God and Mrs Thatcher (37 page)

As a child, Keith Joseph’s Jewishness was felt to be enough of a social barrier that his father, one-time Lord Mayor of London, made the conscious decision not to give him a bar mitzvah. This shift from a culture of suspicion and alienation to top ministerial rank in the Conservative Party is not to be underestimated and was as radical a development as the election of a female leader.

Not without evidence did Margaret Thatcher herald the Jewish community as the embodiment of her ‘upwardly mobile’ values. In one generation, Anglo-Jews rose from working-class tradesmen of the East End slums to professional middle-class men of the suburbs. In the late ’80s, Jewish Labour MP Leo Abse penned a scathing attack of what he termed the ‘yuppie Jew’ with their materialistic values and self-serving charitable endeavours: ‘the only battles that can command their attention are the takeover struggles of the company boardrooms’, he wrote.
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Abse’s accusation that British Jewry had become dislocated from its traditional identity, roots and left-wing politics (in Abse’s mind all interchangeable things) concealed his actual frustration at what was now a fact: the Jewish vote had turned blue. But Anglo-Jewish embourgeoisement was not the only reason for its distancing from the left. Important, too, was the increasingly anti-Israeli position of the Labour Party in the wake of the Six Day War in 1967 and, moreover, Jewish unwillingness to
associate itself with the restrictive model of multiculturalism, which had become Labour’s default position by the 1970s. The lumping together of minorities’ interest was problematic for all concerned, but especially for British Jewry, which had evolved out of an earlier understanding of assimilation rather than difference. ‘To show sympathy to the Black community may be a principle,’ wrote the
Jewish Tribune
in 1978 at the height of National Front fervour, ‘but is this principle so pure and important that it is worth jeopardising the security of the Jewish public?’
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In January 1978, Margaret Thatcher broke with the bi-partisan consensus on immigration and, in a direct follow-up to Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, legitimised popular anguish in a television interview by making it clear that a vote for the Conservatives would mean tighter restrictions. Thatcher attracted wide criticism for her inflammatory use of the term ‘swamped’ but she leapt ahead in the polls. Weeks later, in the crucial by-election in Ilford North, Keith Joseph delivered a targeted message to Jewish constituents, urging them to support the party’s policy on immigration. The Conservatives won the seat with support from the Jewish community (an 11.2 per cent rise in support) having been crucial. A year later, in the 1979 general election, the Tories experienced their biggest swing in precisely those outer north London seats where the Jewish community resided.

Margaret Thatcher’s seat of Finchley then had the largest Jewish contingency in Britain, representing approximately 20 per cent of residents. Thatcher had proved herself adept at winning the Jewish vote from her very first campaign in 1959, when she faced down a challenge from the Liberals who were then capitalising on accusations of anti-Semitism at the local Tory-dominated golf club. Never one to take her seat for granted, Margaret Thatcher continued to nurture links with her Jewish constituents. She frequently addressed synagogues, was on first-name terms with the local rabbis and was president of her local branch of the Anglo-Israel Friendship League. One young Finchley resident and enthusiastic politics student, Jonathan Sacks, the future
Chief Rabbi, went to interview his local MP for his school project on Proportional Representation. Thatcher immediately questioned his motives. ‘You’re not a Liberal are you?’ was her initial salvo.
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Margaret Thatcher once remarked that ‘Israel is not a Sparta, but an Athens’.
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It has been said that not since Winston Churchill had the Conservatives elected a leader more committed to the State of Israel. Thatcher first visited in 1965 and was apparently impressed with what she saw: ‘They don’t pay people for being idle in Israel,’ she told the Anglo-Israel Friendship League on her return.
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She visited again in 1972 where she had an audience with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. Clearly keen to be associated with Meir (incidentally, the first female leader to be given the title the ‘Iron Lady’) Thatcher described the meeting as ‘one tough nut visiting another tough nut’.
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Thatcher was one of the few British politicians to openly endorse Israel’s controversial new borders after the Six Day War, and in what would be the only time that she rebelled against Edward Heath, opposed her government’s policy of neutrality during the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and, along with Keith Joseph, publicly spoke out against Heath’s refusal to provide Israel with military support. When she became leader in 1975, Thatcher’s pro-Israel sympathies were pronounced enough to raise concerns amongst Foreign Office diplomats. One embassy official in Jordan related his fears that Thatcher might be perceived as ‘prisoner of the Zionists’ by the Arab world and advised her to sever all links with the ‘Conservative Friends of Israel’ (the parliamentary group of which she had been a founder) and even consider swapping Finchley for the safe Tory seat of Westminster.
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In these days of heightened tensions in the Middle East, where the politics of oil and the Cold War were proving a toxic combination, the new Leader of the Opposition, with little experience in diplomacy, was being instructed to tread a careful line.

