God and Mrs Thatcher (16 page)

Nineteen seventy-four was the year when the middle class bolted with the establishment of the Middle Class Association (MCA) soon after the first election that February. The MCA was later joined by the National Association of Ratepayers’ Action Group, which fought a successful campaign against the recent hike in local rates. The Labour government, then wary of another election, immediately extended grants to local councils to cover the increase. The Conservative Party, too, altered its rates policy under the instruction of the new shadow housing spokesperson, Margaret Thatcher. The National Federation of Self-Employed was later established, providing an important voice for this rapidly growing element of Britain’s workforce who were suffering from the contraction in the economy and who feared big business as much as union militancy. It soon claimed 30,000 members and was later joined by the Association of Self-Employed People led by future Conservative MP Teresa Gorman. All this was a worrying development for the Conservatives. Edward
Heath had been conscious of the need to appease middle-class disaffection but not until Margaret Thatcher became leader would the party adequately address their concerns.

The most prominent, but not necessarily the most important, of these organisations was the right-wing libertarian group, the National Association For Freedom (NAFF). Established by the founders of the Guinness Book of Records, the McWhirter brothers and former Governor-General of Australia, Viscount De L’Isle, in 1975, NAFF was an direct reaction to Heath’s failure to get tough with the unions, although its involvement in a ‘Self Help’ press and a ‘Stop the Scroungers’ campaign hinted at a broader agenda. In 1976, NAFF was to stage its greatest coup in helping to defeat the strike at Grunwick Film Processing Laboratories: a local dispute, which escalated into a symbolic confrontation between the unions and small businesses in Britain. Norris McWhirter was an old acquaintance of Margaret Thatcher. She had backed his parliamentary candidature for the seat of Orpington in the 1960s. He in turn supported her leadership campaign in 1975 and dismissed her opponents as the ‘Old Gang of the Tory Party … a bunch of political failures, has-beens who never were’. In Margaret Thatcher, McWhirter recognised a kindred spirit.
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Organisations such as NAFF were important not for their individual success but for collectively triggering a wake-up call within the Conservative Party. What these groups shared in common was not only their middle-class support base but also their geographical concentration in the south of England (they were particularly weak in Scotland and Wales). When Margaret Thatcher became leader, she attended to their fears, much like a mother comforting a screaming child. In one of her first tasks as leader, she established the ‘Small Business Bureau’ within Conservative Central Office and, not for good reason, began to draw on her own heritage as the daughter of an independent grocer. By the general election of 1979, these organisations had either dissolved or ceased to pose a threat to the Conservative Party.

In his 1971 book,
The Permissive Society,
Tory parliamentary candidate John Gummer put the Conservative case succinctly when he wrote: ‘The twentieth century had restricted and corseted us economically while leaving us more and more free to do as we like in bed.’
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At the time that Gummer was writing, popular anguish over moral permissiveness had found its most prominent means of expression in the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association (NVLA) formed by Mary Whitehouse in 1964. Dubbed ‘God’s Rottweiler’ by the press, Whitehouse emerged as the self-appointed guardian of the nation’s morals, leading the fighting against what she called the BBC’s ‘propaganda of disbelief, doubt and dirt’.
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Whitehouse cast herself as a sobering antidote to what she called the ‘candy-floss society’ and spoke in a language of sin and certainty, which even Church leaders found slightly archaic.

The moral lobby in Britain fashioned itself as populist, anti-intellectual and anti-establishment, with Whitehouse presenting her crusade as a David and Goliath tale: that of an unassuming lower-middle-class teacher from the Midlands taking on the tax-funded liberal elites at the BBC. Whitehouse, though, demonstrated an impressive capacity for self-promotion and publicity. She exploited the potentialities of the new media age as much as she condemned them and as a result attracted a level of attention that far outweighed the NVLA’s support base. Whitehouse’s claim that she represented the ‘silent majority’ was questionable; even at its height, the organisation had a membership of just 30,000 and was always more of a one-woman show than a mass movement. Nonetheless, Whitehouse’s attacks on the liberal establishment, much like Enoch Powell on immigration, were both forms of a right-wing populist rhetoric, which Margaret Thatcher, in her anti-establishment flourishes, would later excel in communicating to the electorate.

