Look Where We're Going E-Book

David Howell

• Herausgeber: Unicorn
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 470

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Look Where We're Going is a book of revelation and revolution. Written by someone who has been at the centre of British government and international affairs for half a century, it looks afresh at the ideas, hopes, lessons and largely unintended consequences of successive generations of political leaders; it shows us how to Look Where We're Going. Based on deep personal experience – the author is one of the few left who served in Margaret Thatcher's first Cabinet of just over forty years ago – Howell gives us a new picture of the dramas deep inside government and how yesterday's clashes of ideology and personality have led to today's unanticipated turmoil. Old assumptions are torn apart and accepted versions of what occurred are unravelled. Howell shows how technology has made much of our conventional political vocabulary obsolete, how we now need quite different types of leadership serving new priorities and how, while we wrestle with the issues just before our eyes, much bigger forces are at work which are re-shaping our lives and our future.

Leseprobe

Dedication

To Davina for living with an author To Shiva, the god of paradoxes, in which all opposites are reconciled And, to the next lot and the lot after that

Contents

Title PageDedicationAcknowledgementsForewordIntroduction PART ONE:OriginsChapter One:The Crossroads CabinetChapter Two:The Wind ChangesChapter Three:The Seventy-NinersChapter Four:The Tigress EmergesChapter Five:Manoeuvres at CourtChapter Six:Origins and FearsChapter Seven:Unspinning the Past PART TWO:Roots and False DawnsChapter Eight:Roots of the RevolutionChapter Nine:Heath and HopesChapter Ten:Wrong from the StartChapter Eleven:A Diversion: What If?Chapter Twelve:A Tale of Two RolesChapter Thirteen:Ireland, Europe and the Eternal Question PART THREE:The InheritanceChapter Fourteen:Technology Unravels the Global OrderChapter Fifteen:Asian ResetChapter Sixteen:The Mother of All NetworksChapter Seventeen:Flaws in the TapestryChapter Eighteen:What Is to Be Done?Chapter Nineteen:The New LabyrinthChapter Twenty:The Case for Looking BackChapter Twenty-one:How to Safeguard Democracy NowChapter Twenty-two:Conclusions, Answers, Lessons, HopesChapter Twenty-three:Afterthoughts: On the Head of a Dictator, the Power of Us and Catching Up Appendix I:A ‘Chequered Career’Appendix II:The Times: Mr Howell’s Account of the Whitelaw Years in BelfastBibliographyIndexBy the Same AuthorCopyright

Author Acknowledgements

THE bibliography on page 257 of this book is my main thank you list, although by no means all the authors there will thank me for being included, or for the comments I offer on many of their works.

Other thanks must go to countless colleagues who in conversation or by correspondence have shed a new ray of light across the turmoil of our times as we all wonder how we came to the present atmosphere of deep uncertainty and apprehension, and where it may lead us from here.

I owe a special debt of gratitude to my assistant (and daughter), Kate Bain, who has worked through numerous drafts and amendments, and to those at Unicorn who have both encouraged me and coped with an author’s endless changes, additions and inefficiencies – Ian Strathcarron, Ann Donald and Louise Campbell in particular.

My warmest thanks are reserved for my wife Davina for putting up with the hell of an author in the home.

Needless to say, the words, thoughts and views which follow are my own and no one else is to blame.

David Howell. July 2019, London

Foreword

by Norman Fowler, The Right Honourable Lord Fowler, Lord Speaker

DAVID Howell has been at the centre of British politics for over half a century. He was a speech writer with Edward Heath, later one of his ministers and a vigorous defender of his old boss. He wrote speeches for Margaret Thatcher in opposition then was a member of her first Cabinet. Later he was a Foreign Office minister in David Cameron’s government. Throughout his political career he has maintained a close interest in world affairs, stretching way beyond Europe, which is unusual for a British politician. Today he chairs the House of Lords International Affairs Committee, for which he campaigned.

His skilful and invigorating new book draws on that experience and is what he describes as a hybrid. In one part it is the recollections of a senior and respected politician of a rich and varied career; in another part it looks forward and poses some of the major issues that politicians will have to grapple with in the age of social media, the iPhone and the blog.

I first worked with Howell in 1979 (as the title page photograph in the book shows), when we sat around the Cabinet table of Margaret Thatcher. For both of us it was it was the first time there with the risk of being overawed by the seniority of some of the company. There was Quintin Hogg, the irascible Lord Chancellor, who had been a power in the party for as long as I could remember. There was Peter Carrington who gave amusing and world-weary reports each week on the major international developments and near him the bulky figure of Christopher Soames, the son-in-law of Winston Churchill, whose experience included the plum diplomatic job of ambassador in Paris. There was Keith Joseph demonised by Labour as an extreme free-market apostle but, in fact, one of the gentlest members of the Cabinet. Then of course, there was Willie Whitelaw the bluff ex-Guards officer who was quite indispensable for the successful running of the Government.

Added to this there were the openly ambitious like Michael Heseltine and the resident doubters like Jim Prior, Peter Walker and Francis Pym, who had already spent five long years of opposition becoming accustomed – or not – to the new leader. Howell and I were the most junior members of the Thatcher Cabinet which, over the years and through frequent changes of cast, was credited or blamed in presiding over a revolution in British politics. According to the legend it was a period in which monetarist theory, deregulation and a scepticism about social policy held sway. So how accurate was such a picture? Howell argues that it was not quite like that; I agree.

