Simon Jenkins
THATCHER & SONS
A revolution in three acts
375pp. Penguin. £20.
0 7139 9595 5
Gordon Brown
SPEECHES 1997–2006
Edited by Wilf Stevenson
462pp. Bloomsbury. £30 (paperback, £9.99).
0 7475 8837 6
It began as a daring joke, developed as an insult, and ended up as a proposition for historians to pore over: Tony Blair is a Thatcherite, Mrs Thatcher’s most devoted follower, the true inheritor of her mantle.
Rumour has it that this is a view which the lady herself shares. One can well believe that she has said so, if only to irritate those in her own Party who she feels have let her down. But she must also feel the irony. Time and again, in the 1980s, she reminded her colleagues that their task was to make Labour unelectable, to root out socialism from British political life once and for all. If anyone had suggested to her that she would succeed so well that the leadership of the Labour Party would be forced to reinvent themselves in her image in order to get elected, and that the future leaders of her own Party would then be forced to discard her legacy and imitate the softer aspects of Labour in their attempt to win back power, she would probably have dismissed them as unhinged. But it is a plausible view of what has happened.
The invention of Thatcherism and its impact on New Labour is the territory of Simon Jenkins’s book Thatcher & Sons: A revolution in three acts. Jenkins is a brilliant polemicist, probably the best of our time. He develops his argument forcefully, never letting the reader’s interest flag. He has the knack of summarizing the history of Thatcher and her “sons” – Major, Blair and Brown – swiftly, while including many insights and anecdotes. (I liked the one about the Spanish Foreign Minister who declared to Mrs Thatcher: “I had been told, madam, of your formidable intelligence, but no one had warned me of your beauty”. Douglas Hurd expected her to explode, but not at all. For years afterwards she would ask any Spaniard she met: “Whatever happened to that charming Foreign Minister of yours?”.) Jenkins manages to maintain his momentum through some pretty dense analysis of parts of the public sector.
Above all, his argument is passionate. His indignation, at times verging on rage, makes itself felt through the accumulation of outrageous facts. To take a random example:
To get any project up and running, departments soon learned to hire whatever consultant was currently in favour with the Treasury, the more celebrated (and expensive) the more persuasive. In 1995 the British government spent £300 million on management consultants. By 2003 the Office of Government Commerce put the figure at £1.7 billion. A year later it was found to be £2.5 billion, equivalent to a penny on income tax. PricewaterhouseCoopers were, in 2005, recorded as consultant on an astonishing 174 government projects, with a capital value of £31.4 billion. Labour’s spending on consultants between 1997 and 2006 was estimated at £70 billion by two analysts, David Craig and Richard Brooks . . .
and so on in similar vein. I do not know whether Jenkins’s facts are accurate and fair. I rather hope they are not, because some of them are so depressing. But the cumulative effect is powerful and, whatever detailed flaws there may be, he makes a serious case.
Jenkins identifies two strands in Thatcherism. The first revolution, as he calls it, was a revolution of political will. It assaulted the modern State in order to roll back its frontier and assert the supremacy of the individual. It set out to liberate the “supply side” of the British economy and give new spirit and confidence to private enterprise. Taxes were cut, labour markets were freed through employment-law reform, and competition was enforced, notably in financial services. The private sector was invited to invigorate the public sector. In the process, Jenkins says, Thatcher and her successors “tore up the rulebook of British government. Her distaste for convention, for officialdom and for the old ways of doing things became her unique offering to high office”. The second revolution was a revolution not of political will but of power, and led in quite a different direction. Thatcher centralized government, enforced Treasury discipline, and regulated both public and private sectors to an unprecedented degree.
She brought to public service ceaseless upheaval, bloodletting and top-down reorganization, most notably in the health service, housing, schools, universities, urban renewal, and local government. The purging of public-sector socialism was the engine of Thatcher’s second revolution, so runs Jenkins’s argument, but it resulted in ever greater centralization.
His thesis is not only that these two revolutions continued under John Major, but, more remarkably, that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were recruited to them as total converts who have rendered Thatcherism irreversible. Major held the ring while Blair and Brown brought their colleagues round to accept the Thatcherite settlement. “Labour’s election victories in 1997, 2001 and 2005 saw no return to high income tax rates, nationalisation or employment protection. They saw no rush to European corporatism. Blair drove privatization into every corner of public services. He signed up to the first Thatcher revolution in Opposition and to the second as soon as he was in power.” As a result, political leadership in this country is closer to being an elected dictatorship than in any other Western democracy.
