Do you believe the NHS is safe with the Tories? How Thatcher's behaviour exposed that lie

“The NHS is safe with us,” Thatcher told the nation – well, the Tory Party Conference, but we were all listening – in 1982.

It can take some time – in this case, over three decades – but eventually the truth will out, and the lie is exposed. At least, if you have a newspaper as effective as the Guardian to do the exposing.

It was three years ago that we discovered from papers published under the thirty-year rule, that back then Thatcher’s government had considered a proposal to end free Higher Education and to introduce vouchers to pay for school education, freeze benefits and, most toxic of all, to overthrow the founding principle of the NHS that healthcare should be free at the point of care, replacing the service by one based on insurance. As the paper containing the proposal pointed out, “This would of course mean the end of the National Health Service.”

As quoted in the Guardian: the killer phrase in the 1982 proposals

In her memoirs, Thatcher said, “I was horrified when I saw this paper. I pointed out that it would almost certainly be leaked and give a totally false impression … It was all a total nonsense.”

The government dropped the proposals after what her then Energy Secretary, Nigel Lawson, described as “the nearest thing to a cabinet riot in the history of the Thatcher administration.”

What has now emerged, from newly-published Treasury papers of her then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Geoffrey Howe, is that Thatcher didn’t give up on the proposals herself but kept working on them with him. As he noted, “the prime minister has arranged a series of meetings with the main spending ministers to discuss the follow-up to the discussion in cabinet” on the proposals. Among other things, the discussions were to look into replacing some public services by “more efficient alternatives from the private sector.”

If Thatcher was horrified, it was clearly about the fact that the ideas “would almost certainly be leaked” rather than about the ideas themselves.

Now roll on thirty or more years.

There has been constantly extending privatisation of health services in England with little evidence that they provide better quality. In fact, they don’t even seem to be able to generate levels of profit that would persuade the private companies to keep delivering them – several major contracts have already had to be cancelled.

Meanwhile the NHS is facing an unprecedented level of financial crisis. The 2015/16 year was the second in a row which saw the service in England in deficit – and with three times the level as the year before. The much respected health think tank, the King’s Fund, comments:

The scale of the aggregate deficit makes it clear that overspending is largely not attributable to mismanagement in individual organisations – instead it signifies a health system buckling under the strain of huge financial and operational pressures. The recent strategy of driving efficiencies by cutting the tariff has placed disproportionate strain on providers and is no longer sustainable.

That reference to a “recent strategy” reveals that the problem has been caused by deliberate policy. The government is putting the NHS “under the strain of huge financial and operational pressures”. Unbearable strain, you might say. .

Is this an unfortunate consequence of a misguided policy? Or is it merely the continuation by other means of an approach already launched scouted over three decades ago by Thatcher? An approach that would necessarily lead to “the end of the National Health Service”?

It hardly matters how we answer those questions. What’s clear is that the notion that the “NHS is safe” with the Tories is just sand in the eyes of those too tired or too greedy to resist their propaganda.

Why, you might as reasonably believe that Tories will keep the poor safe.

Maggie, the poll tax, and the danger of firmness

A benefit of the thirty-year rule for disclosure of British government papers is that it can provide a salutary reminder of just how unsavoury certain people were, at a time – three decades on – when there’s a tendency to canonise them.

For a while now, and never more than since her funeral, there has been a growing tendency to sing the praises of Maggie Thatcher. A strong woman, we’re told, a conviction politician, firm in her beliefs, determined to see them through.

That all sounds like praise indeed. So we sometimes have to remind ourselves of the irregular verb: I am firm, you are obstinate, he is pig-headed. What looks like firmness when you feel it’s in a good cause, is simply dogmatism bordering on fanaticism in a bad one.

Firm? Resolut? Or just inflexible?

The Guardian has done us a service by publishing details of the advice Thatcher received from Oliver Letwin, now a Minister but then a 29-year old special adviser, concerning the proposed move to funding local government based on a “residence charge”, later renamed the “community charge” and ultimately known to practically everyone as the “poll tax”.

This was pretty much an unmitigated disaster. Projections in 1985 showed that 44% of the population would be made worse off. The then Chancellor, Nigel Lawson – the minister responsible for Financial matters – declared the tax would mean that “a pensioner couple in inner London could find themselves paying 22% of their net income in poll tax, whereas a better off couple in the suburbs pay only 1%.” He described the scheme as “completely unworkable and politically catastrophic.”

Letwin maintained that it was the way to go, backed by Lord Victor Rothschild, now revealed to be the man who first had the idea. Letwin even supported the approach it has long been suspected Thatcher adopted, of using the Scots as guinea pigs and only introducing the poll tax in England and Wales after running it for a year north the border.

Despite the opposition of many of her most senior ministers, Thatcher made this an issue on which to prove her “firmness”. The poll tax was imposed on the rest of Britain after Scotland, amid increasing resentment and indeed resistance, culminating in widespread rioting in 1990. Her dogmatic attachment to a bad idea had lasted five years and done huge damage – not least, to herself. It was in 1990 that Tory Party grandees decided that they’d had enough of a good thing, or that Thatcher was no longer the good thing she had been, and dumped her.

