Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [34]
I visited the province again on Christmas Eve. This time I met members of the Northern Ireland prison service as well as the security forces. For the prison officers, too, faced grave danger and worked often in appalling conditions. From March 1978 they had been dealing with the consequences of the so-called ‘dirty protest’* by over 350 terrorist prisoners, seeking ‘special category status’ and privileges. Seventeen prison officers had been murdered in the past four years, seven of them in the previous three months. It made the troubles of a political life seem very trivial.
* In order to try to give a better indication of the real effect of government policies on living standards, we published from 17 August 1979 a new ‘Tax and Price Index’ (TPI) which combined, in one figure, a measure both of the tax changes and the movements in retail prices. For those dependent on earned income, who constituted the bulk of the population, this provided a better indicator of changes in total household costs than the RPI. However, for the purposes of wage bargaining, the circumstances of an individual enterprise should determine what could be afforded.
* The proportion of the British workforce employed in the public sector crept inexorably upwards from 24 per cent in 1961 to reach almost 30 per cent by the time we came into office. By 1990 through privatization and other measures we had brought it down again to a level below that of 1961.
* The Griffiths Report of 1983 was the basis for the introduction of general management in the NHS, without which the later reforms would not have been practicable. See pp. 606–17.
* It was only towards the end of my time in government that we embarked upon the radical reforms of the civil service which were contained in the ‘Next Steps’ programme. Under this programme much of the administrative — as opposed to policy-making — work of government departments is being transferred to agencies, staffed by civil servants and headed by chief executives appointed by open competition. The agencies operate within frameworks set by the departments, but are free of detailed departmental control. The quality of management within the public service promises to be significantly improved.
* ‘Wet’ is a public schoolboy term meaning ‘feeble’ or ‘timid’, as in ‘he is so wet you could shoot snipe off him.’ The opponents of government economic policy in the early 1980s were termed ‘wets’ by their opponents because they were judged to be shrinking from stern and difficult action. As often happens with pejorative political labels (cf. Tory, which originally referred to Irish political bandits), ‘wet’ was embraced by the opponents of our economic strategy, who in turn named its supporters ‘the dries’.
* For the steel strike, see Chapter 4, pp. 108–14.
* These were a whole series of measures which we had inherited from the previous Labour Government and modified in various ways. They included the Youth Opportunities Programme, measures to encourage training, job release schemes, help for small firms and compensation for those in temporary, short-time work.
* Patrick Jenkin had already announced in June 1979 that we would end the statutory obligation to uprate long-term benefits in line with prices or earnings, whichever was higher: henceforth, uprating would be in line with prices.
* For the measures in the 1980 budget see Chapter 4, pp. 95–7.
* For the summits I attended and the visits that I made in this period, see Chapter 3.
* See Volume II.
* For the outcome of these protests and our response to the hunger strikes, see Chapter 14.
CHAPTER III
Into