Originally published on Oxford Policy Podcast.
In this conversation, Nick Fabbri speaks with Lord Michael Heseltine, former UK Deputy Prime Minister and leading figure in the governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major. In this interview, we reflect on Lord Heseltine's love of gardening, his time at Oxford University and presidency of the Oxford Union, his political career and lessons in leadership, his approach to public policy solutions including privatisation and the revitalisation of Liverpool, as well as Britain, multiculturalism, Brexit, and relations with Europe.
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Lord Michael Heseltine is a giant of British politics, having served as a Conservative Member of the Parliament from 1966 to 2001. He was a Cabinet Minister in various departments in the Heath, Thatcher and Major governments from 1979 to 1986 and 1990 to 1997, and Deputy Prime Minister under John Major from 1995 to 1997. Lord Heseltine later served as an advisor to the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Growth under David Cameron's administration, and as a Commissioner on the National Infrastructure Commission (October 2015 to March 2017). He is the founder and Chairman of the Haymarket Group, and runs the internationally-acclaimed Thenford Arboretum and Gardens.
Transcript below ^_^
[Nick Fabbri] (0:00 - 0:51)
Welcome back dear friends and listeners to another episode of the Oxford Policy Podcast. My name is Nick Fabbri and I'll be your host for today. I'm a co-producer of the show with a background in the humanitarian sector, government and the military in Australia.
It's a great honour to be joined today by Lord Michael Heseltine. Lord Heseltine has had a remarkable life and career in British politics, serving as Deputy Prime Minister in the mid-1990s under John Major, as well as a Cabinet Minister in a variety of portfolios in the Thatcher and Heath administrations, having entered the House of Commons in 1966. He's also had a fascinating life in business, civil society and philanthropy, as well as gardening, with his renowned Fenford Arboretum and Gardens winning international acclaim.
So thank you so much for your time today, Lord Heseltine, it's an honour to have you on the show.
[Lord Heseltine] (0:52 - 0:53)
It's a great pleasure to be here.
[Nick Fabbri] (0:54 - 1:20)
Wonderful. So I heard you speak at Jesus College some weeks ago at an event run by Oxford Speaks. It may seem like an odd place to start an interview on a public policy podcast, but as a keen gardener myself, I was struck by your insistence that you hoped and thought you'd be most remembered for your gardening.
So could you tell us a bit about Fenford, the Arboretum and Gardens, and how it's looking now as we head towards spring, and what it is that you love about gardening?
[Lord Heseltine] (1:21 - 5:46)
Well, I've had three careers, politics, business and gardening, but looking back, my view is clear that if anything, they'll remember me for my garden. Look back at the 19th century, how many politicians can you remember? A couple of prime ministers here or there.
So I take a very simple view, my trees will last. And so they should. Like most of life, it was more or less luck that first introduced me to the gardening that I now so care about.
I went away to school at the age of nine, and the headmaster gave every new boy a square yard of mud and a packet of Virginia stock seeds. I spread the seeds methodically across the square yard of mud, and six weeks later, I had a sea of colour. I was a gardener.
Well, of course, it developed from there. My parents had a nice garden on the suburbs of Swansea, about two acres, but it was very much a domestic garden, lupins, delphiniums, that sort of thing. It wasn't until the 1970s, ten years after I'd been elected to the House of Commons, that my wife and I knew where we would spend the rest of our life, because my political career had meant there was no certainty as to where I would end up as a Member of Parliament.
And until I had that certainty, I couldn't be sure where the roots could be put down. Well, having been selected as the candidate for Henley, that uncertainty came to an end. And we found the house we were looking for, very important, the house we were looking for, a high-quality piece of Georgian architecture.
We assumed there'd be a garden, but we didn't give much thought to it. We found the house, and there was a very ordinary garden in the immediate embowerments of the house, but surrounding the house was a woodland of about 70 acres, and that was in a bad way. It had really been left to go.
So little by little, we began to clear, and perhaps the most formative experience of all was my introduction to a man called Harold Hillier, who was one of the great plantsmen of the period, and I asked his advice as to what would grow here, because I didn't know. And he produced an extensive list of trees and shrubs, and I said, OK, fine, I'll have them, and I'll line them all up in the walled garden until I'm able to plant them out. What I didn't realize is that he had sold me a collection, that instead of the more obvious Quercus roba, the common English oak, he'd sold me five or six different oaks, half a dozen different bibonium, a few willows, some different aces.