She could never forgive them. Like all people who have her brand of “firmness’, she knew she could do no wrong. The poll tax hadn’t been her calamitous error, her utter failure of political sensitivity towards the real concerns of voters, it had been a policy that others hadn’t had the courage to see through, preferring instead to bring her down in an act that could only be qualified as treason.

That’s the kind of history we need to recall each time anyone speaks with nostalgia of the Thatcher period. Remember that her departure was the end of an error as well as the end of the era.

But we should also remember that the man who advised her down this destructive route was Oliver Letwin. Thatcher’s gone, but he’s still in government. The Guardian quotes Lord Rothschild expressing some reservations: “…I am nervous lest [the poll tax] is accidentally or deliberately misinterpreted, for example: ‘Tories hit the poor again’, ‘No compassion for the have-nots’.”

How ironic. Those are precisely the charges anyone with empathy for the poor makes of the government in which Letwin, architect of the poll tax, serves today.

Which demonstrates that this kind of story not only provides useful insight on the reputation Thatcher really deserves, it also reveals how balefully her legacy still affects us today.

Getting over that death and getting a life

It’s sad that the very qualities that win Brits grudging admiration abroad, alongside the usual derision, are the ones that tend to go fastest when some major event occurs.

The qualities are a sense of humour and a certain civility. You know, the good manners that mean we check with our hapless victim that the electrodes are comfortably attached to his genitals, sir, before turning on the current.

The major event was the death of an old age pensioner last week. She’d played a significant role in politics a generation ago, had been stitched up by her closest friends, and had left the stage in some disarray.

That’s her in disarray, but also the stage. Her immediate legacy was decline, into a corruption without even the redeeming feature of grandeur – you know, the larger-than-life drama that goes with a Richard Daley in the States, a John Profumo in the UK, a Mohammed Karzi in Afghanistan – and marked instead by the sleaze that merely provokes ridicule. 

One remembers, for instance, a fine tabloid paper set up a Conservative MP, Piers Merchant, by getting a young woman to kiss him in a park – oh, and he kissed her back too, naturally – while their photographer was lurking in the shrubbery snapping the whole scene.

Cue one career-challenged MP and the Beckenham constituency needing a new representative.

However, twice as much time has passed since Maggie left office than she spent in it. When she died, it seemed to me to be a moment for historians, politicians and journalists to make a few appropriate comments, maybe publish a paper or two, but for the public to do no more than any other historical footnote merited.

But of course the Conservatives are back in power now, and not doing well in the polls. Whatever they could do in the way of riding a Maggie wave back into some popularity was worth trying.

And that’s when the sense of humour and civility failures click in.

First the civility. There were a number of parties celebrating Maggie’s death. Odd, really. In dying, Thatcher became the equal of all of us, who will in turn also have to face that same dreary exit some day, in a way she hadn’t been for years. Surely that was a moment for some restraint; the time for parties was at the time of her political assassination by her supposed allies back in ’90.

Much funnier than the parties was the campaign to get people to download the 1939 Wizard of Oz song, Ding, dong! The witch is dead. I refused to take part, for the same reason I wouldn’t have gone to a party: I’m against celebrating death. But the controversy was great to follow. Why, the other side decided to get in of the act too, and set out a little late to persuade people to buy I’m in love with Margaret Thatcher. In the end, Ding dong didn’t quite make it to number 1, falling one place short. I’m in love only got to 35.

What amazed me is how few people can make that much difference to a song’s place in the charts: Ding dong sold just 52,605 copies. In a nation of nearly 60 million. That’s what it takes to get to number 2.

Even more amusing were the reactions. Tory grandees were lining up to suggest that, despite their total and unshakable commitment to democratic principle, and all that free speech stuff, doncha know, they really rather felt that the BBC should do the decent thing and not play the song on its Chart Show. A new entry. Straight in at number 2. But the BBC caved and another victory was notched up for the humourless, over the adherents of the good old phlegmatic British inclination to say, ‘boys (and girls) will be boys (and girls); let them have their fun.’

Then protesters travelled down to her funeral to turn their backs on the procession as it went past. Strikes me if you want to reduce the event to its real insignificance, the best thing is not to go at all. By turning up in person, you surely give the moment substance – as though protesting against Thatcher hadn’t become irrelevant two decades ago.

That’s where the sense of humour failure showed through too. Nigel Lawson, Lord Lawson, told the BBC that the protesters were exercising a right Maggie had done everything she could to protect. On the other hand – oh, wasn’t it obvious there was another hand coming along? – it would be a terrible pity to show the world an image of Britain as a place that couldn’t show respect to that fine, fine woman.

This from the man whose resignation from Maggie’s cabinet triggered her eventual fall.

Hey, lighten up a bit

It’s pretty significant that he mentioned that point about the image of Britain abroad. Many eulogies to Maggie have pointed out that she converted ‘basket-case’ Britain of 1979 into a nation that won the respect of others.

Well, basket-case Britain had one child in ten living in poverty. Eighteen years of Tory rule later, internationally respected Britain had taken that ratio to one child in three.

International respect paid for by little children? You can keep it. The kind of respect I’d appreciate – and show myself – would be for those who did what they could to alleviate the suffering of little children, not to increase it.

And I might also feel more respect for the country if it learned to take itself less seriously again. To see the funny side. So that instead of working up outrage in response to a little tasteless protest, people just shrugged, walked off and got a life.