Source: BBC Radio 4 iPM
URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01rrdd8
Date: 13/04/2013
Event: "Maggie Thatcher did try and at least put environment on the map"
Credit: BBC Radio 4, also to Ben Pile for transcribing this
People:
Eddie Mair: The programme starts this week with a quote from a speech. Here, you read it.
Jennifer Tracey: "What we are now doing to the world by degrading the land surfaces, by polluting the waters and by adding greenhouse gases to the air at an unprecedented rate, all this is new in the experience of the Earth. It is mankind and his activities that are changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways."
Eddie Mair: The words of Margaret Thatcher to the United Nations in November 1989. It was unusual for a political figure to speak out about climate change in such a provocative way.
Jennifer Tracey: So we are not going to be a Margaret Thatcher free zone this week.
Eddie Mair: As with all iPMs, this starts with a listener. After hearing our discussion on PM about the context of Margaret Thatcher's famous phrase, "there's no such thing as society", Professor Ian Swingland wrote:
Jennifer Tracey: "Thatcher eschewed the idea of society because of a high table dinner at Magdalen College at Oxford. Richard Dawkins convinced her there was no such thing as society, just individuals. I, as a lowly researcher said she should emphasise environment in her administration, which was missing at the time".
Eddie Mair: So, we spoke to Professor Swingland, and to the BBC's Environment Analyst, Roger Harrabin.
Ian Swingland: My girlfriend had just won a first prize fellowship at Magdalen. And as a result, I was invited to the Judge Randolph dinner in March of 1978, only eighteen months after Richard Dawkins had published The Selfish Gene. And I was close to Thatcher and I know Richard Dawkins was there. John Krebs I think was there. A lot of us who came from the Zoology Department in Oxford. And she was heard to say that society is the building block for the future.
Eddie Mair: Ah.
Ian Swingland: And immediately, many zoologists, lowly post-doctoral researchers like me said society doesn't exist, and this was joined by a mighty chorus from those more senior than I. And this put her back and she challenged why we were saying it. And that brought us to essentially the argument from the evolutionary ecologists which indeed did prove that individuals mattered more than society.
Eddie Mair: Is it your belief... Is it your assertion, perhaps that Mrs. Thatcher's well-discussed views on society were perhaps put to her, and she became persuaded of that that evening?
Ian Swingland: I think there's some likelihood it would have affected her thinking. Because at the end of the evening after the argument that goes with those statements and protestations that society doesn't exist, she then said well perhaps I ought to centre on the individuals, hereafter.
Eddie Mair: You were discussing the environment with her, weren't you?
Ian Swingland: Indeed I was. And we basically said to her that environment was missing from the political agenda of many administrations prior to her becoming Prime Minister, and it was about time environment became important, since those industries that for example embraced environment became more profitable, that the climate was undoubtedly changing, and that something had to be done about that, possibly using the private sector. Renewable energy was important, although we also said that nuclear would be an inevitability. We wanted her to grab hold of animal welfare, and species conservation, and also recycling. Her question always in all of these things was: how can I make it work, how can I make it pay for itself? Will it produce a profit? Does it help individuals?
Eddie Mair: And what did she understand by "environment", bearing in mind again this was the end of the seventies and it might have had a different meaning to some politicians?
Ian Swingland: You know, Eddie, I'm not sure that she ever grabbed environment as a concept. She grabbed it as something that we lived in as individuals and if we messed it up we were going to suffer the consequences. And she had the responsibility and felt she ought to do something about it, but using her market approach rather than any other sort of donation approach that was going to cost the Exchequer too much money. I don't think she actually grabbed what you're asking me at all. It was just a name as far as she was concerned, and something that she ought to do something about.
Eddie Mair: Roger Harrabin, people in all the words that have been said about Baroness Thatcher of late, and there have been so many, they haven't tended to focus on the environment, and her green credentials, whatever they were. What were they?
Roger Harrabin: Well Mrs. Thatcher had an absolutely remarkable effect on the environment movement, and how the environment is perceived in the wider public. I think it was the fact that a Prime Minister always adds legitimacy to what they say, the role adds legitimacy, the fact that she was herself a research chemist, and the fact that she was coming from the libertarian right at a time when the environment movement was dominated by, I suppose you might say, the soft-green left, lent a massive weight to two speeches that she gave, which I think a lot of people will may have forgotten. One of them was to the Royal Society, both at the back end of the eighties, these, one of them to the United Nations. They were absolutely extraordinary blistering environmental speeches, warning of the prospect of irretrievable damage to the atmosphere, the oceans and the Earth itself. And if you speak to the people who were running Friends of the Earth at the time, they will say their membership profile changed. You suddenly noticed the environment appearing on the front pages of the newspapers instead of the inside pages, and the front pages of serious papers, leading the BBC, which it hadn't tended to do before. It was absolutely extraordinary galvanising speeches. Now the policy often didn't match up with the speeches. And later on she recanted in a major way, saying that climate change was some sort of leftist plot to redistribute global wealth, which, it's easy to see it that way. But the effect she had on society in general and on institutions and their change was very very profound.
Eddie Mair: I've got a quote here from Margaret Thatcher from 1982. She did say - this was commenting on the Falklands war - "When you spend half your political life dealing with humdrum issues like the environment, it's exciting to have a real crisis on your hands". [Laughter.]
Ian Swingland: She went further than that, Eddie, I mean, Roger knows that she said at one point that she thought that climate change was just a marvellous excuse for worldwide supranational socialism.
Eddie Mair: Let me finish by asking you both how green a tint there is then to Margaret Thatcher's blue, looking back over her entire contribution? Professor, first of all...
Ian Swingland: I think Maggie Thatcher did try and at least put environment on the map. She may have had second thoughts towards the end of her eleven-and-a-half years, but she put it on the map, as she did many other things. And thereafter, the British government and many other governments couldn't ignore it, at their peril.
Roger Harrabin: Oh yes, I would agree absolutely with that. And she may have recanted climate change concerns later on. A lot of environmental issues may have run completely counter to her libertarian approach and her dislike of regulation. But her intervention at the back end of the eighties to legitimise climate change and the environment, she wasn't just an ordinary Prime Minister, and for her to legitimise the environment in that way was absolutely massive.
Eddie Mair: Roger Harrabin and Professor Ian Swingland.