The handbag, of course, might remind us of Lady Bracknell – with whom perhaps she had something in common, embodying respectable, bourgeois values with unexpected quirks and a seemingly iron will. Of course the word, ‘Society,’ meant something very different for Margaret Thatcher. For her it was not, for example, a place, ‘Full of women of the very highest birth, who have of their own free choice remained thirty five for years.’ For her, it is said, society did not exist. And yet in his sermon for her funeral at St Paul’s, the Bishop of London cast an interesting light on this view by referring to a lecture she gave at the Church of St Lawrence Jewry in March 1979, shortly before she became Prime Minister.
Her theme in that lecture was Christianity and Politics. Here she explained that she saw politics as one of the ways in which we can fulfil the duty to neighbour which God demands of us. The work of the politician is important because ‘though good institutions and laws cannot make men good, bad ones can encourage them to be a lot worse.’ Nevertheless, she believes her Christianity offers no easy solutions to political and economic issues. For example, ‘It teaches us that there is some evil in everyone and that it cannot be banished by sound policies and institutional reforms; that we cannot eliminate crime simply by making people rich, or achieve a compassionate society simply by passing new laws and appointing more staff to administer them.’
One of her key principles is shown here that though the state has a duty to help those most in need, by seeking to relieve poverty and suffering, more often than not the individual or the local group are better at doing this than central government. The state can never replace personal moral responsibility for one’s neighbour, nor should it act in such a way that people begin to delegate that responsibility to the state. ‘The role of the State in Christian Society is to encourage virtue not to usurp it.’
On the other hand she was quite clear that humankind is not perfectible. Though the state might try to encourage virtue, large expenditure of money on policies designed to make people better and happier do not succeed in improving man’s moral condition. Though the law has to intervene to prevent the worst excesses of sin, she believes above all in the value of freedom. And, ‘Even when freedom, as it sometimes does, seems to be working against social harmony, we must remember that it has its own intrinsic value, just because men and women were born to be free.’ And again, ‘There are many difficult things about freedom: it does not give you safety, it creates moral dilemmas for you; it requires self-discipline; it imposes great responsibilities; but such is the destiny of Man and in such consists his glory and salvation.’
And here perhaps is the central dilemma of her outlook. She believes in freedom per se, but at the same time she quotes de Tocqueville, to the effect that ‘Religion… is more needed in democratic countries than in any others. How is it possible that society should escape destruction if the moral tie is not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed. And what can be done with a people who are their own masters if they are not submissive to the Deity?’ There seems perhaps to be a contradiction here. How can freedom of itself be an intrinsic value if it cannot be exercised for the good without reference to a higher moral order embodied in faith?
She gives as an example of that moral order in the Christian doctrine, which Bp Richard quoted in his sermon, ’that we are all members one of another expressed in the concept of the Church on earth as the Body of Christ. From this we learn our interdependence, and the great truth that we do not achieve happiness or salvation in isolation from each other but as members of Society.’
And yet she is also concerned to show that we all have an individual moral responsibility before God. ‘You might almost say that the whole of political wisdom consists in getting these two ideas in the right relationship to each other.’
Two years after she became Prime Minister in May 1979 she returned to St Lawrence Jewry on March 4th 1981. Her subject in this second lecture was, ‘The Spirit of the Nation’ and her theme was ‘that the virtue of a nation is only as great as the virtue of the individuals who compose it.’ She begins by tracing the idea of personal moral responsibility in Scripture, focusing on the individual and the way in which even principles of public morality refer back to the individual in relationships to others. Such individual moral duties cannot be handed over to the community just as personal guilt cannot be turned into national or social guilt.
However, because of our social needs, family, neighbourhood and nation come into being, held together by mutual dependence and by common customs and beliefs. Rules are needed to enable us to live together harmoniously but because of human sin they have to be enforced if the innocent are to be protected from the ravages of evil.
Thus individual freedom and the social good have to go together – a reiteration of a theme in her first lecture. ‘None of us can opt out of the community in which we live. Whether we do something or nothing our actions will affect it.’ She then goes on to assert that our national way of life was founded on Biblical principles and fundamental moral laws. Perhaps confusingly, she sets the ideas of tolerance and moral absolutes alongside each other. She describes work as a duty and a virtue, an expression of our dependence on each other, ‘a means whereby everyone in the community benefits and society is enriched.’ ‘Creating wealth must be seen as a Christian obligation if we are to fulfil our role as stewards of the resources and talents the Creator has provided for us.’
Moving into the present she sees the nation in moral decline; the state has taken over duties which used to be the prerogative of families; violence is on the increase and faith is decreasing; respect for property is diminishing and integrity, outside the city of London(!) can no longer be assumed. She also sees sustained inflation as an evil, the eroding of the value of our currency. It is evil because it reduces the value of saving and thrift, stimulates conflict over pay, encourages debt and increases unemployment. Of all the difficulties that faced her she sees unemployment as the worst.
She then identifies what she sees as a sense of pessimism brought on by not seeming to have a national purpose, which allows groups within the nation to work for their own limited goals. And she castigates the ‘grasping of wealth for its own sake and the pursuit of selfish pleasure.’
