In September 1986, the city of Southampton organized a reunion for GI brides who had sailed for a new life in the United States forty years before. Most had been very young, working class, and many had not known their husbands more than a few weeks or months. The women knew that it would be many years before they saw Britain again. ‘You’ll be sorry. You’ll be back,’ the dockers had shouted as they boarded their ships. ‘We left under a cloud,’ said one. In 1946 marrying a Yank was selling out to silk stockings and Hershey bars.’ I met them at Broadlands, the late Lord Mountbatten’s home, where they had been invited to a garden party: I was curious to know how different their lives had been in the States from those of siblings and friends whom they had left behind. The Solent Silver Band played wartime melodies, and in a corner of a marquee Patience Strong, wearing two strings of pearls and a hat that made her look like a straw lady, read from her poems:
Behind the prison bars of Europe,
men are listening in the dark …
The brides sat on red plush chairs swapping reminiscences of Tidworth camp, where they had been waited on by German POWs, processed and deloused. Having found one another again, they were determined to hold on. ‘Just remember, if you ever get to California …’
A woman originally from Wales had been shocked to find her nephews and nieces on the dole: ‘I didn’t realize how hard it was for those who are out of work,’ she said. Of a group of four sisters present, three had married blue-collar Americans, but nevertheless had enjoyed a life – cars, detached homes, kitchen gadgets, holidays – that it took the sister who stayed behind and married a builder thirty years to catch up on. An exuberant woman from Florida in a wild pink dress burst out: ‘Like Martina Navratilova, I was born to be an American.’ Even in her sixties, life was still very much a ball – ‘parties, travel, dances, bridge.’ A woman who had married a farmer in the middle of Alabama said she felt that it was only in the last ten to fifteen years that working people in Britain had been allowed a decent education. Both her sons had graduated. ‘Here I am sure they would have been just labourers,’ she said. Her nephews and nieces in Britain had left school at fifteen. She herself had studied for a degree: ‘I would never have made it in England.’
They were frank about the disadvantages of American life. Several spoke of the financial disaster that could overwhelm a family if someone suffered a long, terminal illness. One woman, who had broken several bones in an accident, had been pitched out of hospital the day her insurance ran out, although she was only half mended. A retired couple were paying $2,400 a year on health insurance. I joined a jokey group. ‘You ask me what would have happened if I’d stayed. Well, I’m old and grey now, and I would have been old and grey if I’d stayed,’ said one in answer to the inescapable question. A woman started to talk about her brother. Her parents in Britain had died when he was fourteen, and he had been sent to join her in Florida. He had been a bright, ambitious boy, an honours student at college, and before long was running his own building business – the American dream personified. One day a gunman walked into his site hut and shot him dead. No one was ever arrested and no motive ever deduced.
While I have been writing this book, one vital section of British society has been voting with its feet. By 1987 the quantity and quality of the ‘brain drain’ was threatening the intellectual and economic future of Britain. The Times, normally as close to Mrs Thatcher as a coat of paint, suggested that the exodus of scientists was paving the way for Britain’s ‘exclusion from the twenty-first century’: one thousand scientists a year were crossing the Atlantic. In March 1987 scientific and engineering research was halted for the rest of the year. Professors were forced to ‘mothball’ departments because of lack of chemicals; the breakdown of vital pieces of equipment like lasers threatened others. Scientists cancelled or postponed research they had spent months setting up.
The immediate crisis was caused by a pay rise for university workers which the government awarded but refused to fund, throwing the burden on the fully stretched Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC). The amount of money involved was a derisory fifteen million pounds out of a total of £660 million. Scientists at all levels and in most disciplines were being offered jobs in the United States at upwards of three times their British salaries; across the Atlantic newly graduated British PhDs were paid more than their erstwhile professors. The government responded to its critics by claiming that tax cuts would create a climate in which research could thrive – as if a few hundred pounds on a salary would compensate for the collapse of scientific departments. Scientists were particularly bitter because the SERC crisis coincided with the 1987 pre-election budget in which Chancellor Nigel Lawson disposed of nearly five billion pounds of public money in various giveaways.
The government’s fundamental misunderstanding of why scientists were leaving made campaigners like Denis Noble, Professor of Cardiovascular Physiology at Oxford University and a founder of the Save British Science Society, almost laugh in their anguish. Scientists were concerned about the destruction of everything they had worked for, and the government offered them peanuts. A physiologist already in the States said of his British experience: ‘I even collected dole for two weeks. I will not go back on the dole, nor to an emasculated research career.’ In many subjects like inorganic chemistry and molecular biology a vital proportion of the best and brightest had already left Britain, creating a siphon effect that was rapidly sucking further talent across the Atlantic. A House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology reported: ‘the overall picture conveys an impression of turmoil and frustration’.
