I was also impressed by the writing of the American theologian and social scientist Michael Novak who put into new and striking language what I had always believed about individuals and communities. Mr Novak stressed the fact that what he called ‘democratic capitalism’ was a moral and social, not just an economic system, that it encouraged a range of virtues and that it depended upon co-operation not just ‘going it alone’. These were important insights which, along with our thinking about the effects of the dependency culture, provided the intellectual basis for my approach to those great questions brought together in political parlance as ‘the quality of life’.
The fact that the arguments deployed against the kind of economy and society which my policies were designed to foster were muddled and half-baked did not, of course, detract from the fact that there were social ills and that in some respects these were becoming more serious. I have mentioned the rise in crime. The Home Office and liberal opinion more generally were inclined to cast doubt on this. Certainly, it was possible to point to similar trends throughout the West and to worse criminality in American cities. It was also arguable that the rise in the number of recorded crimes reflected a greater willingness to report crimes – rape for example – which would previously have not come to the attention of the police. But I was never greatly impressed by arguments which minimized the extent and significance of crime. I shared the view of the general public that more must be done to apprehend and punish those who committed it and that violent criminals must be given exemplary sentences. In this regard the measure we introduced in which I took greatest satisfaction was the provision in the 1988 Criminal Justice Act which empowered the Attorney-General to appeal against overlenient sentences passed by the Crown Court.
The fact that the level of crime rose in times of recession and of prosperity alike gave the lie to the notion that poverty explained – or even justified – criminal behaviour. Arguably, the opposite might have been true: greater prosperity led to more opportunities to steal. In any case, the rise in violent crime and the alarming levels of juvenile delinquency had their origins deeper in society.
I became increasingly convinced during the last two or three years of my time in office that we could only get to the roots of crime and much else besides by concentrating on strengthening the traditional family. The statistics told their own story. One in four children were born to unmarried parents. No fewer than one in five children experienced a parental divorce before they were sixteen. Of course, family breakdown and single parenthood did not mean that juvenile delinquency would inevitably follow. But all the evidence pointed to the breakdown of families as the starting point for a range of social ills of which getting into trouble with the police was only one. Boys who lack the guidance of a father are more likely to suffer social problems of all kinds. Single parents are more likely to live in relative poverty and poorer housing. Children can be traumatized by divorce far more than their parents realize. Children from unstable family backgrounds are more likely to have learning difficulties. They are at greater risk of abuse in the home from men who are not the real father. They are also more likely to run away to our cities and join the ranks of the young homeless where, in turn, they fall prey to all kinds of evil.
The most important – and most difficult – aspect of what needed to be done was to reduce the positive incentives to irresponsible conduct. Young girls were tempted to become pregnant because that brought them a council flat and an income from the state. My advisers and I were considering whether there was some way of providing less attractive – but correspondingly more secure and supervised – housing for these young people. Similarly, young people who ran away from home needed help. But I firmly resisted the argument that poverty was the basic cause – rather than the result – of their plight and felt that it was the voluntary bodies which could provide not just hostel places (which were often in surplus) but guidance and friendship of the sort the state never could.
We were feeling our way towards a new ethos for welfare policy: one comprising the discouragement of state dependency and the encouragement of self-reliance; greater use of voluntary bodies including religious and charitable organizations like the Salvation Army; and, most controversially, built-in incentives towards decent and responsible behaviour. But our attempts to rethink welfare along these lines met a number of objections. Some were strictly practical and we had to respect them. Others, though, were rooted in the attitude that it was not for the state to make moral distinctions in its social policy.
In spite of all the difficulties, by the time I left office my advisers and I were assembling a package of measures to strengthen the traditional family whose disintegration was the common source of so much suffering. We had not the slightest illusion that the effects of what could be done would be more than marginal. Nor, in a sense, would I have wanted them to be. For while the stability of the family is a condition for social order and economic progress the independence of the family is also a powerful check on the authority of the state. There are limits beyond which ‘family policy’ should not seek to go.
I preferred if at all possible that direct help should come from someone other than professional social workers. Of course, professionals have a vital role in the most difficult cases – for example, where access to the home has to be gained to prevent tragedy. In recent years, however, some social workers have exaggerated their expertise and magnified their role, in effect substituting themselves for the parents with insufficient cause.
I was also appalled by the way in which men fathered a child and then absconded, leaving the single mother – and the taxpayer – to foot the bill for their irresponsibility and condemning the child to a lower standard of living. So – against considerable opposition from Tony Newton, the Social Security Secretary, and from the Lord Chancellor’s department – I insisted that a new Child Support Agency be set up, and the maintenance be based not just on the cost of bringing up a child but on that child’s right to share in its parents’ rising living standards. This was the background to the Child Support Act, 1991.
