Interviewer
[Question paraphrased: Will home life have changed in a major way by 2000?]
Prime Minister
I think it is not so much major change in that area. What one has to watch is that you do not get a gradual deterioration in the importance of home life. [end p1]
You know some of the most telling things that happen in national life are the things that happen so gradually that you almost do not notice them.
Interviewer
For instance?
Prime Minister
If you look, for example, at the moment the numbers of children being born to single parent families, that is children who have never had a father, are going up considerably and those mothers tend to congregate in certain areas.
Now the fact is that the whole basis of our life is on the family unit and one obviously does not wish to see any weakening of that and so one has to watch this other thing very carefully indeed.
You also I think have to watch the second aspect which is quite different which is that I think we went through a period really when parents were receiving so much advice through the several media as to what they should and should not do with young children and the long-term effect that they ceased in fact to have regard to their own fundamental common sense and fundamental affection and to be guided by that. I think that did quite a lot of harm but I think one has seen … [end p2]
Interviewer
[Question paraphrased: All started with Dr Spock?]
Prime Minister
Yes. A certain restoration of both the importance of family life and the importance of starting off with a set of accepted rules, perhaps rules is not quite the, accepted yardsticks, accepted rules really, by which to live because these are for the protection of young people. Give them a structure for life because once you are living in any community, in a family, obviously you have to have some understandings and some rules by which to live and I have found quite a number of young people, as they were coming out of school and going into training or going into life, saying: “Well, there are not any rules any more by which to live”.
Now that is really falling down on the duties of one generation to transmit the best to another and because you have to have these internal disciplines and courtesies and respect for others if you are to have the best background and the pleasantest way to live for everyone.
You also have to remember that before a child goes to school all the things that that child has absorbed about what you can do and what you cannot, about what you do and when, have been absorbed from the home. And this period from nought to four or five and therefore what the mother does and what the family does in relation to the child matters enormously, whether they can give the child right from the beginning that feeling of affection and security and fairness. [end p3]
You know children are the first to understand fairness. You will notice that in a school, in a class, the children are the first to know whether a teacher is being fair. They expect to be told off if they know that they are doing something which they should not. They will understand immediately if that rule is not applied fairly. So I think what you have to watch is not fundamental big changes but gradual changes over time.
Now I would think that on the young people now, they have come through a period when the rules got too lax and I think that they are feeling that and feeling that it perhaps would have been better, they are always grateful if they had a kindly, affectionate, secure upbringing where certain rules of life were given to them.
Of course you break the rules, of course you do, but at least you know where you are. It is like a building, you could not have a building without certain fundamental cornerstones and certain load-bearing columns, etc. You cannot have life without putting in that fundamental architecture, your cornerstones, your building.
That I think is tremendously important. The other thing which while we are talking about it is I do feel tremendously, very strongly, particularly in a more prosperous society, that you must give your children your time, time to talk to them. I think sometimes the worries you have at school are as great, if not greater, in your proportion to your capacity to tackle them as they are in later life and you have just got to give them time to talk things through and give them advice. [end p4]
It is not enough you know to come home and have a very nicely furnished home, television and nice holidays, if you do not give enough time to your children and doing things with your children. I think it is the things you do as a family which matter more than anything else.
Interviewer
[Question paraphrased: Your children have lived through the permissive period and will be the parents in decades to come. Do you think they will be more responsible parents?]
Prime Minister
I think that many generations learn from the previous generation, they learn both from what they had and from what they did not have. We have always had single parents and we always shall have, but you can always accept in life and look after these exceptional things provided they do not become the normal thing. It is when the exceptional becomes the normal that you find a fundamental change in your life.
Interviewer
[Question paraphrased: Known in our day as unmarried mothers, now single parents?] [end p5]
Prime Minister
They were, but because there were not very many of them, and these things happen, I mean one was able to enfold them and look after and often it was granny who then in fact took over and gave the child the family background. But you see because there were comparatively few, the child got somehow family background, or you all saw to it that whatever happened you managed to make up to the child for some things which the child lacked.
It is always when, if you go back to the earlier times, in what was known as the Bloomsbury set, the Bohemian period, when you have got a life at which certain things are accepted and most people accept them, you can deal much more easily with the differences, with a more informal lifestyle, which will always happen, some people believe in it that way. But you can cope with it and see that the children get the general standards and rules as well.
