God and Mrs Thatcher (25 page)

In the 1980s, the BBC still fulfilled its Reithian obligations in delivering its set quota of Christian programming. When, in 1978, a Sikh presented Radio 4’s
Thought for the Day
it provoked a barrage of criticism and the precedent was not soon repeated. The BBC’s religious broadcasting department was still considered to be the ‘Church of England at the microphone’ and remained in the safe hands of the Anglican priests in charge.
13
What was discernible was a new understanding that Christianity was something newsworthy, as coverage of the General Synod as well as religious affairs across the globe, including the rise of liberation theology in South America and Islamic Fundamentalism in the Middle East, now featured alongside the regular broadcasting of worship.

Congregational numbers may have been on the wane and but weekly parish attendances still gave the Church a bigger audience than most Sunday newspapers, especially in the Conservative heartlands. Moreover, it had resources that most pressure groups spend years and millions of pounds trying to acquire: a recognisable brand, extensive land, royal patronage, connections with the corridors of power and the media, a professional staff (many of whom came from the ranks of the civil service), its own think-tank (the Board for Social Responsibility), an extensive local network and an army of volunteers at the grassroots.
14
And yet, any claims that it was a ‘national’ Church or that the Synod was representative of society was highly dubious to say the least. A staggering 71 per cent of its House of Laity had attended London, Oxford or Cambridge universities (compared with only 44 per cent of parliamentary candidates in the October 1974 general election). Nonetheless, the local parish remained the centre of the nation’s pastoral activities and Christians still made up the majority of Britain’s charity
workers with over 70 per cent of volunteers claiming a godly motivation. Its network of parishes across the land was one that no other institution had, and as Archbishop Runcie legitimately pointed out during a Lords debate on the Brixton riots in 1981, the clergy, unlike other public servants such as policemen, doctors and social workers, did at least live where they served. It was easy to reel out a long list of the failures of the Church, particularly in the secular urban enclaves, and yet when seen in a civic rather than a spiritual light, the Church could legitimately claim (and often did) that its local clergy were better informed and more intimately connected with their communities than the impersonal and bureaucratic mechanisms of state.

Archbishop William Temple once observed that the Church ‘is the only institution that exists primarily for the benefit of those who are not its members’ and in an era of declining observance, Anglican clergymen came to rely on this definition even more. Back in the 1970s, many feared that the distinction between committed worshippers and nominal members was so acute that Anglicanism was in danger of becoming another congregational sect rather than fulfilling its proper role as the territorial Church of the land. Over the following decade, the Church hierarchy rediscovered its responsibility to the unchurched mass, which, in essence, meant clinging to a vague and contestable notion of folk and residual Christianity as the main rationale for the Established Church. In his 1983 work
Church and Nation in a Secular Age,
Archbishop of York John Habgood challenged the view that rising secularism rendered Christianity redundant, arguing forcefully that the Church of England (and indeed all churches) remained key ‘struts and beams’ of social harmony and the means through which ‘social values’ were ‘generated and transmitted’.
15
That such sentiments were being voiced at a time of political and social division upheaval was no accident but, importantly, this understanding of the Church’s role was largely accepted in an era when multiculturalism was still in its infancy and the term ‘multi-faith’ had not yet garnered currency.
Some radical Anglicans, though, were unconvinced and many came to see disestablishment as the only way forward if the Church was to fulfil its social prophecy: ‘Today the myth of a national Church, the religious arm of the nation, is blatant nonsense,’ wrote Christian socialist Fr Kenneth Leech, before posing a legitimate question: ‘Is not the Church’s entanglement with the structures and value system of the ruling class a major obstacle to its influence being taken seriously?’
16

Most, though, still spoke confidently of Britain as a Christian country and the Church of England as its chief spiritual representative. Delivering
Thought for the Day
on the wedding day of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer in 1981, the Archbishop Stuart Blanch of York asserted:

Secularists and some Anglicans routinely challenged these assumptions but, encouragingly, there was statistical evidence for the continuation of residual Christian faith amongst the populace, what sociologist Grace Davie called the ‘believing without belonging’ phenomenon. The European Values System Study of 1981 revealed that three-quarters of the British sample still pledged a belief in God while half admitted to praying regularly, even though only one-fifth were weekly worshippers. Sociologist A. H. Halsey, the man behind the survey, offered a reassuring assessment:

When
The Times
religious affairs editor Clifford Longley wrote to Robert Runcie informing him that Roman Catholics now outnumbered Anglicans in terms of weekly worship, Runcie confidently dismissed its significance: ‘The ebb and flow of belief and unbelief is not readily translated into statistical bedrock.’
19
According to Archbishop Blanch, it was not secularism that was the real obstacle, but ecclesiastical introspection: ‘The fields are ripe for harvest if we can only get out into the fields and not spend all our time mending the barns or oiling the machinery,’ he said in a spirited plea to the Synod in 1982.
20
Many considered that political engagement was one way of reaping that harvest. Clifford Longley, though, probably judged the public’s relationship with Anglicanism more accurately when he wrote in 1976: ‘The church is a place to stay away from, but on which they secretly depend, just as a rebelling adolescent needs to know his parents are still there.’
21

CONTRARY TO POPULAR
belief, the Conservative government did not foresee nor did it plan for the sharp rise in unemployment, which by January 1982 had reached the symbolic mark of three million. The government was not ignorant or dismissive of its political impact, particularly Margaret Thatcher, who had to face off serious threats of rebellion from within her Cabinet. The Treasury continued on its economic path of tackling inflation while the Department of Employment, in a marked consistency with post-war policy, piled funds into the state’s jobs quango, the Manpower Services Commission (MSC). As Secretary of State for Employment from September 1981, Norman Tebbit’s first action was to sack the MSC’s long-serving chairman Richard O’Brien and replace him with some fresh Thatcherite blood. Businessman and philanthropist Lord Young was a director of the
Centre for Policy Studies, but it was his involvement in youth training that Tebbit believed made him the ideal candidate to head up the MSC. Young’s goal was to specifically target unemployed youth, who he rightly presumed were a more malleable and mobile workforce than the long-term unemployed. His method, though, was to massively increase the role of the voluntary sector and compel unemployed youth to undertake state-funded voluntary roles; an initiative, which many pointed out, was a corruption of the voluntary ethic. This did not prevent charities and Christian groups (still the leading form of non-statutory welfare provision) from helping the government contend with what many considered to be the biggest crisis in the body politic since the Depression.

MSC funds were initially channelled into establishing a mobilising group, Church Action with the Unemployed, which aimed, in its own words, to entreat the laity to extend their Christian obligation ‘beyond mowing the Church lawn and arranging the flowers’ to running government-sponsored job schemes for the unemployed.
22
Demonstrating a commitment and energy not seen since the formation of the welfare state, Christians worked alongside trade unions, local councils and charities in establishing resource centres, training and business cooperatives for the unemployed. The British Youth-for Christ organisation, an evangelical group founded by Billy Graham in 1946, led over sixty-three youth resource centres across the UK. Some church groups even acted as managing agents for the government’s Community Programme such as the Bristol Churches Group, which oversaw a £1.5 million budget and twenty-one different schemes. In Hampshire, Industrial Mission priests in alliance with local trade union representatives set up an advice centre run by the unemployed themselves. It encountered problems when it launched a ‘take up your benefit rights’ campaign which, unsurprisingly, was challenged by the local Conservative council, and the MSC subsequently withdrew its funding.