So when I came to understand what I'd got, it was a very easy step to realize that this was a beginning, and now we have over 4,000 different types of trees and shrubs. You asked me at the beginning where we are now, well, we've just been awarded a national collection status of snowdrops. So we have something nearly 1,000 different snowdrops here, and they're nearly over now, but they have been fantastic, and they've attracted a lot of attention.
The early spring flowers are now beginning to replace them, wonderful cyclamencum primroses. The next will be the anemone blander. It's all beginning to show life, that very exciting moment in the garden when things begin to create that extraordinary excitement in the springtime.
[Nick Fabbri] (5:48 - 6:40)
Fantastic. Well, I very much look forward to visiting at some stage while I'm over here. I think Australia has inherited a wonderful tradition of gardening from the English, I think, and we have some amazing gardens back home in Victoria, like Paul Bungay's Stonefields and things, and they are very much inspired by, I think, what happens over here in England.
So turning now to Oxford and your time here as a student, you studied here at Pembroke College in the early 1950s and became President of the Oxford Union in 1954, which I think you've described as being the first step to becoming Prime Minister. So could you take us back to that time in the early 1950s and give us a sense of how different life here was 70 years ago in the shadows of World War II, and what feels the same and different as you revisit Oxford today?
[Lord Heseltine] (6:43 - 9:14)
Well, there's no doubt that Oxford was one of the most formative experiences of my life. And really, I came from a conventional middle-class background, broadly conservative, relatively prosperous compared with many people, and a public school boy. I was meeting, living amongst, being friends with people very much from my own background.
Oxford, of course, changed all that. For the first time, one was really with one's peer group in a generation of all the talents and many different races. It was an invigorating, exciting, eye-opening experience.
And I treasure those three years I spent at Oxford. I got involved in Oxford politics. On the day I arrived at Oxford, I joined the Union.
I joined the University Conservative Association and the City of Oxford Conservative Association. So it was quite obvious where my inclinations were. And that really was the guiding theme of my Oxford career, the involvement in student politics, ending up as President of the Union, having been Secretary and Treasurer.
Treasurership was very important in my life, because for the first time, I became very aware of the dilemma that faces any business that's in trouble, and the Union was in trouble with membership. The argument's always the same. Cut your cloth to what you can afford.
That's the wise view. The other view is give a better deal, offer the customer something more attractive, invest for the future. I belonged to the latter, the classic entrepreneurial stand, and as Treasurer, I introduced a number of reforms which actually had the effect of achieving the extra membership that we needed.
[Nick Fabbri] (9:14 - 9:24)
What are some of your fond memories of your time here, and maybe pubs you might have visited or college bops if you had them? What kind of stands out in the memory bank for you about Oxford?
[Lord Heseltine] (9:26 - 10:42)
My memories are focused on the people, the friends I made there remained with me for life. The experiences were relevant for life, and it was the intellectual stimulus of a generation of young people from all sorts of backgrounds and all sorts of interests and all sorts of ambitions interwoven with everyday life. People of such talent and energy and enthusiasm.
It was an enriching experience beyond measure, beyond privilege, and to be President of the Oxford Union, well, someone once said, I think, of the head boy of Eton, you are greater now than ever I can make you, and there's an element of that, being President of the Oxford Union. You are singled out before your time to hold a position which, of course, has been such a remarkable part of the career of so many people.
[Nick Fabbri] (10:44 - 11:08)
During your talk the other week, I was struck by your personal reminiscences of working alongside political figures such as Prime Minister Ted Heath, Margaret Thatcher and John Major, whom you work with as Deputy Prime Minister. So could you talk a bit about the personal and leadership qualities, both good and bad, that stand out most for you when thinking of each of those leaders which the public aren't privy to outside Whitehall?
[Lord Heseltine] (11:09 - 15:23)
The one thing you must not do is generalise, because those three people were totally different in their character and in their approach. Ted was a difficult man, and he was a man of few words, and he could be quite brusque. I remember as a junior minister once being on the long end of his tongue, and I went to complain to one of his senior aides, to which the reply was, oh yes, join the club, we all get that.
But one mustn't underestimate, Ted took this country into the European community. That was a huge political achievement. The vision was that of Harold Macmillan, but the achievement was that of Ted Heath.