As for divorce itself, I did not accept that we should follow the Law Commission’s recommendation in November 1990 that this should just become a ‘process’ in which ‘fault’ was not at issue. In some cases – for example where there is violence – I considered that divorce was not just permissible but unavoidable. Yet I also felt strongly that if all the remaining culpability was removed from marital desertion, divorce would be that much more common.
The question of how best – through the tax and social security system – to support families with children was a vexed one to which I and my advisers were giving much thought when I left office. There was great pressure, which I had to fight hard to resist, to provide tax reliefs or subsidies for child care. This would, of course, have swung the emphasis further towards discouraging mothers from staying at home. I believed that it was possible – as I had – to bring up a family while working, as long as one was willing to make a great effort to organize one’s time properly and with some extra help. But I did not believe that it was fair to those mothers who chose to stay at home and bring up their families on the one income to give tax reliefs to those who went out to work and had two incomes.* It always seemed odd to me that the feminists – so keenly sensitive to being patronized by men but without any such sensitivity to the patronage of the state – could not grasp that.
More generally, there was the question of how to treat children within the tax and benefit system. At one extreme were those ‘libertarians’ who believed that children no more merited recognition within the tax and benefit systems than a consumer durable. At the other were those who would have liked a fully fledged ‘natalist policy’ to increase the birth rate. I rejected both views. But I accepted the long-standing idea that the tax someone paid on his income should take into account his family responsibilities. This starting point was important in deciding what to do about child benefit. This sum was paid – tax free �
� to many families whose incomes were such that they did not really need it and was very expensive. But it had been introduced partly as an equivalent of the (now abolished) child tax allowances, so there was an argument on grounds of fairness that its real value should be sustained. As a compromise, we eventually decided in the autumn of 1990 that it should be uprated for the first child but not the others. I would have liked to return to a system including child tax allowances, which I believed would have been fairer, clearer and – incidentally – extremely popular. But the fiscal purists in the Treasury were still fighting a strong action against me on this at the time I left Downing Street.
All that family policy can do is to create a framework in which families are encouraged to stay together and provide properly for their children. But so much hung on what happened to the structure of the nation’s families that only the most myopic libertarian would regard it as outside the purview of the state: for my part, I felt that over the years the state had done so much harm that the opportunity to do some remedial work was not to be missed.
In 1988 and 1989 there was a great burst of public interest in the environment. Unfortunately, under the green environmental umbrella sheltered a number of only slightly connected issues. At the lowest but not any means least important level, there was concern for the local environment, which I too always felt strongly about. But this was essentially and necessarily a matter for the local community, though the privatizing of badly run municipal cleaning services often helped.
Then there was the concern about planning – or rather the alleged lack of it – and overdevelopment of the countryside. Here there was, as Nick Ridley became somewhat unpopular for robustly pointing out, a straightforward choice. If people were to be able to afford houses there must be sufficient amounts of building land available. Tighter planning meant less development land and fewer opportunities for home ownership.
There was also widespread public concern about the standard of Britain’s drinking water, rivers and sea. The European Commission found this a fruitful area into which to extend its ‘competence’ whenever possible. In fact, a hugely expensive and highly successful programme was under way to clean up our rivers and the results were already evident – for example the return of healthy and abundant fish to the Thames, Tyne, Wear and Tees.
I always drew a clear distinction between these ‘environmental’ concerns and the quite separate question of atmospheric pollution. For me, the proper starting point in formulating policy towards this latter problem was science. But the closer I examined what was happening to Britain’s scientific effort, the less happy I was about it.
There were two problems. First, too high a proportion of government funding for science was directed towards the Defence budget. Second, too much emphasis was being given to the development of products for the market rather than to pure science. Government was funding research which could and should have been left to industry and, as a result, there was a tendency for the research effort in the universities and in scientific institutes to lose out. I was convinced that this was wrong. As someone with a scientific background, I knew that the greatest economic benefits of scientific research had always resulted from advances in fundamental knowledge rather than the search for specific applications. For example, transistors were not discovered by the entertainment industry seeking new ways of marketing pop music but rather by people working on wave mechanics and solid-state physics.
In the summer of 1987 I instituted a new approach to government funding of science. I set up ‘E’(ST) as a new sub-committee of the Economic Committee of the Cabinet which I now chaired. My ideal was to search out the brightest and best scientists and back them rather than try to provide support for work in particular sectors.
