Margaret Thatcher: still in power?

Margaret Thatcher’s death has revived the controversy, rhetoric and hysteria of her time as prime minister. Her supporters claim  she ‘saved Britain’ from economic decline or even from a Marxist revolution; that she ended the Cold War, and that she was a beacon of liberty for much of the World. Her opponents make equally extreme claims: that she undermined the sense of mutual-responsibility in our society; that she destroyed British industry; and that by selling council houses, privatising public services and deregulating financial services (the ‘big bang’), she was responsible for the extreme inequality in this country. All of these policies have been designated by her opponents as ‘Thatcherism’, which is portrayed as an unstoppable political force, responsible for all our current ills.

Blaming Thatcher in this way is bizarre: she resigned as Prime Minister 23 years ago. She was succeeded by seven years of John Major, who had a far more conciliatory style of leadership, and then 13 years of New Labour government under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. The two latter prime ministers, with substantial majorities in the House of Commons and leading a different political party could surely have reversed many aspects of ‘Thatcherism’ had they chose. The New Labour government did indeed begin with about two years of mild left-wing policies. Low income workers were helped by the introduction of the minimum wage and a 10p starting rate of income tax. There were some long-delayed constitutional reforms including the Human Rights Act, devolved governments in Scotland and Wales, and the exclusion of most hereditary peers from the House of Lords. There were also some sensible administrative reforms in the NHS.

After this, however, the New Labour government changed direction. There were substantial increases in expenditure on health, but an increasing proportion of this was allocated to fund independent providers. The NHS in England was substantially re-organised to facilitate competition between providers, and favourable contracts were given to private corporations to provide medicine and surgery.  From 2000, New Labour  expanded the programme of ‘city technology colleges’ (CTCs) set up by Margaret Thatcher’s government. These were renamed ‘academy’ schools, and, like the CTCs,  were ‘sponsored’ and de facto controlled by businessmen.

New Labour also retreated from its initial concern for low-paid workers. The 10p starting rate of income tax was abolished in the 2007 Budget, and loose immigration restrictions kept down wages. Benefits for disabled people were converted into Employment and Support Allowances in 2008, and the work of assessment contracted out to the French corporation ATOS Healthcare. Many people with severe disabilities or terminal illnesses have since been assessed as ‘fit for work’ on the basis of poorly-conducted assessments. The combined result of these measures was to maintain but not worsen the extreme inequality introduced by Margaret Thatcher’s government. However, measures like Working Tax Credit introduced by New Labour did reduce the proportion of the population in poverty from 22% to 17%. 

The same desire to control public expenditure under the later years of the New Labour government did not apply with financial services. Gordon Brown as Chancellor of the Exchequer introduced a succession of tax changes benefiting the highest-paid, and created and promoted the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) which channelled billions of pounds into banks, the accountancy corporations and other legal and financial services. Annual payments from taxes to the private corporations holding PFI contracts will rise to about £10 billion/year by 2017. ‘Light-touch regulation’ was used for the City of London, thereby  failing to prevent most of the country’s major banks becoming insolvent in 2008.

Until the crash in 2008, the largest financial returns were in property speculation and PFIs, rather than by investing in industry. This, combined with an overvalued pound resulted in a decline in British manufacturing industry to less than 10% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). By comparison, manufacturing fell from 18% to 15% of GDP when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister.

Finally, the New Labour government under Tony Blair began to use war as an instrument of foreign policy. Margaret Thatcher’s government had been involved in only one war, to defend the Falkland Isles from occupation by a murderous dictatorship. From 1997, the UK became involved in wars in Iraq (twice), Afghanistan, Serbia and Kossovo, and Sierra Leone. 

With the exception of this greater commitment to military action, the New Labour government therefore continued and extended ‘Thatcherism’. The same policies have largely continued under the present coalition government, albeit in much more constrained financial circumstances and with less apparent desire to engage in war.

