God and Mrs Thatcher (10 page)

The wave of strikes that dominated the Edwardian years forced the specific issue of industrial relations onto the Anglican agenda. In 1917, William Temple, then the Bishop of Manchester, published a compendium of essays calling for a ‘New Reformation’ to subvert the ‘evils of capitalism’.
21
His prayers would be answered a year later in the Church’s
Christianity and Industrial Problems
Report. Co-authored by his close friend, Christian Socialist and historian R. H. Tawney, it outlined in unequivocal terms the culture of selfishness, greed and mutual distrust that pervaded the capitalist system. In the 1920s, the label of the ‘Tory Party at Prayer’ was still bandied about, but in tone and political outlook the Church was no longer so. This old spiritual-political marriage was quietly being dissolved, yet it was the Church rather than the Conservative Party that had taken the adulterous step and renounced the vows that united them. Importantly, though, the Church did not fly into the arms of the Labour Party (whose rise it welcomed) but increasingly came to view itself outside partisan boundaries, as independent actors in the political sphere, free from such murky affiliations and constraints. William Temple had initially joined the Labour Party but later cancelled his membership when he became a bishop, convinced that high ecclesiastical office and partisan groupings did not mix. ‘I want no Christian party,’ Temple explained in 1924, ‘I want Christians to leaven and control all parties’ – a sentiment which by the 1920s had become the common hope rather than the reality within the Church.
22
But while many clergy considered
this growing independence as a proactive and positive step, it was in fact an indication of the weakening of religio-political allegiances in Britain, which was then being mirrored at the opposite end of the political spectrum with the separation of the Nonconformists from the Liberal Party.

‘Not individual charity, but the administration of social righteousness is the test by which the Lord of Glory will condemn or will commend the nations of earth’, so preached Rev. F. Lewis Donaldson of the Christian Socialist League in 1917.
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With the Depression exposing the limitations of Britain’s piecemeal welfare system, Donaldson’s perspective on the inadequacy of charity quickly became the consensus amongst Anglican social reformers, from those slum priests involved in housing projects to the theologians in their ivory towers drafting a Christian sociology.
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As one of the main providers of education, housing, welfare and health, ecclesiastical opinions naturally received a hearing, although the reception was not always favourable and clergy were often accused of being too idealistic in their thinking and amateurs when it came to specifics. In all this, it was not evangelicals (whose social conscience would only be awakened in the 1960s) but Anglo-Catholics who were by far the most vocal in calling for change. Some lent heavily on an incarnational theology, others on a pre-Reformation notion of an obligation to the poor, while others called for a universalised welfare system to mirror the universality of God’s grace.

In 1924, Anglicans came together for the ‘Conference on Christian Politics, Economics and Citizenship’ (COPEC) in Birmingham, a gathering that was endorsed by all the political parties and received a supportive message from the King. Led by William Temple, the conference was ecumenical and included the Free Churches (although not Roman Catholics); this was no tokenistic inclusivity but reflected the level of convergence across the Protestant denominations on social issues. COPEC may have demonstrated a unity of purpose but it was not without tensions, particularly from radical Christian
socialists who pressed the churches to go further. There was, however, a consensus on the unchristian nature of economic individualism, the exploitative nature of capitalism and the immorality of inherited privilege: ‘We have realised with a fresh intensity the scandal to our civilisation and religion involved in the fact that thousands of our fellow-countrymen are without decent homes, are without work, are without education that would develop their faculties to the full.’
25

Two years later the ecclesiastical leadership, in alliance with the Free Churches, would attempt to intervene in the biggest industrial dispute Britain had ever faced: the General Strike. But it turned out to be a clumsy affair, with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson’s reasoned call for an end to the dispute deemed too controversial by the Director-General of the BBC, Lord Reith, who refused to broadcast the Primate’s statement on the BBC. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin reprimanded the Church for intruding on terrain over which they were ignorant while it was left to the Cardinal Bourne, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, who denounced the strike as ‘a sin against the obedience which we owe to God’, to preach the message Conservatives wanted to hear.
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The Church of England was ready to act as independent mediator in defence of the commonweal, but the Conservatives were clearly not prepared to tolerate it.

