God and Mrs Thatcher (49 page)

Blair the Christian socialist, as we know, would later transform into Blair the Crusader. Any Christian ethos behind the New Labour project was quietly shelved as the domestic overspill from the War on Terror forced the government to face up to the complications of governing Britain’s multi-faith society. Few were surprised when Blair the closet Catholic converted to Rome when he left office; the real question that many wanted to have answered was how Blair was able to reconcile his Christian faith with his political actions. Gordon Brown was the son of the Manse from Kirkcaldy and, like Thatcher, indulged in rose-tinted recollections of his minister father, although he never sought any biblical endorsement for his politics and only offered vague references to his ‘moral compass’. Ed Miliband is the first non-Christian Labour leader since Neil Kinnock, although he describes himself, somewhat confusingly, as someone who does not believe in God but does
have ‘faith’.
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There is little evidence that the current Labour Party shows much interest in Christian socialism although there are signs that its ‘responsible capitalism’ agenda draws some inspiration from Catholic social teaching. In seeking to hark back to a pre-statist tradition of socialism, it is hardly surprising that those on the left have bypassed Anglican theology and looked to the Catholic notion of the common good.

IN THE
1980
S
the debate on religion and politics in Britain hinged on where Christianity stood in respect of the market and the state. In the 2000s it was an altogether different issue: how religious extremism threatened Britain’s secular values of liberty, tolerance and democracy. Here, after all, has been the great change since the Thatcher years: the tussle over Protestant England has been replaced with a debate, long overdue, about the nature of multi-faith Britain. But this was not triggered by a positive desire to integrate ostracised believers within British society, but a panic measure to address the threat of homegrown Islamic fundamentalism in the wake of the War of Terror. For Britain’s Muslims it has resulted in mixed fortunes; greater legal recognition and presence in British public life has been matched with the inevitable disadvantages of living under a culture of heightened Islamophobia. Although it may come as no consolation, it is a process and a struggle with which Britain’s Nonconformists, Catholics and Jews are intimately familiar.

One of the inevitable consequences of this has been the dominance of the radical fringe in the public discussion of religion. The moderate majority of believers are frequently drowned out by the aggressive and provocative shouts of fundamentalists, be they militant atheists, Islamic extremists or Conservative evangelicals. These developments have
reordered how religion is dealt with by the ruling elite and the media. While politicians speak less about their personal faith, they now speak much more about religion. While the notion of Britain’s Christian heritage still retains currency, no longer do politicians (or churchmen) make wide-ranging assertions about the relationship between Christian and political values as Margaret Thatcher once did. The focus has inevitably turned to a much trickier subject: the individual rights of the believer in a liberal secular democracy. Religious organisations are invited to make a contribution to civil society but it is on condition that they operate within the rules of tolerance and pluralism, which some faith organisations have found problematic, especially in respect to homosexuality. Meanwhile, some speak of a new phenomenon of ‘Christianophobia’. Many cite the multi-faith re-marketing of Christian festivals and the fact that the hijab receives greater protection than the crucifix as evidence not of the erosion of faith, but a hostility to Christian culture, although there is some confusion over whether it is secularism or pluralism (or both) which is to blame.

Since the
Satanic Verses
controversy, the Church of England has, at both a local and national level, proved pivotal in smoothing the way for Britain to become a multi-faith society. Arguably, inter-faith cooperation rather than secular multiculturalism has been a greater aid to integration. With respect to the Church of England, this openness has not been an entirely selfless act, for in seeking to align with other faiths it has in effect reinforced its own position. The Church of England has effectively become the spiritual head of a multi-faith society, but there are limits, it seems, as to how far the Church is allowed to go.

Archbishop Williams sparked public outrage in 2008 when, in a speech to the Royal Courts of Justice, he proposed that a partial implementation of Sharia Law in the UK was ‘unavoidable’.
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Williams’s nuanced argument (he referenced the precedent of Orthodox Jewish law courts) was lost in a media storm as Christians and secularists united in their criticism. Even those who did not support
The Sun
’s call
for him to resign were appalled by the fact that the leading Christian voice in Britain seemed to be endorsing an extension of Muslim law. Williams’s speech, however, was entirely in keeping with the position that the Church of England has carved out for itself since the
Satanic
Verses
controversy; as the mediating voice between secular liberals and those of faith in Britain. Like ecumenism, inter-faithism is criticised for its tokenistic pleasantries and lack of challenging dialogue. Indeed David Sheppard once argued that its texture should be like that of a ‘chunky stew’ rather than a blended soup. The most fruitful inter-faith initiatives can be found at a local level between churches, chapels, mosques and synagogues. In this, faiths working together have done much to dissolve some of the tensions caused by the exaggerated and poisonous rhetoric that dominates public debate.

In 1940, T. S. Eliot wrote that a ‘society has not ceased to be Christian until it has become positively something else’. The last quarter of the twentieth century saw Protestant England draw her last breath; the first decade of the twenty-first finally saw the long-awaited birth of multi-faith Britain.

