God and Mrs Thatcher (34 page)

When, in 1987, the Synod consented to female deacons (which
allowed women to undergo the same training as men and to conduct baptisms, weddings, and funerals, although not the Eucharist), reformers saw it as a natural stepping-stone to full ordination. Traditionalists, on the other hand, considered female deacons, given the references in the Bible and their role in the early Church, an entirely different order. Runcie hoped, rather than believed, that the Measure would satisfy those pushing for change. The Movement for the Ordination of Women pressed ahead, encouraged by the growing legitimacy of their cause, which now counted members of the House of Lords, judges, bishops and theologians as well as a number of laity amongst its supporters. As for traditionalists, they too could point to a notable level of support in Parliament (including some such as John Gummer who also sat on the Synod). Anglican liberals accused traditionalists of being misogynistic and out of touch with the modern world; traditionalists in turn accused liberals of wilfully sabotaging the notion of the universal Catholic Church in pursuit of the secular cause of equality.

In retrospect, what is striking about the debate over female ordination in the 1980s is not the legitimacy or pedantry of either side, but the level of vitriol and disagreement. Anglicanism’s gift had always been its ability to incorporate those of differing opinions and yet by the end of the decade, many began to talk in all seriousness of the break-up of the Church of England. Runcie’s ultimate prerogative was to prevent a schism; he had no wish to preside over the division of the Church of England and believed that patience rather than haste was the best means of achieving this, although it was precisely this lack of clear direction that allowed factionalism to fester and positions to harden. In the end, the Church would have to face the issue one way or another. Runcie had begun his career as archbishop as an opponent of female ordination, fearing that it threatened any eventual union with Rome, but he soon came to accept the way that the Church was heading, although he made sure that he would not be the one to steer it through.

In 1987, the Church would experience one of the bleakest episodes
in its modern history, one that would ultimately illustrate, in a rather tragic way, the cracks within Anglicanism. It was established custom that
Crockford’s Clerical Directory,
a reference book listing Anglican clergy, featured an anonymous preface by a priest. For the 1987 edition, the task was assigned to distinguished Church historian and prominent Anglo-Catholic, Rev. Gareth Bennett. Runcie had come to rely on him (as well as others) as a speechwriter although Bennett had grown frustrated with the archbishop, believing that Runcie had deliberately thwarted his career.

Bennett’s preface, which was published unedited significantly just a week after the Synod had voted to allow women to become deacons, was a candid and damning attack on what Bennett considered to be the ‘liberal’ mafia running the Church of England who were marginalising those with different views and jeopardising the comprehensiveness of Anglicanism as a result. More worrying, though, was Bennett’s contention that Anglicanism was suffering from a crisis of identity. Those features, which had kept the disparate factions together – the Church– state relationship; the Book of Common Prayer; its priesthood; and finally, its conservative theological tradition – were gradually being eroded. Rather than correctly seeing this as a long-term phenomenon, Bennett heaped all the blame on the Archbishop of Canterbury as someone predisposed ‘to put off all questions until someone else makes a decision for him’.
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Bennett also singled out David Jenkins as a ‘minor Anglican disaster’ and attacked the sentimentalism and misguided priorities of
Faith in the City.
Bennett’s rather fatalistic conclusion was that the Church was theologically and politically in the quagmire.

Just before it was published, Runcie’s chaplain, Graham James, passed it on to his boss with the accompanying note: ‘Odd piece … he’s just as confused as the rest of us about the nature of the Anglican Church.’
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Bennett’s vituperative tone and personal attacks on Runcie ensured that the preface would not go unnoticed. The national press soon picked up the story and engaged in a witch-hunt to uncover the
identity of the anonymous author. The Archbishop of York rallied to Runcie’s defence and denounced the preface as ‘scurrilous’ while conservative Anglicans publicly came out in support of Bennett’s critique.
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The appearance of the unedited preface in an official publication of the Church of England had been an error in judgement not only by Bennett but also by those at Church House who had commissioned it. Fearful that his name was about to be revealed, Bennett committed suicide at his home in Oxford. As David Jenkins sensibly remarked in his autobiography: ‘Too much absorption in church affairs is a damaging thing and total absorption in church affairs is devastating.’ So it proved in the 1980s.
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O
N THE
15 April 1986, after nine long hours of heated debate, Margaret Thatcher suffered her one and only parliamentary defeat as Prime Minister. This was not over the more contentious issues of trade union reform or the privatisation of state industries, but a seemingly straightforward bill to loosen shop-opening hours on Sundays in England and Wales. The government had boldly opted for a policy of complete deregulation and imposed
the party whip on a matter historically considered one of individual conscience, but not even the shrewdest political commentators predicted that over seventy Conservative MPs would rebel and overturn the Prime Minister’s majority.

