Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [187]
CHAPTER XII
Back to Normalcy
Politics, the economy and foreign affairs from the election to the end of 1983
Political success is a good deal pleasanter than political failure, but it too brings its problems. Conventional wisdom, reinforced by classical mythology, has it that this is all a matter of hubris or at least of complacency. But it is not always so. Nor was it in fact during the somewhat troubled six months which followed the 1983 general election. On this occasion there were subtler problems. One was that the media, having felt obliged during the election campaign to cover real political arguments about practical choices, soon reverted to the more amusing sport of scoring points off the Government. And there was a second problem, which we encountered increasingly over the years, that the less the socialist threat seemed, the more people were inclined to jib at the inevitable difficulties and disappointments of running a free enterprise economy.
In 1983 we also had two other problems to face — one of our own making and one not. The first was that the 1983 manifesto did not inspire the Government with the sort of crusading spirit which would have got us off to a good start in the new Parliament. Some of the main pledges were popular enough, such as the abolition of the GLC and Metropolitan Counties and the introduction of rate-capping, but they ran into a difficulty with which any reforming administration must bear: that the generalized approval of the silent majority is no match for the chorus of disapproval from the organized minority. The left-wing municipal socialists and their subsidized front organizations were astute campaigners, trained and adept at exploiting every weakness of presentation of the Government’s case. Much of the manifesto promised ‘more of the same’ — not the most inspiring of cries, although there is no doubt that a lot more was needed. We had not yet cut taxes anything like as much as we wished. There was more work to be done on trade union law and the privatization programme — which would perhaps constitute the really big advance of this Parliament — was barely under way; the bill to privatize British Telecom, which had fallen with the election, had to be reintroduced.
The second problem was one for which we could not be blamed — that there was still too much socialism in Britain. The fortunes of socialism do not depend on those of the Labour Party: in fact, in the long run it would be truer to say that Labour’ fortunes depend on those of socialism. And socialism was still built into the institutions and mentality of Britain. We had sold thousands of council homes; but 29 per cent of the housing stock remained in the public sector. We had increased parent’ rights in the education system; but the ethos in classrooms and teacher’ training colleges remained stubbornly left wing. We had grappled with the problem of bringing more efficiency into local government; but the Left’ redoubts in the great cities still went virtually unchallenged. We had cut back trade union power; but still almost 50 per cent of the workforce in employment was unionized, far more than our main competitors, and of them around 4 million were working in a union closed shop. Moreover, as the miner’ strike would shortly demonstrate, the grip of the hard Left on union power was still unbroken. We had won a great victory in the Falklands War, reversing the years in which British influence seemed doomed to an inexorable retreat; but there was still a sour envy of American power and sometimes a deeper anti-Americanism, shared by too many across the political spectrum.
In all this, my problem was simple. There was a revolution still to be made, but too few revolutionaries. The appointment of the first Cabinet in the new Parliament, which took place incongruously to the background accompaniment of traditional military music and the Trooping of the Colour, seemed