Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography by Charles Moore

Author:Charles Moore [Moore, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction, Biography, Politics
ISBN: 9780307958945
Goodreads: 17797257
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2013-04-23T07:00:00+00:00

Hunt recommended asking the Chancellor to say what the consequences of higher public spending would be for GDP and for interest rates. His proposed way of ‘steering’ the discussion was to push all individual spending arguments into bilateral meetings with the Chief Secretary and stick to general points in Cabinet. On the same day, Keith Joseph, the voice of her conscience, wrote to Mrs Thatcher to say: ‘The fact of the matter is that public expenditure on pay is soaring without real restraint.’62

At Cabinet on 12 July, Mrs Thatcher blatantly employed the unorthodox style of chairmanship for which she was already known, and announced the conclusion of the meeting at its very beginning: ‘Unless we go for this, we’ll be taking a larger proportion of national revenue and have no scope for further tax reductions.’63 Howe then told the assembled company that British economic performance was deteriorating and that all the economic indicators were pointing in the wrong direction, with everything made worse by the high oil price. ‘Got to go through this vale of tears but is the last chance of restoring sanity,’ Hunt noted Howe as saying.64 There was a fierce debate in which, as the official minutes put it, ‘it was suggested that the Government faced the most serious dilemma in economic policy of any post-war Government.’65 Mrs Thatcher, haunted more by past Tory failure than by anything the previous Labour government had done, begged colleagues to support the Chancellor: ‘Remember the Barber spending spree,’ she cried.66 Cuts, said Jim Prior, with some support, would lead to ‘massive redundancies’, and would be worse politically than putting up taxes. He warned of ‘severe depression’.67 Using the time-honoured official formula for expressing both sides of the case, the minutes added, ‘Against this, it was argued strongly that no one had faulted the Chancellor’s analysis of the economic prospects.’68 At a meeting four days later, Prior had it out with Mrs Thatcher at No. 10. The official Note for the Record said:

Mr Prior said that he was very worried that the Treasury were aiming for excessive public spending cuts. In his view, the Treasury forecasts for the PSBR were too pessimistic. It would be disastrous for industry if public expenditure was cut too much. The Prime Minister … did not accept the premise that public expenditure cuts would damage industry: industry would only recover if resources were freed from the public sector to the private sector.69

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