And for my generation, that was the critical moment. I remember when I first met my wife, saying you must come and listen to this man, Ted Heath. He's the future of our party.
Margaret, a totally different person, although she shared the same sort of background, and this was part of a social revolution in the Conservative Party, that people from that sort of background could rise to the leadership of the party. She really reacted in a very predictable way to most political thoughts. They came, it's rather odd to say, but they came from the gut, and a lot of what she reacted to one didn't like.
She didn't like foreigners much. And she was pretty suspicious of anybody who hadn't actually made a mark for themselves. But she had a very fine mind.
And what you had to learn, which was pretty uncomfortable for someone from my background, is that you had to stand up to this woman. I remember quite vividly in cabinet, if you were responsible for presenting a paper, she'd interrupt you within minutes of you starting. And if you let her get away with it, well, frankly, it was the beginning of the end of your political career.
So you had to wait until she paused her breath and start again. And she'll do it again. She would do it again.
So you waited, and you started again. And in the end, she had to listen. And in my relationship with her, which was, although it came to tears in the end, but consistently as one of her colleagues and one of her cabinet ministers, she backed me in the policies I wanted to pursue when they were controversial, and often in disagreement with my political colleagues.
But Margaret backed me. John, again, a much more emollient character, and he always listened. And it was punctilious in the care that he took to try and embrace a consensus of view.
He had strong views himself, but he was a listening leader. And that's a very considerable attractive quality. So our relationship, I think, was a very good one.
I saw my job as deputy prime minister to be an extension of his power. And I made sure I never moved without knowing exactly what his views were. And I think he came to appreciate that.
That's why he made me deputy prime minister.
[Nick Fabbri] (15:24 - 16:12)
And just thinking to today and the Tory party having been in power for 13 years now, there's a lot of criticism here in the UK, but also across the Western world about the quality of leadership in our political parties. And you have to look at the revolving door of Conservative Party leaders here recently with Cameron, May, Johnson, Liz Truss and now Rishi Sunak. I mean, it is extraordinary to think about, I suppose, the pressures that those leaders are under in a contemporary sense.
And I often think about it, comparing them to the titans of the names of Heath, Thatcher and Major, as controversial as some of them have been, obviously, historically, and even Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Do you think that there's something changed, I suppose, in the quality of political leadership in this country?
[Lord Heseltine] (16:13 - 18:11)
I'll tell you what has changed. It's the economic background, that the period that we're talking about has largely been one against an economic period of depression. And in that circumstance, leaders are under pressure because people are fed up and they want change.
And there's now been a prolonged period in which their aspirations to raise their living standards have not been met. So then the issue develops as, well, whose fault is it? And there have been some extraordinarily unfortunate developments in, not just in this country, but in the world, because across the Western world, immigration and race has become one of the tools to which the extremists turn in order to find someone to blame.
You can add to that the civil servants. And in this country, of course, you can add to the queue Europe and Brussels, all of which are easy targets. And it has been the tragedy of the Tory party in recent years that they have been part of a process of putting the agenda of blame at the feet of either Europe or immigrants, as though if you had power, you would be able to solve these problems.
Of course, now they have got power in this country and they haven't solved problems, which makes it very difficult for them. One of the commonest arguments you hear today is, oh, Brexit hasn't failed, it's just been never given a chance. The truth is Brexit was always going to fail.
You cut yourself off from your principal market, there's a price to pay. And anybody who has any idea of how commerce and trade works knew that in advance.
[Nick Fabbri] (18:11 - 19:45)
So I do want to come to the question of Brexit, of immigration, of race in the UK, later in the interview. But firstly, I'd like to turn to the legacy of Thatcher and Thatcherism today, as I suppose maybe a bit of a starting point for that sort of, for modern Britain, at least economically. And thinking about the problems which you just cited, the country is in economically, you know, due to some external factors, obviously, like the Russian invasion of Ukraine and inflation generally and so on.
But in terms of Thatcherism, at least from down under in Australia, you know, no other British political figure apart from Churchill is so widely known, nor more widely reviled in some sections of the population, particularly with people who kind of emigrated to Australia in the 80s and 90s and have, you know, memory of Margaret, as you call her. So for the first seven years of that government, you were the speedhead of a lot of the Thatcherist agenda and her core controversial policies, as you say, even touted as her successor before you both clashed over Europe, defence and cabinet processes in 1986. So how do you assess the legacy of Thatcherism today, over the last 40 years, and the way in which reform was implemented at the time?
