The Downing Street Years (108 page)

The fact that the level of crime rose in times of recession and of prosperity alike gave the lie to the notion that poverty explained — or even justified — criminal behaviour. Arguably, the opposite might have been true: greater prosperity led to more opportunities to steal. In any case, the rise in violent crime could not in any sense be regarded as an economic phenomenon. Nor could the alarming levels of juvenile delinquency. These had their origins deeper in society.

I became increasingly convinced during the last two or three years of my time in office that, though there were crucially important limits to what politicians could do in this area, we could only get to the roots of crime and much else besides by concentrating on strengthening the traditional family. The statistics told their own story. One in four children were born to unmarried parents. No fewer than one in five children experienced a parental divorce before they were sixteen. Of course, family breakdown and single parenthood did not mean that juvenile delinquency would inevitably follow: grandparents, friends and neighbours can in some circumstances help lone mothers to cope quite well. But all the evidence — statistical and anecdotal — pointed
to the breakdown of families as the starting point for a range of social ills of which getting into trouble with the police was only one. Boys who lack the guidance of a father are more likely to suffer social problems of all kinds. Single parents are more likely to live in relative poverty and poorer housing. Children can be traumatized by divorce far more than their parents realize. Children from unstable family backgrounds are more likely to have learning difficulties. They are at greater risk of abuse in the home from men who are not the real father. They are also more likely to run away to our cities and join the ranks of the young homeless where, in turn, they fall prey to all kinds of evil.

The most important — and most difficult — aspect of what needed to be done was to reduce the positive incentives to irresponsible conduct. Young girls were tempted to become pregnant because that brought them a council flat and an income from the state. My advisers and I were considering whether there was some way of providing less attractive — but correspondingly more secure and supervised — housing for these young people. I had seen some excellent hostels of this sort run by the churches. Similarly, young people who ran away from home to sleep on the streets needed help. But I firmly resisted the argument that poverty was the basic cause — rather than the result — of their plight and felt that it was the voluntary bodies which could provide not just hostel places (which were often in surplus) but guidance and friendship of the sort the state never could.
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We were feeling our way towards a new ethos for welfare policy: one comprising the discouragement of state dependency and the encouragement of self-reliance; greater use of voluntary bodies including religious and charitable organizations like the Salvation Army; and, most controversially, built-in incentives towards decent and responsible behaviour. We might then reduce the problem over the next generation rather than increase it, as the last generation had done. But our attempts to rethink welfare along these lines met a number of objections. Some were strictly practical and we had to respect them. Others, though, were rooted in the attitude that it was not for the state to make moral distinctions in its social policy. Indeed, when I raised such points I was sometimes amused to detect ill-concealed expressions of disapproval on the faces of civil servants under the veneer of official politeness.

In spite of all the difficulties, by the time I left office my advisers and I were assembling a package of measures to strengthen the
traditional family whose disintegration was the common source of so much suffering. We had not the slightest illusion that the effects of what could be done would be more than marginal. Nor, in a sense, would I have wanted them to be. For while the stability of the family is a condition for social order and economic progress the independence of the family is also a powerful check on the authority of the state. There are limits beyond which ‘family policy’ should not seek to go.

That is why I considered it important to encourage voluntary bodies which had the right values and vision, like Mrs Margaret Harrison’s ‘Homestart’, whose six thousand voluntary workers were themselves parents and offered friendship, common sense advice and support in the family home. I preferred if at all possible that direct help should come from someone other than professional social workers. Of course, professionals have a vital role in the most difficult cases — for example, where access to the home has to be gained to prevent tragedy. In recent years, however, some social workers have exaggerated their expertise and magnified their role, in effect substituting themselves for the parents with insufficient cause.

I was also appalled by the way in which men fathered a child and then absconded, leaving the single mother — and the taxpayer — to foot the bill for their irresponsibility and condemning the child to a lower standard of living. I thought it scandalous that only one in three children entitled to receive maintenance actually benefited from regular payments. So — against considerable opposition from Tony Newton, the Social Security Secretary, and from the Lord Chancellor’s department — I insisted that a new Child Support Agency be set up, and that maintenance be based not just on the cost of bringing up a child but on that child’s right to share in its parents’ rising living standards. This was the background to the Child Support Act, 1991.

As for divorce itself, I did not accept that we should follow the Law Commission’s recommendation in November 1990 that this should just become a ‘process’ in which ‘fault’ was not at issue. In some cases — for example where there is violence — I considered that divorce was not just permissible but unavoidable. Yet I also felt strongly that if all the remaining culpability was removed from marital desertion, divorce would be that much more common.

The question of how best — through the tax and social security system — to support families with children was a vexed one to which I and my advisers were giving much thought when I left office. There was great pressure, which I had to fight hard to resist, to provide tax reliefs or subsidies for child care. This would, of course, have swung the emphasis further towards discouraging mothers from staying at
home. I believed that it was possible — as I had — to bring up a family while working, as long as one was willing to make a great effort to organize one’s time properly and with some extra help. But I did not believe that it was fair to those mothers who chose to stay at home and bring up their families on the one income to give tax reliefs to those who went out to work and had two incomes.
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It always seemed odd to me that the feminists — so keenly sensitive to being patronized by men but without any such sensitivity to the patronage of the state — could not grasp that.

