The Downing Street Years, 1979-1990

INDIVIDUALS AND COMMUNITIES

The surge of prosperity — most of it soundly based but some of it unsustainable — which occurred from 1986 to 1989 had one paradoxical effect. Deprived for the moment at least of the opportunity to chastise the Government and blame free enterprise capitalism for failing to create jobs and raise living standards, the Left turned their attention to non-economic issues. The idea that the state was the engine of economic progress was discredited — and ever more so as the failures of communism became more widely known. But was the price of capitalist prosperity too high? Was it not resulting in a gross and offensive materialism, traffic congestion and pollution? Were not the attitudes required to get on in Thatcher’s Britain causing the weak to be marginalized, homelessness to grow, communities to break down? In short, was not the ‘quality of life’ being threatened?

I found all this misguided and hypocritical. If socialism had produced economic success those same critics would have been celebrating in the streets. But socialism had failed. And it was the poorer, weaker members of society who had suffered worst as a result of that failure. More than that, however, socialism, in spite of the high-minded rhetoric in which its arguments were framed, had played on the worst aspects of human nature. It had literally demoralized communities and families, offering dependency in place of independence as well as subjecting traditional values to sustained derision. It was a cynical ploy for the Left to start talking as if they were old-fashioned Tories, fighting to preserve decency amid social disintegration.

But nor could the arguments be ignored. Some Conservatives were always tempted to appease the Left’s social arguments — just as before I became leader they had appeased their economic arguments — on the grounds that we ourselves were very nearly as socialist in practice. These were the people who thought that the answer to every criticism was for the state to spend and intervene more. I could not accept this. There was a case for the state to intervene in specific instances — for example to protect children in real danger from malign parents. The state must uphold the law and ensure that criminals were punished — an area in which I was deeply uneasy, for our streets were becoming more not less violent, in spite of large increases in police numbers and prison places. But the root cause of our contemporary social problems — to the extent that these did not reflect the timeless influence and bottomless resources of old-fashioned human wickedness — was that the state had been doing too much. A Conservative social policy had to recognize this. Society was made up of individuals and communities. If individuals were discouraged and communities disorientated by the state stepping in to take decisions which should properly be made by people, families and neighbourhoods then society’s problems would grow not diminish.

This belief was what lay behind my remarks in an interview with a woman’s magazine — which caused a storm of abuse at the time — about there being ‘no such thing as society’. But they never quoted the rest. I went on to say:

My meaning, clear at the time but subsequently distorted beyond recognition, was that society was not an abstraction, separate from the men and women who composed it, but a living structure of individuals, families, neighbours and voluntary associations. I expected great things from society in this sense because I believed that as economic wealth grew, individuals and voluntary groups should assume more responsibility for their neighbours’ misfortunes. The error to which I was objecting was the confusion of society with the state as the helper of first resort. Whenever I heard people complain that ‘society’ should not permit some particular misfortune, I would retort, ‘And what are you doing about it, then?’ Society for me was not an excuse, it was a source of obligation.

I was an individualist in the sense that I believed that individuals are ultimately accountable for their actions and must behave like it. But I always refused to accept that there was some kind of conflict between this kind of individualism and social responsibility. I was reinforced in this view by the writings of conservative thinkers in the United States on the growth of an ‘underclass’ and the development of a dependency culture. If irresponsible behaviour does not involve penalty of some kind, irresponsibility will for a large number of people become the norm. More important still, the attitudes may be passed on to their children, setting them off in the wrong direction.

I had great regard for the Victorians for many reasons — not least their civic spirit to which the increase in voluntary and charitable societies and the great buildings and endowments of our cities pay eloquent tribute. I never felt uneasy about praising ‘Victorian values’ or — the phrase I originally used — ‘Victorian virtues’, not least because they were by no means just Victorian. But the Victorians also had a way of talking which summed up what we were now rediscovering — they distinguished between the ‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving poor’. Both groups should be given help: but it must be help of very different kinds if public spending is not just going to reinforce the dependency culture. The problem with our welfare state was that — perhaps to some degree inevitably — we had failed to remember that distinction and so we provided the same ‘help’ to those who had genuinely fallen into difficulties and needed some support till they could get out of them, as to those who had simply lost the will or habit of work and self-improvement. The purpose of help must not be to allow people merely to live a half-life, but to restore their self-discipline and through that their self-esteem.

