God and Mrs Thatcher (35 page)

Griffiths was not simply forwarding an ethical case for capitalism, but an explicitly Christian one. (He was as guilty as Christian socialists of cherry-picking from the Bible and he was teasingly vague on the notion of debt, usury and how these key principles operated within the globalised financial services market.) Nor was his call for freedom with responsibility altogether coherent. Griffiths seemed to suggest that if secular humanism was cast aside and Christianity was allowed to flourish, then responsible capitalism, led by responsible capitalists, would prevail. Needless to say, Griffiths’s model was not readily applicable to the secular pluralist society that Britain was fast becoming.

And yet for Margaret Thatcher, Griffiths’s ideas were enticing. In
the first part, the social market economy was the reality: Britain had a market-led economy and a welfare state for its inactive members; unlike libertarians, Margaret Thatcher never believed in the abolition of the welfare state. On the point of freedom with responsibility, she was much closer to Griffiths than Hayek, but she was also attracted to Griffiths’s distinction between the creation and the worship of wealth. Unlike Adam Smith, Friedman or Hayek, Griffiths purported that capitalism did not simply encourage selfishness but enabled individual virtue to flourish – a view with which Thatcher readily concurred.

It is perhaps down to Griffiths’s influence, then, that, in 1988, Margaret Thatcher started reading the Old Testament and returned to the sermons of John Wesley. Griffiths was a much more attractive prospect than, say, Rev. Edward Norman, who, although critical of Christian socialism, refused to be drawn into positively endorsing the alternative. Margaret Thatcher always preferred men who gave her answers, not just critiques. Another theologian from whom Thatcher took inspiration was American Catholic theologian Michael Novak. In his highly influential work
The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism,
first published in 1982, Novak argued that capitalism did not threaten the predominance of spirituality, rather it complemented it. In his 1976 essay ‘A Closet Capitalist Confesses’, in which he set out his conversion, Novak explained: ‘Capitalism, accepting human sinfulness, rubs sinner against sinner, making even dry wood yield a spark of grace.’
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This was quite different from the position of Lord Harris, who believed that the market was neutral and provided whatever humans desired: ‘from prayer books and communion wine to pornography and hard liquor’.
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When Novak was invited to Downing Street, Thatcher proudly presented him with her annotated copy of
The Spirit of Democratic
Capitalism,
while she also later made explicit reference to his influence in her memoirs. What appealed to Thatcher was Novak’s contention that the democratic capitalist system was not just an economic system but also a moral one, which encouraged both individual virtue and,
crucially, mutual cooperation. As historian Gertrude Himmelfarb has correctly pointed out, Thatcher was not an ‘individualist’ who held an ‘atomised view of the autonomous self as the alternative to statist collectivism’; she stressed the social responsibility that came with individual freedom.
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Whereas Friedman and Hayek were libertarians, Griffiths and Novak pushed forward a Christian notion of capitalism that incorporated both the individual and the social responsibility, in effect to rescue the market from hard-nosed capitalist ideology.

By the late 1980s Thatcher was confident that she had the theological and philosophical armoury to fight any accusations that she had given rise to a culture of greed and so it was that in 1988, she ventured once more into the pulpit. It would turn out to be the most controversial speech she ever made.

‘It was an unmitigated disaster and she should never have done it,’ was how Charles Powell remembers Margaret Thatcher’s address to the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly in May 1988.
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Her advisers must have anticipated that the Kirk would be a tough audience, given the Conservatives’ dismal electoral performance north of the border in 1987, which had left the party with just ten MPs. In those pre-devolved days, the Church of Scotland was not only the source of Scottish religious identity but also of nationalist sentiment, which, after its setbacks in the 1970s, was once more in the ascendant, capitalising on the resentment towards high unemployment, the early-introduction of the poll tax and the southward direction of most of the profits of North Sea oil. ‘Frankly, even if she had read from a telephone directory, they would have taken objection,’ recorded Thatcher’s former Scottish Secretary Malcolm Rifkind.
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Dressed in a resplendent Tory blue suit with matching hat, Margaret Thatcher looked like a convict in the dock as she faced the packed gallery of professors, elders and presbyters. Griffiths’s fingerprints were all over the script but so too were the Prime Minister’s, in an address which was composed as a theological defence of
Thatcherism. Quoting the phrase ‘Christianity is about spiritual redemption, not social reform’, Thatcher went on to elaborate: ‘We must not profess the Christian faith and go to Church simply because we want social reforms and benefits or a better standard of behaviour – but because we accept the sanctity of life, the responsibility that comes with freedom.’
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Convict in the dock: Margaret Thatcher offers a spirited defence of the Christian basis of her political philosophy. The audience, however, are left unconvinced

Margaret Thatcher set out the tenets of her theology on the sanctity of the individual, God-given liberty and the Protestant work ethic and how they applied to the temporal sphere. She controversially offered the words of St Paul: ‘If a man will not work he shall not eat’ as proof that ‘abundance rather than poverty’ had a biblical basis while making a careful distinction between the creation of wealth and the worship of money. By focusing on the creation rather than the consequences of wealth, Thatcher was of course conveniently dodging the main criticisms of capitalism. Devoid of personal reflections and romantic evocations of her Nonconformist upbringing, this speech differed from Thatcher’s earlier public proclamations of her faith. It was more theological and definitely more political. For critic Jonathan Raban, the speech was a potent summation of the ethos behind Thatcherism:

In her claims of the Christian nature of the market and individual freedom, Thatcher was not saying anything new – what was different was the time and context in which she was saying it. The fact was that Margaret Thatcher’s protestations on the Christian basis of the free economy, or her attacks on atheistic Marxism were now much less palatable than they had been a decade earlier, given that the neoliberal experiment was now in full swing and the communist threat was beginning to wane.

