Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [411]
My main message, therefore, had to be that the way to have low community charge bills was to vote Conservative in the forthcoming local elections. I pointed to some of the figures for the charge to illustrate my point.
It costs £96 more for the privilege of living in Labour Warrington than in neighbouring Tory Trafford; £108 more in Labour Liverpool than in next-door Tory Wirral; and an appalling £339 more in Labour Camden than in adjoining Tory Westminster.
But I also drew a wider lesson, and in doing so I deliberately sought to move the political argument back to the greater questions of politics which distinguished the Conservative from the socialist approach — and back to the values for which I personally stood:
Our struggle with the Labour Party has never been a matter just of economics. It concerns the way of life we believe is right for Britain now and in the future. It concerns the values by which we live. Socialism is a creed of the state. It regards ordinary human beings as the raw material for its schemes of social change. But we put our faith in people — in the millions of people who spend what they earn, not what other people earn. Who make sacrifices for their young family or their elderly parents. Who help their neighbours and take care of their neighbourhoods. The sort of people I grew up with. These are the people whom I became leader of this party to defend. The people who gave us their trust. To them I say, of course I understand your worries. They are part of the fabric of my life too, and I share the aspirations which you hold. You don’t expect the moon. But you do want the opportunity to succeed for yourselves and your children.
The reception was good. But for them and for me the worries remained.
TO CAP OR NOT TO CAP?
Now I had to ensure that my colleagues threw themselves as wholeheartedly as I would into the job of protecting our people from the kind of problems we were experiencing in 1990–91. There was not much we could do as regards this year’s bills. The lawyers advised that anything like the scale of capping I wanted to see was unlikely to be sustainable in the courts. Consequently, Chris Patten could only announce the capping of twenty councils. This was very disappointing. But a defeat in the courts could have put the whole system in disarray if, for example, the judges had found not just against a decision about a particular council but against the fairness of the system of SSAs which were crucial to the community charge.
All this reinforced the case for seeking new ways of holding down local government spending — and so community charges — the following year. I pressed with the Treasury and the Department of the Environment my ideas for wide-ranging direct controls over local authority spending combined with more extensive use of specific grants. I had also come round to the idea of single-tier authorities which — though the abolition of county councils would create a furore with Tory councillors — would mean that the identities of the culprits of overspending and high community charges were much clearer in the eyes of local electors.
Chris Patten was strongly opposed to any kind of comprehensive capping of local authorities. He argued against it both on the ground that it would undermine the principle of local accountability and because he thought such a system could not be got up and running in time for 1991–2. But I insisted that the DoE should work up the options. I wanted to see cuts in expenditure in some local authorities.
The local election results on Thursday 3 May 1990 strongly suggested that where Conservative councillors and candidates used the community charge in order