Christian involvement was not an entirely selfless act; churchmen
were enthused by the evangelical potential and the practical advantage of having an army of unemployed volunteers at their disposal. Many an organ was fixed and a leaky parish roof patched up in the name of Thatcher’s job-creation schemes. Initial enthusiasm, however, soon turned into resentment as the laity soon found that they were ill-equipped and ill-trained to deal with the administration of large funds and the pressure of government expectations. Some questioned whether the churches should be acting as ‘managing agents’ for a government committed to piecemeal measures and pursuing an economic doctrine that put inflation ahead of jobs. Giles Ecclestone, head of the Church of England’s Board for Social Responsibility, wondered whether the role of the Church was ‘not so much to take over the Samaritan role from statutory agents, as to question a system which puts so many people into the ditch’.
23

‘I believe that the volunteer movement is at the heart of all our social welfare provision,’ Margaret Thatcher had told the Women’s Royal Voluntary Service in 1981, in a speech which heralded her government’s commitment to re-balancing the welfare system in favour of the voluntary sector.
24
And yet, Thatcher’s contention that the third sector could significantly replace government responsibilities, or even that there was a clear division between the two, betrayed a willing miscalculation of how the modern charity sector actually operated. From its dip in the post-war years, the third sector had evolved into a fully professionalised service with paid personnel and, with a large number of local authority contracts going to non-profit organisations from the mid-1970s, its fate was now inextricably tied to the state. In 1981, in a Lords debate on proposed cuts to public services, the Bishop of Liverpool put forward the alternative case on behalf of all those involved in the third sector: ‘Voluntary organisations, important as they are, cannot carry the main load of caring for the neediest … The belief that the community as a whole has that responsibility expresses an important moral principle in our country.’
25
In the era of small state thinking, the Church found itself in
the rather paradoxical position of defending state services against its own efforts in the voluntary sector. Over the course of the decade, through a steady drip feed of pamphlets, sermons and speeches, the Church consistently opposed contractions in public spending and the privatisation of state services while upholding the welfare state as an institutionalised demonstration of the Christian duty to one’s fellow man.

The decline of Britain’s Victorian industries and the shrinking of its associated workforce was a situation that Thatcher inherited rather than caused; unemployment had started to rise in the mid-’70s while its true origins could be dated back to the inter-war period, if not further. And yet, one of the features of Britain’s experience of deindustrialisation in the 1980s was an unwillingness to acknowledge that it was actually taking place, let alone make effective contingency plans for those communities centred on those key industries. The debate hinged rather narrowly on monetarism versus Keynesianism and a war of words between a Labour Party that blamed the government and the government that blamed the union as the unemployed were instructed to get on their bikes.

In his 1983 book,
Bias to the Poor,
Bishop David Sheppard offered an analysis based on what he had witnessed on his own patch in Liverpool. Sheppard accepted that the post-war concept of the state as the supplier of jobs was over, but also understood that in an era when traditional industries were crumbling, more and more women were entering the workplace and, with the additional pressures of technological development and the globalisation of production, it was highly unlikely that Britain would ever return to the full employment of the post-war years. This was something that the government refused to admit, with Thatcher pledging that unemployment would fall as soon as inflation had been tackled and Britain’s ‘industrial spirit’ had been revived. Sheppard, however, wondered whether individuals could be expected to ‘get on their bike’ and find work when it was blatantly clear that the individual, particularly the low-skilled male worker,
could no longer be said to be in control of his means of production. During the Depression, William Temple had spoken of the ‘dignity of work’ in his Keynesian-inspired plea for the state to supply jobs; forty years later, Sheppard wrote of an alternative ‘life-ethic’, calling for a different employment policy and redefinition of the Protestant work ethic in line with the new post-industrial reality. Sheppard was short on solutions but at least he had highlighted the problem. Even though unemployment declined in the late 1980s, even in 1990 it was still running at 7.5 per cent, with 9.6 per cent the average across the decade (between 1950 and 1970, in contrast, unemployment never once rose above 3 per cent). Successive governments in the 1990s and 2000s would mask this problem by fiddling the statistics, chiefly by shifting the middle-aged long-term unemployed onto incapacity benefits, as Britain became a nation of dual-wage earners, part-time workers and households solely reliant on benefits. In 1993, those on incapacity benefits stood at three million, exactly the same number that had been on the dole approximately a decade earlier.
26
A high unemployment rate proved not to be a short-term by-product of a national economy in transition but a lasting feature of a neo-liberal economy.