Read God and Mrs Thatcher Online
Authors: Eliza Filby
During her time in Downing Street, Margaret Thatcher liked to quote John Wesley’s mantra: ‘Earn all you can, save all you can and give all you can’, yet it was only ever the first instruction that was sufficiently encouraged. When asked by Frank Field what was her greatest regret in office, Margaret Thatcher reportedly replied, without any
hesitation, that she had not taxed the rich high enough. ‘I cut taxes and I thought we would get a giving society and we haven’t.’
35
Even Thatcher recognised that she had not instilled a sense of responsibility that comes with greater wealth. Perhaps, on this, she was reflecting her own father’s message in the pulpit, that the real danger was not poverty but affluence. She might have also looked to the words of William Temple for the answer: ‘the art of government is the art of so ordering life that self-interest prompts what justice demands’.
Margaret Thatcher always avowed to a belief in the inherent virtue of man. When she said there was ‘no such thing as society’, it was not a negative or flippant statement but an optimistic rallying cry for individual moral responsibility to oneself and to one another. The flaw in Margaret Thatcher’s theology was not that she did not believe in society, as many criticised, but that she had too much faith in man. She had forgotten the essence of Conservative philosophy: the Fall. In many ways, Thatcherism was a challenge to individual moral virtue, yet in Thatcher’s Eden, when given the choice, we, of course, ate the fruit.
The ideas of thrift, responsibility and rectitude made sense to Margaret Thatcher because she had grown up in a religious environment where the boundaries on individual freedom were clear. These were constraints, however, that British society (including the young Margaret Roberts) demonstrated a remarkable determination to escape from. The irony is that despite Thatcher’s pledges to re-instil Victorian values, her government ultimately accelerated their decline. As Peregrine Worsthorne has rather bluntly surmised: ‘Margaret Thatcher had set out to create a country in the image of her father but ended up creating one in the image of her son.’
36
It was not the sexual revolution of the 1960s, as Conservatives liked to claim, which ultimately undermined the Christian fabric of Britain, but the changes, struggles and upheavals of the 1980s that would eventually transform the British psyche. Margaret Thatcher’s time in office may have heralded a renaissance of individual freedom, but in doing
so also hastened the death of Christian Britain. In Margaret Thatcher, Britain had its last taste of Victorian Nonconformist culture, but while Britons largely accepted the economic changes, they rejected the moral conventions and expectations underpinning it. Britain was still considered to be a Christian country in 1979, yet by the end of the 1980s it had transformed into something altogether different. In her crusade to raise Albion from the ashes, Thatcher ended up destroying all that was familiar. The future was not to be conservative but consumerist, not English, but cosmopolitan, not Christian, but secular.
1
Interview with
The Guardian
, 8 July 1986
http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106265
2
Julie Burchill,
The Times
, 14 November 2004
http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/110576
3
Private interview with author
4
Speech on Europe (‘Europe as I see it’) 24 June 1977
http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/103403
5
TV interview for BBC1
Panorama
, 8 June 1987
http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106647
6
The second half of the quote is often forgotten. ‘ …as long as they pay their taxes.’ Mandelson said it to a conference of California computer executives in 1998: Andrew Rawnsley,
Servants of the People: The Inside Story of New Labour
(London: Penguin, 2001), p. 213
7
Private interview with author
8
Carol Thatcher,
Below the Parapet
, p. 247
9
Private interview with author
10
Speech to British Society of Magazine Editors, 29 July 1988
http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107300
11
Interview for
Manchester Evening News
, 8 April 1987
http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106792
12
Speech at Lord Mayor’s Banquet, 10 November 1986
http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106512
13
Matthew Hancock & Rob Wood, ‘Household Secured Debt’, Bank of England, 2004, pp. 291–301
14
John Bone & Karen O’Reilly, ‘No place called home: the causes and social consequences of the UK housing “bubble”’,
British Journal of Sociology
, (2010) Vol. 61, Issue 2, p. 238
15
Ibid.
16
Richard Berthoud & Elaine Kempson,
Credit and Debit: The PSI Report
(London: Policy Studies Institute, 1992), p. 47
17
Article for
Signpost
, ‘This is your choice’, 1 September 1959
http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/101020
18
Berthoud & Kempson,
Credit and Debit
, pp. 46–7
19
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2009/nov/06/
bankruptcy-iva-insolvency-debt-data
20
J. Ford & K. Rowlingston, ‘Low-income households and credit: exclusion, preference, and inclusion’,
Environment and Planning A
, Vol. 28, p. 1345
21
Stewart Lansley, ‘Britain’s Livelihood Crisis’, Trade Union Congress, 2011
http://www.tuc.org.uk/sites/default/files/tuc-19639-f0.pdf
22
Ford & Rowlingston, ‘Low-income households’, p. 1345
23
Berthoud & Kempson,
Credit and Debit
24
Henry Palmer & Pat Conaty,
Profiting from Poverty: Why Debt is Big Business in Britain
(London: New Economics Foundation, 2002); Ford & Rowlingston, ‘Low-income households’, p. 1350
25
Speech to Conservative Party conference, 14 Oct 1977
http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/103443
26
The Church sold the centre in 1995 although it retained a 10 per cent stake
27
‘Household Debt in the Economic and Fiscal Outlook,’
Office for Budget Responsibility
, 21 April 2011
28
Daily Telegraph
, 31 October 2011
29
Speech at Lord Mayor’s Banquet, 10 November 1986
http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106512
30
Financial Times
, 28 September 2011
31
Richard Davies, Peter Richardson, Vaiva Katinaite & Mark Manning, ‘Evolution of the UK banking system’, Ban of England Quarterly Bulletin, 2010, pp. 321–32; Stephen Burgess, ‘Measuring financial sector output and its contribution to the UK GDP’, Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin, 2011 Q3, pp. 234–46; Andrew Haldane, The Contribution of the Financial Sector – Miracle or Mirage?, Speech to the Future of Finance Conference, 14 July 2010
http://www.bis.org/review/r100716.pdf
32
Richard Roberts,
Did anyone learn anything from the Equitable Life? Lessons and learning from
Financial Crises
, (Institute of Contemporary British History, King’s College London, 2012) p. 9
33
http://www.which.co.uk/money/retirement/guides/contracting-
out-of-state-second-pension-s2p/the-1980s/
34
TV Interview for ITN (recalls losing office), 28 June 1991
http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/110849
35
Private interview with author; Frank Field made a similar statement to the Commons on the occasion of Baroness Thatcher’s death
http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/birkenhead-mp-frank-field-tells-3320350
36
Quoted in Charles Moore,
Margaret Thatcher & Capitalism
(2012 Adam Smith Lecture), 6 February 2012
http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/114620
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