When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain (47 page)

The right, being so in the ascendancy, has grown arrogant in its haste to pooh-pooh uncomfortable facts, like the deep inequalities of health between rich and poor, which time, nutrition and medicine have done little to erode. A
Daily Telegraph
reader, applauding the demise of the Health Education Council, wrote: ‘Surely we do not need an expensive report to tell us that the poor, with their likely disadvantages of inferior diet, housing and general discomforts are more likely to die earlier and contract diseases than those who are better off? [Assertions] that this situation is unacceptable in a democracy are difficult to understand.' The poor, as ever, are always with us. At best, commentators do not believe the facts, dismissing them as the twisted work of the derided servants of the ‘nanny state', like social workers: at worst, they don't care. In a society of ‘haves', the ‘have-nots' can rapidly become objects of derision, taunted for their poverty and inadequacies. Writers on the new right are witty and plausible, and they undoubtedly hold the high ground, but their logic often does not stand scrutiny.

I have before me an article in the
Daily Telegraph
by Norman Stone, Professor of Modern History at Oxford University, which argues that the crisis in British science will not be cured by money. It carries a characteristically new rightist headline – ‘
BRAINLESS TALK ABOUT THE BRAIN DRAIN
' – with its ill-concealed sneer at anyone ‘wet' enough to worry about the issue. Professor Stone uses three of his four columns to provide an entertaining account of how James Watt, Thomas Arkwright and Jethro Tull made their contributions to society without the first notion of what pure science was about, how the Cavendish Laboratory scraped by, and how the only general benefit from the American space programme has been the non-stick saucepan. Having put whingeing scientists thoroughly in their place, confirmed the prejudices of his £75,000-a-year City readers, and made it intellectually respectable not to care that British science is being driven into the ground, with one sentence he throws his argument into reverse: ‘We must accept nowadays that science is much more complicated than in the past and requires money.' With one bound, our hero is free. Real life is not so easy.

One doesn't have to swallow all (or even most) tenets of Thatcherism to advocate capitalist enterprise as the most efficient engine to drive society and create the surpluses needed for collective action and for protecting the unfortunate. The records of nationalized industries and the attitude of state and local government bureaucrats demonstrate the inefficient way forward offered by the alternatives. But how do we translate that realism into action? Enterprise is bred into Americans: the kid brown-bagging groceries in a supermarket on a Saturday morning may well be the son of successful, rich parents. How many privileged youths in Britain learn the fundamentals of enterprise from the bottom up? Young Americans working their way through college see nothing wrong in service, be it ever so humble. It gives them a grounding in the creation of wealth and close contact with less privileged or less gifted citizens, which stands them in good stead both in their careers and in everyday life. The director of a British enterprise trust said that when he visited schools he asked pupils if they had ever done anything ‘enterprising', like repairing bicycles for money or selling home-made cakes. It was rare if more than one in twenty put up a hand. In an American school there was only one kid who
didn't
shoot up his arm.

In Britain, we have instilled in us the notion that enterprise is exploitive: one man's profit is made at another man's expense. The idea that it might create another man's opportunity didn't occur to me for many years. When John Bloom, the one-time washing-machine tycoon and pre-Thatcher Thatcherite, was a national serviceman at a remote RAF base, he chartered buses to take his fellow erks for Saturday nights out. What appalled me then was that, instead of splitting the cost amongst his comrades at arms, Mr Bloom made a profit on the deal. But, if he had not had that motive, a large number of bored teenagers might have spent Saturday cooped up in the Naafi drinking tea. And, although there are people who would have arranged the bus for nothing (and even borne the loss if someone had failed to pay up), there are, sadly, not enough such citizens to go round.