If Margaret Thatcher’s government was part of a policy continuum, how can we explain the extreme and rival claims about her influence? I think the reason is her style of politics rather than the specific policies she promoted. Margaret Thatcher was essentially a tribal rather than a national leader. When she spoke passionately of Britain, she did not mean all the inhabitants of this land. Instead, her phrase ‘people like us’ excluded whole categories of individuals and institutions. To her, the miners were the ‘enemy within’. She condemned the 96 dead Liverpool football supporters at Hillsborough and exonerated the police. She would never travel on a train as long as the railways were a public enterprise rather than privately-owned.

Tribalism of this kind was characteristic of politics in her time, and was a driving force on much of the left as well as the right. But Margaret Thatcher was unique in British politics  in not even making a pretence of speaking for the whole country. Thismade her intolerable to those who did not see themselves as ‘one of us’. We endured night after night of her hectoring elocution-trained voice on television news, speaking with absolute certainty and without a trace of humour or compassion. I am prepared to believe that in her private life she showed kindness and concern for others. But this was rarely evident in her speeches. Margaret Thatcher’s death thus brought back this memory of misery for many of us. The only other person who had a similar effect, for me at least, was Jimmy Savile. He was a frequent visitor to Chequers when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister and counted her as a friend. Perhaps they will be reunited in the afterlife. 

See also:
Meet the new boss - same as the old boss

Laws of Information 4 and 5

A long time ago, I proposed some ‘laws of information’, looking particularly at the kind of information available to manage large public organisation. These are as below:
1. Information is costly
2. Data is always less reliable than you think.
3. data that is collected to measure performance loses reliability
You can click these weblinks to access the relevant text for each law.

Here is another law:
4. There is always more information available than you first thought.
Natural science has advanced through ever-improved measurement techniques, of which the Large Hadron Collider is the most recent and by far the most expensive. Each area of science has its own preferred measurement technique, and great effort is expended in improving its accuracy and reliability. Social science works on very different principles: no single measure remotely approaches the levels of accuracy taken for granted in the natural sciences, and so social scientists draw on multiple sources of data to base their conclusions. This principle is also a good one for managing large public organisations like universities and hospitals, where there is also a mass of different information, sometimes of dubious reliability (for reasons why it is dubious, see Laws of Information 1-3).

Sadly, this principle is not always applied. Managers and politicians often focus on one (unreliable) measurement and ignore the others. In part, this is a consequence of a commitment to the written word. Nothing is truly believed to exist unless it has been written down, preferably on a form. Once written down, it is believed superior to all other forms of information such as observation, informal discussions with staff, or patients’ letters of complaint. The most holy of all written data is quantitative data, especially that emanating from a computer. This tendency is reinforced by the use by governments of simple quantitative targets to measure the complex activities of complex institutions.

As an example, look at the Stafford Hospital case. Analyses of routine data showed that the hospital was an outlier in mortality statistics for some surgical procedures (ie people were much more likely to die). This all explained in an excellent article in the London Review of Books, available here:
Rigging the death rate
If the hospital management had followed the Fourth Law of Information, they would have seen this analysis of mortality statistics as a sign that they should gather data from other sources. They could then have visited the wards and observed daily care, spoken to patients and staff, reviewed casenotes, checked how their staffing levels compared with those of other similar hospitals, or brought in some outside experts to do these things and advise. They don’t seem to have done any of this: instead, they decided to discredit the mortality statistics. Management consultants were brought in to change the diagnostic codes of patients who died in hospital. Researchers at Birmingham University were funded to discredit the use of statistics to assess hospital performance. Their report made the correct conclusion that statistics can be misleading and that one set of them should not be used exclusively to assess performance. But that of course misses the point. Being an outlier should be regarded as a warning sign rather than definitive proof. It should have indicated a need to collect other data. In other words, the truth is found not in one set of data, however tidily it is presented and however quantitative, but in a wide range of information, from which an informed person can make a judgement. This leads to the fifth law of information:
5. Interpreting information requires judgement.

The word ‘judgement’ of course will sound a warning bell to some. How much better to pretend that decisions follow automatically from the data without human intervention or the exercise of personal responsibility. Then all that is needed when things go wrong is for the relevant procedures to be blamed and amended. This defence (“I was only carrying out procedures”) is an effective life strategy in any large organisation, and may be a more reliable path to promotion than anticipating problems and taking the initiative in solving them. Look around, and you will see the consequences.

