The Government’s White Paper which proposed directly elected Assemblies for both Scotland and Wales was published in November 1975. But the Shadow Cabinet was deeply divided as to how to deal with it.
The arguments continued in 1976. I now began to harden our opposition. In November, when the Bill was published, I had dinner with a constitutional lawyer, Professor Yardley of Birmingham, to discuss its details. I also saw a good deal of the constitutional scholar Nevil Johnson. The more I heard and the more closely I read the Bill, the more dangerous it appeared to the Union. It was a prescription for bureaucracy and wrangling, and the idea that it would appease those Scots who wanted independence was becoming ever more absurd. Moreover, a private poll conducted for the Party in November 1976 confirmed my suspicion of the electoral arguments for devolution. Scottish opinion was highly fragmented: the Government’s devolution plans had only 22 per cent support – less than our own (26 per cent), and less even than ‘no change’ (23 per cent). Only 14 per cent favoured independence. A far-reaching constitutional change required much more public support than that.
In November/December 1976, with the Bill about to come before the House for Second Reading, there were four long discussions in Shadow Cabinet about whether or not to impose a three-line whip against it. Our position could be fudged no longer. In addition to the overwhelming majority of our backbenchers, most Shadow ministers were by now opposed to devolution, at least on any lines similar to those contained in the White Paper. But there was a rooted belief among its supporters that devolution was the only way of heading off independence, and even some of those who disliked it intensely were wary of appearing to be anti-Scottish or of being seen to overrule the Scottish Tory leaders. In the end, in a marathon meeting ending in the early hours of Thursday 2 December we decided – with a significant dissenting minority including Alick Buchanan-Smith – that we would oppose the Bill on a three-line whip.
Alick Buchanan-Smith duly resigned as Shadow Scottish Secretary, along with Malcolm Rifkind. Four other front-benchers wanted to go, but I refused their resignations and even allowed one of them to speak against our line in the debate and vote with the Government. No Party leader could have done more. To replace Alick Buchanan-Smith I moved Teddy Taylor, whose robust patriotism and soundness had long impressed me, from Trade to become Shadow Scottish Secretary.
It is generally an unnerving experience to have to speak from the front bench when you know that the debate, and in all probability the vote, will expose divisions on your own side. But the speech I had to give on Monday 13 December at the Bill’s Second Reading debate was exactly the sort of forensic operation that I enjoyed. I said as little as possible about our proposals, making only minimal reference to our residual commitment to an Assembly in Scotland, and saying a great deal about the internal contradictions and inconsistencies of the legislation. At the end of the debate twenty-seven Conservatives, including Ted Heath and Peter Walker, abstained. Five voted with the Government, including Alick Buchanan-Smith, Malcolm Rifkind and Hamish Gray. But Labour were also divided: twenty-nine Labour MPs abstained and ten voted with us. The forty-five-vote majority at Second Reading thus concealed great unhappiness on the Labour side as well as our own over the issue, which was to resurface. In the course of the debate the Prime Minister hinted that the Government would concede a referendum in Scotland and Wales – a commitment that in the end proved fatal to the whole devolution enterprise.
Precisely what would happen now was far from clear. On Thursday 17 March 1977 the Government refused to contest our motion to adjourn the House following a debate on public expenditure, for fear of a defection of left-wing Labour MPs. I promptly described this almost unheard-of breach of orderly procedure as ‘defeat with dishonour’. We tabled, as we had to, a Motion of No Confidence in the Government. If it succeeded, there would be a general election. In spite of my natural caution, I thought that it would. I used the speech I made to the Central Council at Torquay that Saturday to put the Party on the alert for an imminent campaign.
These were days of intense manoeuvring between the parties and their whips. But I refused to engage in it. David Steel, the Liberal Party Leader, had already indicated that he might be prepared to keep Labour in power if the terms and conditions were judged right. Legislation for direct elections to the European Assembly on a proportional representation basis, ‘industrial democracy’ and tax reform were the topics publicly mentioned, but no one believed that the Liberals’ decision as to whether or not to support the Labour Government would be determined by secondary issues. For the Liberals there were two large questions they had to answer. Would they be blamed for keeping an unpopular government in power? Or would they be credited with moderating its policies? I did not myself believe that they would sign up to a pact with the Government – certainly not unless there was a formal coalition with several Liberals as Cabinet ministers, which it was difficult to imagine the left of the Labour Party being prepared to tolerate.
My calculation of the political equation was broadly correct; but I left out the crucial element of vanity. Although the Lib-Lab Pact did the Liberals a good deal of harm, while doing Jim Callaghan no end of good, it did allow Liberal Party spokesmen the thrilling illusion that they were important.
I was told some hours before I was due to propose the No Confidence Motion in the House that the Liberals would support the Government. The pact would apparently last initially for the rest of the parliamentary session. The Liberals would not be members of the Government, but would liaise with individual ministers and send representatives to a joint consultative committee chaired by Michael Foot, the Leader of the House. The Government gave undertakings on direct elections to the European Assembly and devolution (accepting free votes on PR), promised to find time for a Liberal Bill on homelessness and agreed to limit the scope of planned legislation on local authority direct-labour organizations. It was a lacklustre shopping list. But, knowing that we were looking at certain defeat, with all the recriminations which would follow from the press and our supporters, it drained me of inspiration.