From the beginning it was clear for entirely pragmatic reasons that certain steps needed to be taken. Industrial relations law had to be reformed, particularly after the disaster of the Winter of Discontent. Equally it was clear that public spending had to be sensibly controlled unless we wanted to see increasing taxes on the public and businesses. There was no need to be a disciple of Milton Friedman to recognise these truths – though I suspect there were quite a number of the Cabinet who had never read the great man’s theories on money supply. Then there was privatisation, still characterised in the public mind as the essence of the Thatcher administration – but, emphatically, it was not at all how we started.

If you look at the Conservative manifesto for the 1979 election you will find only two new privatisation pledges, both in my area of transport. The first was to denationalise the vast state-run conglomerate, the National Freight Corporation, which ran everything from road haulage to Pickford’s removal services. Does anyone still argue that we need a state-run removals business? The second was to privatise the British Transport Docks Board, which ran a series of ports around the country like Southampton and Hull. The resulting Associated British Ports is one of the most successful of all privatisations.

In pursuing these policies, I was not being pressed forward by Chris Patten and Angus Maude, the authors of the manifesto. Quite the opposite. The order had come down from the top. We were not to frighten the electoral horses. There were strong fears that such a policy was not of proven popularity with the party, let alone the public.

Howell argues that many of the signature policies of the new government evolved from past experience and past failures. The Winter of Discontent marked the long-delayed end of the belief that only Labour could manage the trade unions. It became clear that Ted Heath, far from being the discredited figure of lore, had laid the foundations for proper reform. The anti-inflation policies became popular with large numbers of the public, although not with union leaders – nor, as Mrs Thatcher once added gratuitously, with farmers. Margaret Thatcher was in the right place at the right time for these reforms, just as Ted Heath had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Heath also faced one obstacle which we were able to do something about in the Thatcher years: the opposition and obstructiveness of some of the senior figures in the Civil Service. Howell, a former Civil Service minister is outspoken on this. It would be nice to say that we eliminated such opposition; nice but not quite true. I remember when I was leading a four-day departmental meeting on the reform of social security, I was contradicted publicly by the Second Permanent Secretary in charge of the policy area, who made it quite clear that he rejected reform. I should have had him moved – no one would dream of sacking such a top official – but instead I simply drove around him. To be fair, such open disloyalty was almost unknown in my dealings with the Civil Service and most worked beyond normal hours to make our policies work. When I abolished the dock labour scheme in 1989, I remember one civil servant telling me that taking off the regulations and allowing the ports’ areas to flourish had made his career worthwhile. I had more trouble – as did David Howell – with the chairmen of nationalised industries who regarded the public companies as ‘theirs’.

* * * * *

So much for the history; what of the future? Here Howell proves himself a totally original thinker. Indeed, had we listened to him in the past we might have avoided some undoubted errors and omissions. He argues strongly for an extension of popular ownership – in particular that everyone working for a company should have a stake in it; this was how the National Freight Corporation started in the private sector, with remarkable success. Annual general meetings had to be held at Wembley or in some convenient theatre to accommodate all the new shareholders who wanted to attend. The chairman needed to field questions from the floor on drivers’ hours and not just the prospects for the year. Sadly, by the time I joined the board ten years later the position had already changed, leading one chairman to refer to what had once been his shareholding staff, as ‘hungry mouths to feed’.

However, it is in international policy that Howell makes his really distinctive contribution. He goes back to the early 1970s when the choice between Europe and the Commonwealth was portrayed as distinct alternatives. ‘Far away’ Commonwealth nations like Australia and Canada were swept to one side as not having the same relevance as the neighbouring countries of Europe. The same argument also told against the countries of Asia. But, as Howell points out, the world today has changed almost out of recognition. The communications revolution has seen to that. It is a far cry from the days before the internet, the mobile phone and relatively easy international travel.

Happily, Howell does not get bogged down in the politics of Brussels. He proposes instead that Britain should look outward to the Commonwealth, very much including the developing economies of African countries like Nigeria, and to Asia, but at the same time developing our links with Europe. They are not alternatives. It may well be that this new way forward will be put to the test in the next decade. Certainly, there will be problems, but this book contains the hope that Britain can move forward from the sterile political arguments on the European Union and open a genuinely new chapter. It is a book that all politicians should read.

INTRODUCTION

Being on the Purpose and Nature of This Book

‘If you really want to face the future without fear, make sure you’re carrying a bit of the past with you.’

—Rabbi Jonathan Sacks1

‘The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.’

—Winston S. Churchill2

‘The web of history is wearing dangerously thin. If the web breaks civilisation breaks. Such a break with the past is the most fearful of the calamities that can fall upon humankind.’

—Herbert Agar in A Time for Greatness3

ABOVE my desk hangs a picture. It is a copy, a very good one, brush stroke by brush stroke, of Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire, voted at one time Britain’s favourite picture. It shows the magnificent old HMS Temeraire, a ninety-two-gun ship-of-the-line, being towed by a steam tug to the breaker’s yard, the age of sail being pulled to its end by the age of steam power, new technology about to open up limitless new worlds, and new politics, as the old order fades.

There are similarities here with the underlying theme and messages of this book. What the chapters ahead seek to illustrate, through a mixture of memoir, anecdote and explanation, is how the grand political and philosophical debates and struggles of the last century have been largely overtaken by new technologies which have changed everything: our lives, our concerns, our politics and parties, our behaviour and our national direction and destiny.

Over the period of roughly half a century, British politics have been transformed. Gone, so it seems, are the time-honoured stability, pragmatism and mannered debates which the world saw as the hallmarks of the Westminster model. Maybe this picture was rose-tinted, but it was widely believed.

