The Path to Power

1

Theosophy was a mixture of mysticism, Christianity and the ‘wisdom of the East’, sense and nonsense.

2

Aldermen were indirectly elected council members — elected to serve a fixed term by the directly elected element in the council; a highly honoured position which has since been abolished.

3

From God Knows, by Minnie Louise Haskins.

4

Problems of Socialist England (1947).

5

The Party’s staff college in Yorkshire, where everyone from ordinary Party members to Cabinet ministers attended courses and discussions on policy.

6

A.V. Dicey, Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (8th edition, 1915), pp. 465-6.

7

Admittedly he went on, as I used to point out: ‘What is beginning to worry some of us is “Is it too good to be true?” or perhaps I should say “Is it too good to last?” for, amidst all the prosperity, there is one problem that has troubled us in one way or another ever since the war. It’s the problem of rising prices.’

8

‘Pairing’ is an informal arrangement by which pairs of MPs from opposing parties agree to abstain in parliamentary votes when one or other of them wishes to be absent from the House of Commons. The arrangement does not usually apply to crucial votes.

9

See pp. 247-9; also The Downing Street Years, pp. 642-67.

10

A Balance of Power (1986), p. 42.

11

Exchange Rates and Liquidity.

12

Desmond Donnelly was a Labour MP for almost twenty years. He resigned the Labour whip in 1968 in protest at the withdrawal from east of Suez and died a Conservative.

13

In Place of Strife was the — in retrospect ironically chosen — title of a Labour White Paper of 1969 which proposed a range of union reforms. The proposals had to be abandoned due to internal opposition within the Cabinet and the Labour Party, led by Jim Callaghan.

14

See p. 198.

15

Direct grant schools, which included some of the most famous and successful secondary schools in Britain, entry to which was often highly competitive, were funded direct from the DES and were outside local control.

16

The Assisted Places Scheme makes public funds available for gifted children from poorer backgrounds to take up places in private schools. Grant-maintained schools are state schools which have opted to move outside local education authority control.

17

See p. 219.

18

See pp. 213-30.

19

The PAR system was a characteristic innovation of the Heath Government — an ambitious attempt to review existing departmental programmes with the professed intention of radically reducing the role of Government, but with little or no effect.

20

See p. 232.

21

For the Department of Education and Science, see the previous chapter.

22

‘The Lesson’ (1902). The lesson in question was the Boer War, in which Britain had suffered many military reverses.

23

A State of Emergency may be proclaimed by the Crown-effectively by Ministers — whenever a situation arises which threatens to deprive the community of the essentials of life by disrupting the supply and distribution of food, water, fuel or light, or communications. It gives Government extensive powers to make regulations to restore these necessities. Troops may be used. If Parliament is not sitting when the proclamation is made, it must be recalled within five days. A State of Emergency expires at the end of one month, but may be extended.

24

John Poulson was an architect convicted in 1974 of making corrupt payments to win contracts. A number of local government figures also went to gaol. Reggie Maudling had served on the board of one of Poulson’s companies.

25

‘n-1’ was a semi-official policy that each year’s pay increase should be 1 per cent less than the previous year’s.

26

Hansard, 13 June 1972: Volume 838, columns 1319-20.

27

See pp. 497-8.

28

Patrials were those citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies whose parents or grandparents were born in the UK; citizens of the UK and Colonies who had been settled here for five years; any Commonwealth citizen who had a father or mother or grandparent born in the UK.

29

Alan Walters became my economic adviser as Prime Minister 1981-84 and again in 1989.

30

Mi comprised the total stock of money held in cash and in current and deposit accounts at a particular point in time; M3 included the whole of Mi, with the addition of certain other types of bank accounts, including those held in currencies other than sterling.

31

A property revaluation was due every five years, but was often postponed.

32

i.e. Foreign Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary.

33

Jim Prior and Geoffrey Howe had nineteen votes each and John Peyton eleven.

34

For the referendum see pp. 330-5.

35

See pp. 335-6.

36

See pp. 397–403.

