God and Mrs Thatcher (27 page)

IN THE SPRING
of 1983, Bishop David Sheppard was invited to deliver the BBC’s prestigious Dimbleby Lecture. Determined not to waste this golden opportunity of preaching to the masses, Sheppard envisaged his speech as a ‘state of the nation’ address and wasted no time in setting out why Thatcherite individualism contravened the corporate ethic of Christianity. What made his speech controversial, however, was at whom he pointed the finger. According to Sheppard, it was not the government but the middle classes who, through their own self-interest, ignorance and willing compliance, were to blame for the plight of places such as Liverpool. In its editorial the next morning, the
Daily Telegraph
predictably leapt to the defence of Middle England: ‘Christ died for them, too: and this Easter it would be good to hear Bishop Sheppard say so.’
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But David Sheppard, more than any of his contemporaries, understood that if Thatcherite individualism was to be countered, the chief battleground was not Parliament, nor was it in places such as Toxteth, but Tory-voting middle-class constituencies – crucially those areas where the Church still had some influence. This had in fact been the main motivation behind
Faith in the City,
as Sheppard confirmed in a letter to the Chief Rabbi: ‘[It] is rightly aimed at suburban Britons, who all too easily seem to blame those who have been left behind.’
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The hope (however misguided) was that if the Church could mount the right form of priestly pressure, it could undermine Thatcherite appeals to self-interest and reignite a sense of Christian compassion amongst the middle classes. ‘Those of us who know the reality of poverty in Britain today,’ David Sheppard later declared, ‘owe it to the rich and comfortable – our brothers and sisters – to tell them about the actual experience of people, who belong to the same body, the same marching regiment, the same nation.’
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Canon Eric James, of the pressure group Christian Action, was more direct in his assessment, seeing its
mission as challenging the entrenched ‘white middle-class mentality’ that prevailed in Britain’s ‘BUPA areas’.
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If this class-specific approach was in any doubt, it was made blatantly apparent in Sheppard’s own favourite phrase, to ‘remember the poor’, which as Joe Hasler, a church community worker from Liverpool pointed out, the poor themselves did not need reminding of.
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Age-old class tensions had reared their ugly head once more in Thatcher’s Britain as the working class were posited as either a threat to social stability or a drain on the nation’s resources and naturally in direct opposition to middle-class interests and prosperity. With the Thatcher government encouraging the ‘opting out’ of public healthcare, pensions, education and housing under the banner of individual freedom, the perception in the Church at least was that the buttresses holding the British social democratic system together were gradually being eroded. Sheppard was articulating a fear, then widespread, that if some sort of balance was not restored and the middle classes kept on board, the whole structure would crumble.

This, though, was an airbrushed view of post-war history. To a degree, the social democratic consensus had been sold to the middle class on the twin pillars of collective altruism and personal gain. They benefited from the expansion in public housing, pensions, free education, health and welfare as much, if not more than any other section of British society, but the system also relied on their compliance given that the tax burden fell unduly on them. Middle-class discontent did not begin with the election of Margaret Thatcher but could be traced back to the 1950s and had clearly reached a point of crisis in the mid-1970s. That this had sharpened into animosity towards the poor was proven in a European-wide survey from 1976, which revealed that Britons were far less sympathetic towards those at the bottom of the social scale than their European counterparts, with 43 per cent of UK respondents believing that the poor were responsible for their own circumstances (compared with a European average of 24 per cent).
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The Church, like many others, tended to position Margaret Thatcher incorrectly as the cause rather a consequence of a gradual change in middle-class values in Britain since the Second World War.

