Moses, Maggie and the Message
Bubble — By David Melding AM on March 12, 2010 7:00 am
When does a tablet become a pill? When a politician mangles a good joke
I HAVE set myself two Lenten tasks: to read the Old Testament (I might only manage the Pentateuch) and to ponder Mrs Thatcher’s record in government. Already I have discovered that Moses was the first devolutionist. He listened to Jethro’s warning against judicial centralisation, “The thing that thou doest is not good. Though wilt surely wear away, both thou, and this people that is with thee; for this thing is too heavy for thee; thou art not able to perform it thyself alone.” Very sensibly, Moses delegated.
That Moses influenced Mrs Thatcher is in little doubt – there was always something about the old dispensation in her Conservative strictures. This did not stop her from nearly mangling a good biblical joke in 1977. James Callaghan had compared his labours to those of Moses leading the Israelites to the Promised Land. The hapless speechwriter had suggested the line: “All I can say to Mr Callaghan is keep taking the tablets!” Mrs Thatcher preferred “keep taking the pills”…
The performance of Mrs Thatcher’s government can now be reassessed with the balm of perspective. And all of a sudden, with a Conservative election victory a distinct possibility, there are constant references to that decade – most of them wildly hyperbolic. My nagging question is this: while Mrs Thatcher’s record as an economic surgeon was brisk and efficient, why was the subsequent recovery incomplete? Quite simply not enough of the new economic growth occurred in the former heart of industrial Britain.
The wheel of fortune started to turn in 1985. The Westland Affair brewed bitterly all year and led to Michael Heseltine’s resignation (in early 1986). It is true that the Miners’ strike was a face-off that Mrs Thatcher won, but we remember it now as a wider conflict of cultures. And conflict rarely produces optimum outcomes. Instead it creates winners and losers and leaves even the victors with a problematic legacy (just ask Welsh Tories). But I think a more biblical event had the most significance that year: the publication of Faith in the City. Like the lamentations of the Prophets it spoke to the heart of the establishment. It was an unsettling message. One cabinet minister dismissed it as ‘Marxist theology’. Well, there is a lot of the Bible in Marx!
Of course that modest, courageous and saintly Archbishop, Robert Runcie, had already spoken truth unto power during the Falklands memorial service. In victory, he said, Christians remember too the vanquished enemy. Now Faith in the City reminded the prosperous that poverty cannot be dismissed as the consequences of sloth. The poor are often no more responsible for their lot than are the sick. A Gospel truth if ever there was one.
I believe that in economic essentials, Thatcher and that quiet Welshman Geoffrey Howe got it broadly right. The 1981 budget may have been condemned by 364 economists in their infamous letter to the Times, but in retrospect the tough monetary line appears justified. You would certainly not get 364 economists of like standing to condemn that budget today. But man cannot live by economic rigour alone, and ultimately the opportunities created by monetary discipline were not fully exploited.
The Iron Lady in full force during the heyday of her leadership
Thatcher was right, of course, to cut the penal rates of tax imposed on higher earners. Labour’s policies had managed to deter enterprise not further social justice. But alas a similar vision was not forthcoming for low earners who instead saw the burden of indirect taxes increase. Taking lower earners out of income tax altogether would have been a bold policy and one that would have done wonders for the work ethic. Strangely, very strangely, the Party that popularised the right to buy did not do enough to protect the right to earn.
Faith in the City remains a remarkably good read. It focused on the “signs of an evident and apparently increasing inequality in our society.” And the report pointedly observed that “No adequate response is being made by government, nation or Church.” This was even-handed but also a particularly robust response to Mrs. Thatcher’s disastrous statement to Women’s Own that too many people cast:
“their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families …”
David Cameron’s emphasis on the big society is a gentle genuflexion to Faith in the City. Today the Conservative Party has moved on and has no difficulty in accepting the report’s central contention that “poverty is the root of powerlessness.”
