Kenneth Wilfred Baker was born in Newport, Wales, in 1934, the son of Wilfred Michael Baker, a civil servant, and Amanda Baker (née Harries). His father moved to London in 1939 but moved back to work in Liverpool during World War II, living at nearby Southport.
After the war the family moved to Twickenham, London, and the young Kenneth won a place at Hampton Grammar School; from there, he moved on to St. Paul’s, a school to which the rising middle classes had sent their sons since its foundation in 1509. After graduating, he did his national service in the army and then enrolled at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he obtained a second-class honors degree in history. He then became a trainee at the Shell Oil Company and from there moved on to sev¬eral other, smaller firms.
He gained his first post in March 1972 in the Edward Heath government (1970— 1974), when he was made parliamentary undersecretary to the Civil Service Department, a department designed to improve the efficiency of public administration. This was a junior post that trained him in the internal workings of government administration. His experience there was relatively brief, as the Heath government was defeated in the general election of February 1974. It is clear that Baker was not fully in sympathy with Heath but was more in tune with Margaret Thatcher, the subsequent Conservative leader. When she became prime minister, in May 1979, his political career took off.
In January 1981 Baker was made minister of information technology in what became Thatcher’s first administrative reshuffle after her assumption of the office of prime minister, an occasion dubbed by journalists and political observers “the night of the long hatpin.”
Baker was elected to represent the Dorking constituency in the June 1983 general election, a move forced on him by the breakup of his old constituency, and retained his post as minister of information technology in Thatcher’s new administration. However, in September 1984 he was moved and became minister for local government.
In 1984 and 1985, Baker presided over a review group that suggested that council rates should not be based upon the size of property but upon a locally based charge levied on every person over the age of eighteen, thus ensuring that every citizen would contribute to local services and that councils would be responsive to the demands of their local community.
Baker became environment secretary in September 1985, which brought with it a seat in the cabinet. This was a brief, nine-month appointment, during which Baker focused on the concerns of the inner cities and, in February 1986, announced plans to privatize the water industry. By May 1986 he had been appointed education secretary, in charge of the Department of Education and Science.
Much to the relief of many educationists, Baker was asked to become the Conservative Party chairman on 25 July 1989, retaining his position within the cabinet as chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, a post that carried no ministerial responsibility. The party chairmanship was no easy brief; Baker had problems with some of the other leading political figures in the party—most notably with Michael Heseltine, Nigel Lawson, and Sir Geoffrey Howe—and encountered setbacks in the implementation of the Community Charge. Throughout the final days of the Thatcher administration, Baker remained one of the prime minister’s most faithful supporters. Reflecting on Thatcher’s decision in November 1990 to resign, Baker commented, “A great leader of our country, a very great Prime Minister, had been struck down by a collective loss of nerve among her colleagues” Thatcher supported John Major for the subsequent Conservative leadership, and Major was duly elected as Conservative leader and thus prime minister of the Conservative government. Baker loyally supported this action and was rewarded with an appointment to the office of home secretary on 29 November 1990, a post that he held until the general election of April 1992. During Baker’s tenure in this post, in late 1990, the Criminal Justice Bill put forward by his predecessor to ensure greater consistency in sentencing and punishment was successfully passed. Baker was deeply involved in his duties as home secretary and was particularly active in supporting the police, in initiating the privatization of prisons, and in promoting the National Lottery. His biggest embarrassment was the escape of two Irish Republican Army (IRA) terrorists from Brixton Prison on 8 July 1991. An inquiry revealed security weaknesses at Brixton as well as a failure to take preventive measures despite prior knowledge that the two prisoners intended to escape. Given that these were flaws in operations rather than demonstrable indicators of policy weakness, Baker felt that there was no reason to resign. Nevertheless, he did resign following Major’s victory in the general election of April 1992; refusing the post of secretary of state for Wales—an appointment that must have seemed a demotion to a man who had long been a member of the inner cabinet circle— Baker returned to the back benches.
Baker’s main function, as a minister of information technology, was to prepare British technology for the microchip revolution that was about to occur, diverting money into the new electronic technologies. He also announced, in April 1981, the objective of getting a microcomputer into every school, with the government paying 50 percent of the cost. In addition, he was involved in completing the process of introducing the British Telecommunications Bill, which would pave the way for ending the monopoly of British Telecom (a section of the post office) over British communications. The latter task was accomplished with the sale of 51 percent of British Telecom to the public at the end of 1984.
As a minister for local government his main battle was with Ken Livingstone, a left-wing figure in the labor movement, and his supporters, who had gained control of the Greater London Council (GLC) in 1981 and had used its financial resources to reduce the fares on London Transport by 25 percent. Skirmishes between Kenneth Baker (“Blue Ken”) and Ken Livingstone (“Red Ken”) became a regular feature of London and British politics in 1984 and 1985, which eventuated in the passage of the “Abolition” Bill ending the existence of the GLC in 1985. In fact, this was but one of three major battles Baker fought. The second was the rate-capping of 20 Labour inner-city councils whose expenditures were exceeding government budgetary guidelines. The most prominent of these was Liverpool, which had fallen into the hands of Militant Tendency councillors who were in the left wing of the Labour Party and who wished to use the party for revolutionary socialist objectives. The Liverpool council was dominated by Derek Hatton, its rather brash deputy leader, who committed Liverpool to increased spending and set a tax rate inadequate to meet the financial costs. The conflict raged throughout 1985 and early 1986, until the Liverpool council agreed to set a “legal” budget. Thirdly, Baker was involved in the development of the idea of a Community Charge, essentially a poll tax, to replace the standard system of rates (this idea later led to the downfall of Thatcher).