One is not suggesting that these things do not happen and certainly any Member of Parliament or lawyer will tell you that there are things that happen behind closed doors that none of us will know about and of course the break-up of marriages and many marriages that do break up it is better for the children that they do.
So one is not in any way going against that, what one is saying is that the broad general accepted standards it is important they continue because they are vital to us all because the family is the basis of society and it should in a way be strengthened now [end p6] because I think for the first time in the history of our country most great-grandparents by the end of the century will have something to leave to their children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren because we are going into a period when, now, when people retire, where over half of them already own their own homes.
Now you retire because of the foresight years ago, I remember when I first came into Parliament in 1959, I eventually went to be Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Pensions, even in those days we started up a second pension scheme. In addition to your basic pension you had to have a second one either from your work, if you had not got that you had to have what was called a graduated pension scheme.
Now all this is now bearing fruit as people are retiring with not only a basic pension but with a second pension and, because of a much higher standard of living in the last ten years, they are retiring with some of their savings, some of their shares, people from the shop floor are having the chance to become capitalists either from saving their own earnings or from taking shares in their company.
So you are going into a period when the kind of quality of life for your retired people can steadily become much more enriched but they also you know have the resources, they can think of helping the younger generation much more than ever before. [end p7]
So in a way that kind of strengthens the bond of family life through generations and I am so keen on family life. I have a great belief that it is often easier and grandma or grandpa has more time, it is often easier for children to talk to their grandparents or someone else's grandparents, than to your own parents.
So I am a great believer in the family across the generations because I think there has been a tendency, partly due to television, because television stops a lot as well as enlarging your ideas and enriching them, I think television has stopped a lot of the ordinary talks and discussion between parents and children and I think it is absolutely vital now children are getting more used to having television that you get this talk across generations because that is the way in which you transmit the experience of a previous generation and some feeling of history and the movement of history from grandparents to grandchildren.
I can remember as children grandma lived with us and one of the things in which we really were most interested was when grandma began to talk about life when she was a child and grandma used to talk about some of the things that happened during those periods and we asked about those things again and again, we had heard many of them over and over again, because they were much more exciting than any stories we were told or read. [end p8]
Interviewer
[Question paraphrased: They stay with you and come back again and again later in life?]
Prime Minister
That is right and we also try to see that children and single parents have some kind of that experience because there is a lot of interplay between the child who has never had a father living with them in the home and the other families. [end p9]
Interviewer
[Question paraphrased: You favour people having to retire less early? A Civil Servant at sixty has to retire.]
Prime Minister
Yes, what I found is some people come in here, you know, who have been at No. 10 for a long time and they are marvellous and they say that they are retiring. I think: “Good Heavens!” People look so much younger these days at sixty, sixty-five than they used to. I say to them: “What are you going to do?” and they all say there is a lot to do. A man will say: “My wife wants me to do some things in the kitchen and put up cupboards in the bedroom and shelves, and there is a lot of maintenance that we need to do - I have not had time to do it!” [end p10]
Then, after about six months, you know, they are coming back in because they come back in and see us and we also have a party at Christmas-time that includes all the people who have left, and they are looking for some part-time work because they not only want the work, but for an interest and to meet other people, because the worst thing about stopping work unless you have got a passionate hobby is that you cease to have as many contacts with other people. And so we find that this is the natural wish and some part-time work not only gives you extra income but it also gives you this fundamental sort of social contact.
We have a lot of skills among older people, a lot of skills that young people do not always have and, of course, we are going into the last decade of this century, from the 1990's to the year 2000. It is going to be quite different.
In the 1980's, we have had far many more young people leaving school than we have had people retiring, so we have had about an extra million and a quarter jobs to try to find merely because that is the way the birth-rate went in that decade years ago - extra people coming in, wanting jobs. Now, it is going to reverse between the 1990's and the year 2000. There are going to be over that period, a million fewer young people coming wanting jobs and therefore a million fewer young people available for training, so we are going to take every young person; it is going to be very precious that we get them with the right training to have the right [end p11] skills to keep our industries and commerce going, but it is also going to mean lots more opportunities for older people either to stay on at work if they wish or to break your life when you retire and go on to some of the many jobs for which part-time is required.
So it is going to be a rather different quality of life for which we must prepare and, you see, again what people do not realise: we have managed somehow in this last ten years in which I have been here to pay pensions - all of which are inflation-proof, the basic pension - not only to the same number of pensioners, but to a million more. If there had not been a million more, then each of the existing ones could have had more. But it is the young, present working generation that pays those pensions. We have managed to keep it up for a million more pensioners.