During the 1987 election campaign, we were constantly told that Britain was top of this or that league table for productivity, growth in employment and industrial efficiency. With three million unemployed, sixteen million in ‘poverty', with the run-down, filthy inner cities, the lengthening hospital waiting lists, the physically depressing schools, the manufacturing output still below the level of eight years earlier, the rapidly widening balance of trade deficit on manufactured goods, common sense should indicate that the statistics, if not entirely a sham, are widely misleading. An understanding of the fundamentals of commerce and manufacture is growing; a schoolchild is more likely now than twenty years ago to be taught something of the economy of his own country; the concept that work has an objective – usually the satisfaction of a customer – beyond a wage for the worker is gaining ground; more people are breaking free of large, stultifying employers and doing something for themselves. But it will take a yet greater change in outlook and effort before the British society and economy will be regenerated in the manner in which Americans daily make things happen by responding urgently and automatically to necessity and opportunity, if you mention an idea at a dinner party,' said one former British diplomat in Washington, ‘by noon the next day three of your fellow guests will have done something about it.'

In September 1986, the city of Southampton organized a reunion for GI brides who had sailed for a new life in the United States forty years before. Most had been very young, working class, and many had not known their husbands more than a few weeks or months. The women knew that it would be many years before they saw Britain again. ‘You'll be sorry. You'll be back,' the dockers had shouted as they boarded their ships. ‘We left under a cloud,' said one. In 1946 marrying a Yank was selling out to silk stockings and Hershey bars.' I met them at Broadlands, the late Lord Mountbatten's home, where they had been invited to a garden party: I was curious to know how different their lives had been in the States from those of siblings and friends whom they had left behind. The Solent Silver Band played wartime melodies, and in a corner of a marquee Patience Strong, wearing two strings of pearls and a hat that made her look like a straw lady, read from her poems:

Behind the prison bars of Europe,

men are listening in the dark …

The brides sat on red plush chairs swapping reminiscences of Tidworth camp, where they had been waited on by German POWs, processed and deloused. Having found one another again, they were determined to hold on. ‘Just remember, if you ever get to California …'

A woman originally from Wales had been shocked to find her nephews and nieces on the dole: ‘I didn't realize how hard it was for those who are out of work,' she said. Of a group of four sisters present, three had married blue-collar Americans, but nevertheless had enjoyed a life – cars, detached homes, kitchen gadgets, holidays – that it took the sister who stayed behind and married a builder thirty years to catch up on. An exuberant woman from Florida in a wild pink dress burst out: ‘Like Martina Navratilova, I was born to be an American.' Even in her sixties, life was still very much a ball – ‘parties, travel, dances, bridge.' A woman who had married a farmer in the middle of Alabama said she felt that it was only in the last ten to fifteen years that working people in Britain had been allowed a decent education. Both her sons had graduated. ‘Here I am sure they would have been just labourers,' she said. Her nephews and nieces in Britain had left school at fifteen. She herself had studied for a degree: ‘I would never have made it in England.'

They were frank about the disadvantages of American life. Several spoke of the financial disaster that could overwhelm a family if someone suffered a long, terminal illness. One woman, who had broken several bones in an accident, had been pitched out of hospital the day her insurance ran out, although she was only half mended. A retired couple were paying $2,400 a year on health insurance. I joined a jokey group. ‘You ask me what would have happened if I'd stayed. Well, I'm old and grey now, and I would have been old and grey if I'd stayed,' said one in answer to the inescapable question. A woman started to talk about her brother. Her parents in Britain had died when he was fourteen, and he had been sent to join her in Florida. He had been a bright, ambitious boy, an honours student at college, and before long was running his own building business – the American dream personified. One day a gunman walked into his site hut and shot him dead. No one was ever arrested and no motive ever deduced.

While I have been writing this book, one vital section of British society has been voting with its feet. By 1987 the quantity and quality of the ‘brain drain' was threatening the intellectual and economic future of Britain.
The Times
, normally as close to Mrs Thatcher as a coat of paint, suggested that the exodus of scientists was paving the way for Britain's ‘exclusion from the twenty-first century': one thousand scientists a year were crossing the Atlantic. In March 1987 scientific and engineering research was halted for the rest of the year. Professors were forced to ‘mothball' departments because of lack of chemicals; the breakdown of vital pieces of equipment like lasers threatened others. Scientists cancelled or postponed research they had spent months setting up.