And what do you make of the pain that a lot of communities experienced at the time, but in the 90s too, from growth in relative poverty, unemployment and the closure of historical industries like coal and mining and things like that as well?
[Lord Heseltine] (19:48 - 25:26)
You have to see the context of Thatcher as a prime minister to realise what she did and why. Her biggest single achievements were undoubtedly the reform of the trade unions, the single market in Europe and the privatisation policies. If we look at those three, the post-war governments of all parties had failed to cope with the rise of militant left-wing union pressure.
The first government to recognise this was Harold Wilson's government in 1968, when it produced a white paper, a document called In Place of Strife, which analysed the problems and then ran away from any solutions, because the party was divided. It fell to the Conservative government under Ted Heath to try to find a way of healing the wounds, if you like, or bridging the political divide. And of course, as everybody knows, it ended with the defeat of that government in 1974 as a result of the miners' strike.
Of course, the truth is the government was finished in 1973 because of the price of oil crisis, which completely undermined the economy and people's living standards. So, although the actual battleground was fought over the miners' issue, it wasn't the miners that was really the problem, it was the cost of living. And if anything, the miners nearly gave us a card which could have enabled us to win an election on the basis of who governs.
The next Labour government was destroyed by the same controversies. The winter of discontent in 1978, when Mr Callaghan was Prime Minister, saw such acute public sector strikes that the undertakers couldn't even bury the dead. So, when the Conservative government came back in 1979, which I was a member, we were actually very much the same people who'd been Ted Heath's government five years before.
It was like Ted's army given the second chance. And we knew exactly what had to be done. We had to confront the issue, and we did, and quite rightly so.
So, that was the right historic context and the right answer to a very difficult social and economic problem. Margaret's second great achievement, well, she didn't like foreigners, but she had been in support of Britain joining the Europeans. In the mid-80s, she was confronted with the desire in Europe to move forward, to create a single market with all the economic benefits.
And she knew perfectly well from her experience of what had happened after the war, when France and Germany had created a social and economic policy to suit their economies, that if Britain didn't play a role this time, which we hadn't last time, then they would fix it their way. And what else would you expect them to do? So, Margaret took a very positive view and sent Arthur Cofield to negotiate the single market with Britain's interests as much in mind as everybody else's.
And it was a very considerable success. So, that was Margaret the thinking Prime Minister. Of course, the changes were all in detail, new forms for hundreds, thousands of new regulations.
And they all hit the small businessman as the economy was in some difficulties in the late 80s. And Margaret began to waver and started looking for someone to blame. And, of course, Brussels was the easy thing to do.
So, Euroscepticism was born of those very difficult circumstances. But let's have no illusions. It was a huge achievement to have got the single market as she did.
Privatization. Well, I think I privatized more individual parts of the state than any other minister. The biggest of them all was the sale of council houses.
And, of course, a game actually was announced under Ted Heath in 1974 and implemented under Mr. Thatcher in 1979. Well, that's when we began the implementation. There were other significant privatization measures.
I'm responsible for quite a few of them. But they helped transform the economy. And I have no doubt at all that regulated capitalism is the most effective way of encouraging dynamism, encouraging investment, encouraging ownership, and a spread of wealth in society.
[Nick Fabbri] (25:28 - 27:17)
I agree that obviously a lot of the reforms were probably necessary in terms of encouraging reallocation of resources into more productive areas of the economy. The UK is now, I think, over an 80% services-oriented economy. People are out of mines and factories and now in the information economy, which is a good thing, I think, in terms of overall well-being.
Not totally forsaking and abandoning a country's autonomous industrial base or manufacturing capacity, which I think is really important in terms of national resilience. But Australia underwent kind of similar reforms in the 1980s under the Hawke and Keating administration, whom you obviously would have probably worked with or been aware of. But I think the approach in implementation seems to me to be quite interesting case study of differences, right?
I mean, there was none of the major, I guess, unrest that you might have seen, like the opposition to the poll tax, for instance, which I know you opposed and ultimately got off the table, but certainly to closures of mines and some labour market reforms, productivity reforms too. And I think the approach of the labour government, and maybe it's something that labour governments can do because of their linkages with the unions, et cetera, and organised labour, was approach of, they called it the accord of sitting down with business, government and the unions as well to sort of drive through a consensus-based approach to reform. Do you think that the approach adopted by Thatcher and your government as well in some of these maybe necessary policy reforms could have been sort of done in a way which didn't lead to, I guess, a lot of the rancour that you see today towards Margaret Thatcher's name and the historical memory of her government?
