Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography (96 page)

That said, I was saddened that we had had to give all these assurances. It is my passionate belief that what above all has gone wrong with British education is that since the war we have ‘strangled the middle way’. Direct grant schools and grammar schools provided the means for people like me to get on equal terms with those who came from well-off backgrounds. I would have liked grant-maintained schools – combined with the other changes we were making – to move us back to that ‘middle way’. I also wanted a return to selection – not of the old eleven-plus kind but a development of specialization and competition so that some schools would become centres of excellence in music, others in technology, others in science, others in the arts etc. This would have given specially gifted children the chance to develop their talents, regardless of their background.

At Monday’s press conference we took the economy as the subject of the day and Nigel Lawson made the opening statement. This was a good campaign for Nigel. Not only did he demonstrate complete command of the issues, he also spotted the implications of Labour’s tax and national insurance proposals – especially their planned abolition of the married man’s tax allowance and of the upper limit on employees’ national insurance contributions – for people on quite modest incomes. This threw Labour into total disarray in the last week of the campaign and revealed that they did not understand their own policies. Nigel had earlier published costings of the Labour Party’s manifesto at some £35 billion over and above the Government’s spending plans. As I was to say later in a speech: ‘Nigel’s favourite bedside reading is Labour policy documents: he likes a good mystery.’

At this stage, however, defence continued to dominate the headlines, mainly because of Neil Kinnock’s extraordinary gaffe in a television interview in which he suggested that Labour’s response to armed aggression would be to take to the hills for guerrilla warfare. We gleefully leapt upon this and it provided the inspiration for the only good advertisement of our campaign, depicting ‘Labour’s Policy on Arms’ with a British soldier, his hands held up in surrender. On Tuesday evening, after a day’s campaigning in Wales, I told a big rally in Cardiff:

Wednesday’s press conference was of particular importance to the campaign because we took education as the theme, with Ken Baker and me together, in order to allay the doubts our early confusion had generated and to regain the initiative on the subject, which I regarded as central to our manifesto. It went well.

But my tours, by general agreement, did not. Neil Kinnock was gaining more and better television coverage. He was portrayed – as I had specifically requested at the beginning of the campaign that I should be – against the background of cheering crowds, or doing something which fitted in with the theme of the day. The media were entranced by the highly polished Party Election Broadcast showing Neil and Glenys walking hand in hand, bathed in a warm glow of summer sunlight, to strains of patriotic music, looking rather like an advertisement for early retirement. This probably encouraged them to give favourable coverage to the Kinnock tours.

In spite of our difficulties the political situation was still favourable. Our lead in the polls was holding up. There had been a big erosion of support for the Alliance, whose campaign was marred by splits and that basic incoherence which is the nemesis of people who eschew principle in politics. Neil Kinnock kept away from the main London-based journalists and Bryan Gould took most of the press conferences. By the second week, however, this tactic was beginning to rebound. The Fleet Street press were able to cross-question me day after day and they expected to enjoy a similar sport with the Leader of the Opposition. In this they were enthusiastically encouraged by Norman Tebbit, who by temperament and talent was perfectly suited to maul Neil Kinnock and did so effectively in successive speeches as the campaign wore on.

That Thursday’s press conference was on the NHS. Norman Fowler had devised a splendid illustration of new hospitals built throughout Britain, marked by lights on a map which were lit up when he pressed a switch. Like the Kinnocks’ Election Broadcast, I had him repeat the performance by popular demand. But what was worrying me, as usual, was my speech that evening in Solihull.

We had worked on the draft late until 3.30 a.m. but I was still not happy with it. I continued to break away to work on it whenever I could during the day – that is when I was not meeting candidates, talking to regional editors, admiring Jaguars at the factory and then meeting crowds at the Home and Garden exhibition at the Birmingham NEC. As soon as we arrived at Dame Joan Seccombe’s house – she is one of the Party’s most committed volunteers – I left the others to enjoy her hospitality and closeted myself away with my speech writers, working frantically on the text right up to the last moment. For some mysterious reason the more you all suffer in preparing a speech, the better it turns out to be and this speech was very good indeed. It contained one wounding passage which drew a roar of approval from the audience:

And so to the final week. After voting myself, I spent the Thursday morning of June 11 and the early afternoon in Finchley visiting our Committee Rooms and then, as the time for getting late voters out to the poll approached, I returned to No. 10. Norman Tebbit came over and we had a long talk over drinks, not just about the campaign and the likely result, but also about Norman’s own plans. He had already told me that he intended to leave the Government after the election because he felt that he should spend more time with Margaret. There was not much I could say to try to persuade him otherwise, because his reasons were as personal as they were admirable. But I did bitterly regret his decision.

I had supper in the flat and listened to the television comment and speculation about the result. Before I left for Finchley at 10.30 p.m. I heard Vincent Hanna on the BBC forecasting a hung Parliament. ITV was talking about a Conservative majority of about 40. I felt reasonably confident that we would have a majority, but I was not at all confident how large it would be. My own result would be one of the later ones; but the first results began to come in just after 11 p.m. We held Torbay with a larger than predicted majority. Then we held Hyndburn, the second most marginal seat, then Cheltenham, a seat targeted by the Liberals, and then
Basildon. At about 2.15 a.m. we had passed the winning post. My own majority was down by 400, though I secured a slightly higher percentage of the vote (53.9 per cent).