It was not just scientists who were feeling they could no longer do their best work in Britain. Philosophers and historians were also departing. Philosopher Bernard Williams, Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, himself about to depart, said: ‘Today’s problem is not fundamentally about salaries. Cuts in government support, a lack of job opportunities and new requirements encouraging early retirement have led to a very high degree of demoralization.’ He also claimed that the United States had become a more stimulating environment for philosophy; key issues are pitched into the public arena by the American legal system and Supreme Court. He told the Sunday Telegraph that, when he left, he would have ‘the feeling of leaving behind a place in decline … you don’t have to be a rat to leave a sinking ship. The passengers may also have to leave. So many people in England feel it is going downhill. You get tired of people – including oneself – saying it. I don’t think it is as nice a place as it used to be.’ As a reporter in Washington DC, I had felt something of the intellectual stimulation described by Professor Williams. It was not simply that I was writing about bigger events than I would have been in London, but that important ideas were chased about in public.
Few anti-Americans take the trouble to understand the positive side of American life. They watch ‘Cagney and Lacey’ and ‘Miami Vice’, see news extracts of Reagan bumbling his way through a press conference, and run into camera-festooned mid-westerners blocking Underground escalators, and persuade themselves that is all there is to America. They turn their faces from the unpalatable truth that the United States is the intellectual, literary, philosophic and academic heart of the English-speaking world. Britain has pockets of excellence, like the theatre and television (up to a point), and has civilized, literate men of affairs like Roy Jenkins and Michael Foot, but such achievements and people should not be mistaken for general superiority. It is not materialism that attracts the likes of Professor Williams and the annual average of a thousand ‘brain-drainers’ to leave for America, and, inasmuch as anti-Americans believe that it is, they delude themselves.
I met Professor Denis Noble, of the Save British Science Society, in an eyrie at the top of an office block near London’s Victoria station. There was nothing on the door to indicate the presence of the Society, and the young woman who helped me find the rooms said she thought something ‘secret’ went on inside, which sounded unlikely. But i
t turned out that SBSS shared its accommodation with an organization that might be a target for the animal liberationists. Professor Noble sat at a leather-topped table writing an article in pencil: he had become more of a polemicist than a physiologist in recent months. He was a gentle, patient man, with longish, floppy hair and a cardigan, but he had been made angry enough by the paucity of government funding for universities and science to tear himself away from all but general supervision of his life’s work into the rhythms of the heart to fight the cause of science in public. We met on the day that SERC had announced the freezing of all research, and colleagues occasionally thrust their heads round the door when news organizations rang for comment.
Professor Noble had launched SBSS eighteen months earlier over dinner at his Oxford college, Balliol. The diners agreed that the traditional British way of lobbying, softly behind closed doors, was doing science a disservice. Their dilemma was: ‘How does a profession that normally trusts in quiet discussions between distinguished people respond when the system totally breaks down?’ They planned a once only ‘SOS’, placing an advertisement in the Times, expecting two hundred responses and sufficient contributions to pay for the ad. They received two thousand more or less anguished replies, and SBSS was founded. The media response had been overwhelming: the SBSS cause had been in the press virtually every day, and several television programmes were in the making. Polls showed widespread public support for the campaign. The government’s attitude, according to Professor Noble, was that British scientists were not hard-headed enough – one junior minister had accused them of being ‘just as happy to work on a white elephant as on a winner’ – and that they lacked public support, a notion retained apparently from the 1968–72 days of student unrest and the general feeling against the universities.
The scientists answered that all manner of American companies were beating a path to their laboratories. Professor Noble’s own research, which he described as ‘very fundamental’, was exciting interest from US drug companies: there is a huge potential world market for successful heart drugs. Had he himself been offered jobs abroad? ‘Yes, of course, anyone in my position has been.’ Two or three years earlier he had made a decision to stay, but added: ‘If the situation does collapse entirely, I might – for the sake of my research – have to say that I would be better off abroad under reasonably calm conditions.’ The government told SBSS to go to industry, and industry sent them back to the government, claiming that it needed improved tax incentives for research and development before it could justify the expenditure to its shareholders.
I asked whether it helped that Mrs Thatcher had been a scientist. Professor Noble laughed: ‘Just because she had a little bit of science in her background, people believe she understands. It’s not true.’ There was not, he said, a single scientist in the Cabinet, and precious few in the top echelons of industry. The reason was no longer principally the amateurism of British industry, but the subject specialization at sixteen which removed budding scientists from the world of value judgements. Scientists therefore enter industry ill-equipped to argue their point of view against professional managers. ‘We are told that quite frankly not many scientists are up to it,’ said the professor. Being an advocate required very different skills from those of the laboratory scientist, who had to lay out all his doubts on the bench. Professor Noble, a fluent French speaker, supported the idea of an exam like the baccalaureate, with its compulsory breadth of subjects.
He argued that British science was a victim of the government’s ideology. Science, according to ministers he had dealt with, should be out in the market-place. But, he argued, they overlooked such foreign practices as massive Federal funding in the United States and 150 per cent research and development tax breaks in Australia. Sir Keith Joseph, when Secretary of State for Education and Science, had told an Oxford audience of scientists – worth, according to Professor Noble, thirty million pounds of public investment – that, since the government could not possibly afford what they wanted, they should go abroad. Colleagues who did not attend the meeting anxiously phoned those who had, asking, ‘Is the outlook that bad?’ Sir Keith had shattered the morale of several hundred scientists in one speech.