Memories of memories: the Great War

A few conversations between the old and the young take us back centuries. When I was a teenager, I knew two old men who had fought in the Great War. One I knew when I was a volunteer for the Visiting Service for Old People in Birmingham. He had joined the Royal Warwickshire Regiment just after the start of the war in 1914, after lying about his age. He spent most of the war in the trenches of the Western Front, but was later transferred to the Italian Front. He had been wounded, was sent to the field hospital and missed some action. When he returned to his squad, he found that all his friends were dead. The second old man was a next door neighbour in Shirley. He too had been on the Western Front, and after the Armistice had advanced with the Army into Western Germany. He told me that he and his fellow soldiers did not like the French civilians they met, and were amazed when they occupied Germany to find people who seemed far more like themselves. “We’ve been fighting on the wrong side”, the soldiers said. 

These are memories of memories of events almost a hundred years ago. Both these men, when themselves teenagers, also may have talked to old men who in their youth had fought in distant wars: perhaps the Crimean War or the Indian Mutiny. Assume a 50 years span of memory for such conversations, and only seven link me with someone who saw Shakespeare perform at the Globe, and the first settlers leave for New England. The past is closer than we think.

Living next to savages

My wife and I still live in the first home we moved into after we married, in Autumn 1983. This is in the village of Martley in Worcestershire, and is the third of four bungalows in a short unadopted road with the bungalows on one side of the road facing woodland on the other. At the end of our road, where it joins one of the main roads through the village, is a small green where children can play. In 1983, our neighbours were an elderly single lady on one side, and a pleasant family with two young sons on the other. The family left within a year and the Savages moved in. Mr and Mrs Savage were an elderly couple who had moved to our village after living in Devon. Devon, they told us, was an awful place. There was an erratic water supply, the roads were full of tourists, and the locals were unfriendly. Martley was much better.

It was not long, however, before this positive opinion began to change. The Savages totally opposed the idea that children could play on the small green at the end of the road. The noise of children playing, they said, made their life unbearable. This became a public campaign which involved shouting at children and demanding people sign a petition against their use of the green. Few, however, signed it. Indeed, their only supporters were their other neighbours, also an elderly couple. The lack of support from the rest of the village was a sign to the Savages that its inhabitants did not meet their own high standards. Mrs Savage told me “This village may be full of three and four-bedroom houses, but they are not three and four-bedroom people”. Another time, she complained that the village was little better than a slum. At the time, I was planting flowers in my front garden, under the dappled sunlight coming through the trees. Eventually, the Savages could bear it no longer and left for another village where, they assured me, people were far nicer and where they would be much happier. I thought this unlikely and suspected that their life followed a repeated cycle of optimism, disappointment, anger and evacuation. I therefore felt sorry for them.

I suspect that every village in England has at least one couple like the Savages: incomers who complain about church bells, the sound of cows mooing and sheep bleating, the noise from tractors in fields, and the happy sounds of children playing. This might be a product of the way country life is depicted on television, as an idyllic escape. In fact, one programme at present is called ‘Escape to the Country’. People who have experienced distress in a city may mistakenly come to believe that a village offers a life of absolute quiet, without the need to deal with other people. However, I think a more probable cause in some cases at least is subclinical paranoia. The person experiences noise as a kind of invasion of their identity, which they are unable to control. Children present particular problems for such people because children are spontaneous and joyful.

From my house, I can hear the children when they have their playtime in the village primary school across the fields. I can also hear the church bells on Sundays, at weddings, and when the bellringers practice on Friday evenings. These are all the happiest sounds I know. How sad are people who can not bear them.

Confessions of a parish councillor

It is now well over a year since I became a parish councillor for my small village in Worcestershire. Like most of my colleagues, I was co-opted to fill a vacancy. Most such vacancies arise, I suspect, because new parish councillors find that this unpaid post demands impossibly large amounts of their time. But another factor may be the complexity of the issues facing parish councils, despite their almost total lack of powers. Planning is the most complex of all, not just because planning laws and regulations are difficult to grasp for non-experts, but because the operation of the planning system utterly contradicts the common sense of local people.

The centre-piece of the planning system is the so-called ‘local plan’, prepared by the planning departments of the district council. I use the term ‘so-called’ because local plans are anything but local. In my part of the country, three district councils have prepared a joint ‘South Worcestershire Development Plan’ (SWDP). This covers an area of 1274 square kilometres and a population of over 286,000. Local plans must conform with the Government’s National Policy Planning Framework and a plethora of other regulations. But most important of all, they are required by law to meet nationally-determined targets for building new houses. These in turn are estimated by the Office of National Statistics from predicted population trends and rates of ‘household formation’.

So the SWDP begins with statements of aspirations which meet current government policies such as energy saving, better waste disposal, and the mysteriously-vague term ‘sustainability’. This is followed by lists of sites judged suitable for ‘development’. These include sites for employment and retail, but most are for new housing estates to be built by one of the big housebuilding companies. In most cases, they will have already purchased and promoted these sites for development. Finally, the SWDP identifies the implications of proposed developments for employment, roads and other local services.

Parish councils do not have the power to vary these ‘local plans’, but they can comment on them as part of a formal process of consultation. The plan is then forwarded to a planning inspector who holds a quasi-judicial hearing to rule on whether the plan is ‘sound’ (ie internally-consistent and in accord with national policies). Developments on individual sites, even if positively-identified in the local plan, still require planning permission from the district council. Once again, parish councils can comment on these before a decision is made. If the district council refuses planning permission, the applicant can appeal to a planning inspector, who will conduct a hearing and then make the final decision.

This system, at first sight, looks rational and fair. But the discussions at parish councils and with its citizens illustrate a real conflict of culture and belief. Parish councillors are usually people who are longstanding residents of their community and know every road, hedge and ditch and (between them) almost every resident in the parish. Parish councillors’ sense of identity is therefore strongly connected to their parish. They are aware of what makes their community distinctive and different from others. In a country parish, they will therefore try to maintain its familiar local features and its rural character while also striving to improve the services available to its residents.

District planning officers have an outlook that is almost the exact opposite of that of parish councillors. Planning officers are professional local government officers who are responsible for ensuring that the local plans they help formulate are in accord with national policies. Many planning officers are transient: they know that promotion will often depend on moving elsewhere - perhaps to the other end of the country. In a rural district, they are responsible for many dispersed communities, and can not hope to have the kind of expert local knowledge possessed by a parish councillor or a local resident. Lacking a long-term commitment to a particular community, they probably regard parish councillors’ passionate defence of their village against development as a self-interested protection of property values. At worst, we are seen as backward peasants standing in the way of ‘progress’.

By contrast, the building corporations speak the planners’ language. Their planning applications meet the complex requirements of national and local planning policy, and are backed up by various specialist reports on drainage, environmental impact, transport impact and so on. These specialist reports are commissioned by the developers from various consultancy agencies who (I suspect) generally support applications by those who pay their fees.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that local plans end up proposing lots of new housing, and that individual planning applications to build new estates and supermarkets are usually passed by district councils and (should there be an appeal) by the planning inspectors. The planning system, in other words, is part of an great unstoppable engine of government which works to make all parts of the country look the same, to empty our high streets, and to destroy what is special and unique about each town and country in England.

The new modern and heritage motorways

A film critic noted many years ago that French films always seemed to include a scene of family meals around a garden table, while British films generally featured trains pulled by steam engines. The love of steam engines is now obsessional for many people. A thousand or so steam engines in Britain operate on about 150 standard gauge and narrow gauge ‘heritage railways’. All are maintained by amateurs, who spend years of their lives restoring and maintaining machinery that is over 50 years old. They would probably regard it as near-sacrilege to refer to a steam engine as a mere ‘machine’. It is a gleaming, living being, hissing and snorting, fed coal and water, and oiled and polished by its devoted attendants.

It was not always so. I remember as a child my excitement when I travelled on my first diesel-powered train. How much more modern than the dirty black tank engines used by British Railways. The modern world we imagined in the 1950s consisted of fast cars and motorways, concrete and glass skyscrapers, television and jet aircraft. Soon, it seemed, we would be able to fly all over the world and even to other planets. To be modern therefore meant scrapping steam engines, trams, and most of our railways altogether, demolishing smoky Victorian buildings, and clearing land in town centres to widen roads and create urban motorways. People would live in high-rise flats surrounded by parkland, and drive their cars to supermarkets. No town was exempt from this vision of modernity. Birmingham City Council demolished the town square (the Bullring) and replaced it by roads with tunnels underneath for people who persisted in walking rather than driving. Edinburgh commissioned Sir Colin Buchanan to design a would-be urban motorway cutting under Calton Hill, by bridge across to the Royal Mile, thereby cutting in half the most historic street in all Scotland. Edinburgh was lucky: no political party had a majority on the City Council and so there was no dynamic leader to enforce this insanity. Birmingham was less fortunate.

Since the 1960s, modernity has changed. It now means pedestrian-only city centres, efficient urban tram systems, old buildings restored and converted for new uses, and open-air cafes selling good coffee and Mediterranean food. The best new buildings either look like restored old ones or are shaped in strange round forms. Anything in fact, to escape from the square concrete blockhouses inflicted by modernist architects of the 1960s. High-rise blocks of flats are being demolished, usually to the cheers of their former residents. Supermarkets still survive, but may soon begin a long decline as people switch to home delivery. Cities compete for funding to build new urban tramways, often using the same routes as the ones torn up over 50 years earlier. Every country in Europe has, or plans to have, high-speed trains linking its major cities.

How far will this new modernity go? Perhaps motorways will one day seem quaint items of nostalgia. Old driving enthusiasts - possibly an elderly Jeremy Clarkson - will drive their ancient Ferraris up and down short stretches of heritage motorway kept in operation by dedicated preservation movements.

Huddled round the fire

As I type this post, I am sitting at my desk looking through woodland at the parish church. The trees are bare and patches of frost remain despite the low midday sun of the English winter. In the trees there are clumps of mistletoe and, a little further down the woodland, the nests of a large flock of jackdaws. These circle the village at dawn and dusk, and spend the day foraging in the nearby fields.

The most striking thing to me about this scene is that I am warm. Central heating keeps the temperature of the house at about 19° Celsius. Double-glazing and insulation prevent draughts and reduce heating costs. It was not always so in my life. I belong to probably the last generation in England that learnt to light a coal fire as part of my childhood duties. I remember being taught how to screw up paper (but leave it overlapping so it all caught fire), place fire-lighters, lay a cross pattern of sticks on top, and then a small tower of coal from the bucket. After lighting the fire, it was common to ‘draw’ it with a sheet of newspaper held in place by a poker fixed across the front of the fireplace.

Until this procedure had been completed and the fire had begun, the house was cold - often very cold. We lived in a suburban semi-detached house but, like all our neighbours, our house lacked any double-glazing, insulation or draught-proofing. The fire in the living-room (and occasionally in the front room) was the only source of heat. In winter, our chairs were arranged around it, keeping the front of our bodies warm. We would talk and listen to the radio (television only appeared in our house when I was about eight years old). A journey elsewhere in the house at that time of year was an ordeal. Hot water bottles (actually small rubber bags with a stopper at the top) were used to warm our beds. I remember the sound of a kettle being boiled for the hot water bottles as the signal that bedtime was near.

The house I live in now does not have a fire. Instead of gathering as a family around the fire to talk, our chairs now face the television. It produces a constant rattle of quiz shows with strikingly ill-informed contestants, unconvincing dramas, superficial and sometimes misleading news programmes, and documentaries which are high in scenic content and low on information. I admit to nostalgia for the time we would gather around a fire, toast some pikelets, and talk of the day’s events. I am not, however, nostalgic for the damp, the draughts, and the cold.

See also:
February Fill Dyke
Synthetic nostalgia