Jenkins is an admirer of the first revolution but fearful of the second. His conclusion is that centralism, though inherent in the modern State, cannot deliver. His solution is a third revolution which would take powers fiercely and formally from central government and restore them to British counties, cities and local communities, with parallel increases in local taxes and local accountability: in short, a return to the rights and autonomies of civic life that were enjoyed in this country until relatively recently.
This is a strong polemic, skilfully expressed. The question is: is it true, is it accurate? There are a number of secondary points that one could debate. I was surprised, for instance, to read that Mrs Thatcher disliked the concept of privatization, with particular reference to the sale of Britoil, the government’s North Sea company. I was the official who headed the team that carried out the sale, and it never occurred to me that she was opposed to what we were doing. It is true that she was initially hesitant when David Howell raised the possibility, in 1980, but once Nigel Lawson convinced her, he had her backing. We did not invent the “golden share” in order to overcome her opposition: the Government had already decided to go ahead by then, and the share was invented to reassure wider political opinion during the passage of legislation through Parliament. And there was no hint of opposition in her attitude to later privatizations, say of the electricity industry.
But this is minor. The important point, which Jenkins gets right, is that Thatcher was often much more cautious and interesting than she is sometimes portrayed as being. It was not unusual for a minister to present her with what he fondly thought was a Thatcherite policy, expecting praise, only to be roundly disabused and sent away. Rail privatization was a case in point: she absolutely refused to let it through.
Thatcher & Sons tends at times to overstate its case in the interests of effect. I would, for instance, take issue with Jenkins’s assertion that Thatcher expected from the Civil Service “not advice but obedience, the obedience of an automaton”. I spent nearly three years giving her advice from the Cabinet Office on a regular basis, and this was simply not my experience. It is true that she would not have wanted to be told the whole time that everything she stood for was wrong; but that is true of most ministers in most governments. I suspect it is also true that, in her early years, she scented that some parts of the Civil Service, personified by the Civil Service Department, had not grasped what she stood for: “They’re against me, I can feel it, they’re against me”, she murmured on one occasion. But within the framework of her policies, and the general tenor of what she was trying to achieve, she certainly wanted and needed advice from civil servants, and frequently accepted it.
But the strength of Jenkins’s analysis and the frequency with which he hits the nerve are far more important than any flaws. The evidence that the broad thrust of his argument is right is everywhere around us. There is no doubt of Mrs Thatcher’s profound influence on Messrs Blair and Brown.
For one thing, we have Peter Mandelson’s word for it. In his book The Blair Revolution (1996), he paid her the compliment of analysing her leadership in admiring detail, actually saying “Blair should emulate some of Mrs Thatcher’s practices”. His analysis of the way she ran her Government led him to recommend “a more formalised strengthening of the centre of government . . . . Mrs Thatcher conducted a lot of government business through bilateral meetings with ministers . . . . Bilateral and ad-hoc meetings, serviced by No.10 staff, are a good idea . . .”. No matter that he and his colleagues misinterpreted her example and took it to extremes which she would never have contemplated. The continuation of the second revolution was explicit in their thinking even before they won power.
Since then, the gradual revival of key Thatcherite policies has been striking. The return to the internal market in the NHS reforms; the introduction of city academies, which, as Jenkins remarks, are facsimiles of the grant-maintained schools and city technology colleges which Labour had fiercely opposed; the deep belief that the private sector can invigorate public services; the development of private finance to a level of public debt which may have reached a gross figure of around £110 billion by 2003: all were heavily influenced by the Thatcher revolutions, even though they were frequently taken further than she would ever have contemplated.
Perhaps the most striking evidence is the loss of autonomy of local government. The Blair government made a manifesto commitment in 1997 to “more independent but accountable local government” and “reformed local government with higher-quality services, as we decentralise power”. But the reality has been continuation of the transformation of local government from an independent tier of government, accountable to the local electorate, to an agency of central government, which began twenty-five years ago under Mrs Thatcher.
None of this would matter, perhaps, if there were a sense that the revolution had worked, if there were general acceptance that the new model of government was a significant improvement on what had gone before and had produced better government of Britain and strikingly improved public services. But as Jenkins comments acutely: “there is no sense of a job well done, of a new regime in place and working well”.
As we stand on the threshold of the probable succession to power of the last of Thatcher’s sons, Gordon Brown, is there any sign that he will seize his inheritance and rescue it by steering it towards Jenkins’s third revolution, to a return to localism, and restoration of the rights and autonomies of civic life? The publication of Gordon Brown’s Speeches 1997–2006 in one handy volume provides as good a source as any to look for clues as to what the future may hold. It comes with brief chapter introductions by a dazzling array of famous people (Kofi Annan, Al Gore, Nelson Mandela, J. K. Rowling, Alan Greenspan and many, many more) and a connecting narrative by Wilf Stevenson, the book’s editor, who is tipped for great things in Number 10, assuming Brown takes over. But, after scrutinizing the work for weeks – it is not the sort of volume that you read at a sitting – I confess I am still in the dark about how Brown (assuming, again, that he does becomes Prime Minister) will handle his inheritance from Thatcher, Major and Blair.
