Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (38 page)

But she certainly took back political lessons from her trip. From that time on, her speeches began to draw on American examples, often contrasting them favourably with the situation in Britain. Within months of her return, she spoke, on different occasions, about the joys of America’s simple tax forms for low earners,
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of its methods for reviving the coal industry
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and, in her CPC Lecture, of its concern to protect personal privacy from government computers. Above all, she noticed the contrast between a society with bearable tax rates and free markets, and the alternative: ‘The maximum rate of tax on personal incomes in the United Kingdom is 91.25 per cent … and for a married couple with two small children it starts at an income of £18,900. The same marginal rate in the United States … is 60 per cent, and it does not start until an income of £77,000.’
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Her next visit to the US took place at the request of the English Speaking Union (ESU), a non-political association dedicated to strengthening links among English-speaking people around the world, who invited Mrs Thatcher to deliver a series of lectures. Ted Heath was reluctant to spare her from the political fray at home in the course of 1968, so the trip even
tually took place in March 1969, which meant that she missed the conference on the first draft of the party’s manifesto for the next general election. Before she set out, she had to clear up a few troublesome logistics. The first problem was financial. ‘Mrs Thatcher is not in the least grasping,’ a London-based ESU official minuted her US colleague, ‘but I gather from her secretary, (in Confidence) that the last time she visited the United States on a Leader Grant, she had occasionally to walk from A to B as she had not been provided with any money, or the wherewithall [sic] to take any form of transport, and in some cases her hotel bill was not taken care of. I have naturally assured the secretary that Mrs Thatcher will be very well looked after.’
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A second issue concerned her preferred form of address: ‘… Mrs Thatcher has asked me to say … that as a member of parliament in her own right, she likes to be described as Mrs Margaret Thatcher MP although she is not a widow. She noticed that Mrs D. Thatcher had been put on the itinerary … Perhaps in all future communications to your branches you could tell them this.’
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Mrs Thatcher toured America once more. She had two setpiece speeches for the ESU, delivered on several occasions across the nation. One, called ‘Challenge to Democracy’, appears to have recapitulated some of the themes of her CPC Lecture. The other, ‘Preparing for the future: Britain and America’, ‘explains the special relationship between our two countries in the past and its relevance to the future. It discusses the tendency towards nationalism and separatism in the nations of the world, and its significance in the coming years. Bearing in mind the inability of each nation to impress its theories on others, each pursues its own ends. What can we do as nations to solve these problems?’
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It is a pity that neither speech survives. All we know about them is the ecstatic reaction they or, perhaps more likely, Mrs Thatcher’s personality engendered: ‘She came, She saw, She conquered!’ wrote the secretary of the ESU’s central Florida branch to HQ in New York, making the nomenclatural mistake in her excitement, ‘which, of course, can only mean one person – the stunning Mrs Dennis [sic] Thatcher … There were 150 members and guests present, and each and every one was charmed not only by the speaker’s good looks but her very brilliant talk.’
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When she paid her first visit to the Soviet Union in 1969, therefore, Mrs Thatcher had a clear standard of superpower comparison. She travelled with her fellow Conservative MP, Paul Channon,
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later a minister in her
Cabinet, and his wife Ingrid. Although an official guest, as opposition transport spokesman, of the Soviet government, she took a tip from a colleague and paid her own fare to make herself less beholden to her hosts. She visited the Kremlin, where she said that when her hosts asked her if NATO had not become irrelevant, she replied ‘Certainly not.’ She went to Moscow University and to GUM, the huge Moscow department store with ‘pathetically little in it’.
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She had lunch at the Soviet Academy of Sciences and demanded to see inside churches, which were purged of all religion. In Moscow, her interpreter showed her a sculpture of a man beating a sword into a ploughshare. ‘That’s communism,’ he told her. ‘It’s not, you know,’ she replied. ‘It’s the Bible.’
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She travelled by train from Moscow to Leningrad (as St Petersburg was then called). There she was shown the docks, and a housing block where she noted that the people ate communally and there was little scope for family life. Even her taste for dry facts was exhausted by the ‘endless statistics of production’ recited by her hosts. Visiting one of the palaces on the edge of the city, she fell into conversation with an attendant. She asked him where his family was. ‘In America.’ ‘Wouldn’t they like to come back?’ ‘Oh, no, no, no.’ As she boarded the plane for home, she remembered thinking to herself, ‘Oh, the relief!’

When Heath made Mrs Thatcher his shadow education minister on 21 October 1969, he was pitching her into an area where Conservative principles seemed to conflict with what many real live Conservatives actually wanted. The difficulty lay in the comprehensivization of secondary schools, which was by then happening fast. This was the process which abolished selection at the age of eleven, and got rid of the 1944 division between grammar schools, attended by the more intellectually able, and secondary moderns, which educated the less academic majority. It was natural for Conservatives to favour the continued existence of the grammar schools. They represented excellence, they benefited from the exercise of parental choice, and they were the best ladder of advancement ever devised for bright children from poor backgrounds. Both Mrs Thatcher and Heath himself were classic products of the grammar school meritocracy. ‘People like me’, Mrs Thatcher remembered in the 1990s, ‘had to have access to grammar schools so that we could compete with people like Shirley Williams.’
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But two great difficulties presented themselves.