In its place we have miracles of connection and glittering opportunities. But we also have angry and polarised discourse, a society divided, a political system distrusted and a kingdom threatened with disunity. The democracy which was taken for granted fifty years ago now seems to have a missing half – as the pages ahead will explore.

How has this happened? What are the lessons to be learnt? Where do the roots of discord lie? How do we escape the myths of the past which continue to distort our views, but retain and build on the best of the past which served us well? And how far do the upheavals of the outside world account for our changed circumstances?

The book divides roughly into two periods although with a good deal of overlap. The first period examines the twenty-five years or so from the late ’60s to the early ’90s. This period marked the slow retreat of collectivism and state ascendancy of the kind which had dominated the Western world for the previous half century, in war and peace, and the gradual acceptance of economic liberalism and market power from the mid-1950s to what was seen to be its apogee, roughly in the early 1990s.

The second period covers the next twenty-five years or so, from the mid-’90s, perhaps the high point of free-market fervour, to the present twenty-first century times of turmoil, with revolutionary technology entering every sphere of existence, public and private. This is a time when the old ideological arguments seem to have slipped out of focus, when the simplicities of the Western liberal case have turned into bewildering paradoxes, and entirely new forces, powers, dangers and debates – and in some cases, new stories, which distort the very democratic process itself – begin to shape the future.

At the hinge of these two very different periods, more or less midway, sits the premiership of Margaret Thatcher, whose very first Cabinet is the first picture in this book.

The British Cabinet of 1979, of which I was a member for four years and of which I have acute memories, is a good staging post in my story because it marks both an end and a beginning. What truly went on within it reflects the clashes and confluence of two eras. It was the end in British politics of the era of collectivism – the consensual doctrine of interventionist governance which had reigned widely, in one form or another, for most of the twentieth century until that date. It was also the beginning, the first dawning – and warning – of a quite different era of splintered views, shattered certainties and disparate and divided powers and forces which have come to colour the world today.

By going back to the two governments of the last century in which I served, I hope to identify the tremendous contrast in economic, social and surrounding political circumstances between that era and the present one, despite the tendency for public debate to cling to old shibboleths, old struggles and the old political lexicon. The Book of Thatcher is now closed, or so it will be argued. There is a need to escape past assumptions and modes of thought and debate, and the hall of mirrors which successive interpretations have bequeathed to us. But the need also remains to pick out those principles of that era which remain valid, enduring and essential to preserve.

Myths cloud the story at every point. For example, the Heath period of government is more or less written off by historians and condemned in some Conservative circles by the decision to join the European Community.4

Meanwhile, the Thatcher era is still seen by some as a free-market nirvana to which they long to return, a more certain world of values and verities that they believe have been lost. For others that period represents a destruction of collective and community values and a surrender to narrow doctrines of self-interest and winner-takes-all capitalism. Some observers and analysts have depicted it as the burial of social democracy which had governed post-war Europe.

Yet, instead of dying away, in the course of my writing, the virulence of these different attitudes has intensified. The hankering for a return to the apparent simplicities of free-market economics has increased while, on the other side, the rejection of the liberalising approach has been elevated into a moral crusade against the Thatcher legacy. In the words of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks ‘morality had been outsourced to the market’.5 Or take a statement by Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, that a form of capitalism has been growing which has ‘lost any contact with moral foundation’.6 Today’s confusions are squarely blamed on the alleged excesses of the past.

A powerful feeling of resentment has grown up – not just in Britain (although especially here) but in advanced societies generally. People have come to believe that their identities and worth are not getting a fair share of recognition or adequate respect – that, most emphatically, the economy does not work for everyone, that capital ownership, and the dignity and security that go with it, is over-concentrated in the hands of those who already own more than they can use. This is the message that the new connectivity spreads with increasing vividness and speed. In doing so it leads almost seamlessly to a suspicion of supranational institutions and rules, and a demand for the reassertion of the place and role of nation states in the international order – a call to put ‘our own people’ first. Echoes of this have rattled through the Brexit debate in the UK and will continue to do so.

It will be argued in the chapters ahead that these feelings are heavily fuelled by parodies of the past, that none of these versions truly portray the political world of forty years ago, or where it has led us to now. Nor do they help us address today’s issues in a balanced way.

Nonetheless, the realisation is growing that something is fundamentally and dangerously wrong with the world’s economic (and therefore social) structure and Britain’s own part of it.

A central contention of the story is that populism is here to stay and grow as massive, all-embracing digital connectivity, identity politics, and migrants on the march guarantee that populist pressures will not go away. The micro-chip inevitably sees to that. When three-quarters of the world’s population has access to the World Wide Web; when twelve-billion smart phones, or more, are in use; when most individuals have their own ‘echo chamber’,7 this is inescapable. The populist ‘box’ contains many different types of grievance and protest. It has its own vocabulary of intolerance, denunciation of élites and rage against foreigners – of the kind which engulfed Europe in the twentieth century. Its shadow darkens even more moderate kinds of nationalism, which may amount to no more than proper love of, and loyalty to, one’s country. We must guard against a process which, in the words of Parag Khanna, is ‘democracy being hijacked by populism’.8

The implications for both domestic tranquillity and international stability are vast. They have major significance both for the global re-positioning of Britain (which is a central part of this story) and for those who wonder how and when the Donald Trump phenomenon will end in the United States. It means that virulent antagonism to technocrats, élites, public authorities, ‘experts’, and that amorphous enemy, ‘the other’, will grow, that narrower breeds of nationalism will flourish and that the European Union will continue to be a target for populists from all quarters and within every member state.

