God and Mrs Thatcher (43 page)

The weight of the bishops, particularly of Runcie, drowned out the loud chorus of unilateralists in both the Houses of Clergy and Laity. In the end, the Synod passed a resolution that Britain should not pursue a ‘first strike’ policy but should maintain its nuclear capabilities. This was successfully carried, although not wholly convincingly, by 275 to 222. The debate (and for that matter the result) revealed the Church not as Christian idealists but concerned pragmatists, although US observers could not help but remark on the lack of theological insight and the latent anti-Americanism of some of the contributions. No doubt the government was relieved. Months before the election, the Synod had
firmly rejected the Labour line as unrealistic. The Synod’s resolution was not an explicit endorsement of government policy but the debate was an important moment in halting the popular swing towards disarmament.

FOR CHRISTIAN SOCIAL
activists of the 1980s, there was one issue in international affairs on which there could be no moral ambivalence or compromise: South Africa. Anglicans had been involved in the struggle against apartheid since the late 1940s, both within and outside South Africa, with such figures as Anglican priest Michael Scott and Canon John Collins of St Paul’s legitimising the cause at home and gathering support from the press, Church hierarchy and the secular left. Through Christian Action, Collins managed to establish a fund for those engaged in resisting apartheid in South Africa; Christian Aid soon followed suit by redirecting its funds from war-torn Europe into providing legal aid and support for families of imprisoned ANC activists. The movement was bolstered by the presence of South African exiles in London, but it was another Anglican priest, Trevor Huddleston, who would become the public face of the anti-apartheid movement in Britain. Arriving in South Africa as a missionary in 1943, Huddleston spent more than a decade in the slums of Sophiatown before penning
Nought for your Comfort
in 1956, one of the first publications to unmask the realities of the apartheid system, which Huddleston unapologetically compared to Nazi Germany. Later, as Bishop of Stepney and President of the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM), Huddleston would play a pivotal role in legitimising the ANC, pressing the issue of sanctions to the UN and campaigning for the release of Nelson Mandela. Of Trevor Huddleston, Mandela later said: ‘No white person has done more for South Africa.’

Anglicans had played no small part in supporting independence movements in Africa, but after the wave of British decolonisation in the 1960s,
the anti-apartheid movement slotted into a broader set of international causes deemed worthy of Christian concern and action, including CND, opposing the war in Vietnam and addressing poverty in the developing world. The growth of ‘Christian internationalism’ fed off old imperial bonds and a paternalistic sense of a Christian civilised order, but it also borrowed from the language and tactics of contemporary left-wing civil rights and liberation movements. Canon John Collins was one such Christian who combined his leadership of CND with his role as part of the International Defence and Aid Fund, bringing the atrocities and inequalities in South Africa to public attention. Another prominent Anglican who also lent credibility to the anti-apartheid cause was David Sheppard, who in his cricketing days had refused to play against an all-white South African team and in 1968 was instrumental in getting campaign cricketer Basil D’Oliveira reinstated as part of the England team for its proposed tour of South Africa. The tour never went ahead but the affair had convinced anti-apartheid activists that sport was one way of bringing international shame on the Pretorian government. The sporting boycott of South Africa was eventually made official in the Gleneagles Agreement signed by the Commonwealth of Nations in 1977, but the question of trade embargoes and sanctions, which Anglicans, along with left-wing sympathisers, had been pressing for since the 1960s, would prove to be a much more complicated thing to engineer.

Britain, of course, was not the only location for anti-apartheid activity, but it was the most important international pressure movement outside South Africa, largely because the old imperial perception of London as the metropole still remained. The movement in Britain was also incredibly well organised with the formation of the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM); an umbrella organisation of church groups, left-wing activists, trade union supporters, local councils and a strong following of Liberal and Labour politicians. Funding from Christian organisations such as the World Council of Churches and the British Council of Churches was crucial to AAM, as was the involvement of many Christians and
churches, whose advocacy of non-violent tactics was crucial in ensuring the movement’s legitimacy and widespread appeal; as it was for CND.