Of the Christian motivation behind the NVLA, there can be no doubt. Whitehouse was an evangelical Anglican, while the NVLA’s original manifesto had begun with the declaration: ‘We women of Britain believe in a Christian way of life.’ NVLA members were much
like Whitehouse herself – predominantly middle-aged, evangelical women – although the NVLA also counted many Nonconformists, High Anglicans and Roman Catholics within their ranks. The NVLA’s respectable and discreet form of middle-class female activism proved a sharp contrast to the brash ostentatiousness and radicalism of the women’s movement then beginning to flower. This was Britain’s culture war and it was distinctly female in its composition. At the same time that feminists were hijacking the Miss World competition and heckling host Bob Hope, Mary Whitehouse was staging silent prayer demonstrations and petitioning the Home Office to remove death metal man of darkness Alice Cooper from Britain. It hardly needs saying that the majority of Britons did not consider either Bob Hope or Alice Cooper much of a threat.

The moral right was given additional impetus in the early 1970s with the formation of the National Festival of Light, founded by evangelical Peter Hall, who, on returning to the UK from missionary work in India, was shocked to find Britain in what he described as a ‘moral landslide’.
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Hall convinced other prominent lay-Christians to join his cause, including the evangelical industrialist Sir Fred Catherwood, Catholic anti-obscenity campaigner Lord Longford (later dubbed ‘Lord Porn’) and Malcolm Muggeridge, a former atheist and satirist who seemed to lose his sense of humour when he found Christ. Taking its cue from American-style evangelicalism, the Festival of Light held mass rallies in Trafalgar Square in 1971 and again in 1972, attracting crowds of well over 20,000. Activists soon realised, however, that if there was to be a moral revival it would come through legislative change rather than the saving of souls.

Whitehouse’s own tactic was to move the fight from the streets to the law courts where she believed, correctly as it turned out, that such causes were likely to find favour amongst the predominantly conservative judiciary. The 1970s saw a series of successes against obscenity, such as the banning of
The Little Red Book,
penned by
two Danish schoolteachers, which had asked the youths to question and challenge societal moral norms. In 1971, the publishers of underground satirical magazine Oz were charged with ‘conspiracy to corrupt public morals’ and although they were eventually let off, their trial put ‘obscenity’ in the spotlight in the same way that
Lady
Chatterley’s Lover
had done ten years previously. In 1978, Danish filmmaker Jens Jørgen Thorsen, who was due to shoot the
Sex Life of Christ,
was arrested at Heathrow. By far the most important case came in 1977 when Whitehouse pursued a successful private prosecution of blasphemy against the editor of
Gay News
for publishing a poem concerning the sexual fantasies of a Roman soldier towards Jesus’ crucified body. This was the first prosecution for blasphemy since 1922.

Whitehouse once complained that ‘the “liberators” of the ’60s have become the tyrants of the ’70s’.
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She had a point. When it came to Mary Whitehouse and her cohort of moralists, the liberal intelligentsia did not appear to be all that liberal. Whitehouse was appalled by the vilification she received from all quarters and by the lack of support from the one institution upon which she had assumed she could rely: ‘I was completely overwhelmed by the extent of the opposition, and the silence of the Church’ she later wrote on her blasphemy campaign.
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Christian leaders had taken a conscious decision to distance themselves from the
Gay News
trial with both the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster refusing an offer to testify. Paul Oestreicher, went so far as to question the ‘Christian’ worth of the moral lobby:

One of the striking features of the moral conservative revival in the 1970s was the fact that its figurehead was a female layperson rather than a man of the cloth. Whitehouse and her supporters also tended to receive a much more favourable reception in Parliament than in the Synod. Whitehouse considered this ecclesiastical reticence as evidence that the Church had embraced the New Morality. The fact that the Church had been unforthcoming in its support for the Festival of Light (the Archbishop of Canterbury had not been present) but had willingly hosted a communion service in St Paul’s Cathedral for the three-year anniversary of the counter-cultural musical
Hair
seemed a shameful example of a Church gone awry.