Two even more basic issues that arise from the populist ferment will also be examined:

First, whether the processes and procedures of business and finance today, with the staggering concentrations of wealth they generate, can any longer be called ‘capitalism’. Whether they are described as ‘crony capitalism’, or ‘plutocracy’ or ‘hyper-capitalism’, do these transactional patterns and extraordinary outcomes merit the capitalist epithet at all? Do they match the wealth-spreading, free-market democratic capitalism of the textbooks at any point? Or are we now living with a new cosmos, that certainly still has strong capitalist features but also deep differences – a process whose course and behaviour is not fully understood and to which the old analysis and the political battle-lines, no longer relate?

Secondly, we ask whether, in an age of revolutionary communications technology, it is any longer possible to distil mass opinion in the way which the traditional institutions of democracy require.

In his powerful book The Future of Capitalism,9 Sir Paul Collier sums up the imbroglio of misapprehensions. Today’s anxieties, he writes:

have promptly been answered by the old ideologies, returning us to the stale and abusive confrontation of Left and Right. An ideology offers the seductive combination of easy moral certainties and an all-purpose analysis, providing a confident reply to any problem. The revived ideologies of nineteenth-century Marxism, twentieth-century fascism and seventeenth-century religious fundamentalism have all already lured societies into tragedy. Because the ideologies failed, they lost most of their adherents, and so few ideologue politicians were available to lead this revival. Those that were belonged to tiny residue organisations: people with a taste for the paranoid psychology of the cult, and too blinkered to face the reality of past failure.

As the chapters ahead will show in detail, current thinking is dominated by exaggerated generalisation (that fatal intellectual dèformation) that must be dismantled if we are to see or move ahead clearly and safely.

Thus, we are surrounded with versions of the political past which have been coloured and overstated to the point of falsehood. We have allowed these fables to narrow our views of the challenges before us. Adding to this, new forces are at work which distort the interpretation of events and opinions almost beyond recognition, driven by technological manipulation and opinion-bending, and by algorithms which can even read an individual’s moods and half-expressed concerns with a scale and precision inconceivable a few decades ago.

* * * * *

One of the more significant of past political myths, at least in the British context, is the insistent claim that the arrival of the first Thatcher administration marked a massive swing away from the state and the collective interests of society to narrow individual interests and motivations: from social cohesion to market greed; from ethics to profits – and much more besides. When Margaret Thatcher observed that there was ‘no such thing as society’ – meaning of course that society, far from being a solid lump, was a complex mosaic of interests and lives, and is now becoming even more so – it was pounced upon as evidence that the community spirit was under assault and that social democracy had collapsed.

Was this anything like what occurred? Or is it, as I shall argue with evidence, bunkum? Memories are fading about the Thatcher and Reagan years and the rhetorical high profile they and their supporters gave to free-market doctrines and capitalism as it was then perceived. What happened was quite different and much more limited than the revolutionary rhetoric implied. A line will be traced in the pages ahead between the political world of 1979, with its issues – which in retrospect look so clear cut – and today’s maelstrom of doubts. However, there has been more than enough distortion to give these false pictures of the past a life of their own.

For example, it will be shown that the swing to free-market capitalism was very limited, a far cry from the unbridled free-market fiesta the critics feared and the most zealous free-marketeers hoped for. Moreover, consideration will be given to how much of this swing was simply a natural resurgence of markets.

Ownership may have moved from the state to private enterprise. But throughout the Thatcher period the degree of close regulation, if anything, intensified as new regulatory authorities spread their wings. Ironically, major utilities found themselves under more exposure and control in the private sector than in their state-owned days, when ‘control’ had often been little more than a private dialogue with nervous civil servants and uncomprehending ministers.

Without it being ordained by legislators or blessed by philosophers or doctrines, the world has been compelled to accept the truth that markets cannot work without the state and the state needs markets in order to function – more so than ever in the digital era. The issue is one of balance between the state, the market economy and the communities within society.

The author Raghuram Rajan likens the three domains to three pillars – state, markets and community – which must have equal importance to sustain a functioning society, and to anchor the individual in the disorienting swirl of change.10 No state can survive now by dominating or trying to eliminate markets and private property, or without ceding power to vibrant communities within it, and to free and liberated markets. The mixed and managed economy, in some form or other, is all prevailing. As maintained by Francis Fukuyama in The End of History,11 the Right’s liberalised market systems have triumphed almost everywhere, consigning detailed centralised planning and control to the dustbin.

But here is the paradox: Using the old language, if the Right has won, so has the Left. Élites and established hierarchies of the pre-digital age are now under attack as never before. By enabling and transmitting almost total transparency, the revolution of instant communication has seized power away from governing structures, ruling classes and cabals, and from central planners. Outraged charges of unfairness and lack of social justice now clog the media. In this sense it is the Left that has ‘won’, in diluting and weakening the ruling order and reducing its authority to an inchoate mess. Through social media and the global reach of smart phones and their successors, protest against authority is now empowered with a speed, organizational force and mass never before available; it is governments, rather than les misèrables, who find themselves behind barricades as they struggle to maintain legitimacy. Far from being the end of history, this has been the unfolding prologue to a new phase of disarray in human affairs.

In truth the old Left–Right vocabulary of politics is incapable of explaining or conveying what has occurred in the redistribution and interplay of modern power. Political parties based on the old language have lost coherence. Technology pulls leftward and rightward simultaneously. It is attached to no ‘isms’. It can neither be conserved nor socialised. On one side, power goes to the market, to business and to the new giant oligopolies controlling the master algorithms of the planet; on the other side, it splinters away to the people in their myriad cells, units, groupings, tribes, families and factions – and, indeed, to the empowered individual, who is connected to every corner of the world and to every source of knowledge and information.