Despite intense pressure from the AAM, successive governments refused to be drawn over the issue of sanctions to South Africa; even Archbishop Ramsey was not convinced. In a letter to Foreign Secretary Alec Douglas-Home in 1970, the archbishop endorsed the government’s policy of ‘friendly criticism’ rather than ‘ostracism’.
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Neither were the World Council of Churches or the British Council of Churches sold on the case for sanctions. That the international campaign against apartheid would become crystallised around disinvestment was largely down to Huddleston’s tireless leadership on the issue and, even more importantly, changing events in South Africa itself.

If Huddleston was a moderate face who could stir the conscience of those in Britain, then the same too could be said of his protégé, Desmond Tutu, General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches. Robert Runcie had been personally committed to raising Tutu’s profile, smoothing his elevation to the bishopric to Johannesburg and finally Cape Town (the first black man to hold this office).
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Terry Waite, Lambeth Palace’s diplomatic envoy, later said of Runcie’s intervention: ‘That was an example of what other people might think was intrigue, but it was good diplomacy – it had a big effect on world affairs.’
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In this instance, Runcie’s discreet exercise of his patronage certainly did more good than any public dressing down of the Conservative government’s policy. In contrast to the passive patriarchs in Moscow, Christian leaders in South Africa became the leading voices of resistance to state ideology and in Desmond Tutu the opposition movement had a legitimate spokesperson who could not simply be dismissed as a terrorist or a communist; indeed, Tutu always described communism as being as evil as apartheid and condemned violence as much as state oppression.

The key moment came in 1985 when, in response to a state of emergency being declared, 150 Christian leaders issued ‘The Kairos Document’, a damning indictment of the ideology of apartheid
and one of the most eloquent and powerful theological responses to state oppression ever produced. The point was not only to cast a Christian light on the state’s approach to law and order but also to cast shame on the Dutch Reformed Church, which publicly supported the status quo. ‘This god [of the state] is an idol … the very opposite of the God of the Bible … the devil disguised as Almighty God.’ The Kairos Document’s influence would extend well beyond South Africa; Central American theologians published their own version, ‘The Road to Damascus’, in 1988 and some Anglicans even saw it as a blueprint for how they should respond to the Conservative government.

Margaret Thatcher is often cast as an apologist for apartheid, although her position on South Africa was complex, pragmatic and, some might argue, a continuation of the British government’s position from the 1960s. What was deemed an acceptable policy in the 1970s, however, was considered unacceptable in the 1980s as South Africa descended into chaos and international and domestic pressure mounted. On South Africa, Margaret Thatcher quite clearly diverged from the Foreign Office and, as negotiations unfolded, South Africa proved to be one of the main sources of agitation between her and her Foreign Secretary, Geoffrey Howe. Both were of the view that dialogue rather than isolation was the best course of action, but Howe was prepared to be much more aggressive in pressurising the South African government than his prime minister. Margaret Thatcher had always been sceptical of sanctions as a tactic of diplomatic pressure (she opposed them against the Soviet Union as well as South Africa); she was, however, clear where she stood in respect to the South African regime. ‘I loathe Apartheid and everything connected with it,’ she had said in a speech to the National Press Club in Australia in 1979; Harold Wilson had said much the same thing, but, significantly, in an address at an anti-apartheid rally.
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Margaret Thatcher, unlike her colleagues at
the Foreign Office, tended to view the problems in South Africa through two prisms: her ideological war with communism and her opposition to terrorism.

Writing to Thatcher in 1980, South African Prime Minister Botha offered to dispel what he considered to be some of myths surrounding the apartheid system, while also position his government’s ideological alignment with Western democracy: ‘Whatever imperfections there may be in South African society, South Africa has a democratic, free-enterprise, Christian society and is spiritually, emotionally and ideologically committed to the democracy of the Greeks, Europeans and Americans.’
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More pointedly, Botha made sure to position the apartheid struggle within the context of what he called the ‘Soviet doctrine of world domination’: ‘It has taken the rape of Afghanistan to open the eyes of the West,’ he added, words which Margaret Thatcher had underlined with her pen.