More generally, there was the question of how to treat children within the tax and benefit system. At one extreme were those ‘libertarians’ who believed that children no more merited recognition within the tax and benefit systems than a consumer durable. At the other were those who would have liked a fully fledged ‘natalist policy’ to increase the birth rate. I rejected both views. But I accepted the long-standing idea that the tax someone paid on his income should take into account his family responsibilities. This starting point was important in deciding what to do about child benefit. This sum was paid — tax free — to many families whose incomes were such that they did not really need it and was very expensive. But, as I reminded the Treasury on a number of occasions, it had been introduced partly as an equivalent of the (now abolished) child tax allowances, so there was an argument on grounds of fairness that its real value should be sustained. As a compromise we eventually decided in the autumn of 1990 that it should be uprated for the first child but not the others: but this did not settle the larger question of what the future of child support should be. I would have liked to return to a system including child tax allowances, which I believed would have been fairer, clearer and — incidentally — extremely popular. But the fiscal purists in the Treasury were still fighting a strong action against me on this at the time I left Downing Street.

All that family policy can do is to create a framework in which families are encouraged to stay together and provide properly for their children. The wider influences of the media, schools and above all the churches are more powerful than anything government can do. But so much hung on what happened to the structure of the nation’s families that only the most myopic libertarian would regard it as outside the purview of the state: for my part, I felt that over the years
the state had done so much harm that the opportunity to do some remedial work was not to be missed.

Perhaps nowhere were the proper limits of what the state should do more hotly disputed than in the world of the arts. The proponents of subsidies would stress that the state today was only performing the role of generous private patrons of the past, that access to artistic treasures must not depend on personal wealth and — more practically — that every other country subsidized the arts and therefore we must too. Against that — and this was significantly the view of Nick Ridley, the only member of the Government who could really
paint —
it could be argued that no artist had a right to a living from his work and that the market should be left to operate as with any other activity. My own attitude was somewhat different from either of these. I was not convinced that the state should play Maecenas. Artistic talent — let alone artistic genius — is unplanned, unpredictable, eccentrically individual. Regimented, subsidized, owned and determined by the state, it withers. Moreover the ‘state’ in these cases comes to mean the vested interests of the arts lobby. I wanted to see the private sector raising more money and bringing business acumen and efficiency to bear on the administration of cultural institutions. I wanted to encourage private individuals to give by covenant, not the state to take through taxes. But I was profoundly conscious of how a country’s art collections, museums, libraries, operas and orchestras combine with its architecture and monuments to magnify its international standing. It is not just or even mainly a question of revenues from tourism: the public manifestation of a nation’s culture is as much a demonstration of its qualities as the size of its GDP is of its energies. Consequently, it mattered to me that culturally as well as economically Britain should be able to hold its head up in comparison with the United States and Europe. And indeed we did. London is one of the world’s great centres of culture. We have, in the West End, the most vibrant commercial theatre in the world. We have probably the widest variety of museums of any city, ranging from the intimate and yet magnificent Wallace Collection to the glories of the British Museum. The performing arts, whether theatre, music or opera are represented in astonishing diversity.

But there is always more to be done — if it can be afforded. I
certainly did not regret — though from the chorus of complaints about ‘cuts’ you would not have known it — that central government spending on the arts rose sharply in real terms while I was in Downing Street. Greater stability was provided too: from 1988 the Arts Council budget was set for a three-year period. Government funds were, wherever possible, used to attract private sponsorship for developing existing museums and galleries. For example, in March 1990 we announced the establishment of a new Museums and Galleries Improvement Fund — a joint initiative with the Wolfson Foundation. A succession of budgets included provisions to encourage covenanted giving. The most potentially significant of these was the introduction in October 1990 of a new tax relief for one-off gifts to charities from individuals and companies.

My greatest disappointment was my inability to secure for Britain the magnificent Thyssen Collection. In February 1988 my old friend Sir Peter Smithers wrote to me from Switzerland to tell me that his neighbour, Baron ‘Heinie’ Thyssen-Bornemisza, was keen to have his collection of Old and Modern Masters come permanently to Britain. Fifty of the Thyssen Collection pictures were on show at the Royal Academy and I had been to see them like so many others — and they were just fabulous. I asked for a report on the full Thyssen Collection and learned that it contained some supreme masterpieces including a Van Eyck
Annunciation
, Dürer’s
Christ Among the Doctors
and Holbein’s
Henry VIII
, as well as paintings by Carpaccio, Caravaggio, Cézanne, Degas and Van Gogh. I was determined to do all that we could to secure it for Britain. I had been to Portugal in 1984 where I had seen the Gulbenkian Collection which had been offered to Britain in the 1930s but, sadly, was let slip.

The project would have been very costly. We thought that it would require at least £200 million to satisfy the Baron’s requirements: but for this we would receive a collection valued at Sotheby’s at $1.2 billion. The cost would have had to be met by a combination of public and private funding to go towards the building in which the collection would be housed. It would have caused an outcry from some of the British arts lobby, who understandably thought that such sums would be better spent on them and their favoured projects. But it was worth it.

Nick Ridley and I took charge of the negotiations. Cabinet agreed the allocation of money. The international legal problems were all ironed out. Within a matter of six weeks the formal offer was taken personally by Robin Butler (the Cabinet Secretary) to Baron Thyssen in Switzerland. Alas, the real problem — insuperable as it turned out
— was that it was not clear who precisely had the final say about the disposition of the collection. Nor was it clear what the status was of a loan agreement reached with the Spanish Government to the effect that the collection would go there for a period of years. In the end, it did indeed go to Spain on loan. But I had no regrets about having made the attempt to win it for Britain. It was not only a great treasure but a good investment — in every sense.