Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [398]
The relationship between scientific research and policy towards the global environment was not just a technical matter. It went to the heart of what differentiated my approach from that of the socialists. For me, the economic progress, scientific advance and public debate which occur in free societies themselves offered the means to overcome threats to individual and collective wellbeing. For the socialist, each new discovery revealed a ‘problem’ for which the repression of human activity by the state was the only ‘solution’ and state-planned production targets must always take precedence. The scarred landscape, dying forests, poisoned rivers and sick children of the former communist states bear tragic testimony to which system worked better, both for people and the environment.
* For more discussion of ‘homelessness’ see pp. 603–4.
* I was, though, content to make one minor adjustment. This was to provide tax relief for workplace nurseries.
CHAPTER XXII
A Little Local Difficulty
The replacement of the rating system with the community charge
The introduction of the community charge to replace the domestic rates turned out to be by far the most controversial of the changes promised in our 1987 general election manifesto. Whereas the other elements of those reforms — in education, housing and trade union law — took root, the community charge has since been abolished by a government consisting largely of those who framed and implemented it.
The charge became a rallying point for those who opposed me, both within the Conservative Party and on the far left. Had I not been facing problems on other fronts — above all, had the Cabinet and Party held their nerve — I could have ridden through the difficulties. Indeed, the community charge, having been modified in several ways, was beginning to work at the very time it was abandoned. Given time, it would have been seen as one of the most far-reaching and beneficial reforms ever made in the working of local government. Above all, the community charge offered a last chance of responsible, efficient, local democracy in Britain. Its abandonment will mean that more and more powers will pass to central government, that upward pressures on public spending and taxation will increase accordingly, and that still fewer people of ability will become local councillors.
PROBLEMS WITH THE OLD SYSTEM
We did not enter lightly upon the path of radical reform of local government finance. I shared much of the traditional Tory caution about turning existing financial or administrative systems upside down. If it had been possible to carry on as before I would have been quite prepared to do so. But by almost universal agreement it was not. The person who knew this best was Michael Heseltine — in fact, as it turned out, the most vocal Conservative opponent of the community charge. Michael, as Environment Secretary in the early 1980s, had tried to make the old system work by resorting to more and more complicated devices. He took a whole battery of new powers in an attempt to deal with the problem: that we lacked the means to control local government spending, though it made up a large fraction of overall public expenditure. He brought in the block grant system and ‘grant-related expenditure assessments’ (GREAs), ‘targets’ and ‘holdback’, limits on local authority capital expenditure, and the Audit Commission, as well as beginning a general squeeze on the central government grant — all designed to hold down local spending and to give ratepayers an incentive to think twice before re-electing high-spending councils.*
The system became so complicated that scarcely anyone understood it. It was like the ‘Schleswig-Holstein question’ of the last century: Palmerston joked once that only three people ever had a real grasp of it — one of them was dead, one was mad and he himself had forgotten