The Meek Have Inherited the iPad

When nearly every member of a society has his or her own echo chamber and is able to transmit opinions instantly to millions, we have taken the power of the masses – just about as far as it can go. The meek have inherited the iPad and the oppressed have their eyes on their iPhones.12 Although in ways unforeseen by Karl Marx, it seems that the triumph of the proletariat, the all-conquering march of the masses and the classless society, has arrived.

But has it? Again, the question is: What are we really seeing? In early days the internet was going to be the great instrument of citizens’ empowerment, breaking down the centres of privilege and influence. In latter days it has become the agent and enabler of global networks of unprecedented size, monopoly power and influence, soaring above nation states and opening the way to targeted persuasion of the subtlest, and often most poisonous, kind.

Like the earlier dream of all-conquering markets in Thatcher’s days, the subsequent dream of the internet as the great instrument of citizens’ liberation has evolved into something else, which the conventional political debate has been unable to connect with or even describe. The grammar of the political past has become redundant. The phrase ‘the masses’ sounds antiquated, like the old language of class distinction. But there is now a new kind of mass, far more connected by technology than ever before, more opinion-fired and much more fragmented, resentful and disputatious. The triumph belongs to nobody. Everyone or no-one has won.

Empires without Power

Preoccupation with the controversies of the past would matter less if it were not for the way they blind us to what is happening now. Discussion continues as though the power of cabinets and national leaders to shape events today is just the same as it was forty years ago, and as though the democratic, free-market, capitalist process is exactly what it was in previous decades. However, the reality is quite different. In today’s democracies, our own in Britain very much included, power at every level has seeped away from the central governments and elected authorities of the past. That power and legitimacy, which we in the ’79 Cabinet team assumed so confidently we possessed, is no longer there. That world has gone forever.

On the global scale power has also obviously shifted, but not in the historically ‘normal’ way from West to East, or from one empire to another, as many commentators like to maintain in apocalyptic style. Instead we are witnessing central power and authority drain away in two directions: first, in countless rivulets to open sites outside the administrative order, to non-state actors and agencies, some open and good, some dark and evil; secondly, to the tech Leviathans which now preside over nations, transforming the lives of every citizen in ways of which we are barely conscious.

The mantras and clichés of the twentieth-century Left–Right political debate, largely economic in flavour, but with deep philosophical roots, have few answers to questions raised by current global forces: algorithmic power; transparent inequality; the fragmentation of identities; terrorism and rising gang crime; pockets of moral wilderness in our great cities; global ecological challenges; or the rise of non-liberal China. Technology is centre-stage, where it was already moving when Margaret Thatcher formed her first Cabinet and has left many of the philosophical wranglings of that era far behind. The intellectual giants of the twentieth century have not prepared us in any way for the hyper-capitalism or social disorder and rancour of the digital age, as completely distinct from an earlier era of democratic capitalist behaviour rooted in trust, civility and obligation and in clear principles, going far back into the history of civilisation.

Furthermore, as chapters ahead will explain, nothing has prepared us in the West for the rising power and influence of Asia, and its fundamental challenge to Western hegemony, values and systems. In 1979 the USA was entering its unipolar moment, with enthusiastic British encouragement. A century ahead that would prove Asian rather than American, was inconceivable; a world order shaped by superior Asian influence and principles entered no-one’s calculations for a single second.

In contradiction to past ‘absolute truths’, the practicalities of modern economic life mean that, with or without conditions of political freedom and genuine democratic governance, economic success can be delivered – at least for a time, as China demonstrates. The Chinese model, with its confusing and often obscured mix between illiberal state involvement and capitalist enterprise – on a colossal scale – fits neither the rhetoric nor the realities of the twentieth-century past.

* * * * *

We are stuck with the remnants – the philosophical leftovers of the political collectivists from Marx onwards. But we go on fighting about laissez-faire and Marxian capitalism, long since dead and their coffins sealed, so it was thought, by the digital age of popular empowerment. (In one minor sense only may the old ideological head-to-head still be truly relevant, given the back-to-Marx theme song in Britain of the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn and some of his party.)

Meanwhile, the time-honoured polar argument, still prevalent among some Conservative thinkers, between those who still believe in the power of the state and those who think individuals should be left to run their own lives, has become redundant, reduced to a marginal issue of adjustment. Columnists may still like to dilate on it, but it now belongs in the sidelines.

This new reality is a lesson which has been learnt by both authoritarians and democrats alike, if not by theorists.

The digital age now tells every ruler what even the demagogue dictators of the twentieth century did not understand, or ignored – that markets must be allowed to operate freely to a very large degree and that the attempt to govern and control the total state from the centre will not work even in the short term, let alone for the decades the totalitarian leaders of the twentieth century hoped for, with their visions of new orders and all-knowing state plans.

Perhaps even the last country on earth in the twenty-first century to defy this reality – the ‘hermit nation’ of North Korea – is reaching its moment of truth. Already some market sectors under Kim Jong-Un’s regime have been cautiously allowed to thrive. Now comes disruption, not just by the decentralising pull of information and communications technology, but by Donald Trump’s wheeler-dealer offers to transform a frozen state-run economy into a new Vietnam (itself one of the new species which doesn’t conform with past templates or philosophies of state or free-market economies).

Instead, we see today the mushrooming of a new genus in the evolutionary pattern of governance. Enter illiberal democracies which go through the elaborate charade of elections and, through force majeure, are compelled to permit enterprise and markets to flourish within limits, in the knowledge that there is now no choice. The ‘choice’ between markets and the state is now irrelevant or even unavailable. In these blurred worlds there is law, but not the universal rule of law; law for the people but not for the government; elected leaders but not removable leaders; rights by permission but not by lawful entitlement.

Profound thinkers like Fareed Zakaria13 and David Runciman14 have warned us strongly about these threats to our cosy democracies and Left–Right political squabbles, which carry on while the democratic ground is slipping away beneath our feet and, with it, the norms-based Western patterns of behaviour between nations and peoples. There will be a return to their views and others towards the end of this story. Here, the conclusion is simply that the economy-centred debates which raged through the twentieth century do not equip us for today’s problems, or for understanding how government is to be carried on and social order upheld, nor for adjusting to the fundamental changes in the international order, with its rising Asian preponderance, or for calming today’s churn of economic and social discontent. Nor do these past philosophic battles equip us to address today’s existential threats of uncontrollable new infections or approaching climactic upheaval and environmental destruction. The issues are not addressed, not explained, not linked, not understood. Something very big is missing.

The Theoretical Fog

As these familiar debates and thought patterns become sidelined, we are left with a theoretical fog swirling around us, hindering us from seeing our new conditions clearly.

Take as our a case in point the Thatcher legacy. Was it a stripped-down state with markets triumphant? No, her legacy after thirteen years in office was a still huge UK state sector, with public spending still at 40 per cent at the end of her premiership, having risen in real terms by about 1.3 per cent every year between 1979 and 1990. The legacy was still a massive National Health Service – one of the world’s largest employers – plus pages of laws and statutes pouring out faster at the end of her premiership than at the outset15 – more rights and freedoms in theory but more laws and controls in practice.

Despite many public commitments to deregulation, notably in the financial sector, the regulatory environment grew more extensive than ever, while welfare spending remained at record levels, with government intrusion and involvement (good and supportive but also tiresome and disincentivising) on an unprecedented scale. Whatever else this could be called, it was certainly not the world of the weak state, small government, market greed and lost community spirit the critics keep portraying.

As I shall show, the legend of the Thatcher era of rampaging free markets, of blind faith in untrammelled market forces, is distracting us from real and truly dangerous forces now transforming the patterns of society. These forces are creating evolving capitalist processes different from anything that went before, shifting the global power balance, promoting new kinds and perceptions of inequality and injustice, and leaving the moral compass spinning. We remain stuck in a quagmire of false antitheses – between the state and the individual, between ethics and profits, between the community and self-interest, between the common good and market forces – the pitched philosophical battles of the past which are completely superseded by other more real and relevant issues today.

Plainly the last thing modern democrats want is reversion to the kind of powerful and coercive state fashioned by Stalin or Hitler or envisaged by Hegel. The twentieth century saw that idea off, with all its horrors. But nor can we welcome a state so weak and challenged that democratic government becomes unstable, constantly pushed this way and that by volatile and incoherent public opinion, and unable to inspire loyalty or provide a governing framework of standards and conduct. That is not democracy, and never was.

Instead, the new Asia, which is becoming the determining influence in all our lives, East and West, and about which I shall have much to say in later chapters, is settling for a kind of technocratic yet accountable government which conforms to no Western principles and cannot be explained in the language of Western politics and philosophy.

The old dogmas of ideological battlelines between state legitimacy and individual freedom, which continue to trouble the body politic in the ways described above, are all essentially Western topics, addressed through Western thinking and historical experience.

But surrounding and overlaying them is a global contextual shift of fundamental and all-embracing significance.

Our Western future and the key strategic issues facing us are going to be shaped as much by Asia as by America. The twentieth-century transatlantic relationship is becoming like ‘driving forwards while looking in the rear-view mirror’.16

There is a tendency in London and Washington, and in other capitals, to attribute the transatlantic deterioration to Donald Trump. The nightmare, we are assured, of American self-centredness will pass and we will be back to good old Uncle Sam and Pax Americana, the world which Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher lived in and worked together to uphold.

As will be explained in Chapter Fifteen, no view could be more wrong.

* * * * *

To lift thinking out of the old polarities, many myths about the political past must be put aside and new methods of governance accepted and fostered. Government, as the humble and trusted instrument of the people, must be reborn in a new setting. The escape from the dichotomies of the past must somehow be engineered. This book will attempt to help in doing just that by describing some of what really went on inside the Thatcher administration and by tracing the lessons from those times for today’s world, with its very different challenges and hazards.

Possible Side Effects of Reading on from Here

An early warning for those who read on from here, and especially for those who have an understandable aversion to political memoirs, is that this book is a hybrid. Nowadays, a genre called ‘autofiction’ is said to blur the line between autobiography and fiction; here I am blurring the line between history and memories, between accounts of events and evolving ideas, and some of my personal journey through the ideological thickets in quite extraordinary times.

These are dangerous days for moderates. The middle ground of political debate and discussion has become a perilous no-man’s line, dotted with mines and swept by snipers and machine gun-fire.

By ‘moderates’ I do not mean those poised half way between the old Left and Right positions, traditional centrists caught in the old debate between socialist state planning versus free markets. We have left all that behind as the pages ahead will show. I mean moderate against ideological and dogmatic certainty of any backward-looking variety in relation to the issues of our times.

So, if you are convinced you are right and have clear-cut solutions to hand, put this book down at once. It is not for you.

If, for instance, you either know that Britain is on the certain path to liberation and greatness – the stairway to heaven,17 or, on the other hand, know that leaving the European Union is the greatest disaster for Britain since 1940, then read no further.

If you think, looking back, that everything Margaret Thatcher did as Prime Minister was perfect and that good government began in 1979, or, at the other extreme, that she and her policies inflicted catastrophic damage on Britain, that her premiership was a disaster and of no relevance to today’s issues, then stop here. You are in a world out of which this book steps.

