers’, while the tabloids call them the ‘chattering classes’. All felt themselves under attack by a Conservative Government which was out of sympathy with all their values and assumptions. Seen from Downing Street, conversely, they were all faces of the same hydra-like enemy which Mrs Thatcher believed she had been called to office to defeat.
More publicly than any other recent Prime Minister before Tony Blair, Mrs Thatcher was a practising Christian. Alec Home, Harold Wilson and Ted Heath had all in their different styles professed to be believers; but Mrs Thatcher advertised the religious basis of her politics more than any of them. She not only attended the parish church near Chequers most Sundays when she was there, but she never shied from asserting what she believed should be the central place of Christianity in national life. It is impossible to know the exact nature of her personal faith, but she was steeped in the language and practice of Christianity from childhood and believed in it implicitly as a force for good.
She blamed the Church, however – all the churches – for their abdication of moral leadership in the face of permissiveness and for a general loss of moral values in society. Whereas the Church of England had once been known as ‘the Conservative Party at prayer’, and her father’s brand of Methodism had been identified with self-reliance, individual responsibility and thrift, she thought the churches had become politically wet if not actually left wing, infected by a sort of soggy collectivism which looked to the state, instead of the individual, to solve all social ills. No one personified this sort of hand-wringing churchmanship better than the Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, whom she appointed – in preference to the still more liberal Hugh Montefiore – soon after she became Prime Minister and who was therefore in office for almost her entire premiership. From the start Runcie did not shrink from criticising the harsh social consequences of her Government’s economic policies; and he particularly outraged her by his sermon at the thanksgiving service at the conclusion of the Falklands war when he prayed even-handedly for those who had died on both sides.
She was constrained from responding in public, partly because Runcie was a good friend of Peter Carrington and Willie Whitelaw but also because – improbably in the light of his donnish manner – he had a distinguished war record, winning the Military Cross as a tank commander, and therefore could not easily be dismissed as a pacifist wimp.
However, she was hurt by the allegation that her social policies showed a lack of compassion, and worried by the widespread impression that Christians could no longer be Conservatives. She believed absolutely the contrary. Her politics and her religion were based alike on the primacy of individual choice and individual responsibility. ‘The heart of the Christian message,’ she told Laurens van der Post in a 1983 television interview with her favourite mystic, ‘is that each person has the right to choose.’25 She did not believe in collective morality or collective compassion, via taxation, but in individual charity – which depended on a degree of individual wealth. ‘No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions,’ she told Brian Walden in another interview. The important point was that ‘he had money as well’.26
Unless provoked, she was generally careful not to bring religion into h
er political speeches.27 She recognised that many sincere Christians were not Tories, and knew that it would cause an outcry if she suggested that they should be. But at the same time she was keen to demonstrate that good Christians could be – and in her view, should be – Conservatives; so she was not afraid to preach her own distinctive political theology whenever she was given the chance in an appropriate setting. In March 1981 she revisited the City church of St Lawrence Jewry, where she had preached once before when she was Leader of the Opposition, to expound her favourite parable of the talents: ‘Creating wealth,’ she told her lunchtime audience of bankers and stockbrokers, ‘must be seen as a Christian obligation if we are to fulfil our role as stewards of the resources and talents the Creator has provided for us.’28 And in 1988 she outraged the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland with her gospel of unfettered individualism.
Though the Prime Minister’s initiative in the appointment of bishops had been greatly curtailed by a new system introduced in 1976 whereby she was given only two names to choose from, Mrs Thatcher took her diminished responsibility very seriously and made a point of trying to appoint the more conservative of the options put up to her.‘They only give me two choices,’ she once complained, ‘both from the left.’ Another time, when Woodrow Wyatt asked her why she had appointed so-and-so, she said, ‘You should have seen the other one.’29 In fact, she could ask for more names and at least once did so. Right at the end of her time she had the chance to replace Runcie at Canterbury. With no obvious front-runner, she made a bold choice by picking a complete outsider, the very non-Establishment, state school-educated evangelical George Carey – a moral and theological conservative who nevertheless supported the ordination of women – in preference to any of the Establishment candidates. ‘In choosing him,’ The Times’s religious correspondent Clifford Longley commented, ‘Mrs Thatcher’s known impatience with theological and moral woolliness… will have been a factor.’30
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