As Prime Minister, Thatcher’s relationship with Israel was inevitably more complicated, given that it tended to be curtailed by Foreign Office pragmatism and American leadership. Admiring of its democracy as a
bulwark against Soviet influence in the Middle East, she was extremely vocal in her support for the persecuted Soviet Jews (so too was Ronald Reagan) and, in 1986, became the first serving Prime Minister to visit Israel. But she was not an uncritical friend. She publicly opposed Israel’s war with Lebanon in 1982 (she controversially compared it to the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands) and the following year objected to former Irgun fighter Eliyahu Lankin’s appointment as Israeli ambassador to the UK because of his terrorist past. She always supported a settlement with the Palestinians, and could be partly credited for persuading Reagan to enter into diplomatic talks with the PLO in the final years of his administration.

Much more striking than Thatcher’s relationship with Israel was her identification with the Jewish faith. Frequently, Thatcher would allude to the shared characteristics between the Methodism of her youth and Jewish values of family, self-help and hard work. She would repeatedly refer to what she termed ‘Judaeo-Christian values’, which she applied to anything from capitalism and democracy to British culture. This was a relatively modern phrase (more widely used in America than in Britain), referring to the shared characteristics of the two Testaments, but its modern usage more accurately reflected the collaborative spirit of the post-Holocaust age. According to Thatcher, though, it had a more specific meaning. Explaining her specific understanding in her memoirs, she noted that her ‘whole political philosophy’ was based on ‘Judaeo-Christian values’, with the Old Testament providing the ‘history of the law’ and the New Testament the ‘history of mercy’.
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Doctrinal unity aside, Thatcher certainly felt a personal affinity with a group that was socially mobile and not part of the establishment. It is true to say that anti-Semitism has always been less evident amongst Nonconformists than other Christian denominations, possibly because both historically had been marked as outsiders in British society. But Thatcher’s linkage with Judaism was to a large degree down to one man, the Chief Rabbi, Immanuel Jakobovits, whom Peregrine Worsthorne
considered, the ‘spiritual leader of Thatcherite Britain’.
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As Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, Jakobovits had a higher public profile than any of his predecessors although casting him as representative of the whole of British Jewry is, of course, rather like saying that the Pope is representative of the Christian Church. Certainly, there was a degree of personal rapport between Margaret Thatcher and Jakobovits, but it was his critical response to
Faith in the City
that most endeared him to the Prime Minister. In his pamphlet
From Doom to Hope,
published in 1986, the Chief Rabbi posited that ‘cheap labour’ was ‘more dignified than a free dole’ and that community responsibility was morally superior to collective taxation and state aid.
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He also gave a necessary nod to self-discipline, hard work and the acquisition of wealth, while at the same time lambasted union militancy and a dependency culture as a denial of responsibility. Margaret Thatcher was clearly delighted with this endorsement and swiftly elevated him to the House of Lords. He was the first Chief Rabbi to be granted such an honour, which was a milestone in itself, although Thatcher probably hoped that his presence would prove an effective antidote to the Anglican bishops in the chamber. (Jakobovits in fact always sat on the cross benches.)

Jakobovits’s sentiments may have succeeded in impressing the Prime Minister, but they provoked consternation from those within the Jewish community, who neither shared his politics nor his interpretation of Jewish law. Factionalism within Judaism, it must be said, is as bad, if not worse, than it is within Anglicanism. Rabbi Dan Cohn-Sherbok criticised the Chief Rabbi for his reductive take on Jewish ethics, arguing with equal force that Torah was one of liberation and social justice with the prophets the conscience arousers of their day. Jonathan Sacks, however, pointed to the fact that Judaism, unlike Christianity, did not hold to a notion of the nobility of poverty or paternalism but rather the shame of poverty and the self-esteem that comes from prosperity.

