God and Mrs Thatcher (36 page)

But the Church was sceptical and for good reason. The culture of charitable giving had certainly changed in the ’80s although this had little to do with Lawson’s tweaking of the tax system. In the first instance, causes became more visible as national organisations increasingly looked to professional agencies for their advertising campaigns; these budgets leapt eight-fold from 1977 to 1989. Meanwhile, those public institutions and organisations that had seen their public budgets cut now employed a great deal of energy into attracting wealthy donors and corporate sponsorship.
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Charities became more politicised too. Taking their lead from secular pressure-group politics, Christian organisations soon added lobbying and engagement to existing remedial work and fundraising. Many believed that if the Thatcher government really wanted to help charities, it could do so by making charitable donations exempt from tax and reforming the existing Charities Act, which allowed for the advancement of religion and the relief of poverty but forbade political campaigning.
The government was never likely to consent on the latter, even though its policies had been one of the main reasons why charities devoted so much of their energy in the political sphere.

Britons now channelled their monies into national, media-driven, celebrity-endorsed causes such as Band Aid or Children In Need rather than into local or smaller charities; although even in this, there was evidence of ‘donor fatigue’ by the end of the decade. A survey conducted by the Charities Aid Foundation in 1989 revealed that those who gave the most were committed Christians – as had always been the case – although these donors came not from the prosperous south but were disproportionately located in Northern Ireland, Scotland and the north of England, i.e. those areas which had benefited least from the Thatcher boom.

Responding to Lawson’s Budget of 1988, religious leaders in Manchester organised a campaign to persuade the public to donate their extra income to the NHS. As the Bishop of Manchester explained in a lengthy letter to the
Church Times,
individual giving was not ‘morally superior to action in the political field, which is absolutely vital – and often far more effective’. Drawing on the Hunger Marchers’ slogan from the 1930s, he concluded, ‘Damn your charity, we want justice.’
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David Sheppard put it even more decisively in a speech to his Diocesan Synod the following year: ‘Charity,’ he affirmed, ‘is discriminate and dictated by preferences or prejudices, whereas indiscriminate contribution through taxation is a greater example of collective giving and “belonging to one body”.’
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In an age when marathon telethon charity appeals could generate £24 million in twenty-four hours (equal to the annual budget of a local authority), it was the Anglican bishops who spoke of the limitations of giving and proclaimed the spiritual superiority of progressive taxation over charity.
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To Conservatives, though, Sheppard’s characterisation of donating as a demonstration of ‘private prejudices’ was yet further confirmation that Church leaders were reading from a different Gospel.

Competition, profit and interest were dirty words to churchmen, which
they tended to dismiss outright as encouraging human sin, possessive individualism and debasing relationships and values in society. This portrayal of wealth, materialism and the market as an unsavoury and ungodly business was hardly a novel position for Christians. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Church had offered no effective retort to Adam Smith’s positive notion of the ‘natural order’ as Christians withdrew into speaking about the ill effects of industrialisation and the market rather than offering a framework in which economic forces should operate.
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Martin Wiener, in his highly influential book
English
Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit: 1850–1980,
which traced the hostility to industrialisation and wealth creation amongst the English literary elite from the mid-nineteenth century, singled out Tawney and Temple in particular as reflective of what he called the ‘moralistic and anti-materialistic radicalism’ predominant within Christianity.
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* Anglicans, though, had embraced this tradition with fresh intensity in the era of neo-liberalism and the growth of multinational corporations and the globalisation of the financial markets. Like their predecessors, modern Christians were much more willing to talk about the challenges of being poor rather than rich and of the redistribution of wealth rather than its creation. The problem was that Anglicans appeared to speak as if they wished global finance could simply be undone, rather than actually engage with what was fast becoming Britain’s most important sector. This did not go unnoticed by the Director General of the Institute of Directors, Peter Morgan, who in a speech in 1990 echoed Wiener’s critique of the ‘anti-industrial spirit’ in Britain and pinpointed the contemporary Church as one of its main offenders:

When Margaret Thatcher and others criticised the Church for its antimaterialist and anti-industrial spirit, they did so with some justification. The Church had very little to say that was constructive on the acquisition of money, while Christians engaged in business tended to be cast as either ‘corrupt or naive’.
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Professions, lifestyles and choices were divided into those that encouraged altruism and social duty and those characterised by selfishness and a lack of integrity. There was no sense that a merchant banker could have the same calling as a teacher or a doctor or, perhaps more importantly, that chaplains should be positioned in banks as they were in prisons, hospitals or schools (which in hindsight might have been a good idea).
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No Church leader took seriously Home Office Minister John Patten’s call in 1989 for the Church of England to conceive a theology ‘appropriate for the climate of success that we have in Britain in the late 1980s’.
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This is perhaps understandable, but nor did they listen to affluent Anglicans’ frequent complaints that the Church was ignoring their spiritual concerns: ‘May I remind the Synod that … the Gospel is for rich and poor?’ reprimanded one lay member during the debate over the urban poverty report
Faith in the City.
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For Rev. Malcolm Grundy, this question was central to the future of the Church and its prophecy: ‘If the principal Christian denominations cannot affirm the ways in which most people in this country earn their living, then is there any surprise that God is seen as an optional interest on the edge of life?’
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Too often the dialogue between economists and theologians resulted in what Rev. John Atherton called ‘the dialogue of the deaf’. Christian Conservatives and neo-liberals tended to dismiss Christian social commentary as either ‘socialist’ or ‘outdated’ while church leaders and
theologians failed to acknowledge that their criticisms of capitalism were to a large degree part of the reality of living in an advanced Western economy. Some attempt at dialogue was orchestrated by the Church’s Board for Social Responsibility in 1986, which brought together Brian Griffiths, Lord Harris and theologian John Atherton. Harris, clearly in no mood for compromise, dismissed clerics such as David Sheppard, for propagating a ‘socialist testament’, while remarking that the Church’s failure to engage with the market was down to a misappropriation of blame on the system rather than the individual: ‘How can the fat man in the restaurant blame his own obesity on the waiter?’
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Harris thought that the Church had a legitimate role in elevating individual human conduct, but nothing of any value to say on the economic system with which the individual engaged. John Atherton was prepared to admit some of the shortcomings within Christian theology on economics, but pointed to the flaws of Griffiths’s own concept of a Christian social market, particularly on inequality, which Atherton maintained was contrary to the Christian notion of fellowship. The problem was an unwillingness on either side to concede on two crucial points: Christian theologians seemed unprepared to admit that laissez-faire capitalism had historically raised thousands out of poverty and was now the reality, while economic liberals seemed reluctant to admit that the capitalist system had a ruthless ability to marginalise people out of the market place. It was indeed a ‘dialogue of the deaf’.