37

Alan Walters was then Cassel Professor at the London School of Economics. He left the following year for the United States to work for the World Bank. As already noted, he was my economic adviser as Prime Minister, 1981-84 and in 1989. Brian Griffiths (later Head of my Policy Unit at No. 10) was then a lecturer at the London School of Economics; he became a professor at the City University the following year. Gordon Pepper was an economic analyst at Greenwell & Co., and an expert on monetary policy. Sam Brittan then as now was Principal Economic Commentator on the Financial Times.

38

See Chapter X.

39

See pp. 397-403.

40

The Mace — a silver gilt staff topped by an orb and cross — symbolizes the authority of the Crown delegated to the Commons. It rests on the table facing the Speaker when the House is sitting, within easy reach of the two front benches.

41

For our differences on foreign affairs, see pp. 351-3, 361.

42

For Wales there would be no such Assembly, but rather a Welsh Select Committee, a strengthened Welsh (advisory) Council, and Welsh spending would be financed by block grant.

43

For further discussion of referenda see pp. 480, 501.

44

See pp. 312-13.

45

See pp. 349-53.

46

Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York, 1994), p. 717. This is, of course, an oversimplified description of the concept. Diplomacy contains a fuller, masterly account of Dr Kissinger’s thinking.

47

Typical of the coverage was an article from the Wall Street Journal (20 August 1975) I found in my briefing papers. It began: ‘Hardly anyone needs to be told now that Great Britain is the sick country of Europe. Everywhere you look the evidence abounds.’ The article described our position — falling output, runaway inflation, declining industries, a falling (and relatively low) standard of living. Its author reflected: ‘It is all very curious. For Britain has not been brought to this state by defeat in war, by earthquakes, plagues, droughts or any natural disasters. Britain’s undoing is its own doing. It has been brought to this by the calculated policies of its Government and by their resigned acceptance by the people.’

48

For further discussion of the issue of Rhodesia see pp. 417-18.

49

His death had a particular significance for me, quite apart from the loss of a courageous friend: within days I was assigned a team of personal detectives who have been with me ever since.

50

See p. 57.

51

The Attorney-General attempted unsuccessfully to stop NAFF applying for an injunction to prevent the boycott, claiming that he alone had discretion to decide on applications for injunctions from private citizens without standing in the action. The Court of Appeal found in favour of NAFF, but on appeal to the House of Lords the Attorney’s view was upheld.

52

Hansard, Vol. 961, cc. 712-15, 25 January 1979. Asked whether withdrawal of a union card could constitute intimidation within the meaning of the law, the Attorney-General replied: ‘The answer… must be that it depends on whether the intimidation is of a lawful character.’

53

In fact, it was not until 1990 that we passed legislation to end the closed shop, making it unlawful to deny people a job because they are, or are not, members of a union, though we had already significantly tightened the law on the closed shop in earlier legislation.

54

See pp. 368-9.

55

Our manifesto pledged us to introduce a British Nationality Act defining British citizenship and the right to abode, to set up a register of dependants from Commonwealth countries who had the right of settlement under existing legislation (whose numbers were uncertain) and to establish a quota system to restrict the rate of entry for settlement from non-EC countries. In the event, only the first of these measures was passed into law. During the 1980s primary immigration — the admission of heads of household in their own right — fell significantly, diminishing the number of future dependants with a right of settlement and reducing the overall total below 50,000 in most years, compared to 82,000 in 1975 and 69,000 in 1979.

56

See pp. 435-8 for a discussion of the 1978 manifesto drafts.

57

I described some of the subsequent events in The Downing Street Years, pp. 3-4.

58

See The Downing Street Years, p. 102n. The report showed that SLADE had been using its strength in the printing industry to recruit among freelance artists, photographic studios and advertising agencies by threatening to ‘black’ the printing of their work unless they joined the union. The report’s conclusion was that the union had acted ‘without any regard whatever to the feelings, interests, or welfare of the prospective recruits’.

59

See The Downing Street Years, pp. 32, 44-5.

60

Our proposals were distilled into five tasks:

1. To restore the health of our economic and social life, by controlling inflation and striking a fair balance between the rights and duties of the trade union movement.

2. To restore incentives so that hard work pays, success is rewarded and genuine new jobs are created in an expanding economy.