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 FAMILY

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. I believed that while it was right that those who did not really need to go to prison should be punished in other ways, 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 could not in any sense be regarded as an economic phenomenon. Nor could the alarming levels of juvenile delinquency. These had their origins deeper in society.

I became increasingly convinced during the last two or three years of my time in office that, though there were crucially important limits to what politicians could do in this area, 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: grandparents, friends and neighbours can in some circumstances help lone mothers to cope quite well. But all the evidence — statistical and anecdotal — 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. I had seen some excellent hostels of this sort run by the churches. Similarly, young people who ran away from home to sleep on the streets 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.[82]

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. We might then reduce the problem over the next generation rather than increase it, as the last generation had done. 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. Indeed, when I raised such points I was sometimes amused to detect ill-concealed expressions of disapproval on the faces of civil servants under the veneer of official politeness.

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.

That is why I considered it important to encourage voluntary bodies which had the right values and vision, like Mrs Margaret Harrison’s ‘Homestart’, whose six thousand voluntary workers were themselves parents and offered friendship, common sense advice and support in the family home. 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. I thought it scandalous that only one in three children entitled to receive maintenance actually benefited from regular payments. 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 that 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.[83] 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, as I reminded the Treasury on a number of occasions, 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: but this did not settle the larger question of what the future of child support should be. 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. The wider influences of the media, schools and above all the churches are more powerful than anything government can do. 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.

THE ARTS

Perhaps nowhere were the proper limits of what the state should do more hotly disputed than in the world of the arts. The proponents of subsidies would stress that the state today was only performing the role of generous private patrons of the past, that access to artistic treasures must not depend on personal wealth and — more practically — that every other country subsidized the arts and therefore we must too. Against that — and this was significantly the view of Nick Ridley, the only member of the Government who could really paint — it could be argued that no artist had a right to a living from his work and that the market should be left to operate as with any other activity. My own attitude was somewhat different from either of these. I was not convinced that the state should play Maecenas. Artistic talent — let alone artistic genius — is unplanned, unpredictable, eccentrically individual. Regimented, subsidized, owned and determined by the state, it withers. Moreover the ‘state’ in these cases comes to mean the vested interests of the arts lobby. I wanted to see the private sector raising more money and bringing business acumen and efficiency to bear on the administration of cultural institutions. I wanted to encourage private individuals to give by covenant, not the state to take through taxes. But I was profoundly conscious of how a country’s art collections, museums, libraries, operas and orchestras combine with its architecture and monuments to magnify its international standing. It is not just or even mainly a question of revenues from tourism: the public manifestation of a nation’s culture is as much a demonstration of its qualities as the size of its GDP is of its energies. Consequently, it mattered to me that culturally as well as economically Britain should be able to hold its head up in comparison with the United States and Europe. And indeed we did. London is one of the world’s great centres of culture. We have, in the West End, the most vibrant commercial theatre in the world. We have probably the widest variety of museums of any city, ranging from the intimate and yet magnificent Wallace Collection to the glories of the British Museum. The performing arts, whether theatre, music or opera are represented in astonishing diversity.

But there is always more to be done — if it can be afforded. I certainly did not regret — though from the chorus of complaints about ‘cuts’ you would not have known it — that central government spending on the arts rose sharply in real terms while I was in Downing Street. Greater stability was provided too: from 1988 the Arts Council budget was set for a three-year period. Government funds were, wherever possible, used to attract private sponsorship for developing existing museums and galleries. For example, in March 1990 we announced the establishment of a new Museums and Galleries Improvement Fund — a joint initiative with the Wolfson Foundation. A succession of budgets included provisions to encourage covenanted giving. The most potentially significant of these was the introduction in October 1990 of a new tax relief for one-off gifts to charities from individuals and companies.

