Thatcher (10 page)

The results of the policies were clear in the print strike. On 24 January 1986, some 6,000 trade unionists struck after months of protracted negotiation with their employers, News International and Times Group Newspapers. The company management was seeking a legally binding agreement at their new plant in Wapping which incorporated flexible working, a no-strike clause, new technology and the abandonment of the closed shop. Immediately after the strike was declared, the employers dismissed the striking workers and moved their major business to Wapping. There was a police presence to ensure that work continued, and in 1987 the strike collapsed. Two failed strikes and the government's policies, changed the face of trade unionism irrevocably.

Control of trade unions went side by side with the government programme of privatisation. This was a more far-reaching process than the simple removal of subsidies begun during the first term, but undertaken because of the same underlying philosophy. The government had no business being directly involved in the marketplace. Individuals should have the right to succeed, the incentive to work, and the ability to fail – otherwise they would never try.
Which is the better nurse?
, asked Margaret Thatcher in 1980,
the one who brings you all your meals, or the one who makes you shake out of it and put your feet to the floor?
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So the industries painstakingly nationalised since 1945, in order to ensure that all people had equal rights to benefits, were now returned to individual ownership. The railways, the Post Office, telephones, the electricity boards, gas, water – all would, in time, be returned to private ownership and so become open to competition. The public were given the opportunity to buy shares in the industries, and many did. For some, this was their first experience of owning shares and often a very lucrative one. Of course, others did not or could not buy shares. Nigel Lawson headed this programme of flotation on the stock market of previously nationalised industries, helped by a world wide favourable economic climate and fall in the price of oil. British Steel was used as an example: By 1989 the corporation that had lost one-third of its workforce was making as much steel as it had in 1979. Privatisation through share flotation was not a programme supported by all Conservatives – Lord Stockton, formerly Harold Macmillan, called it ‘selling the family silver'. Margaret Thatcher replied
It is selling it back to the family
. She knew the policy was popular:
Share-ownership is up threefold since 1979. People who've bought shares in British Gas, British Telecom and the other highly successful privatised companies want to see how their shares are doing
.
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There was at least a possibility that share ownership would give a bonanza to ordinary people.

The third strand of this manifesto was control of local authority power and spending. Again, this was a cause that was both personal and political. John Campbell talks about her hatred of local government as ‘irrational, almost visceral dislike'.
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He links it to the episode where her father was voted out of his position as alderman, and goes further – perhaps her dislike was a delayed revenge for what he saw as her repressed and joyless childhood. Certainly, she showed few signs of returning to Grantham after her marriage to Denis. However it is also true that during the bruising period before the 1983 election, Ken Livingstone's Labour Greater London Council was displaying the growing numbers of unemployed in floodlights on the roof of County Hall, across the river from Westminster. Six other Metropolitan Boroughs, also Labour-run, were ignoring spending restraints and education policy. The result was predictable. The seven city councils were abolished.

With manifesto commitments secured, it seemed an easy downhill run to the next election, at least on the home front. The ‘blip' that arose on the horizon was called the Westland affair in the press, and resulted in open dissent in the Conservative Party. A small company manufacturing helicopters ran into financial difficulties. Michael Heseltine wanted to secure support from a European consortium in order to protect Britain's defence interests. The company looked towards American support. Margaret Thatcher argued that the government should not be involved in the choice, but privately favoured the American option. There were arguments, inside and outside Parliament. Michael Heseltine walked out of Cabinet, and two weeks later Leon Brittan also resigned. These two became formidable enemies to Margaret Thatcher in the future.

The election in June 1987 returned the Conservative government with a majority of 101. For the first few months after this election they were riding high in the opinion polls, and able to set about their manifesto commitments. This government intended to reform education, housing and health, all areas where collectivism seemed well entrenched. The economy was booming. Nigel Lawson, in his first budget, reduced the standard rate of income tax to 25 per cent – an all-time post-war low. More controversially, he reduced the top rate of tax from 60 per cent to 40 per cent – the rich no longer supported the poor.

The next few years were hard for Margaret Thatcher. She distrusted Lawson, whom she felt took too much credit for the economic gains of the party, and who would make a redoubtable opponent for the leadership. All was not well in the economy, either. In October 1987, ‘Black Monday' saw the largest recorded fall in stock-market prices ever recorded. Lawson responded to the world-wide fall in shares by cutting interest rates. The long-term effect of this was to restore inflation, never absolutely defeated, by encouraging spending. In December, Willie Whitelaw suffered a slight stroke, and resigned in January 1988. However, in November 1988, all the key planks of the government's programme were unveiled. First, housing reform spelled the end of council housing: Housing Action Trusts (HATs) were introduced to improve run down estates by converting them to private ownership. Over the Thatcher years, the sale of good-quality council houses to working people had forced poor people to live in poorer housing: increases in rent had made more people dependent on housing benefit. Where there were still council housing estates, often in job-poor areas of Britain, they were occupied by poor families drawing housing benefit. These families saw no advantage in swapping the council they knew for the HAT they did not. The largest category of housing need at this time was the shocking increase in visible homelessness, not the poor in poor-quality housing. Welfare cuts had removed benefit entitlement from several categories, particularly young people and single unemployed people. The million council houses that had been sold had not been replaced in any way. Rents in remaining housing and the private rented sector had risen out of reach for such people. Margaret Thatcher was not unaware of the problem, but did not regard it as one a government should solve:
This year
[1990]
, we are increasing from £600,000 to £2 million the support we give to voluntary organisations who help and advise the homeless. Much of this money will go to advisory services, so that fewer young people leave home without making proper arrangements about where to live
. In her memoirs, she made it clear that young people should be at home with their families, and that the government had no right to interfere with family life. It was this belief that fuelled changes in the welfare benefit scheme that reduced benefits for young and unemployed people, providing some relief for the disabled and the ‘deserving' poor – people who had worked.