In this period, Christian social thought mirrored and incorporated progressive secular political thinking to the extent that some Anglicans complained that it was now impossible to distinguish between the two. The man who can be credited for doing the most to bridge this gap was R. H. Tawney, who would later be heralded as the godfather of twentieth-century British socialism, but may also be lauded as the mastermind behind twentieth-century Christian social thought. In his
Acquisitive Society
(1920) Tawney set out why a materialist and mechanistic philosophy was the source of contemporary social and economic malaise. He offered an historical dimension to his thesis in his
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism
(1926), which both complemented and challenged sociologist Max Weber’s account on the association between Calvinism and capitalist values,
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
(1905). Tawney evoked pre-Reformation Catholic teachings in his denigration of a Christian-endorsed capitalism, which he maintained was a corruption of the original medieval teachings on usury, the common good and the biblical obligation to the poor. He followed this with
Equality
(1931) in which he explained why inequality was an obstruction to harmony, commonality, cooperation and even economic efficiency. Tawney’s vision, although rooted in the Gospel, was always articulated in ethical rather than explicitly biblical terms. This was deliberate, for Tawney realised that it was much easier to convert Christians to socialism than socialists to Christianity. It was for this reason he was to have equal influence on both the left and in Christian circles.
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Anglicans may have been forwarding the same arguments as secular socialists, but there was a notable difference in language and tone. Anglicans, particularly the ecclesiastical hierarchy, tended to talk not in terms of class hostility or the potential of the proletariat but of fellowship, fair competition and cooperation in industrial practice and profit. What may be called ‘establishment radicalism’ was to a large degree conditioned by the upper-middle-class background and culture of those Anglican clergy advocating it.
28
Centrism, inclusivity and paternalism, rather than revolution and class conflict, always characterised the Anglican approach to social and economic issues right up to the 1980s.

Importantly, liberal Anglicanism did not go unchallenged. ‘The Church affects the world not directly, but indirectly,’ preached Rev. Hensley Henson in 1891, ‘not by prescribing a scheme of society, but by providing true principles of action.’
29
By 1920, Henson was Bishop of Durham and had firmly established himself as one of the leading critics of social thought within the Church of England. Henson was
unconvinced by the clergy’s apparent ‘solidarity’ with the working class, which he suspected was not out of compassion, knowledge or brotherhood but crude expediency: ‘The clerical toadies of the age do not flatter princes but mobs … They worship the new possessors of power,’ he wrote in his journal in 1919 in response to the then Bishop of Peterborough’s support for railway strikers.
30
Henson’s was not a partisan critique of Christian socialism; he was no Conservative and in fact always considered himself a Liberal. Rather, his main objection to Temple and others was the way in which they tended to pronounce political progressive aims as ‘divine will’. William Inge, Dean of St Paul’s, was one who shared Henson’s scepticism. Inge’s views on the incompatibility of socialism with Christianity was summarised in his rather cynical phrase: ‘Socialism always assumes that the sty makes the pig, while Christianity declares that the pig makes the sty.’
31
Christian Conservatives would rehearse similar arguments against the turbulent priests of the 1980s.

The work produced by the COPEC conference in the 1920s was followed up by two major church reports on the great concerns of the 1930s – housing and unemployment – but the aim was to provoke moral outrage rather than provide a detailed plan. By far the most important and widely read document on Christian social prophecy was William Temple’s
Christianity and the Social Order.
Published in 1942, the same year as Beveridge’s blueprint for the welfare state, Temple set out a Christian communitarian vision for Britain’s post-war society incorporating now well-worn orthodoxies on housing, employment, education and health provision. But it was not Temple’s objective to endorse particular proposals, rather his aim was to set out the Christian ethos or ‘middle axioms’, which should guide such decisions. His chief fear in the 1940s was not that these plans would be shelved, but that they would be set within a secular rather than a Christian framework. In the end, Temple’s wish would be granted. Prime Minister Attlee’s post-war settlement was christened the ‘New Jerusalem’ and given a suitable Christian gloss by
those in Westminster: although Temple would not live to see the final result, dying in office in 1944. Of the Beveridge Report, Temple considered that it was ‘the first time anyone had set out to embody the whole spirit of the Christian ethic in an Act of Parliament’.
32
Temple’s
Social
Order,
however, was equally influential and deserves to stand alongside both Beveridge’s Report and Keynes’s
General Theory of Employment
as one of the founding tracts of Britain’s social democracy.