On the occasion of Jakobovits’s retirement in 1991, Thatcher heaped
praise on a man whose twenty-four years of leadership had been characterised by an ‘unyielding commitment to principle, a refusal to seek easy popularity at the expense of integrity and a fearless statement of values symbolised not just in the life of the Jewish people but of lasting relevance and general application to the modern world’.
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Tellingly, Margaret Thatcher never lavished such praise on any of her Anglican bishops.

IN THE
1980s, the concept of ‘Christian Britain’ still held currency, though this was now spoken of in terms of heritage and values rather than active worship and faith. Thatcher, in her unashamedly spiritually patriotic flourishes would speak of a nation ‘founded on biblical principles’ that of ‘the acknowledgement of the Almighty, a sense of tolerance, of moral absolutes and a positive view of work’.
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The truth was, however, that Britain was at the crossroads of its religious identity, neither exclusively Christian, nor fully secular and certainly not ‘multi-faith’. Two developments in the late 1980s – the reform of religious education provision and the publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel
The Satanic Verses
– would force the government and the Established Church to consider where Britain stood in relation to its Christian past and its multi-faith future.

The 1988 Education Act, which still holds the record for being the longest-debated bill in Parliament, was one of the most controversial pieces of legislation to be passed by the Conservative government. Sold on the notion of extending parental choice and improving standards, it was arguably a centralising measure, which established the National Curriculum and permitted schools to financially ‘opt out’ of their local education authority. The stipulations regarding RE and the daily act of communal worship had originally been set out in the 1944 Education
Act as the only mandatory subject and part of a school’s day. R. A. Butler had implemented this, partly to appease the bishops’ fears about Church schools integrating into the state system. The negotiations over religious education forty years later would be a very different, but no less fractious, battle.

No one, especially not the Church, seriously considered that preserving religious education (RE) would halt the decline of Christianity in Britain, although it was appreciated that in an age when children were unlikely to receive religious instruction in the home or in church, school might be the only place where the next generation would encounter the Christian faith. Right-wing educationalists were sceptical of the credibility of RE, but for different reasons. Their main concern was that left-wing teachers were deliberately flouting the 1944 regulations and were indoctrinating children in a multicultural and multi-faith curriculum (what Mary Whitehouse called ‘a Cook’s Tour of World Religions’), giving rise to a generation who were biblically illiterate and morally ambivalent.
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Such accusations were no doubt exaggerated and yet few could deny that the teaching of RE had undergone profound change since Butler’s Act.

In the 1940s, when ‘religion’ had been the default word for Christianity, the word Christian was not made explicit. This had allowed for flexibility in the classroom and as Britain became more pluralised and secular in the 1970s, so religious teaching began reflect these changes.

Birmingham council’s religious syllabus in 1975 was one such example, yet it caused a stir not for its inclusion of other faiths but for its incorporation of what was termed ‘other world views’ such as humanism and communism. Birmingham was the exception rather than the rule, however. Much more notable was the move from a prescriptive approach to a more inclusive teaching of religion: symbolised in the renaming of ‘Religious Instruction’ to ‘Religious Education’. But, for right-wing educationalists, RE (much like sex education) became the litmus test that exposed the left-wing leanings of the teaching
profession and the spiritual and moral ill-health of Britain’s youth. In a pamphlet entitled
The Crisis of Religious Education,
cross-bench peer and educationalist Baroness Cox encapsulated the fears of many when she forewarned that Britain was in danger of ‘selling’ its ‘spiritual birth right for a mess of secular pottage’. In sentiments she hoped might convince the Education Secretary, Kenneth Baker, Cox pointed to the teaching of those ideologies in schools, which denied ‘human freedom, human responsibility and the reality of sin’. In a coded appeal to the government, Cox maintained that Christian teaching was necessary for the revival of the nation’s ‘entrepreneurial spirit’.
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