God and Mrs Thatcher (20 page)

According to Conservative writer G. K. Chesterton, the doctrine of original sin was the Christian creed for which there was the ‘most evidence’. In the political sphere, however, the concept of sinful man (a label that tended to be heaped on the poor rather than the rich) had largely gone out of fashion in the twentieth century, for much the same reason that it had gone out of fashion in the churches. In the mass democratic age, politics on both the right and the left became about change, aspiration and hope for a
better world. The pessimistic claim that man was born sinful and remained so, whatever the government did, was therefore unlikely to make it into the party manifestos or even feature in the minds of politicians whose primary concern was garnering votes. But, as we have seen, a notion of human fallibility attained new currency in the 1970s as neo-liberals deployed it as a way of undermining left-wing notions of human progress and, more obviously, as a way of reinforcing their attack on the welfare state. Margaret Thatcher fully subscribed to this view and in her address at St Lawrence Jewry in 1978 offered an explanation that was both politicised and uncompromising: ‘There is some evil in everyone … In my own lifetime, we have expended vast efforts and huge sums of money on policies designed to make people better and happier. Have we really brought about a fundamental improvement in Man’s moral condition? The Devil is still with us.’
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Socialism was characterised as morally unsound precisely because it denied human frailty, stifled freedom and thus constrained individual moral responsibility. ‘You will in effect dry up in them the milk of human kindness,’ Thatcher said.

Not content to speak in abstract terms, Thatcher readily applied her theological understanding to specific political problems. Spiralling prices and inflation were categorised in no uncertain terms as an ‘evil’ and a ‘morally debilitating influence’ in the way that it reduced savings, encouraged debt and created hostility between employers and employees over pay. ‘It is, in my view, a moral issue, not just an economic one,’ she told the congregation at St Lawrence Jewry in 1981, significantly at a time when her government was yet to control inflation. Unemployment (then running at 2.5 million), however, was merely deemed a ‘concern’ and was ultimately a matter of ‘personal responsibility’. Here Thatcher was invoked the Protestant work ethic as the justification for her government’s relinquishing of the post-war commitment to full employment. The work ethic was purportedly an
inherently British characteristic that simply needed to be reawakened: ‘We have always had a sense that work is not only a necessity, it is a duty, and indeed a virtue … Work is not merely a way of receiving a pay packet but a means whereby everyone in the community benefits and society is enriched.’
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In an article for the
Daily Telegraph
in 1978, Margaret Thatcher had singled out R. H. Tawney and William Temple as typical of the compassionate but essentially misguided approach of Christian socialists, whom she simply dismissed as ‘misunderstanding of how the modern capitalist order works’.
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Slating the founders of Christian social thought as outdated and ignorant was bold, but tellingly Thatcher chose not to elaborate on precisely what she meant by ‘modern capitalism’. As shadow leader it was perhaps not necessary to do so, but by the late 1980s, when the deregulation of the market and the excesses of the City put the spotlight on the moral credibility of the free economy, Prime Minister Thatcher would be forced to elaborate.

Remaining true to her Conservative credentials, Margaret Thatcher always maintained the rule of law as essential for the maintenance of social order and for regulating ‘man’s imperfection’. Law and order was of course spoken of in benign rather than authoritarian terms – although those at the sharp end of police enforcement in the 1980s may have perhaps taken a different view. The state was accorded a legitimate but limited place in Thatcher’s thinking: to provide a welfare safety net and a legal framework. In her words, the purpose of the state was ‘to encourage virtue, not to usurp it’. In denying that the state could either generate wealth, employment or altruism, Thatcher was deliberately targeting (and clumsily caricaturing) the main contentions of post-war political and economic philosophy.

But how did Margaret Thatcher explain the biblical obligation to one’s fellow neighbour? For many Christians, this maxim was reflected
in Britain’s welfare state. Thatcher, however, offered a wildly different explanation of its meaning. Extending the quotation in full, ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’, Thatcher offered that the ‘thyself’ part of the sentiment was equally as important as its prefix. In Thatcher’s Gospel, it did not mean to ‘elevate love of others above it’ but rather that ‘concern for self’ was expected while the Gospel simply demanded ‘that this be extended to others’. ‘Self-regard’ according to Thatcher was at the ‘root of regard for one’s fellows’.
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We need be in no doubt of her political motives on this point; the aim was to disentangle ‘love thy neighbour’ from its Christian socialist associations and pin it to a Thatcherite concept of personal responsibility. ‘The Good Samaritan could only have helped because he had money,’ Thatcher had proclaimed in 1968, which became a neat summation of her belief that Christian fellowship could not be administered collectively through taxation nor ‘manufactured by politicians’, but could only be initiated by the individual.

Appearing to speak on behalf of all Christians, Thatcher explained in her article to the
Daily Telegraph
:

Thatcher’s promise was that greater individual freedom would naturally generate a greater sense of responsibility to others. It revealed a naive hope that greater wealth would not encourage selfishness but neighbourliness, but turn us all into Good Samaritans. We would not walk by on the other side, nor would we need state-imposed traffic lights to guide us there. Thatcher set out the moral basis of a laissez-faire economy:

Thatcher’s theo-political vision was both political in its aim and theologically reductive in its articulation. Many Christians, including Methodists, would spend a large part of the 1980s repudiating the Gospel of Thatcherism and unmasking the social realities of the Prime Minister’s so-called ‘values’. And yet, as unpalatable as these ideas were to modern churchmen, they had legitimate roots in Wesleyanism, nineteenth-century evangelical thought and, even much further back, in the work of John Calvin, particularly on the notion of the godly inspiration behind work, finance and wealth. Margaret Thatcher was applying this theological tradition to the contemporary age, but importantly her statements were also largely in tune with what she had learnt as a child. In essence, she had not strayed too far from those Sundays spent at Finkin Street. On the few occasions that Margaret Thatcher did speak in the pulpit, it was both necessary and appropriate for an explicit theological exposition, but whatever the forum, occasion or policy, her theo-political values of hard work, individual freedom and personal responsibility underscored her every word and deed.

