God and Mrs Thatcher (15 page)

NEO-LIBERALISM, AS IT
became known, was not that new by the time that the Conservative Party came to fully embrace it. It could be dated back to 1947 with the formation of the Mont Pelerin Society, named after the resort in Switzerland where a collection of like-minded scholars, including Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper and Milton Friedman, established a group committed to reasserting classical economic liberalism against the Keynesian orthodoxy. Britain soon had its own neo-liberal vehicle in the form of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), set up in 1955 and led by a son of a tramways inspector and failed Conservative parliamentary candidate, Ralph Harris, and former Liberal Party activist and son of a Jewish émigré, Arthur Seldon. That the economic tide in Britain was turning away from post-war Keynesianism was clearly
evident by 1976 when Labour Chancellor Denis Healey implemented cuts as a condition of Britain’s embarrassing bail-out by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Jim Callaghan declared at the Labour Party conference that year that it was now ‘impossible to spend your way out of a recession’. But in this, the Labour government was merely accepting pragmatic monetary constraints; it did not represent an ideological switch. What was discernible about the economic liberals who gained prominence in the 1970s was not only their discrediting of the Keynesian model, but their fanatical belief in the alternative.

British economic liberals tended to hark back to the glory days of nineteenth-century laissez-faire capitalism as the historical precedent to be repeated, while the Keynesian post-war ‘experiment’ was dismissed as a tale of false idols, wrong policies and bad results, particularly in respect to the welfare state. As early as 1971, just when welfare spending was beginning to contract, Ralph Harris pleaded for a more radical overhaul. The welfare state, he wrote, ‘is anything but a gift horse. Rather it is a lame nag harnessed to an outdated bandwagon … the sovereign people should pull hard on the reins, ask for their money back and get off the overcrowded monstrosity.’
15
Harris, who had been born a Nonconformist and later became an Anglican was not averse to casually drawing on the doctrine of original sin to debunk the myth of the exalted state. According to Harris, the state was not one of utopian dreams, as socialists professed, but a heretical fantasy, which incorrectly assumed the inherent goodness of humanity and largely benefited the bureaucratic class in charge. Nigel Lawson would make an almost identical point in 1980, when as Financial Secretary to the Treasury he gave a speech entitled ‘the New Conservatism’. Drawing on philosopher Anthony Quinton’s notion that Conservatism rested on the imperfection of mankind (devoid of its religious associations), Lawson claimed that whereas socialism forwarded a ‘creed of utopianism and the perfectibility of man’, Conservatism on the other hand concerned ‘the creed of original sin and the politics of
imperfection’. Few Conservatives would have challenged him on the notion that Conservative philosophy was rooted in ‘imperfection’; what was contentious was Lawson’s application to the welfare state: ‘We are all imperfect – even the most high-minded civil servant … the civil servants and middle-class welfare professionals are far from the selfless Platonic guardians of paternalist mythology: they are a major interest group in their own right.’
16

In both cases, Harris and Lawson were not offering a Christian vision of Conservatism or even the market (this job would later fall to Margaret Thatcher), rather they were conveniently using the doctrine of the Fall to discredit the man-made state; and in Lawson’s case, to define the characteristics of what he called ‘the New Conservatism’.

Friedrich Hayek never considered himself a Conservative and indeed wrote an essay refuting the claim; rather he aligned himself with ‘old-fashioned Liberals’, that is, the classical liberalism of the nineteenth-century Manchester school.
*
Neo-liberalism was always an intellectual movement outside the Conservative Party upon which only a handful of Conservatives would directly draw. The influence of Hayek, Michael Oakeshott and others was subtle but important in establishing the philosophical and economic critique of socialism’s suppression of liberty and also the exalting of individual liberty over the concept of social equality; two doctrines which would later underscore Thatcherism. What particularly excited the political class, however, was the fanaticism and above all certainty, with which economic liberals – chiefly those at the Chicago school – spoke of the market as the antidote to collectivism. Economic theory was elevated to doctrinal heights, economists lauded as the new apostles, as monetarists claimed to have discovered the miraculous formula for controlling the money supply. The chief ingredients that made up economic liberalism from the late 1960s differed from the
Conservative libertarians of the 1940s and 1950s, who had tended to root their arguments not in the sovereignty of the market but in the moral supremacy of civil society over the state.

