U-turn if you want to: why politicians can't change their minds
Any change of policy is open to the charge of a U-turn—but why is changing your mind such a fatal mistake in politics?
“To those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catchphrase, the ‘U-turn’, I have only one thing to say: ‘You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning!”
It was one of Margaret Thatcher’s iconic moments. When the Conservative Party met in Brighton for its annual conference in October 1980, she had been prime minister for a little under 18 months, and things were not going well. The economy was in recession and unemployment had just reached two million, the highest it had ever been since the Labour Force Survey was introduced in 1971, and probably higher than at any point since the Great Depression of the 1930s. In the period immediately after the Second World War, jobless rates had been so low that it was generally considered there was “full employment”—Lord Beveridge had defined that as unemployment below three per cent—and maintaining that was a major plank of economic policy of both the main parties.
Thatcher had changed that consensus, rejecting Keynesian economics and replacing full employment as a major goal with bringing down inflation, which was over 13 per cent when she took office. Milton Friedman, the monetarist professor of economics and Nobel Prize winner who had helped shape the Chicago School of economics, was one of Thatcher’s gurus, and had argued that there was a “natural” level of unemployment of about five or six per cent. Thatcher knew that the medicine she was administering to the British economy would be unpleasant, but she had determination and self-belief in abundance. Her cabinet, however, and her parliamentary party were not, by 1980, dominated by “true believers”, and many took the view that the economic shocks had now lasted long enough to suggest a change of course. The commentariat shared that view. Inflation had actually risen, while the government’s expenditure cuts were biting. In many quarters, then, there were hopes that she would see sense and change tack.
That was not Thatcher’s way. She was almost at her best with her back to the wall, and she delivered the line “The lady’s not for turning” with emphatic and imperious disdain. The assembled party members loved it, and the applause was resounding. It had been written for her by Sir Ronald Millar, the moderately successful playwright who had been her speechwriter since 1973, and was in fact a pun: it played on the title of Christopher Fry’s 1948 play The Lady’s Not For Burning, a three-act romantic comedy set in the Middle Ages. In Millar’s mind, it had been almost a throwaway, his emphasis having been placed on the preceding, also punning, phrase “You turn if you want to”, but there was something about Thatcher’s delivery, and the resonance of the phrase “the lady”, that made it the punchline.
The impact of the phrase and the speech were profound. Not only did it assert the prime minister’s defiant resolution at that moment in time, but it set a tone which is with us today: when a government performs a U-turn, it is somehow showing weakness, lack of determination or simple opportunism, avoiding a difficult but correct path in order to seek cheap public approval. As I wrote over the summer, this has now transformed itself into the dangerous notion that, not only is a U-turn bad, but that an unpopular or even seemingly damaging choice is ipso facto a proof of being right. This was echoed in 1989 by the then-chancellor of the Exchequer, John Major, when he had said of his measures to reduce inflation, “If it isn’t hurting, it isn’t working.” It was a dangerous piece of rhetoric, since harmful policies are not necessarily the right ones, but it was both a good excuse for poor economic performance and very much in keeping with one side of Thatcher’s character as reflected in the times, the stern, no-nonsense, non-conformist self-discipline which she had imbibed as a young girl.
The important context of Thatcher’s speech in 1980, which we often forget now, was her searing memory of the Heath government of 1970-74. It was a fact that Edward Heath himself liked to forget, but when he won an unexpected victory at the general election of June 1970, he did so leading a shadow cabinet which had agreed on a relatively right-wing manifesto. In February of that year, Heath and his top team had met at the Seldson Park Hotel, near Croydon, to formulate new policies. The Conservatives had been soundly beaten by Labour’s Harold Wilson in 1966 and were smarting after more than five years in opposition.
The most radical idea proposed, but not adopted, was that of Maurice Macmillan, son of the former prime minister. MP for Farnham and a frontbench Treasury spokesman, he struggled with alcoholism and perhaps disappointment that he lacked his father’s gifts, but he was generally a moderate and progressive Conservative; but at Selsdon he suggested that the National Health Service might abandon universal provision at the point of delivery and meet only up to 80 per cent of the costs of treatment. His boss, shadow chancellor Iain Macleod, quickly stamped on this idea: he had been minister of health in Winston Churchill’s post-war government and a founding member of the One Nation group of backbenchers in 1950, and he argued that the scheme would prove too expensive for ordinary voters.
Although few dramatic policies were agreed, the press, who had been led to expect a big story, were briefed that the Conservatives were embracing a platform of law and order, extensive reforms to trades unions, a tough stance on immigration and a whole-hearted adoption of free-market principles; it was a slow news week and the idea of an ideological shift was probably blown out of proportion. It did not help that Wilson, for all his faults an instinctive campaigner, seized on the meeting the following week when he spoke to Labour Party workers in Nottingham, and, with his unerring gift for phrase-making, raised the spectre of a new kind of Tory, “Selsdon Man”.
Selsdon Man is not just a lurch to the right. It is an atavistic desire to reverse the course of twenty-five years of social revolution. What they are planning is a wanton, calculated and deliberate return to greater inequality. The new Tory slogan is: back to the free for all. A free for all in place of the welfare state. A free for all market in labour, in housing, in the social services. They seek to replace the compassionate society with the ruthless, pushing society. The message to the British people would be simple. And brutal. It would say: ‘You’re out on your own.’
