God and Mrs Thatcher (30 page)

O
N MATTERS OF
private morality and the family, never was the divide between what Thatcher preached and what she put into practice so stark. Despite ministers’ protestations against the permissive age, the Conservative government did very little to reverse the legislative reforms of the 1960s and, in some cases, actually travelled further down the liberalising road. In this, they were simply continuing what Parliament had always done: reforming the law in accordance with changing public opinion and behaviour. Private morality did become more closely aligned with party politics in the 1980s (a characteristic of the left as much as it was the right), but Margaret Thatcher never showed any great desire to patrol the nation’s bedrooms. If anything, she was personally naive when it came to sexual morality (particularly on the indiscretions and activities of some of her political allies) and pragmatic on the need for legislative change. Ultimately, she regarded such matters as a distraction from her main priorities and, like constitutional reform, a political minefield best avoided.

Thatcher could have chosen to put a hardliner such as Norman Tebbit in the Home Office, but instead went with liberal figures such as Willie Whitelaw and Douglas Hurd. Her backbenchers, egged on by a reinvigorated moral lobby and an increasingly moralistic right-wing press, showed no such restraint, and along with MPs and peers of all political shades campaigned for a tightening of existing laws on abortion, obscenity and homosexuality. If there was a whiff of a moral revival in the 1980s it was not because the Conservative government was engaged in some moral offensive, but precisely because it was not. The moral lobby’s relationship with the Conservative government – much like its engagement with the Established Church in the 1970s – would be one of frustration and unfulfilled promise.

MARGARET THATCHER HAD
been a consistent advocate for capital punishment although she had always classified it as a law and order issue rather than a moral one, forwarding the spurious argument that it acted as a necessary deterrent. It was under her initiative that the Conservative Party pledged to review the existing capital punishment in its manifesto in 1979. When the debate was held a year later, a reluctant Home Secretary, Willie Whitelaw, let it be known that he would not support abolition and delivered a forceful defence of his position in the Commons. The free vote was lost by 119 votes in what was probably the last time that the issue would ever be brought before the House. A law banning corporal punishment in state schools was included in the government’s 1986 Education Act; but it had been Education Secretary, Kenneth Baker, who had been the impetus rather than the Prime Minister, who had always voted for its retention.

In 1969 when the Divorce Reform Act was passed there was genuine hope that the time lapse of three years in which a petition could be made would help prevent permanent separation. This was not what happened for the divorce rate rose in the 1970s and soon there were demands from the legal profession to shorten the time so as to prevent an unnecessary prolonging of the procedure for families.
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In 1984, the government introduced the Matrimonial Causes Act, which reduced the necessary time for finalising divorce from three years to one. It was a free vote but no more than thirty-two Labour MPs and four Liberals voted in each of the divisions. It was a different mood on the Conservative benches as some MPs vocalised what admittedly now felt like outdated arguments, namely that Parliament, as a Christian institution, should uphold the sanctity of marriage. ‘This debate is about marriage and God’s interpretation of it,’ complained Harry Greenway
MP in frustration, ‘not about man’s legal interpretation of marriage, because it is a gift of God.’
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There was no way that the 1984 Act could be construed as anything but a relaxation in the divorce laws. The divorce rate did decrease by 6 per cent between 1986 and 1990 – although this was largely due to fewer people getting married. Speaking in 1977, Thatcher admitted the limitations of politicians in this sphere but also the need for fair and just laws: ‘What can I do about the rising rate of marital breakdown? What am I expected to do? Go into the houses? To say that if you are living a violent, drunken life you may not divorce?’
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In 1969, the Wilson government had taken great care to consult the bishops' bench; fifteen years later, the Thatcher government felt little need. The bishops of Birmingham and London led the opposition to the bill in the second chamber but it was a little too late and to no avail. The fact that the Church was reduced to commenting on the sidelines was a sure sign of the growing separation between secular law and Christian morality in Britain. When, much later, John Major’s government introduced the Family Law Reform Bill in 1996, allowing for ‘quickie’ divorces, the opposition from the ‘party of the family’ was still strong but only one Conservative, Edward Leigh MP, made reference to the fact that Britain, as a ‘Judeo-Christian’ county, might consider the religious implications of the bill.
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Even the bishops seemed to give up on the idea that the divorce law could or should be compatible with a Christian view of marriage and were even less inclined to promote reconciliation through counselling. The law assumed a greater responsibility on the part of the individual, chiefly women, who were no longer beholden to Christian standards, public shame, or a restrictive legal code.