When the bill was introduced, the government heralded deregulation as a populist and libertarian move in the name of ‘consumer choice’. But Thatcher soon faced accusations of hypocrisy; given that the bill seemed at odds with her so-called ‘Victorian values’. ‘Is she, as the Head of the Government going to besmirch her father’s memory,’ asked former Methodist preacher and Labour MP Ron Lewis at Prime Minister’s Questions, ‘by bringing in legislation that will help to consign the sanctity of the Sabbath day to the scrapheap?’ In a rather awkward response, Thatcher highlighted the possible benefits for employment.
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Meanwhile, those outside Westminster – churches, trade unions and evangelical organisations – were busy forming themselves into a coalition called the ‘Keep Sunday Special’ campaign (KSS), which within months had amassed a petition of over one million signatories. The KSS specifically targeted their campaign in the Conservative strongholds, putting pressure on conscience-ridden MPs who were aware that a general election was looming.
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Chairman of the 1922 Committee Cranley Onslow found himself on the receiving end of a barrage of abuse from his constituents. ‘The government pays lip service to God but its real god is money,’ complained one, a charge, that in respect to the Shops Bill, Onslow felt unable to counter.
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Douglas Hurd, who as Home Secretary was responsible for pushing it through, knew it was looking bad for the government when at his local parish the Sunday before the crucial vote, the vicar led the congregation in prayers for the defeat of the bill.

In Parliament, the government went to great lengths to dismiss the opposition as puritanical Sabbatarians at odds with the will of the people. Viscount Cranborne, the man behind the Prayer Book Protection Bill in 1981, accused the ‘canting bishops’ of predisposing ‘to tell us what we should do’, and in a rather desperate bid to woo his fellow
Conservatives, compared the Church’s defence of the Sabbath to the ‘sort of spirit which the Labour Party introduced for the first time in its paternalistic legislation in 1945, and which this Government has done so much to repeal’.
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Meanwhile, Douglas Hurd, in an effort to appease Christian opposition drew on the example of Scotland, which did not have any restrictions on Sunday trading but had a higher attendance of religious worship than England. Yet, as the Bishop of Birmingham pointed out in the Lords, ‘There never has been any law in Scotland against Sunday trading because it was never conceived possible that any shop in Scotland would open.’
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Speaking in support of the bill, Lord Simon of Glaisdale, in a nod to free-market economist Lionel Robbins, spoke of the supposed harmony between consumerism and democracy:

Such talk sounded worryingly libertarian to many Conservatives. Those who opposed to the bill spoke not of Sabbatarianism but in defence of what they called ‘the traditional English Sunday’; a romantic and admittedly vague notion which did not seem to have a great deal to do with religion. But their nostalgic defence of roast beef lunches and family trips to the countryside, however, concealed their real concern, namely that deregulation completely contravened those values and institutions upon which Conservatism was supposed to be based: the social order, family and Christianity. ‘Conservatives are not libertarians,’ Anglican Tory MP Ivor Stanbrook reminded his fellow backbenchers in an impassioned outburst. ‘We are not devotees of the free market to the extreme, certainly not to the extreme that involves conflict with a deeply rooted institution in the life of the British people and a part of our Christian heritage.’
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The
small matter on whether to allow shopping on a Sunday had escalated into a crisis about the nature of Conservatism under Thatcher. Just before the crucial vote, a ghost from the Conservative past appeared in his self-appointed role as the party’s conscience. Harold Macmillan, at the grand age of ninety-one and in his final performance in the Lords, forewarned that the bill was another step ‘in the gradual secularisation of our people’ and, even more profoundly, represented an abandonment of the party’s principles. New Conservatism was not Conservatism at all, he said, but an amalgamation of ‘the worst elements of the liberal Victorian tradition’, which by his definition was a toxic mix of laissez-faire economics and Victorian moralism.
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After Macmillan’s speech, Margaret Thatcher reportedly had his portrait removed from her study in No. 10.