The phrase “Selsdon Man” was, of course, a play on the famous 1912 archaeological “discovery”, Piltdown Man. Invoking an early form of hominid was cunning, as it associated the Conservatives with brutal unsophistication, but the added element of genius was that Piltdown Man had been conclusively unmasked as a hoax in 1953, so there was a double meaning.
The Conservative Party probably went into the 1970 general election with an image of misleading radicalism. That hardly seemed to matter at first: after the win that no-one expected him to pull off Heath could be forgiven for feeling assured and confident, and he was never a man for whom a belief that he was right was difficult to achieve. His major goal, of course, the guiding principle of much of his adult life, was to take the UK into the European Economic Community, which he would do in 1973. But he also promised a new kind of seriousness of purpose and earnestness, a sober approach to government in contrast with Harold Wilson’s intensely political and conspiratorial nature. The two men, born in the same year, were strikingly similar in background, both clever lower-middle-class boys who had used scholarships to grammar schools to find their ways to Oxford and had then had successful wartime careers, Heath in the Royal Artillery and Wilson for a while as research assistant to William Beveridge, master of University College, Oxford, then as an economist an statistician at the Ministry of Fuel and Power. But while Wilson disliked Heath, who was not an easy man in social terms, Heath despised Wilson, regarding him as a pragmatist devoid of any real ideals. He had a point; as historian Philip Ziegler said of Wilson, “if you had showed him a principle on a plate he would hardly have recognised it”. But it entrenched Heath’s determination to pursue a new kind of politics.
The economic policy of the Heath government suffered a serious blow, from which it never really recovered, when the chancellor, Iain Macleod, died of a heart attack a month after the election. His replacement, Anthony Barber, was an able tax barrister who had taken his law degree from the confines of Stalag Luft III in Lower Silesia, but he was a not a figure of much independent weight in the party and was notable for his loyalty to Heath. The Guardian lamented on his appointment “it is hard to be convinced that he has the weight or the intellectual tenacity to carry it with the Treasury”. Economic policy did not go well: the Selsdon manifesto with its commitment to the free market was largely discarded, and in January 1972, unemployment reached a million for the first time in more than 20 years. It is difficult to appreciate the horror that mass unemployment represented in the minds of those who had come to maturity in the 1930s; for many of them, it was a profound moral issue, not merely an economic one, and had the potential to strike at societal stability.
1972 would become the year of the great Heath U-turn, which shattered the government’s credibility and for the first time held up a substantial change of policy as a failure of statecraft. In the March 1972 Budget, Barber cut taxes extensively—to the tune of two per cent of GDP—and increased pensions and benefits, injecting £2.5 billion (about £31 billion in today’s equivalent) into the economy. Disastrously, but with resonances for our own time, it was mostly paid for by borrowing, but Barber claimed to be relaxed, remarking “I do not believe that a stimulus to demand of the order I propose will be inimical to the fight against inflation”. His aim was “to achieve a rate of growth twice as fast as in the past decade”, adding 10 per cent in two years, and to preserve jobs through tax concessions to industry.
Predictably, with the money supply having increased by a quarter between 1971 and 1972 already, inflation continued to surge upwards. As public sector pay increases hit an average of nine per cent, investors became uneasy. In June, Barber temporarily floated the pound as the trade balance deteriorated, and many feared it was a first step towards devaluation. In May 1971, Heath had already abandoned his opposition to government intervention in industry; as aero engine manufacturer Rolls Royce Ltd ran into financial difficulties, the government decided to nationalise the concern through the Rolls Royce (Purchase) Act 1971, separating out the profitable but financially insignificant car manufacturing division. But this taxpayer but-out would not be a one-off, despite the trade and industry secretary, John Davies, telling the House of Commons in late 1970:
We believe that the essential need of the country is to gear its policies to the great majority of people, who are not lame ducks, who do not need a hand, who are quite capable of looking after their own interests and only demand to be allowed to do so.
The phrase “lame ducks” would be a haunting one.
Perhaps the totem of the great U-turn was the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders. The consortium had brought together five Glasgow shipyards in 1968 in the wake of the Shipbuilding Industry Act 1967, the brainchild of Anthony Wedgwood Benn, then minister of technology. The government owned 48.4 per cent of the new consortium, and provided an interest-free loan of £5.5 million for three years. UCS seemed in good health, with orders on its books worth £87 million, but by the end of 1970, it was operating at a loss. One of the yards, Yarrow Shipbuilders Ltd, was still profitable but had left the consortium in April. Shipbuilders in Japan and South Korea had been challenging the Clyde for some time, though Glasgow-built ships still had a formidable reputation for quality; but industrial relations deteriorated throughout the 1960s and sapped their competitiveness. Creditors began to lose faith, and government loans were needed by shipyards more and more to keep going.