Hand-on-heart, I have problems with economic equality. It requires the Leviathan of a state apparatus which would gobble-up individual liberty. But this cannot be taken as a licence to rationalise or worse ignore the evils of inequality. And evil they are; and they come aplenty in free market forces that can spawn an alternative Leviathan.
Twenty-five years on, does the Church of England carry the authority to shape a national debate in the way Faith in the City did? While the unedifying obsession with sex seems to narrow the Church’s vision, I think it does. Mind you, there are branches of Christianity than seem a parody of the Gospel. Some American evangelists are claiming that earthquakes are God’s vengeance for homosexuality. This calumny goes back at least to the Emperor Justinian in the 6th century (I suppose it is no more than a variation of that ancient-anxious query “did the earth move for you my dear?”). Christianity cannot retain its deep cultural influence if shackled to such obdurate thought.
Secularists would limit the political and social influence of the Church of England despite its evident toleration. Militant atheists go further and deny the Church any moral authority. But it is all rather unconvincing. Just who are we kidding if we try to deny the role of Christianity in shaping liberal democracy? It is like the Old Testament without Moses or the Gospels without Christ. Most of us are inevitable Christians – just like our Victorian ancestors. We don’t practice the faith much – and church attendance is thin (it was thinner than you think in Victorian times). Yet while most of us think the ‘great perhaps’ has become the ‘sadly probably not’, asking whether we are still Christian makes about as much sense as asking whether we still speak English. It remains part of us, just as English does when we learn a second language. Christianity has formed our political outlook and the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount are incalculably more influential than the Communist Manifesto or the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. Indeed these and other key texts are difficult to understand without a biblical context. They are part of the third, Modern Testament.
And the message? Conservatism must contain some red letters if it is to serve the whole nation. Core messages remain relevant to modern conditions by skilful adaptation. Economic equality may be for Heaven, but the fruits of inequality cannot be ignored on God’s Earth if we are to be good neighbours. For as a famous lady told the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, it is in the Old and New Testaments that we gain “a view of the universe, a proper attitude to work, and principles to shape economic and social life”.
Happy Easter.
Tags: Conservatives, David Melding, Easter, Economy, inequality, Margaret Thatcher, Moses, religion, Welsh Conservatives
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15 Comments
Margaret Thatcher:
“the Party that popularised the right to buy did not do enough to protect the right to earn.”
The articles this week about the place of women in politics got me thinking about women who had achieved high positions in political life and names such as Barbara Castle and Shirley Williams came to mind and then eclipsed by Margaret Thatcher. My Grandmother who campaigned for Kier Hardie at the end of her life voted for Margaret Thatcher on the basis that men had been in office forever and made a mess of things, so let’s give a woman a chance. I have often wondered, had my Grandmother lived, what her assessment would have been of the Thatcher years.
I have no doubt that she would have supported Thatcher’s right to buy as she owned her own home and saw the leasehold arrangement so common in Wales as a form of theft. Although a lifelong Labour member and chairperson of the local Co-operative Society she was also at the same time a small trader who competed with the Coop! I am sure that she would have supported “the right to earn”.
I view my Grandmother’s actions as typical of how women view life and politics. Utterly inconsistent but wholly practical. Margaret Thatcher, despite the many criticism that people might aim at her, did one significant thing that was at the heart of the security of the family – she gave them the right to buy the home they lived in, and to possess the leasehold. For a vast number of families this was the single most important event that directly effected their lives and wealth.
I think my Grandmother would have given a thumbs-up to Margaret Thatcher. And as a life-long Methodist she would have also signed-up to Thatcher’s“a view of the universe, a proper attitude to work, and principles to shape economic and social life”. As did the Methodist local preachers at Tolpuddle who before them formed a friendly society to have the right to protected their homes and the right to earn a reasonable liveable wage.
Mmmm…may be I should review my opinion of radical Methodist women…to being utterly consistent and wholly practical.
