Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [389]
I had great regard for the Victorians for many reasons — not least their civic spirit to which the increase in voluntary and charitable societies and the great buildings and endowments of our cities pay eloquent tribute. I never felt uneasy about praising ‘Victorian values’ or — the phrase I originally used — ‘Victorian virtues’, not least because they were by no means just Victorian. But the Victorians also had a way of talking which summed up what we were now rediscovering — they distinguished between the ‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving poor’. Both groups should be given help: but it must be help of very different kinds if public spending is not just going to reinforce the dependency culture. The problem with our welfare state was that — perhaps to some degree inevitably — we had failed to remember that distinction and so we provided the same ‘help’ to those who had genuinely fallen into difficulties and needed some support till they could get out of them, as to those who had simply lost the will or habit of work and self-improvement. The purpose of help must not be to allow people merely to live a half-life, but to restore their self-discipline and through that their self-esteem.
I was also impressed by the writing of the American theologian and social scientist Michael Novak who put into new and striking language what I had always believed about individuals and communities. Mr Novak stressed the fact that what he called ‘democratic capitalism’ was a moral and social, not just an economic system, that it encouraged a range of virtues and that it depended upon co-operation not just ‘going it alone’. These were important insights which, along with our thinking about the effects of the dependency culture, provided the intellectual basis for my approach to those great questions brought together in political parlance as ‘the quality of life’.
THE FAMILY
The fact that the arguments deployed against the kind of economy and society which my policies were designed to foster were muddled and half-baked did not, of course, detract from the fact that there were social ills and that in some respects these were becoming more serious. I have mentioned the rise in crime. The Home Office and liberal opinion more generally were inclined to cast doubt on this. Certainly, it was possible to point to similar trends throughout the West and to worse criminality in American cities. It was also arguable that the rise in the number of recorded crimes reflected a greater willingness to report crimes — rape for example — which would previously have not come to the attention of the police. But I was never greatly impressed by arguments which minimized the extent and significance of crime. I shared the view of the general public that more must be done to apprehend and punish those who committed it. I believed that while it was right that those who did not really need to go to prison should be punished in other ways, violent criminals must be given exemplary sentences. In this regard the measure we introduced in which I took greatest satisfaction was the provision in the 1988 Criminal Justice Act which empowered the Attorney-General to appeal against overlenient sentences passed by the Crown Court.
The fact that the level of crime rose in times of recession and of prosperity alike gave the lie to the notion that poverty explained — or even justified — criminal behaviour. Arguably, the opposite might have been true: greater prosperity led to more opportunities to steal. In any case, the rise in violent crime could not in any sense be regarded as an economic phenomenon. Nor could the alarming levels of juvenile delinquency. These had their origins deeper in society.
I became increasingly convinced during the last two or three years of my time in office that, though there were crucially important limits to what politicians could do in this area, we could only get to the roots of crime and much else besides by concentrating