Bakers period of service as education secretary was both momentous and embattled, since he decided to tackle education on all fronts. His driving forces were the twin themes of standards and choice. Concerned that Britain’s educa-tional standards were falling behind those of foreign competitors and that only 12 percent of Britain’s eighteen-year-olds went on to higher education, he introduced a national curriculum and extended the provision of higher and further education. Believing that parents should have a choice in what schools they sent their children to, he attempted to revive choice through the creation of alternative schools. He also tried to weaken the control of the Local Education Authorities (LEAs) by introducing the local management of schools (LMS), which allowed head teachers (similar to American prin-cipals) and governors (elected unpaid directors) to manage their own school budgets. In addition, Baker removed the Burnham arrangements for organizing teachers’ pay and replaced them with a pay review body, thus effectively cutting off the negotiating rights of teachers’ unions. He also established the basis for a network of 15 city technology colleges.
Baker’s introduction of a national curriculum laying out what should be taught in schools, and his institution of national testing in English, math, science, and other subjects, evoked controversy, as did his announcement in April 1987 that “we can no longer leave individual teachers, schools or local education authorities to devise a curriculum children should follow” (Baker 1993, p. 192). Under his leadership, separate committees were set up to work out the various subjects taught in the different stages of the various curriculum patterns. As part of these new arrangements Baker mandated five days of training per year for teachers, which subsequently became known as “Baker Days.”
Baker was committed to the principle on which the 1944 Education Act was based: that pupils should be educated in accordance with the wishes of their parents. Recognizing that only parents with money had a choice of which schools to send their children to, he sought to create the possibility of the parents of children at a school voting to opt out of the state system through ballots and gaining grant-maintained status (direct funding from the government) for their operation, but running their own affairs, without local authority control, in educating to the national curriculum (similar to charter schools in the United States). Baker also instigated the 1988 Education Act disbanding the Inner London Education Authority, an agency that he felt had had a stranglehold on public education. School inspection was placed in the hands of Ofsted, a new government oversight agency created to examine the standards of teaching. All of these actions evoked as much opposition as support. The national curriculum was opposed by many teachers and parents, usually on the grounds that it limited teachers’ and students’ prerogatives.
As education secretary he initiated highly controversial changes that saw the emergence of the local management of schools (LMS) at the expense of Local Education Authority control. He also chaired the Conservative Party between 1989 and 1990, a period of internal party dissension that resulted in the resignation of Thatcher. Thus, he was a leading and active participant in British politics during one of its most turbulent periods.
Reflecting recently on his actions as education secretary (in an interview with the Guardian, 16 September 1999), Baker candidly admitted: “I took away all the negotiating rights from the unions. It was quite brutal stuff. It was absolutely extreme stuff. ... I would have reduced LEAs to dealing with special educational needs and not much else. I put them on a course to wither in the vine. I have no regrets. My sins are of omission rather than commission.” He said that he had wished to challenge the comprehensive system of schooling: “I would have liked to bring back selection but I would have got into such controversy at an early stage that the other reforms would have been lost.” Thus, stealth was essential: “I was not going to take the comprehensive system head-on. I’d had the teachers’ strike, the national curriculum, you can’t take on yet another great fight. So I believed that if I set in train certain changes they would, er, have a cumulative beneficial effect.” He felt that offering parents a choice of schools would cause the poorer schools to close and other necessary changes to take place.
In the realms of higher and further education, Baker advocated rapid expansion; and indeed, whereas only one in eight children received higher education in 1980, the figure had risen to one in five by 1990. The problem was that even in improving these ratios, and in setting a target of one in three for 2000, he, like his predecessors Mark Carlisle (1979-1981) and Keith Joseph (1981-1986), aimed at the same time to reduce radically the funding that the government paid for each student. Universities found student numbers increasing on a vast scale, but had little money with which to deal with this flood. There were staff and student protests at these developments—particularly at Baker’s insistence that the cost of student education should be cut by replacing student grants with student loans, the first of which were made available for the academic year 1990-1991. Baker and his department were strongly opposed by what Baker called the “reactionary forces in education—the National Union of Students, the Labour Party, the Liberal Party, and the Tory Reform Group”.
Baker’s style in the education and other ministerial posts he held was clearly confrontational. He was as driven by his own ideological approach as were the extreme socialists whom he condemned. Consultation was not his habit, and the advice he sought was that which supported his own position. It is fair to describe him as a most unpopular education secretary, particularly among what he dubbed the “reactionary” forces—that is, the majority of the British electorate.
He eventually joined the Minster Trust, a City of London investment trust. From there he moved on to become managing director of a clothing company. In 1962 he met Mary Muir, whom he later married. It was at this point that Baker began to cultivate an interest in politics, serving on the ward committee of Twickenham Conservative Association and becoming a member of the Twickenham Borough Council in 1960.
From that base, Baker moved into national politics.
After unsuccessfully contesting the Poplar seat in London, he won election to Parliament representing the Acton constituency in a parliamentary by-election in March 1968. Although he lost his seat in the 1970 general election, he won the London seat of St. Marylebone in a parliamentary by-election later in 1970. Thereafter, he gradually began to rise in Conservative ranks.
Baker was at the center of British politics during the Thatcherite years when change was afoot. However, he will be remembered more for his confrontational style as education secretary and for the fact that he instigated several measures of privatization than for his more modest performance as home secretary.
