Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [383]
THATCHERISM REBUFFED — THE CASE OF SCOTLAND
In Education, Housing and Health the common themes of my policies were the extension of choice, the dispersal of power and the encouragement of responsibility. This was the application of a philosophy not just an administrative programme. Though there were teething troubles and mistakes along the way, this approach was successful: it was also popular. Indeed, if it had not been the Conservative Party would have lost the three general election elections it fought under my leadership, not won them. But there were regional exceptions, most notably Scotland. There was no Tartan Thatcherite revolution.
That might seem strange. For Scotland in the eighteenth century was the home of the very same Scottish Enlightenment which produced Adam Smith, the greatest exponent of free enterprise economics till Hayek and Friedman. It had been a country humming with science, invention and enterprise — a theme to which I used time and again to return in my Scottish speeches. But on top of decline in Scotland’s heavy industry came socialism — intended as cure, but itself developing quite new strains of social and economic disease, not least militant trade unionism. Only in the 1980s did things really begin to change for the better as Britain’s transformed reputation started to attract foreign — often high technology — companies to Scotland and Edinburgh became a prosperous financial centre. Earlier, private enterprise had developed a prosperous and thriving oil industry. Even then, jobs in uncompetitive industry continued to be shed and unemployment remained higher than in England.
The fortunes of Scottish Toryism had declined in line with these long-term economic difficulties. So whereas in 1955 Conservative candidates took just over 50 per cent of the vote, in 1987 we were down to 24 per cent. And this reflected short-term as well as long-term economic conditions. Unemployment in Scotland had only started to fall four months before the 1987 general election — there was still too little economic confidence to start a recovery for the Scottish Tories.
There were now only ten Conservative MPs north of the border and this presented real difficulties in finding enough Tory back-benchers to take part in the House of Commons Select Committee monitoring the Scottish Office, which consequently could not be set up at all during the 1987 Parliament given that there were the ministries of the Scottish Office to fill. The real question now was whether the falling unemployment and economic recovery taking place would of themselves be sufficient to revive the Conservative Party’s fortunes in Scotland. I never believed that they would and this indeed proved to be the case. So if it was not all a matter of economics, what was wrong?
It was certainly possible — even plausible — to point to changes in social and religious attitudes to explain this decline. The old Glaswegian Orange foundations of Unionist support which had in earlier decades been so important had irreparably crumbled. Moreover, whereas in the past it might have been possible for the Conservatives in Scotland to rely on a mixture of deference, tradition and paternalism to see them through, this was just no longer an option — and none the worse for that. But that did not explain why Scotland was so different from England now, that is after eight years of Tory government.
Although there was a much better economic record in Scotland than was usually admitted, the statistics which were most revealing were those which showed that about half Scotland’s population were living in highly subsidized local authority housing compared with about a quarter in England. In short the conditions of dependency were strongly present. And the conditions of dependency are conditions for socialism. In Scotland the Left still formed its own establishment