Angus Maude had helped me with the drafting of the speech. We decided to make it very short. In fact, it was too short. Moreover, it had been drafted when it seemed that we might be facing an immediate general election, so that positive statements of our policies had appeared preferable to detailed attacks on the Government’s. It received the worst press of any speech I have given. Of course, if I had read out the Westminster telephone directory and we had won at the end of the day no one would have bothered. But in politics, as in life, the ‘ifs’ offer no consolation. As I drove back to Flood Street later that night it was not my poor reception in the House or even the Government’s majority of twenty-four which most depressed me. It was the fact that after all our efforts the chance to begin turning Britain round seemed no nearer than before.
* Alan Walters was then Cassel Professor at the London School of Economics. He left the following year for the United States to work for the World Bank. As already noted, he was my economic adviser as Prime Minister, 1981–84 and in 1989. Brian Griffiths (later Head of my Policy Unit at No. 10) was then a lecturer at the London School of Economics; he became a professor at the City University the following year. Gordon Pepper was an economic analyst at Greenwell & Co., and an expert on monetary policy. Sam Brittan was Principal Economic Commentator on the Financial Times.
CHAPTER TEN
Détente or Defeat?
Foreign policy and visits 1975–1979
THE FIRST MAJOR POLITICAL CHALLENGE I faced on becoming Leader was the referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Economic Community, promised by Labour in Opposition as a way of keeping their party together. I would have preferred a challenge on some other topic. Europe was very much Ted’s issue. He considered that his greatest achievement was to take Britain into the EEC and, now that he had lost the leadership, it was only natural that he would engage even more passion in the cause. As had become eviden
t during the leadership campaign, there was some suspicion that I was less enthusiastic. Compared with Ted, perhaps, that was true. But I did genuinely believe that it would be foolish to leave the Community; I thought it provided an economic bond with other western European countries, which was of strategic significance; and above all I welcomed the larger opportunities for trade which membership gave. I did not, however, see the European issue as a touchstone for everything else. It did not seem to me that high-flown rhetoric about Britain’s European destiny, let alone European identity, was really to the point, though I had on occasion to employ a little on public platforms. For all these reasons, I was more than happy for Ted to take the leading public role on our side in the referendum campaign and for Willie to be the Conservative Vice-President of ‘Britain in Europe’ – the ‘Yes’ campaign organization which was set up in co-operation with pro-European Labour MPs and the Liberals, and of which Con O’Neill and later Roy Jenkins was President.
The Commons passed the proposal for a referendum by 312 votes to 248. But it was the outcome of the debate on Wednesday 9 April on the substantive issue of continued EEC membership which was a foretaste of things to come: Ayes 396, Noes 170. From now on until Thursday 5 June, the day set for the referendum, the formidable power of business, the leaderships of both parties and the wider, respectable establishment combined to extol the merits of Community membership, to elaborate fears of job losses, to warn of a third world war originating in intra-European conflict and to ridicule the odd combination of Labour left-wingers and Tory reactionaries which constituted the ‘No’ lobby. The ‘Yes’ campaign was well organized and very well funded – not least as a result of the efforts of Alistair McAlpine, whom I would shortly recruit to be Conservative Party Treasurer. For all the talk of a ‘great debate’ it was really a contest between David and Goliath, which Goliath won. The substantial issues often went by default.
Most distasteful of all to me was the patent opportunism of the Labour leadership. The ‘renegotiation’ of Britain’s terms of entry, which had been concluded in March at the Dublin European Council where a special ‘Financial Mechanism’ had been agreed to prevent Britain shouldering too heavy a financial burden, was simply not serious: the mechanism was never triggered and so never yielded a penny piece. Yet the booklet distributed to all households by the Government abandoned all of the Euro-sceptical rhetoric which Labour, particularly the Foreign Secretary Jim Callaghan, had employed at the general election.
I duly launched the Conservative pro-Market campaign at the St Ermin’s Hotel, at a press conference presided over by Ted Heath, even describing myself as ‘the pupil speaking before the master’. I spoke in my constituency and elsewhere. I contributed an article on the eve of poll to the Daily Telegraph. I felt that I did my share of campaigning. But others did not see it that way. There was criticism in the press – the Sun, for example, commenting:
Missing: one Tory Leader. Answers to the name of Margaret Thatcher. Mysteriously disappeared from the Market Referendum Campaign eleven days ago. Has not been seen since. Will finder kindly wake her up and remind her she is failing the nation in her duty as Leader of the Opposition?
The referendum result itself was no surprise, with 67 per cent voting ‘Yes’ and 33 per cent ‘No’. Less predictable were the effects on the political scene as a whole. The result was a blow to the left of the Labour Party; and Harold Wilson, whose cunning tactical ploy the whole exercise had been, used it to move Tony Benn from Industry, where he had proved a political liability, to Energy where his scope for mischief was more limited. For the Conservatives, it was naturally Ted and his friends who won most of the plaudits; I myself paid tribute to him in the House. He made no response. That came later.
