Letters: From 'Great' to 'Little' Britain

Apropos T N Ninan's column "The greatest! Who?" (Weekend Ruminations, April 20), one of Margaret Thatcher's major "achievements" was her downgrading of tertiary education. That is ironic since she started out being education minister. Clement Attlee's major initiative of actively supporting the Redbricks does not often find mention. If Sussex, Birmingham, Reading and even Warwick attained unprecedented fame in the 1960s and the early 1970s, it was because Attlee had set in motion policies to enhance support for them without infringing on their autonomy. In Thatcher's zeal to cut government spending, milk for schoolchildren was not the only casualty. The universities had the mortification of finding reduced government support, which affected the Redbricks far worse than the ancients. The out-migration of British academics, chiefly to the US, Canada and Australia, has been irreversible. I know many of them personally, and they are without exception still smarting from having to leave in the midst of careers just beginning to bloom. I rather suspect that if efforts at quantifying the quality of universities, which are now routine and involve measures such as publications in peer-reviewed journals and patents, were to be extrapolated back to the history of British universities in the second half of the last century, one would find a decline from the 1980s onwards, directly attributable to the Thatcher cuts.

Even non-university institutions were not spared. I G Patel is on record as having to look for additional support for the London School of Economics, including raising tuition fees. Sir Guy Hunter, for long the eminence grise of the Overseas Development Institute and the recognised face of British applied knowledge in many Commonwealth countries, confided in me in the late 1980s that he no longer relished his visits to Sub-Saharan Africa because he could no longer afford to offer the countries research studies or experiments addressed to their problems. He said in effect, Thatcher had turned Great Britain into Little Britain by her monomania of less government.

In the last week, the legion of Thatcher admirers in the Indian media have saluted her contributions and their relevance to our current situation. I wonder if they would extend their admiration to her experiments with higher education.

Shreekant Sambrani Baroda

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