It was a significant feature of industrial relations at UCS that the union leaders were in the main intensely political. The most prominent was Jimmy Reid of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering and Foundry Workers (AEF), a Govan-born engineer not yet 40 years old and a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Thought to be most powerful was Reid’s AEF colleague, a ship fitter from Renfrew called Jimmy Airlie, younger still than Reid. He too was a Communist. Sammy Barr, a welder with a persuasive manner in speaking and writing, was a welder and shop steward for the Amalgamated Society of Boilermakers, Shipwrights, Blacksmiths and Structural Workers (ASB). Again, he was a Communist Party member. The youngest was Sammy Gilmore, an electrician and convener of the Electrical Trades Union (ETU). Gilmore was a Labour Party member, a Bennite avant la lettre, and had an impressive line in dry Glasgow wit; during one conversation with Heath, he told the prolix prime minister to “cut the commercials”, while a journalist from London who complained that his telephone calls after hours went unanswered was told, “Did no one tell you? Govan shipbuilders go jogging on a Friday night.”
By 1971, although UCS had orders through to the following year, cashflow was a problem.When Heath intervened to help Rolls-Royce, the management thought the chances of assistance from Whitehall might not be as remote as they had thought, and asked for a working capital loan of £6 million. It was essentially a bridging loan, since they would receive income from the ships under construction, and UCS had better prospects than Rolls-Royce, but the government, having been burned once, was in no mood to compromise. The request was refused.
To understand why Upper Clyde Shipbuilders became such a symbolically importnat issue, why the government acted in the way it did, and why its U-turn was of such great significance, one needs to understand the context of the debate. The first factor was that the very existence and nature of the UCS consortium was objectionable to some of the more free-market members of the parliamentary party. In 1969, Nicholas Ridley, a junior trade and technology spokesman, had drafted a confidential memorandum on the subject. The chain-smoking younger son of a viscount, Ridley was clever, impatient and rebarbative, seeming to revel in the hostility of his colleagues on both sides of the House, and he was one of the earliest Conservative MPs (he had been elected for Cirencester and Tewkesbury in 1959) to embrace the Chicago School of economics. He had spoken to Scottish business leaders, and UCS was agreed to be an example of everything that was wrong with the economic settlement: an industry which relied on state support to stay competitive, and one dominated by powerful trade union interests, some of the leaders of which were openly Communists.
Ridley had a solution, typically radical. Reporting that one industrialist had described UCS as “a cancer eating into the whole of Clydeside industrial life”, he recommended that the consortium be “dealt with by a government ‘butcher’”, who should “cut up and to sell cheaply to the Lower Clyde and others the assets” then dispose of the government’s substantial minority stake “even for a pittance”. Harsh words and a harsh approach to a consortium which did, as the unions would point out again and again, have orders on its books; but for Ridley it was ideologically incompatible with the sort of economy he thought his party wanted to build.
By the summer of 1971, Heath’s cabinet had something resembling a plan. Although they had bailed out Rolls-Royce, that would be an end of it, and the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, if matters came to a crisis, “should be allowed to collapse”. After that, ministers believed, the private sector would come in and salvage what could be reconstructed on their own, free-market terms. They did not have to wait long. Cashflow ran out in June, and UCS was forced into receivership. The government would not bail the yards out, so liquidation seemed the only possible outcome. And so it would have been, had not the union leaders done an extraordinary thing: instead of going out on strike to protest at the impending closure of their employers, they staged a “work-in”, intending to fulfil the orders still on the books and show that the yards had a future. This way, they hoped, they would force the government to change its approach.
Jimmy Reid became the public face of the unconventional protest. He was a remarkable man; born into soul-crushing poverty in the slums of Govan on the south bank of the Clyde in the summer of 1932, he was the son of a shipyard worker and spent his early years in the unhealthy squalor of the area which had been a separate burgh from Glasgow until 1912. Three of his sisters died in infancy, and Reid would forever say, with profound anger, that they had been “killed by capitalism”. He left school at 14 to work as a delivery boy and become involved in the Labour Party but quickly sought out the more radical politics of the Young Communist League. While an engineering apprentice at British Polar Engines—a significant achievement for a Roman Catholic, as most of the technical trades had unofficial sectarian bars to entry—he was one of the organisers of a national apprentices’ strike in 1951, and he became ever more active in the union movement thereafter.
Reid was enormously charismatic, his manner somewhere between a revivalist preacher and a Calvinist minister, and always a voracious reader, giving himself an extensive political education in Elder Park Library in Govan. He also developed a firm grasp of Marx and Lenin from his Communist Party membership. His charm and fluency made him a hypnotic figurehead for the unions, and the speech he gave to the thousands of assembled workers when the protest began was electrifying.
We are not going to strike. We are not even having a sit-in strike. Nobody and nothing will come in, and nothing will go out, without our permission. And there will be no hooliganism, there will be no vandalism, there will be no bevvying, because the world is watching us, and it is our responsibility to conduct ourselves with responsibility, and with dignity, and with maturity.
His oration, which was largely improvised, set out a wider notion which seized the imagination of a public stretching far, far beyond Govan or Glasgow. It was delivered in his rich Glasgow accent, bearing Govan’s Highland influence in its occasional sing-song intonation, but, unlike the stereotype of the Glaswegian, precisely and clearly enunciated.
Financial and moral support for the striking-but-not-striking workers poured in from around the world. Fundraising events were held, there were public declarations of solidarity from people like Falkirk FC and former Rangers striker Alex Ferguson, a childhood friend of Reid’s, and Billy Connolly, then with folk group the Humblebums but beginning his career in comedy, who had known Reid as a shipyard worker. John Lennon donated £5,000, Reid was able happily to announce to his fellow workers at one meeting (a bemused listener was heard to remark “But Lenin’s deid”). Eventually a fund of £250,000 was raised.
The work-in subverted every norm of industrial relations. It was not a stoppage, nor days lost, and it was the senior management who were locked out, not the workers. They were fighting for a right to work, and, so far as the outside world could see, were soberly and responsibly proceeding with the commitments of UCS. The government did not know how to respond to this innovation. In October, Davies told the Commons that he was working with the liquidator, and argued that the UCS workers were, at best, mistaken when they claimed that the consortium was still viable.
It is already abundantly evident that the ship orders being worked on by the liquidator are likely to realise a heavy loss, as will the new work needed to maintain employment at Govan and Linthouse. Financial guarantees will be required from the Government to enable him to do this and will be included in the further statement to be made. This refutes the assertions that UCS was on the verge of turning the corner into profitability. Moreover, the likely scale of the funds involved in putting a part of UCS on the road to ultimate prosperity reveals very clearly how unreal was the claim that the whole concern could have been saved by the injection of some £6 million. That might have tided the situation over for a few months but was entirely inadequate to set it on the road to viability even if ship orders to sustain all four yards had been at all in view, which they were not.
Even so, Heath could not stop the shipyards operating. Labour’s shadow trade and industry secretary, Anthony Wedgwood Benn, who would the following year begin to shed his upper-middle-class, public school-and-Oxford chrysalis and emerge as “Tony Benn”, threw his considerable influence and dynamism behind the UCS workers.
As the year ground to an end, there was still no solution. The workers proceeded, but Davies reiterated to the House in December that “the establishment, through Govan Shipbuilders Ltd., of a viable merchant shipbuilding undertaking remains the Government’s aim”. Behind this bland reassurance, the government was starting to wobble. On 28 February 1972, Davies announced to the House that Govan Shipbuilders were confident that they could take control of three of the yards—Govan, Scotstoun and Linthouse—and transform them “into a complex fully up to comparable European standards for similar construction”. The proviso was that the transformation would take time, perhaps three years, and they would need financial support during that time.
The government gave way. Davies expressed his concern, but conceded “I am prepared to propose legislation to this House to carry through this project”. That was the U-turn, exposed for all to see. The government, having spent nine months resisting the demands of the UCS workers, had run out of ideas and resolve, and would bail the shipyards out as they had bailed Rolls-Royce out. After that, it was a total collapse of willpower. On 21 March, Barber delivered his budget, in which he began a “dash for growth” which he hoped would create an unrealistic 10 per cent growth over two years. He raised pension benefits substantially, cut two of the various rates of purchase tax (which would be replaced by value-added tax when the UK joined the EEC on 1 January 1973), introduced greater relief on estate duty and cut income tax at a cost of £1 billion. He proposed to borrow £3.4 billion to pay for these measures. The economy leapt ahead, but the “Barber boom” contained the seeds of the government’s destruction. Inflation rose from seven per cent in 1972, to 9.2 per cent in 1973 and 16 per cent in 1974. By the summer of 1972, Barber had to float sterling, and it rapidly devalued. In November, the government introduced a temporary freeze on pay and prices, swiftly replaced by a Price Commission and a Pay Board. Any free-market instincts the Heath administration may have had were dead. Any lever of state control would do, but none seemed effective. The government fell in February/March 1974.
I have dwelt in the events of 1972 in such exhaustive detail for two reasons: firstly, it stands as the first great charge against a government of making a U-turn: of abandoning previous policies and principles as a kind of admission of failure. The shockwaves of the change in direction, and their calamitous effect on both the British economy and the fate of the Heath government, resonated so loudly that they effectively created a political trope.
There is another reason: the disintegration of the Heath government was immensely traumatic for the Conservative Party. In some ways it was a necessary trauma, since it prised the party away from the Keynesian economic consensus of the post-war decades which was clearly beginning to fail, and created the space for new thinking to emerge, a space into which Margaret Thatcher, Sir Keith Joseph, the Institute of Economic Affairs and others would step and revolutionise both the party and the country. But while the change would come, and by the mid-1980s Thatcherism would be more or less the party’s orthodoxy, the waning of pre-Thatcher ideology was slow. Although she was elected Conservative leader in 1975 and became prime minister in 1979, she remained in a very small minority in her cabinet until at least 1981. The Heathite old guard remained powerful until the 1983 general election.
Once the idea of a U-turn in politics as a humiliating climbdown or abandonment of principle was established after 1972, it proved a remarkably versatile narrative device. It was not much seen during the 1980s, since Thatcher was a devout believer in herself and in consistency. Once she knew what her goal was, and how to achieve it, she rarely found it necessary to alter course. But shortly after her removal from office in November 1990, the Conservative government carried out a U-turn which was essential for its own survival.
