A Revolution’s Mid-Life Crisis
There had been some bad moments for the second Thatcher government. Most obviously, she had nearly been assassinated. The IRA bomb which demolished a chunk of the Grand Hotel at Brighton during the 1984 Conservative conference was intended as a response to Mrs Thatcher’s hard line at the time of the 1981 hunger strike. The plot had been to murder the British cabinet and Prime Minister and plunge the country into political chaos, resulting in withdrawal from all Ireland. As for her, when it went off at 2.50 she was still working on an official paper about Liverpool’s garden festival, having finished writing her speech ten minutes earlier so she was not even woken up. The blast scattered broken glass on her bedroom carpet and filled her mouth with dust. She then decamped to lie fully clothed in the bedroom of a nearby police college, pausing only to kneel and pray with her personal assistant Cynthia Crawford, or ‘Crawfie’, when they heard that the bomb had killed the wife of the cabinet minister John Wakeham and nearly killed him; killed the Tory MP Anthony Berry; had badly injured Norman Tebbit, and paralysed his wife.
After less than an hour’s fitful sleep and with her cabinet hurriedly dressed in clothes from a nearby branch of Marks & Spencer, their dresses and suits still being in the half-wrecked hotel, she rewrote her speech and told the still stunned conference that they had witnessed an attempt to cripple the government. ‘And the fact that we are gathered here now, shocked but composed and determined, is a sign not only that this attack has failed, but that all attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail.’ The final death toll from Brighton was five dead and several more seriously injured but its consequences for British politics, which could have been momentous, turned out to be minimal.
If the IRA could not shake her, could anything else? There had been internal rows, not only over Westland but more ominously for the future, about economic policy. Her Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, had wanted to replace the old and rather wobbly system of controlling the money supply through targets, the Medium Term Financial Strategy, with a new stratagem – tying the pound to the German mark in the European Exchange Rate system, or ERM. This was an admission of failure; the older system of measuring money was useless in the world of global fast money described earlier. Using Germanic bondage was an alternative. In effect, Britain would have subcontracted her anti-inflationary policy to the more successful and harder-faced disciplinarians of the West German Central Bank. Lawson was keen. She was not; if anyone was to play dominatrix round here, it would be her. At the time, little of this debate bubbled from the specialist financial world into general political life.
Other rows did. There was the Westland affair itself but also a botched sale of British Leyland and the highly unpopular use of British airbases for President Reagan’s attack on Libya in 1986. After her hugely successful fight to claw back some of Britain’s overpayment to the European Community budget in her first term, these were years of Thatcherite drift over Europe, which would so fatally damage her at the end. Jacques Delors, later her great enemy, had been appointed President of the European Commission and begun his grand plan for the next stages of union. The Single European Act, which smashed down thousands of national laws preventing free trade inside the EC, promising free movement of goods, capital, services and people, and presaging the single currency, was passed with her urgent approval. She pooh-poohed the idea that when the continentals talked of economic and political union, they really meant it. She would regret all this later.
At home a wider dilemma was emerging right across domestic policy, from the inner cities to hospitals, schools to police forces. It was one which would puzzle both her successor governments, John Major’s and Tony Blair’s. It was simply this: how does a modern government get things done? In the economy, she had an answer. Government sets the rules, delivers sound money and then stands back letting other people get on with it. In practice she often behaved differently, always more pragmatic and interventionist than her image suggested. At least, however, the principle was clear. But when it came to the public services there was no similar principle. Where were the staunch, independent-spirited movers and shakers in the hospitals, town halls or the school system, the equivalent for public life of the entrepreneurs and risk takers she admired in business? If government stood back and just let go of schools, hospitals, inner cities, who would be waiting to catch them?