But Thatcher wasn’t a Conservative. She was basically the heir to those 19th Liberal industrialists who drove working class Liberals to form the Labour Party. Her natural home would have been the party of Gladstone, not Disraeli. The Labour Party, unlike continental democratic socialist parties has always owed more to Christianity than to Marxism or, as Morgan Phillips, a former Labour Party General Secretary, put it: “More to Methodism than to Marxism”. When asked once to define Socialism, Keir Hardie famously replied that it was “the Sermon on the Mount put into practice”.
David
Excellent article and a welcome respite from the party political broadcasts we’ve had recently. Your critique of Thatcher is honest (though I don’t agree with it all); could Cameron dare echo this without causing uproar in his own ranks? Interesting because his currently stated policies suggest he’s with you on most of this.
Jeff, elements of Thatcher’s economic policy were liberal but certainly not her foreign policy – bellicose in Europe, absurdly reactionary beyond – or her approach to the role of the state in controlling people’s lives. Disraeli’s “one nation” Toryism was largely restricted to his novels and many other Tories of the era followed the free market orthodoxy associated with the Liberals quite happily. She was also a huge supporter of the arms industry, utter anathema to many 19th century Liberals.
Bill Clinton raised taxes on the rich ended his term with enormous surplus. George W Bush cut taxes on the rich ended his term with a enormous deficit. Tax rates on the rich might have been too high, however she would not got way with it if we did not have North Sea oil.
Michael touches on a key point of the 1980s. Thatcher squandered the oil money through tax cuts and mass unemployment while Norway invested it in a fund that is now worth billions.
A lamentable piece of ponderous, mannered, shallow posturing.
Conservatism should expunge all red letters from its alphabet.
Mr Melding has long since lost touch with the mainstream of his party.
I don’t think that Mr Melding is the Welsh Conservatives’ director of policy. He may fulfil that role for the Conservative Welsh Assembly group, but that is entirely a different thing.
Look up Ezra and Nehemiah’s massive regeneration project for Jerusalem which had huge social and economic consequences for Judea, providing a stable and energetic focus for the re-building of regional confidence.
I agree with you that Faith in the City is still a very good read the up date “Faithful Cities- a call for celebration, vision and justice (2006)” and our own Spiritual Capital Report also sets out, amongst other things, the contribution of faith groups. It deeply questions whether regenerating Cities simply with economic and social modelling can really deliver happiness or well-being for all.
All these Reports argue strongly, in the growing recognition that factors beyond material wealth are essential for human happiness, that we need a new approach – what about:
- Fulfilled and secure relations in personal life.
- Relations that spread beyond the personal to create good community
life and relationships.
- Good health, especially mental health.
- Freedom, including the scope to participate in matters affecting ones’ life.
- A philosophy of life, faith or worldview which includes a commitment to
something beyond serving one’s individual needs.
As our Archbisshop Barry Morgan said on St David’s Day this year at St John’s “The regeneration of Cardiff is meant to stimulate the urban, regional and indeed the national economy and assist in beating the economic blight which still deeply afflicts the post-coal industrial valleys of this area. At the heart of Ezra and Nehemiah’s city was the temple, signifying religious values but also signifying the importance of the city, not just as an economic financial and commercial centre but as a place that valued people as people and catered for all their needs – social, religious, communal.”
Quite rightly the Archbishop referred to a hidden element of the total Cardiff regeneration programme a £3 million pound hostel and support centre for the homeless, planned to improve significantly the city’s existing service provision and enhance the work of rehabilitation. He could have added the new Library. The city has realised that unless there is good news for everyone, there’s good news for no-one and that a city or society is ultimately judged by how it treats its poorest inhabitants.
The Report Spiritual Capital is available on : http://www.spiritualcapital-cardiff.org.uk
It was written and we hope will inform policy.It offers up-to-date information publicly available of the contact details of 200 religious organisations in the City as a point of reference and support for really putting the Old Testament teachings into action.
An estimated 35,000 plus are attracted to a faith and cultural group on one day in Cardiff more than watch our sports teams.May I suggest there may be policy in this rather than the superfical secular trash dished out out to us day after day.Thank goodness for the Internet.