Interviewer
Are you going to be able to manage to keep it up as it increases and increases?
Prime Minister
Obviously, we pledged that the basic pension is inflation-proofed but we are going to have to look at the whole span of life and it will continue to be pledged to be inflation-proof, but people [end p12] are earning their second pension, usually for themselves, because their second pension, as an occupational pension, that is a funded scheme, so that comes from investments. The basic pension is the contributions this year pay for the pensions going out and so we have to keep the enterprise and the increasing creation of wealth going in order to do that.
Did I see yesterday that there are twice the number of people now who are over a hundred years old than there were ten years ago? That is only tiny, but by the end of this century there are going to be three-quarters of a million, on our calculations, who are over eighty-five. They are going to need a lot of attention from the Health Service and a lot of attention and care and so we have got to keep this enterprise, this industrial, vigorous, exciting enterprise of manufacturing and commerce going in order to create the wealth.
I sometimes think, in respect of my own life, because I am as vigorous now as ever I was, if you are thinking normally that you somehow during your working life say from about eighteen to the age of sixty, sixty-five, that you would normally have to build up enough savings or enough pension rights to last, say, for twenty years, say at eighty-five well it might be that you might live for much much longer and it is a long time to be retired isn't it, unless you have really got &dubellip; [end p13]
Interviewer
[Question paraphrased: Once we worked towards a younger retirement age and leisure but now people will have to work longer because otherwise we will not be able to afford to pay the pensions. (Meaning slightly unclear in original.)]
Prime Minister
I think we shall keep the basic pension going, but I think there are going to be two problems:
I have the impression that many people who retire first go back and offer their skills. They are very very reliable usually. They go back to work because they want work; they enjoy what they are doing; they can choose what they are doing; they are very very reliable and they are a great asset, but also, it fits in with how things will have to go.
Interviewer
[Question paraphrased: There is great prejudice against older people. In things like television everyone has to be young. Newspapers always state people’s ages (eg, 63) and put this emphasis on age. Have they a good point?] [end p14]
Prime Minister
I think if you are looking for a young, thrusting, thriving sales manager of a manufacturing organisation obviously you want someone who has got a future career, but there are so many jobs.
Interviewer
Where experience counts.
Prime Minister
Yes, so many jobs where experience of dealing with people counts. If you are dealing in shops, experience of dealing with people. Experience of dealing with accounts. Experience of dealing with some practical things, some skills, counts enormously.
I think they want to know that if a person is coming to work for them is something, particularly in a small business, where you do really need the continuity, that that person wants the job, can do it and is reasonably reliable. But as you see, we are keeping more healthy. We are keeping much healthier much longer.
I find quite a number of people finding a person is older but, you know, that has its advantages because they have this reliability and experience and sometimes they are marvellous, too, at dealing with children because they have had so much experience.
Interviewer
[Question paraphrased: Your view of more women going to work? You talk of family and child coming home to the …] [end p15]
Prime Minister
Well you can do it. Let me take another kind of single parent family.
Some of the best parents are widows who have suddenly been bereft (bereaved?) in middle life but still have a young family. They are marvellous parents. You get a unity in that family; you get consideration of the children for the mother, the mother for the children, although mum has do quite a lot, they do things together, they help so therefore they are with their children. They give time to children, and mother usually has to go out and do some work as well. It is a question of the way you organise it, the feeling you have and the way you do it and it is good for children to do things as well, so they can be done.
You will find that many many women want to keep in touch. If they are career women, they want a career - so did I - but they simply must make proper arrangements for their children. I am very much against latch-key kids going home.
Interviewer
Or going to companies' nurseries in the office? [end p16]
Prime Minister
If companies wish to do that, so be it. That is a facility which they can provide. The mother then knows the children are being properly looked after.
But you will find that there is a fantastic amount of part-time work. If grandma lives near and she looks after the children, that is fine, or it may be another career for another woman who is very good with children, has taken nursery training, perhaps is a teacher and to have those children in provided that they are looked after properly and up to standard.