Local government in England had been funded by domestic rates, a tax based on the value of property, since at least the Poor Relief Act 1601. By the 20th century, a revaluation of property, more accurately to calculate taxpayers’ liability, was supposed to be carried out every five years, but the exercise was often delayed or cancelled, not least because it tended to result in higher charges. But there was a widespread feeling by the 1970s that it was no longer a satisfactory basis for taxation, and Margaret Thatcher, in her very brief stint as Heath’s shadow environment secretary in 1974, pledged to do away with rates and find an alternative system.
When the Conservatives returned to power in 1979, local government finance was not at the very top of the new government’s agenda, but in 1981 the Department of the Environment published a Green Paper entitled Alternatives to Domestic Rates. The environment secretary, Michael Heseltine, had rehearsed a number of options: personally he felt a local sales tax was the most logical option, but observed that “as we lowered income tax nationally, local Labour authorities would push up tax locally”. He considered an individual flat charge, a “poll tax”, which had simplicity in its favour, and would also “ensure that voters identified much more clearly the consequences of voting for high spending—invariably Labour—authorities”, but would appear deeply unfair to the electorate, since the richest would pay as much as the poorest. For a time, the government contented itself with capping rates which were raised to levels it regarded as too high, but no long-term decision was made on its replacement.
In 1986, another Green Paper, Paying for Local Government, eventually endorsed a poll tax, albeit with concessions for the poorest. It described these as “proposals for the most radical reform of local government finance in Great Britain this century”, which was quite true, and advanced a splendidly coherent intellectual argument for the idea of what would be called the Community Charge.
The [proposals] would widen the tax base so that virtually all adults would have a financial stake in the affairs of their local authority; they would ensure that the full costs or benefits of any changes in a local authority’s expenditure would fall on its domestic taxpayers alone; and, while non-domestic ratepayers would still make a significant contribution to local government expenditure overall, authorities would no longer be able to finance extra expenditure by taxing them at their own discretion. Together these reforms would ensure that the accountability of local authorities to local electors would be greatly enhanced.
It was a scheme which must have warmed Thatcher’s logical, rationalist heart, and she would remain convinced of its fundamental fairness until her dying day, but she could not see the presentational challenge; nor, it must be assumed, did anyone draw her attention to the events of 1379, when Parliament authorised Richard II to levy a poll tax to raise money for the ongoing Hundred Years’ War. This raised far less money than expected, and was so unpopular that it became a significant contributory factor to the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.
The Community Charge, a fixed tax per adult resident of a council jurisdiction, waqs the brainchild of Kenneth Baker (environment secretary 1985-86), William Waldegrave (minister for local government 1985-86) and Lord Rothschild, a one-time oil executive who had been head of the Central Policy Review Staff under Heath from 1971 to 1974 (though he took the Labour whip in the House of Lords) and chairman of the family business, N.M. Rothschild & Sons Limited, briefly in 1975-76. Waldegrave had worked for Rothschild in the CPRS and turned to him as a highly intelligent and informed but apolitical adviser when tasked with finding a new system of local government finance, despite Rothschild priding himself on having no “political” judgement. Indeed, the peer would to Thatcher after the drafting of the Green Paper:
The community charge is, I believe, a winner. But I am nervous lest it is accidentally or deliberately misinterpreted, for example: ‘Tories hit the poor again’, ‘No compassion for the have-nots’.
His words were prescient, yet he could not see it. The rest still haunts the Conservative memory: the idea was contained in the manifesto for the 1987 general election, enshrined in legislation by the Local Government Finance Act 1988 and, disastrously and arguably unconstitutionally, implemented first in Scotland in 1989/90 then England and Wales in 1990/91. Opposition was massive, widespread and visceral, bursting into violence on the streets in early 1990 and making many Conservative MPs wonder if Thatcher’s magic touch with the electorate was not waning but gone, and when Michael Heseltine challenged her for the party leadership in November that year, it was enough to unseat her and allow the emergence of John Major as prime minister.
It was obvious to anyone that a U-turn was now not just unavoidable but desperately needed. When Major faced the Commons for his first Prime Minister’s Questions on 29 November, he was guarded on the future of the poll tax, saying primly and non-committally:
We have decided that we shall look again to see what further refinements may be necessary to ensure that the community charge is accepted throughout the country.
But the decision had already been taken to abolish this hated tax. In forming his cabinet, Major had—rather brilliantly—offered Heseltine a return to his first cabinet post, environment secretary, which he had held from 1979 to 1983, on the understanding that his primary task would be to replace the Community Charge. Heseltine gave the job of devising alternatives to Michael Portillo, minister for local government and then an arch-Thatcherite, and Robert Key, under-secretary of state responsible for local government and inner cities. Possible replacements were systematically leaked to the media to gauge their likely reception, and the result, after delays which frustrated the prime minister, was the Local Government Finance Act 1992 which introduced the Council Tax, still in effect, based as had been domestic rates on the value of a property and payable per household.
The advent of the Council Tax did not solve every problem. By 1993, the cumulative costs of introducing and abolishing the Community Charge, bringing in Council Tax and allowing for non-payment of the poll tax and subsidies to local government had cost more than £25 billion. The ferocity of the public reaction to the poll tax had enabled an activist movement of non-payers—rates of refusal were as high as 20 per cent in urban areas and 10 per cent in rural districts—many of whom saw the dismantling of the Community Charge not as an end of the matter but their first major victory. And Council Tax did nothing to address the accountability problem that councils were still only responsible for raising perhaps a fifth of their income, the rest coming from Whitehall.