Soon the press was full of accounts of Ted’s earlier meeting with me at Wilton Street, but given in such a way as to suggest that I had not made a serious offer to him to join the Shadow Cabinet. These stories were accompanied by suggestions that he now intended to use the position gained through the referendum campaign to make his way back – presumably at my expense – to power. Ted’s ambitions were his own affair. But at least the real facts about the Wilton Street meeting should be known. Consequently, I told them to George Hutchinson of The Times – not a supporter of mine, but a journalist of great integrity – and the account duly appeared.
No doubt Ted’s hopes were buoyed up by two other things. First, I could not fail to be aware that all sorts of well-informed commentators were predicting that my tenure of the leadership would not last; indeed, that I would be gone by Christmas. Secondly, the deepening economic crisis into which a combination of the Heath Government’s earlier financial irresponsibility and the Wilson Government’s present anti-enterprise policies were plunging Britain might conceivably lead to that National Government on which Ted’s prospects were deemed to ride. And perhaps too, the introduction of proportional representation might keep a centrist coalition in power – and people like me out of it – permanently.
In fact, the chances of any of this happening were less than the commentators imagined. It was not just that I had no intention of relinquishing the leadership, nor even that Tory backbenchers were unprepared to tolerate Ted’s return. Neither was there any prospect of a shrewd, self-assured politician like Harold Wilson stepping aside gracefully to allow the sort of self-important figures he despised a free hand to sort Britain’s problems out. If he went he would do so on his terms and at his timing: this of course is what subsequently occurred.
One of the first foreign statesmen I met after becoming Leader was Henry Kissinger, President Gerald Ford’s Secretary of State. Over the years my respect for Dr Kissinger steadily grew and – though starting from different perspectives – our analysis of international events increasingly converged. At this time, however, I was uneasy about the direction of western policy towards the Soviet Union, of which he was acknowledged to be the impresario.
I did indeed recognize the importance of the ‘opening to China’ achieved under Richard Nixon in the power play with the Soviets. It was a crucial element of victory in the Cold War to detach China permanently from the Soviet Union. As for ‘linkage’ – that is to recognize the links between one issue and another in bilateral relations between states, in Henry Kissinger’s own words ‘to create a network of incentives and penalties to produce the most favourable outcome’* – I took the view that its prospects had been undermined by President Nixon’s domestic weakness induced by Watergate. But I had serious doubts about the strategy of détente.
My gut instinct was that this was one of those soothing foreign terms which conceal an ugly reality that plain English would expose. It was difficult to see any difference between appeasement and détente as it began to evolve under the conditions of American paralysis after the election of a post-Watergate Congress dominated by ultra-liberal Democrats and the collapsing position in South Vietnam. Although so many obeisances had been paid to the concept that it was not prudent to attack it directly, I came as near as I could. This was not just a reflection of my preference for plain speaking: it was also the result of my conviction that too many people in the West had been lulled into believing that their way of life was secure, when it was in fact under mortal threat.
The first condition for meeting and overcoming that threat was that the Alliance should perceive what was happening; the second and equally important condition was that we should summon up the will to change it. Even in Britain’s parlous economic state we still had the resources to fight back, as part of NATO and under the leadership of the United States. But we could not assume that that would always be so. At some point decline – not just relative but absolute and not just limited to one sphere but in every sphere, economic, military, political and psychological – might become irreversible. Urgent action was required and urgency entails risks. Accordingly, my first major foreign affairs speech was a risk.
Events continued to confirm my analysis. In March the Labour Government’s Defence Wh
ite Paper announced sharp cuts in the defence budget, £4,700 million over the next ten years. In the same month Alexander Shelepin, previously head of the KGB and now in charge of the Soviet Union’s ‘trade unions’, arrived in Britain as a guest of the TUC. The following month saw the fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese communists amid scenes of chaos, adding to America’s woes. Cuban ‘advisers’ were beginning to arrive to support the communist MPLA faction in Angola. It was, however, what I heard and read about the preparations for the Helsinki summit that triggered my decision to speak.
The idea for Helsinki had come from the Soviets, was warmly welcomed by Chancellor Brandt’s West Germany as a contribution to Ostpolitik, and was then accepted on to the Nixon Administration’s agenda. The West wanted the Soviets to enter into talks to reduce their military superiority in Europe – Mutual Balanced Force Reductions (MBFR) – and to respect the human rights of their subject peoples. But what did the Soviets want? This was by far the most interesting question, since even if, as the sceptics suggested, they would not honour their agreements anyway, they still would not have taken this trouble unless something important for them would result. Respectability could be the only answer. If the Soviet Union and its satellites – particularly the more potentially fragile regimes in eastern Europe – could receive the international seal of approval they would feel more secure.
But did we want them to feel more secure? Arguably, one of the most exploitable weaknesses of totalitarian dictatorships is the paranoid insecurity which flows from the lack of consent to the regime itself and which results in inefficiency and even paralysis of decision-taking. If the Soviets felt more secure, if their new-found respectability gave them greater access to credit and technology, if they were treated with tolerant respect rather than suspicious hostility, how would they use these advantages?
Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography Page 27
