POLITICS
The cutting edge which Mrs Thatcher has never gained
CHARLES MOORE
It has often been pointed out that it is a waste of time for anyone to try to alter the Prime Minister's political persona. You may be able to persuade her to raise her voice or lower it, but it will still say the same things. There are those who say that it is this unchangeable quality, this un- forgettable and monotonous personality, which makes Mrs Thatcher certain to be defeated at the next election. If this is so, then there is nothing to be done but get rid of her, and this the Tories do not seem to be prepared to do.
Anyway, the evidence for the theory is thin. Mrs Thatcher certainly achieves un- dreamt of heights of unpopularity from time to time, but she can make herself popular, or at least populist, too. In particular, she is the best fighter of elec- tions since the Harold Wilson of 20 years ago. She happily complies with the market- ing theories of Saatchi and Saatchi, submit- ting herself to every sort of public relations indignity and making sure that she is filmed in the right places, with the right audiences and in the right clothes. In this respect, she is modern. She also enjoys the drama and speed, the sound and fury of an election campaign. Her morning press conferences quite outclass their rivals. In them, she displays the combative readiness which is her nearest approximation to wit. She twits her colleagues and savages her opponents and never stands back for a second. She senses political vulnerability and likes to inflict the wound. In this respect, she is old-fashioned. She is thinking about win- ning all the time, and so she tends to do so.
The danger, then, is not in her character per se. It is the danger that she will be irreparably associated with something which people very much dislike. Politicians have a curious way of being caught out by the very things on which they pride them- selves. Macmillan's successful economic management (`you've never had it so good') came to seem like untruthful cynic- ism; Callaghan's comfortable calm came to seem like complacency, and the remark which he never made — 'Crisis? What crisis?' — came to epitomise his govern- ment. Mrs Thatcher has said that 'there is no alternative'; how brave, how tough, how true, voters might think at first; how arrogant, how narrow, how false, they might later conclude.
The evidence of polls, anecdote and the complaints of backbenchers is that Mrs Thatcher now suffers from this syndrome. Thatcher, for many people, means 'the cuts', and the cuts are unpopular. Tell people who do not follow politics closely that in no major area of public spending have real, overall cuts been made, and they do not believe you. Indeed, so great is the conviction that Mrs Thatcher cuts that one wonders whether Mr Kinnock is wise to proclaim, as he has just started to do, that the Government has failed to make cuts. His truthful charge of inconsistency is less potent than the lie about ruthlessness.
The lie is powerful because it really does feel as if cuts have been made. At first one only notices it in small things. The council cuts the verges later in the summer, and less often. Then one notices the roads acquiring a rather attractive, rough, many- textured appearance, as holes appear and little patches supersede the huge retarmac- ing of the past. And then bigger things begin to impinge. Wards have to close, and then hospitals. Nothing seems to be cleaned or repainted. There are fewer bus services and fewer railway lines. There must have been cuts, people feel; we can see them all round us. And even if, unaided, we do not see them, the em- ployees and spokesmen of the public ser- vices helpfully point them out to us.
The Government's failure, surely, is that it has permitted the statements of these employees and spokesmen to go unchal- lenged. Worse, it has allowed these em- ployees and spokesmen to direct the money as they think fit. Wards close, but there are more administrative workers in hospitals than ever before. Schools cannot buy textbooks, but teachers refuse to accept any system by which they could be sacked, or even paid according to merit. The now Labour-controlled education em- ployers have offered teachers a pay rise which, if paid within the present education budget, would reduce the amount of money spent on the children, and yet these employers and the teachers' unions some- how manage to represent themselves as the friends of education. Fortunately the teachers have solved the Government's problem by refusing the offer.
The Government may have succeeded in making the public services less glamorous occupations for talented graduates than they seemed in the 1960s, but it has failed to dent the fallacy implied in the phrase 'public service' itself. Hospitals and schools are still thought of as unselfish insitutions. Anyone with any experience of the Nation- al Health knows that it keeps you waiting, that it provides a minimum of comfort, that it intensely dislikes any action — like bringing a telephone to a bed — which might extend the range of services which it is supposed to provide. Anyone with an experience of Sainsbury's knows that the shops constantly alter to respond to the demands of the customer, that no shop assistant tells you to wait in a queue before he will deign to tell you where the frozen meat counter is, that a request for a product is seldom considered unreasonable or 'difficult' but as something which the shop would like to try to answer. And yet the Health Service is selfless and Sains- bury's is merely 'commercial'. It is as if inefficiency were evidence of altruism.
The public service illusion still seems to fool almost everyone. One hardly ever hears doctors or nurses or dentists de- scribed as 'greedy', a word frequently applied to men who make things or sell services. Things which have an aura of being positively 'good', like health and education, are thought too sacred to be provided by methods which are accepted for things which are merely necessary, like food, or convenient, like household goods. Thus it has been possible, partly through the argument for efficiency, partly through financial inducements, to persuade people that the Government does not need to run all large industrial concerns. British Tele- com has gone: British Gas is going. Even in those industries, like coal and rail, which are almost in the 'good' class, bitter battles have been won in favour of the proposition that commercial considerations count. But with 'pure' public services such battles have been lost, or rather, never fought.
At the last election, Labour's only mo- ment of hope was when it succeeded, for a day or two, in spreading the scare that Mrs Thatcher wanted to dismantle the National Health Service. She and her spokesmen rushed round with frantic denials, and her art men produced attractive charts of the huge bagfuls of money which the Govern- ment had spent on health. At no point in her two administrations has she argued why the present health and education arrangements are radically hopeless. In- stead she has merely raised fears by ex- pressing occasional, ill-formulated doubts, and dissatisfaction by allowing public ser- vants to pass on any modest economy direct to the people whom they 'serve'. Such cuts appear unkind and pointless to be paying more for less. And so they are and will be, so long as the public has to suffer under the spirit of 'service'.
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