On the change of policy itself, however, there was little negative media comment. Indeed, what is extraordinary is the extent to which the heat went out of the issue once the end of the poll tax was announced in 1991, even though there were two more years until it ceased to apply. It melted into a larger picture of a more generous, less doctrinaire and harsh Conservatism: while the party’s essential ideology remained popular, the fall of Margaret Thatcher, the election of the emollient and self-effacing Major and the party’s surprising win in the 1992 general election seemed in the public imagination to smooth off the rougher corners of the Thatcher years without endorsing a change to Labour administration. It was astonishing that there was little personal blame attached to any individual. Major had been chancellor for the last year of Thatcher’s reign, Kenneth Baker, in charge of the Department of the Environment when the Community Charge was devised, had become home secretary in 1990, Waldegrave had joined the cabinet as health secretary, Portillo became chief secretary to the Treasury in 1992 and Chris Patten, environment secretary 1989-90 and in charge of the actual implementation of the poll tax, masterminded the 1992 election victory as party chairman (though lost his own seat in Bath to the Liberal Democrats). The U-turn, then, had virtually no casualties. It was as if Thatcher’s fall represented a cleaning of the slate.
Even as adept a political operator as Tony Blair could not avoid the U-turn’s hidden quicksand altogether. In 2000, the Police Foundation, a think tank which focused on law enforcement, published a report called Drugs and the Law, which examined the provisions and application of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. Written by Dame Ruth Runciman (Viscountess Runciman of Doxford), who had been chairman of the Mental Health Act Commission 1994-98, it proposed that the classification of illegal drugs should be based more closely on scientific evidence of the harm caused by each drug, and recommended that cannabis be reclassified from Class B to Class C. This would make possession of cannabis a non-arrestable offence and reduce the number of often young, otherwise law-abiding young people being criminalised and potentially sentenced to a custodial term. This would, the report argued, reduce the friction between police and local communities, and save police time and effort.
After the 2001 general election, David Blunkett replaced Jack Straw as home secretary. Often underestimated because of his blindness, Blunkett was tough, ambitious and single-minded, and had long harboured ambitions of taking over the Home Office, where he would prove a robust, some said authoritarian, minister. He had been education and employment secretary throughout the 1997 Parliament and was judged a success, delivering concrete improvements in school results. His time as home secretary would be dominated by national security, as the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington came only months after his appointment, but six weeks after that world-changing day, he announced that the law governing cannabis would be changed.
In line with Runciman’s recommendation, cannabis would become a Class C substance, stopping arrests for possession at that point running at 90,000 a year. More than 40 per cent of schoolchildren were estimated to have tried cannabis, and the administrative burden alone of dealing with the drug was enormous without obvious gain or any sign of usage decreasing. It would remain a prohibited substance, but the maximum sentence for possession—now only prosecuted under a court summons rather than arrest—would drop from five to two years, and for possession with intent to supply from 14 to five years. These changes had first been mooted in 1981 by the Home Office’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, and, for anyone who judged that a “war” on drugs had manifestly failed, it was a welcome step towards a more rational and harms-based policy. Sir John Stevens, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, endorsed the move, saying “Reclassification could reduce the time spent by officers dealing with such offenders, enabling them to concentrate on tackling more serious crimes such as street robbery”.
The changes came into effect in January 2004 after some debate over the penalties for redistribution. Polls suggested nearly half of the adult population supported decriminalisation of cannabis, with only 36 per cent opposing it; in 2004, arrests for possession fell by a third, saving an estimated 199,000 hours of police time. Blair and Blunkett seemed to have found the magical synthesis of Blair’s early motto, “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”, with practical, evidence-based policy and broad-based public support. But by the end of 2004, Blunkett was gone, having been forced to resign after allegations that he had (deep breath) fast-tracked the renewal of a work permit for the nanny of his former lover, Kimberly Quinn. He was replaced by Charles Clarke, his successor-but-one as education secretary, a ferociously clever but abrasive and combative former Labour Party apparatchik whose father, Sir Richard, nicknamed “Otto”, had been a permanent secretary in the 1960s. Like Blunkett, he was tough on order and security. But in January 2006, on advice from the Advisory Council, he announced that he did not intend to reclassify cannabis again; however, he stressed to the House of Commons that “Everyone needs to understand that cannabis is harmful and it is illegal”, and said that he would begin a review of the whole system of classification. He also instructed police to toughen their approach to producers and dealers of cannabis.
A U-turn was not predicted, but sure enough, Gordon Brown, newly appointed prime minister, was asked at Prime Minister’s Questions in July 2007 whether Sativex, a cannabis-based medicine used to treat the symptoms of multiple sclerosis, would be licensed for use in the UK. Brown seized on the question: he told Martin Salter, who had raised the matter, that Sativex was under review by the medical authorities, but added that the new home secretary, Jacqui Smith, would publish a consultation paper on future drugs policy which would explicitly raise the issue of whether cannabis should remain in Class C or return to Class B. It sounded as if the review was not entirely open-minded; one of Brown’s key allies, Ed Balls, appearing on election coverage in 2005, had pointed to the invasion of Iraq and the reclassification of cannabis as mistakes from which Labour had to learn.
