Interviewer
Prime Minister, you talked this morning about your sense of achievement. What would you say has been your greatest success?
Prime Minister
It is difficult to single out one. I think if you take it as a whole, I think the greatest success has been the high reputation in which Britain is now held abroad. That is due to a number of separate things. It is due to the firm position we have always taken overseas and it is due to the firm way in which we have dealt with the economy at home.
So really it is a feature of firmness and everyone knows where they are.
Interviewer
Given the standards you yourself have set, what would you say has been your greatest failure? [end p1]
Prime Minister
Oh my goodness me, sometimes not putting over well enough policies which are very very good indeed. I have always taken the view that politics is about a lot more than presentation. It is first of all about getting the policies right.
Interviewer
Can you give some examples of that?
Prime Minister
Well, I think we are having difficulty now, for example, with getting over the real message of the White Paper. You know it was strange, soon after the election people on the opposition side were growling and growling about the Health Service. I thought it was very good. I thought the doctors and nurses were doing, and are doing, a marvellous job and the patients were pretty pleased with it and pretty glad it was there.
So eventually I said: “Well, we will have a review” and we found some improvements and now they do not want any improvements, but we want improvements, we want to make it better. But we have not put it over, or we have not got it over, I think that Ken Clarke has been doing a marvellous job but he has not quite got over.
Interviewer
Water privatisation, does that come in the same category? [end p2]
Prime Minister
No I think water privatisation is now coming very much better. And we shall get the National Health Service better and I think the moment the improvements come in people will say, marvellous, as they have done always in the past.
Interviewer
How do you react when you read in the papers, as you must have done this weekend, to the findings of opinion polls that suggest that the British people generally have not embraced much of what we now describe as “Thatcherism”.
Prime Minister
I think “Thatcherism” is the wrong thing to call it. It does not sound very attractive when you call it that, does it? It is really common sense and belief in people and running finances soundly and being sure in defence and I think that they would agree with all of those things.
Interviewer
Sure in defence I think very few people would dispute. But you yourself have said that the management of the economy is perhaps the single most crucial responsibility for a government at home. Given what is happening on inflation, interest rates, and the trade deficit, what has gone wrong? [end p3]
Prime Minister
I think that things went slightly too fast. After the Stock Exchange crashed the world over we were all very concerned lest we should ever go into another recession and we took, therefore, what we thought was corrective action. It happened the world over, but we took corrective action and we started to go a little bit too fast and people began to have so much faith in the future that they not only spent what they were earning, but they borrowed a lot else as well.
That in fact was very very difficult. Had we not taken so much corrective action to avoid a possible recession, we should not have gone quite as fast we are going now, so we have to slow it down a little. But that can be done.
Interviewer
You say “Thatcherism” as a label may not be the appropriate label. Enterprise culture is another description. I wonder what you say to critics who say that you are moving too fast and actually you care not enough about those who are either unwilling or perhaps unable, like the homeless, to take advantage of what you have to offer.
Prime Minister
Well we are making available, through the success of the economy, which is the success of people working in it, very much more resources than we have ever had before. [end p4]
The disabled, for example, a good case in point. We nearly double in terms over and above inflation what we are able to spend on people with disabilities. That is very good. The mobility allowance, which helps them to get about so much, is nearly six times as much as when we came in.
Of course, however much you manage to make available, people always want more and that is perhaps the way in which they are looking. But we really have thought, and even the people who at the bottom tenth of income, the income they have is still better, it is still above what it was ten years ago.
So we have been able to help and I think, for example, for young people the opportunities and the training now are, oh, better than they have ever been, they are quite exciting the prospects.
Interviewer
You enjoy, and indeed you thrive on, the very idea of competition. Has that not turned Britain into a society in which people are perhaps more selfish, more aggressive, and is that right?
Prime Minister
No, not at all. When the housewife goes shopping she goes to the shop which gives best value. The alternative would have been to have one great big government grocery store, like in Gum, Moscow, as it were, do you really think she would have had the same value as if she can go to half a dozen different supermarkets? [end p5]
She goes to where she can get the best clothes, where she can get the best furniture, she has choice, she can use her money as she wishes. This is really a thriving, enterprising society and it is very very good so she has indeed benefitted from it.
And indeed the people who have been making those things have sold more, and they have benefitted too, and we really have got a more generous society. We have sometimes unavoidable tragedies and some are avoidable. You have a tragedy, people give, they see things on television, they give, they see someone in the local community wanting extra help, they give. And if you have not got the money you cannot give.
When you have got enough and your standard of living is reasonably good, you can turn your thoughts much more to doing other things.
Interviewer
And indeed you are a Prime Minister in a hurry. Is there not a danger that you might leave some people, some regions of this country behind and create division?
Prime Minister
All regions are doing very much better now. Indeed in a way, the further away they are perhaps the more help they have had to enable them to find new business, new industry, and all of them are doing better now and unemployment is going down everywhere which is very good. [end p6]
And we have got more people in work than ever before in history. It is good.
Interviewer
So ten years down, how many more to go?
Prime Minister
I do not know, let us get on and take each day and each year as it comes and do the very best we can, always thinking and planning for the future and never going to the politics of expediency.