[Lord Heseltine] (27:18 - 30:03)
You see, I think I've answered your question in a sense. The confrontation argument to your questioning, that was the inevitable result of what happened to labour governments, that this was not anti-Thatcher or anti-Tory. This was anti-anything that stood in the way of trade union power.
And if it happened to be a labour government, it had to be a labour government that was confronted. So there was a problem at the heart of the way this country was working or not working. And I think that there was no doubt at all that the government that was elected in 79 was experienced in these matters and knew what had to happen.
Yes, it was uncomfortable. But the mere demonstration of how uncomfortable it was, and you have to look now at the films of the riots and the protests and all of that to realise that the extreme feelings on the left and the lengths to which they would go to realise that this matter had to be brought to a head. On the coal mine, yes, that was a very difficult situation.
There were three quarters of a million people employed after the war in the coal mining industry. By the time I was responsible, there were 30,000. And under all governments, mines ran out of coal.
And by the time that I was responsible, it was much cheaper to import coal into this country than to mine it. And the electricity industries had been privatised. They had a duty to their shareholders and to their customers to provide the electricity at the most competitive price.
And they weren't prepared to subsidise coal mining. So I had the lonely decision to close the rest of the mines. I think that we got a very good deal for the miners.
They each got about £30,000. In those days, money was quite a lot of money. And of course, the extraordinary thing today, if you look at the coal mining industry areas, constituencies, significant numbers of them have now voted Conservative.
So ending coal mining, very difficult, socially stretching, but desirable in the outcome because it was a dirty, dangerous industry.
[Nick Fabbri] (30:04 - 30:42)
Fascinating. So in a number of interviews, you've touted your Conservative approach to public policy solutions, championing free enterprise, privatisation, removing red tape and regulations and creating certainty for investors. And you often cite Liverpool and your work in regenerating that city as a shining example of this sort of pragmatic approach to urban regeneration and economic revitalisation.
So could you tell our listeners a little bit about your work transforming Liverpool in the 1980s and I suppose what lessons that might have for the British economy and urban scapes today?
[Lord Heseltine] (30:42 - 35:44)
I remember the experience extremely well, and it had the most profound effect on me. Basically, I became responsible for Liverpool in 1979 as a new Secretary of State. And in the two years that I intervened before the riots, I did some things I thought were materially helpful.
I set up a development corporation in order to get rid of toxicity on the banks of the Mersey. I created a massive reclamation program to green areas on the banks of the Mersey in order to make it fit for development. I created public-private sector partnerships.
And I thought I'd done a reasonable job. And then they rioted in 1981. And I said to Margaret, look, the first responsibility of a Conservative government is law and order.
We have to back the police. But I think there's something more profound at work here. And I want your agreement that I walk the streets and listen and report back to you.
And she agreed. Quite interesting that because that was probably the most interventionist thing you could conceivably have done. This was not free market economics standing back and let the market rule.
This was intervention of a cabinet minister walking the streets of a big city. I did for three days. And people were very generous.
How nice of you to come. Last, somebody's listening. But then on the third day, someone said, what are you going to do about it?
I realized that I hadn't got the option to say, well, how nice. I've enjoyed myself. And I think about it because I would have been panned.
So I had to try and think of something to do. And I produced a list of 30 things that I thought could be done that would transform the psychology of prevailing at the time, which was one of nothing works, nothing and nobody cares. So I thought, well, I'll show you that you can achieve things and people can care and they can work together.
And of course, that was quite well received. But the next problem was who's going to do it? Because there was no leadership there.
And I realized there was no choice. I had to do it. So for 18 months, I had a team of secondees from the public and private sector.
And I went back every Thursday to check progress and troubleshoot on the Friday, anything that was getting in the way of achieving what we wanted. And it completely reorientated my approach to domestic politics, because I realized that here was a great city, which had no powers of its own. It was all totally dependent upon the central power of Whitehall in London.
And worse than that, in London, the power was spread by about 10 different departments, health, education, transport, treasury, homes, you name it, there were different departments. And they never coordinated their policies. So you had officials devising policies of a general nature, completely oblivious of the very different circumstances have been places like Manchester and Birmingham, Newcastle, Sheffield.