The review concluded in May 2008. Professor Sir Michael Rawlins, chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, recommended that there be no change to cannabis’s classification, warning that such a move “is neither warranted, nor will it achieve its desired effect”. Smith noted the advice but chose not to follow it. She told the House:
In reaching my decision, I have also taken into account the views of others, particularly those responsible for enforcing the law, and the public—58 per cent of whom, according to a survey carried out for the council, favour upgrading cannabis from class C.
The home secretary acknowledged that cannabis use was falling across all age groups, and adduced from this that the government’s drugs strategy was a success. But she also warned the House that the cannabis market was now dominated by skunk, a powerful and more dangerous form of cannabis, and that it should be understood that this was “an illegal and harmful drug” (being in Class C did not contradict this). Having set out the various points made by the council, but refuting their scientific advise, she insisted:
My decision takes into account issues such as public perception and the needs and consequences for policing priorities. There is a compelling case for us to act now rather than risk the future health of young people. Where there is a clear and serious problem, but doubt about the potential harm that will be caused, we must err on the side of caution and protect the public. I make no apology for that. I am not prepared to wait and see.
It is always a bad sign when politicians “make no apology” for a decision. Prima facie her judgement made no sense. She did not dissent from the facts laid out by the advisory council, and she was not, to use a more recent phrase, following the science: this a politicians has every right to do, but what was curious about Smith’s conclusion was that she did not cite any addition, non-scientific evidence. She simply made the opposite choice from the scientists, emphasising potential risk and weighing it much more heavily than had Rawlins. Her decision was “part of the relentless drive to tackle drugs and the harm they bring to families and communities”, yet she admitted that cannabis use had fallen across all age groups following reclassification as Class C. She ignored the fact that the council had described evidence of a substantial link even between skunk and mental illness as weak. That she was criticised by the council’s former chairman, Professor Colin Blakemore, and leading drugs informatiopn charity DrugScope, but grudgingly supported by the shadow home secretary, David Davis, suggested that it was a judgement of politics, not science.
This was the oddest of U-turns, as it was an entirely unforced error. Even Davis, for the Conservatives, while agreeing with the outcome, said witheringly “This long-awaited U-turn has followed delay, dithering and indecision when the country cries out for leadership”, and he couldn’t help but note that the issue had been given to the council in 2007, a year had gone by, and the council’s careful and meticulous advice had then been rejected. The Liberal Democrats opposed the measure, their spokesman, Chris Huhne, saying “Cannabis use is falling, as is the incidence of psychosis. We need public education, not public flagellation.” The UK Drug Policy Commission was also critical: “We are very concerned about how political this debate has become. The drug classification system is a very poor vehicle for communicating the risk of drug use to potential users.” Transform, a drugs lobby group, dismissed the row over classification as “distracting” from the broader argument over full legalisation. Even The Daily Telegraph, while content with the outcome, had harsh words about the process.
Ministers relied on two arguments in the wake of the reclassification. The first was the greater potency of skunk, though they failed to explain how the return of cannabis to a Class B substance would affect this, since the effect of becoming Class C had been to reduce usage overall. And they pointed again and again to the fact that there was evidence of a link between skunk and mental illness, even though the council had considered this and found it weak. Some police officers maintained that reclassification would “send a message” to users and potential users, but this had been all but refuted by the council, and users who were willing to speak publicly suggested that it was an ineffective move.
New Labour had always been haunted by the idea of being seen as soft on crime, an accusation which the Conservatives had usefully and repeatedly levelled at the Labour Party in the past. It is often forgotten that for the two short years of John Smith’s leadership, from 1992 to 1994, Tony Blair had been shadow home secretary, so this policy area had been his everyday concern, and as early as January 1993 he had written an article for The New Statesman in which he had suggested that the Conservatives had run out of ideas on law and order. Cleverly, he had argued that crime could not be solved by the individual, the fundamental building block of the Thatcherite world view, but needed to be addressed in the setting of the community. Labour was more comfortable on this ground, where it could be teated as a “people’s” issue; nevertheless, he used robust language, given not an inch, and it was here that he had deployed the phrase “We should be tough on crime and tough on the underlying causes of crime”. It was this issue, one almost of generational or even existential anxiety for the party, that had driven the decision on cannabis.
It was true that deaths from cannabis use dropped dramatically after 2009. But then they began to climb again, and increased threefold in 2014, which suggested that classification was not the decisive factor. Usage of the drug did not fall appreciably after 2008, while hospital admissions for cannabis psychosis fell between 2004 and 2009, but rose after 2008, suggesting that reclassification had in fact had an adverse effect (though the study admitted the potential reason for any casual link was unclear).
Smith did not remain in post very long. She was forced to resign in the summer of 2009 after various irregularities with her parliamentary expenses, and was replaced by Alan Johnson. In any event, a sense of listlessness had set into the government. Brown had considered calling a snap general election in the autumn of 2007, shortly after becoming prime minister, and there was substantial evidence he would have won it. But caution overcame him, and he seemed determined to see out almost all of the parliament’s full five years. As time wore on, he and his ministers looked more and more stale, and could display fewer and fewer fresh ideas. In that context, the U-turn on cannabis was merely a symptom of a wider malaise and loss of purpose.
