The Atlantic and Its Enemies

themselves disagreed with the policy. She at once told Lawson that the pound must rise, which it did, to DM3.10. Lawson, though humiliated, survived because of his triumphant budget. But the economic climate began to worsen, in the sense that inflation was returning, and now the demand for a link with the ERM, to prevent the inflation (as the French franc fort was alleged to be doing), became very very strong. The French had high unemployment, because credit rates and the franc were kept high. But this was ‘Europe’, an apparently sacred cause. An excellent account of the problem appears in Bernard Connolly’s book, The Rotten Heart of Europe (1995). Writing as a European civil servant, he exposed the rough dealings of Brussels, and the machinations to which Lawson exposed himself.

In the inflationary boom of the later eighties, as stocks and house prices doubled and trebled, the popularity of the Reagan and Thatcher governments was unassailably strong; and, besides, especially in Margaret Thatcher’s case, they had demonstrably dealt with at least the short-term problems confronting them in 1979. It would not be wrong to say that she had turned round the temper of the country. The same was also obviously true of Ronald Reagan, as witness his triumphant re-election in 1984. However, both had been sucked more and more into foreign affairs. The ending of the Cold War was quite well managed, and was maybe the last moment at which a British Prime Minister could claim a true world role (although she had an unnecessarily carping tone when Germany was reunited). But both in London and in Washington, when it came to matters of the longer term, the Right fell apart. Here again, those critics with their hearts in the seventies can be dismissed out of hand as irrelevant. It was certainly correct to observe, as did the reactionary critic Anthony Daniels (a prison psychiatrist with considerable qualifications), that the British had achieved the feat of becoming much richer while also having a more uncomfortable life. But the seventies-minded commentators were quite mistaken in blaming the rising crime and growing coarseness on ‘the Thatcher cuts’ or an alleged ethos of ‘greed’. The problems had been well in evidence before, and had even caused the rise of Margaret Thatcher in the first place. If she can be faulted, it would have to be in failing to take up a strategy to deal with such problems. The Atlantic, or ‘the Anglo-Saxons’ if we are to include Australia, struck French observers as undergoing a sort of social crisis, for all the money, or perhaps because of all the money, that was pouring out. Plantu, the cartoonist of Le Monde, wrote the line, ‘socialism is the hope of Europe’, and then drew three representative British figures — the Prime Minister saying, ‘What’s Europe?’, the banker saying, ‘What’s socialism?’, and the young street hooligan saying, ‘What’s hope?’. ‘Yob’ was the reinvigorated word used for this last figure, while ‘yuppie’ entered the language to describe the noisy young products of the financial revolution.

England was visibly changing in very unpleasant ways. In 1944 Orwell had called attention to British orderliness: football matches resembling church parades; Richard Hoggart in a famous book thought that the working classes’ future would be a sort of ‘virtuous materialism’. By 1990, in a neat little Westphalian town, before some football match, there was a notice, ‘English people not served’. Richard Tawney had done much to develop the Welfare State. When he died in 1962, he can have had no idea of what, very shortly, was to come about. For him the best things in England were stable families and internal peace. No policeman even needed a Perspex shield until 1977, let alone a gun. In 1955 there were fewer than 1,000 crimes per 100,000 people, a figure steady since the middle of the nineteenth century. It crept up to 1,700 in 1960, 2,600 in 1965, 3,200 by 1970, over 5,000 by 1980 and 10,000 by 1990. In Sunderland there were 480 armed robberies in 1980 and 5,300 in 1991. Again, the facts of family breakdown were incontrovertible. In 1942 10,000 divorces occurred. There was a Divorce Reform in 1969 and in 1971 there were 100,000 divorces. This was expected to be the last of it — unhappy marriages at last over. But there have been at least 100,000 divorces per annum ever since, even where children are involved. In 1990 there were nearly 200,000 divorces, but the figure then levelled out because people did not marry. In 1971 under one in ten births was illegitimate; in 1981, the figure was 13 per cent and in 1990 nearly one third, 50,000 of them to teenage mothers.