Her answer to the problem is strong leadership – the person who has belief rather than simply interests – and strong institutions. And amongst such institutions she sees the Church as having the role of setting before us the moral standards by which public affairs should be conducted, while not descending into the political arena and taking sides over practical issues.
As the lecture concludes she comes back to the role of the individual: ‘The state cannot create wealth. That depends on the exertions of countless people motivated not only by the wholesome desire to provide for themselves and their families, but also by a passion for excellence and a genuine spirit of public service. The state cannot generate compassion; it can and must provide a “safety net” for those who, through no fault of their own, are unable to cope on their own. There is need for far more generosity in our national life, but generosity is born in the hearts of men and women; it cannot be manufactured by politicians, and assuredly it will not flourish if politicians foster the illusion that the exercise of compassion can be left to officials. And so, I repeat, it is on the individual that the health of both church and state depends.’ The spirit of the nation is not achieved by complaining that ‘the government ought to do something about it.’
For democracy to work it requires the quality of virtue and understanding in the people. Our traditional values, and the qualities of ‘peace, liberty and truth’, are in danger of being undermined, but they can be revived and maintained.
It was worth reviewing these lectures at length because they illustrate the values by which she tried to govern and the results of her three governments can be evaluated in the light of what she said at St Lawrence.
Her policies at home were dictated by a rejection of the post war consensus of a mixed public-private economy and a welfare state, and the promotion of the virtues of free enterprise, free trade and individual self reliance. It was this transformation which led to the breaking of trade union power, the privatization of the nationalized industries, the sale of council housing on very favorable terms, the increase in private shareholding, and the deregulation of the city.
The consequences of her policies have been much disputed. We do not know what would have happened anyway, whoever had been Prime Minister. Certainly she enabled more people to become homeowners than any government since. In 1981 there were 10.2 million owner occupiers, by 1991 13.4million. The downside of the policy was that houses were sold at a hefty discount and local councils were not required to spend the money on building new social housing – which in part accounts for our many housing problems today. Another long term legacy of these policies may be the rocketing of house prices. The average selling price of a house in 1979 was £19, 925. By 1990 it was £59,785. By 2010 it was £251,634.
As to the distribution of wealth during her time of office those families right in the middle saw their incomes increase by 26%. Those in the bottom 10% saw an increase of only 4.6%. Those in the top 10% saw an increase of 46%. At the same time the number of children in poverty went from 1.7 million to 3.3 million. Pensioner poverty also went up, by 1 million. Her effect on the coal mining industry is notorious but perhaps misunderstood. Such jobs were being lost at a considerable rate in the 60 years before she came to power. ‘She was the coal industry’s most visible foe, but not the one that lost it the most jobs.’ Where she is perhaps most to blame is in failing to find or create replacement jobs or to plan in any way for the communities gutted by the cuts. De- industrialization was happening in Europe and America at the same time, but what it resulted in was a huge increase in unemployment. In her lecture she sees unemployment as a social evil. She came to power on the clever campaign slogan ‘Labour isn’t working’. And yet during her 11 years in power unemployment rose from 5.3% to 11.9% and then back to 6.9% still higher than when she took over from Labour. These are just some of the figures relating to the economy which in itself, however, saw a reasonable GDP growth of around 2.3% a year.
Socially speaking the changing values in society must have disappointed her. She had voted in favour of the decriminalization of homosexuality unlike most other Tory MPs. She also supported the legalization of abortion. In power, however, she opposed the gay rights movement with the notorious Section 28 ban on homosexual material being used in schools, though at an early stage she had though this was an unnecessary and risky piece of legislation. Then 50% of the population thought gay relationships were always wrong. Now only 20% do. Numbers of weddings during her premiership fell by 38,000 and divorces rose by 34, 000. Objection to premarital sex, fell from 28% to 22% – it now stands at 12%. When she left office a poll showed that 54% favored a society ‘which emphasizes the social and collective provision of welfare” as opposed to one ‘where the individual is encouraged to look after himself’ which only gained 40%. She had it would seem failed to win one of her core arguments.
There is much room for discussion here, but it could be suggested that she trusted too much in the moral values of the individual to resist the forces at work in society which were undermining those values. She was perhaps too optimistic about the individual and she was inadequately suspicious of the moral dangers of money and the dangers of financial deregulation. Here she misunderstood the gospels she liked to refer to more often than most politicians. ‘Christ did not condemn riches as such, only the way in which they were used and those who put their trust in them.’ The New Testament message is a lot stronger than that. And she confused the freedom the faithful have in God, with individual freedom within a secular state. Perhaps she trusted too much in the abiding influence of Christianity. And perhaps that led her to mismanage the balance between individual responsibility and state intervention. It is not that the state can make us good, but it may be that the state needs to intervene more than she would like to moderate the bad angels of our nature.
The lectures quoted can be found on the website of the Margaret Thatcher Foundation. The statistics are taken from an article in the Guardian by James Ball on 13th April.
The Vicar Writes
Stephen Tucker