Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s (66 page)

The consequences of the 1992 vote lie outside the remit of any study of the eighties, but even without women priests the hopes of those seeking greater unity between the two principal Christian
churches rested more at a symbolic than a theological level. The encouraging signs that the final report of the Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission claimed to discern in
September 1981 lasted less than twenty-four hours before being disowned by a press release from the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, under Cardinal
Ratzinger.
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When, the following May, Pope John Paul II became the first pontiff to visit Britain, it seemed it was the Old Faith that had the
greatest opportunity for renewal. After 450 years of Italian-born popes, the descent upon the Gatwick tarmac of the charismatic Pole, who had survived an assassination attempt only twelve months
earlier and who embodied his homeland’s struggle for freedom from martial law and communist ideology, resonated beyond the direct enthusiasm of the faithful. The trip had nearly been
cancelled at the last moment by the outbreak of the Falklands War in April, with the Vatican’s apprehensions assuaged only by the scheduling of a counterbalancing trip to Argentina and the
agreement that the pope would meet Queen Elizabeth but not the prime minister. The enduring image of the trip was provided by pope and archbishop kneeling together in prayer before the tomb of St
Thomas à Becket in Canterbury Cathedral, though the most extraordinary testament to the pontiff’s appeal came in Glasgow’s Bellahouston Park where three hundred thousand people
(almost 40 per cent of the entire Catholic population of Scotland) turned up for mass. Yet for all such displays, when reduced to the accountancy ledger, the best the Roman Catholic Church could
achieve in Britain during the eighties was a congregation declining at a gentler rate than the protestant competition. The pope was no more able to reverse the trend with his visit than was the
American evangelical preacher Billy Graham with his Mission England tour of the summer of 1984. Over one million people crowded into the enclosures of the nation’s football grounds to hear
Graham interpret the gospels, in a series of events of which the only enduring legacy was a new hymn-book,
Mission Praise
. Only the Pentecostal Church, which drew its congregations
disproportionately from the Afro-Caribbean community,
ended the eighties with more members than it started with – by which time only 11.7 per cent of Britons were still
attending church at least once a week.

Thatcher was reluctant to introduce God into contemporary politics – another feature of the manner in which her brand of conservatism lacked the unabashed religious self-certainty then
animating the right-wing Republican revival in the United States. ‘I do not like talking about religion because people will misinterpret,’ she confided to the broadcaster David Frost
when he tried, with only limited success, to steer an interview for breakfast-time television on to the nature of her faith. Privately, while in Downing Street she snatched moments of relaxation by
slowly working her way through the Old Testament, along with commentaries by such diverse theologians as Cardinal Hume; C. S. Lewis; the former Archbishop of York, Stuart Blanch; and the Chief
Rabbi, Immanuel Jakobovits (whom she elevated to the House of Lords).
⁵⁸
Despite this, outside the Orthodox Jewish community she struggled to find
much support for her political agenda from religious figures. A lack of choice ensured that only one of her appointments to various bishoprics – Bill Westwood at Peterborough – was
considered sympathetic to her politics. The donnish David Jenkins, whom she appointed Bishop of Durham in 1984, was a persistent critic of her politics, particularly over the miners’ strike.
While Thatcher decided to ignore the provocation, her energy secretary, Peter Walker, was so affronted by the bishop’s pronouncement that the government ‘did not seem to care for the
unemployed’ that he sent Jenkins a seven-page letter pointing out that, ‘as somebody whose father was an unemployed factory worker in the 1930s’, he was only too aware of
‘the despair of unemployment’ and that ‘I know of no problem which so dominates the thinking and the anxieties of myself and the government’ – before going on to take
issue with the bishop’s condemnation of Britain’s retaking of the Falklands and his attack on increased spending on law and order.
⁵⁹
Jenkins was no better at restoring harmony when addressing matters theological, succeeding in dividing his own parish by questioning the virgin birth and raising the possibility that Jesus’s
resurrection might not have been physically manifest but just ‘a conjuring trick with bones’.
⁶⁰
In May 1988, Thatcher did make one
sustained effort to explain the compatibility of her outlook with scripture, a piece of evangelism that fell upon the stony ground of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. For the most
part, she chose to leave it to less reverential Tories to tell clergymen offering political instruction to set their own house in order first.

Money was the root of serious misunderstanding between church and state during the eighties. The perceived greed of those doing well and the despair of those doing without provoked a succession
of pulpit denunciations of the government’s economic policies. Hardship in an age of
materialism, and Thatcherism’s assumed responsibility for both, fostered the
most sustained political engagement by clerics since the nuclear bomb had brought dog-collars to the front rank of CND a quarter of a century previously (and the Cold War did so again during the
cruise missile deployment in 1983, although, despite the arguments for Britain’s unilateral nuclear disarmament put forward in the paper of its working party,
The Church and the Bomb
,
the General Synod did vote, albeit narrowly, in favour of deterrence). Thatcher, oblivious to complaints that the rich getting richer made for a less equal society, not only saw no inconsistency
between wealth and doing good, but regarded it almost as a prerequisite, pointing out to the interviewer Brian Walden in 1980: ‘No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had
good intentions; he had money as well.’
⁶¹
The collective riposte to government policy came from
Faith in the City
, a report into
inner-city deprivation compiled by senior Anglican churchmen and published in December 1985. Many of its recommendations concerned what the church could do to improve its social outreach, but it
was its advice to the government that contained the contentious material. While carefully eschewing a party political line, its assertion that ‘too much emphasis is being given to
individualism and not enough to collective obligation’, while calling on clergy to ‘get involved’ in the debate about the government’s ‘dogmatic and inflexible
macro-economic stance’ because it was creating ‘unacceptable’ levels of unemployment, left little doubt that Thatcherism was weighed in the balance and found wanting.
Faith in
the City
called for higher government grants to the voluntary sector, more public sector jobs to be created in areas where the private sector was absent, and higher public spending on capital
investment and services, especially education and local services, ‘even if it meant more taxes or borrowing’.
⁶²

The irony was that at the very moment the Church of England was calling for increased state spending, it was itself engaged in one of the most speculative forms of capitalism. This was because
its shrinking income from declining congregations was no longer sufficient to meet the church’s high levels of expenditure, particularly the ever rising pensions bill. Anglican clergymen
typically had relatively little experience of making money – perhaps one reason why they found it difficult to empathize with the enterprise culture Thatcher saw as the road to salvation
– and showed little interest in where the financial subsidies came from that sustained their own livelihoods and their parishes. The reality was that, to meet the shortfall, the Church
Commissioners opted to finance high-risk commercial property developments, mostly raising the proceeds through borrowing, which rose from a total of £11 million in 1986 to £518 million
in 1990 – just as the property market collapsed. The subsequent parliamentary inquiry into the losses was damning, finding ‘complacency about the loss of up to £800 million of the
Commissioners’ capital base’ and stating that they had ‘foolishly speculated’ and had ‘failed to comply with normal accounting practices that
are a legal requirement in the commercial world thereby creating a misleading impression of the church’s finances’.
⁶³
Thatcher was too
preoccupied with her own problems by that time to remind the clergy of her ‘dogmatic and inflexible macro-economic stance’ about living within one’s means, but with clerical
stipends cut and the Commissioners ending all parsonage refurbishments as part of emergency austerity measures, the message nevertheless reached the vicarage during 1990 and 1991. Not that the
legacy was especially Thatcherite: within a year the church was turning to the state for a bail-out, in the guise of its church and cathedral repair bill being subsidized by English Heritage and
the National Heritage Memorial Fund.

If society’s ills were to be healed through enterprise and philanthropy, it would be necessary for rejuvenated mechanisms and voluntary bodies to flourish where previously the
state’s monopolistic tendencies had squeezed out private provision. In the United States, church-based charity continued to provide a major conduit through which individual wealth could be
directed towards community projects. Problematically for the United Kingdom during the eighties, the same process was hindered by the diminishing congregations and collection plates of organized
religion. Since it scarcely existed as a social construct, organized atheism was clearly not going to assume the obligation – the membership of the British Humanist Society remained
comfortably within the low thousands. Other organizations and structures would have to be built up. In encouraging individual endeavour, government did take steps to remove barriers to benefactors.
Legislation in 1980 and 1986 made charitable covenants more attractive, while gifts to charity were exempted from stamp duty in 1982 and from inheritance tax the following year. Further tax relief
for donations followed in 1986. However, in terms of ensuring that voluntary bodies were efficient and well run, the response was tardy. Until it was updated in 1992, the law failed adequately to
regulate charities. There was no obligation for registered organizations to submit their accounts to the Charity Commission and only one tenth of the 171,434 registered charities existing in 1990
bothered to do so voluntarily.
⁶⁴
War on Want was so ineptly run that when it went insolvent in 1990 it was under the impression that it had
£1 million in the bank, whereas in reality it owed its bank over £40,000.
⁶⁵

