Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography

by Margaret Thatcher

  Our side of the House liked it. I got a good press, the Daily Telegraph observing that ‘it has taken a woman … to slam the faces of the Government’s Treasury ministers in the mud and then stamp on them’. Iain Macleod himself wrote some generous lines about the performance in another paper.

  He did the same after my speech that autumn to the Party Conference in Blackpool. I put a special effort into it – though the nine hours of work I did would have seemed culpable idleness compared with the time I took for Conference speechwriting as Party Leader. That autumn, however, I spoke from notes, which gives extra spontaneity and the flexibility to insert a joke or jibe on the spur of the moment. Although the debate I was answering was on taxation, the cheers came in response to what I said about the way in which the Government was undermining the rule of law by the arbitrary powers it had taken through incomes policy and tax policy. With more than a touch of hyperbole, it must be admitted, I said: ‘All this is fundamentally wrong for Britain. It is a step not merely towards socialism but towards communism.’ The new and still left-of-centre Sun noted: ‘A Fiery Blonde Warns of the Road to Ruin’.

  In October 1967 Ted made me front-bench spokesman on Fuel and Power and a member of the Shadow Cabinet. It may be that my House of Commons performances and perhaps Iain Macleod’s recommendation overcame any temperamental reluctance on Ted’s part. My first task was to read through all the evidence given to the inquiry about the causes of the terrible Aberfan disaster the previous year, when 116 children and 28 adults were killed by a slag tip which slipped onto a Welsh mining village. Many of the parents of the victims were in the gallery for the debate, and I felt for them. Very serious criticisms had been made of the National Coal Board and as a result someone, I thought, should have resigned, though I held back from stating this conclusion with complete clarity in my first speech to the House as Shadow spokesman. What was revealed by the report made me realize how very easy it is in any large organization to assume that someone else has taken the requisite action and will assume responsibility. This is a problem which, as later tragedies have demonstrated, industrial civilization has yet to solve.

  Outside the House, my main interest was in trying to find a framework for privatization of electricity generation. To this end I visited power stations and sought all the advice I could from business contacts. But it turned out to be a fruitless enterprise, and I had not come up with what I considered acceptable answers by the time my portfolio was changed again – to Transport – in October 1968. Parliament had just passed a major Transport Bill reorganizing the railways, nationalizing the bus companies, setting up a new National Freight Authority – in effect, implementing most of the Government’s transport programme in one measure. I argued our case against nationalization of the ports. But, all in all, Transport proved a brief with limited possibilities.

  As a member of the Shadow Cabinet I attended its weekly discussions, usually on a Wednesday, in Ted’s room in the House. Discussion was generally not very stimulating. We would begin by looking ahead to the parliamentary business for the week and agreeing who was to speak and on what line. There might be a paper from a colleague which he would introduce. But, doubtless because we knew that there were large divisions between us, particularly on economic policy, issues of principle were not usually openly debated.

  For my part, I did not make a particularly important contribution to Shadow Cabinet. Nor was I asked to do so. For Ted and perhaps others I was principally there as the statutory woman whose main task was to explain what ‘women’ – Kiri Te Kanawa, Barbara Cartland, Esther Rantzen, Stella Rimington and all the rest of our uniform, undifferentiated sex – were likely to think and want on troublesome issues. I had, of course, great affection for Alec Douglas-Home, then Shadow Foreign Secretary, and got on perfectly well with most of my colleagues, but I had only three real friends around the table – Keith Joseph, Peter Thomas and Edward Boyle. And Edward by now was very much on the opposite wing of the Party from me.

  The atmosphere at our meetings was certainly made more difficult by the fact that the most senior figures now had somewhat tense relations with each other. Ted was settling into the role of Party Leader with determination, but without any real assurance. Reggie Maudling, Deputy Leader, had never really recovered from his defeat for the leadership. Iain Macleod was the most politically acute of us, but though a superb public orator he was a rather private and reserved character. He was also growing out of sympathy with his old friend Enoch Powell, who was increasingly concerned about immigration, a topic about which Iain felt equally strongly on the other side. Undoubtedly, Enoch was our finest intellect – classicist, historian, economist and biblical scholar. In a quite different way from Iain, he was a powerful public orator and able to command the House of Commons, or indeed any audience, with his remorseless logic and controlled passion. But as regards the Shadow Cabinet, by this stage he had largely withdrawn into himself. He was disliked and probably feared by Ted Heath.

  On Monday 26 February 1968 Shadow Cabinet discussed the Government’s Commonwealth Immigrants’ Bill to introduce the new immigration controls. A statement had been issued the previous week setting out the principles on which we would judge the measure. Ted Heath said that it was now up to Shadow Cabinet to decide whether the Bill came sufficiently within those terms. In fact, it did some of the things which we advocated. But it did not provide for registration of dependants, nor for appeal by those refused entry, nor for financial help for voluntary repatriation. It was decided to support the Bill, but also to move amendments where appropriate. Iain Macleod said that he would vote against the Bill, and was as good as his word.