The first was that state education at that time was largely out of the hands of the central government. Under the provisions of R. A. Butler’s 1944 Education Act, which was esteemed by all parties, local education authorities, chosen from local government, decided on the provision of schools, and teachers decreed what went on in them. The arrangement was known as ‘a national service locally delivered’. The role of Whitehall was an arm’s-length one of paying for new school building and negotiating and paying – via grants to the local authorities – the salaries of teachers. This distance from schools themselves was treasured, and no one seriously attempted to overthrow it. As early as the 1950s, the comprehensive ideal had gained ground, and the very first comprehensive experiment, in 1957, was conducted by Leicestershire County Council, which was Conservative controlled. The Labour Party developed a fiercely ideological commitment to comprehensives, and translated this into central government pressure, but even without this the trend to comprehensivization was considered unstoppable. By the time Mrs Thatcher took up her position, almost a quarter of children were already in comprehensives, and all but about 30 of the 163 education authorities had submitted plans to comprehensivize. No central government, therefore, had the power to reverse this without new legislation and a battle with local government. Besides, the great majority of the local education authorities were Conservative controlled.

The other problem for the Conservatives was numerical. Just under a fifth of all children attended grammar schools. The parents of those who did not were much less satisfied, and much more likely to favour a system which was heralded as giving a chance to all. The big objection to grammar schools was the notion that children could be ‘branded a failure’ at the age of eleven. This fear of failing, Mrs Thatcher remembered in old age, was ‘the fever that gripped education’.
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Many Conservative voters had children who had failed or, they expected, would fail the eleven-plus, the examination which, as its name suggests, determined entry to secondary school at that age. For every Tory desperate to preserve the grammar school system, there might well be one desperate to get rid of it. In June 1966, for example, the Shadow Cabinet discussed an NOP poll which showed 65 per cent of the public in favour of comprehensives, and Conservative voters split exactly in half on the issue.
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The consequent mental paralysis afflicting the Conservative Party on
the subject had, by the time Mrs Thatcher arrived on the scene, achieved the status of a policy. In a paper which he submitted to the Shadow Cabinet, Edward Boyle said that the issue was about ‘the separation of children by ability at the age of 11’. ‘Far more Tories than we always realise have been genuinely worried about the implications of 11-plus selection for their children.’ In particular, parents feared their children being shunted away from the path that could lead them to university. Boyle went on to argue that ‘The important thing is to ensure that this
institutional
change does not entail the sacrifice of the
traditions of learning and intellectual discipline
long associated with these schools [that is, grammar schools].’
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This was to prove easier said than done.

The policy therefore concentrated on resisting the ‘rapid and universal imposition’ of comprehensives by central government, a line which had some resonance because, in the controversial Circulars 10/65 and 10/66 which gave central government instructions to education authorities, Labour education ministers had attempted to put more pressure on local authorities to go comprehensive.
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Under Circular 10/66, grants for new school building were tied to the progress of a council’s schemes for comprehensives. The Tory fight became more a defence of the independence of local government, therefore, than a stand on the quality of education. The buzz phrase for what the Conservatives did not like was ‘botched-up schemes’. Ideas of parental choice, such as vouchers, were formally considered only to be rejected. The party felt happier with the simple statistics which showed that whereas there had been 7 million children of school age in 1964, there would be 9.1 million in 1974. The task that politicians most wanted to talk about was spending more money on more buildings, more teachers and – a Labour promise which they had postponed and the Conservatives had adopted – the raising of the school-leaving age to sixteen.

Of Mrs Thatcher’s own views on the subject, there was never any doubt. As early as 1965, she had told her Finchley Association’s annual general
meeting that she was ‘very concerned indeed about the Government’s intention to reorganise secondary education on comprehensive lines’.
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‘I am a firm believer in grammar schools,’ she told Friern Barnet Young Conservatives. ‘For many years now they have been the ladder from the bottom to the top … I note that the leaders of both Conservative and Labour parties, as well as the new chairman of the Conservative Party [Anthony Barber], all went to grammar schools.’
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But, by the time she took up her post, a general election was expected within the year. There was no time to rethink a subject in which, the Conservatives believed, they had simply to maintain their historic lead over Labour. The Conservative Research Department’s review of education policy, produced a week after she arrived, put the matter rather complacently: ‘Tory image on education still very good so that a more positive and distinctive programme may not be required.’
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Besides, Heath evinced no interest in education.

So Mrs Thatcher decided to be the loyal executant of the existing policy, while adopting a somewhat different tone to that of her predecessor, Sir Edward Boyle. It was not a question, she told the press on her appointment, of comprehensives ‘versus’ grammars: what she was against was ‘imposing’ comprehensives.
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She told the Commons that the Conservatives had always been ‘forward-looking’ on education – with the Butler Act, the expansion of universities, the improvement of primary schools – and she did not seek confrontation: ‘the true relationship between Government and local authorities is that of partnership of both and not dictatorship by one.’
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This partnership was to give her (and the local authorities) little joy in years to come. As for the teachers themselves, she felt quite kindly towards them. When they went on strike in London in November 1969, she condemned them in public, but in private she saw them as victims of the prices and incomes policy. She told the Shadow Cabinet that ‘it was difficult not to sympathise with their case.’
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Her slightly precarious stance was eased by the fact that the government tried to press ahead with comprehensives, this time by legislation compelling their introduction. By a great stroke of luck, while the Bill was in committee, two Labour MPs failed to attend for a crucial vote on 14 April 1970. The government was defeated, and the imminent election meant that there was no time to get the Bill back on track. In this atmosphere of government ideological zeal mixed with incompetence, Mrs Thatcher had the chance to promote her criticisms of the comprehensive ideal without actually having to turn against the whole process. She pushed the cause of the existing ‘direct grant’ schools, which were outside local authority control, emphasized problems of size and geography with many comprehensives, and spoke encouragingly to those local authorities which did not want to go comprehensive.
She could assault Labour’s absolutism in the matter, and also its motives: ‘As I listen to our educational debates, I think that the Labour Party must hate the middle class, because every time the worst they can say about a school … is that a large proportion of the middle class get through there.’
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