In the past couple of weeks, Rishi Sunak, not a man you would necessarily associate with daringly disruptive political strategy, has quietly but with some force subverted the very narrative of the U-turn. First with his speech in Downing Street on 20 September on achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050, then in his speech to the Conservative Party conference in Manchester on 4 October scaling back the extent of High Speed 2, he made a substantial reversal in policy terms into a presentational virtue which even spoke to his character and to the theme of the general election campaign. When he mitigated some of the measures to achieve net zero, such as delaying the ban on new petrol and diesel cars from 2030 to 2035, he attempted to show that he was in tune with the pressures on ordinary people and seeking a way to take the financial sting out of well-intentioned environmental measures. It also showed him as a pragmatist, determined to ‘do what works’, rather than a blinkered ideologue.
The same held true for the cancellation of the Manchester leg of HS2. Again, it was about fiscal discipline and avoiding wasteful spending: the costs of HS2 have spiralled so far out of control, as well as other challenges facing the basic need and business case for the project, that simply the Manchester leg was projected to cost £36 billion (in 2009, the whole HS2 was estimated to have a cost of £37.5 million), which was a sum of money Sunak claimed to find impossible to accept. As a result, he announced that all of the budget would instead be spent on various road and rail programmes around Yorkshire and Lancashire, improving connectivity between cities like Liverpool, Manchester, Bradford and Sheffield. Again, pragmatist, but also an ability to assess quickly what needs to be done and to get it done with decision, clarity but minimum fuss. He hoped to prove himself to be discreetly disruptive. The jury remains out on both charges, but it was certainly a bold course to steer at a time when the party is so far behind in the opinion polls that its cause can look hopeless.
This leads, I think, to a broader question. Why has changing one’s mind become such a toxic act in modern politics? The classic response is to cite the economist John Maynard Keynes: “When the facts change, I change my mind: why, sir, what do you do?” It has some force as an aphorism (although there is no record of Keynes saying or writing it; it has also been attributed to Winston Churchill, but then what hasn’t, or more plausibly may have been misattributed to Keynes by Professor Paul Samuelson of MIT, who cited it in 1970). Its simple underlying meaning is clear. If the facts of a case change, then any sane and mentally flexible person will reassess his or her attitude to accommodate the new reality. U-turns, therefore, should be all right if they are executed against a very different background. Certainly, you could make the argument that HS2 was planned and unveiled in 2009, before the pandemic, before Brexit, before the financial contraction of recent years; such is the pace of change, remember, that the investigation into a potential second high-speed rail route in the UK was launched only two years after the first iPhone was launched. So we have come a long way.
There is an alternative perspective, and it’s one which is defined by the factor that no observer of politics should ever forget, which is the paucity of interest the average voter has for anything he or she defines as “political”. Almost every U-turn, I imagine, could be explained away, justified by a persuasive speaker armed with a arsenal of facts and figures. But the electorate has no time for nuance, and so in a 90-second story on the media, it is much easier to explain that the government, or the opposition, or anyone has performed a U-turn than it is to analyse and express the rationale behind a policy having been suitable in the past but no longer sensible.
Changing one’s mind can also easily be portrayed as a lack of resolution or indecisiveness. The argument goes that if a politician is willing to switch from one proposal to a different one, one might wonder how committed he was to the first, or how committed he will remain to the second. Perhaps he simply does not set down deep intellectual roots, is a lightweight, a dilettante.
The end result is that we strap our politicians into intellectual straitjackets, demanding that we make decisions once and there after cleave to them for dear life. You are for something or against it; you are a suburban commuter or an intercity traveller, you are a free trader or a protectionist. These are all different, sometimes antithetical concepts, but politicians do change their minds, both when the facts change and when they haven’t. I am as guilty of this as anyone. In this week’s City AM, column, I listed some of the matters on which Sir Keir Starmer has changed his mind—in fairness, there are many—and then tried to draw some observations on the tenor, the mood, the philosophical atmosphere of the current Labour Party. And it is not easy. Perhaps I may be permitted at least to point out that Starmer and his top team have abandoned several ideas but incoming plans have not matched their weight. They are suffering from an ideological balance of payments problem.
It is not a habit of commentators I expect to change. It would be nice if the frenzied “Gotcha!” nature of the reporting was toned down, and we understood the way that the context of politics was an ever-changing landscape, where in we looked to our leaders not for mulish consistency but for the nous, the imagination and the rigour to adapt to the changing financial, ideogical, diplomatic, military and socio-cultural winds which buffet us.
I hope this longer-than-expected (by me, no less than you) essay has explained why changing course became such a difficult matter in politics, and the extent to which it is permissable to alter commitments and undertakings one has given. We will see how well the prime minister’s counter-intuitive, narrative-adapting U-turns on net zero and HS2 play to an electorate which must by now be growing weary of all politicians. But next time you hear a politician or a party accused of a humiliating U-turn, just ask yourself why they have changed tack, what it says about their underlying beliefs in world they are trying to show us, and how far journalists simply want the tension between opposites that any good story has to have.