My greatest disappointment was my inability to secure for Britain the magnificent Thyssen Collection. In February 1988 my old friend Sir Peter Smithers wrote to me from Switzerland to tell me that his neighbour, Baron ‘Heinie’ Thyssen-Bornemisza, was keen to have his collection of Old and Modern Masters come permanently to Britain. Fifty of the Thyssen Collection pictures were on show at the Royal Academy and I had been to see them like so many others — and they were just fabulous. I asked for a report on the full Thyssen Collection and learned that it contained some supreme masterpieces including a Van Eyck Annunciation, Dürer’s Christ Among the Doctors and Holbein’s Henry VIII, as well as paintings by Carpaccio, Caravaggio, Cézanne, Degas and Van Gogh. I was determined to do all that we could to secure it for Britain. I had been to Portugal in 1984 where I had seen the Gulbenkian Collection which had been offered to Britain in the 1930s but, sadly, was let slip.

The project would have been very costly. We thought that it would require at least £200 million to satisfy the Baron’s requirements: but for this we would receive a collection valued at Sotheby’s at $1.2 billion. The cost would have had to be met by a combination of public and private funding to go towards the building in which the collection would be housed. It would have caused an outcry from some of the British arts lobby, who understandably thought that such sums would be better spent on them and their favoured projects. But it was worth it.

Nick Ridley and I took charge of the negotiations. Cabinet agreed the allocation of money. The international legal problems were all ironed out. Within a matter of six weeks the formal offer was taken personally by Robin Butler (the Cabinet Secretary) to Baron Thyssen in Switzerland. Alas, the real problem — insuperable as it turned out — was that it was not clear who precisely had the final say about the disposition of the collection. Nor was it clear what the status was of a loan agreement reached with the Spanish Government to the effect that the collection would go there for a period of years. In the end, it did indeed go to Spain on loan. But I had no regrets about having made the attempt to win it for Britain. It was not only a great treasure but a good investment — in every sense.

BROADCASTING

The world of the media had in common with that of the arts a highly developed sense of its own importance to the life of the nation. But whereas the arts lobby was constantly urging government to do more, the broadcasters were pressing us to do less. Broadcasting was one of a number of areas — the professions such as teaching, medicine and the law were others — in which special pleading by powerful interest groups was disguised as high-minded commitment to some greater good. So anyone who queried, as I did, whether a licence fee — with non-payment subject to criminal sanctions — was the best way to pay for the BBC, was likely to be pilloried as at best philistine and at worst undermining its ‘constitutional independence’. Criticism of the broadcasters’ decisions to show material which outraged the sense of public decency or played into the hands of terrorists and criminals was always likely to be met with accusations of censorship. Attempts to break the powerful duopoly which the BBC and ITV had achieved — which encouraged restrictive practices, increased costs and kept out talent — were decried as threatening the ‘quality of broadcasting’. Some of Britain’s television and radio was of very high quality indeed, particularly drama and news. Internationally, it was in a class of its own. But the idea that a small clique of broadcasting professionals always knew what was best and that they should be more or less immune from criticism or competition was not one I could accept. Unfortunately, in the Home Office the broadcasters often found a ready advocate. The irony that a Reithian rhetoric should be used to defend a moral neutrality between terrorism and the forces of law and order, as well as programmes that seemed to many to be scurrilous and offensive, was quite lost.

The notion of ‘public service broadcasting’ was the kernel of what the broadcasting oligopolists claimed to be defending. Unfortunately, when subject to closer inspection that kernel began rapidly to disintegrate. ‘Public service broadcasting’ was extremely difficult to define. One element was supposed to be that viewers or listeners in all parts of the country who paid the same licence fee should be able to receive all public service channels — what was described as the concept of ‘universality’. More important, though, was the idea that there should be a proper balance of information, education and entertainment offered through a wide range of high quality programmes. More recently, the public service obligation had been extended to cover particular ‘minority’ programmes. The BBC and the IBA — which regulated the independent television companies — mainly gave effect to this public service obligation by their influence over scheduling.