On a positive note, the number of registered charities rose by a quarter over the decade and the sums they distributed increased significantly as well.
⁶⁶
Most of these organizations remained small in scale and narrow in purpose. In terms of income, the sector continued to be dominated by the top two hundred registered
charities; taking account of inflation, their real income continued to increase during the eighties at roughly the same rate as
it had done in the seventies and would do in
the nineties – an increase that, more tellingly, also grew as a proportion of GDP. As to how they raised their money over the decade, what they received from fees charged for their services
and from funding via government bodies nearly equalled the amount they raised through voluntary donations, so the equation was not a zero-sum equation of the state simply bowing out so that the
voluntary sector could take over.
⁶⁷
Among the most successful bodies during the eighties was the National Trust, whose membership more than
doubled to well over two million.
⁶⁸
As with the arts, the voluntary sector was encouraged to seek out corporate sponsors and donations. The top
two hundred corporate donors increased their philanthropy by 50 per cent in real terms between 1979 and 1987,
⁶⁹
though given the low base from
which this sector was growing, the amount remained but a fraction of total charitable income. This was despite the efforts of Sir Hector Laing, the Thatcher-admiring chairman of United Biscuits,
who in 1986 set up the Per Cent Club whose business members promised to contribute at least 0.5 per cent of pre-tax profits (or to institute ‘money-in-kind’ staff secondments) towards
community projects.

The age’s most prominent charity impresario transpired to be neither a clergyman nor a captain of industry but a pop singer. In 1984, famine in Ethiopia worsened significantly; searing
images were broadcast on the BBC news, with Michael Buerk reporting a disaster of what he called ‘biblical’ proportions. The footage of dying children strapped to their emaciated
mothers, who had walked for days in the vain hope of finding food and shelter, profoundly affected Bob Geldof, the Irish-born, British-domiciled, lead singer of The Boomtown Rats. Outraged by the
inadequacy of the response, Geldof teamed up with Midge Ure, lead singer of Ultravox, and quickly enlisted forty-three of the most prominent British pop stars of the moment to perform a hastily
written charity single, ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ Released at the end of November to raise funds and awareness of the Ethiopians’ plight, it spent five weeks at number
one in the charts, during which time it sold more copies (3.5 million) than any other single up to that point in British pop history. Neither Ure nor Geldof were under any illusion that this could
be more than a token response to the enormity of the famine. On 13 July 1985, they put on what at the time was the most spectacular charity appeal in history.

Live Aid, as the event was billed, had antecedents, most notably the 1972 Concert for Bangladesh. What made it remarkable, however, was the majestic scale of its ambition. In the space of little
over a month, Geldof, with help from Ure and the promoter Harvey Goldsmith, organized a continuous sixteen-hour live event which was held simultaneously at Wembley stadium in London and the JFK
stadium in Philadelphia. To succeed, it relied upon precision timing (warning lights alerted the bands when they were about to
have the power shut off if they did not wrap up
their performances). In particular, it was made viable by satellite technology, which enabled the transatlantic spectacular (with additional contributions from other parts of the world) to be shown
in real time across more than one hundred and fifty countries – even in communist states. With a few notable exceptions, Geldof managed to cajole the biggest pop acts of the period to appear
without a fee, which was all the more remarkable given the shortness of notice and the reality that – at least until that moment – Geldof was scarcely a rock star of international
renown. Come the day, there were a few technical hiccups when the sound or the live feed momentarily faltered, but given the extent to which the technology was being pushed to its limits, the most
ambitious world television event that had ever been attempted could only be regarded as a remarkable success. A conjectured 1.4 to 1.9 billion of the world’s five billion inhabitants
supposedly watched the concert – which, if true, implied few television sets could have been tuned to much else.