DAVID TORRANCE HAS WRITTEN an enthralling book. It is refreshing to read a serious work on Scottish politics that is carefully impartial, and free from the self-righteous complacency that has distorted so much writing on the subject in recent years
.
This book is a meticulous record of what actually happened in Scotland under Thatcher, what she was seeking to achieve and why, setting it in the true context of those times and within the wider picture of the whole United Kingdom. It is fair to both sides over the great controversies and battles of the period and, by buttressing his conclusions with extensive quotations from a wide range of sources, including recent comment from the lady herself, the author produces what could become the definitive record of one of the most dramatic chapters in Scotland's political history.
It is common ground that the 1979 general election marked a watershed. The post-war consensus was abandoned. Margaret Thatcher was determined, not to manage decline, but to rebuild Britain and to do so based on the sound principles that had imbued her upbringing and were at the core of Conservative philosophy.
The time was right. In hock to the IMF, in thrall to militant trade unionism and with the economy collapsing, Britain was a basket case. There was a mood for firm action; and she responded.
In a recent interview quoted by the author, she speaks of "my determination that the policies I believed were necessary to revive Britain should be applied everywhere – no part of the United Kingdom should be left behind". Why, then, did so many Scots feel that they received a uniquely heavy dose of the medicine?
Partly because Scotland was the crucible of those state-dependent heavy industries that were most in need of a firm hand. Disfigured by nationalisation, starved of capital, bereft of enterprising management and beset by militant unions, these out-of-date monoliths were already shrinking, despite massive subsidy, when she came to power. De-industrialisation, as the author notes, was already well under way in Scotland.
She took the tough decisions that accelerated that trend, but in doing so she also brought down inflation and interest rates; and after the leap in unemployment as she cleared away the detritus of past failures, a new trend developed that was exceptionally beneficial to Scotland. During the 1980s and for years afterwards, new jobs and new industries flowed into the country.
George Younger, as Secretary of State, had used the special nature of that position to soften the sometimes harsh rhetoric of the time and to retain, with Thatcher's agreement, the highly advantageous public spending differential that Scotland enjoyed. She kept open most Scottish steel plants throughout her term of office (though it did take the threat of resignation by Malcolm Rifkind and myself to save Ravenscraig in the late 1980s). By then, though, as Torrance says, average Scottish incomes were among the highest in the UK, as was GDP per head. Inward investment was pouring into Scotland and employment and productivity were growing faster than anywhere in the UK.
Inevitably, the book addresses the battle of the poll tax. As the author points out, a tax seen by so many Scots as the ultimate manifestation of anti-Scottish Thatcherism was actually introduced in response to urgent demands from Scotland to ease the burden on hard-pressed Scottish rate-payers.
The introduction of the community charge was a serious, though rare, political misjudgment, but its underlying philosophy was one of greater fairness and it was intended to strengthen, not weaken, democratic local government.
On devolution, while Labour were late converts in 1974 when they saw their heartlands threatened, Torrance lays out interesting new material on how Margaret Thatcher carefully and slowly extricated the Conservatives from the pro-devolutionary hook on which Ted Heath had impaled them six years earlier.
She saw clearly the threat to the UK, and to Scotland, that devolution would bring and eschewed the easy populism of supporting it. She was absolutely right to do so, as subsequent events have shown. Those who suggest that Thatcherism brought about devolution talk nonsense: it was never a high priority in the public opinion polls of the time, but once Labour built their long-running campaign of grievance politics upon it, it took on a sad inevitability.
Margaret Thatcher changed the political weather, which is why today the Browns and Salmonds of this world can parrot Thatcherite policies with impunity. She blazed the trail and bore the resultant opprobrium. She did not deserve it, as more and more people are beginning to recognise.
Torrance is a perceptive historian who records fairly her achievements and her shortcomings. He understands her sensitive nature, her integrity and her courage. He dispels many of the vicious myths that enveloped her and acknowledges her love of family and community and her encouragement of self-help as a means of helping others.
Her "Sermon on the Mound", now uncontroversial, was born of simple faith, modestly offered – and received with snide discourtesy by a General Assembly that should have known better. It is published in full in an appendix.
No other politician has had their full-length bronze statue erected in the House of Commons during their own lifetime so perhaps there, at least, the myths have begun to die away. Now, this impressive and comprehensive book may light the way for her true qualities to be recognised at last, even in Scotland.