It was completely wrong to have a central set of compartmentalized policies, when actually what you wanted was powerful local elected mayors, as basically you have in all other capitalist economies, devising local strategies based on local circumstances, local opportunities and strengths. So I became deeply committed to the devolution agenda, which when I went, David Cameron brought me back to help the government, and I produced a report called No Stone Unturned, which set out this journey. And the journey is half complete.
But the trouble is, it's a very unpopular journey, because it confronts so many vested interests, so many power bases, all of whom resist giving up their power. But under David Cameron, George Osborne and Greg Clark, a very significant step was made. And now about half of urban England is under male elected authorities with considerable powers of their own, not enough, but certainly a major change.
And that has been one of the most satisfying experiences of my life.
[Nick Fabbri] (35:45 - 36:48)
And you've said, going from that example of Liverpool as an example of an interventionist success story, you've said that no other British politician has privatized more state assets or quangos, quasi-governmental organizations, than you have. And you're writing a book on your role in privatization. I'm curious as to why you're such a staunch defender of this sort of area of politics and economic reform, when privatization is such a dirty word across the Western world.
In my own home state in New South Wales, there have been outright pledges by the incoming Labor government, for instance, to not sell off any further state assets. So what do you think, looking back on your 40 years, you know, since a lot of these major reforms in the 80s and 90s, what do you think are the benefits of asset recycling and privatization for the community that I suppose a lot of people don't necessarily feel on the ground at the moment with, you know, rising electricity prices, the degradation in rail services, etc.?
[Lord Heseltine] (36:48 - 39:00)
Well, start with the sale of council houses. This was a major transfer of wealth from the public sector to the private sector, and it enabled a generation of people who would never have been able to afford their homes to become owners. That was a massive step in a constructive direction and was very instrumental in helping us to win the 1983 general election.
But other things I did, small things, were the laboratory of the government chemist. There were various advisory services of government that I privatized. And of course, in the end, there were the rest of the coal industry.
And nobody suggested bringing the coal industry back into public ownership. So basically, I believe in a free enterprise society because it is the most effective way of allocating economic resource. I also believe in a regulated community, and that's why you never hear me using the language of red tape and civil servants and all that.
The civil service regulation, red tape, is actually what stands between our present civilized society and the rule of the jungle. Without civil servants, without regulation, you are just allowing the most evil and the most powerful to do what the hell they like to everybody else. If you think about health, fire, all the dangers of life, they are subject to regulation and quite rightly so.
And so you have to have a government which has the sense to understand the desirability of regulation, but the sense also to make it as practical as can be done to allow enterprise to flourish within it.
[Nick Fabbri] (39:01 - 39:58)
So turning now to the question of Britain and multiculturalism, which you raised earlier in the conversation today, the question of migration and multiculturalism has seized British politics and public opinion for over two decades now, similar to the rest of the Western world, frankly, and has led to the tectonic shifts we've seen like Brexit in 2016 or the election of Donald Trump also in 2016. And so you've always been a strong conservative defender of both immigration and multiculturalism as I think moral but also economic and societal imperatives. And you gave a famous and principled response to Enoch Powell's 1968 Rivers of Blood speech, which railed against multiculturalism and the loss of British identity as he saw it.
So could you give us the story behind that speech, the 1968 Race Relations Bill, and what it took to stand up against some of the strong anti-immigration sentiments in the Tory party?
[Lord Heseltine] (39:59 - 43:19)
Yes, I remember it well. Enoch Powell had been Health Secretary and during that time we had seen some of the most significant early manifestations of immigration because he needed people to help man the health service. But he then was in a difficult position with his position in the Conservative Party and Ted Heath was leader, we were in opposition at the time, when the Labour government of Harold Wilson introduced legislation to outlaw prejudice on grounds of colour, class or creed.
That was a Labour proposal. The Conservatives had to decide what to do and Enoch Powell was very clear he wanted them to vote against that legislation and made the Rivers of Blood speech coincidental with it all. Ted sacked him, quite rightly so.
But I remember the upswell of opinion in favour of Powell at the time, which was very nasty. I was totally opposed to it because I knew what was going on. I knew because I had a small hotel and because I had a small employment agency and I knew that there was sheer prejudice on grounds of race and it was unacceptable.