W
HERE CRITICS SOMETIMES
go wrong in their assessment of Thatcherism is that they assume that there was only economic rather than moral thinking behind the government’s
policies. Where its admirers often go wrong is that they do not admit that there was a fundamental discrepancy between Margaret Thatcher’s intentions and the actual outcomes. Thatcher never pledged to solve inequality, rather she contended that some sort of ‘gap’ was necessary in order for wealth to trickle down. What she did promise was a reinvigoration of individual freedom, with social responsibility the inevitable by-product. Yet Thatcherism gave rise to a society that in the end showed little willingness to live by those Nonconformist virtues that Thatcher so fervently proselyted. Britain became a nation addicted to credit rather than thrift, one that prioritised individual gain over societal responsibility and prized moral freedom over rectitude. In truth, capitalism, or perhaps, more accurately the British public’s relationship with capitalism, failed to live up to the Christian vision that Thatcher espoused. The market proved to be a dysfunctional system and the people rather dysfunctional with it. While there is little point in measuring neo-liberalism against left-wing theories of redistribution in which Margaret Thatcher did not believe, perhaps one fertile course is to judge neo-liberalism against Margaret Thatcher’s own values, or perhaps her father’s.

MARGARET THATCHER’S STATED
ambition ‘to turn every man into a capitalist’ was certainly achieved, but, in the end, ‘capitalist man’ was not someone she herself recognised nor admired.
4
In public, she would explain the huge rise in bankers’ wage packets as an inevitable by-product of the City’s roaring success. In private, however, she reportedly use to rage against the bankers; why did they not follow the example of the army, she would cry, which was in her view the perfect model of leadership, responsibility and duty to one’s fellow man.
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New Labour’s Peter Mandelson may have proclaimed that he was ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich’, but Margaret Thatcher never
was.
6
Geoffrey Howe has recalled that Thatcher was always distinctly uncomfortable with the excesses of capitalism, which he admitted was never something that concerned him.
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Nor did it bother his successor at the Treasury, Nigel Lawson, or a number of other notable worshippers of the market who, unlike Thatcher, did not have the same faith in its moral potential.

Thatcher’s portrait of capitalism was often one where companies were small, privately owned and operated along much the same lines as the grocer’s shop in which she had served as a child. Alfred Roberts behind the counter rather than the yuppie on the trading floor was always the predominant image of market transaction in her mind. There was little reference to, let alone justification for, the system that her government created and would later become the norm. A situation where the nation’s homes and household budgets were intertwined with a global financial services sector that made up an ever-growing percentage of Britain’s GDP, but which was increasingly internationally owned and in the hands of speculators, who were chiefly concerned with short-term gain and distant from the deals and lives they were gambling on.

One aspect of Margaret Thatcher’s character, which is rarely commented on, was her naivety, especially when it came to economics. According to Carol Thatcher, for example, the interconnectedness of the global market used to irritate her mother:

Margaret Thatcher did not believe in regulating the market then; only the time zone it operated in. More pointedly, for someone nurtured in a household where thrift was considered a godly virtue and an ingrained personal habit, Margaret Thatcher could not fathom why so many Britons struggled with debt. Her former head of communications, Harvey Thomas had recalled Thatcher’s response to the housing recession of the late-1980s: ‘I really don’t understand this negative equity, because surely when young people are trying to buy a house they look at their income, they assess what they can afford, they assess what is the likelihood of potential problems. Surely?’ To which the answer is ‘no’ when a mortgage lender on commission offers you a high percentage loan on a property that is twice the size that you dreamed of or can actually afford. Harvey Thomas reflected:

Greed was certainly a charge that Thatcher aggressively refuted. When, in 1988, Thatcher was asked for her opinion of
Wall Street
’s Gordon Gekko’s famous ‘greed is good’ mantra she leapt on it straight away, dismissing avarice as one of the seven deadly sins, before adding: ‘What is good is to have sufficient self-reliance and responsibility, to want to do things for your own family, for your old folk, meet your obligations to your community.’
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Thatcher refused to believe that she had bred a society of workaholic consumers who rarely saw their relations, but that she had merely given a leg up to those secure 2.4 units who were now able to enjoy the fruits of their labour without state interference. Thatcherism according to Thatcher, then, was the politics of aspiration and responsibility not materialism and greed, as she explained to the
Manchester Evening Times
in 1987:

Margaret Thatcher would always confront the charge of ruthless metropolitan individualistic avarice by recasting it as the legitimate needs and desires of the provincial hard-working family. This was certainly the reality for some, but not for all. If, as Margaret Thatcher once said, ‘Marxism should be judged by its fruits’, then so, too, must neo-liberalism be – and over the entire period from the 1980s to the financial crash of 2008. The Thatcher years heralded a new economic consensus, which over the following thirty years would radically reformulate the individual’s relationship with money, the market, and the state. To put it crudely, during the Keynesian years the state had been expected to provide the conditions in which the majority of people had access to a home and were able to exercise their
producer power
(i.e. jobs). During the years of the neo-liberal consensus the government was now expected to establish conditions in which people could
buy
a house and exercise their
consumer power.

