Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [358]
I always held my adoption meeting in Finchley on a Thursday rather than a Friday because the large Jewish population would otherwise be preparing for the Sabbath. In my speech that Thursday evening I concentrated heavily on defence, targeting not just the Labour Party but the Alliance, to the latter’s great irritation.
Our first regular press conference of the campaign was on Friday (22 May). The subject was officially defence and George Younger made the opening statement. We had suddenly been given a great opportunity to sink the Alliance parties which some Tory strategists — but not I — thought were the principal electoral threat to us. Instead, the two Davids sank themselves. The passage in our manifesto claimed that their joint defence policy, because it amounted to unilateral nuclear disarmament by degrees, would just as surely as Labour’s eventually produce a ‘frightened and fellow-travelling Britain’ vulnerable to Soviet blackmail. This was not, of course, an allegation of a lack of patriotism, but a forecast of what weakness would inevitably lead to. David Owen, however, failed to make this distinction and took enormous offence. We could hardly believe our luck when for several days he concentrated the public’s attention on our strongest card, defence, and his weakest one, his connection with the Liberal Party’s sandal-wearing unilateralists. The Alliance never recovered from this misjudgement.
But we were not without our difficulties. I was questioned on education, on which it was suggested that there were contradictions between my and Ken Baker’s line on ‘opted-out’, grant-maintained schools. In fact, we were not suggesting that the new schools would be fee paying in the sense of being private schools: they would remain in the public sector. Moreover, the Secretary of State for Education has to give his approval if a school — whether grant-maintained or not — wishes to change from being a comprehensive school to becoming a grammar school.
That said, however — and over the next few days it all had to be said repeatedly by Ken Baker — I was saddened that we had had to give all these assurances. It is my passionate belief that what above all has gone wrong with British education is that since the war we have, as I put it at this time, ‘strangled the middle way’. Direct grant schools and grammar schools provided the means for people like me to get on equal terms with those who came from well-off backgrounds. I would have liked grant-maintained schools — combined with the other changes we were making, and perhaps supplemented by a voucher applying in public and private sectors alike — to move us back to that ‘middle way’. I also wanted a return to selection — not of the old eleven-plus kind but a development of specialization and competition so that some schools would become centres of excellence in music, others in technology, others in science, others in the arts etc. This would have given specially gifted children the chance to develop their talents, regardless of their background.
If you are to have specialization of the sort I would like to see you ought to allow the school, which has become a centre of excellence in some field, to control its admission procedures. Competition between schools and individuals will also be more effective if there is some ability to ‘top up’ grants received from the state. I hope that we can go further along these lines. We ought to if the full Conservative vision for education is to be fulfilled. But at this stage it was clearly not going to be possible.
Some critics argued that this early row resulted from the fact that our reforms had not been fully thought through. That is certainly true of some of the details, even though the main lines were clear. But what was really behind the dispute was that, as I often did in government, I was using public statements to advance the argument and to push reluctant colleagues further than they would