So much for the — somewhat nebulous and increasingly outdated — theory. The practice was very different. BBC1 and ITV ran programmes that were increasingly indistinguishable from commercial programming in market systems — soap operas, sport, game shows and made-for-TV films. To use Benthamite language, the public broadcasters were claiming the rights of poetry but providing us with pushpin. Good fun perhaps. But did our civilization really depend on it?

Furthermore the duopoly was being undermined by technological developments. Scarcity of available spectrum had previously determined that only a very few channels could be broadcast. But this was changing. It seemed likely that ever higher-frequency parts of the spectrum would be able to be brought into use. Cable television and direct broadcasting by satellite (DBS) also looked likely to transform the possibilities. There was more opportunity for payment — per channel or per programme — by subscription. An entire new world was opening up.

I believed we should take advantage of these technical possibilities to give viewers a far wider choice. This was already happening in countries as diverse as the United States and Luxemburg. Why not in Britain? But this vastly increased potential demand for programmes should not be met from within the existing duopoly. I wanted to see the widest competition among and opportunities for the independent producers — who were themselves virtually a creation of our earlier decision to set up Channel 4 in 1982. I also believed that it would be possible to combine more choice for viewers and more opportunity for producers with standards — both of production and of taste — that were as high as, if not higher than, those under the existing duopoly. To make assurance doubly sure, however, I wanted to establish independent watchdogs to keep standards high by exposing broadcasters to public criticism, complaint and debate.

The Peacock Committee on Broadcasting, which had been set up by Leon Brittan as Home Secretary in March 1985 and reported the following year, provided a good opportunity to look at all these matters once again. I would have liked to find an alternative to the BBC licence fee. One possibility was advertising: Peacock rejected the idea. Willie Whitelaw too was fiercely opposed to it and indeed threatened to resign from the Government if it were introduced. I felt that index-linking the licence fee achieved something of the same purpose — to make the BBC more cost-conscious and business-like. In October 1986 the ministerial committee on broadcasting which I chaired agreed that the BBC licence fee should remain at £58 until April 1988 and then be linked to the RPI until 1991. But I did not drop my long-term reservations about the licence fee as the source of its funding. It was agreed to study whether the licence fee could be replaced by subscription.

At least as important for the future was the need to break the BBC and ITV duopoly over the production of the programmes they showed. My ministerial group agreed that the Government should set a target of 25 per cent of BBC and ITV programmes to be provided by independent producers. But there was a sharp division between those of us like Nigel Lawson and David Young who believed that the BBC and ITV would use every opportunity to resist this and Douglas Hurd and Willie Whitelaw who thought that they could be persuaded without legislation. Douglas was to enter into discussions with the broadcasters and report back. In the end we had to legislate to secure it.

I also insisted, against Home Office resistance, that our 1987 general election manifesto should contain a firm commitment to ‘bring forward proposals for stronger and more effective arrangements to reflect [public] concern [about] the display of sex and violence on television’. This produced the Broadcasting Standards Council of which William Rees-Mogg became the very effective chairman and which was put on a statutory basis in the 1989 Broadcasting Act.

After the election there was more time to think about the long-term future of broadcasting. Apart from the opportunities for more channels which technology offered and the continuing discussion about how to achieve the 25 per cent target for independent producers, we needed to consider the future of Channel 4 — which I would have liked to privatize altogether, though Douglas Hurd disagreed — and the still more important matter of how the existing system of allocating ITV franchises should be changed. The Peacock Committee recommended that the system be changed to become more ‘transparent’ and I strongly agreed with this objective. Under the Peacock proposals, if the IBA decided to award a franchise to a contractor other than the highest bidder it should be required to make a full, public and detailed statement of its reasons. This had the merit of openness and simplicity as well as maximizing revenues for the Treasury. But we immediately ran into the morass of arguments about ‘quality’.