A politician lecturing on the
real
meaning of Christianity to a religious gathering was politically bold, preaching this message to the Scottish General Assembly was political suicide. It had been written by a Welsh Baptist-turned-Anglican, was delivered by an English Methodist-turned-Anglican to a gathering of Scottish Presbyterians, and thus the potential of wandering into cultural insensitivities was there from the start. The fact that Thatcher ended up quoting from the Anglican rather than the Scottish hymnody did not help matters either; religious ministers tend to notice such slips. To the shipbuilders of the Clyde, the redundant miners and the Glaswegian poor, the message seemed callous and cold.

Writing to
The Scotsman
afterwards, one woman suggested that Mark 4:25 was the most appropriate scriptural explanation for Thatcherism: ‘Whoever has, to him will be given more and whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him.’ From that moment, Scottish political identity, both its socialist and nationalist mutations, would position itself in direct opposition to Thatcherite individualism, as Scots became convinced that only self-governance would save them
from this alien creed. It did not matter if Scotland was the home of the Enlightenment and Smith’s
Wealth of Nations
(a point Thatcher repeatedly made); this was no longer how the nation wished to view itself.

Margaret Thatcher was despised in Scotland as much as that other English conqueror Oliver Cromwell, who incidentally had made a similar plea to the General Assembly against its support for Charles I: ‘I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.’ Then, the Scots’ reply had been emphatic: ‘Would you have us to be sceptics in our religion?’ The response in 1988 was much the same. On finishing her speech, the Prime Minister was handed a copy of
Just Sharing: A Christian Approach to the Distribution of Wealth, Income and Benefits,
a report by the Church of Scotland that advocated heavy taxation of the rich and a revived Beveridge Report for the poor, by Moderator Dr James Whyte. The muffled chuckles were soon drowned out by courteous applause.

The Church of England’s Board of Social Responsibility issued an open letter in which it begrudgingly thanked the Prime Minister for ‘giving time and thought to matters of Christian faith’ before putting a red pen to her entire speech. In rather sexist and patronising remarks, the Anglican Bishop of St Andrews slammed Thatcher’s ‘unsophisticated’ theology, which he thought came across as ‘the laywoman’s use of the Bible with a vengeance’.
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The Catholic Cardinal Hume chose not to make a public statement: ‘I already have to deal with one leader who thinks they’re infallible,’ he remarked to his aides.

The address caused such a monumental row that Thatcher understandably went off talking about her faith in public. She did, however, support an initiative by Michael Alison (then chairman of Parliament’s Christian Fellowship and Second Church Estates Commissioner) of a dialogue between Christians and Conservatives, which resulted in a collection of essays:
Are Christianity and Conservatism Compatible?
(The answer, unsurprisingly, was the affirmative).
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And in an unexpected stroke in November 1988, the Prime Minister summoned seven selected Anglican prelates to a private meeting at Chequers. Runcie
had been reluctant, but fearing that any slight would further sour relations agreed to drive up to Chequers with a carload of his bishops. The prelates were ushered into the drawing room and lined up like body dummies in a shooting range ready for the Prime Minister to take a pop. She first honed in on the Bishop of Oxford, Richard Harries who remembers:

THE CHURCH MAY
have spent most of the 1980s clinging to outdated political consensus, but what, if anything, did it have to say on the new market economy and the Thatcher boom? In short, not a lot that was positive. ‘To return to the ethics of nineteenth-century entrepreneurial individualism’, declared the Bishop of Durham in the Hibbert Lecture broadcast on BBC’s Radio 4 in 1985, ‘is either nostalgic nonsense or
else a firm declaration that individual selfishness and organised greed are the only motivations for human behaviour.’
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Even in the height of the Lawson boom, his views clearly had not changed. In a radio interview broadcast on Easter Sunday, Jenkins offered an unequivocal statement that the government’s social and economic policies were ‘wicked’ and a year later, denounced the government’s proposals to introduce an ‘internal market’ into the NHS, as ‘sheer fraud’.
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In 1988 Margaret Thatcher pledged that a ‘wealthy nation would be a giving nation’ and in the Budget of that year Chancellor Lawson committed to this pledge by lowering the high income tax rate from 60 per cent to 40 per cent and cutting the basic rate. Initiatives such as the Payroll-Giving Scheme also gave credibility to the Conservatives’ new idea of the ‘active citizen’, which Margaret Thatcher hoped would counter any accusations that she had bred a nation of materialistic yuppies. ‘For every Pharisee our system produces, you will find at least three Good Samaritans,’ Thatcher enthused at the Conservative Party conference in 1989.
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