God and Mrs Thatcher (29 page)

More important than any of this, though, was the fact that the Church was articulating what the majority of the British people felt. The year-long strike, with its intransigency, violence, and even death, in the words of historian Richard Vinen, ‘all seemed un-English’. The public were undoubtedly sympathetic to Thatcher’s attempts to curtail union power, but at the same time were equally uncomfortable with the harsh tactics being deployed.
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A Mori poll by the
Sunday
Times
at the height of the strike revealed that nearly 90 per cent considered that Thatcher was doing a ‘bad job’ managing the dispute, while another by the
Evening Standard
showed that even 49 per cent of Conservative voters disagreed with the government’s approach (Thatcher personally had an eight-point lead over Kinnock in the polls). The country hardly needed reminding of how damaging the dispute was, yet where the Church proved to be credible was as a non-partisan voice calling for reconciliation in a lengthy battle largely defined by hard-line positions and unsympathetic personalities. It was a call that was particularly welcomed by those on the moderate left. ‘Their lamps shin[e] brightly with an innocence that is both sobering and inspiring in a world grown cynical under the pressure of so much claptrap from so many other quarters,’ wrote Geoffrey Goodman, industrial editor of the
Daily Mirror,
who had himself attempted to negotiate a settlement along with his boss, newspaper magnate Robert Maxwell.
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Recognising the importance of public opinion and frustrated by Scargill’s continued attempts to scupper negotiations, Norman Willis, the
General Secretary of the TUC, established the Miners’ Hardship Fund in November 1984. The aim, which was separate from the Miners’ Solidarity Fund, was to support families in the run up to Christmas and, no doubt, to generate public sympathy not with the miners, but the mining communities. For this explicit purpose, Willis turned to two Christian leaders who had no mining connections but who symbolised unity: David Sheppard and Derek Worlock, along with Moderator of the Free Churches Council, Howard Williams, former union man, Mr George Lowthian and Labour leader in the House of Lords, Lord Cledwyn of Penrhos. In its first three months, the Miners’ Hardship Fund raised over £900,000, with one parishioner writing to Worlock informing him that he had sold his shares in the recently privatised British Telecom and donated the proceeds to the fund: a symbolic, albeit minor victory for the churches in their battle against Thatcherite values.
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In late 1984, with the NUM’s position significantly weakened and with miners drifting back to work, an increasingly desperate Scargill reached out to the Christian leaders, issuing a statement welcoming their help in negotiating a settlement. That November, an ecumenical delegation made up of Archbishop Habgood, Derek Worlock and the Bishop of Lincoln, Simon Phipps, met with NUM representatives in the rather grand surroundings of Bishopthorpe Palace, York. At the press conference after the meeting, the delegation put the onus on the NCB, hinting that a negotiation was possible if the government and MacGregor were willing. In a private letter to Worlock, however, Peter Walker warned that the Church leaders risked being pawns in Scargill’s games:

The religious delegation, though, pressed ahead and over the next three months senior church representatives from all denominations in Wales, Scotland and England, met with the NUM and eventually Walker himself, in a concerted effort to succeed where the NUM, TUC and the Labour Party had all failed. In the end, it was to no avail. The miners trickled back to work as all lost hope for a settlement being reached.

It has been estimated that the Miners’ Strike cost the state £6 billion, with the police bill amounting to £200 million alone. For a government supposedly committed to reducing public expenditure, the fact that such sums were spent without question indicates the level of determination of the Thatcher government in defeating the most powerful union in Britain. Many interpretations have been imprinted onto the Miners’ Strike. For the left, it was a triumphant tragedy, a time when old solidarities were destroyed and new ones forged; for the right, Thatcher’s unrelenting and resounding victory against the over-powerful and undemocratic union movement remains her greatest triumph. For the Church though, the Miners’ Strike was a moral fight about the nation’s values: between community and capital; dogmatism and compromise; harmony and conflict. ‘Their solidarity and endurance, have helped the rest of the nation to see that materialism is not the only motivating force in people’s lives’ wrote the Bishop of Lincoln in pointed words at the end of the strike.
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Reflecting years later, David Jenkins concluded that the social consequences of economic policies was not a ‘wet’ question, but a necessary one in order to formulate a proper assessment of the ‘structural deficiency or inefficiency’ of the government’s agenda.
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Anyone who had witnessed not only the social but also the economic costs of those communities that had been built on mines, could not fail to agree.

‘
WHEN GOVERNMENTS START
attacking the consensus,’ wrote
Guardian
journalist Hugo Young in 1984, ‘other people – its
custodians, if you like – start behaving differently as well … When government has ceased to be a healer and becomes for its own good reasons, a fighter, others begin to fight back accordingly.’
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Young had highlighted the motivation and political position of the Church as one of the main custodians of consensus. But it was not alone – the SDP Alliance, some beleaguered One-nation Tories, the liberal press and (as much as it could get away with) the BBC and even the monarchy – would also assume this mantle during the Thatcher years. But of all of these, it was the Established Church – despite its clumsy interventions, patrician tone and outdated thinking – which proved to be the most forceful enunciators of the centrist position. ‘The effect may be not to stir the conscience but to start a fashion,’ wrote Clifford Longley in
The Times
at the height of the Miners’ Strike, ‘the time may be soon when it is fashionable to be “wet”. If it does happen the Church of England could reasonably claim to have started it.’
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Broadly speaking, the Church of England’s socio-political values had been forged in the Second World War and engendered a sort of patrician decency; a sense of ‘this will not do’. This ethos had remained largely intact despite flirtations with 1960s radicalism, which meant that its leadership at least were disinclined to see politics and indeed all aspects of national life, in adversarial terms. It might be said that this had been the Anglican way of doing things since its inception. As the historian Brian Harrison has noted, the Elizabethan religious settlement, in pursuing a doctrinal middle road between Catholicism and Puritanism, ‘set the tone’ for Anglicanism ‘by exemplifying the
via media
’.
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This tradition continued into the twentieth century, whereby the Church of England bishops consistently acted as prominent articulators of these values, particularly in respect to class relations. Individual Anglicans may have held strong partisan convictions but in tone and content the Church of England remained very much tied to its
via media
tradition. The Church of
England had succeeded in exposing some of the moral failings within Thatcherism; Thatcherites, however, were equally determined to disclose similar failings within Anglicanism.