That children born in such circumstances would probably go wrong was simply a commonplace of the wisdom of the ages. From the sixties, an often asserted line was that, where there were problems, these had to do with money. It was of course true that single-parent families had less money, and three quarters of unmarried single mothers were indeed on ‘income support’. For many years, the evidence was fought over, but in the United States, where the whole problem had come up earlier, a long-term study had been made, and by 1993 the evidence was published. It showed that ‘the dissolution of intact two-parent families is harmful to large numbers of children… [It] dramatically weakens and undermines society.’ It was not difficult to make a list of the stupidity, cowardice and lying that had been involved in denying this common-sense generalization. Even the educational pundit A. H. Halsey, who came very close to apologizing for his own part in the creation of the world of the 1990s, could not help blaming ‘Mrs Thatcher’ because the housing estates where the mayhem occurred were broken down and poor, although he admitted that family breakdown had caused his own educational reforms to fail. But for governments to deal with these things is obviously difficult; the best writing on this subject is by Margaret Thatcher’s own one-time political secretary Ferdinand Mount, whose Mind the Gap (2004) argues for a restoration of civil institutions, even the Church. In the United States, so much larger and with a far higher degree of decentralization, various answers could be variously tested, and it was there, rather than in England, that some progress was made as regards such problems, vigorously identified by Charles Murray or Myron Magnet (The Dream and the Nightmare, 1993).
In matters to do with society, the Welfare State, the National Health Service and education, uncreativity was on display. Perhaps this reflected an obsession with ‘information technology’. Computers, programmed for this or that, were supposed to replace manned offices, and there were fantasies as to how ‘paper’ would just disappear. Boxes would be ticked, managers would know how, automatically, to respond, and if need be management consultants could be brought on to advise. This was to confuse efficiency with efficacy, and it was extraordinary that the Thatcher governments went in for a degree of centralization that enfeebled ‘the little platoons’ which had so distinguished British history. Ferdinand Mount noted in effect how the growing central state had turned everyone into a functionary or a prole: exactly what had been said in the later 1970s. Government was not cut back at all. True 600,000 workers — a seventh — had been moved from public to private sectors, but the effort meant that more, not fewer, public servants were required, and Mrs Thatcher even appointed a minister to the National Health management board — precisely what was not supposed to happen. The government did indeed try to manage the civil service better but the Welfare State had become a great monster, the DHSS having fifty volumes of rules created since 1980. Samuel Finer said that Margaret Thatcher was ‘historic rather than historical’: greater for what she represented than for what she did. Businessmen were asked to look at the whole problem. In 1984 there had been some improvements, some money saved by elimination of the more extravagant absurdities, such as the experiment-rats that cost £30 each. But most of this was tinkering.
English education had suffered from the abolition of the grammar schools in the later 1960s. The head of Margaret Thatcher’s political centre, a Welsh non-conformist, had ‘an almost fanatical horror of the way education was now done in schools’ but where could he restart? Reform meant a parade of acronyms which, not long before the 1987 election, Die Zeit could mock unmercifully (a German correspondent in London, with an English wife and modish Hamburg views, lamented that his fourteen-year-old son, taken from his German school, was being diseducated). A National Curriculum was hammered out and hijacked by the educationalist bureaucracy; a universal examination called GCSE was installed, absurdly easy for some, impossibly difficult for others. Melanie Phillips listed the resulting woes, in a book, All Must Have Prizes (1996), which took all the tricks and had no effect. George Walden, who could handle the international comparisons, also wrote in the same sense, also to no effect. The minister in charge, Kenneth Baker, was himself a businessman, a believer in head office intervention, who did not see that without the threat of dismissal for the delinquent branch officials and of bankruptcy for the main firm itself such ways of doing things did not work. As Walden sadly pointed out, the fact was that the politicians (and many of the bureaucrats) could side-step the entire mess because they, like a rough tenth of British parents, used private (‘public’) schools which were often world-beaters. Margaret Thatcher herself had briefly been Minister of Education when the calamitous comprehensive reform had been going ahead, and had herself abolished many of the grammar schools. She later regretted this. But it was strange that the government waved aside its own supporters. There were similar problems in the USA, but there (as, to some degree, in Germany) there was such decentralization that good ideas could be tried out locally, in defiance of an educational establishment that a forthright Reaganite, William Bennett, dismissed as ‘the Blob’, with its weasellings and jargon (though even he proved ineffective at controlling it).
The preposterous over-centralization was on display over universities. A sage at the London School of Economics was Elie Kedourie. He wrote a pamphlet called Diamonds into Glass which summed up the problem: that the spending of money on the second rate would destroy the first rate. At least the American system was mixed, public and private of various sorts, the tax system encouraging towards the private side. If a Cornell collapsed in chest-beating self-righteousness, a San Diego would manage its affairs differently. The world’s young wanted to go to American universities, and European ones, easily within living memory a target for bright Americans, no longer attracted them. As Kedourie showed, in the thirties and forties British universities had been very good; the ‘boffins’ of the Second World War had worked wonders, with radar, jet engines, penicillin, nuclear physics and much else to their credit. Such facts were then misinterpreted, and the problem, as ever, went back to the later 1950s. Back then, national decline had had to be addressed. The spending of money on universities looked like an obvious start, the more so as universities always complained about money. A great man, Lionel Robbins, was commissioned to write a report, which doubled universities, created thirty-two polytechnics, and asserted that there must be ‘parity of esteem’. Architects made (ugly) whoopee, concrete went up and, as Noel Annan said, ‘all students could be given a Rolls-Royce higher education’, modelled on Oxford. In fact British education was set to be the beggar’s Oxford. It was a variant — on a small and therefore potentially rescuable — scale of the Continent’s experience, which had led to 1968. The fact was that Robbins’s report had set up ‘financially unviable arrangements’ after 1958 that ‘no country could afford’. The Thatcher government continued this, without embracing an alternative and creative course. In due course it made the problem even worse, by upgrading polytechnics, and thus doubling the number of universities.
Here again at work was the vociferous irrelevance — or downright humbug — of the critics. They went on as if the universities were wonderful, and as if there were a straight line between higher education and national prosperity, an argument easily defeated by the instance of Romania, which produced more graduates in the natural sciences than anywhere else, and where the lights frequently went out. Such thinking, in England, had caused provision for women students to take places in the natural sciences which, at considerable cost, they then failed to take up. Oxford ‘dons’ were especially pleased with themselves, whereas the conversation at their high tables would generally have made the exchanges in the bus stop in the rain outside seem exhilarating.