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Keith Sinjohn Joseph, Baron Joseph,Bt, CH, PC (17 January 1918 – 10 December 1994), known asSir Keith Joseph, 2nd Baronet, for most of his political life, was a British politician. A member of theConservative Party, he served as a minister under four prime ministers:Harold Macmillan,Alec Douglas-Home,Edward Heath, andMargaret Thatcher. He was a key influence in the creation of what came to be known asThatcherism.[3]
Joseph introduced the concept of thesocial market economy into Britain, an economic and social system inspired byChristian democracy.[4] He also co-founded theCentre for Policy Studies writing its first publication:Why Britain needs a Social Market Economy.[5]
Joseph was born inWestminster,London, to a wealthy and influential family, the son of Edna Cicely (Phillips) andSamuel Joseph. His father headed the vast family construction and project-management company,Bovis, and wasLord Mayor of London in 1942–3. At the end of his term he was created abaronet.[6] Joseph's family was Jewish.[7] On the death of his father on 4 October 1944, 26-year-old Keith inherited thebaronetcy.[citation needed]
Joseph was educated atLockers Park School inHemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire, followed byHarrow School, where, uncharacteristically, he did not do particularly well academically.[8][better source needed] He then attendedMagdalen College, Oxford, where he readjurisprudence, obtaining first class honours. He was elected a Prize Fellow ofAll Souls College, Oxford in 1946.
DuringWorld War II, Joseph served as a captain in theRoyal Artillery, and suffered a minor wound during German shelling of his company's headquarters in Italy, as well as beingmentioned in dispatches. After the end of the war, he was called to the Bar (Middle Temple). Following his father, he was elected as anAlderman of the City of London. He was a Director of Bovis, becoming chairman in 1958, and became an underwriter atLloyd's of London. In 1945, Joseph joined the leadership of the Post-War Orphans’ Committee of the Central British Fund for German Jewry (nowWorld Jewish Relief).[9]
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Joseph failed to be elected to the marginal seat ofBarons Court in West London by 125 votes in the1955 election. He was elected to parliament in a by-election forLeeds North East in February 1956. He was swiftly appointed as a Parliamentary Private Secretary.
Following 1959, Joseph had several junior posts in theMacmillan government at theMinistry of Housing and theBoard of Trade. In the 'Night of the Long Knives' reshuffle of 13 July 1962 he was made Minister for Housing and Local Government. He introduced a massive programme to buildcouncil housing, which aimed at 400,000 new homes per year by 1965. He wished to increase the proportion of owner-occupied households, by offering help with mortgage deposits. Housing was an important issue at the1964 election and Joseph was felt to have done well on television in the campaign.
In opposition, Joseph was spokesman on Social Services, and then on Labour underEdward Heath. He was one of twelve founder members of theNational Council for the Single Woman and Her Dependants on 15 December 1965. According to Tim Cook'sThe History of the Carers' Movement, Joseph andSally Oppenheim were critical in raising funds from theCarnegie Trust and other organisations, which enabled the carers movement to succeed and thrive through its formative years.
Despite Joseph's reputation as a right-winger, Heath promoted him to Trade spokesman in 1967, where he had an important role in policy development. In the run-up to the1970 election Joseph made a series of speeches under the title "civilised capitalism", in which he outlined his political philosophy and hinted of cuts in public spending. At theSelsdon Park Hotel meeting, the Conservative Party largely adopted this approach.
After the Conservatives won the election, Joseph was madeSecretary of State for Social Services, which put him in charge of the largest bureaucracy of any government department but kept him out of control of economics. Despite his speeches against bureaucracy, Joseph found himself compelled to add to it as he increased and improved services in theNational Health Service. However, he grew increasingly opposed to the Heath government's economic strategy, which had seen a 'U-turn' in favour of intervention in industry in 1972.
