God and Mrs Thatcher (14 page)

C
ONSERVATISM IN BRITAIN
has always been a disparate group of ideas and influences and in this regard the New Right that emerged in the 1970s was no exception. As historian Maurice Cowling on the right and Marxist sociologist Stuart Hall on the left recognised, Conservatism underwent a profound and uncompromising transformation in the 1970s, reordering itself intellectually, culturally, religiously, and finally, politically with the elevation of Margaret
Thatcher as leader in 1975. Signs of a ‘right turn’ in British public life were discernible long before it took hold in Westminster; in the senior common room of Peterhouse, Cambridge, the seminar halls at the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), at the annual meeting of Mary Whitehouse’s National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association (NVLA) and in the debating chamber of the Church’s General Synod. Collectively, these represented variations on the same theme: a conservative reaction against liberal progressivism and the post-war world. Margaret Thatcher was the political benefactor of a right-wing mood that she did not initiate, but crucially she would come to symbolise it, give her name to it and put flesh on its ideological bones.

THE YEAR OF
1968 is generally regarded as a triumphant moment for the left when pacifists, feminists, socialists and civil rights activists engaged in a simultaneous and seemingly spontaneous orgy of protest across the globe. But in many ways it was an equally significant moment for the right, representing as it did the beginnings of radical reactionary conservatism, which pitted itself not only against socialism but also what many considered to be an equally damaging and complacent force: establishment conservatism. Those on the right would eventually come to steal the language of ‘liberty’ and ‘individualism’ from the left but would attach to it very different meanings. True freedom, they judged, was not sexual liberation, but owning one’s house.

It was in 1968 when the post-war consensus came off the rails. Political centrism was in crisis mode from that point onwards as radicals on the right as well as the left grabbed the headlines and began to set the terms of the debate. In April 1968, Enoch Powell delivered his infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, which sought to re-mould Tory nationalism in an anti-immigration guise. That same year, monetarist
economic theory and the ideas of Milton Friedman made it into the pages of
The Times.
The following year saw the publication of the first of the notorious ‘Black Papers’ attacking progressive education and Labour’s abolition of grammar schools. Spearheaded by literary critic and founder of the Homosexual Law Reform Society, A. E. Dyson, the Papers were lauded by those on the right for denting the socialist myth of equality in education, which they always suspected would result in a flat-lining of opportunity.

In 1968, Margaret Thatcher, then Conservative shadow minister for fuel and power, was invited to give an address to the Conservative Political Centre’s meeting to commemorate forty years since women had achieved full emancipation. Rejecting such a tokenistic notion, she instead delivered an ambitiously titled piece ‘What’s Wrong with Politics’. Thatcher’s speech, which contained very little by way of economics or policies, offered a broad critique on post-war state expansion and its corrosive effects on individual liberty. Margaret Thatcher’s contention, which many considered quite innocent and sensible at the time, was that the individual must be emancipated from such burdens so that the values of responsibility and duty to others could be restored. In preparation, Thatcher had studied works of Conservative philosophy, but in the end, it was to her Bible that she turned to for legitimation: ‘Even the Good Samaritan had to have the money to help, otherwise he too would have had to pass on the other side.’
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It was a foretaste of what was to come.

In 1968 though, it was Enoch Powell who was the leading light on the right. Prime Minister Harold Wilson said as much at the Labour Party conference that year, and in a calculated swipe at Edward Heath, singled Powell out as his main rival. Wilson was, of course, conscious of the support that Powell had amongst the working-class Labour voters, as the pro-Powellite march by the East End Dockers had recently demonstrated. The Conservatives would later take advantage of anti-immigration feeling, but Heath condemned Powell’s views in no
uncertain terms as ‘an example of man’s inhumanity to man which is absolutely intolerable in a Christian, civilised society’.
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Both Labour and Conservatives remained aware that in evoking the popular anguish about immigration at a time of a weakening economy, Powell had stirred up a hornet’s nest that would not easily go away.

Enoch Powell always lacked the personal skills and charm required to become leader and tended to inspire admiration rather than loyalty from his colleagues. He was principled yet populist, poetic yet rational but had a kamikaze-like approach to his career, which even his closest friends could not fathom. ‘I go a long way along the line with Enoch,’ remarked Conservative Chancellor Iain Macleod, ‘but I get off before the train crashes into the buffers.’
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Nor was Powell easy to bracket. He had given up his schoolboy dream of becoming Viceroy of India when he realised Britain’s imperial game was up and in the post-decolonised new world order, became an ardent nationalist voicing anti-Americanism and anti-Europeanism with equal aggression. Long before Powell became synonymous with immigration restrictions, it was on the free market where he had shown the lead. Powell was an advocate of privatisation twenty years before the policy was enacted and even Milton Friedman wrote to
The Times
defending his economic views. But in 1974, just when it looked like the Conservative Party might come round to his way of thinking, Powell left to join the Ulster Unionists, convinced that the Conservatives, led by his great adversary Ted Heath, was no longer the party he had joined in his youth.

Powell was the first politician to combine the two strands which would later become the central tenets of the New Right – Tory nationalism with a free-market approach to economics – although the reason he is cast as the ‘Godfather of Thatcherism’ is as much to do with his class as his politics. A grammar-school boy from Wolverhampton, Powell dismissed the aristocratic pretensions of Toryism and promoted a form of populism, which pitted the ruling elite against the so-called ‘will of the British people’, be it on immigration, economics or even
the Church of England. Even though Powell had a historical consciousness that sometimes led him astray, he did not have an anachronistic view of the world and in important ways prompted and pre-empted many of the debates that would later dominate the Thatcher years.

