‘Milk snatcher’
She blamed her officials for failing to foresee the hornets’ nest she would stir up by cutting free school milk. To the Department it seemed an obviously sensible and uncontentious economy. The Government was currently spending more on providing free milk than on books for schools; much of the milk was never drunk – partly because the crates of little bottles were not refrigerated, partly because children’s taste had simply moved on since Attlee’s day. Labour had already stopped the supply to secondary schools, with no public outcry and no ill effect on children. By ending the provision to children aged seven to eleven, Mrs Thatcher was merely continuing a process which Labour had begun: as she pointed out, milk would still be provided free to those children who were prescribed it on medical grounds, and schools could still sell milk.14 Insofar as she was withdrawing a previously universal benefit in accordance with the Tory belief that those who could afford to pay should do so, it could be presented as an ideological measure; but in truth it was a minor administrative rationalisation, ending a wasteful anachronism.
She was unprepared for the furore it aroused. It was the personal nature of the attacks which shook her. The Sun asked ‘Is Mrs Thatcher human?’15 and dubbed her ‘The Most Unpopular Woman in Britain’.16 For the first time in her political career her sex was being used against her. The fact of a woman, a mother, taking milk from children was portrayed as far more shocking – unnatural even – than a man doing the same thing; and the cruel nickname ‘Thatcher – Milk Snatcher’ (coined by a speaker at the 1971 Labour Party Conference) struck a deep and lasting chord in the public mind. For better or worse it made her name: image recognition was never a problem for her again.
At the beginning of 1972 there was speculation that Heath might sack his Education Secretary. In fact, he stood by her in her darkest hour. At the end of the month he invited her, with Pile and other of her officials, to Chequers to discuss her future plans. This was a clear signal that she was not about to be removed. She ‘emerged radiant’, the Daily Mail reported. ‘The comeback has begun.’17
From this low point her fortunes sharply improved: the second half of her time at the DES was, at least in terms of public perception, dramatically more successful than the first. This was partly due to the fact that from late 1971 she had a new press officer with whom she got on exceptionally well. Terry Perks had a lot to do with Mrs Thatcher’s more professional presentation of herself from 1972 onwards. The first sign that she had turned the corner actually came before the end of January when she won an unexpectedly good reception from an NUT dinner. She was able to reap the credit for having finally given the go-ahead to raising the school-leaving age. She made ‘a splendid speech’, The Times reported, ‘full of warmth, wit and friendly reproach to her critics. Seasoned Thatcher-watchers reckoned it her best public appearance yet.’18
Mrs Thatcher sealed her rehabilitation in the eyes of the educational establishment with the publication, towards the end of 1972, of her White Paper, A Framework for Expansion. This represented the culmination of a whole raft of policies the DES had been working on for twenty years. In truth she had remarkably little to do with its conception: she was merely the midwife. It projected a 50 per cent rise in education spending (in real terms) over the next ten years, pushing education’s share from 13 to 14 per cent of total government expenditure (overtaking defence for the first time). Within this overall growth there was to be a vast expansion of nursery education, designed to provide free part-time nursery places for 50 per cent of three-year-olds and 90 per cent of four-year-olds by 1981 (concentrated at first in areas of greatest need); a 40 per cent increase in the number of teachers – from 360,000 in 1971 to a projected 510,000 in 1981, which would cut the average teacher – pupil ratio from one to 22.6 to one to 18.5; and the continued expansion of higher education, evenly divided between the universities and polytechnics, to a target of 750,000 students by 1981 (an increase from 15 to 22 per cent of eighteen-year-olds).19
This was a hugely ambitious plan, and a triumph for the DES. Pile was afraid that Mrs Thatcher would not swallow it: in fact she took it all on board without demur. At a time when Government spending was expanding on all fronts she was determined to get her share of it. Having had to fight the Treasury hard over her first two years to get the money she wanted for school building and improving teachers’ pay, she was taken aback by the ease with which the Cabinet accepted her proposed White Paper. She had expected another battle. Very soon she came to repudiate her own enthusiasm for it. Looking back, she wrote in her memoirs, it was ‘all too typical of those over-ambitious, high-spending years… In retrospect the White Paper marks the high point of the attempts by Government to overcome the problems inherent in Britain’s education system by throwing money at them.’20 At the time, however, she basked in the almost universal praise her plans attracted. Every minister likes to put his or her name to something big; and she was happy to be seen as less of a reactionary than had been thought.
Alas, her optimism was blown away within a year by the quadrupling of oil prices following the Yom Kippur war and the consequent recession which forced cutbacks in Government spending for the next decade. Mrs Thatcher’s bold plans were under threat before she had even left office. They were not pursued by her Labour successors after February 1974; and by the time she returned to Downing Street as Prime Minister in 1979 her interest in using the state to extend educational opportunity had passed. Not until 1995 did the aspiration to offer nursery places to all pre-school children creep back on to the political agenda. A generous vision which might have been the most far-reaching legacy from Mrs Thatcher’s time as Education Secretary was sadly destined to go down as one of the great might-have-beens of recent history.
In the end, however, even she could not protect her department from the heavy cuts Barber was forced to impose at the end of 1973. Excluding Scotland, science and the arts, the DES share of the cuts amounted to £157 million out of a total departmental budget of £3.5 billion. This she described as ‘serious but not disastrous’ : she gave the impression that the cuts would only slow the projected building programme and procurement by LEAs, insisting that the department’s priorities – including the nursery programme – had been substantially preserved.21 But this was her last speech as Education Secretary. Just over a week later the miners – whose overtime ban had already reduced the country to a three-day week – voted for a full-scale strike. Confronted with this challenge, Heath finally gave in to the hawks in his Cabinet and called the General Election which removed him from office.