It is making provision to see the child is properly looked after because frequently the mother, when she goes out, say to do part-time work, comes back, she has been with other people, she contributes a little bit, it is a little bit of her independence and it is a question of how you arrange it and you can arrange it, because one woman's career in looking after children will be the solution for another mother who maybe has been trained for something which she wishes to keep in contact with and when her children are grown up she will want to return to fuller-time to that. So you can do it, but I always give the examples of some people I have known in life have been unexpectedly widowed and my goodness, they really are very very good parents, but they managed to do everything and people muscle in and help as well. [end p17]
Interviewer
[Question paraphrased: The environment in 2000, how to deal with the problems coming up there?]
Prime Minister
You know, people are very very conscious of them and particularly young people.
If you go into supermarkets - I can tell you, although I had better not advertise - there are two supermarkets which I know, two very very big ones, they have got on all their aerosols “ozone friendly” because they are deliberately only buying the things which have not got the chlorofluorocarbons which are the very damaging things, but have got a different aerosol with a solvent which is not damaging. They have got “ozone friendly” and they have done it because people are conscious of that “ozone friendly”.
You will also find other people on their plastics bags will have “bio-degradable” so that if they are dropped where they should not be, they will not be perpetually tossed by wind and produce a terrible blot on the environment.
You will also find that some of them are having some of the plastic cups bio-degradable and which do not come from the tropical forests.
All of this is already happening and that is very important. [end p18]
We also have to look, all of us, to be reasonably fuel-efficient, we really must, because you know what has really happened and I spent a lot of time on a speech that I did to the Royal Society, got all the scientific papers out and really went into it in enormous depth. All of a sudden, it dawned on one just exactly what has happened:
For millions of years, our planet has not had a lot of people on it. It has not used up coal or oil and they have had far fewer people and they have had trees growing and so Early Man cut down the trees to do things. Then, all of a sudden, in the last hundred years, the population of the Earth has gone up by leaps and bounds as medical science has enabled us to overcome disease. For example, we overcame malaria, all those tropical diseases, and so whole areas were opened up in which there could have been no-one before, particularly the tropical areas. We mastered the diseases, so people are all living &dubellip; you know &dubellip; whereas they used to have ten, twelve, fourteen youngsters, you know, believing in some of these areas that only two would survive - not even that. Now they all survive. You marry, you get many more, so you have had a colossal increase in population. Even in your and my lifetime, the population of the world has doubled and it is going on.
So all of a sudden, this enormous increase in population over a very short time and still going on. In order to support that, science has solved so many of our agricultural problems, so we have to grow more food - and we have. We have got the newer seeds, we [end p19] have got the fertilizers, we know what crops will grow where, we have got the variety of fruits, so much much bigger agriculture, with all of the problems of waste and the problems of methane, the excreta, and so on, all the problems of fertilizers and the methane which you get from cattle and so on and which you get from paddy fields because it all gives off some kind of gas. And with the increase in population, you have found that many of your tropical peoples, they get the food, what do they do to cook it? Cut down the trees, the roots die, so there is nothing to pull up the moisture from deep in the earth to go up to form clouds, the rain does not come down, so you get the creation of deserts.
So you get the increasing population, the increasing agriculture, the cutting down of some of the forests which create deserts fast and then you get the whole industrial revolution, the whole scientific revolution - look at all the things which we have now - which has given us a much much higher standard of living than we ever dreamed of. Look at the transport! Unknown a century ago! The aircraft, the cars!
Interviewer
All the problems these things have brought with them! [end p20]
Prime Minister
All in the last century, a lot in the last half-century, and so you find a colossal increase in population, a colossal increase in agriculture, all giving off the carbon dioxide, the methane from the agriculture and using up the coal and the oil which was created over millions of years and there over millions of years now being used up in a short period of time and we who thought that the Earth would always be there unchangeable almost as far as its great systems - atmosphere, stratosphere - were concerned, find that what we are doing is having an effect on it, and that is why we are having to have a look at it very seriously, because we have a great heritage to pass on to our children and we do not know whether it will somehow come back into equilibrium, but we fear that it will not.
What we do know is that there have been Ice Ages in the past, but that was brought about by a change in temperature that was comparatively small to the changes in temperature which we might now be seeing because of what we are doing to the layers over there, and the only quick way to deal with it is to ensure that you keep all your tropical forests and your trees going because it is the trees that use up carbon dioxide and fix it and stop it from going up there. So you must keep the proportion of trees and tropical forests in proportion to your population. [end p21]
And also, the other thing that fixes it is the little plankton and small fish in the sea. If you destroy that food chain, if you destroy that chain of one fish feeding on another, little ones and bigger ones each feeding on the other, and then they fix carbon dioxide, then they die and go down to the sea bed and it is fixed and that is why we have great big chalk things, cliffs, coming up in due course of time. You have to keep those two things going to keep the equilibrium.
Young people are very keen. I get a lot of correspondence from children: “What are you doing about the tropical forests?” and I can send back and say we have great forestry systems, we give advice, we train people how to look after them. We, in fact, give aid for people who keep tropical forests, who will keep the plantations, for finding the best methods of farming, the best methods of keeping those forests and giving them aid, to make certain that they get the right kind of plants and aid not to cut down the trees and to restore the soil and to plan more trees - keep both the soil there and the fixation. Children are very interested in this and it is good.
The real thing that every child can do and every family to improve the environment more quickly than anything else, is to make certain that you do not throw things down on the grass, in the streets, out of a car window, that you are proud that you pick it up because Nature is beautiful and Man should not spoil it - and I am afraid we have got the reputation of being a very dirty people with our waste. [end p22]
If we did not throw it down, if we did not do those awful graffiti … and that is a matter of the families and the schools. When I went to Toronto for the Economic Summit, I had not been there more than a few hours and I said to Brian Mulroney, the Prime Minister: “This is a very clean city!” wherever we went. “The cleanest city I have seen, not only on Main Street, but your side streets. I have seen no refuse, no things thrown down in the streets. They are clean. I see no graffiti, not one!” and he said: “Well, people are very proud and each area says to its children and young people: &oq;Now, don't you let us down!’ To the schools: &oq;Don't you let us down!’” and there are a lot of people who have gone there from other countries, a lot of different nationalities. Each of them says: “Now, don't you let us down! We keep our neighbourhood nice! ” and that is taught in the schools, it is taught in the families, it is taught by all the voluntary organisations, if you have a British Legion, if you have a trade union, if you have a group of people who are looking after the elderly or the young or the cancer research or whatever it is: “Don't you let us down!” That is what I mean by rules by which to live. [end p23]
Interviewer
When you talk about the family, you are obviously optimistic for the future.
Prime Minister
Do you know, the greatest richness you can have in life is to have been born into a family which really looks after its children. It does not smother them, but brings them up to develop their own abilities, encourages them constantly to do better, always with that certainty that home is the place where you go, whatever happened, whatever problems you have, whatever you might have done wrong - you have always got that centre of your life and you have got parents who encourage you to keep the home as the centre of your life, but not the boundary. They do not say: “Just sit back! That is too difficult! You cannot do that!” They say: “Come on! You can do it! Let us have a go!” They work with the schools and teach them that you are part of a community. If someone needs your help, you go and offer it, but you are always courteous. If you expect people to be courteous and kindly to you, you must be courteous and kindly to them, and if you want to have a friend, you must learn to be a friend.
Interviewer
And you are going to be - my congratulations - a grandparent yourself very soon. [end p24]
Prime Minister
Isn't that marvellous?
Interviewer
So for your grandchild, all these things will apply presumably.
Prime Minister
You know, Mark Thatchermy son is extremely good with small children, always has been. So was Denis Thatcherhis father. They love small children and Mark is very very good with them.
Interviewer
So you are looking forward to that with great pleasure?
Prime Minister
Yes.
Interviewer
And what kind of world will you hope that he or she will grow up in?
Prime Minister
A world where people accept their responsibilities to others. After all, you are here to use your talents and abilities and you can only really use your talents and abilities as part of a community in respect to others. This is the fundamental link. [end p25]
People say: “Oh, you are only interested in the individual!” I say: “But you cannot flower as an individual except in relation to someone else and then to someone else and then to someone else. How else can you use your talents and abilities?”
So a world in which people recognise that they are born free and that that is an immense privilege and that freedom incurs responsibilities. You cannot be free without responsibilities to others and you rise to those - and you do it not because someone tells you to do it but because that is the way you live. That is the way. That has been the way of Britain. You do not do things because you are told to do it.
I was brought up as a very young child in my home that we British do not have to be told. We know that if something is wrong, we go and lend a hand. This was always taught me as the great thing about the British Army if they are in a tricky corner - this was after the First World War - they do not have to be told, they know; they have got some ingenuity, some resourcefulness, some inventiveness.
Interviewer
Are you going to find it difficult being a granny and being a prime minister? [end p26]
Prime Minister
No, I do not think so. Alas, the baby will not be here very much, which will be my great sorrow. No, I shall just be like any other granny, absolutely thrilled and I suppose with a tendency to spoil, but very conscious that one must not, you know, but we are there with fantastic affection.
Interviewer
But you will be going backwards and forwards as much as possible?
Prime Minister
I hope to have a way of seeing the baby as much as possible, yes.
Other granny will be much closer. Other granny had five children, so other granny knows a lot about big families!
Interviewer
[Question paraphrased: Last time I interviewed you, we talked a little about the year 2000, and you said you doubted you would be here. I think the words were: “I doubt very much whether I will be here then!”
Since then you have said: “I am going to go on and on and on!”]
Prime Minister
Well, you know, you cannot plan your life, can you? You hope for certain things and you put away things for the longer term. You know, in my day, there was the expression: “You have a bottom drawer!” That was a way of saying that you put away things for when you eventually get married and you put away savings. You did not sort of play the stock market, but you put away savings for the future. You put things in your bottom drawer - and you still automatically do that.
I am just unbelievably lucky in being and staying very very fit. I am just unbelievably lucky, I suppose, in the whole way that one has been brought up; that as you climb one little mountain, you know when you are climbing the hills you are looking and you are climbing up and you see what looks like a peak and you get up there and it is not a peak, there is another one higher, and so as life has gone or or as I have managed to complete one things, so long before I have got to the top there are other things, other mountains to climb.
Interviewer
But how can there be when in your case as a Prime Minister, the highest office in the land? [end p28]
Prime Minister
Oh yes, but there are always other things to do, always.
As you know, I hope that after ten years, we still have as many ideas for the future. You know the little poem - is it J. Russell [Lowell] ? -
“New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth; they must upwards still and onwards, who would keep abreast of truth!”
And so you do find, because life is changing. The great thing is to keep the quality of the personality and of the character. That is really what matters. It is what you do with your talents, what you do with the wealth you create, that matters.
People talk a lot about compassion these days and some people talk about “Judge compassion merely by how deeply you can put your hand into the taxpayer's pocket to do things!” That is compulsion and, of course, you have to have a certain amount.
Actually, the Health Service and the money spent on Social Security has gone up under us, because we have encouraged people to be so much more active that they are creating so much more wealth so there is enough to share out to the Health Service and elderly people and to keep far more for yourself and looking after your own family as well. [end p29]
But the true compassion is how much you voluntarily do yourself for others. We must have a look at this soon. In the last budget, Nigel LawsonNigel said: “Look! We will arrange so that everyone can give a certain small amount from their salary or wages tax-free to a charity of their choice!” That was to enable you to do “what I can do about things”. I enquired of one of my favourite charities and they said that they thought they had got something from me but not quite as much as they expected. It has not yet quite taken off but of course, we have profited tremendously as a government. Once people are working harder with a will, with enthusiasm, the enterprise spirit, the vitality is there, two things happen: they create enough extra for them to have a much higher standard of living and for us, without putting the rate of tax up - indeed, putting it down - because they are creating so many more funds, we get more income, so you get the two things, but you simply cannot pass on the generosity delegate the generosity in life, the personal concern, the personal giving, just a government.
If ever life became: “Oh, I thought it was the Government that did that these days!” what a terribly selfish heartless, cold life it would be! [end p30]
Interviewer
[Question paraphrased: To press you a little about the future, whether you expect to go on, what will this next mountain or next mountains be? Voluntary work or something to help celebrations of 2000?]
Prime Minister
That is very much in our minds at the moment. We will have, as we go into the 1990s a decade and it is very much in my mind as to what we can all do so that we all take part. The environment, internationally, is very very vital and we are of course doing far more about that internationally because we are a small country, 55 million people, we will do our part but it is equally important [end p31] that the countries with enormous populations, like India, like China, that we all have regard to some of these things so we all are very much more conscious about that. There is a very good United Nations organisation, there is a World Climate Organisation and conferences and we are all taking part in that, and it is pretty vital.
But environment is not only about the big things, it is about the local environment in which you live and that is partly the waste and do not forget the environment it is partly about being courteous and thoughtful to one another.
But we are doing very great things now in inner cities, you know this is one of part of my things for this Parliament and we are doing it very much and they really are taking off, they are so very much better now.