The immediate crisis was caused by a pay rise for university workers which the government awarded but refused to fund, throwing the burden on the fully stretched Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC). The amount of money involved was a derisory fifteen million pounds out of a total of £660 million. Scientists at all levels and in most disciplines were being offered jobs in the United States at upwards of three times their British salaries; across the Atlantic newly graduated British PhDs were paid more than their erstwhile professors. The government responded to its critics by claiming that tax cuts would create a climate in which research could thrive – as if a few hundred pounds on a salary would compensate for the collapse of scientific departments. Scientists were particularly bitter because the SERC crisis coincided with the 1987 pre-election budget in which Chancellor Nigel Lawson disposed of nearly five billion pounds of public money in various giveaways.

The government's fundamental misunderstanding of why scientists were leaving made campaigners like Denis Noble, Professor of Cardiovascular Physiology at Oxford University and a founder of the Save British Science Society, almost laugh in their anguish. Scientists were concerned about the destruction of everything they had worked for, and the government offered them peanuts. A physiologist already in the States said of his British experience: ‘I even collected dole for two weeks. I will not go back on the dole, nor to an emasculated research career.' In many subjects like inorganic chemistry and molecular biology a vital proportion of the best and brightest had already left Britain, creating a siphon effect that was rapidly sucking further talent across the Atlantic. A House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology reported: ‘the overall picture conveys an impression of turmoil and frustration'.

It was not just scientists who were feeling they could no longer do their best work in Britain. Philosophers and historians were also departing. Philosopher Bernard Williams, Provost of King's College, Cambridge, himself about to depart, said: ‘Today's problem is not fundamentally about salaries. Cuts in government support, a lack of job opportunities and new requirements encouraging early retirement have led to a very high degree of demoralization.' He also claimed that the United States had become a more stimulating environment for philosophy; key issues are pitched into the public arena by the American legal system and Supreme Court. He told the
Sunday Telegraph
that, when he left, he would have ‘the feeling of leaving behind a place in decline … you don't have to be a rat to leave a sinking ship. The passengers may also have to leave. So many people in England feel it is going downhill. You get tired of people – including oneself – saying it. I don't think it is as nice a place as it used to be.' As a reporter in Washington DC, I had felt something of the intellectual stimulation described by Professor Williams. It was not simply that I was writing about bigger events than I would have been in London, but that important ideas were chased about in public.

Few anti-Americans take the trouble to understand the positive side of American life. They watch ‘Cagney and Lacey' and ‘Miami Vice', see news extracts of Reagan bumbling his way through a press conference, and run into camera-festooned mid-westerners blocking Underground escalators, and persuade themselves that is all there is to America. They turn their faces from the unpalatable truth that the United States is the intellectual, literary, philosophic and academic heart of the English-speaking world. Britain has pockets of excellence, like the theatre and television (up to a point), and has civilized, literate men of affairs like Roy Jenkins and Michael Foot, but such achievements and people should not be mistaken for general superiority. It is not materialism that attracts the likes of Professor Williams and the annual average of a thousand ‘brain-drainers' to leave for America, and, inasmuch as anti-Americans believe that it is, they delude themselves.

I met Professor Denis Noble, of the Save British Science Society, in an eyrie at the top of an office block near London's Victoria station. There was nothing on the door to indicate the presence of the Society, and the young woman who helped me find the rooms said she thought something ‘secret' went on inside, which sounded unlikely. But it turned out that SBSS shared its accommodation with an organization that might be a target for the animal liberationists. Professor Noble sat at a leather-topped table writing an article in pencil: he had become more of a polemicist than a physiologist in recent months. He was a gentle, patient man, with longish, floppy hair and a cardigan, but he had been made angry enough by the paucity of government funding for universities and science to tear himself away from all but general supervision of his life's work into the rhythms of the heart to fight the cause of science in public. We met on the day that SERC had announced the freezing of all research, and colleagues occasionally thrust their heads round the door when news organizations rang for comment.