One aspect of Powell that is rarely remarked upon is his religious belief. A devout Anglican, Powell’s faith was formed not in the home but from a conversion experience in his youth when he had been invited into the church by the local vicar. An evangelical, Powell later became a biblical scholar and spent his dying days working on a revised translation of St John’s Gospel. His faith, though, was always rooted in a historic (and what many clerics considered to be inaccurate) belief in the supremacy of Parliament as the protector of the Church and its people. Speaking to a gathering at the East Grinstead Young Conservatives in 1980, Powell put forward the historic case:

The constitutional basis of the Church of England was something that Powell had been arguing since the 1950s, but it later became his main line of defence in halting the liberal direction of the Church of England. On the main aspects of modern Anglicanism, Powell stood in defiant opposition. He was an instrumental figure in the parliamentary campaign against the Church’s updating of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, considered female ordination a ‘blasphemous pantomime’ and was deeply hostile to any ecumenical alliances against Protestant England’s old enemy, Rome. He even changed his place of worship from St Peter’s, Eaton Square, to St Margaret’s, Westminster, because of the incumbent priest’s ‘imitation of Roman fashions’.
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Powell’s anti-Romanism may also have been the origins of his opposition to the EEC; his paranoia seems to have led him to view it as some kind of conspiratorial Catholic plot. Powell’s views on immigration inevitably put him at odds with Archbishop Ramsey. If Powell was a reluctant hero for the National Front, then Ramsey became one of its targets as head of the National Committee for Commonwealth Immigrants. Enoch Powell challenged the bishops on their support for multiculturalism, which to him stemmed from a left-wing political bias rather than sound theology. In 1969, Powell appeared in a TV debate with anti-apartheid campaigner and Bishop of Stepney, Trevor Huddleston. When Huddleston denounced Powell’s views on race as incompatible with biblical teaching, Powell’s response was emphatic: ‘When you are gratified with the conclusions that you arrive at, you dignify them as a consequence of Christian belief.’
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In Powell’s mind, the clergy did not have anything original or substantive to say on political affairs. ‘They are amateurs in economics, amateurs in politics, their expertise lies in a different sphere,’ was his response to the Church’s Declaration on World Poverty in 1973.
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Powell proved to be a thorn in the Church’s side throughout the 1970s and 1980s, working with traditionalists in the Synod to thwart Church Measures when they reached Parliament. Powell was clearly a reassuring figure for conservative Anglicans. One parishioner wrote a series of letters to Powell with a list of complaints about her local vicar who had apparently allowed the use of the church for an Islamic funeral, consented to female laity conducting Holy Communion and whose Easter service had featured a West Indian Calypso. ‘Just what religion is this Church practising?’ she complained to Powell, assured that her frustrations would gain a favourable hearing.
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Powell liked to claim that his faith and his politics were separate (‘My Kingdom is not of this World’ was one of his stock phrases), but no one could deny the political resonance of his statement: ‘Man is born as an individual, he dies as an individual … It is to man the individual
that the Gospel speaks.’
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Margaret Thatcher would later reiterate this point using almost identical language. Powell’s belief in the doctrine of original sin lay behind his scepticism towards any utopian visions of state. According to Powell, the Bible did not contain a blueprint for human advancement, as he explained, in rather bleak terms, to the parishioners of St Michael and Mary in Southwark in 1973:

Enoch Powell was an unsettling figure for the ruling elite. He pierced holes in the ideological foundations of the post-war liberal order: its politics, its religion and the make-up of British society. Powellism foreshadowed Thatcherism in serving up a new vision of post-imperial nationalism combined with economic liberalism and, like Thatcher, Powell drew on the notion of the sanctity of the individual and Godgiven liberty to justify it.

Powell had merely rocked the boat in the late 1960s. It would take a further seven years and two election defeats to bring about change in the Conservative Party. But, importantly, something happened to Britain in the interim: a crisis in national self-confidence. Economic and industrial disruption following from the oil shock of 1973 exacerbated an already prevailing sense of uncertainty about Britain’s place in the world in the wake of decolonisation (something, which Britain’s entry into European Economic Community in 1973 did not halt). Rising immigration and Celtic nationalism, too, seemed to be corroding a traditional and cohesive notion of Britishness. The fallout in Ulster was a knock to national pride not to mention a cause of international
embarrassment. In the 1970s, Britain seemed like a racehorse that had lost its rider but was still in the race, jumping limply over each hurdle and meandering all over the place. Henry Kissinger summed it up succinctly in a note to President Ford in 1975: ‘Britain is a tragedy.’
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In 1970, Ted Heath appeared to have the answers, setting out a programme for change devised at the Selsdon Park Hotel. Selsdon was always more important for its tone rather than specifics. An enthused Keith Joseph, then shadow Minister for Technology and Trade proclaimed that it aimed for ‘civilised capitalism based on competitive free enterprise in a context of human laws and institutions’.
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This all sounded inherently sensible, but in the end Heath would not have the luck or the mettle to enact the necessary changes. He would be defeated by the two great crises of the age – industrial strife and inflation – as he opted for appeasement rather than confrontation with the unions. Margaret Thatcher would learn pertinent lessons from the Heath government of 1970–74.