active on many fronts in promoting equality: in the provision of social welfare and in the redistribution of wealth and incomes’. There followed a detailed analysis of its effects in the form of over-taxation, the discouragement of enterprise, the squeeze on profits, the defrauding of savers by inflation and negative interest rates and the apparently inexorable growth of the public sector and public spending.
Unfortunately, tacked on to the draft and, far more seriously, to the ‘final’ version issued to the press by Conservative Central Office was a passage about public expenditure constraints requiring tough, painful decisions such as limiting the number of kidney machines. Kidney machines were in fact already limited in number as part of the unacknowledged rationing of health treatment under Labour. Nevertheless, a frank statement of it — particularly in the form of a throwaway line — was asking for trouble. In the helter-skelter preparations Adam and I let it through. Luckily, when Gordon in New York saw a copy of the speech he immediately understood the potential damage and removed the offending part. All press releases are subject to the usually formal qualification ‘check against delivery’, so he was also able to ring round Fleet Street to tell the editors that the page in question, although part of the press release they had received from Central Office, was not being used and so should not be covered. They had sufficient respect for him to comply; and since the front page of the
In fact, the main message of the speech was given maximum attention on both sides of the Atlantic. I was promptly attacked back home by the Labour Government for running Britain down abroad. In fact, the message I was bringing to America about Britain was essentially one of hope, namely that the nation’s potential was great enough to withstand even the effects of socialism. The criticism from the Foreign Secretary, Jim Callaghan, who quaintly criticized me later for putting ‘argumentative passages’ into my American speeches, found a faithful echo in the British Embassy where I was staying. A senior member of the Embassy staff briefed the American press against me. Gordon Reece quickly discovered what was happening, and there was a sharp exchange of letters on the subject between me and Jim Callaghan when I returned to England.
Aware of the attempt to try to cast me in this light, I used my speech to the National Press Club in Washington to point out that if the present socialist policies were abandoned, Britain had underlying strengths which would ensure its swift recovery. A shift of popular opinion against the far Left, the extent of our energy reserves and the strength of our scientific potential — shown by seventy-two Nobel Prizes, more than France, Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium put together — all justified long-term optimism.
Now, slowly, we are finding our way. It is true that the reports about Britain still reflect a serious situation, and they are right to do so. But a change is coming over us… I see some signs that our people are ready to make the tough choice, to follow the harder road. We are still the same people who have fought for freedom, and won. The spirit of adventure, the inventiveness, the determination are still strands in our character. We may suffer from a British sickness now, but our constitution is sound and we have the heart and the will to win through.
In the course of my American visit I met the key figures in the Ford Administration. Dr Kissinger I knew already. But this was the first time that I had met Bill Simon, the free-market-minded Treasury Secretary, who had jettisoned the wage and price controls imposed under President Nixon, and the immensely experienced James Schlesinger, the Defense Secretary, the Administration’s principal internal opponent to
I was also received by President Ford himself. He was a large, friendly man, unexpectedly precipitated into high office who, perhaps to his own surprise as well as that of others, had started to relish it. He had assembled or inherited a talented team around him and had already demonstrated to the Europeans America’s continued commitment to their security, in spite of all the upheavals of domestic politics. He had, in fact, both the strengths and weaknesses of what in current political parlance is described as ‘a safe pair of hands’. He was not the kind of man to challenge accepted orthodoxies, which I increasingly believed ought to be challenged. But he was a reassuring and steady figure who helped America heal the self-inflicted wounds of Watergate. After a rocky period in the wake of his pardon for Richard Nixon, his Administration’s fortunes appeared to be improving, and his undeclared bid for the Republican nomination was proceeding against a genially effective campaign by a certain Governor Ronald Reagan. President Ford’s prospects for re-election appeared good. I came away hoping that he would succeed.
I found on my return to London that the coverage given to my American tour had transformed my political standing. Even the Labour Party’s simulated outrage helped. For the more attention was paid to my arguments, the more seriously they were taken. I was soon conscious also of a change of attitude within the upper echelons of the Conservative Party. People who had regarded my accession to the leadership as an irritating but temporary fluke had to think again. Not only was I evidently being treated seriously by some of the most powerful figures in the free world; the warnings I had given in my Helsinki speech looked ever less eccentric and more prescient.
In late September the Cubans, acting as Soviet surrogates, began to pour troops into Angola. In December the US Senate overturned President Ford’s policy of providing assistance to the anti-communist forces there and resistance to the MPLA collapsed. I thought and read more about these things over Christmas and decided that I would make a further speech.
On this occasion I stuck to the conventions and told Reggie Maudling of my decision. It was perhaps a testimony to his unease at the prospect that Reggie went so far as to offer me a draft. Unfortunately, this would not do. As Denis might have said, ‘It was so weak it wouldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding.’ Bob Conquest had now departed for the more politically conducive Hoover Institution in California, so I asked Robert Moss to help me. The editor of
The speech which I delivered on Monday 19 January at Kensington Town Hall covered similar ground to the previous year’s Chelsea speech, but concentrated more on defence and contained even stronger language about the Soviet menace. It accused the Labour Government of ‘dismantling our defence at a moment when the strategic threat to Britain and her allies from an expansionist power is graver than at any moment since the end of the last war’. It also offered an analysis of Soviet intentions different from that of the proponents of
Russia is ruled by a dictatorship of patient, far-sighted men who are rapidly making their country the foremost naval and military power in the world. They are not doing this solely for the sake of self-defence. A huge, largely land-locked country like Russia does not need to build the most powerful navy in the world just to guard its own frontiers. No. The Russians are bent on world dominance, and they are rapidly acquiring the means to become the most powerful imperial nation the world has seen. The men in the Soviet Politburo do not have to worry about the ebb and flow of public opinion. They put guns before butter, while we put just about everything before guns.
I warned of the imbalance between NATO and Warsaw Pact forces in Central Europe, where the latter outnumbered us by 150,000 men, nearly 10,000 tanks and 2,600 aircraft. But I emphasized that the West’s defence could not be ensured in Europe alone: NATO’s supply lines had also to be protected. This meant that we could not ignore what Soviet-backed forces were doing in Angola. In any case, if they were allowed their way there, they might well conclude that they could repeat the performance elsewhere.
The reaction to the speech, particularly in the more thoughtful sections of the British press, was much more favourable than to the Chelsea speech. The
It is one of the few defences which free societies have against totalitarian propaganda that totalitarians are inclined to see the Western mind as a mirror image of their own. They are consequently capable from time to time