THE MAJORITY OF
Britons undoubtedly felt richer at the end of the 1980s than they had at the start. This, however, was not down to
rising wages, which actually lagged during the decade due to competition from emerging economies and the growing flexibility of the UK employment market. The monthly income of middle-earners increased by an average of 56 per cent between 1978 and 2006, even though Britain’s GDP increased by 108 per cent over the same period. The medical, financial, legal and administrative class did experience a steady rise, although those at the lower end, such as truck drivers and factory packers, saw an actual decrease in real terms. The rise in living standards in the 1980s was largely due to the expansion of personal debt, which would prove to be the most important economic development of the decade, and was arguably more significant than either the collapse of the unions or the privatisation of industry in reshaping the British psyche and its economy.

‘Popular capitalism’ was the term and opening up the market to the people was the aim, be it through shares, private pensions, mortgages or forms of consumer credit. At the Lord Mayor’s Banquet to the City in 1986, Thatcher rightly heralded this as a historic and democratic shift: ‘The great reform of the last century was to make more and more people voters. The great reform of our time is to make more and more people owners. Popular capitalism is a crusade: a crusade to enfranchise the many in the economic life of Britain.’
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By the end of the decade, the marketisation of assets and savings as well as the democratisation of debt was in full swing and while undoubtedly liberating in one sense, these opportunities were certainly not risk free as people’s wealth, savings and home became inextricably linked to a volatile and globalised financial sector.

Land has always been a prized commodity in Britain and the trend towards homeownership was well established long before Margaret Thatcher came to power. Nonetheless, Thatcher did oversee a monumental change in this regard; not only in increasing the number of homeowners but, more crucially, changing attitudes towards homeownership, which became the desired norm for most Britons rather than the privileged few. The ‘Right to Buy’ scheme for council tenants opened up this opportunity
to those who had previously not thought home ownership possible, while the easing of lending restrictions on building societies and banks increased competition from which many inevitably benefited. As banks merged and spread the risk of their investments in the international market place, so they were able to fund large percentage mortgages and satisfy an increasingly property-hungry British public. The government was fulfilling its promise of creating a ‘property-owning democracy’ (and hopefully a nation of Tory-voters), an ever-increasing pool entered the housing market and the mortgage lenders were more than happy to offer a service which ensured their profits reach record heights.

As the government stopped building houses and more people entered the market so prices rose, fuelling an even greater desire for what seemed to be a guaranteed investment. The values of homes increased one and a half times the rate of inflation in the 1980s, two and half times in the 1990s, and six times the rate in the 2000s; two-thirds of UK homes were now owned, to the value of £1,000 billion.
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But there was a clear generational disparity emerging too. At the end of the 1980s, 40 per cent of twenty to 24-year-olds were homeowners, but by 2006 this figure had dropped by half to just 20 per cent.
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The house-buying boom of the 1980s would have negative consequences for the next generation, who now put greater faith in inheriting property from their parents than buying it for themselves.

Unsurprisingly, this phenomenon had a knock-on effect on interest rates, which would come to dominate national fiscal policy and be weighed heavily in favour of the spender rather than the saver as Britons became a nation of DIY’ers and NIMBY obsessives, determined to deploy whatever means possible to increase or at least maintain the price of their home. During the slump of the 1970s, house prices had not fallen, only stalled. The early ’90s would see the first ‘house-price’ recession with the value of some properties falling by 10 per cent in a year as negative equity disproportionately hit younger borrowers and those at the lower end of the market.

As ex-council properties were sold on and the state relinquished its responsibility of matching this by building new homes, the private rental sector increased in importance. Letting became a legitimate entrepreneurial activity and was considered a more secure retirement package than private pensions. This was something that the Thatcher government willingly encouraged; it retained mortgage interest tax relief for buy-to-let landlords while it removed it for first-time buyers. Since 1996, one million Britons have bought properties exclusively to rent; the same number of council homes purchased in the height of the ‘Right to Buy’ boom of the 1980s.
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The growth in banking credit facilities had expanded in the affluent 1960s, fuelled by competitive wages and full employment, but it accelerated in the 1980s under quite different conditions. Total consumer credit in the UK more than doubled in the 1980s, from nearly £21 billion in 1981 to £48 billion in 1989 and would spiral to unimaginable levels in the next decade.
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Thrift was undoubtedly one of Margaret Thatcher’s favourite words, which she applied to both the personal and governmental sphere. When first canvassing in Finchley in 1959, she had referenced Abraham Lincoln’s phrase: ‘You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.’
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There is little doubt that Thatcher not only adhered to the economic concept but also its moral worth. Yet during her period in office, it became devoid of meaning and pretty much fell out of the English lexicon. The notion of deferred gratification, that is, the principle of saving for something before consuming it, became an alien concept for Britain’s ‘grab now, pay later’ society. Credit was no longer something to be ashamed of, or morally reprehensible or even irresponsible: now you showed your lack of aspiration if you did not live your life on the ‘never-never’.