Professor Noble said: ‘Sir Keith said we couldn’t afford more for science. He’s an honest man, and I am sure he believed it. But there are right-wing governments in most industrialized countries, and they are affording it.’ President Reagan had doubled the budget for the National Science Foundation shortly before SERC halted British research. Commenting on President Reagan’s move, the American magazine Science said: ‘The nation’s science and engineering enterprise must have the financial resources to do two things: remain at the leading edge of discoveries and produce the technical personnel that the country needs. Both are essential to our economic competitiveness and must be done even in times of fiscal stringency … where we have a clear lead, we must preserve it; where we are lagging, we must catch up.’
Egged on by campus journals, American universities and research institutes that had once restricted their raids on British academics to second-tier people, were, by the spring of 1987, going for the very best. One head-hunter from California’s Silicon Valley said that he had once enjoyed rounding up British computer scientists, but he had become frightened by his success and that of others. ‘When I recruit in Britain, I am worried I am consuming the seed corn.’ More than ten professorial chairs in computer science at British universities were already vacant, and Oxford, having failed to find a suitable candidate for its chair, had readvertised. Traditional, conservative Oxford’s refusal to give Mrs Thatcher an honorary doctorate should, said Professor Noble, have posted the danger signals to the government.
The despair felt by young scientists was captured in a letter to Professor Noble from a young woman who had just obtained her PhD. She had an impressive academic track record, and several publications, but was being forced to work as an ‘academic visitor’ without pay. ‘I accept the lack of pay and proper position because I passionately believe in what I am doing, and am holding on to a lifelong dream – although I realize I could become a tax inspector and earn £9,000 p.a. (as often advertised in the New Scientist!).’ She had been, when she wrote the letter, shortlisted for a job in North Carolina. Such was her frustration that she added: ‘I feel I would be foolish to turn the job down if offered it – even if accepting it would mean leaving my husband, family, friends and the England I love.’ (She also commented that she felt discriminated against in Britain because she was a woman and married – ‘every application I have completed here asks for my marital status whereas none of those for the US and Canada even ask!’) The sheaf of letters sent to SBSS included dozens of examples of wasted opportunities at the highest levels. A Cambridge scientist had arrived home from an international symposium in Japan where she had been the key speaker, to find a grant rejection from SERC in the post. She wrote: ‘An area of basic and applied research, where Britain has been pre-eminent and indeed where we are also very successful commercially, is being allowed to collapse in a disorganized, unplanned way. Should I continue to seek funds in this area? Is the expenditure of time and effort worth it? I am seized by a great weariness.’
An area of science in which Britain has a lead at least in Europe is ‘artificial intelligence’, the programming of computers for uses beyond sophisticated number-crunching to simulate higher mental processes, like reasoning, problem-solving and understanding language. The acknowledged academic centre for this endeavour is Edinburgh University, and one of its bright stars was Peter Jackson who headed the ‘Experts’ Systems Group’, which is developing computer programs that can tackle real problems, using the kind of knowledge that a doctor or geologist, for example, calls on when making decisions. It is very much ‘new frontier’ stuff.
Dr Jackson had had, in his own word, a ‘chequered’ career, starting, but not completing, an English degree, working in London as a social worker, taking a first-class degree in psychology
, moving to computers and artificial intelligence in his late twenties. In the spring of 1987 he was plotting his departure to the United States. It was hard to find brain-drainers in the act of stealing away who were prepared to talk, and even Dr Jackson was anxious about the reaction of colleagues and superiors when the news leaked out. The crucial elements of his story, I suspect, would have applied to the hundreds of our brightest and best motivated research scientists who were then exploring American possibilities.
The day before we met, news was released that one of Britain’s academic stars, Professor Colin Blakemore, Oxford University’s youngest ever professor of physiology and a former Reith Lecturer, was in Los Angeles exploring openings for himself and his entire twenty-strong team. ‘I don’t want to leave England, but I might have to,’ he said.
Dr Jackson had reached the point at which he wanted to go, come what may. He was thirty-eight, and the battle to get where he was had been intense. At a time when his contemporaries were already well-launched on their careers, he had been struggling through his PhD on £2,500 a year at a university where he had almost no intellectual support, teaching himself advanced computer languages – including LISP, the language of artificial intelligence – and competing for use of the department’s one computer with large numbers of undergraduates. ‘If I had not been highly motivated, I would have quit after a year,’ he said. His marriage did collapse. He had been qualified a year, when, in 1983, the ‘New Blood’ lectureship scheme was launched to create more posts in Information Technology. He applied and got his Edinburgh job, and at the same time the government ‘Alvey’ initiative, designed to forge a partnership between industry and university research, pumped a great deal more money into research and development. Through ‘Alvey’ he was instrumental in raising £3,500,000 for his project, and created five new posts. After the years of sacrifice, extreme hard work and achievement, he was paid under £15,000 a year.
When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain Page 41