Nonetheless, every sermon, speech and Church pamphlet was geared towards reigniting public altruism out of a genuine fear that the middle classes, like the Conservative parliamentary party, had lost faith in the collective idea of the nation. Education may have been the method but it was conceived as a divine cause; namely, the salvation of Britain’s Christian social democratic values. The Church drummed up all sorts of imaginative and novel ways to appeal to Anglicans and a broader non-religious audience, whom they termed ‘men of goodwill’. One particularly inspired example came from the Christian Unemployment Group in Yorkshire, which created a board game, ‘The 24 Steps’. Described as a ‘lived experience’, participants would move through each stage of a family’s struggle with unemployment including the selling of the car, relationship breakdown, even interrogation from the Department of Health and Social Security. The game reportedly aimed to ‘cut through the lies, the myths, the sheer ignorance of so many’.
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Rev. Donald Reeves of St James’s in Piccadilly opted for a more direct approach; ‘an immersion scheme’ in which he dumped willing parishioners in London for two days without any money. Lest there be any doubt of the political slant of the Church’s ‘educational’ material, it is worth considering this piece from the York diocesan newsletter which encouraged parishioners to consider the following questions:

The parishioners of York were instructed to speak to ‘one who is deprived’ in order to understand who was ‘benefiting from our
prosperous economy’.
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This sort of politicised education (which Sheppard termed ‘fostering dialogue’) had long been established practice within the churches, especially in promoting causes in the developing world, but on the domestic front, the Church was clearly treading a fine line between what was deemed legitimate Christian concern and what could be construed as politicalised campaigning.

The publication of
Faith in the City
elevated this conscious-raising activity to new heights as Runcie instructed that the report be debated in every parish in the land.
Faith in the City
officers were positioned in each diocese and a shortened version of the report was produced, which soon sold over 60,000 copies.
Faith in the City
awareness days were run by the Mothers’ Union while the City of Hull had their own
Faith in the City
group led by the Evangelical Coalition for Urban Mission. A professional theatre company was also commissioned to perform a play,
Up the Wall,
‘designed to promote interest in the inner city issues and to stimulate giving’. The production received a glowing review from the Bishop of Oxford, who thought it a ‘superb drama … containing the right mixture of humour and challenge’.
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One wonders, though, if it achieved anything more than providing work for unemployed actors.

What the Thatcher government refused to do through the taxation system, the Church was determined to enact through the parish collection box as a result of the establishment of its Church Urban Fund (CUF). The prelates led the way, producing the
Bishop’s Cookbook
, a collection of recipes that included the Bishop of Aba’s Nigerian Spinach Soup and the Bishop of Dover’s wife’s ‘Never Fail’ Sponge Cake, which raised over £20,000 for the fund. Winchester proved an interesting test case for the local operations of the fund. This diocese in the south-west, which had the lowest unemployment rate in the country (4 per cent), comparatively high levels of church attendance, and was then a stronghold for the Conservative Party, exemplified David Sheppard’s notion of ‘comfortable Britain’. Initially, the Winchester laity rallied to the cause; Lady Prideaux raised funds by selling
her hand-made red church kneelers, while clergy wife, Mrs Virginia Sutherland, organised an open day for visitors to view her ‘English Vicarage Garden’.
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By 1988, however, with only £20,000 generated, local clergyman Michael Robinson concluded that the CUF had failed to capture the imagination of the Winchester laity. This he put down to suspicions about the laity’s political slant with its overemphasis on ‘social and community projects’ and ‘too little on the saving of souls’.
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The letters pages of the
Winchester Churchman
also revealed the laity’s alternative priorities: opposition to female ordination and the modernisation of the Prayer Book. In seeking to heal a divided nation, the bishops were in danger of aggravating the wounds of a divided Church.