It is of course faith based organisations that bring relief to victims of disaster – the Red Cross, the Red
Crescent, Islamic Relief, CAFOD, Christian Aid, Hindu Aid and SEWA International, World Jewish Relief and Khalsa Aid – are recognised globally, drawing inspiration from the humanitarian teachings of different faiths.
Faith-based charitable activity is widespreadhere in Cardiff, groups which are active in the community but often work unrecognised as they spend little on marketing and self-promotion, simply getting on with the job.
Peter
A particularly nasty and valueless comment that nearly didn’t make it through despite some heavy editing. If you wish to contribute to this site, I urge you to think of some more interesting and positive to say.
I would add that if anyone doubt’s David’s Conservative convictions, they can tune in to Senedd TV each week (http://www.senedd.tv/) and assess him on his performances in the Siambr. I’ve never mistaken him for anything other than true Blue. Don’t confuse a conciliatory approach and an ability to generate individual ideas with a desire to jump ship.
I have quite a bit of respect for David Melding and the tradition of “One Nation Conservatism” that he comes from. However the classical Liberalism that dominated Margaret Thatcher’s thought (I believe it was John Nott who said she was not a Tory) along with the type of Calvinism that has a contempt for the “underserving poor” despised the likes of Robert Runcie who was perceived as a souped up Marxist.
The only people that benefitted from the tax cuts of the 1980s were the super rich. and what was given to us in income tax cuts was more than made up in VAT, property tax. For example under the old rating system my household paid £300 pounds a year. In 1990, it was £1,200 in Ely.
Faith in the City was a great report. It’s time for FITC2, for our time. Roy, what the Church in Wales does for the poor and the marginalized is minuscule compared to communities in my locality, where they build houses for the poor and feed the hungry through kitchens. When churches in Cardiff actively run kitchens for the poor and free classes for kids, and build houses for the homeless, then I will be impressed. At the moment it’s more restaurants and tea shops for profit.
Tea shops keep Churches alive and profit can be called social enterprise. Some examples, all in the Spiritual Capital Report :
Education
Churches pioneered free community schooling in Wales. Today there are 31 Church Aided schools in Cardiff Borough, representing 28% of the Local Authority public provision. Of these 18 are Roman Catholic (14 primaries and four secondary) and 13 are Anglican – 11 primaries, 2 secondary). There are in addition nine independent schools, of which five have a religious community affiliation. Two of these are Muslim foundations. Some of them are very diverse in culture and nationality, and have been at the forefront of
welcoming and including newcomers to the City for generations.
Homeless youngsters
The Church Army’s innovative work with homeless young people in Cardiff has created two hostels offering support to the vulnerable. This charity works with Cadwyn, a local housing association and social services in seeking to limit the damage caused by family dysfunction and breakdown, drug abuse and self harm, with educational and rehabilitation programmes.City Centre Curches provide great support.
Canton Uniting Church
Brings together former Baptist andReformed Church congregations with a common will to serve the wide local community, through its Treganna family centre, and a range of church based community activities for
the whole age range of people. These include Alcoholics Anonymous, Rainbows, Brownies, Guides; The Little Folks Play Group; Pensioners Luncheon Club; Weight Watchers; dance classes; concerts, choir rehearsals; counselling.
City United Reform Church
City United Reformed Church exemplifies how city centre churches can serve as gathering places for a diversity of needs. Its building hosts ecumenical meetings, is home to Cardiff’s Adult Christian Education Centre, to Cruse, bereavement counselling, Weight watchers, Alcoholics Anonymous, a free Legal service for refugees, a religious book shop, and the Refectory coffee shop, and ordinary church social organisations. It has an open policy to all-comers, expressing its commitment to be a “safe space” for marginalized populations in the city seeking acceptance, support and affirmation.”
St Teilo Arts Trust
St Teilo’s Cathays illustrates how a building can be adapted as a centre for musical performance and rehearsal, benefiting both the artistic community and a church congregation which would otherwise not be able to afford to maintain it as a place of worship and community activity.