So I attacked Enoch Powell and have consistently done so ever since. I happen to think this country today is one of the most civilised examples of racial harmony anywhere on earth. And whilst nobody would pretend everything is perfect because it isn't, but if you compare us with virtually every other country, we have a remarkable record of assimilating people from different backgrounds and different bases into the totality of our community and we're the richer for it.
That doesn't mean to say you don't control immigration, you have to, because we can't carry the sort of weight of numbers that otherwise come here for the most obvious reasons. We are so prosperous compared with sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Middle East that of course young energetic people want to share in that and therefore they head this way. I have no doubt at all that this is not something that we as a nation state can control ourselves.
We should be doing it on a European basis and we should be doing it in a two-party way. First, we need to control the frontiers and we should help the best of Europe control the frontiers. Secondly, we should have a much more wealth-orientated aid programme in order to help create the conditions of prosperity in the countries from which the immigrants are coming.
The model for that is the Marshall Aid Programme of America towards Europe after the Second World War.
[Nick Fabbri] (43:20 - 44:08)
The idea being that you kind of create or you remove, I suppose, the pull factors for people to come to the UK because they have prosperous and healthy and fulfilling societies in which to live, whether it's in sub-Saharan Africa or the Middle East or wherever it might be and they don't necessarily feel that economic desire for economic migration to the UK. It goes without saying that the Tory party has made a lot of hay, political hay rather, on this issue of migration. You obviously have to look at Brexit, the constant pledges to reduce net migration to the tens of thousands rather than the hundreds of thousands per year on every electoral manifesto since 2010 and obviously Brexit as well in the 2019 election.
[Lord Heseltine] (44:09 - 44:17)
You say it made a lot of hay. I look to see the Tory party standing in the polls today. I'm not quite sure hay is the way you would describe it.
[Nick Fabbri] (44:18 - 45:07)
So it's obviously interlinked with this question of Brexit though, right, and that whole line of taking back control of your borders, etc. You've long been a prominent conservative Europhile or supporter of Europe and arguing that Brexit was a grave mistake and that it was more about migration and I suppose anxiety around multiculturalism as well than economics or national sovereignty and that you hope that Britain may one day rejoin the EU. So could you talk a bit about why you are such a strong supporter of the European project and Britain being within there and a leading member of the EU and what some of your formative motivations for believing in the project were?
I think you mentioned growing up in the shadows of World War II and having memories of the Blitz in London even, right?
[Lord Heseltine] (45:07 - 49:27)
Well, it's not rocket science. If you look at the history of Europe, it is one of bloodshed. A thousand years in which every manner of reason was provided as to why the young generation should be sent to die because the older generation couldn't sort out their problems.
My own lifetime, of course, was created during the Second World War, just before the Second World War, and the feeling in Europe at the end of the Second World War was absolutely overwhelming. We can't go on like this. This is the third time, Franco-Prussian War, First World War, Second World War.
Each time the figures get worse, the numbers dead, get larger, and there has to be a better way. And from my point of view, of course, this was articulated by Winston Churchill in his great speeches to The Hague and Zurich and Albert Hall, in which he said we must create a kind of United States of Europe. He didn't say they must create, he said we must create.
And from that moment on, one saw the way in which this country's history evolved. We couldn't keep an armed presence in the British Empire trying to suppress the instincts for nationalism of the people there. The imperial days were over and it was the great vision of Harold Wilson who explained all this to the British people.
Well, his attempt to join Europe was vetoed by de Gaulle, but Ted Heath then took us in. These were the leaders of my party when I was becoming active in the party. My days at Oxford, all characteristic of the same sort of mood.
So I have, all my political life, I have worked for Tory leaders who told me that Britain's destiny was in Europe and who consolidated that position. No one more so than Mrs. Thatcher with her Single European Act. So what am I supposed to say?
I was wrong? They were wrong? History should be rewritten?
Well, I'm not prepared to do that. And I'm doubly not prepared to do it because I actually do understand why Euroscepticism is where it is and how it's being exploited and who it's being exploited by. And I know that it is an unscrupulous use of human fear and human resentment in order to pander to racialist attitudes which lurk beneath the surface and which I've seen so many times in my life, but also which I understand have played such a devastating role in human relationships throughout history.
So no, my party may have moved, but I'm not moving. And I believe that the party will come back to its European stance. I think all parties will move back that way actually.