3. To uphold Parliament and the rule of law.

4. To support family life, by helping people to become home-owners, raising the standards of their children’s education, and concentrating welfare services on the effective support of the old, the sick, the disabled and those who are in real need.

5. To strengthen Britain’s defences and work with our allies to protect our interests in an increasingly threatening world.

61

‘The Dawn Wind’.

62

The Downing Street Years, pp. 17-19.

63

I have described the arguments about Europe, which formed the background to my stepping down as Prime Minister, in The Downing Street Years.

64

See The Downing Street Years, pp. 724-46.

65

See The Downing Street Years, pp. 90-1.

66

The Downing Street Years, p. 723.

67

The Plaza Agreement (March 1985) was an attempt by international finance ministers and central bank governors to bring down the value of the dollar. The markets proved all too obliging. The Louvre Agreement (February 1987) was concluded in the hope of checking the dollar’s fall and bringing about a wider stabilization of currencies — paving the way for Nigel Lawson’s shadowing of the Deutschmark, which began the following month.

68

In saying this I was bending over backwards to be obliging to the Government, which in fact was unnecessarily worsening the recession by a monetary overkill resulting from an obsession with the exchange rate.

69

Speech to the Bertelsmann Foundation, 3 April 1992.

70

See The Downing Street Years, pp. 724-5.

71

For the full text of the speech see Appendix 1, pp. 609-25.

72

The Schengen Treaty has been signed and implemented by nine members of the European Union, providing for the removal of border controls between participating states.

73

Quoted in Mark Almond, Europe’s Backyard War (London, 1994), p. 32.

74

My concern with this wording led to my having it glossed with the phrase ‘cooperation in economic and monetary policy’ in the text of the Single European Act.

75

Noel Malcolm, Sense on Sovereignty (Centre for Policy Studies, November 1991), p. 10: ‘The central fault is that they fail to make any distinction between power and authority. That distinction is the basis of all legal understanding: if you do not have the concept of authority as something different from mere power, then you cannot have the concept of law as anything other than the mere application of force.’

76

Patrick Messerlin, ‘Why such Blindness? European Union Trade Policy at the Crossroads’, in Trade Policy Review (Centre for Policy Studies, September 1994) p. 46.

77

For example, in the Cohn-Bendit case (1978), 1 CMLR 543, where the conseil d’état simply disregarded previous decisions of the European Court of Justice, decided that Community law could not be invoked in this case affecting public order, and quashed a decision of the lower court to refer the case to the European Court of Justice.

78

I am indebted to Martin Howe both for these suggestions, made in his pamphlet Europe and the Constitution After Maastricht (Society of Conservative Lawyers, June 1992), and for other helpful and stimulating suggestions which have influenced my thinking on these matters.

79

I have described this visit in The Downing Street Years, pp. 806-7.

80

The Downing Street Years, p. 767.

81

New York Times, 6 August 1992. Copyright © 1992 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission.

82

Francis Fukuyama, ‘The End of History?’, The National Interest, Summer 1989. In the many subsequent debates it was sometimes forgotten that Mr Fukuyama had qualified his provocative assertion as follows: ‘This is not to say that there will no longer be events to fill the pages of Foreign Affairs’s yearly summaries of international relations, for the victory of liberalism has occurred primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet incomplete in the real or material world. But there are powerful reasons for believing that it is the ideal that will govern the material world in the long run.’

83

Samuel P. Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilisations?’, Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993.

84

See p. 583.

85

See pp. 490-1.

86

See Jonathan Sunley’s pamphlet Hungary: The Triumph of Compromise, Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies, 1993.

87

These issues are examined by Neil Melvin in Forging the New Russian Nation, The Royal Institute of International Affairs, Discussion Paper 50, 1994.

88

See The Downing Street Years, p. 258.

89

William E. Odom, ‘Strategic Realignment in Europe — NATO’s Obligation to the East’, in NATO — The Case for Enlargement, Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies, 1993.

90

I had spoken to this effect at the North Atlantic Council in Turnberry in June 1990. See The Downing Street Years, p. 812.

91

J.L. Esposito, Islam and Politics (New York, 1991), p. 244.

92

I am grateful to Professor James Q. Wilson for drawing this and a number of other points in this chapter to my attention.