  On Wednesday 10 April Shadow Cabinet discussed the other side of the Government’s policy, the Race Relations Bill. Ted opened the discussion. He said that though the Bill itself appeared to have many faults he thought that some legal machinery would be necessary to help improve the prospects for coloured immigrants in Britain. Quintin Hogg, the Shadow Home Secretary, outlined his own views. He thought that legislation was necessary, but that we should move amendments. However, he noted that our backbenchers were very hostile to the Bill. Reggie Maudling agreed with Quintin on both points. In the discussion which followed, in which I did not participate, the main point in dispute was whether, flawed as the Bill was, to vote against it at Second Reading would be misinterpreted as racist. Shadow Cabinet’s view was that the best assurance for good race relations was confidence that future numbers of immigrants would not be too great and that the existing law of the land would be upheld. In the end it was decided that a reasoned amendment would be drafted and there would be a two-line whip. Keith Joseph, Edward Boyle and Robert Carr, on the liberal wing, reserved their positions until they had seen the terms of the amendment. In the event they all supported it.

  On Sunday 21 April 1968 – two days before the debate – I woke up to find the front pages of the newspapers dominated by reports of a speech Enoch Powell had made in Birmingham on immigration the previous afternoon. It was strong meat, and there were some lines which had a sinister ring about them. But I strongly sympathized with the gravamen of his argument about the scale of New Commonwealth immigration into Britain. I too thought this threatened not just public order but also the way of life of some communities, themselves already beginning to be demoralized by insensitive housing policies, Social Security dependence and the onset of the ‘permissive society’. I was also quite convinced that, however selective quotations from his speech may have sounded, Enoch was no racist.

  At about 11 o’clock the telephone rang. It was Ted Heath. ‘I am ringing round all the Shadow Cabinet. I have come to the conclusion that Enoch must go.’ It was more statement than enquiry. But I said that I really thought that it was better to let things cool down rather than heighten the crisis. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘He absolutely must go, and most people think he must go.’ In fact, I understood later that several members of the Shadow Cabinet would have resigned if Enoch had not gone.
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  The longer-term consequences of Enoch’s departure on this issue and under these circumstances extended far beyond immigration policy. He was free to develop a philosophical approach to a range of policies, uninhibited by the compromises of collective responsibility. This spanned both economic and foreign affairs and embraced what would come to be called ‘monetarism’, deregulation, denationalization, an end to regional policy, and culminated in his opposition to British membership of the Common Market. Having Enoch preaching to such effect in the wilderness carried advantages and disadvantages for those of us on the right in the Shadow Cabinet and later the Cabinet. On the one hand, he shifted the basis of the political argument to the right and so made it easier to advance sound doctrines without being accused of taking an extreme position. On the other hand, so bitter was the feud between Ted and Enoch that querying any policy advanced by the leadership was likely to be branded disloyalty. Moreover, the very fact that Enoch advanced all his positions as part of a coherent whole made it more difficult to express agreement with one or two of them. For example, the arguments against prices and incomes policies, intervention and corporatism might have been better received if they had not been associated with Enoch’s views about immigration or Europe.

  At this time, as it happens, other Conservatives were moving independently in the same direction, with the notable exception of Europe, and Ted gave me an opportunity to chart this way ahead. The annual Conservative Political Centre lecture is designed to give some intellectual meat to those attending the Tory Party Conference. The choice of speaker is generally reserved to the Party Leader. It was doubtless a pollster or Party adviser who suggested that it might be a good idea to have me talk about a subject which would appeal to ‘women’. Luckily, I was free to choose my subject, and I decided on something that might appeal to thinking people of both sexes: I spoke on ‘What’s Wrong With Politics?’

  I began by listing the reasons why there was so much disillusionment with politics. Some of these really consisted of the growth of a critical spirit through the effects of education and the mass media. But others were the fault of the politicians themselves. Political programmes were becoming dominated by a series of promises whose impact was all the greater because of the growth of the Welfare State. This led me on to what I considered the main cause of the public’s increasing alienation from political parties – too much government. The competition between the parties to offer ever higher levels of economic growth and the belief that government itself could deliver these had provided the socialists with an opportunity massively to extend state control and intervention. This in turn caused ordinary people to feel that they had insufficient say in their own and their families’ lives. The Left claimed that the answer was the creation of structures which would allow more democratic ‘participation’ in political decisions. But the real problem was that politics itself was intruding into far too many decisions that were properly outside its scope. Alongside the expansion of government had developed a political obsession with size – the notion that large units promoted efficiency. In fact, the opposite was true. Smaller units – small businesses, families and ultimately individuals – should once again be the focus of attention.