In September 1987 I held a seminar to which the main figures in broadcasting were invited to discuss the future. There was more agreement than I might have thought possible on the technical opportunities and the need for greater choice and competition. But some of those present took a dim view of our decision to set up a Broadcasting Standards Council and to remove the exemption enjoyed by the broadcasters from the provisions of the Obscene Publications Act. I was entirely unrepentant. I said that they must remember that television was special because it was watched in the family’s sitting-room. Standards on television had an effect on society as a whole and were therefore a matter of proper public interest for the Government.

We had a number of discussions during 1988 about the contents of the planned white paper on broadcasting. (It was eventually published in November.) I was pressing for the phasing out of the BBC licence fee altogether to be announced in that document. But Douglas was against this and a powerful lobby on behalf of the BBC built up. In the end I agreed to drop my insistence on it and on the privatization of Channel 4. But I made more progress in ensuring that Channel 3 should be subject to much less heavy regulation under the new ITC (Independent Television Commission) than under the IBA.

Of course, one could only do so much by changing the framework of the system: as always, it was the people who operated within it who were the key. The appointment of Duke Hussey as Chairman of the BBC in 1986 and later of John Birt as Deputy Director-General represented an improvement in every respect. When I met Duke Hussey and Joel Barnett — his deputy — in September 1988 I told them how much I supported the new approach being taken. But I also did not disguise my anger at the BBC’s continued ambivalence as regards the reporting of terrorism and violence. I said that the BBC had a duty to uphold the great institutions and liberties of the country from which we all benefited.

The broadcasters continued to lobby fiercely against the proposals in the Broadcasting White Paper on the process of auctioning the ITV franchises. My preferred approach was that every applicant would have to pass a ‘quality threshold’ and then go on to offer a financial bid, with the ITC being obliged to select the highest. Otherwise a gathering of the great and the good could make an essentially arbitrary choice with clear possibilities of favouritism, injustice and propping up the status quo. But the Home Office team argued that we had to make concessions — first in June 1989 in response to consultation on the white paper and then at report stage of the broadcasting bill in the spring of 1990, when they said there would be great parliamentary difficulties otherwise. These unfortunately muddied the transparency which I had hoped to achieve and produced a compromise which turned out to be less than satisfactory when the ITC bestowed the franchises the following year ‘in the old-fashioned way’. Still, the new auctioning system — combined with the 25 per cent target for independent producers, the arrival of new satellite channels, and a successful assault on union restrictive practices — went some way towards weakening the monopolistic grip of the broadcasting establishment. They did not break it.

SCIENCE AND THE ENVIRONMENT

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 by any means least important level, there was concern for the local environment, which I too always felt strongly about. Indeed, every time I came back from some spotlessly maintained foreign city my staff and the then Secretary of State for the Environment knew that they could expect a stiff lecture on the litter-strewn streets of parts of London. 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 — some merited but much not — 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. There had always to be a sound scientific base on which to build — and of course a clear estimation of the cost in terms of public expenditure and economic growth foregone — if one was not going to be thrust into the kind of ‘green socialism’ which the Left were eager to promote. 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 — and reflecting the same approach — 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. This replaced ‘E’(RD) that had been chaired by Paul Channon as Industry Secretary. I also set up a Cabinet committee of officials and experts — ACOST — to replace ACARD which had been shadowing Paul Channon’s committee. ‘E’(ST) and ACOST examined departmental science budgets, breaking them down between basic science and support for innovation, giving greater emphasis to the first. 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. What those who have no real understanding of science are inclined to overlook is that in science — just as in the arts — the greatest achievements cannot be planned and predicted: they result from the unique creativity of a particular mind.

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. From the time of the first international meeting and agreement in Montreal in 1987 until my last days in office when I was addressing the Second World Climate Conference in Geneva on the subject, I took the closest personal interest as the scientific evidence was amassed and analysed.

‘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. It was our outgoing ambassador at the UN, Sir Crispin Tickell, who first suggested that I should make a major speech on the subject. I decided that the Royal Society was the perfect forum. George Guise, who advised me on science in the Policy Unit, and I spent two weekends working on the draft. It 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 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:

The relationship between scientific research and policy towards the global environment was not just a technical matter. It 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 wellbeing. 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.