That children born in such circumstances would probably go wrong was simply a commonplace of the wisdom of the ages. From the sixties, an often asserted line was that, where there were problems, these had to do with money. It was of course true that single-parent families had less money, and three quarters of unmarried single mothers were indeed on ‘income support’. For many years, the evidence was fought over, but in the United States, where the whole problem had come up earlier, a long-term study had been made, and by 1993 the evidence was published. It showed that ‘the dissolution of intact two-parent families is harmful to large numbers of children… [It] dramatically weakens and undermines society.’ It was not difficult to make a list of the stupidity, cowardice and lying that had been involved in denying this common-sense generalization. Even the educational pundit A. H. Halsey, who came very close to apologizing for his own part in the creation of the world of the 1990s, could not help blaming ‘Mrs Thatcher’ because the housing estates where the mayhem occurred were broken down and poor, although he admitted that family breakdown had caused his own educational reforms to fail. But for governments to deal with these things is obviously difficult; the best writing on this subject is by Margaret Thatcher’s own one-time political secretary Ferdinand Mount, whose Mind the Gap (2004) argues for a restoration of civil institutions, even the Church. In the United States, so much larger and with a far higher degree of decentralization, various answers could be variously tested, and it was there, rather than in England, that some progress was made as regards such problems, vigorously identified by Charles Murray or Myron Magnet (The Dream and the Nightmare, 1993).

In matters to do with society, the Welfare State, the National Health Service and education, uncreativity was on display. Perhaps this reflected an obsession with ‘information technology’. Computers, programmed for this or that, were supposed to replace manned offices, and there were fantasies as to how ‘paper’ would just disappear. Boxes would be ticked, managers would know how, automatically, to respond, and if need be management consultants could be brought on to advise. This was to confuse efficiency with efficacy, and it was extraordinary that the Thatcher governments went in for a degree of centralization that enfeebled ‘the little platoons’ which had so distinguished British history. Ferdinand Mount noted in effect how the growing central state had turned everyone into a functionary or a prole: exactly what had been said in the later 1970s. Government was not cut back at all. True 600,000 workers — a seventh — had been moved from public to private sectors, but the effort meant that more, not fewer, public servants were required, and Mrs Thatcher even appointed a minister to the National Health management board — precisely what was not supposed to happen. The government did indeed try to manage the civil service better but the Welfare State had become a great monster, the DHSS having fifty volumes of rules created since 1980. Samuel Finer said that Margaret Thatcher was ‘historic rather than historical’: greater for what she represented than for what she did. Businessmen were asked to look at the whole problem. In 1984 there had been some improvements, some money saved by elimination of the more extravagant absurdities, such as the experiment-rats that cost ?30 each. But most of this was tinkering.

English education had suffered from the abolition of the grammar schools in the later 1960s. The head of Margaret Thatcher’s political centre, a Welsh non-conformist, had ‘an almost fanatical horror of the way education was now done in schools’ but where could he restart? Reform meant a parade of acronyms which, not long before the 1987 election, Die Zeit could mock unmercifully (a German correspondent in London, with an English wife and modish Hamburg views, lamented that his fourteen-year-old son, taken from his German school, was being diseducated). A National Curriculum was hammered out and hijacked by the educationalist bureaucracy; a universal examination called GCSE was installed, absurdly easy for some, impossibly difficult for others. Melanie Phillips listed the resulting woes, in a book, All Must Have Prizes (1996), which took all the tricks and had no effect. George Walden, who could handle the international comparisons, also wrote in the same sense, also to no effect. The minister in charge, Kenneth Baker, was himself a businessman, a believer in head office intervention, who did not see that without the threat of dismissal for the delinquent branch officials and of bankruptcy for the main firm itself such ways of doing things did not work. As Walden sadly pointed out, the fact was that the politicians (and many of the bureaucrats) could side-step the entire mess because they, like a rough tenth of British parents, used private (‘public’) schools which were often world-beaters. Margaret Thatcher herself had briefly been Minister of Education when the calamitous comprehensive reform had been going ahead, and had herself abolished many of the grammar schools. She later regretted this. But it was strange that the government waved aside its own supporters. There were similar problems in the USA, but there (as, to some degree, in Germany) there was such decentralization that good ideas could be tried out locally, in defiance of an educational establishment that a forthright Reaganite, William Bennett, dismissed as ‘the Blob’, with its weasellings and jargon (though even he proved ineffective at controlling it).

The preposterous over-centralization was on display over universities. A sage at the London School of Economics was Elie Kedourie. He wrote a pamphlet called Diamonds into Glass which