tim's experiment

So what, after all the words and demonstrations … and the song … are we to make of Mrs Thatcher? I must confess that like most English people of my age I do not approach this question with an open mind undisturbed by any previous thoughts or feelings.

Actually I thought Mrs Thatcher was the worst Education Minister who ever held the job and one of the reasons I moved to Hong Kong in 1980 was because I did not wish to be present during her Prime Ministership, which I thought would not be a happy period. As indeed it wasn’t, for a good many people. I bristled at the suggestion by a local columnist that her decision to abolish the supply of free milk to schoolchildren was an example of fearless and creative administration. It was a short-term political fix with distressing long-term consequences.

The history of “school milk” goes back to the Second World War, when large numbers of children were evacuated from London for their own safety and billeted with foster families elsewhere in the country. Most of the children provided with this service were from working class families. Most of the foster families were prosperous enough to have a spare bedroom or two. As a result of this coincidence it became widely known for the first time that rickets (a bone deformity caused by insufficient calcium in the diet) was endemic among the children of the poor. The solution adopted by the first post-war government was to issue to all schoolchildren a small bottle of milk every school day. In primary schools the teachers made sure that you drank it. In secondary schools it was optional. I did not personally like it. But as a piece of social policy this was a complete success. Rickets disappeared. Mrs Thatcher’s decision to stop the milk supply was an instant political success with calamitous long-term consequences. Rickets returned. Of course if you believe, as devout Thatcherists tend to, that the feeding of children is entirely up to their parents then the reappearance of child malnutrition will not bother you.

And this is what a good many people hate about the “Thatcher revolution”. It depended heavily on ignoring the consequences — particularly for the vulnerable — of politically tempting options. The argument that this was necessary — that her willingness to grasp nettles and tread on toes rescued the economy from the doldrums and led it to the sunny uplands of sustained growth — is not born out by the facts. The British economy grew no faster in the 80s and 90s than it had done in the 70s. None of these three decades matched the record of the 60s, when the policies which she despised were in their full flower.

Still if you expect prime ministers to solve the UK’s economic problems you are probably over-estimating the power which goes with the job. What bothered me about Mrs T was that she made all sorts of toxic ideas respectable, at least for a while. Her admirers describe her as “principled”, but her principles eerily coincided with the prejudices which had been for years the staple of conversation in Home Counties golf club bars and Conservative Association tea meetings. She did not like trade unions. She did not like nationalised industries. She did not like council housing programmes. She did not like welfare. She did not like foreigners who could not speak English. Especially if they spoke German. And like the Roman administrators of Britain she thought the territory north of a line between the Wash and the Severn Estuary was a barbaric country which needed only firm policing. If you manage to become prime minister than of course academics will queue up to dress your prejudices in the verbiage of political theory. And mandarins who share them will then translate the theories into policies.

If great unhappiness then results then you must not, I fear, complain if people sing happy songs at your funeral. The tragedy of Mrs Thatcher’s political life was that she was a good war Prime Minister. But unlike Winston Churchill she only had one small war in which to display this quality. Like Churchill she was no good at the peacetime stuff but she didn’t get his opportunities for heroics. In some ways she leaves a harder, crueller world.

Let us return briefly to education policy. When I was a student — as indeed when she was a student — everyone who won admission to university had his or her fees paid by the government. You also got a maintenance grant, which was inversely proportionate to your parents’ income. There were similar arrangements for post graduates. Many universities also offered scholarships. If you were a geeky type who was good at exams you could pay your way. When I describe these arrangements to students from the UK now they think I grew up on another planet.

I do not dance on people’s graves. A charitable epitaph might be: She made a lot of things happen. Not all of them good.