93

Although I refer to the rising crime and connected problems as a ‘Western’ phenomenon, I do so in full recognition that a virulent crime wave has afflicted the post-communist world. This is largely a matter of infection spread from the West which the post-communist states, lacking effective police forces and the institutions of civil society, Burke’s ‘little platoons’, have been unable to combat. By contrast, in the homogeneous and strongly group-oriented Japanese society, which in this regard is thoroughly un-Western, crime is remarkably low.

94

See Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (London and Boston, 1984).

95

I am grateful to Professor Gary McDowell, Director of the Institute of United States Studies at London University, for letting me draw upon the proceedings of the Institute’s conference on juvenile crime, Juvenile Justice and the Limits of Social Policy, held in May 1994. I would not, however, wish to suggest that the experts who presented papers at that conference would necessarily agree with my conclusions.

96

‘Letter to a Member of the National Assembly’ (1791), Reflections on the Revolution in France and Other Essays, Everyman edition, pp. 281-2.

97

I am grateful to the contributors to a National Review Institute Conference, which I chaired in December 1993, on this theme for their insights.

98

James Q. Wilson, Thinking About Crime (New York, 1983), pp. 117-24.

99

Ernest Van Den Haag, ‘How to Cut Crime’, National Review, 30 May 1994.

100

See pp. 121-2.

101

In January 1994 the Government announced a limited but welcome tightening of the rules on local authority housing allocation to help tackle the problem of queue-jumping by single parents.

102

This research is summarized in a Centre for Policy Studies pamphlet, Divorce Dissent, by Ruth Deech (1994).

103

See The Downing Street Years, pp. 132-9.

104

See The Downing Street Years, pp. 699-707.

105

Gerrard and National Monthly Economic Review, April 1991.

106

Patrick Minford, The Supply Side Revolution in Britain, Institute of Economic Affairs, 1991. I have also described this more fully myself in The Downing Street Years, pp. 668-87.

107

See The Downing Street Years, pp. 589-617.

108

One of the best summaries of the evidence is that of N.F.R. Crafts, ‘Reversing Relative Economic Decline? The 1980s in Historical Perspective’, Oxford Review of Economic Polity, Volume 7, No. 3, 1991.

109

For example, the Treasury Bulletin (Winter 1991/92, Vol. 3, Issue 1) shows the remarkable improvement in the productivity and finances of the nine largest (once-) nationalized industries over the period.

110

For a full and persuasive defence of the Reagan record against the criticisms made of it, see National Review, 31 August 1992.

111

See pp. 538-9.

112

Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Rise of Christian Europe (1965), pp. 23-4.

113

Ralph Raico, ‘The Theory of Economic Development and “The European Miracle” ‘, in The Collapse of Development Planning, ed. Peter Boettke (New York University, 1994), p. 41.

114

Hernando de Soto, The Other Path (London, 1989).

115

N.R. Evans, ‘Antipodean Economics: Up from Down Under’, National Review, 29 August 1994.

116

George B.N. Ayittey, ‘The Failure of Development Planning in Africa’, in The Collapse of Development Planning, ed. Peter Boettke (New York University, 1994).

117

See p. 525.

118

I am grateful to Peter Anwyl-Harris and GT Management pic for much of the following information.

119

This is described in The Downing Street Years, pp. 489-90.

120

These reforms are well described by Jeffrey Sachs in Poland’s Jump to the Market Economy (London, 1994).

121

Marek Matraszek, Poland: The Politics of Restoration, Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies, 1994.

122

This survey, part of the study New Democracies Barometer III, is reproduced in the magazine Business Central Europe, October 1994, p. 80.

123

See p. 599.

124

Milton Friedman, ‘Out of Bretton Woods: Free-Floating Anxiety’, National Review, 12 September 1994.

125

See Sir James Goldsmith’s powerfully argued book The Trap (London, 1994).

126

I am grateful to Professor Patrick Minford for drawing my attention to this research, which he has conducted.

127

Brian Hindley, The Goldsmith Fallacy, Centre for Policy Studies, December 1994, p. 27.

128

Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Gods of the Copybook Headings’ (1919).