Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography (21 page)

But a number of commentators, with varying mixtures of relish and regret, thought that I was done for. On my return after the Christmas holiday at Lamberhurst, I was able to read my fate openly discussed in the newspapers. One described me as ‘The Lady Nobody Loves’. Another published a thoughtful article entitled ‘Why Mrs Thatcher is so Unpopular’. But I pushed the stuff aside and concentrated on my red boxes.

In fact, it was not long before the tide – for me personally, though not for the Government – began to turn. The far more serious issues of 1972
were now upon us – the miners’ strike and the various elements of the U-turn – and these dwarfed the personal campaign against me. And, of course, I was evidently not going to buckle or depart – at least voluntarily. But I owe a debt of gratitude to Ted Heath as well.

Ted asked me and my officials down to Chequers on Wednesday 12 January to have a general discussion about education. I took with me an
aide-mémoire
summing up the situation and looking ahead. In spite of all the difficulties, there was only one pre-election commitment which still remained to be implemented: the expansion of nursery education. More money was needed if something substantial was to be achieved. The other area was secondary school organization. There the problem was, as I put it, ‘many of our own local councils are running with the comprehensive tide. The question is what sort of balance should be struck between defending existing grammar schools and leaving local education authorities free to make their own decisions?’ We discussed both these points at Chequers. Ted was keen on nursery education; he had been pressing for action on student unions; and he very reasonably asked whether we could not use educational arguments in justifying our policy on selection, rather than just resting on the arguments about local authority autonomy.

From my point of view, however, at least as important as the discussion was the fact that by inviting me down with my officials Ted implied that there was no intention to move me from Education in the foreseeable future. This was a vital reinforcement for my authority. Ted went on a few days later in the House to list my achievements. Why did he give me such strong support? Some felt that he needed a woman in the Cabinet and it was difficult to find a credible alternative candidate. But I like to think that it also showed Ted’s character at its admirable best. He knew that the policies for which I had been so roundly attacked were essentially policies which I had reluctantly accepted under pressure from the Treasury and the requirements of public finance. He also knew that I had not tried to shift the blame onto others. However unreliable his adherence to particular policies, he always stood by people who did their best for him and his Government. This was one of the better reasons why his Cabinet reciprocated by remaining united behind him.

From the spring of 1972 the chilly political climate in which I had been living began noticeably to thaw.

It was, however, the Education White Paper, published in December 1972, which restored the fortunes of our education policy. The decision to
publish it stemmed from discussions of the three Programme Analysis and Review (PAR) Reports which we had prepared in the department.
*
Education: A Framework for Advance
was the original suggested title but, in a change which appears in retrospect to be all too typical of these over-ambitious, high-spending years, this became
Education: A Framework for Expansion.
The White Paper set out a ten-year plan for higher spending and better provision.

The White Paper received a disconcertingly rapturous reception. The
Daily Telegraph
, although making some criticisms about the lack of proposals for student loans or vouchers, said that the White Paper established me ‘as one of our most distinguished reforming – and spending – Ministers of Education’. The
Daily Mail
described it as a ‘Quiet Revolution’ and commented, ‘there has been nothing like it since the war’. More unsettling was the
Guardian’s
praise for a ‘progressive programme’ and the comment – I hoped tongue in cheek – that ‘apart from not mandatorily ending 11-Plus segregation, Mrs Thatcher is more than halfway towards a respectably socialist education policy’.

With the exception of some vigorous exchanges with Labour’s new and highly articulate Education spokesman, Roy Hattersley, about the rate of increase of education expenditure, the early months of 1973 were as near as any at the DES to being quiet. But the consequences of the Government’s fiscal and monetary policies were shortly to catch up with us. The first instalment was in May – a round of public expenditure cuts designed to cool the overheated economy. Capital spending in education, particularly the less politically sensitive area of higher education, was an obvious target. The reduction in the DES budget for 1974/75 was £182 million – out of £1,200 million total cuts in public spending. But I did manage for the time being to salvage the nursery school programme and also building programmes for special schools.

By now, however, my mind was fast focusing on the cataclysmic events overtaking the Government. It was not long before I would have to mount my soapbox and defend the policies I had pursued in my years at Education. I found no difficulty in doing so, for on almost every front the record was one of advance. And if the measures by which ‘advance’ at this time was assessed – resources committed rather than results achieved – are
accepted, it was also a record of genuine improvement. Nearly 2,000 out-of-date primary schools in England and Wales were replaced or improved. There was a substantial expansion of nursery education. I pushed through the raising of the school leaving age, which the Labour Party had had to postpone. Fewer pupils were now taught in very large classes. There were more qualified teachers and more students in higher education. But too much of my time at Education had been spent arguing about structures and resources, too little in addressing the crucial issue of the
contents
of education.

Equally, it was clear by the time of the general election that both the figures and, more fundamentally, the approach of
A Framework for Expansion
had been bypassed by events. There was no way that a programme of universal nursery education was affordable. Schools would have to make do with leaky roofs for many more years, until declining pupil numbers and school closures allowed resources to be better used. The Robbins Report principle – that ‘courses of higher education should be available for all those qualified by ability and attainment to pursue them’ (paragraph 31) – would have to take second place to the demands of financial stringency.