(Or for that matter, if you are looking for a truly detailed and deep account of the Thatcher years in particular, then go straight to Charles Moore’s magisterial, authorised biography18 or to Jonathan Aitken’s Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality.19)

If you believe that democracy is just about majorities and that those minorities who disagree with you are therefore anti-democratic, or that democracy is about obeying something called ‘the will of the people’ and that the power of mass opinion justifies vitriolic and personal attacks on opponents as acceptable, then turn away. What lies ahead will not please you.

If you believe even half of what you read in the daily newspapers, especially the negative, shock-horror stuff, or the phantasmagoria of Left–Right party politics, or that governments are in charge of everything, or completely ‘in control’ (and therefore to blame for everything that goes wrong), or that the ‘answer’ is a strong leader possessed of clear-cut convictions to see us through, then here you will be disappointed.

However, if you hope that the current divisions in our society can be bridged (and may not be nearly as deep as depicted), that the forces at work pulling us together are mostly stronger than the forces pulling us apart, that the paradoxes and disruptions of globalisation are survivable, that the bewildering momentum of technology and the massive growth of communications are manageable without dragging us into anarchy, that the bitter polarisation of debate should and can be challenged and some civility restored to it, that new battles can and must be fought to uphold new kinds of democracy, then there just might be something here for you.

If you care for serious argument, put forward with some sense of accountability (unlike the venomous one-liners that flow through Twitter), if you believe that a careful reappraisal of the last fifty years of political thinking and ideas and their consequences can help to better explain where we have got to and what might come next, then I hope you enjoy reading on.

Read selectively. Chapters are essays. Not every one of them connects, but then nor does every part of life. If you think, as Margaret Thatcher thought, that looking back is pointless, then start where the new world started, at Chapter Fourteen.

But if you believe, as I do, that an understanding of roots is the beginning of wisdom, never more so than in this age of turmoil, then start here.

Notes

1https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2018/08/rabbi-jonathan-sacks-hate-begins-jews-never-ends-jews

2 Winston S. Churchill, Thoughts and Adventures (Thornton Butterworth, 1932)

3 Herbert Agar, A Time of Greatness (Little, Brown 1942)

4 A noble exception is Richard Cockett’s book, Thinking the Unthinkable (HarperCollins, 1994).

5 BBC Radio 4, 7 September 2018.

6 Financial Times interview, 8 September 2018.

7 Prophetic words from Madeleine Albright.

8 Parag Khanna, The Future is Asian (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2019)

9 Paul Collier, The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties (Penguin, 2018), p. 6.

10 Raghuram Rajan, The Third Pillar: The Revival of Community in a Polarized World (HarperCollins, 2019)

11 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Free Press, 1992)

12 Latest estimates claim that 6-billion people now have mobiles – seven-eighths of the entire human race.

13 Niall Ferguson and Fareed Zakaria, The End of the Liberal Order? (Oneworld Publications, 2017)

14 David Runciman, How Democracy Ends (Profile Books, 2018). See also p. 164 ff.

15 Pages of UK legislation created per year: 1979, 7,500 pages; 1991 10,000 pages. See House of Commons Briefing Paper CBP 2017, April 2017.

16 Parag Khanna again, The Future is Asian (2019)

17 Dr Andreas Dombret, Deutsche Bundesbank Communication Director, at the London School of Economics, 18 February 2018.

18 Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography (Allen Lane, 2013)

19 Jonathan Aitken, Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (Bloomsbury, 2013)

PART ONE

ORIGINS

Chapter One

The Crossroads Cabinet

VENICE, 19 June 1980, the Group of Seven Summit. Looking around the table at the eight leaders of the Western world, I was seized by the extraordinary emptiness of the occasion. This was truly the Wizard of Oz moment when, behind the giant machinery and awesome panels of power, there turns out to be, as in the story and the movie, just one elderly blinking gentleman, not intending much and not knowing much either. The trappings were there but not the power. Much larger forces were sweeping the world, turning leaders into followers who were neither shaping nor fully understanding what was happening, or the direction in which they were being pulled.

Earlier in the day I had been late for the motor launch. Margaret Thatcher was asking, slightly impatiently, where I was. I had a filthy cold and had had no breakfast. We were on our way along the Grand Canal and out across the lagoon to visit the Isola Torcello where exciting new Byzantine frescoes had just been uncovered. This was considered to be a suitable dawn pastime for the British Prime Minister and her delegation before the day of summit meetings ahead. I was the only other Cabinet minister in her entourage; I was there because the world was having an oil shock and this summit was intended to be all about oil.

Jimmy Carter was still in the White House and had arrived in an oversized US warship parked somehow in the lagoon. He was said to be accompanied by 800 staff, although a nought may have been added, or the crew thrown in. We, on the other hand, had just our launch.

We arrived at the island as the sun rose and, sure enough, a magnificent breakfast feast had been laid out. However, the Prime Minister swept the party on to the nearby church in search of culture. Culture involved a ladder climb up several levels of scaffolding to view the recently uncovered walls. Most of us were tired and hungry by this time, but Mrs Thatcher was up on the high viewing platform in a trice. Then she was down, and it was time to return to the launch the Grand Canal, sweeping again past the croissants, to be in time for the first round-table meeting of G7 leaders later that morning, in the vast monastery library on Isola San Giorgio Maggiore. I was kept tightly in tow and told I would be summoned to attend the library meeting shortly, to brief the leaders on oil and energy.