More than any other issue during the 1980s, Sunday trading exposed the internal contradictions within Thatcherism: the championing of economic and individual freedom on the one hand and the preservation of community, family and faith on the other. When faced with the choice between social conservatism and libertarianism, Margaret Thatcher seemed prepared to prioritise the latter, but many of her MPs were unable to follow their leader into the division lobby. Realising that this was a matter on which she had unwisely tested the loyalty of her backbenchers, Thatcher abandoned the bill and it was to be another eight years, in altogether different circumstances, that a Conservative government under John Major would cautiously steer through limited deregulation of Sunday trading.

The Shops Bill was just one instance of the Prime Minister’s wobbling authority in the mid-1980s, with the Westland fiasco in 1985 further evidence that Margaret Thatcher’s authority was on the wane. As the 1987 election approached there was a genuine belief amongst reformers that the public had grown weary of the Conservative government and that a Labour victory might be possible. The campaign of 1987 would turn out to be a very different battle to the election of 1983 when the ‘Falklands factor’ had conveniently masked the holes in the economy
and halted the rise of the centrist option, the SDP. In 1987, the Thatcher government could confidently claim that Britain was prospering but it now had to confront the charge that neo-liberal economics was a zero-sum game in which the wealth of one came at the expense of the other.

The debate switched from one concerning the unemployment figures and a miscalculated monetarist strategy to the growth of materialist values, the unfettered market and the widening gap between rich and poor. Unemployment and poverty continued to persist, especially in the north of England, Wales and Scotland, yet opposers were now disposed to link this situation with the prosperous south in order to highlight the moral paradox that came with free-market inspired affluence. The Labour Party regained their appetite for power and edged much closer to the Church’s position, using moral rectitude rather than fiscal imprudence as the chief way to attack the Tories. Two moves in 1986 – the explosion of Militants and the integration of the Christian Socialist Movement into the Labour Party – symbolised this shift. They dusted off their copies of Tawney’s
Equality
and rediscovered their ethical drive.

Writing in the
Daily Mirror,
Walter Schwarz dubbed 1987 the ‘moral election’: ‘Plenty of politicians and pundits will be arguing that Thatcherism doesn’t work … the churches can do better, with more effect, just by pointing out that Thatcherism is wrong.’
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During the campaign, the Christian vote was deemed significant, perhaps for the first time since the Edwardian period. Three MPs from the main parties contributed to a collection of essays
Which Way Should Christians Vote?
in a bid to tag biblical legitimation to their cause and lure the Christian electorate. The British Council of Churches organised local hustings, although Conservative Central Office advised prospective Tory candidates to stay away from what they predicted would be hostile occasions.

The BBC, too, feared that its religious output might compromise the Corporation’s impartiality. Head of Religious Broadcasting, David Winter, was warned by executives not to allow ‘some lefty bishop’ to rant on Radio 4’s
Thought for the Day.
According to Winter, every sermon
was scrutinised, each speaker was cautioned and all content ‘kept so scrupulously to genuinely religious topics that someone unkindly remarked that if they kept this up people might think it was a Christian programme’.
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The Kensington & Chelsea Conservative Association also waded in, writing to the Bishop of Stepney to advise him not to make partisan statements that risked alienating the Church’s only loyal adherents. This did not stop David Sheppard, days before polling day, from issuing a public appeal to ‘comfortable Britain’ to think beyond their own sectional interests (i.e. not to vote Conservative).