Well, I say all parties, all serious parties. At the moment, the political parties are frightened of the extreme right argument about race. And so at the moment, the issue is kept out of sight, but it won't remain there.
And after the election, I think we will see concerted moves to recreate a better relationship. I mean, it's preposterous that a younger generation growing up on the fringe of Europe, part of Europe, every day a relationship about Europe. And yet the one country of substance that we undoubtedly are is not there at the councils of Europe.
We don't play a part in it at all. And that is going to be increasingly frustrating to a very generation of young people.
[Nick Fabbri] (49:27 - 50:47)
And I did do a bit of reading on Churchill's remarks about the question of Britain in Europe. And he often said that, you know, Britain has to be at the table because otherwise it would be dwarfed by the superpowers of the United States, of Russia, of China, I believe India as well, and the European Union, these five, you know, superpowers essentially. And you know, it's not rocket science.
No, no. And well, I mean, it is in some ways because you brought up the example of the European Space Agency is a great example of how Britain could play in space technology. And we see how important that is today with, you know, satellites, but also the emerging domain of conflict as well.
But, you know, the United Kingdom's space industry is not sort of well resourced enough or dynamic enough to sort of compete with the United States's, you know, NASA, SpaceX, et cetera, Blue Origin, but also the European Space Agency and the work that the 27 European countries do together and the way that they can kind of, you know, amplify their resources and I guess, technological horizons as well. So if Britain's not part of that, then how can, you know, sort of, it's just an illustrative example, frankly, of the way in which Britain might be stronger with its European partners than sort of going it alone on every single issue.
[Lord Heseltine] (50:47 - 51:45)
Well, of course, the European Space Agency, which I helped to create in the 1970s, was an example of my indoctrination. I remember being asked to subsidize a British project for six million pounds to compete more effectively with France and Germany. I asked, before I did that, I said, I'd like two quick figures.
One, the total European spend on space and the total American spend on space. And the figure for Europe was 200 million, America 1.2 billion, six times as much. And I said to my officials, this is toy town.
We must create a European Space Agency and that would give us a chance of being able to compete at some sort of scale with the Americans. Now, of course, you have China and India will be there as well.
[Nick Fabbri] (51:45 - 52:26)
Yeah. And so coming towards the end of the interview, we're coming to what looks like the end of 13 years of Tory rule in Britain, with the polls showing a thumping Labour victory in the works. The country does seem to be economically distressed, as you mentioned, with constant rail and NHS strikes, economic growth outside London, and anxiety about migration and Britain's place in the world in the wake of Brexit.
So what does a conservatism that works for ordinary people look like in the 21st century, such that it might be a path back to power for the Tory party after a period in opposition, which you obviously experienced when you joined the House of Commons in 1966?
[Lord Heseltine] (52:26 - 53:14)
Yes, I mean, I was one of 11 new Conservative members in 1966. And it was a very bad result. I hope, of course, this doesn't happen to the Conservative Party this year.
But one can't look the polls in the eye and not realise that there are dangers ahead. But the Tory party's most successful political party in the history of human democracy, it will be back. And it will be back just as it was when David Cameron became leader, because it recaptures the centre ground.
That's what it will do. It's what it always does. And I hope to live long enough to see it happen.
[Nick Fabbri] (53:16 - 53:46)
So finally, we started the interview talking about gardening, which I think is a great metaphor for life and also public service. Looking back on your life and career in its entirety, what advice would you have for students here at the Master of Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, who may wish to create a life or a garden like yours full of interesting flowerbeds and hedges and, you know, sort of cameos in politics and business and in civil society and all the different things you've been involved in?
[Lord Heseltine] (53:47 - 54:30)
I never give advice to people I don't know, because it's preposterous. How do I know what to say to people? But I know nothing about their attitudes, their skills, their energy.
But what I do say, do something that makes you look forward to Monday morning. Because the most depressing thing I can think of is to have a job, which, oh God, it's Monday, how awful. I have never had that feeling.
To me, Monday has always been a new beginning. And so do what you enjoy. Do something that you believe in.
Do something that makes you look forward to Monday morning.
[Nick Fabbri] (54:31 - 54:36)
Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for your time today, Lord Heseltine. It's been a real honour to have you on the Oxford Policy Podcast.
[Lord Heseltine] (54:37 - 54:41)
Great pleasure. Thank you very much. Wonderful.
Thank you so much. Bye-bye.