Joseph’s largest intervention was a proposed major reform of theBritish pension system. Whilst theState Pension would have survived the reforms, Joseph instead planned for workers to contribute towardsoccupational schemes provided by employers (similar toAustralian Superannuation). A ‘State Reserve’ scheme would have been set up for employees who were not enrolled in an occupational scheme, but critically without any prior funding, meaning a worker would only reach the maximum entitlement in 2019. State Reserve contributions would also not be subject to tax relief, reducing a worker's take home pay.
Although legislation was passed in theSocial Security Act 1973, it was abolished by Labour under theSocial Security Pensions Act 1975. Graduated Retirement Benefit was still abolished in 1975, replaced by theSERPS scheme in 1978.
Following theelection defeat of February 1974, Joseph worked withMargaret Thatcher to set up theCentre for Policy Studies, a think-tank to develop policies for the new free-market Conservatism that they both favoured. Joseph became interested in the economic theory ofmonetarism as formulated byMilton Friedman and persuaded Thatcher to support it.[10] Despite still being a member of Heath's Shadow Cabinet, Joseph was openly critical of his government's record. In 1976, Joseph delivered his famous Stockton lecture on the economyMonetarism Is Not Enough in which he sought to discredit previously dominant Keynesian economic strategies and contrasted wealth-producing sectors in an economy, such as manufacturing, with the service sector and government, which tend to be wealth-consuming. He contended that an economy begins to decline as its wealth-producing sector shrinks.[11]
Many on the right wing of the Conservative Party looked to Joseph to challenge Heath for the leadership, but his chances declined following a controversial speech on 19 October 1974. It covered a variety ofsocially-conservative topics and drew on an article that had been written byArthur Wynn and his wife and published by theChild Poverty Action Group.[12] The notion of the "cycle of deprivation" holding down poor people was the basis of his speech.[13] He linked it to current theories of the culture of poverty, especially to the chaotic lifestyle of the poorest people. However, he suggested that poor people should stop having so many children. In his highly publicised speech atEdgbaston, he reflected on the moral and spiritual state of Britain:
A high and rising proportion of children are being born to mothers least fitted to bring children into the world ... Some are of low intelligence, most of low educational attainment. They are unlikely to be able to give children the stable emotional background, the consistent combination of love and firmness ... They are producing problem children ... The balance of our human stock, is threatened.[14]
The outrage, despite his repeated apologies, in reaction to his speech sharply undercut Joseph's campaign to replace Heath as party leader. The speech was not largely written byJonathan Sumption (who later went on to become a Supreme Court judge in United Kingdom) though it has been erroneously suggested that this was the case.[15][16][17]
Joseph withdrew from the contest against Heath and informed Margaret Thatcher, who responded "if you're not going to stand, I will, because someone who represents our viewpoint has to stand."[18] He now became a major advisor. Thatcher later referred to Joseph as her closest political friend. His overnight conversion to free-market, small-government policies "had the force of a religious conversion".[19] This conviction earned him the nickname the "Mad Monk", courtesy ofChris Patten, the then director of theConservative Research Department.[20][21] In 1975, Joseph said:
It was only in April 1974 that I was converted to Conservatism. (I had thought I was a Conservative but I now see that I was not really one at all.)[22]
This remark expressed Joseph's sense of failure during multiple Conservative governments that had automatically followed thepost-war consensus of a welfare state with strong labour unions. Their policies to stabilise the economy retained government control on industries and created an intricate system to control wages and dividends. In the eyes of Thatcher and Joseph, that pragmatic approach was contrary to the true "Conservative" ideology. As he had done a great deal to promote Thatcher, when she won the leadership in1975, she determined to put him in a position that would facilitate a profound influence on Conservative Party policy.
In Thatcher'sShadow cabinet, Joseph wanted to beShadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, but that was impossible since his notorious 1974 speech. Instead, he was given overall responsibility for Policy and Research. He had a large impact on the Conservative manifesto for the1979 election, but frequently, a compromise had to be reached with Heath's more moderate supporters, such asJim Prior. Thatcher named JosephSecretary of State for Industry. He began to prepare the many nationalised industries for privatisation by bringing in private sector managers such asIan MacGregor but was still forced to give large subsidies to those industries making losses.