The other thing we are doing now, which should take shape into the next Parliament, is increasing opportunity for young people through education and increasing personal responsibility by delegating it down in the public services, saying if you are a doctor or a nurse you should have far more capacity to make your own decisions, together with the patient, so you delegate responsibility down.
Now when I say thinking about, it has to be something in which everyone can take part, there have to be some big things as well, but one is thinking how we can get everyone enthused so that [end p32] every town and village has its target, its pride, its joy in beautifying its town or village and saying that it really is one of the best cities and villages in which to live. Not only because you have got it nice and clean and you are watching the new development and the new architecture, you are watching all of the things which are created by people.
And it is how to harness that which is concerning me. Obviously we are looking at other things, yes we are looking at the quality of water for example, water is very important in the whole of your life. The whole of the standards which the consumer is going to expect are rising. Yes, as a matter of fact we are doing very well on the quality of water, we still have to have the nitrates, to have a look at that, and if you are interested in environmental quality it will cost something but you see on the higher standard of living you want that and can afford to do it.
We are just going to have to look at transport very very carefully because in fact the number of cars and people wanting to travel are going up really far more rapidly than the number of roads or the number of runways. And air traffic control, we have got to have a look at that and you have got to have a look to balance the freedom of people, their natural desire to travel, see the beauty spots, go to other corners of the world with the facilities that we have got. [end p33]
Things are going pretty fast in this direction. As I say, our thing this time is to bring opportunity and better standards to people for whom they have not reached, it is years since we launched our inner cities and it is going very well and I must say I am very pleased with some of the new architecture, some of the new houses, some of the new flats. We are through that oblong period when terrible big oblong skyscrapers, and the houses look gentler and they have attractive gables and we are having a look and they are built round squares and they are not built in straight lines, they are built much more gently.
Interviewer
[Question paraphrased: When you talk about celebrations for 2000 you assume and hope there will be a Conservative Government still?]
Prime Minister
I am hoping obviously because I do think that Britain would not be doing so well unless people, whether they admit it or not or accept it or not, had actually responded to the policies. You see my whole belief is that we give the opportunities, we look after the things which only government can do and we do them very well and we have the strength and belief in the British character to say: “Now over to you, greater responsibility, greater enterprise”, and people have responded. [end p34]
Interviewer
And will presumably go on so.
Prime Minister
We have struck a chord, whether they accept it, we have struck a chord and we are freer, much freer, accepting more responsibilities, having a higher standard of living. But the fact is that the more prosperous society has become a more environmentally conscious society, which is good, and has become a more generous society.
Look at something on television, how they will give to it, the amount of voluntary giving has gone up more than twice in real terms, over and above inflation. Just look at the great concern once we have any terrible thing like child abuse. The real difficult problems we are up against now are the fundamental problems of human nature, the evil that is in some people and they turn to violent crime.
Now we are involving again the people in cities and towns with this. Where we have neighbourhood watches we find the crime goes down and people say: “Oh you only move it to the next district” so we say: “And when that district has neighbourhood watches” and people say: “I have got a duty, I cannot leave everything to the policemen.” There cannot be half a dozen police in every street, it would be like a police state if they were, and they watch and they see. Then if neighbourhood watches get crime down we need neighbourhood watches all over because that cuts crime. [end p35]
So that is the biggest thing you come up against. You can deal with the material things in a way, you can build more hospitals and train more people, the real difficult things are the problems of human nature. Why do people flout all the rules, of course they will break some rules but why do they turn to violent crime, why do they drink more than is good for them, why do they go to drugs, and how can you stop it and how can you give children the capacity and the strength of mind to say: “No, it is wrong, we do not accept that in our school”?
Interviewer
Do you think this government has helped change human nature at all?
Prime Minister
I do not think you can change human nature, I think what you have to do, and Alfred Robertsmy father always said to me there is good and bad in every single person, and the whole of training and the whole of family life is to try to bring out the good and to try to say: “Look you must not do that” on the bad things and to try to cut down the bad and bring out the good, and that is true.
I think this is why family life is so important. If you have got a problem and you start going wrong you must have a supportive family to go back to. [end p36]
We find that with drugs the children who unfortunately have fallen into a bad set or have tried it, it is easier to get them off if they have got a good supportive family to go back to.
Interviewer
I think a lot of people would say how can we do any of these things if you leave?
Prime Minister
If we leave?
Interviewer
If you leave, if you step down.
Prime Minister
Well, we are very fit at the moment.