Few economic liberals were Christians, a number were notable atheists and a large number were of Jewish origin. Hayek did believe that the modern trend towards socialism was a denial of the key characteristics of Western civilisation that had its roots in Christianity, but both he and Friedman espoused to what may be called an atheist libertarian position. Economic liberals may not have drawn on the Bible as Thatcher would later do, but they did assert the
moral
superiority of the market over socialism. Adam Smith was heralded not an economist but a moral philosopher (which he was of course was) as neo-liberals endorsed Smith’s contention that the market enabled citizens to exercise their self-interest, which ultimately was for the benefit of the greater good. In Smith’s classic phrase: ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.’ Smith’s notion of a ‘system of natural order’ also distinctly appealed to economic liberals seeking to cast socialism as an artificial construct and thus contrary to the natural laws of man.

It took a while for economic liberalism to gain a foothold within the party; meanwhile a more traditional thread of Conservative thinking, which still went by the historic label of ‘High Toryism’, also enjoyed renewed prominence in the 1970s. If Balliol College, Oxford, had been the intellectual pulse of post-war progressivism (the alma mater of Heath, Temple, Tawney, Roy Jenkins amongst others), then Peterhouse, Cambridge, operated in much the same function for the New Right in the 1970s, housing the likes of historians Maurice Cowling and Edward Norman and the Cambridge base for future Thatcherites Michael Howard and Michael Portillo. It, too, had notable links in the right-wing press with Colin Welch, deputy editor of the
Daily Telegraph
and Peregrine Worsthorne,
associate editor of the
Sunday Telegraph
and Patrick Cosgrave, one-time political editor of
The Spectator
and later adviser to Margaret Thatcher, all linked to Peterhouse. Also rising through the ranks, but not Peterhouse men, were the likes of Charles Moore and A. N. Wilson, who would later be dubbed the ‘Young Fogeys’, so called because of their old-fashioned dress and high cultural tastes. These High Tories may have acted like the 1960s had never happened but they were in fact entirely a product of it. They revelled in a traditionalist and hierarchical view of society and positioned themselves in opposition to the New Liberalism and all its manifestations: its politics, culture, education, architecture and religion. High Toryism would eventually establish its own mouthpiece, the
Salisbury Review
journal, founded in 1980 and edited by philosopher Roger Scruton.

It is in fact extremely difficult to pinpoint precisely what united these disparate figures. Indeed, it was a desire for coherence that motivated Maurice Cowling to pen his exhaustive three-volume work,
Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England
(1980–2001), which charted contribution of Conservative thought in the twentieth century as the intellectual antidote to liberal progressivism.) Above all, it was a distinctly English intellectual movement rooted in a Whiggish understanding of the organic and harmonious evolution of the English constitution and a suspicion of anything done in the name of ‘progress’. Their faith in Britain’s institutions was coupled with serious misgivings about who was now running them – be it the universities, the Church or the Tory Party. This was combined with a tangible sense of England (rather than Britain), which naturally underscored their evolving attitudes towards European federalism, immigration and the nationalist causes of the Celtic fringe.

In Maurice Cowling’s view, the real enemy was neither socialism nor communism, but a much more pernicious force: ‘secular liberalism’, which, in his view, was not liberal at all but a decidedly
stringent, intolerant doctrine that had pervaded Britain’s culture like an alternative religion. This was the ideological label given to establishment thinking and the inspiration behind what High Tories considered the three main disasters of post-war politics: the social-democratic consensus, the ‘permissive’ legislation and progressive education. Cowling’s particular gripe was that secular liberalism had found intellectual credibility in the discipline of sociology; he was to fight a long but futile campaign against it becoming a degree subject at Cambridge.

Most High Tories came from the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England and upheld the sovereign notion of establishment, although they considered the liberal drift within Anglicanism to be a sign that secular humanism had gained a worrying foothold in the Church. This was a high charge, but, as Maurice Cowling admitted, their own underlying prejudices could not be denied either: ‘It could well be that it was a polemical conviction against liberalism rather than a real conviction of the truth of Christianity,’ he later said.
17
Cowling’s religious commitment was ambiguous to say the least; he had considered joining the priesthood in his youth but had ceased to be an active churchgoer in his later years.

The man to imprint a historical understanding on this critique of Anglicanism was the Dean of Peterhouse, the Very Rev. Edward Norman. In his history of the Church since 1770, Norman argued that the story of the modern Anglicanism was one of gradual capitulation to the predominant secular left-wing ideas of the age, with Hensley Henson emerging as a particular hero. Norman’s aim was to undermine the theological credibility of the social gospel, although he was less inclined to see similar failings within conservative Christianity, which was equally guilty of drawing on a secular bourgeois individualism to legitimise its own version of the Gospel. Liberal Anglican priest Paul Oestreicher would later dismiss Norman’s position as ‘populist theology’, noting ‘there are as many Alf Garnetts in Oxbridge
as in Stepney’.
18
Oestreicher was right to label Norman’s position as ‘populist’, for like Enoch Powell on immigration, Norman, too, pitted the elite upper-middle-class clergy against the churchgoing mass. Norman’s thesis was to prove a compelling argument and one that would be rehearsed time and time again by traditionalist Anglicans in the 1980s. High Tories would take Thatcher’s side in her battle with the Church but many were uncomfortable with Thatcherism as a political doctrine, especially its libertarian emphasis. This was particularly true in the sphere of economics, where the prioritising of the market, they rightly predicted, would bring about irrevocable changes to the nation’s landscape, culture and psyche.

It is impossible to overstate the sense of paranoia and frustration that engulfed the Conservative-voting middle classes in the 1970s, with fears about rising prices and union militancy mirroring an earlier wave of anti-socialist hysteria that had gripped Britain in the 1920s. The middle classes had been hit hard by the economic slump and inflation; retail prices increased by 25 per cent between 1965 and 1970 and by 16 per cent in 1976 alone. Inflation was a potent issue precisely because it was seen to break the middle-class association between ‘effort and reward’.
19
Meanwhile, fears about rising ‘permissiveness’ compounded a sense that middle-class values – respectability, discipline and deferred gratification – were wilfully being discarded for a culture of dependency, decadence and debt. The apocalyptic fears about ‘national decline’ or the ‘British disease’ masked the actual concern; the erosion of middle-class values. Signs for this frustration could be traced as far back as the 1940s with the establishment of the welfare state, although post-war affluence had done a great deal to silence these cries. In more testing times they became impossible to muzzle. By the mid-1970s, the middle class began to wail like a persecuted and vilified interest group. ‘In this time of crisis … [we] are subject to unprecedented pressures, and, at the same time, to unprecedented denigration,’ wrote Patrick Hutber in his defensive tract
The Decline and Fall of the Middle Class.
20

The problem was that the middle classes’ chief political mouthpiece appeared not to be listening. Reports from the Tory Associations gathered by Conservative Central Office in the early ’70s spoke very little about fiscal management but included a long list of other complaints, including trade union power, immigration, inflation, immorality and much on the diminishing virtues of personal responsibility and individual liberty. Heath had attempted to reach out to the Conservative core with his Selsdon manifesto in 1970, but disillusionment soon reappeared as he yielded to union demands. They were to punish him in the election of October 1974, with the Conservatives suffering their worst result since 1918. Some fled to the Liberals, who amassed an increasing share of the vote in the 1970s, while others decided to take matters into their own hands and establish extra-parliamentary groups. The logic was that if trade unions were able to use bullying tactics to bargain for higher wages, why should the middle classes not deploy similar methods to defend their interests?