In an essay written in 1985, political philosopher and Anglican Raymond Plant was sceptical about what was precisely ‘theological’ about the Church’s prophecy, which, in his view, amounted to a simplistic reinforcement of more powerful and complex political theories:

This was a critique that probably Enoch Powell, Maurice Cowling, Margaret Thatcher or even Hensley Henson would have agreed. Plant’s contention was that whereas the New Right thinking had an ‘internal coherence’, the Christian social thought countering it was theologically and politically weak.
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This was a point that Archbishop Runcie was eventually to concede. In his last Synod as Primate, Runcie admitted that although the Church had been ‘saying important things’ in the 1980s, it could be accused of ‘framing them in the sort of collectivist language which has been thought to be discredited … I cannot emphasise and agree with that enough.’
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The Methodists came to a similar conclusion. At a meeting on the ethics of wealth creation in 1991, John Kennedy spoke plainly: ‘We bring embarrassingly little to modern debate, and tend to struggle behind it, adjusting our alleged insights, pumping up our supposed visions, and rewriting our tradition in ways that might have made Stalin blush.’
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One of the deficiencies of social Anglicanism in the 1980s was its refusal to accept that those on the right were also arguing from a legitimate biblical basis. Christian Conservative commentators were indeed right when they spoke of the intolerance of liberal Anglicanism. It was this tendency to project theo-political values as undeniable biblical truths, while at the same time completely dismissing alternative political theologies, which so incensed Margaret Thatcher, Conservative Anglican voters and the wider traditional Anglican movement in the 1980s. The New Right could be criticised for being overly optimistic and complacent about the free market and unwilling to pay due attention on the need for constraints and regulation, but the Church could be equally criticised for not recognising the positive benefits of competition and the free economy. For all this talk about the morality of capitalism, the question that neither the Church nor the New Right sufficiently addressed was whether the answer for regulating the free market
lay at an individual, corporate or state level: a glaring oversight, which would later become all too apparent.

RELATIONS BETWEEN THE
Church of England and the Conservative Party may have soured in the ’80s, but there was also evidence that a new religious–political alliance had forged between the Conservative Party and British Jewry. Between 1955 and 1980 there had been only two Jewish Conservative MPs (both with inherited titles) but by 1987 this had increased to sixteen, far more than on the Labour benches. Outside the parliamentary party, there was a notable Jewish presence at the Centre for Policy Studies, with the likes of Alfred Sherman, Keith Joseph, Lord Young and retail businessman Stanley Kalms. In fact, Joseph was anxious that the CPS might be cast as a Jewish pressure group, which was one of the reasons why he appointed millionaire Nigel Vinson as its treasurer. The presence of Nigel Lawson, Michael Howard, Leon Brittan and David Young filling the top posts prompted Harold Macmillan to famously declare that there were more ‘Estonians than Etonians’ in the Cabinet, while Tory journalist Peregrine Worsthorne went so far as to dub Judaism as the ‘New Creed of Thatcherite Britain’.
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Margaret Thatcher never hid her admiration for the Jewish community (necessary given that her constituency in Finchley had a significant Jewish population), yet this new alliance was not simply down to prime ministerial favouritism or political expediency, rather it was a consequence of the social and political evolution of British Jewry in the post-war period. In short, the answer was economic rather than religious.

A small but influential band of Anglo-Jewish elites had always aligned themselves with the Conservative Party but the Jewish immigrants who came to Britain via Eastern Europe and Russia at the turn
of the twentieth century were disproportionately low-skilled workers who initially aligned themselves to the Liberal Party and subsequently Labour in the wake of the former’s demise. The Conservative Party, with its associations with hierarchy, establishment and privilege, was never likely to attract working-class Jewish support, especially given the suspicion that anti-Semitism always lurked beneath the surface. The 1905 Aliens Act (a law chiefly to restrict Jewish immigration) and Moseley’s Black Shirts were not too distant memories while the widespread riots in 1947 that followed the murder of two British soldiers by Zionist paramilitaries in Palestine demonstrated how easily anti-Semitism could still be aroused.