Thornhill Community Church
Thornhill Community Church demonstrates the capability of an enthusiastic active group of Christians to pioneer community development in a new housing area, and take initiatives which led to the City Council being willing to work through partnership with them to set up a new purpose built community library, to add to the existing wide range of social amenities established through this enterprise of faith.
The Beacon Centre
Trowbridge St Mellons housing estate is an area of high unemployment and social deprivation, where a group of local Christians worked for 10 years to create a meeting place that could serve a wide variety of needs for people in the local community. It offers activities for all ages, from crèche to luncheon club for seniors, and flexible opportunities for a range of educational and training activities. With success in funding applications to
the E.U., government and charitable trusts, it opened in 2005, and is still developing its range of activities in response of local community needs.
The City Council provides service on occasions of bereavement touching 3500 families a year in Cardiff. Ninety percent of these will be assisted by a minister of religion.
The recent Gweini Report, ‘Faith in Wales – Counting for Communities’ estimated that the economic value of the contribution of faith community groups in Cardiff is over £10.8 million.
For profit.
Michael Cridland
“The only people that benefited from the tax cuts of the 1980s were the super rich.”
You are fortunate you live in Ely…I pay £1,536 for living in sight of the Corus blast furnaces. But the amount begs the question. The reality is that we have to pay tax. A fair way is to distribute the collection of tax across income, expenditure and use. The ‘mixed economy’ of Harold Wilson required an adjustment of tax collection and Margaret Thatcher broadened the scope of collection. The rich did well but so did the average taxpayer. They got to keep more of the money they earned and paid tax as they spent it. The ability to keep income encouraged people to earn money and the economy grew, there was a shift away from the number of poor towards middle incomes and the gap between the poor and median income was better than almost anytime since 1945.
We have to all intents and purposes being living in a mixed economy and broad tax system since Harold Wilson and for the majority of the time there has been a Labour administration. If there is any group who deserves your ire it is Blair/Brown because they have been in charge for thirteen years, longer than Margaret Thatcher was in office. In this period the position of the poor has worsened and it has become more difficult than anytime since Harold Wilson for the children of the poor to move up to median income.
Harold Wilson famously said, “A week is a long time in politics.” Perhaps 13 years of Tories or Labour is to long although we should remember something else Wilson said, “Whichever party is in office, the Treasury is in power.”
“When churches in Cardiff actively run kitchens for the poor and free classes for kids, and build houses for the homeless, then I will be impressed.”
A sense of history is a very useful thing. The Church has done most of these things and is still doing them, and other things beside. But it is not possible or right for voluntary organisations to provide things that we are already paying tax towards. In our mixed economy welfare state, the state that takes our taxes should be largely responsible for making provision for the poor and those in need.
“Calvinism”
It is easy to take a word and use it as it disparagingly. But in Wales the Welsh Calvinistic Methodists have a great record in supplying aid to the needy and providing free education to both adults and children. The continued use of the Welsh language can be closely linked to its activities.
Like you, I am critical of tea-shops for profit and my own congregation does not support income activities. We do however, support Age Concern, free creche for mothers and toddlers, cancer research, self-help sustainable housing in South Africa, relief in Georgia and Ukraine, alcohol and drug rehabilitation, a youth football team, various social events for the community throughout the year and Tear Fund. I’m impressed with the commitment and generosity of the people.
In the spirit of the recently celebrated International Women’s Day, the only thing I care to say about Baroness Thatcher was that she was a fine leader of her party and a good leader for her country.
I think Len Gibbs actually hit on what I was talking about. I’ts the locals churches that I am on about, not these projects that Roy quotes. What do the local churches do, except projects that may entitle them to public money? Faith Schools are paid for by the state.
As far as your point on taxes, economists believed that without North Sea oil the Thatcher experiment would have ended in 1981. As for Blair and Brown, they were more of the same. Just ask the ASW workers who were deprived of their pensions why the government just stood by and did nothing.