I was driven back into town, arriving at 2.45 a.m. at Conservative Central Office to celebrate the victory and thank those who had helped achieve it. Then I returned to Downing Street where I was met by my personal staff. I remember Denis saying to Stephen Sherbourne, as we went down the line: ‘You have done as much as anyone else to win the election. We could not have done it without you.’ Stephen may have been less pleased by my next remark. It was to ask him to come up to the study to begin work on making the next Cabinet. A new day had begun.

Reforms in education, housing and the Health Service

T
HE FIRST PRIORITY
after the 1987 election victory was to see that I had the right team of ministers to implement the reforms set out in our manifesto. The reshuffle was a limited one: five Cabinet ministers left the Government, two at their own request. The general balance of the new Cabinet made it clear that ‘consolidation’ was no more my preferred option after the election than before it. John Biffen left the Cabinet: this was a loss in some ways, for he agreed with me about Europe and had sound instincts on economic matters too, but he had come to prefer commentary to collective responsibility. I lost Norman Tebbit for reasons I have explained. But Cecil Parkinson, a radical of my way of thinking, rejoined the Cabinet as Energy Secretary. I made no change at Education where Ken Baker would make up in presentational flair whatever he lacked in attention to detail, nor Environment where Nick Ridley was obviously the right man to implement the housing reforms which he had conceived. These two areas – schools and housing – were those in which we were proposing the most far-reaching changes. But it was not long before I decided that there must be a major reform of the National Health Service too. In John Moore, whom I had promoted to be Secretary of State for Health and Social Services, I had another radical, anxious to reform the ossified system he had inherited. So the Government soon found itself embarked on even more far-reaching social reforms than we had originally intended.

The starting point for the education reforms outlined in our general election manifesto was a deep dissatisfaction (which I fully shared) with Britain’s standard of education.

I had come to the conclusion that there had to be some consistency in the curriculum, at least in the core subjects. Alongside the national curriculum should be a nationally recognized and reliably monitored system of testing at various stages of the child’s school career, which would allow parents, teachers, local authorities and central government to know what was going right and wrong and take remedial action if necessary. The fact that since 1944 the only compulsory subject in the curriculum in Britain had been religious education reflected a healthy distrust of the state using central control of the syllabus as a means of propaganda. But that was hardly the risk now: the propaganda was coming from left-wing local authorities, teachers and pressure groups, not us. What I never believed, though, was that the state should try to regiment every detail of what happened in schools. Some people argued that the French centralized system worked: but such arrangements would not be acceptable in Britain. Here even the strictly limited objectives I set for the national curriculum were immediately seen by the vested interests in education as an opportunity to impose their own agenda.

The other possibility was to go much further in the direction of decentralization by giving power and choice to parents. Keith Joseph and I had always been attracted by the education voucher, which would give parents a fixed – perhaps means-tested – sum, so that they could shop around in the public and private sectors of education for the school which was best for their children. By means testing a voucher one could even reduce the ‘dead weight’ cost – that is the amount lost to the Exchequer in the form of subsidy for parents who would otherwise have sent their children to private schools anyway.

However, Keith Joseph recommended and I accepted that we could not bring in a straightforward education voucher scheme. In the event, we were, through our education reforms, able to realize the objectives of parental choice and educational variety in other ways. Through the assisted places scheme and the rights of parental choice of school under our 1980 Parents’ Charter we were moving some way towards this objective without mentioning the word ‘voucher’.

In the 1988 Education Reform Act we now made further strides in that direction. We introduced open enrolment – that is allowing popular schools to expand to their physical capacity. This significantly widened
choice further and prevented local authorities setting arbitrary limits on good schools just to keep unsuccessful schools full. An essential element in the same reforms was
per capita
funding, which meant that state money followed the child to whatever school he attended. Parents would vote with their children’s feet and schools actually gained resources when they gained pupils. The worse schools in these circumstances would either have to improve or close. In effect we had gone as far as we could towards a ‘public sector voucher’. I would have liked to go further still and decided that we must work up a possible full-scale voucher scheme – I hinted at this in my final Party Conference speech – but did not have the time to take the idea further. It was Brian Griffiths who devised the extremely successful model of the ‘grant-maintained’ (GM) schools, which are free from local education authority (LEA) control entirely and are directly funded from the DES. With a healthy range of GM schools, City Technology Colleges, denominational schools and private schools (known as ‘public’ schools, much to the confusion of American visitors to Britain) parents would have a much wider choice. But, even more vital, the very fact of having all the important decisions taken at the level closest to parents and teachers, not by a distant and insensitive bureaucracy, would make for better education. This would be true of all schools, which was why we had introduced the Local Management of Schools Initiative (LMS) to give schools more control of their own budgets. But GM schools took it a giant step further.