POLITICS
Why there is no watershed for Mrs Thatcher
CHARLES MOORE
0 ne keeps reading that the Govern- ment has reached a 'watershed'. What is a watershed? At school, I heard the word often (in Geography, I suppose) before I knew what it meant. I imagined that it might be a shed where you kept water, a corrugated iron version of the grand and fanciful water towers which Victorians loved to run up at the slightest excuse. Now I know better. It is 'a narrow elevated tract of ground between two drainage areas'. That is a rather neat description of the Thatcherite position, but not the one which the present users of the word intend. They, too, are confused. They seem to mean that the Government, having reached some pinnacle, is now beginning to run faster and faster downhill, getting wetter and wetter as it does so. It is interesting that the metaphor which they choose suits the case so badly.
One also hears that the battle between Wet and Dry has become a more covert struggle between 'radicals' and 'consolida- tors', and that now, at last, the consolida- tors are winning. This, apparently, is the end of the era of experiment, the beginning of a period of demoralisation. Mr Alan Watkins says that last orders are being called in Downing Street. The image calls for an old-fashioned Punch cartoon: Bar- man (Mr John Bull): 'I must ask you to leave, madam.' Power-tipsy Lady: 'Oh please, just one more drink.'
The evidence for these views amalga- mates various recent events. It can be made to include Mr Lawson's Budget, Mr Norman Fowler's Welfare State review, Sir Keith Joseph's retreat over student fees, the Cabinet decision last week not to introduce a law to decontrol private rents, anything about which the Government has not been unequivocally ideological.
One could add some other instances. The course of privatisation, for instance, seems to have departed from the original intention. The aims of breaking monopoly and making, as Mrs Thatcher loves to say, 'every man a capitalist', have receded.
British Gas is to be sold off in a lump; British Airways has been assured artificial competitive advantages; the British Air- ports Authority will not be disbanded. Now the idea is simply to get the Govern- ment out of the organisations concerned and the money into the Treasury with the greatest possible speed. One can scan Government plans in vain for any serious effort to reduce public spending. And so on. Of course one can detect any amount
of wavering, temporising, trickles from the watershed, but this does not mean that anything very novel has happened.
Take the shortest drive down memory lane, and you will see the burnt-out wrecks of a thousand government plans and the ugly skid marks where Mrs Thatcher shot up the verge and only just managed to get the car back on the road. What about the awards based on the Clegg comparability commission which destroyed the first 18 months of public spending policy? What of agriculture and the unresolved EEC budget crisis? Can you no longer remem- ber the captitulation to the miners in 1981? What happened to education vouchers? Can you think of a government initiative in local government which has succeeded?
You will notice some milestones too, though. There are the Prior/Tebbit union laws, the reduction of inflation, the defeat of the Argentines in 1982 and Mr Scargill in 1985. And there are little furlong mar- kers as well — 'flexible rostering', more parental choice of schools, the refusal to give in to the hunger strikers, the failure of some of the less deserving public em- ployees to repeat their Clegg achieve- ments, lower taxes on the rich, the reduc- tion of the size of the Civil Service.
What you make of this record depends upon your political point of view, of course, but what should be noticed is that this record of success and failure, of (to put it very favourably) two steps back, two and three quarter steps forward, is a simul- taneous record. The Government has not swept forward to success and then sudden- ly decayed, like Mr Macmillan's, nor plunged into inextricable crisis, like Mr Heath's or, though one now forgets it, Mr Callaghan's. Terrible mistakes were being made before Mrs Thatcher had even finished quoting St Francis of Assisi; con- siderable successes were being scored when Britain was burning with riot and freezing with recession.
Why do people find this so hard to understand? Why do so many need to believe that Mrs Thatcher is responsible for bad manners, football hooliganism, starvation and Aids or, on the other hand, for strength, freedom, goodness, truth, and beauty? No doubt it is partly her fault. The Prime Minister speaks as if she embo- dies the virtues which will save her coun- try, and acts as if engaged in a struggle which makes Michael vs Satan look like a youth singles on Court Number 13. This makes people extravagant with praise or blame. One can meet otherwise brilliant men and women who seriously claim that world war will result from another four years of the Prime Minister, others who honestly believe that she is Britain's last, best hope. It is a pity that they have such thoughts, first, because they make them unnecessarily anxious, second, because they are untrue, last, because they make it impossible to understand what has been happening.
The era of 'obscene and vicious cuts' predated Mrs Thatcher. It began in 1976, with a Labour government. The 'context' which frames Mrs Thatcher is one of acute economic crisis. Before that crisis became acute, politics was different and so was our future woman Prime Minister. As Minister of Education for Mr Heath, she was unradical and unvociferous. It was Mr Heath's failures which stirred her to action. No one hoping to get or retain office in 1979 could have pursued economic policies which were the opposite of those which she pursued. No one sitting in a government department, rather than shouting on a husting, could not have been worried by the main things which worried her. Start with these facts, and you see that this horribly/wonderfully radical Government's behaviour was predictable, almost orthodox.
Whatever she may have said, Mrs Thatcher has not broken with all previous conventions or consensuses. She simply reached the top at the moment when those conventions became obviously unsustain- able, and she was sufficiently robust not to resist the obvious. Inflation, reined in by prices and incomes policies based on pacts with union leaders, was no longer — if it ever had been — a policy which a govern- ment could afford to espouse. It is not her view of policy which makes Mrs Thatcher different from her predecessors, but her rather greater honesty and determination.
Her solutions to the problems may not be right, her manner of approaching them may be tiresome, but she does not pretend that, because she is in charge, the problems no longer exist, nor does she cynically neglect them. She persists, badgering ministers and officials, lecturing journal- ists, driving advisers, thinking too little and talking too much, but persisting all the same. She will persist in persisting, and until the next election at least, her party will have to persist with her. Calling on her to do otherwise is so much watershed off a duck's back.
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