Pocket Britannia
In no respect did Mrs Thatcher conduct herself more like a conventional Leader of the Opposition than in her ritual condemnation of Labour’s responsibility for unemployment. From the moment she became leader, the ever-rising rate of unemployment offered the easiest stick with which to beat first Wilson and then Callaghan at Prime Minister’s Questions. From 600,000 in February 1974 the numbers had more than doubled to 1.5 million by 1978. Perhaps no Leader of the Opposition could be expected to resist a sitting target; but there was the most blatant opportunism in the way Mrs Thatcher repeatedly tried to tag Labour ‘the natural party of unemployment’14 and Callaghan ‘the Prime Minister of unemployment’.15 ‘Our policies did not produce unemployment’, she had the nerve to tell the House of Commons in January 1978, ‘whereas his policies have.’16 She contrasted Callaghan’s denial of blame with Heath’s acceptance of responsibility when unemployment touched a million in 1972 – the intolerable figure which more than anything else impelled him to his notorious U-turn.17 When Callaghan and Healey retorted that her monetarist prescription would increase unemployment – as Joseph on occasion candidly admitted – she vehemently denied it. ‘No,’ she insisted on television in October 1976.‘This is nonsense and we must recognise it as nonsense… A very, very small increase would be incurred, nothing like what this government has and is planning to have on present policies.’18 ‘We would have been drummed out of office if we had had this level of unemployment,’ she asserted in a party broadcast the following year.19
As the General Election approached the Tory campaign focused more sharply on jobs than on any other issue, starting with Saatchi & Saatchi’s famous poster in the summer of 1978 featuring a winding dole queue with the caption ‘Labour Isn’t Working’. If not quite a promise, the poster unmistakably suggested that Tory policies would quickly bring the figure down. After two or three years of Conservative Government, however, when the numbers out of work had doubled again to a hitherto unimaginable figure of more than three million, Mrs Thatcher’s glib exploitation of the problem in opposition had begun to look more than a little cynical. The best excuse that can be offered is that she, Joseph and Howe genuinely did not anticipate that their monetarist experiment would coincide with the onset of a world recession. Arguably the pain of an economic shake-out had to be gone through: eventually – after seven years – the figure did begin to fall. But given that the starting point of Joseph’s analysis had been that cutting the dole queues should cease to be the central priority of economic management, a scrupulous Leader of the Opposition would not have made quite so much political capital of unemployment.
Ever since the furore stirred up by Enoch Powell’s ‘River Tiber’ speech in 1968 immigration had been a taboo subject, carefully avoided by the respectable politicians of all parties. Mrs Thatcher had hitherto observed this polite convention; but as an ardent nationalist with a scarcely less mystical view of British identity than Powell himself she shared his concern about the impact of the growing immigrant population. In private she used to sound off about the ‘two Granthams’ worth’ of coloured immigrants she believed were still arriving in Britain each year.20 She believed that continued immigration was something ordinary voters worried about, and that politicians therefore had the right, even a duty, to articulate their worry. But she also had a baser motivation. With the economy picking up in the latter part of 1977, the Tories’ private polls indicated that their most profitable issues were rising crime and other social problems. So it was not a gaffe, but quite deliberate, that when Mrs Thatcher was interviewed on Granada’s World in Action two days after a racial incident in Wolverhampton she chose to speak sympathetically of people’s fear of being ‘swamped by people of a different culture’. Some of her staff tried to dissuade her; but she had determined what she was going to say – without consulting her shadow Home Secretary, Willie Whitelaw – and refused to moderate the emotive word ‘swamped’. ‘We are not in politics to ignore people’s worries,’ she declared, ‘we are in politics to deal with them… If you want good race relations, you have got to allay people’s fears on numbers’, by holding out ‘the prospect of a clear end to immigration’.21
Her words sparked an immediate outcry. In the Commons Labour MPs accused her of stirring up racial prejudice. Callaghan hoped she was not trying to appeal to ‘certain elements in the electorate’, and asked her to explain how she proposed to end immigration, given that all but 750 of the 28,000 admitted in 1977 – actually about one Grantham’s worth – were dependants of those already here.22 Six months later he charged that by speaking as she did she had ‘knowingly aroused the fears of thousands of coloured people living in this country and it will take them a long time to recover their composure’.23 But she hit her intended target. Like Powell in 1968, she received a huge postbag, some 10,000 letters thanking her for speaking out. The Tories gained an immediate boost in the polls, taking them from neck and neck with Labour at 43 – 43 into a clear lead of 48 – 39; and four weeks later they won a by-election at Ilford North, where polls showed that immigration was the key issue in swinging votes.
Yet Tory policy did not change. Whitelaw was furious, and briefly considered resignation. But short of assisted repatriation there was no way the policy could change. The party was already committed to a register of dependants; Mrs Thatcher could hardly reverse Whitelaw’s promise not to break up families. Powell was disappointed that she never referred to the subject again, claiming that ‘a chloroformed gag was immediately clapped over the leader’s mouth’.24 But as he reflected in a later interview: ‘If you’re trying to convey what you feel to the electorate, perhaps you only have to do it once.’25 In one respect Powell was wrong. She did return to the subject, quite unapologetically, in an Observer interview just before the election, when she denied that she had modified her original statement and defiantly repeated it.26
But in another sense Powell was right. Her words did not have to change Tory policy in order to achieve their purpose of signalling her real views to supporters in the country who wanted to believe that she was on their side. It was a trick she often used, even as Prime Minister, to suggest that she was not responsible for the lamentable timidity of her colleagues. She did the same thing over capital punishment, losing no opportunity in the run-up to the election to remind radio and television audiences of her long-standing support for hanging murderers. Most of the time she was obliged to keep her true feelings to herself. Her immigration broadcast was one of those vivid moments that helped bring MrsThatcher’s carefully blurred appeal into sharp focus, revealing, both to those who shared her views and those who loathed her, exactly what her fundamental instincts were.