  Apart from these general reflections, my CPC lecture also contained a section about prices and incomes policy. Although I stuck to the Shadow Cabinet line of condemning a compulsory policy while avoiding the issue of a voluntary one, I included a passage which reads:

  We now put so much emphasis on the control of incomes that we have too little regard for the essential role of government which is the control of the money supply and management of demand [emphasis added]. Greater attention to this role and less to the outward detailed control would have achieved more for the economy. It would mean, of course, that the government had to exercise itself some of the disciplines on expenditure it is so anxious to impose on others. It would mean that expenditure in the vast public sector would not have to be greater than the amount which could be financed out of taxation plus genuine saving.

  In retrospect, it is clear to me that this summed up how far my understanding of these matters had gone – and how far it still needed to go. I had come to see that the money supply was central to any policy to control inflation. But I had not seen either that this made any kind of incomes policy irrelevant or that monetary policy itself was the way in which demand should be managed.

  By now (1968) the left-of-centre consensus on economic policy was being challenged and would continue to be. But the new liberal consensus on moral and social matters was not. That is to say that people in positions of influence in government, the media and universities managed to impose metropolitan liberal views on a society that was still largely conservative morally. The 1960s saw in Britain the beginning of what has become an almost complete separation between traditional Christian values and the authority of the state. Some politicians regarded this as a coherent programme. But for the great majority, myself included, it was a matter of reforms to deal with specific problems, in some cases cruel or unfair provisions.

  So it was that I voted in 1966 for Leo Abse’s Bill proposing that homosexual conduct in private between consenting adults over twenty-one should no longer be a criminal offence. In the same year I voted for David Steel’s Bill to allow abortion if there was substantial risk that a child would suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped, or ‘where the woman’s capacity as a mother would be severely overstrained’. On both these issues I was strongly influenced by my own experience of other people’s suffering. For example, when I was a barrister I had been moved by the humiliation I had seen inflicted in the dock on a man of considerable local standing who had been found engaging in homosexual conduct.

  On the other hand, some aspects of the liberal agenda seemed to me to go too far. Divorce law reform was such a case. I had talked in my constituency surgeries to women subjected to a life of misery from their brutal husbands and for whom marriage had become a prison from which, in my view, they should be released. In these circumstances divorce might be the only answer. But if divorce became too easy it might undermine marriages simply going through a bad patch. If people can withdraw lightly from their responsibilities they are likely to be less serious about entering into the initial obligation. I was concerned about the spouse who was committed to make the marriage work and was deserted. I was also very concerned about what would become of the family of the first marriage when the man (or woman) chose to start a second family. So in 1968 I was one of the minority who voted against a Bill to make divorce far easier. Divorce would be possible where it was judged that there had been an ‘irretrievable breakdown’, broadly defined, in the marriage. I also supported two amendments, the first of which made available a special form of marriage that was indissoluble (except by judicial separation). The second would seek to ensure that in any conflict of interest between the legal wife and children of the first marriage and a common-law wife and her children, the former should have priority.

  Similarly, I voted against Sydney Silverman’s Bill to abolish the death penalty for murder in 1965. Like all the other measures listed above this was passed by Parliament, but subject to a Conservative amendment to the effect that the Act was to expire at the end of July 1970 unless Parliament determined otherwise. I then voted against the motion in December 1969 to make the Act permanent.

  I believed that the state had not just a right but a duty to deter and punish violent crime and to protect the law-abiding public. However sparingly it is used, the power to deprive an individual of liberty, and under certain circumstances of life itself, is inseparable from the sovereignty of the state. I never had the slightest doubt that in nearly all cases the supreme deterrent would be an influence on the potential murderer. And the deterrent effect of capital punishment is at least as great on those who go armed on other criminal activities, such as robbery. To my mind, the serious difficulty in the issue lay in the possibility of the convicti
on and execution of an innocent man – which has certainly happened in a small number of cases. Against these tragic cases, however, must be set the victims of convicted murderers who have been released after their sentence was served only to be convicted of murder a second time – who have certainly numbered many more. I believe that the potential victim of the murderer deserves that highest protection which only the existence of the death penalty gives.

  As regards abortion, homosexuality, and divorce reform it is easy to see that matters did not turn out as was intended. For most of us in Parliament – and certainly for me – the thinking underlying these changes was that they dealt with anomalies or unfairnesses which occurred in a minority of instances, or that they removed uncertainties in the law itself. Or else they were intended to recognize in law what was in any case occurring in fact. Instead, it could be argued that they have paved the way towards a more callous, selfish and irresponsible society. Reforming the law on abortion was primarily intended to stop young women being forced to have back-street abortions. It was not meant to make abortion simply another ‘choice’. Yet in spite of the universal availability of artificial contraception the figures for abortion have kept on rising. Homosexual activists have moved from seeking a right of privacy to demanding social approval for the ‘gay’ lifestyle, equal status with the heterosexual family and even the legal right to exploit the sexual uncertainty of adolescents. Divorce law reform has contributed to – though it is by no means the only cause of – a very large increase in the incidence of marriage breakdown which has left so many children growing up without the continual care and guidance of two parents.