This I did, at a circular table around which sat the then leaders of the free world: the Prime Minister of Canada, the President of France, the Prime Minister of Italy, The Chancellor of West Germany, the Prime Minister of the UK, the President of the United States and the President of the European Commission.20

Otto Lambsdorff21 and I, the two Energy ministers called in to brief the mighty ones, waited outside, along with the Foreign Minister of Japan, Saburō Ōkita. Although Mr Ōkita was the head of the Japanese delegation and although Japan was already then the second largest economy in the world (and a giant consumer of oil and gas), the wonders of protocol and bureaucracy meant he did not qualify for the inner meeting of the lofty and had to wait with us to be summoned. He did not say much but his silences were friendly. Perhaps he thought we were a ship of fools.

Otto Lambsdorff was also the West German Industry minister, which included energy, so he was there with a rather wider brief than mine. Using a stick (he lost a leg at the end of the war), he moved with amazing speed through conference rooms and onto platforms. He was a gloriously non-interventionist, free-market politician who believed that the immediate ‘great world oil crisis’ was no such thing and would be solved by market forces. I believed him to be right (although on broader issues we were both wrong – see Chapter Four). However, on the specific issue, with oil markets self-adjusting and with prices already falling from the sky-high levels of only a few months earlier, it was clear that the immediate ‘crisis’ was over, and we briefed accordingly.

We were out of line with the thinking of most of the leaders around the table, all of whom had clearly been supplied with crisis-strewn briefs. With the exception of Margaret Thatcher, they were fired up to ‘do something’. Was not that why the world’s leaders had been brought together? Was not every media headline filled with warnings of catastrophe and demands for action?

For the leaders, it was very confusing – the crisis was not running according to script or in line with opinion columns. As a result, the conversation around the table became desultory and disconnected. They wanted to lead somewhere: Surely there was a need for action, for coordination, for strategic plans? Which levers should be pulled and what would happen if they were? There was vague talk of the need to build more nuclear power stations – to get out from under the oil sheikhs. The truth which could not be uttered, the communiqué which could not be issued was, as Otto Lambsdorff and I believed, that the situation was not fully understood and there was nothing much to be done.

I never did get my breakfast but I had learnt that wherever the sources of power now lay, they were not around the table in the San Giorgio library in Venice that morning.

May 1979 – Thirteen Months Earlier

Of the twenty-two full-time members of the Thatcher Cabinet (and two more there ‘by invitation’)22 who first assembled that May morning in 1979, nineteen are now – forty years later – dead, leaving Michael Heseltine, John Nott and this author, plus Michael Jopling and Norman Fowler.

In the picture of the first Thatcher Cabinet – see first image, first plate section – we stare out confidently at the camera. ‘A battle-hardened and seasoned team’ Michael Heseltine called us. But the old battles were already being replaced by new ones while we sat and stood there. Unimaginable upheavals lay ahead, terrible errors were waiting to be made, glaring lessons to be tragically ignored. Of course, there were triumphs too. And there was a decade to go before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the definitive end of the Cold War.

It was another world. Not one individual in the picture carried a mobile phone. Nor had we the slightest inkling about social media, Facebook and Twitter. Charles Moore tells us that at that time there was not a single computer in No.10 Downing Street.23

On the left of the picture1 are Michael Jopling, one of the most formidable of chief whips, and Norman Fowler, first as Minister of Transport and later, for six years, Social Services Secretary, a role which had sunk and would continue to sink many less able occupants. Today he is Lord Speaker, greatly to the good fortune of the House of Lords as it struggles to shake off its museum status and views and adjusts to the digital age.

Michael Heseltine, the old lion, remains in his palatial Northamptonshire lair letting loose the occasional roar, especially against Brexit. I backed him for the leadership in 1990 but when he asked me to be formal seconder of his candidacy, I ducked out. It seemed to me that we were already too far apart on where the European Union was heading and our different viewpoints would not look good in the campaign. Also, less honourably but more prudently, my constituents were livid with me for publicly supporting him at all. I need not have worried. Michael got Peter Tapsell24 to second him – ironically a real proto-Brexiteer and far more outspoken against the EU than I ever was.

The third survivor, John Nott, resigned after the Falklands saga, chaired a venerable city banking house and went down to his Cornwall arcadia to look on the world with beautiful cynicism and write sometimes waspish books.

As this is not a conventional memoir – more an unearthing of the past to explain the present – it starts not at the beginning but somewhere in the middle of the fifty-year period preceding the present hour (which is slightly less than the time I have served in Parliament).

We begin with a group of individuals – the first Thatcher Cabinet in 1979 – at a strange moment in history. What impact did they really have? What follies did they inherit with which they had to struggle, and what follies did they go on to commit? Where did they succeed and why is there so much unfinished business? I shall trace where their ideas came from, which way the forces around them were taking them, what bubbles of illusion misled them and, above all, how a thread runs from their actions and beliefs to the current mood of uncertainty.

Camera Unity

In that first photograph we look united. It had not been so in the months and years before and was not to last long afterwards. Our story will show how, by the chances of politics, random events and the interplay of individuals and ideas, this disparate group came to be assembled at the crossroads of political history.

We had very high hopes. We sensed the world was at a turning point, almost a new Enlightenment and that, despite pressing problems, we could play our part in setting the new direction. What had been labelled the ‘neo-liberal agenda’ now had its moment, a political apotheosis with leaders (shortly) in the White House and 10 Downing Street who believed deeply in the power of markets and in the inadequacies of the state to run economic and industrial matters.

In the minds of at least some of us, there was a feeling that we had reached a watershed. From here on we could encourage and release new trends and forces which would change not just Britain but maybe the world. ‘Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive,’ and so on.