‘[The] average Anglican preaching today is rather like
Guardian
readers talking to
Telegraph
readers’ wrote one Anglican priest to the
Yorkshire Post
in an observation which perfectly encapsulated the breach between the shepherds and their flock in the Church of England.
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For the majority of those who filled the pews every Sunday, the label of ‘Tory Party at Prayer’ still meant something. An estimated 62 per cent of Anglicans considered themselves Conservatives while this political bias was also evident in the Synod, with approximately 55 per cent of lay members being Tory supporters in contrast to 27 per cent in the House of Clergy.
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For a significant section of the Anglican laity – those middle-class, Anglican Tories residing in ‘comfortable Britain’ – the breach between their church and party felt distinctly personal. It appeared as if their religious and political loyalties were now in direct conflict. Lord Chancellor, Lord Hailsham, wrote to Runcie in 1983 as a ‘distinguished member of the laity’ informing him of the disaffection amongst the pews, something of which Runcie was well aware. Hailsham did not hold back, however: ‘We are put off by bishops, priests, and committees who appear to us to be advocating policies and practices at once profoundly repugnant to our deepest beliefs and common sense.’
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This, however, was precisely what the bishops aimed to do. During the 1983 election, for example, the Bishop of Winchester, John Taylor, appealed to his laity in his diocesan newsletter to seriously consider which of the party manifestos came ‘nearest to what is morally right and just’ and reminded his flock that they ‘should never be blindly loyal to the party they have always voted for in the past’.
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Soon after the publication of
Faith in the City,
in a heated debate with Norman Tebbit, David Sheppard appeared to utter the unutterable on national television: that it was impossible to be a Christian and vote Tory.
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What had been inferred in the report was now an unequivocal statement by a senior bishop of the Church of England. ‘I am a Tory, but not a so-called “wet” Tory,’ complained one parishioner in a letter to Sheppard soon afterwards, ‘so that must make me right-wing, and apparently, in your eyes I am no longer Christian.’
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Frustrated Conservatives may have casually dismissed the bishops as a bunch of ‘socialists’, but as Runcie made clear in a letter to Neil Kinnock, the Church of England hierarchy claimed little solidarity or intimacy with the modern Labour Party.
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This was in part because of the leftward direction that Labour had taken under Michael Foot. If Harold Wilson had been right that the party owed more to Methodism than to Marx in the 1960s then the opposite was true in the early ’80s. At the annual R. H. Tawney lecture in 1981 (the year that the Social Democratic Party splintered from the Labour Party and Tony Benn fought an infamously close fight with Denis Healey over the deputy leadership), Frank Field made a spirited plea to his party to remember its ethical origins. Evoking Tawney’s axiom that ‘morality was superior to dogma’, Field correctly observed that it was the Christian ethos of the party that had been the source and strength of the Labour Party throughout the twentieth century.
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At the time, though, Tawney was out of vogue within the left and the party was not yet ready to heed Field’s advice.

The troubles within the left of course predated Thatcherism and can be traced back to the late 1960s with the birth of a more militant trade union movement and a self-conscious New Left intelligentsia, which collectively pulled the party leftwards as the right lost ground and eventually power under Callaghan. So it was that the Church came to see itself as filling the centrist void – deliberately positioning itself between dogmatic socialism on the left and dogmatic neo-liberalism on the right.

The Church’s intervention in the battle between the government and the city council in Liverpool proved to be a case in point. With the red flag flying from City Hall, the Labour-run council was just the kind of municipal socialism that Thatcher and the right-wing press loved to hate.
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Tensions had come to a head when the council refused to set a rate, and when it finally produced a budget with a significant deficit, the district auditors decided to take it to court. With the coffers completely empty of funds, the city’s leadership took the bold and miscalculated step of delivering redundancy notices to 31,000 of its workforce via hired taxis round the city: a political stunt that cost the council the support of the Labour Party, the unions and eventually the city’s religious leaders. Worlock and Sheppard had initially endorsed the council’s high spending budget and led the negotiations with the Secretary of State, Patrick Jenkin, to broker a deal, believing, with some justification, that they were more likely to receive a sympathetic hearing from Whitehall than from the councillors themselves. The redundancy fiasco had, however, convinced Worlock and Sheppard of the need to open up communications with the Labour leadership and thus engaged in secret meetings with Neil Kinnock and shadow Environment Secretary, Jack Cunningham on how best to deal with the Militants in Liverpool. Significantly, on the day that Kinnock was due to address the Labour Party conference, Worlock and Sheppard published a joint piece in
The Times,
laying the blame on the intransigency of both the council and the government. Later that day, the Labour leader delivered an almost identical
message to delegates in Bournemouth, singling out the militant councillors for prioritising ‘rigid dogma’ over the well-being and employment of its workers. It proved be a symbolic turning point in Kinnock’s war with the radicals in his party.