Part of the difficulty is that his language is often general and bland, so that the eye glances off the page, unable to decipher his meaning. But part of it is that he is unusually skilful in deploying rhetorical devices to maintain the upper hand over his audience. He sets up nameless straw men with foolish arguments in order to demolish them; he bombards his reader with bullet points, enumerating unfamiliar initiatives to prove that he has the answers; he states with absolute certainty what the position is, and defies contradiction, threatening with even more bullet points anyone foolish enough to interrupt. And then, just as you have stopped listening, he says something really interesting and unexpected, before moving on briskly to the next topic, making you wonder whether you have misheard.
It would be naive to expect such a speaker to acknowledge Thatcher’s influence on his policies. He came closest to it, perhaps, in his Spectator lecture of November 1997, when he dealt with Britishness, saying: “To her great credit she [Thatcher] recognised the need for Britain to reinvent itself and rediscover a new and vital self-confidence; and understood that we could gain strength from the glories of our past which could point the way to a glorious future . . . . So advances, achievements and important changes to Britain under the Thatcher government there were”. But any glow of pride which Thatcher may have derived from this would quickly have been dissolved by his verdict that “she learnt the wrong lessons from the past”.
It is not the style of the man to acknowledge his predecessors or their achievements even when he has benefited from his inheritance from them (neither Norman Lamont nor Kenneth Clarke, both former Chancellors of the Exchequer, is mentioned in these speeches). Gordon Brown does not really do compliments.
Instead, his approach is to define his policies in favourable terms designed to commend them to his audience, if necessary expropriating the policies of others without acknowledgement. There is a splendid example of this in his speech to the Social Market Foundation on February 3, 2003:
So our new approach leads to fundamental changes in direction from the old policy approach. Instead of being suspicious of competition we should embrace it . . . . Instead of being lukewarm about free trade, free trade not protectionism is essential to opportunity and security for all . . . . Instead of being suspicious of enterprise and entrepreneurs, we should celebrate an entrepreneurial culture . . . . Instead of thinking the state must take over responsibility where markets deliver insufficient investment and short-termism in innovation, skills and environmental protection, we must enable markets to work better . . .
and much more in the same vein. If ever there needed to be evidence of the silent victory of Thatcherite thinking, this and other similar passages in Speeches 1997–2006 provide it. Jenkins’s first revolution is still there, buried in Gordon Brown’s interpretation of it.
But what about the second revolution and the case for greater localism? There are a surprising number of passages in these speeches where Brown indicates his consciousness of the case for decentralization. Thus: “To build a long-term and strategic partnership between central and local government, and to deliver improved public services, this government has begun to reverse the trend towards ever greater centralisation” (speech in Hull, October 11, 2002); “The British way is to break up centralised institutions that are too remote and insensitive and so devolve power” (Spectator Lecture, November 4, 1997); “If, as I argue, the British way is to restore and enhance local initiative and mutual responsibility in civic affairs, we should be doing more to strengthen local institutions . . . . We must now look to further devolution of power away from Westminster, particularly to a reinvigoration of local government and to schools, hospitals and the self-management of local services” (Fabian Society, January 2006). There is more of the same in other speeches. Mr Brown knows the case for decentralization, and Simon Jenkins himself could not complain at the sentiments expressed. The snag is that it has not happened. In October 2004, Charles Clarke, then Secretary of State for Education, went so far as to describe local government as “active agents for central government” in relation to certain key services, the very opposite of decentralization and local autonomy. And Brown has personally built up the most powerful position, both in terms of the size of his own departments and the extent of his power across other departments, more centralized than that of any Chancellor of the Exchequer in history. Addressing his Treasury staff, in October 1997, he urged them to be interested in “how other departments can listen to and respond to our message”, without any hint that the Treasury in turn might listen to departments. The evidence is not of a great decentralizer in practice.
So we can only hope. There must be some pretty intense discussion in the circle around Gordon Brown at the moment about what dramatic steps he can take, in his first days as Prime Minister, to show that he has arrived. His speeches refer repeatedly to his decision to give the Bank of England responsibility for setting interest rates, within days of his assuming office in May 1997. It was a formative experience which he must want to repeat in some form on taking up office in Number 10. Someone should give him these two books for Christmas.
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Richard Wilson is Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He was Secretary of the Cabinet, 1998-2002
