A preoccupation with local government bookended Margaret Thatcher’s political career, but her time in Number 10 failed to resolve the fundamentals of the Whitehall-town hall dynamic.
I suppose I should thank her for the job (noting how during the 1980s so many said the opposite). I was employed by the Audit Commission. If in Eric Pickles’ eyes this quango was a fat and unnecessary bureaucracy, to her it once was a gleaming instrument of a distinct and deeply felt project: keeping local government down.
Margaret Thatcher’s biographers have pondered the reasons why Tory cabinets from 1979 were so preoccupied by councils. White paper followed white paper; bill upon bill. Ministers were caught in a succession of judicial reviews.
Local government eventually brought her down by – paradoxically – making happen the very poll tax her ministers had predicted wouldn’t work.
Whence her preoccupation with town halls? Was it her father and the Grantham mayoralty? Or did it spring from Finchley and English suburban hatred of the rates? It certainly started early: Thatcher first attracted parliamentary attention when she pushed a private member’s bill allowing the press to attend council meetings – the intention to break open municipal self-regard.
Part of the reason, which is why Michael Heseltine was permitted to push ahead with the Audit Commission, was pursuit of socialism. If defeated at Westminster in 1979 and 1983, the monster was alive and well in town and County Hall.
But as well as the headbangers, it was spearheaded by some able leaders. A calculating user of PR techniques, she found herself outwitted by the flair for publicity of the salamander-fancier in charge of the blank office block on the opposite side of the Thames from Westminster: cue another inquiry and legislation to control council spending on publicity.
Conventional wisdom now looks back on the 1980s as a centralising decade, blaming Thatcher for tearing function and financial responsibility away from the town and county halls. Rate capping and nationalisation of business rates were dramatic developments. Council spending was subject to successive attempts at constraint and regulation. The decade saw the beginnings of the removal of schools from council control; the polytechnics left local government within a couple of years of her departure.
And yet central-local relations had been in flux for years before, and the contours have gone on changing since. The Thatcher years resolved no fundamentals. She put anti-statism in the political mainstream. (Yet, as her obituarists point out, she expanded spending to cope with the disaster of an economic policy it’s not clear she ever fully understood.) And part of that anti-government ramp was deliberately to hold up local public service as perverse, even contemptible.
But Thatcher, for all her obsessive reading of official papers, was never mistress of administrative detail. Perhaps her antipathy towards government thwarted her understanding it. One result was clever operators got on with it – Michael Heseltine creating urban development corporations in his response to the city disturbances, Peter Kemp in Whitehall creating executive agencies, Maurice Stonefrost producing surpluses at the Greater London Council. They even opened opportunities for imaginative local leadership: think of Margaret Hodge in Islington and David Blunkett in Sheffield – and certain shire Tories.
In memoriam, we may recall that the 1980s were a golden decade for chief finance officers, relied on by councillors, held in awe by Whitehall officials who couldn’t quite understand the sleights of hand, the juggling of reserves and clever interplay between capital and revenue accounts.