IN OCTOBER
1983, Catholic mother and campaigner Victoria Gillick submitted a million-strong petition to the Commons calling for
the prevention of doctors prescribing contraception to underage girls without parental consent. Gillick’s proposal of chastity as the solution to curbing underage sex may not have been shared by all her supporters, but her campaign of parental rights over doctors was endorsed by over 200 MPs, many Christian groups as well as Islamic and Jewish representatives, along with notable figures in the press and a credible section of the British public. Gillick’s campaign was the cause of much agitation within the Department of Health, especially when, in December 1984, she won her case in the Court of Appeal, which ruled that existing NHS guidelines were unlawful. The trouble was that Gillick presented her case in distinctly right-wing terms: a critique of secular humanist culture, the reining-in of permissive behaviour and the prerogative of parents over the professional class. Led by the pragmatic Kenneth Clarke, the Department of Health challenged the Court of Appeal’s ruling, eventually winning its case in the House of Lords. Gillick may have ultimately lost the fight but her efforts had cast a revealing light on political moralising: ‘The Tory Government had played such an abominably duplicitous trick on us all … It was all electioneering humbug!’ was Gillick’s cynical conclusion on the Conservative government’s commitment to family values.
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In the ten years since the passing of the Abortion Act, the number of legal terminations carried out had more than trebled. Pro-life lobbyists complained that the restrictive law had gone beyond its original intention and made the unsubstantiated claim that women were now casually using abortion as a form of contraception. Pro-life groups LIFE and the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child (SPUC) had fought without success for tighter restrictions in the 1970s, although with the election of a leader proclaiming a Christian motivation, there was genuine optimism that reform could be on its way. As issues such as abortion rarely make it into party political manifestos in Britain, the only way they can reach the legislative chamber is through a Private Members’ Bill, which can be carried so far but ultimately
fails without government backing. In 1979, Scottish Conservative MP John Corrie used this privilege to introduce a bill to reduce the legal time limit for abortion from twenty-eight to twenty weeks. It received considerable support in its second reading (242 votes to ninety-eight) although it would prove to be one of many attempts that had to be abandoned owing to the government’s unwillingness to grant the issue sufficient parliamentary time. Sensing renewed enthusiasm for their cause, however, pro-life groups marshalled support within the House and in the election of 1983 fielded their own pro-life candidates and endorsed pro-life MPs – whether Conservative, Liberal or Labour.

The leading advocate for abortion reform came not from the Tory benches, but from the Liberals, in the form of Catholic MP David Alton, who resigned as Chief Whip of his party in order to devote himself to the cause. When Alton proposed his eighteen-week restriction, the bill passed its second reading with a majority of 296–251, despite a forceful showing from pro-choice MPs. Thatcher was mindful of the strong feeling within the House but let it be known that while she would not support Alton’s bill (nor allow it parliamentary time), she would consider a proposal backed by the British Medical Association and the bishops, of twenty-four weeks. Alton was incandescent, casting Thatcher as ‘an immovable object who has almost single-handedly prevented parliament from considering the abortion issue further’.
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The Prime Minister’s tactic had been to offer tepid support to a compromise measure, while essentially kicking the issue into the parliamentary long grass by not granting Alton’s bill adequate time.

That there was an eventual reduction in the number of weeks permissible for an abortion was largely down to progress in science rather than the efforts of the pro-life lobby. In 1982, developments in neonatal medicine and embryology research had led the government to appoint philosopher Mary Warnock to head a commission into possible legislation in this area. Arguably, this position would have once gone to a churchman and even though Professor A. O. Dyson, a theologian at
Manchester University, also served on the commission, the scientific and ethical (rather than Christian) bias was clearly evident. When the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill of 1989 was finally brought before the House, an amendment of twenty-four weeks, along the lines previously agreed by the bishop, medical profession and endorsed by the Prime Minister, was tagged on to the legislation. The time limit had been reduced but the Act had also removed any restriction to abortion if there was any threat to the life or mental well-being of the woman or evidence of extreme abnormality to the foetus. It satisfied neither pro-lifers nor the pro-choice lobby but it did represent a consensus; one that was triggered not by a changing moral climate in politics, or intervention by Christians, but chiefly due to developments in science.

‘
IT WAS A
wonderful thing to have a Prime Minister utter those marvellous words of St Francis before the whole world – already one senses a lifting of the spirit!’ wrote Mary Whitehouse to Thatcher soon after her election victory in 1979.
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In the late 1970s, Whitehouse had aligned herself much more closely to the Conservatives, while putting the blame for Britain’s moral slide on what she termed the ‘colour supplement living’ promoted by the left-wing ‘lilac establishment’. In turn, the Conservative Party had cosied up to Whitehouse and her associates. Yet, once in power, the Conservatives clearly had less need of such affiliation and, although ministers would still grant Whitehouse an audience, they took little interest in her campaign against obscenity and, when pressed, pursued a policy of pragmatism rather than regulation.

When, in 1980, philosopher Bernard Williams published his review of the existing obscenity laws, Whitehouse was understandably
disappointed. Williams had concluded that pornography and violent material were not harmful to the individual and advocated a move away from words such as ‘obscene’ and ‘indecent’; instead the test for restricting such material should be whether it caused offence to ‘reasonable people’. Whitehouse expressed her faith that the Prime Minister would push for further regulations ‘because she is a woman, and especially because she is a mother’.
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Thatcher and her government however showed little interest although it did back Conservative MP Timothy Sainsbury’s Private Members’ Bill to regulate sex shops and ban explicit window displays, which became the Indecent Displays Act of 1981. Whitehouse felt let down: the Act was an even more watered-down version of what had been recommended in the Williams Report. The legislation was to have little impact and probably only resulted in customers feeling less awkward when frequenting those establishments, which were now devoid of lewd window displays.

‘Cosmetic measures’ was how Whitehouse privately judged the government’s action on obscenity, scribbling ‘Moral Falklands – if she would only give the same lead’ over Margaret Thatcher’s polite correspondence in 1983.
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But in many ways, Whitehouse was fighting an old battle. The contents of the Williams Report reflected the fact that the definition of obscenity had changed from the old notion of shock and disgust to the potentially more serious offence of depravity. It had less to do with public morals and much more to do with the damaging effect that indecent material was considered to have on the mental health of the individual – a sure sign that psychologists rather than moral campaigners or churchmen were now exerting a greater influence over the debate. Implicit within this was a switch from a notion of public morality to a focus on the ‘vulnerable child’. This had been the thinking behind Parliament’s Protection of Children Act of 1978, which outlawed the indecent photography of children (interestingly, in light of recent allegations, it also established corporate responsibility for such offences).