As Thatcher'sSecretary of State for Education from 1981 he started the ball rolling forGCSEs, and the establishment of a national curriculum in England and Wales.Mark Carlisle, his predecessor in the Conservative government in 1979, had cancelled the plans ofShirley Williams, his second-last predecessor, to mergeO Levels andCSEs, but he achieved that policy. Although that was not normally the responsibility of central government, he insisted on personally approving the individual subject syllabuses before the GCSE system was introduced. His attempts to reform teachers' pay and bring in new contracts were opposed by the trade unions and led to a series of one-day strikes.
In 1984, his public spending negotiations with his Treasury colleagues resulted in a proposed plan for extra research funding for universities financed through the curtailment of financial support to students who were dependent children of more affluent parents. That plan provoked heated opposition from fellow members of the Cabinet (particularly,Cecil Parkinson) and a compromise plan was found necessary to secure consensus. The compromise involved the abandonment of Joseph's plan to levytuition fees but preserved his aspiration to abolish the minimum grant. The resulting loss to research funding was halved by a concession of further revenue by the Treasury team.
Joseph emerged unscathed from theBrighton hotel bombing during the Conservative Party Conference in 1984. In 1985, he published a White Paper on the university sector,The Development of Higher Education into the 1990s. It advocated an appraisal system to assess the relative quality of research and foresaw a retrenchment in the size of the higher education sector. Both proposals were controversial. Joseph was the primary influence on theEducation (No. 2) Act 1986, enacted soon after his resignation as secretary, which abolishedcorporal punishment in most schools, established regularparents' meetings, and increased parents' influence in school governance.[23][24]
Joseph stepped down from the Cabinet in 1986, and retired from Parliament at the1987 election. He was appointed to theOrder of the Companions of Honour in 1986.[25] He received alife peerage in the dissolution honours, being createdBaron Joseph, ofPortsoken in theCity of London on 12 October 1987.[26] Joseph died on 10 December 1994.[27]
At the end of 2011, the release of confidential documents under the UK Government's30-year rule revealed Joseph's thoughts regarding theLiverpool riots. In response toMichael Heseltine's regeneration proposal, Joseph suggested that there should be a "managed rundown" ofMerseyside instead.[28] Later, his private secretary asked for minutes of a meeting to be amended to remove reference to explicit economic regeneration as Joseph believed "it is by no means clear that any such strategy could lead to a viable economic entity".[28]
Joseph's 1976 speech "Monetarism Is Not Enough" was described byMargaret Thatcher as "one of the very few speeches which have fundamentally affected a political generation's way of thinking".[29] Joseph's political achievement was in pioneering the application of monetarist economics to British political economics, and in developing what would later become known asThatcherism. He knew his own limitations, remarking of the prospect of his becoming Leader of the Conservative Party that "it would have been a disaster for the party, country, and me", and he rated himself a failure in office.[citation needed] The Sir Keith Joseph Memorial Lecture is held annually by the Centre for Policy Studies.[30]
Joseph was married twice: first, in 1951, to Hellen Guggenheimer, with whom he had four children. They separated in 1978,[31] finally divorcing in 1985.[32] In 1990 he married Yolanda Sheriff (née Castro), whom he had known since the 1940s.[32]
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| Parliament of the United Kingdom | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by | Member of Parliament forLeeds North East 1956–1987 | Succeeded by |
| Political offices | ||
| Preceded by | Minister for Housing and Local Government 1962–1964 | Succeeded by |
| Preceded by | Secretary of State for Social Services 1970–1974 | Succeeded by |
| Preceded by | Secretary of State for Industry 1979–1981 | Succeeded by |
| Preceded by | Secretary of State for Education and Science 1981–1986 | Succeeded by |
| Baronetage of the United Kingdom | ||
| Preceded by | Baronet (of Portsoken) 1944–1994 | Succeeded by James Joseph |
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