In the 1960s, moral pressure groups had rightly pointed the finger at consumerism and materialism as well as collectivism for the decline in traditional morality in Britain. This broad analysis too reflected their support base in Parliament, which came as much from the traditional Nonconformist left as it did from the right. Yet, by the end of the 1970s, the moral lobby had more or less aligned its cause with the Conservative Party while it began to cast the left as the main perpetrators of permissiveness. How and why did moralism become the preserve of the right? It was of course easy to point the finger at the Labour Party – its government had brought in most of the offensive legislation. But, more profoundly, it was the Conservatives that initiated this move. In the mid-1970s, conscious of the disaffection at the grassroots, Conservatives started making favourable noises to Whitehouse and her followers. In his notorious Edgbaston speech in 1974, which is now best remembered for some unwise statements on eugenics, Conservative shadow minister Keith Joseph singled out Mary Whitehouse as an embodiment of individual virtue against the bureaucratic elite; that of an ‘unknown middle-aged woman, a schoolteacher in the Midlands’ who had set out ‘to protect adolescents against the permissiveness of our time’.
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Whitehouse was clearly flattered by the attention and duly returned the compliment: ‘The people of Britain
have been like sheep without a shepherd. But now they have found one,’ she declared after Joseph’s speech.
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The association between the moral right and the Conservative Party would become cemented during Margaret Thatcher’s years as Leader of the Opposition. Willie Whitelaw, then shadow Home Secretary, was sent off to attend the NVLA annual conference, while Thatcher purposefully began to speak of a moral revival as necessary for economic revival.

Perhaps sensing that this was where the argument was heading, Whitehouse also tied the economic argument with the moral one. ‘The will to beat inflation,’ Whitehouse wrote in a private plea to all party leaders before the election in 1979, was ‘dependent upon the character of the people’, which was ‘moulded in the home’.
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For years, issues of morality had been determined by MPs’ individual conscience rather than party affiliation, yet as the left came to gradually embrace the New Morality, so the right promoted itself more prominently as the party of the family and conservative morality. Whitehouse, therefore, pinned great hopes on the new female Conservative leader who in character and demeanour seemed remarkably similar to herself: a middle-class suburban mother also armed with a handbag, a moralistic fervour and a determination to kick the ruling elite into shape.

By the mid-1970s, it was clear to most Anglicans that there was a sharp divide emerging within the Church between liberals who advocated ‘accommodation’ with the modern world and traditionalists who advocated ‘resistance’. What is more, this fragmentation seemed to cut across the old factions of evangelicals, liberals and High Anglicans. Anglo-Catholic traditionalists, who feared what liberal reformism was doing to traditional practices, found they had much in common with evangelical conservatives concerned about the weakening of scriptural authority. This schism was not confined to the Church of England but clearly evident in the Roman Catholic Church, where conservatives were determined to halt the progress of Vatican II. Paradoxically then, just at the moment when ecumenism could have been said to have
eased tensions between the churches, this was superseded by an equally damaging phenomenon: fragmentation within the Christian churches themselves.

The establishment of the General Synod in 1970 had given the Church greater control over its affairs, but it had also created a forum in which ecclesiastical factionalism and infighting could ferment. If ever there was an institution to take the sanctity out of Christianity, it was the dry, charmless debating chamber of Synod. In most instances, it showed the Church in the worst possible light with its bureaucratic class, obstructive procedure and endless series of forgettable debates. ‘I regard it as a disaster, a playground for bureaucrats or bores,’ wrote the Bishop of Southwark, Mervyn Stockwood, in his diocesan letter in 1972, two years into its infancy.
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