‘Care in the community’, as it became known in the late Eighties, was an offshoot of the influential Griffiths Report of 1983. The report’s main suggestion was that superfluous expenses might be removed if managers could oversee and correct an organization sometimes lacking in efficiency and accountability. In the same spirit, it encouraged the view that the elderly or mentally ill should receive treatment at home. Roy Griffiths believed fervently in the NHS, but he felt it could do better under something resembling a business model. Moreover, the notion that patients could be better served within their own homes seemed a more humanitarian proposition than a lifetime spent within an institution. But many could not thrive or even survive at home, and found too little around their home that could be called a community. The cumulative result was a rise in homelessness. The National Audit Office suggested that the figure in 1989 had reached 126,000.
When a little-known MP named Jeremy Corbyn rose in the House to call the soaring levels of homelessness a ‘disgrace’, Thatcher barely turned her head. In this case, she could not easily be blamed. By 1990, a startling 100,000 council houses stood empty, and the government was to spend £300 million renovating them. Another 600,000 private properties were similarly unused, and that was harder to remedy. Grants and other incentives to housing associations were provided by the Housing Act of 1988, but the crisis of homelessness could only be eased, not abolished.
The unions had been tamed, but another traditionally leftist foe had submitted neither to lash nor leash. For the Tories, animated by the principle that ‘central knows best’, local councils were a hydra of jostling irritations. The first of these, predictably, concerned money. True to her conviction that people can be trusted to take responsibility where they feel they have a financial stake, Thatcher was anxious about the seeming unaccountability of so many local councils. If, she reasoned, the rates levied on property were to be replaced by a tax on the individual, members of the public would become true local taxpayers, shareholders with the right to demand proper standards. Councils in turn would therefore have to justify their expenditure and their policies. The notion was first seriously mooted in 1983 and took some years to gestate. When at last the new tax was approved, it was given the most innocuous of titles: the community charge.
A second thistle hid within a paradox. The Tories might govern the land, but their rivals governed the cities. The consequences of this lay in education, which was the responsibility of local government and persistently overlooked by the Conservatives. Those children, the vast majority, who did not go to private schools, grew up under a right-wing government but received a left-wing education. This alone ensured that the shadow of the post-war consensus still stretched over the Thatcher government, and that years after the memory of the Seventies had dulled, Thatcher was still vilified in increasingly vague but no less vituperative terms.
In some left-wing boroughs, the children of immigrants were encouraged to read and write in their mother tongues rather than in English. Young, Gay and Proud was the title of a book for secondary school students. The honest impetus behind such initiatives did not protect them from attack. Indeed it was precisely the eclectic approach of such councils that led, some argued, to the Conservative victory of 1987. In its election campaign, the Conservative party placed some of the more provocative textbook titles with the question: ‘Is this Labour’s idea of a comprehensive education?’
Under Ken Livingstone, or ‘Red Ken’, the Greater London Council had proved particularly noxious to the prime minister, with its unabashed socialism, its sometimes uncritical support for fringe causes, and its wholehearted welcome of anything associated with ethnic minorities. That it was led by a true Londoner, who recognized that afternoon tea and scones had given way in the metropolis to curry and rice, did not sweeten matters. Happily for Thatcher, the GLC had its gun squarely trained on its own foot. When it transpired that the council had spent more on the advertising campaign to preserve its own existence than the money collected for the Ethiopian famine, its socialist credentials became harder to maintain.
No longer was there talk of the unions bringing down the government, but Nigel Lawson was not alone in feeling that the prime minister’s renewed self-confidence in the wake of the 1987 landslide was not entirely wholesome. And this self-confidence was now deployed in an arena where the foe had grown considerably more nimble. Thatcher’s last great achievement in Europe had been the Single European Act. Although it had included legislation that freed the Community from any internal trade restrictions, the act also paved the way for monetary union. It was perhaps an uneasy recognition of this that had led to the Bruges speech. But now an unsettling shift had occurred. Where before Thatcher had been at the heart of matters, pushing for ever fewer trade restrictions, she now seemed alone. It is possible that her very strength now seemed an anachronism; the new Europe, under Jacques Delors, had a warm embrace for biddable ciphers, not for those who knew their own minds, however flawed.
Unsuspected by Thatcher or Reagan, the eastern bloc had been steadily crumbling for years. The nations of central and Eastern Europe relied on Russia for their oil and gas, and on Western loans for much else. Russia itself needed Eastern Europe for raw materials. It could not continue. Eastern Europe faced bankruptcy and Hungary was the first to go, slipping away from the bloc in 1988 with so little fanfare that its pioneering defection is hardly remembered. In 1989, the harassed leader of East Germany announced that citizens from East Berlin would be allowed to cross the Berlin Wall. The Berlin Wall was first climbed before being breached and then torn down. Czechoslovakia and Poland fell next. The nations closest to Russia, culturally and politically, took longer, but by that point it scarcely mattered to the West: a great shadow had lifted. Thatcher’s own contribution had been ancillary to the contest between Reagan and Gorbachev, but a midwife was still indispensable. Yet what role now for Britain in the uncertain world that had opened?
The European Community had changed too, but here also Britain’s role seemed diminished. Jacques Delors had imbued the increasingly tired and sclerotic EEC with his own sharply federalist vision, in which monetary union would render national currencies obsolete. More radically yet, such a union would be followed, in time, by its political equivalent. British statesmen since Macmillan had urged their colleagues to press on with European membership in order to influence the Community at its heart, confident that it could ‘steer Europe away from federalism’. To some extent, this promise had been fulfilled. On Britain’s insistence, the EEC had at last begun to consider those countries behind the Iron Curtain as European. And the Single European Act was a largely British project. But as Thatcher noted, there was no hope of a retreat from the federalist course, and with the unification of Germany looming, Britain’s pretensions to the status of paramount European power appeared self-deluding.
But first, the currency question had to be addressed. Both Nigel Lawson, the chancellor, and Geoffrey Howe, now foreign secretary, believed that entry into the Exchange Rate Mechanism could no longer be delayed. Thatcher was unconvinced, but the big beasts were not to be cowed. On 25 July 1989, they warned that they would both resign over the issue. The challenges had begun to mount. When they flew out for the Madrid Summit later that day, an arctic silence prevailed between Thatcher and Howe. At the summit, Thatcher surprised the rebels, agreeing that Britain should enter the ERM. A month later she removed Howe from the Foreign Office, but if she recognized that the anger she felt towards him was now being reciprocated, she did not show it.