Second, there was reform of the National Health Service. Margaret Thatcher would have liked to move away from a tax-funded service but the electorate would not accept that. The tension resulted in the introduction of ‘internal markets' in the Health Service – division between the providers of essential service and the purchasers of those services. Bevan had set up the health service so that all the essential goods needed to provide health care would be the property of the health service – they would own the beds, the towels, the services of the cleaners. He believed that this would make health care as cheap as possible. Now Margaret Thatcher introduced competition in provision of those services, so that the price could be driven down. Bevan had believed that lack of competition would ensure good cheap services: Margaret Thatcher believed exactly the opposite.

Reform of education was also a manifesto commitment, and a problem. Margaret Thatcher's time as Secretary of State for Education had not changed her fundamental view that education should be the transfer of a body of knowledge, and that schools that took a pupil-centred approach were contributing to the creation of a lazy and under-qualified population. Kenneth Baker was charged with steering the Great Education Reform Bill – known all too soon as the ‘GERBIL', through Parliament. This was really five separate bills, each one of which was a substantial measure in itself. One set up a national curriculum for all schools to follow – which caused conflict between Margaret Thatcher, Baker and educationalists everywhere in deciding what was, and what was not, good education. Another gave schools the right to ‘opt out' of local authority control. She hoped that most schools would take this choice, and that local authorities would lose power in education. In fact, in 1990 only about 50 schools in the country did so. Another bill established ‘City Technology Colleges' as an alternative to comprehensive education, but only 15 were ever set up. In higher education, the difference between universities and polytechnics was abolished, facilitating a huge increase in student numbers – from 700,000 in 1988 to one million in 1993. Finally, the Inner London Education Authority was disbanded. This had survived the abolition of the Greater London Council to provide co-ordination for education services in schools across the capital, but it was expensive and, in Margaret Thatcher's eyes, unrepentantly Labour-run. Passing all of these reforms together took up 370 hours of parliamentary time – a post-war record.

By 1990, though, bigger problems were stalking Margaret Thatcher. In 1974, as Shadow Environment Secretary, she had first looked with distaste at the rating system in England and Wales. Now, she had the opportunity to do something about it. The Community Charge (or ‘Poll Tax'), was introduced in April 1990 to replace domestic rates. In theory it simply shifted the levy required by local government from property to individuals. It charged a flat resident's charge per head for every adult – so the richest adult was charged the same amount as the poorest. Charging individually instead of by address caused huge injustices – some groups benefited while poorer households suffered. The Conservatives' own figure indicated that seven out of ten people would be worse off – but these were not people in large houses in wealthy areas. Riots and the biggest wave of civil disobedience ever seen in Britain followed. Lawson had argued against the Poll Tax, the only one of the Cabinet to do so.

In July 1990, the IRA struck again, killing Margaret Thatcher's friend and ally Ian Gow. He had been her first Parliamentary Private Secretary, and had argued for monetarist policies in the long-ago Heath years. He and Margaret Thatcher formed a close friendship, and he was renowned for pressing her interests in Parliament and the Parliamentary party. He was killed by a car bomb outside his home. Margaret Thatcher remembered: I could not help thinking... that my daughter Carol had travelled with Ian in his car the previous weekend to take his dog out for a walk:
It might have been her too
.
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That day she attended the Catholic Church where Gow and his wife were parishioners, and was moved by the response to his death.

The final straw came not from domestic policy but from the European Union. In October 1989, Lawson resigned, citing differences with Margaret Thatcher about the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) – an early sign of storms ahead. In October 1990, the European Council held in Rome had pressed the case for a single currency. Government policy, supported by Geoffrey Howe, was to suggest a parallel rather than a single currency, retaining national coins but using a ‘hard ecu' as money across borders. Margaret Thatcher was prepared to support this, but she was still outspoken in her condemnation of the union.
The President of the Commission, M.Delors, said at a press conference the other day that he wanted the European Parliament to be the democratic body of the community, he wanted the commission to be the executive and he wanted the council of Ministers to be the Senate. No. No. No.
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On 1 November 1990, Geoffrey Howe resigned. He used his resignation speech to criticise Margaret Thatcher, indict ‘Thatcherism' and spell out the real differences between himself and Nigel Lawson, and the Prime Minister. It was, said Ronny Millar who had written Margaret Thatcher's speeches, ‘A demolition job done with such meticulous artistry'.
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This spelled the end. On 14 November, Michael Heseltine declared himself a candidate for the leadership of the party. Margaret Thatcher won the first ballot, but her lead was small. The Cabinet visited her one by one that night, advising her not to continue to a second ballot. Possibly for the first time in her life, Margaret Thatcher turned away from a direct challenge. On 22 November 1990, she resigned as Leader of the Conservative Party.