At every stage scientific discovery and knowledge set the requirements and the limits for the approach we should pursue towards the problems of the global environment. It was, for example, the British Antarctic Survey which discovered a large hole in the ozone layer which protects life from ultra-violet radiation. Similarly, it was scientific research which proved that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were responsible for ozone depletion. Convinced by this evidence, governments agreed first to cut and then to phase out the use of CFCs – for example in refrigerators, aerosols and air conditioning systems.
‘Global warming’ was another atmospheric threat which required the application of hard-headed scientific principles. The relationship between the industrial emission of carbon dioxide – the most significant though not the only ‘greenhouse gas’ – and climatic change was a good deal less certain than the relationship between CFCs and ozone depletion. Nuclear power production did not produce carbon dioxide – nor did it produce the gases which led to acid rain. It was a far cleaner source of power than coal. However, this did not attract the environmental lobby towards it: instead, they used the concern about global warming to attack capitalism, growth and industry. I sought to employ the authority which I had gained in the whole environmental debate, mainly as a result of my speech to the Royal Society in September 1988, to ensure a sense of proportion.
That speech was the fruit of much thought and a great deal of work and broke quite new political ground. But it is an extraordinary commentary on the lack of media interest in the subject that, contrary to my expectations, the television companies did not even bother to send film crews to cover the occasion. In fact, I had been relying on the television lights to enable me to read my script in the gloom of the Fishmongers’ Hall, where it was to be delivered; in the event, candelabra had to be passed up along the table to allow me to do so. The speech itself triggered much debate and discussion, particularly one passage:
For generations, we have assumed that the efforts of mankind would leave the fundamental equilibrium of the world’s systems and atmosphere stable. But it is possible that with all these enormous changes (population, agricultural, use of fossil fuels) concentrated into such a short period of time, we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself … In studying the system of the earth and its atmosphere we have no laboratory in which to carry out controlled experiments. We have to rely on observations of natural systems. We need to identify particular areas of research which will help to establish cause and effect. We need to consider in more detail the likely effects of change within precise timescales. And to consider the wider implications for policy – for energy production, for fuel efficiency, for reforestation … We must ensure that what we do is founded on good science to establish cause and effect.
The relationship between scientific research and policy towards the global environment went to the heart of what differentiated my approach from that of the socialists. For me, the economic progress, scientific advance and public debate which occur in free societies themselves offered the means to overcome threats to individual and collective well-being. For the socialist, each new discovery revealed a ‘problem’ for which the repression of human activity by the state was the only ‘solution’ and state-planned production targets must always take precedence. The scarred landscape, dying forests, poisoned rivers and sick children of the former communist states bear tragic testimony to which system worked better, both for people and the environment.
* I was, though, content to make one minor adjustment. This was to provide tax relief for workplace nurseries.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
A Little Local Difficulty
The replacement of the rating system with the community charge
THE INTRODUCTION OF THE COMMUNITY CHARGE to replace the domestic rates turned out to be by far the most controversial of the changes promised in our 1987 general election manifesto. Whereas the other elements of those reforms – in education, housing and trade union law – took root, the community charge has since been abolished by a government consisting largely of those who framed and implemented it.
The charge became a rallying point for those who opposed me, both within the Conservative Party and on the far
Left. Had I not been facing problems on other fronts – above all, had the Cabinet and Party held their nerve – I could have ridden through the difficulties. Indeed, the community charge was beginning to work at the very time it was abandoned. Given time, it would have been seen as one of the most far-reaching and beneficial reforms ever made in the working of local government. Its abandonment will mean that more and more powers will pass to central government, that upward pressures on public spending and taxation will increase accordingly, and that still fewer people of ability will become local councillors.
We did not enter lightly upon the path of radical reform of local government finance. If it had been possible to carry on as before I would have been quite prepared to do so. But by almost universal agreement it was not. The person who knew this best was Michael Heseltine – in fact, the most vocal Conservative opponent of the community charge. Michael, as Environment Secretary in the early 1980s, had tried to make the old system work by taking on a whole battery of new powers in an attempt to deal with the problem: that we lacked the means to control local government spending, though it made up a large fraction of overall public expenditure. He brought in the block grant system and ‘grant-related expenditure assessments’ (GREAs), ‘targets’ and ‘holdback’, limits on local authority capital expenditure, and the Audit Commission, as well as beginning a general squeeze on the central government grant – all designed to hold down local spending and to give ratepayers an incentive to think twice before re-electing high-spending councils.*
Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography Page 77