All of this was in vain of course. The Conservatives may have had their percentage reduced but they still managed to gain the support of over half of the middle classes, as well as 36 per cent of the working-class vote.
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In the wake of the result, many left-wing campaigners and activists were now resigned to the fact that the Tories, third term would ensure that Thatcherite values would be permanently imprinted onto the political and psychological landscape of the nation. In a rather morbid assessment, poverty campaigner Paul Whiteley judged that there was ‘no longer the same willingness to listen to reformers that existed amongst “middle England”’ in the 1960s and that the left needed to deploy the Thatcherite tactic of appealing to ‘self-interest’ rather than ‘moral indignation’.
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For liberal Anglicans it represented something equally as profound but potentially more serious from their perspective: the collapse of Christian values. In a paper for the Church’s Board for Social Responsibility, Dr Michael Bayley considered that Britain had undergone a ‘sea change’ in national values with the ‘solidarity’ of the post-war years having been replaced with the ‘nineteenth-century ethic of individualism’. This transition, Bayley forewarned, had serious ramifications for the Church and Christian faith in Britain, for, as the ‘communal and broadly Christian values had been taken out of the political structure’, religion was now only a matter for the private sphere.
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The idea that nine years of Thatcher at the helm could reverse nearly a millennia of Christianity in Britain was a tad apocalyptic, to
say the least, but Bayley’s sentiments reveal the extent to which Anglicans invested in the ideals of social democracy as the chief guarantor of a Christian social order.

THE SUNDAY TRADING
debacle had questioned Margaret Thatcher’s integrity and it bothered her – not too much, but it did. Despite her bullish defence in public, Margaret Thatcher was privately concerned that her government was becoming associated with a culture of greed, libertarianism and selfishness, not because of the negative press this generated but rather because it ran contrary to her own moral understanding of her political values. Thatcher’s Christian vision, which she had clearly articulated in the first years of her premiership, needed reaffirming. It was not enough that the market was seen as efficient; Thatcher wished to assert its moral superiority over any other alternative. In her third term, Thatcher returned to her Bible and, specifically, turned to the head of her policy unit, Brian Griffiths.

Born into a Welsh Baptist family and later a convert to Anglicanism, Brian Griffiths had been academic adviser to the Bank of England when he had caught the attention of Margaret Thatcher with his lectures on ‘Morality and the Marketplace’. She soon made him her special adviser and eventually head of her policy unit in 1986. Nicknamed ‘the prof’, Griffiths was held in high esteem by Margaret Thatcher even if his piety and zealousness tended to alienate others in No. 10. ‘I used to despair of that chap,’ Bernard Ingham later admitted.
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Griffiths had a secure understanding of the Christian integrity of the market, which he set out in a series of published works in the early 1980s, critiquing not only Keynesianism and Marxism but also the neo-liberalism of Hayek and Friedman. It was Griffiths’s view that as
libertarianism and Marxism were both products of the secular humanist Enlightenment, they both lacked the moral legitimacy of Christianity. More pointedly, Griffiths challenged Friedman, Hayek and those at the IEA for their over-emphasis on personal freedom, and even Adam Smith’s contention that self-interest, when commercially encouraged, could contribute to the common good. Griffiths agreed that individual freedom was the desired goal, but he believed that it needed to be contained by a Christian sense of social responsibility, otherwise it was liable to give rise to injustice and exploitation. Griffiths’s answer lay not in monetarism, which he considered ‘mechanistic’, nor in a social welfare system, for which he believed there was no biblical basis, but in a social market economy guided by three basic principles rooted in Scripture. Firstly, that the Bible legitimised the right to private property and market transaction. Secondly, that there was a clear distinction between creating wealth, which was a blessing and a godly pursuit, and the worship of wealth, which was a sin. For this, Griffiths not only referenced Scripture, but also John Wesley’s message in his ‘Use of Money’ sermon: ‘Earn all you can, save all you can and give all you can.’ Thirdly, Griffiths argued that the Bible did not promote an abstract notion of equality, only instructed that the relief of poverty was a fundamental Christian endeavour.