However frustrating it was to watch the shrinkage of my cherished plans and programmes, I can now see that it was unavoidable. And it may have had the side effect of forcing us to think creatively about how to get the best value from our suddenly limited resources. In the economic sphere, the crises of 1973 to 1976 led to a deep scepticism about the value of Keynesian demand management and to a new appreciation of the classical liberal economic approach of balanced budgets, low taxes and free markets. Similarly, in education and in other areas of social policy too, the realization that remedies must be found other than increased public expenditure opened up a whole new world. Fundamental questions began to be asked about whether the education system in its present form could deliver the results expected of it. Did it not in practice largely exist for the benefit of those who ran it, rather than those who received it? Was the state doing too much, rather than too little? What did the – often superior – results of other countries’ education systems and methods have to teach us? It was becoming necessary to rethink these policies; and we were shortly to be granted plenty of time to think.

The Heath Government 1970–1974

S
HORTLY BEFORE 11 O
’
CLOCK
on Tuesday 23 June 1970 my new ministerial car dropped me in Downing Street, where with other colleagues I ran the gauntlet of press and television outside No. 10. The hubbub in the ante-room was of enthusiasm and laughter. There was a spring in our step as we filed into the Cabinet Room where Ted Heath, with the Cabinet Secretary Sir Burke Trend beside him, awaited us. I found my place at the Cabinet table, but my mind was at least as much on the department as on the large strategic issues before the Government. It remained there – perhaps excessively so. But I felt an exhilaration which was prompted by more than the fact that this was my first ever Cabinet meeting: I felt, as I suspect we all did, that this was a decisive moment in the life of the country.

It was an impression which Ted himself did everything to justify. Speaking with the same intensity which had suffused his introduction to the manifesto on which we had just fought the election, he announced his intention of establishing a new style of administration. The emphasis was to be upon deliberation and the avoidance of hasty or precipitate reactions. There was to be a clean break and a fresh start and new brooms galore.

The tone was just what we would all have expected from Ted. He had a great belief in the capacity of open-minded politicians to resolve fundamental problems if the processes and structures of government were right and advice of the right technical quality was available and properly used. This was the approach which would lie behind the decision that autumn to set up the Central Policy Review Staff under Victor
Rothschild, to reconstruct the machinery of government on more ‘rational’ lines (including the setting up of the mammoth Department of the Environment) and the establishment of the PAR system. More generally, it inspired what turned out to be an excessive confidence in the Government’s ability to shape and control events.

Inevitably, this account contains a large measure of hindsight. I was not a member of the key Economic Policy Committee (EPC) of the Cabinet, though I would sometimes attend if teachers’ pay or spending on schools was an issue. More frequently, I attended Terence Higgins’s sub-committee on pay when the full rigours of a detailed statutory prices and incomes policy – the policy our manifesto pledged us to avoid – were applied, and made some contributions there. And, naturally, I was not a member of Ted’s inner circle where most of the big decisions originated. The role of the Cabinet itself was generally of reduced importance after the first year of the Heath Government until its very end.

This, however, is said in explanation not exculpation. As a member of the Cabinet I must take my full share of responsibility for what was done under the Government’s authority. Reviewing the events of this period with the benefit of two decades’ hindsight I can see more clearly how Ted Heath, whether right or wrong, took the course he did. And as time went on, he
was
wrong, not just once but repeatedly. His errors – our errors, for we went along with them – did huge harm to the Conservative Party and to the country. But it is easy to comprehend the pressures upon him.

It is also important to remember that the policies Ted pursued between the spring of 1972 and February 1974 were urged on him by most influential commentators and for much of the time enjoyed a wide measure of public support. There were brave and far-sighted critics who were proved right. But they were an embattled, isolated group. Although my reservations steadily grew, I was not at this stage among them.

But some of us (though never Ted, I fear) learned from these mistakes. I can well understand how after I became Leader of the Conservative Party Enoch Powell, who with a small number of other courageous Tory backbenchers had protested at successive U-turns, claimed that: ‘If you are looking for somebody to pick up principles trampled in the mud, the place to look is not among the tramplers.’

But Enoch was wrong. In Rudyard Kipling’s words, Keith Joseph and I had ‘had no end of a lesson’:

In this sense, we owed our later successes to our inside knowledge and to our understanding of the earlier failures. The Heath Government showed, in particular, that socialist policies pursued by Tory politicians are if anything even more disastrous than socialist policies pursued by Labour politicians. Collectivism, without even the tincture of egalitarian idealism to redeem it, is a deeply unattractive creed.

How did it happen? In spite of the acclaim for the Selsdon Park manifesto, we had thought through our policies a good deal less thoroughly than appeared. In particular that was true of our economic policy. We had no clear theory of inflation or the role of wage settlements within it. And without such a theory we drifted into the superstition that inflation was the direct result of wage increases and the power of trade unions. So we were pushed inexorably along the path of regulating incomes and prices.

Ted was also impatient. I share this characteristic. I am often impatient with people. But I knew that, in a broader sense, patience is required if a policy for long-term change is to work. This is especially true if, like Ted’s Government in 1970 and mine in 1979, you are committed to a non-interventionist economic policy that relies on setting a framework rather than designing a plan. Sudden shifts of direction, taken because the results are too long in appearing, can have devastating effects in undermining the credibility of the strategy. And so a government which came to power proud of its principle and consistency left behind it, among other embarrassing legacies, a host of quips about ‘the U-turn’. Ted’s own words in his introduction to the 1970 manifesto came back to haunt him: