Interviewer
Can we start with the Scottish economy? When you were in Perth you painted a very cheerful picture of it but there are people who think that its performance, its recovery, is relatively fragile and that its prospects are not all that favourable. What is your own feeling about it?
Prime Minister
The economy at the moment is good, it has been growing. I know that you have just one set of figures in the last quarter which may reveal some hesitation in growth, but they are still talking about growth, but not at such a big rate. [end p1]
I know that Ian Lang pointed out that if you take the yearly figures that growth has really been very good. That was particularly about the manufacturing industry although I think your manufacturing industry has done very well but your service industry has done even better, which is not surprising, because of the big service economy of Edinburgh.
As you get prosperity rising, so the demand for services of one sort or another, whether it be television, films, newspapers, periodicals, the arts, the environment, leisure activities of one sort or another increases and inevitably you are going to get a bigger proportion of your jobs coming from that.
But at the moment the Scottish economy is good. Look, there were fourteen pages of jobs in there one day last week. There are fourteen pages of property advertising in there. Now that tells you its own story. I do not know how advertising on television is going, I think my information is that it is still going pretty strong and if there is a gap in it, it really is that small businesses cannot possibly advertise on television because the costs are way beyond them.
And that is one thing in trying to get more channels on television because of your small businesses, who may have excellent services to sell, will be able then to have some small advertisements because if you have got a good product you have got to shout it from the housetops to sell it. [end p2]
So yes it is the second best economy in the United Kingdom, is Scotland, apart from the south-east, the south-east economy of course is much more services than manufacturing.
Interviewer
What do you identify as the chief outstanding problems? There is obviously structural unemployment, although it is true there is great demand for labour and particularly for skills.
Prime Minister
It is skill, yes it is skills, and that is why we are, as you know, changing the system. Because really the whole nature of industry is changing and I think perhaps one of the best examples of that is you know when we came to the Glasgow Herald premises on your 200th anniversary and you had changed from the very old heavy clanking dirty equipment and machinery to new up-to-date clean machinery, clean equipment, the people who work it clean, fewer of them certainly, but a whole different atmosphere, in fact which is diminishing the differences, some of the old differences, which used to exist in industry because so many people now can work in really good, clean, circumstances.
That is having its effect. You have fewer people but a bigger proportion of them are skilled and that is one of the reasons why we are bringing the Scottish Development Agency and Training together in Scottish Enterprise because you obviously have to have training for enterprise and it does not make any sense to have [end p3] them separately and you have to have a combination of training together with your Technical Colleges which in Scotland are excellent, with your Technical Colleges and your industry and those who are responsible for boosting enterprise, you have got to bring it together.
I thought from some of the schemes that I have been round and seen in Scotland with young people working in industry under the training schemes, they are keen, they are good, they are getting extremely well trained.
But I quite agree that when you look at the majority of jobs in there, so many of them are wanting a skill and I think that we have to try to work for a bigger proportion of our young people willing to take a training and staying on to take a training. Now a higher proportion of the age group are going into some form of higher education.
I think we want closer cooperation between your local industry and services and the schools. There are some young people who find that some of what they learn during their last years at school they say, “Well, what is the point in doing it? Is it going to be all right for the later life?”
Some know that the very best thing for them to do is to absorb as much learning and ways of thought as they can at school, others get a bit bored. [end p4]
For those who get a bit bored they need the stimulus of some of your businessmen, whether from services, big businessmen or those in small business, going into the schools and saying: “Look, this is what I am going to need, these are the sort of things you will need to know and that if you come out of your school reasonably up to standard, the chances of getting a job are good and then we can take you on into training which we do in conjunction with a Technical College”.
I am absolutely certain that the key to the future is not merely in saying “We will provide training, we will provide grants”, they sound too impersonal. The key to it is the personal interest taken by the people working in the local firm in the people at school and the people in training colleges.
That is why we now have what we call thirty Compact arrangements, which is not anything like enough, where a local industry, they are working mainly in inner cities, now you have not quite such inner city problems.
Interviewer
We have an outer city problem.
Prime Minister
You have an outer city problem, the same thing goes where you have nearby industries making a Compact, an agreement with the schools and going and saying: “Look, we will provide so many jobs [end p5] a year for so many people provided they come up to educational standard”, and then you have established a bond of enthusiasm and the link so that your work and what you learn just is not something impersonal, even something just between your teacher and yourself, which is certainly one of the most important things, but there are some prospects.
And all of that ties in with, originally it was Bill Hughes' idea that to get your Training and Enterprise Boards together, locally as well, and really the response has been very good.
Now you will not get them everywhere but just because you cannot get them everywhere does not mean that you should not have them where you can and then it will be for Scottish Enterprise to fill in the places where we cannot get things working.
Interviewer
Do you see a continuing role for the SDA?
Prime Minister
Yes it is, it will be renamed Scottish Enterprise because you bring in Scottish Training and the regional and local ones will work to Scottish Enterprise as an umbrella and of course the very big things, the very big new things coming in, will have to be done in any event by Scottish Enterprise with the Scottish Office because as you know you now have discretionary grants and sometimes you have to consider where else they could go and what other temptations they have. [end p6]
That means Scottish Enterprise and the Scottish Office working together to see the kind of grant necessary to attract the inward investment.
Interviewer
Could I turn to the question of Prestwick Airport, as you perhaps know there is some surprise in some sections of the business community about the decision not to have a review of Prestwick as the international gateway and there is quite a lot of feeling that there is a growing demand for a secondary airport and Glasgow would fit the bill, the market would prefer Glasgow. How do you feel about that?
Prime Minister
Far the greater representations that we had were to keep Prestwick. Now just remind me, my recollection is that your Glasgow and Edinburgh do the European traffic as well as the short-haul, so they do all the European traffic, and that Prestwick does the intercontinental, so within the continent of Europe is done by Glasgow.
Prestwick is coming up, I think we would find it difficult to do without Prestwick, Prestwick is open when other airports are not, and it was felt by the majority of representations that reached the Scottish Office and reached me that what they really needed was very much better communications on the ground between your Glasgow and your Prestwick and that would be the very best combination. [end p7]
I also understood that to have big intercontinental flights on a big scale into Glasgow would require an extension of that runway, quite a considerable extension of that runway, and that you could be up against a great deal of protest about that.
Also, I think we are not over-anxious to bring a lot of intercontinental traffic heavily into built-up areas. Air Traffic Control at Heathrow is one of the problems, we have got whole new computers working, everyone wants to come in there and we are just having to say look, we simply cannot take any more.
And so you have got two opposite things. First, you have got people saying: “We would like just to go to Glasgow, get off the European and get on to an intercontinental there” and if you were to have a big one you would undoubtedly need an extension of the airport, runway, and you would get quite a lot of complaints from people who for the first time realised that they were going to have heavy and repeated aircraft coming over them. Yet at the same time, not very far away, you really have an excellent airport which is open all the time, sometimes when others are not.
So Malcolm Rifkindthe Secretary of State, rightly I thought, took the view and we all consulted about it, that what he really should do is keep it as it is for the time being and get very very much better communications, particularly from your Glasgow out to Prestwick, which would make it very much easier for people who wished to transfer to go from one to the other. [end p8]
But you know people are very conscious of living near an airport and Glasgow is pretty built up. It would go to I think, is it to Bearsden, Bearsden I think. So at the moment Prestwick is coming up very well and also since then of course you have got British Aerospace there, a marvellous factory, and it has had an order for Jet Stream hasn't it? So Prestwick is coming up very well, I think it is a great asset.
Interviewer
Do you think when it has the communications such as Central London-Gatwick, then people will want to use that?
Prime Minister
Well, frankly many of us much prefer to use Gatwick.
Interviewer
It is handier for certain places.
Prime Minister
Yes it is. You can get on at Victoria and you go straight through. But you want that kind of communications. I am not sure how Malcolm RifkindMalcolm is going to do it, you have got both road and rail. But he did announce some improvements for that and he thought that that would make best use of present resources with extra capital [end p9] expenditure without running into all the problems and troubles of extending the runway and the colossal increase of flights into Glasgow, which would have its problems.
Interviewer
But it would surely need really tremendous expenditure to get road and rail links with Prestwick, to encourage people to actually use it?
Prime Minister
Malcolm RifkindMalcolm has announced some things. But it is a very good airport you know.
Interviewer
Yes, but it is a long way out.
Prime Minister
Not really. Stansted is a long way out of London.
Interviewer
Yes, the comparison with Gatwick is probably better because of good communications. [end p10]
Prime Minister
Yes, but Malcolm has announced some things.
Interviewer
Yes, but not …
Prime Minister
Not enough? But anyway we have got a very great asset at Prestwick and we felt that it would lead to quite considerable protests in Glasgow if we started to extend the runway. And anyway it would take a very very long time with the Planning Enquiry.
So that is the decision and we have had far fewer requests for the one that you are talking about. Certainly business obviously would like it and we have had far more representations about the other, in favour of the other.
Not that that is definitive, but it is interesting and it is a good asset at Prestwick and of course vital to British Aerospace.
Interviewer
You were saying earlier that the new technology had brought a sort of social revolution, it is certainly true from my observation. Among other things it has undermined the power of the old craft unions which were sometimes prejudiced in society. But you are also presiding over another social revolution in Scotland, which is to do with housing, you are shifting the balance of housing tenure away from public stock into private ownership and yet Scottish [end p11] sentiment still appears to be fairly hostile. How do you feel about that?
Prime Minister
I had seen, I just cannot recall the precise circumstances now, but it was just before I came up to Perth, there was a poll which I think asked young people what kind of houses they wanted in the future and the figures in my mind are that something like 80 percent of young people said they wanted to buy their own houses. You would not have got that ten years ago and it is a natural ambition and I thought that that was very good and at the moment, as you know, I think we have gone from about 35 percent owner occupation to 44 percent, which is quite a good increase. [end p12]
We want to try to get at people who would like to buy their own homes but cannot quite afford it. Fortunately, in Scotland you have got something no-one else has got: you have got Scottish homes where the houses actually belong to government, so that enables Scottish people to have an opportunity that other people have not as we say: “Well, let us try to get at a group of people who would like to own it but feel they cannot afford it on the “Right to Buy” and we will try to give them a lesser discount than “Right to Buy” for obvious reasons and then turn their rents into mortgages and make certain understandings about maintaining it!” because it is important that you have enough to maintain it - and, of course, not if you are on Housing Benefit. So that is again trying to get at another group of people who have the ambition to own their home and give them an enlarged opportunity. [end p13]
I have the impression, as I go about Scotland, that there is quite a lot of building of houses for sale of very varied price ranges, including the more expensive ones and including some less expensive ones. I am not quite certain whether you have got in Scotland what we have here, which is what is called “shared ownership”, namely, you have a scheme run by the local authority: if you cannot afford to buy the whole of your house, instead of going out and buying a little bed-sitter and getting your foot on the bottom rung that way, you can say: “All right! I would like that house! We want to get married and think we can afford to buy half of it now!” So you buy half of it, on which you have a mortgage and on the other you have a rent and then you have got your foot on the bottom rung of the ladder and without moving, as both of you get more money coming in, you will be able to buy the other half and you will not have all the expense of moving, which I think is another imaginative idea.
I am not certain whether local authorities do it in Scotland, but it is another possibility because you have to try to fashion possibilities for all sorts of income groups and people who are in council houses will find that they really have a fantastic opportunity because as they have been there for some time they then come in and get the right to buy. [end p14]
But in Scotland, I think Malcolm RifkindMalcolm keeps telling me that you have got quite a surplus of council houses. Maybe they are not all in the right place! You have got a surplus because people are choosing not necessarily to go into those, but if you have got that, you know, you might find quite a number of young people who, if they are offered them at really a knock-down price - because if people do not necessarily want them there is some reason - it might be a start. If you have got this great ambition of young people - 80 percent - you have got to try to find ways either of using your present &dubellip;
There is another scheme - homesteading - that was started in London about fifteen years ago when Horace Cutler was Chairman of London Housing. You used to take some quite tumbledown old houses in very very bad condition and say to young people: “All right, you can have them as they are!” A knock-down price because they had a lot of work to do on them and then say: “You can have a grant - a home improvement grant - with which to do this up; we will provide you with a mortgage; you will have a period of grace of three years in which you do not have to make any payments on that mortgage and during those three years you do the place up! You have a grant and you do the place up!” It was marvellous, because you found someone marrying an electrician, someone else marrying a plumber, someone else marrying a telephone man, someone else marrying a house-painter - they all did it between them and it was fantastic, but that is another way. It may be that you have not got any tumbledown houses, but it was really very good. [end p15]
What I am trying to do is to enlarge the opportunity to meet this pent-up demand of, I think, quite rightly, people would like to own their own home. But it is good! The desire to own your own property - and particularly the home, which is the centre of your life - is very deeply felt and if it is coming up to 80 percent, then we have to try to make arrangements and more and more imaginative arrangements to meet it.
Interviewer
I think it was so popular in Scotland that it got so expensive you had to put a bit of a cap on it.
Prime Minister
Which one, the homesteading?
Interviewer
The grants coming in to do up old property.
Prime Minister
But you see, many people, again, have quite a yen for old property.
Interviewer
I mean tumbledown, broken … [end p16]
Prime Minister
What struck me … I went to look at one the other day … there was a nurse who was marrying an electrician and they had an old Edwardian house with a good structure. We did not do it unless the house had a good firm structure. They got married and they camped in the place, but goodness me, the spur and the stimulus was terrific.
Interviewer
Do you, to some extent, regret the effect that the high interest rates may be having on this movement towards private property because it is going to retard it to some degree?
Prime Minister
Yes, I do but you know, if you look at people who have purchased houses, they borrowed money at the same value as when they purchased the house. The money did not gain in value - the money was subject to inflation - but the house gained, the capital asset has gained in value, so it is worth putting as much as you can into it.
The people for whom one feels most deeply is you always, when you are buying a house, whether it is your first house or your second, pay a bit more than you can afford. You do! You say: “Look! I cannot afford more than £x-thousand!” and the one you see [end p17] is £x+2,000 or £x+3,000 or a little bit more than that and you think: “Well, we will really make an effort!” and if you are caught in that bracket when the interest rate goes up, it is difficult.
We do not believe the latest increase of interest will lead to a further increase in mortgage rates because, quite frankly, so much money is floating into building societies that they are having difficulty in lending it all out at their present interest rates, so we do not believe it will lead to that.
But as you know, the wages, salaries, earnings of men in Scotland are higher than elsewhere and when I look at the house prices there, well you would understand that we would love houses of that standard at that price, but the real difference is in the value of the price of land because the demand for land down here is so colossal that the price has gone up.
Obviously, every generation wants a higher standard of living than their forbears had, of course they do! There would be something very wrong if they did not and whereas we would go and put in white-wood furniture and buy it from sales-rooms and paint it and so on, it is not quite so frequently done as it used to be because they wait until they can get nice furniture. But it is worthwhile putting as much as you can into your house, particularly if it is the sort of house you can stay in for several years. That is why I am so keen on the partial purchase or the homesteading, because I [end p18] think if I could have my life over again - I have moved around quite a bit - I think I would not have moved more than twice, once from a start and then into what became the family home, because I think that if you have a family home … but then I have moved round, first because of the constituency, then because Denis ThatcherDenis moved round … if you have a good family home, it really adds such enormous stability to society. It is the place you can always return to and so enabling people to get half a house or alternatively - I do not know how many builders are doing it - doing houses on a slightly bigger patch of land, so that you can have an extension on your house without destroying the symmetry of it - and we are all after conservatories, it adds another room!
With the private sector you have to cater for - and the private sector does - a range of desires and wishes, but you must try to make that opportunity so we are trying with the training &dubellip; I just may tell you … I went to Napier College three or four years ago … it is fantastic. I have never seen a better one. I was very excited.
Interviewer
The Principal wants to turn it into a university. [end p19]
Prime Minister
I had not heard that, but it is fantastic.
Industry working well; all the latest things; everything the latest thing. They were right up and right ahead and my goodness me, I guess those young people who come out of there are snapped up.
Interviewer
What do you feel about the other Scottish universities, some of whom have been feeling a lot of pressure and strain, particularly Aberdeen and to some degree, Glasgow, I suppose?
Prime Minister
You know what has been happening. The money was allocated by the University Grants Committee and it looked not only at the quality of teaching but at the quality of research. It is not easy to do. It is not a thing government can do. So we said we had better leave it to some of the scientists and the people who run the University Grants Committee and, of course, some got a bigger grant, some got less. We did not hear anything from the ones that got the bigger grant and we heard an awful lot indeed - I did as a dean - got a lesser grant which I must confess surprised me because to those who live south of the border, you know, anything as far north as Aberdeen is absolutely superb, supreme, because of the reputation of it. Aberdeen was just fantastic as well as St. Andrews, and it came as quite a surprise to us. I know that some people felt that [end p20] maybe they would do better if the Scottish universities were in a group of their own. We did set up a little group to enquire, but only two universities wanted to be in a separate Scottish group and six wanted to stay within the whole university family. Perhaps they felt that that way they had wider contacts and wider capacity and opportunity for arrangements between one university and another because there are so many specialities these days and they each have their specialities as well as their general education. Six said “No!” and they wanted to stay and only two said not, so in the end we have had to compromise under the new University Grants Committee - it is now called the University Funding Committee. There is a Scottish group within that, so that we hope to get the best of all worlds. They have their particular Scottish interests catered for but also they keep all of their links with the wider university world because the university world is tremendously important.
I cannot over-emphasise it. As so much of your industry becomes science-based - and that is not only the electronics industry and the chemical industry - so many of the processes, as you know, are science-based. The traditional industry - your processes are science-based, whether it is in your dyes, whether it is in the processing in your textiles, whether it is in your conveyor belt line, whether it is in your ordering mechanism, your invoices, it is all science-based and so the applied science factor of industry is enormous. [end p21]
But also you look to industries because they are there to do the creative things, to do the basic research and you never know where that is going to take you, but also to think quite different thoughts. They are the creative part of our lives and you never know what scientific breakthroughs are going to happen. Well, of course, Glasgow Wet is an example, where they are doing the research on AIDS which, of course, is also linked up with the whole immune system. But do not think of universities as just training for vocational things or even just training for cultural things because although that is an enormous enrichment part of our lives. It is for the new science, also for the new ideas, which will unlock all sorts of things.
Let me put it this way: so many of our problems are really behavioural problems. Why do people take to drugs? Why do they do certain things? Educated people from quite prosperous homes! There is a streak of violence. Football hooliganism has been with us for a very long time. There is always a streak of violence. If you think back, some things which we stopped over the years were awful - dog-fighting, cock-fighting. A terrible streak of violence in human nature and all of our standards that we have arsquouired, really much higher standards of civilisation over the last two hundred (years?), all of a sudden you find the violence coming out and taking new forms. [end p22]
I gather you have got a problem with crack in Edinburgh. Edinburgh! I mean, to us, the zenith of culture, beauty, of finance, the Edinburgh Festival, hard work, so in a way you have got some of the real behavioural problems which is not easy to unravel.
Whether it is that with the new opportunities that science has brought - and television has brought enormous new opportunities and you know what is going on half the world over, you can see wonderful things about the sea around us, you can see wonderful things about architecture, you can see wonderful things about wildlife, there are some marvellous films about the Arctic and Antarctic; you can see marvellous plays, you can see wonderful orchestras, you can see the Glasgow Opera, you can see marvellous things about Scottish life, but whether it in fact has stopped quite a lot of personal contact, both within the home and discussion - that it is too easy to sit down in front of television, instead of going down to your church group or whatever you used to do, to the Scouts, to your hobbies, what it has stopped and whether it has stopped the fundamental communication between parents and children, between grandparents and children, between going out to a group of people, not necessarily sometimes of your own age group, sometimes an interest group, and whether you have lost a lot of that personal contact I do not know, whether people are crying out for more personal interest to be taken in them and their problems. That is [end p23] why I say the other contact is so important. We do not know, but what we do know is that prosperity does not necessarily solve all your problems. You think by the time you have got a good house, a reasonable income, a good education, good health, goodness me, most of your problems are solved. That is not so. You are left with the real problems of human nature. [end p24]
Interviewer
On this thing about personal contact, it is a question we put to Malcolm Rifkind a lot. I wonder about your personal contact with Scotland and the Scottish people. They have an image of you, a probably misunderstood one or an inaccurate one, I do not mean to be offensive, but as a dragon to quite a lot of people in Scotland?
Prime Minister
It is confounded every time I go up there by the people I see. You know, I enjoyed going to Torness enormously and they very kindly and thoughtfully, everyone came in, all the staff, very kindly and thoughtfully allocated quite a lot of time for me to go around and the families came in and they all sort of said: “Oh well, we did not know it was like this”. [end p25]
Interviewer
Did not know you were like this?
Prime Minister
No, but how can they? Because it is not the image that is given. It is not that I do not do it, I have a constituency just as much as other people do. I get around about, I am to be found in the middle of crowds, I am to be found always going around.
Interviewer
It is not easy for you to make personal contacts for all the security reasons.
Prime Minister
Oh well, we do, we do dash into the crowds.
Mr Bernard Ingham
But also Prime Minister, you visit Scotland more than any other part of the British Isles.
Interviewer
More than Yorkshire probably.
Prime Minister
Well yes, it is very lovely to go to. [end p26]
Interviewer
Another thing that was occuring to us, we do not want to go into the great devolutionary thing because we have been into it so often, but it seems to us it is not just a matter of economic affairs, there is a sentiment to the devolution thing?
Prime Minister
I entirely agree. But what I have just been saying to you is just that in connection with other things. Do not think life's problems are solved when you have got a good standard of living, good prospects, a nice house and a lot of leisure time. It is not, you get a different set of problems.
Oh no, but no-one has ever suggested that the material solved everything, it does not. You have got the purpose of life but of course you have got a Scottishness, good heavens, thank goodness you have. I mean that is part of its importance. It is more than part of its importance, it is part of its fundamental nature.
Interviewer
But you do not feel you can address this sentiment by devolutionary methods?
Prime Minister
We do address the sentiment. Look at the great Scottish Regiments, look at the great Scottish things. It is just there, the Scottish songs, the Scottish music, the Scottish scenery, the Scottish interests. [end p27]
Interviewer
But not a Scottish Assembly?
Prime Minister
But how very prosaic can you get? I have just been talking about things which are much more sort of within, the Scottish poetry, the Scottish literature, the Scottish architecture. Look at the old Scottish entrepreneurship, the fact that when they turned to be successful, many of them overseas, they were among the first to turn and say: “As I prosper myself, so have I prospered others”.
They go the world over, they never, never, never lose their Scottishness, thank goodness. Neither, if I might say so, do the Irish. Heaven knows, it is because the Scottish do not lose their Scottishness and the Irish do not lose their Irishness that we have some other problems.
But there you are. No-one denies that, on the contrary, you try to enhance it. It is an asset, it is fantastic.
Interviewer
But there does seem to be a block to the rejuvenation of the Tory Party in Scotland, this thing.
Prime Minister
I do not know. The last Party Conference was really a whole different spirit there. I said to Denis ThatcherDenis, you know you get a feeling. [end p28]
Interviewer
So do you think the tide has turned perhaps?
Prime Minister
Well, I thought it was much much, it was just different, it was more optimistic.
Interviewer
You were speaking in a very interesting way, Prime Minister, about the influence of television on people's lives and there is this review of the broadcasting legislation going on at the moment. You were also speaking earlier of trying to improve access to television by smaller companies. Do you think that …
Prime Minister
More companies, not more companies, more wavelengths, more channels.
Interviewer
Do you think that one of the results of the Broadcasting Review will be to break up the ITV cartel, the five companies award themselves 80 percent of the … [end p29]
Prime Minister
You have got your ITV one, it is your regional channel, that is built deeply into it and that must be maintained. You have got a slight problem because all of those companies which broadcast at the moment think they have a divine right to do it with a little local monopoly for ever more and of course that would stop others from coming in and you cannot stop things from changing.
So we have got a problem as to how we keep that regionalism and to how in fact you allocate the licences. In fact, that regional requirement continues whoever holds the franchise, it is that franchise that they have to bid for. And also they have to come up to certain standards because it is not part of my creed, and I do not think it is any part of your creed either, that we should have any lowering of standards.
People will have different tastes, different varieties, but there are certain standards, whatever your taste, below which the thing must not fall. Very rarely does one intervene on people's different choice. But on certain standards you have to, because otherwise you would find your society corrupted by one thing or another.
So that is why we have to set certain standards and why we are going in fact, for example, to extend the law on obscenity to BBC as well. It should never have been exempt. It should never have been exempt and why you have certain standards, not operated by Government but by a body set up by Government. [end p30]
Once you have got the standards, the standards in two ways, those basic standards, plus the fact that the requirement will be that they simply must operate a good news service. So you have got to have another rival good news service to BBC, a good competent one, a good news service, and they have got to have a variety of programmes. They are not going to be able to go to the cheapest, easiest thing the whole time. So you have got a double set of standards in the sense of certain basic standards and also standards in variety.
Then you are quite right, the question is how then, when everyone who applies has to come up to that, how precisely does the new Broadcasting Authority allocate? And that is exercising our minds very very much indeed and also exercising the minds of the new Broadcasting Authority.
The other thing is that one does feel very much that no one person should be able to get control of too much. And that is quite right. Obviously some of your newspapers can have one, or something like that. You ought not to have control of too many, not to be able to blanket, no one owner ought to be able to blanket an area because you simply must keep various different viewpoints going.
Now these are what I call the natural protections to a free society. That is what I operate really, that in a free society it is not a question of saying you do not intervene, my goodness you do. [end p31]
You intervene to keep standards and freedom working because if you did not intervene, the set of framework, you intervene with the law. Then you would find certain monopolies working, I hate monopoly, it is no part of my belief, competition is my belief.
Sometimes when you are having competition, if you have one big fellow and a little fellow, the little fellow does not have a chance and that is what you are saying. So you have got to make your competition operate so that you do not in fact, although you look to have a competition, it is not real.
So our intervention is to make freedom work because it is only the law that makes freedom work and makes the opportunities spread. So we are giving a lot of thought to that very thing. Competition has to be genuine. There are some things when you cannot have too many companies because they are all fragmented. It has to be genuine and it has to be genuine in certain areas. You cannot have one person blanketing too much because it gives one person too much power and that is bad.
Our creed, as you know, is to get power and responsibilities spread throughout society. With that goes the spread of ownership, spread of power and responsibility. What is the point of educating people more and more and then saying: “But you shall not be able to take the decisions which affect your own life”? [end p32]
The irony is, in the days of Scotland's fantastic days when she went the world over with Empire, the irony is that those people who went out to Empire, who went out to be Colonial District Governors, who went out with the Armies, with the Administration, with the Law, they could not get on the telephone and say: “What do I do now?” They made their own decisions and the letter that they had written got to London two months later and the reply, if lucky, may be back three months later.
But the irony was that they were people who were prepared to make their own decisions and stand by them. Many of them were products of common sense and experience and self-education, others were the products of the very good educational system that we had. But they made their own decisions fearlessly and they were good because they knew the locality.
How very ironic if, when we have got everyone having compulsory education up to sixteen, a large number going on to eighteen, a lot going on further, if they shrank from making decisions and always transferred them upwards because you can get them on to a telephone or a computer. Wouldn't it be terrible?
Interviewer
Ambassadors too. [end p33]
Prime Minister
Yes, Ambassadors too. Life has many ironies. As you raise the standard of living you must be careful that you raise the importance of the individual and do not diminish it.
Interviewer
Do you think any of the problems that you were talking about earlier, like hooliganism and football troubles and so on, is some sort of expression of unexpressed energy in the country? That because of the very thing you are talking about, that we do not have the Imperial theatre in which to express ourselves any more?
Prime Minister
No, I do not think it can be altogether that because do not forget the overwhelming majority of people do not do it. You might have heard me say this before, but when we went to Toronto for the Economic Summit last year, I had been there before, but I had not really looked around and as I went in this time, I was looking around me very carefully because the first evening I had to go out to several different things which took us in different parts. I looked round straight away, it was not just the centre of the city that was clean, the streets were clean, I did not see, everywhere we went I did not see one graffiti, not one. [end p34]
Prime Minister
And so at dinner the second night I raised it and said: “Look, you have solved some of our problems. Why do we not start to analyse success instead of complaining about what has gone wrong? What is it?” Toronto is a very growing city, lots of people coming in, and they said: “We have people coming in from all parts and from all different backgrounds and people of all different European cultures. Each of them brings up their own families and says: “Now don't you let us down. We keep our place clean. We belong to a certain school and do not let us down”. So it is the ordinary people keeping up the standards and low crime.
In Liverpool the other day I went to look around a new housing association run by Tony Gann, a remarkable person in Liverpool, also with the Roman Catholic Church, where they are taking people out of a bad area, putting them into a very good housing association and they consulted the people about what sort of houses, about the sort of lay-out, it is fantastic. Houses done in rather gentle yellow brick with nice red brick round the windows, not the oblong boxes but with a gentle roof and gables.
As we went in, the people had said what they wanted, nice big kitchen, so there was a kitchen part and of course you all ate in a rather nice dining part of the kitchen, a nice big kitchen, good big main room, downstairs cloakroom and one good-sized bedroom upstairs and a good-sized family bathroom with separate toilets. And then they had done all the built-in cupboards, then they got shelves, they had thought about the teenage son who wants to pack everything away, and another one. [end p35]
And as I went round, and it was a mixed age because they also had family houses but they had houses for the retired, all mixed in, and I went to see the two ladies who had just moved in the previous day and then I went to a family house and in the area people were moving in.
They all knew their local policeman, there was a good community policeman on duty, they all knew them. And they said, some had been there for longer than others, they said: “We have no crime round here, we all know one another, we can tell immediately if there is a stranger and there is usually a policeman on duty.”
Now is it not this coming together of communities with the community spirit that will tackle it? Is that not what happened in Toronto, that the communities came but they kept their separate identity?
And here, I thought that that showed a really considerable way forward. And then I went in my own constituency, I was asking about crime, and I went to two different police stations both running big Neighbourhood Watch schemes. In one area the crime, with all the Neighbourhood Watch scheme covering was about 40 percent down.
So when I went a few months later to another, we got in the people, the representatives from the Neighbourhood Watch schemes, and they were saying: “Look, we have lived in the same street for years, we did not even know one another.” [end p36]
It is the same thing, it is a restored sense of community which really is a restored sense of interest in one another. Yes I think there is a streak of violence in human nature, of course there is, it has been there, look, life was so very much more violent. And one of the characteristics of civilisation is how to get rid of the violence.
We had terrible violence in the gladiatorial battles in ancient Rome and people watched! We got rid of it and it was done by training, by saying to people, you teach frankly that violence is wrong and you have to punish it if it is caught. But it is, I am sure, this sense of community is important because it is people again taking much more responsibility and having much more influence and sense of interest.
Interviewer
I was wondering if I could take you on to the Soviet Union …
Prime Minister
Incidentally you get it much more in smaller places, you will get it. The difficulty has come, as we have gone into larger and larger cities, can you keep that sense of community or has it become impersonal? And if you have not got it then you have to revive it, because many big cities are really a collection of small villages. That was how London grew up, and some retain their identity. [end p37]
Interviewer
Yes, back to small units again.
Prime Minister
That is how you run an army.
Interviewer
I wondered if you noticed, two things, Gerasimov in Moscow yesterday saying that they would like to go back to business as normal with Britain and they seem to be modifying their approach to our people there, and I wondered if you feel that you can still do business with Mr Gorbachev?
Prime Minister
Oh yes, I think what they had was a Pavlovian reaction, the same way as in Georgia, they had a Pavlovian reaction. That is to say when they had the riots in Georgia they put the tanks on the streets and they used not only tear gas but other things.
The KGB, they knew and they had a Pavlovian reaction. Now that was what I struggled to prevent, if I might put it that way, to give them a chance. They had the Pavlovian reaction, I think now they have perhaps had second thoughts.
And yes, we do try to do business with them, and will continue to, making it quite clear we are not going to tolerate the intolerable, but we want the enlargement of liberty and it is going to be a much more difficult process than they think, I think we are seeing a little bit of the old guard again. [end p38]
It would be surprising if they could do in ten or twenty years what it took us centuries to complete. But of course you will get, in any great movement forward, with countries as well as with people, of course you will get relapses. But you do not give up, you just go on and try to overcome them.
Because you know when he read out the thing about journalists he clearly said: “Well I am just reading from my script”. But it is what we have been saying, it has not penetrated, there is the biggest bureaucracy in the world. I say in the world, it may be also in China.
Very interesting as one watches both very carefully. And when they have been told what to do, and minutely instructed, and they are left without instructions or the instructions have not been changed, they go on acting according to the old instructions.
So yes, you will get drawbacks and setbacks but in these great forward movements you do not give up.
Interviewer
Did you see his speech yesterday about his defence budget?
Prime Minister
We have been right, we have been right the whole time, we have been saying, and then they say: “No, no, no, we have not got that many, no, no, no, we have not”. And they have been saying: “No, no, no, we have not got as many chemical weapons”, so we are waiting for the real assessment of those. [end p39]
Interviewer
It is part of your anxiety about Europe, related to this process that is going on in the East, the re-emergence of Central Europe as a political entity almost which seems to be taking place, and you are clearly concerned that the European Community might be undermined by a drift into quasi-socialist principles. Do you see that as part of the same picture?
Prime Minister
Some of the same, but obviously different against a background. There are some people who like controls and bureaucracy because they think that that is the way you act in government and you have to set controls over everything.
We had it here in the post-war period and what do you get, I can tell you, you get a black market then, we had so many controls so we escaped from it.
There are two broad ways of running government. One is, which I believe in, and which informs and activates the whole of the United States because they have not got a socialist party, one is that your government, only your government can do certain things. The defence of the realm is one. The fundamental running of the general finance soundly, whether it be your value for money, it is your duty to have honest money, or whether it be keeping within your budget, and therefore you cannot give into every demand for popularity. [end p40]
And when democracy becomes nothing but an auction of promises then it has failed. So you have got your defence, you are running the economy soundly. Thirdly, you have got to try to have an education system which gives opportunity. Obviously I feel passionately about this. I would have been nowhere if one had not had opportunity.