There was, of course, little electoral advantage in preaching such sermons, unlike in America, where Ronald Reagan would successfully marshal the support of the Moral Majority and, along with it, many votes. Christians in Britain, although an important constituency, did not have the power to swing elections and could be found on either side of the political spectrum. If Margaret Thatcher’s biblical values were to have any meaning with a predominantly non-Christian electorate, they needed to be rooted in concrete policies.

THE
1979
CONSERVATIVE
manifesto had reassuringly and rather ambitiously pledged ‘to restore self-reliance and self-confidence which are the basis of personal responsibility and national success.’
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In her first two years of government, the overriding preoccupation was getting a grip on the economy, but Margaret Thatcher always viewed economics as one aspect of a broader long-term project: ‘Economics is the method, the object is to change the soul’ she had told
The Times
in 1981. The following year, Thatcher set to the task of establishing the Family Policy Group (FPG) within Downing Street, which was to be led by journalist and then head of the policy unit, Ferdinand Mount, and would involve all the major ministers of state. The FPG’s brief, according to John Sparrow of the Cabinet Office was to generate initiatives to reverse the ‘collectivist beliefs and attitudes … ingrained in large numbers of the population’ and restore ‘the spirit of individual responsibility, confidence and self-reliance’ within the nation.
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Value projects such as these were hardly new territory for politicians. One might say that Attlee’s post-war reforms had also involved a deliberate re-engineering of British mindset and behaviour to fall in line with the new Keynesian economic order. So it was for the Family Policy Group in 1982, which Mount made clear was about formulating a ‘
general approach
to social policy, which is analogous to our general approach to economic policy’.
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Some of the ideas generated by this policy group never made it beyond briefing-paper stage, but many did and would later reappear as fully digested policies in both the 1983 manifesto (co-drafted by Mount himself) or reappear as part of the legislative programme for Thatcher’s third term.

Mount begun by setting out the problems and possible solutions in a paper entitled ‘renewing the values of society’. In his detailed diagnosis, Mount considered that it was an overbearing and debilitating bureaucratic culture (rather than socialism or union influence)
that was the reason behind the ‘loss of self-respect, disenchantment and sloth’ amongst Britain’s public sector workers.
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In particular, Mount also laid the blame on the ‘man in Whitehall knows best’ mentality and the rise of the public sector professional class – the architects, the medics, the teachers, the councillors and social workers – who, he considered, had taken responsibility out of the hands of the citizens (now pointedly referred to as ‘customers’)whom they were meant to serve. Home ownership was obviously considered one of the most effective ways of generating personal responsibility and Mount was keen to extend the recent sale of council houses even further through rent-based mortgages – a proposal that Michael Heseltine actually blocked. Mount was also an early champion of greater autonomy from central and local government and the contracting out of state services; all of which the Conservative administration would later push through. University students were deemed another problem area not only because of their left-wing leanings but also as a drain on the public purse. Mount proposed that the most effective way of instilling a sense of ‘personal responsibility’ amongst these tax-funded rebels was to put them in debt by replacing the university grants scheme with loans; a proposal that was later made law in the Education (Student Loans) Act in 1990.

Mount was aware that changing the endemic collectivist culture within universities and the public sector would be a challenge but he was much more optimistic about the potential of instilling these values in the next generation. In a scheme that would not have looked out of place in an authoritarian regime, Mount put forward his idea for ‘grammar of society’ lessons in schools, which was designed as an ‘antidote to the half-baked Marxism which dupes so many nineteen-year-olds’
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and which would feature lessons on the history of common law, customs, and culture of Britain. As it turned out, the Conservative government would go even further than Mount’s proposal, opting for a complete overhaul of the classroom by establishing a centralised
National Curriculum under the Education Act of 1988, which would be distinctly ‘Thatcherite’ in flavour. Mount also mooted the possibility of a state-sponsored children’s Broadcasting Corporation that would broadcast themes of ‘right and wrong’ as opposed to the ‘lifeless, moral-less, mindless and theme less’ programmes that in his view dominated the existing children’s schedule.
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It was hoped that children might be encouraged to attend Butlin’s-style summer schools, start savings accounts and get involved in voluntary initiatives such as a ‘adopt a granny’ scheme; on the latter Mount presumably thought that it would have the dual benefit of encouraging a communitarian ethic amongst the young and lowering the cost of care for the elderly.

Many of these child-based initiatives did not make it into the final policy package, perhaps because children were not voters or perhaps because ministers realised how unfeasible they were. Margaret Thatcher was keen though. ‘I am very pleased with these ideas’ she had scrawled across Mount’s initial brief.
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Cabinet Secretary Robert Armstrong, however, anticipated that Mount’s paper would be met with ‘cold water and faint praise’ by the Cabinet and it was true, the response was mixed, although more on the specifics than the overall aims.
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The ministers’ reaction, which came in the form of individual papers submitted to the group, reveals much about the personalities, preoccupations and prejudices of those within Thatcher’s Cabinet.

The Secretary of State for Transport, David Howell, who had recently authored a book,
Freedom and Capital,
but who is rarely noted as a prominent Thatcherite, was one of the most enthusiastic supporters of Mount’s schemes. The Falklands War, according to Howell, had shown the government to be a ‘determined and confident force’ and it was only right that ‘the rest of the country … face its responsibilities in the same way’.
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The urban riots of 1981, however, had exposed the ‘defeatist’ tendency amongst the British to blame the government for everything. This culture, Howell entreated, must be reversed: