Neither the brickbats nor bouquets being thrown at the memory of Margaret Thatcher accurately reflect her record
The real Margaret Thatcher has got lost in the outpouring of reverential praise and vituperative attacks since her death on April 8. These have obscured both the style and substance of her record.
Many of the themes of the 1979–1990 era – tensions in Whitehall, attempts to make the civil service both smaller and more efficient, brushing aside local government – have obvious echoes now.
Thatcher is often accused of being both hostile to the civil service and of politicising it. Both charges are gross over-simplifications. She was certainly unsympathetic to civil servants as a group and to the public sector in general.
However, she had excellent personal relationships with mandarins at Number 10, who admired her strengths, not least her relentless and demanding working style. In many ways, she was a traditionalist in her view of the civil service. The Cabinet and its committees met regularly, even if her style was to lead from the front, rather than to sum up the collective view.
Rather, and in contrast to some Conservative ministers now, she did not regard vigorous discussion by civil servants as obstruction, provided the advice was well argued. Some officials became permanent secretaries who might not have done before – not for partisan reasons but because she saw them as ‘can-do’. However, after her third victory, some advice was no longer welcome, but that is true of all long-lasting governments.
The Thatcher era also saw the dismantling of much of the postwar Whitehall apparatus. Close links with the trade unions, through Whitley councils settling pay, were ended. This was symbolised by the abolition of the Civil Service Department in 1981. Yet the assault on civil service pay, perks and numbers looks modest by current standards. The Thatcher government cut the civil service by a little over 10% in its first four years. This is less than the coalition achieved in its first 18 months, let alone the cuts to come before 2015.
Nevertheless, the Rayner efficiency reviews in the early 1980s produced substantial savings and new approaches to financial management, foreshadowing what became known as the New Public Management and other initiatives (roughly one per Parliament).
While Thatcher was directly involved in pushing the Rayner scrutinies, at least in their early years, David Cameron has shown little interest in civil service reform, preferring to leave this to Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude.
The Ibbs report of 1987 led to the creation of ‘Next Steps’ executive agencies to administer large chunks of government activity at arm’s length. Relationships between sponsoring departments and agencies have remained fraught as it has proved hard to achieve a satisfactory balance between ministerial accountability to Parliament and managerial autonomy on contentious areas, as seen in the recent re-absorption of the Borders Agency within the Home Office.
The Thatcher government was famously reluctant to tolerate different policies, and higher levels of rates and taxes, in local authorities – especially when they were run by the hard-Left. The battles with the old Greater London Council and metropolitan councils, and then over the poll tax, shaped later Whitehall attitudes to local government. For all the subsequent preaching of localism, flexibility is still on Whitehall’s terms. Eric Pickles, himself a product of the battles with the hard-Left of the 1980s, and Michael Gove have gone further than ministers of the Thatcher years in side-stepping local authorities.
Thatcher’s championing of freedom and of the private sector required a strong state to succeed. That paradox has not been lost on the current Tory generation, which is trying to use the powers of the centre to roll back the state. A big difference, however, is that, while she was in many ways a gradualist, developing her programme over more than a decade, the current Conservatives are trying to achieve equally far-reaching changes in a single Parliament.
Peter Riddell is director of the Institute for Government and has written two books on the Thatcher era, legacy and policies