The historian Frank Prochaska has argued that the welfare state had in effect put the churches out of a job, referring to how the state assumed full responsibility in areas where the Church had previously enjoyed influence.
33
But perhaps a more accurate statement would be that the Church of England, increasingly aware of its own limitations, had taken voluntary redundancy. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the sphere of education. For his 1944 Education Act, R. A. Butler managed to convince the Church, many of whose numbers were reluctant, of the need for Anglican schools to become fully integrated into the state system; the Catholic Church however opted to for ‘voluntary aided’ status and thus were required to provide 50 per cent of the funds, but retained greater control over their schools. In a further move designed to satisfy the Anglican bishops, the Act stipulated that all children would be taught ‘Religious Instruction’ (a watered-down Protestantism) and partake in a communal daily act of worship. The settlement did not satisfy some Anglicans who feared a loss of autonomy and a dilution of denominational education, but it was a more than favourable deal for the Church of England in economic terms and, more importantly, established religious schools as a major player within the state system.

The term ‘post-war consensus’ is a loaded and simplistic one. The policies arising from this vision were fiercely contested, not least within the Conservative Party, and with a reluctant Churchill at the helm it would take time for the party to become fully ‘converted’. It was a Christian consensus concerning the moral responsibilities of the state and its presumed Christian citizenry. It was a noble but flawed vision,
layered as it was over existing measures and provisions, constrained by competing interest groups and priorities, and framed around an idealised vision of the family unit and economic behaviour that would eventually unravel over subsequent years as expectations increased, lives got more complicated and the economy faltered.

MARGARET ROBERTS LEFT
Oxford in 1946 just as the Attlee government was beginning to put these measures into place. Her immediate concern, however, was not politics, but settling into her graduate role working for BX Plastics in Manningtree, Essex. Marooned from familiar surroundings, Methodism once again became her anchor. She attended the Culver Street Methodist Church in Colchester and offered her preaching skills to the local circuit. In a letter to Muriel, however, she complained that the local Methodists were not very welcoming, unlike the local Conservative Association and the Young Colchester Conservatives, with whom she spent most of her spare time.
34
Her father was worried about his youngest daughter and wrote to Muriel relaying his suspicions that Margaret may have fallen under the spell of a Catholic friend, Mary. In his letter, her father delivered a wonderful diatribe on the dangers of Roman Catholicism, which he explained was an intolerant religion that oppressed individual freedom and likened it to totalitarianism.

Muriel immediately wrote back to allay her father’s fears, informing him that in fact the reverse was true: it was Mary who was under Margaret’s spell.
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But her father had been right to sense a change in his daughter. Margaret had not been seduced by Rome but she was becoming more and more distanced from her father, Grantham and her Methodist roots.

Her goal of pursuing a political career remained unabated. A whiff of an opportunity came in 1948 in a chance meeting with an old Oxford friend at the Conservative Party conference in Llandudno, who set up a luncheon with the Dartford Conservative Constituency Association in Kent, which was then scouting for a candidate. Margaret Roberts’s Dartford campaigns in the general elections of 1950 and 1951 would not only prove to be excellent training for a political career but would turn out to be a turning point in her life. What kind of Toryism did Margaret Roberts offer the constituents of Dartford? A clue is given in a short piece she composed for the
Young Kent Forum
in 1949. Entitled: ‘Two Contemporaries – Marx and Disraeli’, the article was scrappy history, but offers an intriguing insight into her political beliefs. According to Roberts, Marx and Disraeli were men who had both experienced the Industrial Revolution but had come to quite different conclusions. Marx was dismissed as a ‘German’ intellectual who had devised his thesis in the ‘musty air of the British Museum’. Disraeli, on the other hand, appalled by ‘poverty and misery’, had come to the sensible conclusion that only a combination of social reform, collective bargaining with the workers and opportunity for all would bridge the gulf between the ‘rich and poor’.