POLITICS
Mrs Thatcher's quiet counter-revolution: so quiet it hasn't even happened
NOEL MALCOLM
0 n the face of it, there is something very attractive about the idea of abolishing the Ministry of Agriculture. Having accepted the resignation of Mrs Currie, the bearer of bad news, the next logical step for the Prime Minister would seem to be to turn against Mr MacGregor, the bearer of bad eggs. The Department of Health is keeping up a steady war of attrition against him: only this week, for example, it let it be known that it had written to the Ministry of Agriculture requesting it to close down the salmonella-infected poultry farms, and that nothing had been done. And a mounting tide of newspaper articles calling for a new 'Department of Health and Food' has been surging through the national press — all of them written, as it happens, by a single Tory back-bencher, Sir Richard Body.
There is an element of temporary hyster- ia about all this: a sudden tendency to talk about food in a way which implies that our only interest in growing, buying or eating it is the avoidance of bacteria. This will no doubt pass. And there is also an element of holier-than-thou superiority about the idea that if only food policy could be floated off into the safe haven of the Department of Health, that would be the end of all unseemly conflicts of interest. All govern- ment departments are riddled with con- flicts of interest, and the Department of Health in its present form is no exception. It co-operates closely, for example, with the pharmaceuticals industry, but on the other hand it negotiates on behalf of the NHS to lower the prices of the drugs which that industry produces; and it is also responsible for overseeing pharmaceutical safety standards — thereby raising the industry's production costs. We need not wait for Turkish peasants to organise them- selves before we start talking about pro- ducer lobbies at the Department of Health.
All the same, there is something about the Ministry of Agriculture which sets it apart from nearly every other ministry. It is the only one, apart from the Ministry of Defence, which exists to serve the interests of a single section of the population. Other ministries have been forced, by a mixture of ideology, circumstance and Treasury (and the greatest of these is Treasury) to detach themselves from their main profes- sional interest-groups. The Department of Health has played its populist joker against striking nurses; Mr Baker has invoked parent power (and, to a lesser extent, headmaster power) against the massed ranks of distrustful teachers; and the De- partment of Employment, traditionally the Whitehall mouthpiece of the trade unions, has become under Mr Norman Fowler a Department of Training with a healthy disregard for any union boycotts of its pet schemes. It is as if (roughly speaking) the Ministry of Agriculture spent most of its time setting up schemes with greengrocers to lower the price of vegetables, and merely told the farmers that they could listen in to the discussions if they wanted.
If Mrs Thatcher does turn her axe on the Ministry of Agriculture, this will at least give a little comfort to those observers who have been waiting for many years to see her carve up the established system of ministries and departments. She has a habit of making vague promises in this direction, either at the beginnings of her terms of office or, as in 1987, at the starts of her election campaigns. But the score so far is unimpressive: the abolition of the Civil Service Department in 1981, the merging of Trade and Industry in 1983 and the de-merging of Health and Social Secur- ity in 1988. There is no over-riding pattern about these changes; and, as the last two measures show, her general attitude to- wards the Heath-style super-ministries is not nearly as clear-cut as one would expect. In fact, if we look back to Mr Heath's plans for a 'quiet revolution' in government in 1970, it is striking just how much of his programme has been taken over and taken forward by Mrs Thatcher. Where he set up business-style `agencies' such as the Property Services Agency, Mrs Thatcher has started to hive off bits of the civil service into `executive agencies' with business-like efficiency targets. Mr Heath brought in a think-tank to relate particular policies to the Government's overall strategy; she relies on her own `policy unit' at No. 10, having got rid of his one. Meanwhile the lumbering giants of Mr Heath's departmental reforms — above all, the Department of the Environment continue to lumber.
The DoE has kept very quiet in the great agricultural debate of the last two months; old Whitehall hands are already suspecting the DoE of egging on — sorry — the attack on the Ministry of Agriculture, in the knowledge that it stands to benefit from any break-up of its old rival. The Depart- ment of Health might get its sticky fingers on the food; but the DoE would get its hands on 30 million acres of farm land. The fighting between Agriculture and Environ- ment has been going on at least since Mr 1-leseltine's Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981; and the sparring between William Waldegrave and Michael Jopling in 1986-7 over the question of how to develop an overall, ecology-conscious land-use policy has not been quickly forgotten.
Since the boys from the DoE are cast in this story, for once, as the good guys, many people might support the idea of giving them the farmers to deal with. But do we really want to fatten up the grossly dis- tended DoE any further? The assumption which needs to be challenged here is the idea that friction between different minis- tries is necessarily a bad thing. That is the assumption which the Heathite philosophy of super-ministries took for granted — a philosophy for managers rather than politi- cians. What we need — to borrow a bit of Thatcherite rhetoric — are ministries which are leaner, fitter and more competi- tive.
Some of them, of course, are becoming leaner through theii own efforts. Mrs Thatcher has already hinted that, when gas, electricity and coal have all been privatised, the Department of Energy will wither away. The long-term trend of the Thatcher years may be towards smaller and less important ministries, but in the mean- time a formidable logjam of senior Cabinet ministers is building up with not enough posts to go round. There are all-purpose titles available at the lower end of the scale: Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancas- ter, for instance (currently Mr Newton), or even 'Minister without Portfolio' (last bes- towed on Lord Young). But the problem lies at the high table, where the efficient part of the constitution suffers from a shortage of sufficiently dignified titles. What about `Grand Vizier'? — it would have suited Mr Tebbit, though I am not sure who the right candidate would be now. The word 'Mikado', I learned from one obituary of Hirohito, fell into disuse in Japan because they thought W. S. Gilbert had made it a term of ridicule; we in this country know better, and I am sure that it is a title which Mr Baker would wear with pride. The post of Grand Panjandrum would be reserved, of course, for Lord Young.
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