Before the Thatcher revolution the Conservatives had been seen as, on balance, defenders of local democracy. They were very strongly represented in councils across the country and had been on the receiving end of some of the most thuggish threats from Labour governments intent, for instance, on abolishing grammar schools. Conservatives had seen local representatives on hospital boards and education authorities as bulwarks against socialist Whitehall. Margaret Thatcher herself had good reason to recall the days of sturdy local independents, doing the public’s work on unpaid committees for her father, Alderman Roberts, had been one of them. In the seventies, Tory think tanks regularly produced reports calling for stronger localism, the building of a rich ‘civil society’ in which independent institutions – churches, schools, charities, clubs and the rest – would spread autonomy and freedom. It was the theme of the most influential conservative philosopher of post-war Britain, Michael Oakeshott. The Tory vision emphatically included elected local government. In 1978, two right-wing Conservative politicians, for instance, wrote a passionate pamphlet complaining that ‘local government is being deprived of more and more of the functions it used to be thought capable of fulfilling.’
Yet in power, Thatcher and her ministers could not trust local government, or any elected and therefore independent bodies at all. Between 1979 and 1994, an astonishing 150 Acts of Parliament were passed removing powers from local authorities, and £24 billion a year, at 1994 prices, had been switched from them to unelected and mostly secretive gatherings. The first two Thatcher governments transferred power and discretion away from people who had stood openly for election, and towards the subservient agents of Whitehall, often paid-up party members and well-meaning stooges. Ministers, whether ‘wet’ or ‘dry’, competed to show her their zeal by taking the initiative away from organizations on the ground. Michael Heseltine attacked local government with new auditing arrangements, curbs on how much tax they could raise, and then spending caps as well. Nicholas Ridley, an Environment Secretary, forced them to put out a wide range of services to tender for private companies, telling local councils in the harshest terms that no dissent was permissable: ‘we might have to force them to expose their activities to competition if they did not choose to do that themselves.’
So there was no public service equivalent of privatization. In hospitals and schools Thatcher had eventually rejected the radical alternatives of fees, private management, selection and independence when offered them by the CPRS (Central Policy Review Staff). Stirred by the idea, she was too cautious to follow where it led. If neither new private nor old public, then what? The answer turned out to be expensive bureaucratic central activity which made ministers feel important. In the health service, early attempts to decentralize were rapidly reversed and a vast top-down system of targets and measurements was put in place, driven by a new planning organization. It cost more and the service seemed to get worse. Similar centralist power-grabs took place in urban regeneration, one of the most visible and immediate areas of government action, where unelected corporations, UDCs, rather than elected councils, got the money to pour into rundown cities. The biggest city councils, notably the Greater London Council, were simply abolished. Its powers were distributed, including to an unelected organization controlled by Whitehall. As one critic, Simon Jenkins, pointed out, by 1990 ‘there were some 12,000 laymen and women running London on an appointed basis against just 1,900 elected borough councillors.’ Even in housing, the gap left by the sale of council homes was met by the rise of the Housing Corporation, disbursing 90 per cent of the money used by housing associations to build new cheap homes. In the Thatcher years its staff grew sevenfold and its budget, twentyfold.
Back in the mid-eighties she did, to be fair, have other things on her mind. Personal relationships matter as much in modern diplomacy as they did in the Renaissance, and the Thatcher-Gorbachev courtship engaged her imagination and human interest. She was becoming the closest ally Ronald Reagan had, in another international relationship which was of huge emotional and political significance to her. In these years she had become an international diva of conservative politics, feted by crowds from Russia and China to New York. Her wardrobe, coded depending on where an outfit had first been worn, told its own story: ‘Paris Opera, Washington Pink, Reagan Navy, Toronto Turquoise, Tokyo Blue, Kremlin Silver, Peking Black’. Meanwhile she was negotiating the hard detail of Hong Kong’s transitional status before it was handed over to Communist China in 1997. She got a torrid time at Commonwealth conferences for her opposition to sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa – and where she gave as good as she got. At home, the problem of persistently high unemployment was nagging away, though it started to fall from the summer of 1986, while Tory strategists still seemed to lack a clear idea about how to deal with the unfamiliar threat of the ‘two Davids’ and the Liberal-SDP Alliance. And electorally, the multiple failures and political threats turned out to matter not at all.