To a point, Botha’s positioning of the internal struggles in South Africa as part of the broader conflict between communism and the capitalist democracy was legitimate, albeit not exactly in the terms he proposed. Following decolonisation, both the West and the Soviet Union had engaged in a scramble for African influence through a mixture of trade deals, aid programmes and arms sales. By the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union could count Angola, Mozambique, Congo and Benin as well as the ANC as either comrades or customers. She was not, however, naive enough to take Botha’s reassurances about apartheid at face value, nor was she prepared to support the oppositional movements then gathering pace. To Thatcher, the ANC were Marxists who deployed terrorist and undemocratic tactics: a perception that was shared by most in her party. When Derek Worlock and David Sheppard were invited to speak on South Africa at a fringe meeting at the Conservative Party conference in 1989, they were shocked to find that the event had been fly-leafleted with posters claiming ‘ANC equals IRA’.
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The case for international sanctions was brought to a head in 1985, when intense violence and disruption in South Africa forced Botha to declare a state of emergency. Yet support for disinvestment was not universal nor were the issues clear cut; dreamy Trotskyites within the AAM thought that sanctions would only prolong the capitalist revolution which they believed was a prerequisite to racial reform in South Africa, while even some ANC members thought sanctions a pointless path. Margaret Thatcher, always vulnerable to the charge that she prioritised economics above all else, was, in this case, cast as protecting British jobs over black injustices in South Africa. Thatcher, though, was defiant. ‘What is moral about that?’ was her reply when pressed by
The Guardian
’s Hugo Young on the ethical case for sanctions. ‘Add starvation, poverty, unemployment to the problems you have already got … when people call that moral, I just gasp.’
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By this stage, though, the issue of sanctions, in a large part due to the forcefulness of Church leaders and the AAM, had assumed an ethical mantle on which there could be no compromise. Anyone who took an opposing view, such as John Gummer, who, in an address to Christians for the 1987 election claimed it ‘[was] not a moral one but a matter of political judgement’, was dismissed as either a racist or a supporter of the regime.
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Thatcher’s aim was to bring Botha back in from the diplomatic cold and to coax him into reforms, while holding off the international pressure. This was a legitimate strategy as long as Botha was willing to comply, but he was not. The showdown came at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Nassau in 1985, where Thatcher fought hard to halt economic sanctions much to the ire of Commonwealth leaders and her foreign secretary. ‘I received a good deal of abuse, of being concerned with pennies rather than principles,’ Thatcher wrote to Botha soon afterwards.
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Margaret Thatcher had put her diplomatic head on the line and wanted some concessions from Botha in return, including the release of Mandela as well as
consenting to a monitoring delegation, the Eminent Persons Group, from the Commonwealth. But Botha rejected the stipulations, which, in his words, had been issued by countries that were ‘total strangers to democracy’.
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Meanwhile, mounting domestic pressure in the US led the Senate to pass the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act in 1986. Reagan, who shared Thatcher’s line on constructive engagement with the regime and about communist implications in Africa, had used his veto before going on national television to denounce the Act as ‘immoral’ and ‘utterly repugnant’. The Republican-majority Senate, though, overrode it in what was the first time in the twentieth century that it had overturned a presidential veto on foreign policy.

Thatcher was beginning to look like a lone voice standing up for a corrupt and crumbling regime. She was dismayed by Botha’s intransigency but she had perhaps overestimated her own powers of persuasion. Botha was no Gorbachev and certainly not the man to enact change in South Africa.
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While Margaret Thatcher was not a supporter of apartheid, she could certainly be accused of not condemning it with the same moral certitude she denounced communism. This may have been out of diplomatic pragmatism but it was also true that she did not equate the two on the same moral plane; both Desmond Tutu and Lech Wałęsa were beneficiaries of the Nobel Peace Prize, but Margaret Thatcher never showed the same admiration for the former as she did for the latter. For those Christians involved in the AAM, on the other hand, there was no compromise to be had or grey area to be considered. The South African regime was condemned outright as un-Christian and disinvestment the only possible leverage to bring the apartheid system to its knees. For some Conservatives, though, the Church’s uncompromising stance on South Africa was yet further evidence of its tendency to wrap left-wing causes in a Christian guise