But do not necessarily think that education is something you only learn in school. I learned a lot of it at home and really this is where Scottish people in days of yore must have learned a lot of it at home and so did Scottish Jewish people and English Jewish people because the whole of the Jewish faith was very very much founded on knowledge, culture, transmission, and so did all of those who were passionate believers in any other form of religion.
You see they had their education really from the very best books, if I might put it that way. The reading was from things like, from your Shakespeare, from your great literary works of the times and plenty in Scotland. They had their great knowledge from the literary works, from the great philosophical works, and from the great economic works. So they were automatically learning the best, but it was a combination of a passionately interested school and also people passionately interested in education. But the background of it came almost by definition from the best books because the others were not printed. [end p41]
So you really had almost a set of standards built in and everyone, everyone teaching along the same thing. Education is a bit different now, we have to keep the same standards, so you have got to have defence, finance, education. You must have a rule of law because it is only that which makes freedom work and so you have to have things against violence.
But also, as I do sometimes say to people, I cannot stand monopoly, that is why I have rules about competition. You have got to have rules which enable trade to operate within. This was why one of the great periods of conservatism was the period of Shaftesbury who went around and said, look, first he founded a ragged Sunday School and then started to go round factories and said: “These standards will not do”, so we had to have higher standards and have maximum hours in which women and children worked.
Disraeli went around the cities as, of course, people in from the rural areas and went into the cities and created new problems and realised that the first step to public health was the right drainage and water and refuse collections.
So, let me go again: defence, finance, opportunity, public health and cleanliness which eventually extended to the Health Service, the opportunity of education and a basic safety net, because in the kind of community in which we live you cannot in a highly sophisticated community leave it any longer to people in the village who automatically would have looked after it, do not forget, in Elizabethan times, that is when your Poor Law started. [end p42]
Life is so sophisticated that you must make a reciprocal arrangement with one another which manifests itself in the Beveridge National Insurance Scheme, I will look after you and you will look after me, so we all pay a weekly insurance premium.
Now you do all of that and within that you set a framework of law for trade and you leave then people to get on with it. You set certain laws and rules about ownership so you maximise the freedom and the decision-making so it is a limitation of government to those fundamental things and then you leave people to get on with it.
So you really see it. People think the market economy is a theory. It is not. It is the market place working as it worked in a village, as it works in the High Street. You have got your standards, you keep within it, and then in fact you know how to respond quickly to people's needs.
All the others, and I have seen it so often, who say: “No, we want to know what is being exported, what is being imported. We want to see a credit sale, right put a stopper on credit”. They have no idea that if you put a stopper on something somewhere, you have got to see that it does not promptly come out somewhere else with a new distortion. And it does, and it does.
There are other people who will say: “Now look, just get a regulation about everything.” Now frankly, what that does, if you do it, is to make certain you cannot compete with the goods from overseas. [end p43]
You have the regulations necessary and the law necessary, but you have a strict limitation on government.
Let me say just one other thing. Some people regard democracy as it is all right provided you put every single question to the populous and if you get 51 percent, yes, then your 49 percent are dissatisfied and so be it.
Now what I am saying is the role of government is limited. You do have to have that role about which kind of government you should have. But if you extend democracy into every single sphere of life, you are denying personal liberty. Personal liberty is not subjecting every decision to majority rule. If you did you would have 49 percent or the minority dissatisfied every time.
Personal liberty and liberty of the subject and human rights are respecting the rights of minorities, respecting personal liberty within a general rule of law. That is the doctrine of limitation of government to which your democratic system applies and withdrawing from a whole lot out of your voting system. And the market place is each person exercising their choice so they do not get, say, 51 percent wanted red socks and 49 blue socks, so they all have to have red socks. They all get what they want because government has withdrawn from a whole area of life. And that is when your trade thrives. [end p44]
Interviewer
So if I understand you correctly, you are resisting the regulatory ambitions of the Commission? [end p45]
Prime Minister
And also of the regulatory ambitions of Socialism. We had to ditch an awful lot of regulations and, look, business has thrived once people got used to it. It took two or three years to percolate through and then business began to thrive.
Interviewer
But according to your five principles, they would not exclude a common European currency if a genuine liberalised and unified market did emerge?
Prime Minister
You cannot, in fact, force people to go to a common currency. Why should you? Why should you say: “No! You shall not be able to have either the English pound or the Scottish pound!”? Why should you? You should not make that sort of condition. [end p46]
Interviewer
But it might emerge if you had a genuine Common Market!
Prime Minister
I have got rid of foreign exchange controls - they have not! Well, Germany has and Holland has, Denmark has, we have - the others have not. I have got rid of foreign exchange controls and we had to fight a battle. Some of them were saying: “We cannot have freedom of capital movement unless every country has the same tax on the interest which you get from the capital!” I said: “Certainly not! What you are wanting to say is you people who have got high tax on the interest from capital, you are wanting the rest of us to come up to your tax as a condition of freedom of capital movement! What right have you to put an extra constraint on us when we have already got freedom of capital movement?”
We fought that one through and we have won it and I have been reviled for doing it, but you see, there are some people who say: “No, we cannot have freedom unless you have the same constraints on you as we have on us!” But I say: “No, that is not the object at all! Certainly, we have to have safety standards for electricity, we have to operate on similar standards for television, otherwise we shall not be able to sell it throughout the Community; as a matter of fact, we have to have similar standards for cars, otherwise we shall have about ten or twenty different standards. But what you are saying is you are trying to put far too many regulations on. [end p47] Just because Germany happens to have a company which has the trade unions represented on the board, that suits Germany, she has only got nineteen unions and they are very cooperative; why should you try to impose that on everyone else? We are going for a much more important system - every earner an owner. I am not trying to impose that on you!
We have to watch, but we are steadily winning the battles.
Interviewer
You mentioned being reviled and we are in the middle of an election campaign here.
Ted Heath's rudeness to you and his outburst about Peter Brooke, for example; this is surely rather damaging to your campaign, isn't it?
Prime Minister
We all know Edward HeathTed.
Interviewer
You said that yesterday!
Prime Minister
And I am not going any further! We all know Ted. He is free to say what he wishes to say, just as I am, just as you are. [end p48]
Interviewer
You do not think that he represents a tendency in the Party of any significance?
Prime Minister
No. I think he naturally feels particularly sensitive about anything connected with Europe because he did the negotiations under Macmillan's time, which were abruptly terminated when De Gaulle said “No!” and then he re-did the negotiations, which led to us signing an agreement in 1971 and so naturally he feels particularly sensitive about it and that is natural.
Interviewer
I wonder if I could ask you for your comments on the recent events surrounding Lord Mackay, the Lord Chancellor, in The Free Presbyterian Church. Did this strike you as in any way a bizarre series of events?
Prime Minister
Of course we were concerned. James Mackay is one of the best people, an immensely talented man, the most modest person, more concerned to do the right thing, more concerned for other fellow beings. I cannot think of anyone who I know who is a better man than James Mackay and a better person than his lady wife. [end p49]
What forms his whole life is to try to use his talents to the glory of God and for that to happen to him, we feel very deeply about it, very deeply indeed, and that depth of feeling is shared by many people, I think, in his own church and throughout Scotland, and everyone who knows him and I have always said both about James Mackay and also about George Thomas who was our Speaker of the House of Commons, when they are no longer with us there will be a massive guard of honour by the whole heavenly host in the next world! There really will, because he has been such a marvellous example.
Interviewer
I can imagine George Thomas enjoying that very much indeed, this guard of honour!
Prime Minister
There will be a whole guard of honour of the heavenly host.
The admiration, the fundamental respect, the affection, the fundamental feeling for this remarkable man whom we are so lucky to have as Lord Chancellor, the admiration for him is unbounded.
Interviewer
Do you think this behaviour by his church was abhorrent in a way that you were talking about earlier? [end p50]
Prime Minister
I cannot understand it. It is not for me to criticise. I cannot understand it but we are deeply concerned about it. Lord MackayHe is just a fantastic man. He is just a very very good man. That is what I really wanted (to say). He is such a good man and not in the pious way - a fundamentally good man. Kindly. The admiration for him among everyone who knows him is absolutely boundless, but at the end of every day I think he is one of the people who can really look himself in the face and know that he has done his level best - and it is so - the most excellent best of anyone I know. We are very lucky to have him.
He has got such a warm sense of humour too, such a lovely turn of phrase.
Interviewer
He has been getting quite a hard time from the English lawyers as well.
Prime Minister
A little bit and we are all standing up for James Mackay.
Interviewer
Are you going to give everybody a nice summer holiday this year again, so they know where they stand? [end p51]
Prime Minister
I must tell you I had not thought of this at all and have been horrified at what I have seen in the press, but please let me say this to you: I have not thought of this and I have no idea where it came from, except it must have come from someone who says: “Well, the time is coming up, let us preempt it!”
But please! Do you know how much hurt you do to them, to their families, to their children who are vulnerable? It is wounding. You wound!
Interviewer
Do you think it is damaging to the stability of the pound with all this speculation about Nigel Lawson or indeed Geoffrey Howe for that matter?
Prime Minister
Nigel LawsonNigel is a very good neighbour of mine and a very good Chancellor. Geoffrey HoweGeoffrey is a very good Foreign Secretary. I am not going any further.
You know that I have to do reshuffles from time to time. I hate them! Why? Because I have got a very very good Cabinet, but I know that there are young people who just have to have an opportunity as others had it. I hate them! I have to work myself up because I know that I have to do them. I hate them - and so will they! [end p52]
It is the worst aspect. You work with colleagues whom you respect, who do a really good job and the only reason you sometimes have to ask them to go on is because there are other young people who are also looking to demonstrate their talents and abilities, and fortunately there are people who leave Government who frequently go on to use their talents and abilities in another sphere and also it gives you a number of elder statesmen on your back-benches - that is also very important - so they get a new respect.
But the fact is that however nicely and gently and with regard we try to do it, you people will put on the headlines: “So and So sacked!” and it is not true.
Interviewer
I suppose it is a pity one cannot have a fixed time for it.
Prime Minister
You ought to have someone in the lobby who does a reshuffle every year. Then you might know what it feels like!
Interviewer
It is often fed by the politicians themselves. It is not entirely our fault! [end p53]
Prime Minister
It is not fed by me and I tell you, I really have to make myself do it, not because I want to - because it is essential to the political process.
Interviewer
Prime Minister, we have overrun our time and I would just like to express our gratitude for talking to us.
Prime Minister
Thank you for coming. Did you get some of the answers?
Interviewer
Yes, it was most interesting.
Prime Minister
It is better to do it this way because politics are not just a series of questions and answers. It may be in the House of Commons, but there is always a reason.
Interviewer
Have you had a chance to look at Hugo Young's book? [end p54]
Prime Minister
I will tell you something: I have never read a book about myself and I do not intend to start now! I have got much more important things to do and more interesting things to do! I have never read a book about myself.
Interviewer
I think that makes the point, because it is a long, continuous process, politics, going back a long way.
Prime Minister
Yes. I think that some of the early social reformers had an easier time than we did because they thought: “Right! We will get rid of poverty! We will get decent housing, a decent income, a decent health and a decent education!” and hey presto, we could get the overwhelming majority of people happy, etc., and not doing wrong things, but now we are up against the problem of human nature and it is much more difficult to cope with.
Interviewer
And expectations.
Prime Minister
And expectations.