God and Mrs Thatcher (38 page)

Kenneth Baker was already knee-deep in a fight with councils and teachers over the right to opt out, and the contents of the curriculum, and was in no mood for a tussle with right-wing Christian groups and the Church over the provision of RE. Baker, himself a devout Anglican, initially showed little interest in RE and was more concerned with making sure that the education policy reflected the Thatcherite goal of creating a generation fully equipped for the free-market economy, with City Technology Colleges his pet project. Hence, when the proposals for the National Curriculum were announced, RE was not included: ‘they must recover their position themselves. I can’t do it for them,’ Baker told
The Times
.
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Baker’s difficulty was that the inclusion of RE in the newly centralised curriculum would mean that its content, like other subjects, would have to be decided by a secular body, the National Curriculum Council, which was far from ideal and a ruling that the churches were unlikely to agree to. And yet, as opposers rightly argued, its complete omission would inevitably lead to a demotion of its prime place in schools. Religious representatives, however, carried considerable weight within the Department of Education, especially the determined and redoubtable Graham Leonard, the Bishop of London, who, in his role as head of the Church’s Board of Education, eventually managed to carve out a worthy compromise with Baker whereby RE would be included as part of the
compulsory curriculum but accorded special status. RE content would be in the hands of local syllabus bodies made up of representatives from all faiths but dominated by an Anglican presence. The Church of England rightly considered this a victory for the preservation of RE, Christianity and all faiths in schools.

Right-wing educationalists, however, were not content to leave the responsibility of RE to local syllabus bodies; a fact which reveals as much about their faith in local autonomy as it does about the Church of England. Baroness Cox, backed up with an impressive band of Tory heavyweights, whom Leonard dubbed the ‘Tribe’ and which included ex-party chairman Lord Thorneycroft and former Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home, proposed an amendment to the bill stipulating that teaching should be predominantly Christian. Margaret Thatcher had reportedly been briefed by Brian Griffiths to support the Cox amendment and chose the occasion of her sermon to the Church of Scotland to publicly endorse it.

While Leonard was not opposed in principle to Cox’s amendment, he did consider it as an unwelcome intrusion onto the Church’s terrain and a subversion of the proper consultation process. Those in Lambeth Palace saw it slightly differently, with Runcie’s assistant, John Lyttle, concerned that it put the Church in a dilemma between appeasing ‘Christian dogmatics’ and recognising ‘multi-faith Britain’.
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While Cox and her followers tended to associate ‘multi-faith’ unfavourably with secular left-wing multiculturalism, there was evidence that some within the Church were beginning to see an alliance of all faiths as the most effective bulwark against secularism. Recognising the multi-faith nature of Britain, be it in education or in any sphere, was now considered to be one of the Church of England’s prime duties. It was beginning to look though as if the bishops might
oppose
an amendment that
strengthened
Christianity. Pressure mounted on the Bishop of London, not only from Cox and her supporters, but also from the Synod. ‘If we are not careful,’ wrote one lay member in a letter to Leonard, ‘“Karma” and “Koran” will be as, or more, familiar than “Messiah” and “epistle”.’
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Thatcher pressed the Bishop of London to broker a compromise on which all could agree. This Leonard duly did and, crucially, gained the support of leading Catholic peer Duke of Norfolk, Methodist Lord Soper and the Chief Rabbi, Lord Jakobovits. Leonard’s amendment, which had been based on the regulations then in place for religious broadcasting, stipulated that RE teaching and the daily act of worship should reflect the fact that ‘the religious traditions in Great Britain are in the main Christian, whilst taking into account the teaching and practices of other principal religions represented in Great Britain’. Leonard’s amendment was not wildly different from what had previously been proposed by Cox, but, crucially, it had come at the initiative of the Established Church and had the full support of other faiths. The Islamic community were perhaps the least enthusiastic, despite reassurances that the curriculum would be modified in Muslim-populated areas. Their chief grievance, however, was not over religious education but the Tory government’s persistent refusal to allow Islamic state schools: a privilege that had long been granted to Britain’s other religious minorities.

‘A government which has done its best to ignore the problems of falling school rolls now appears set to try and halt falling church rolls,’ was how
The Guardian
saw the new RE stipulations.
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But this was neither true nor was it the outcome. Like Section 28, the religious aspects of the 1988 Education Act had very little to do with what was appropriate for the classroom: an Ofsted report conducted five years later revealed that few schools actually adhered to the law, especially the daily act of Christian worship. Rather, it was the legislative outcome of a debate chiefly between Conservatives and the Church as to how best to maintain Britain’s Christian identity. When confronted with the choice of either completely secularising curriculum content, adopting a pluralist approach or reasserting the primacy of Christianity, Parliament chose the latter, albeit with certain caveats. It too showed the continuing influence of the Established Church in the sphere of education although Roman Catholics were equal in their opposition to
the bill, particularly on the parental influence in school governance. More profoundly, the 1988 Act had revealed that the main obstacle was not secularism, but the accommodation of other faiths, and was thus an indication of much bigger problems to come.

When viewed alongside the other demonstrators of the 1980s – Brixton rioters of 1981, the colliery picketers of 1984–5 or the poll-tax rebels in Trafalgar Square in 1990 – the book-burners outside Bradford Town Hall in 1989 burning their copies of Salman Rushdie’s
Satanic
Verses
in protest appeared wildly out of context. Nor did they appear to share much in common with campaigners such as Mary Whitehouse’s NVLA, who were also engaged in a fight against religious offence. The widespread outrage and violence sparked by the publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel in 1988, not just in Britain but also across the world, felt like an aberration, with the religious hysteria on display seemed out of sync with the modern age. In these pre-9/11 days no one had yet realised that it would be Islam rather than communism which would become the battleground for Western culture. The book burning, which incidentally had to be re-staged for the press photographers, was obviously an offence to liberal sensitivities, but it was Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa that ultimately escalated what was a legitimate grievance into mass hysteria on both sides.

Up until the publication of the
Satanic Verses
controversy, Britain’s second largest religious minority had been a largely silent, ill-organised force. If the furore surrounding the publication had any lasting consequence, it was in the way in which it mobilised the Muslim community in the public sphere. While some chose illegitimate and even violent tactics to get the book banned, the UK Action Committee on Islamic Affairs (UKACIA), in part out of a desire to contain the more radical elements, pursued legal means. It soon found, though, that they had little means of legal redress other than to take the route paved by Mary Whitehouse a decade earlier – to push to have Rushdie tried under the Blasphemy Act. After a lengthy legal process, the UKACIA lost a high-court ruling, which
affirmed that the existing Blasphemy Act only protected the Anglican faith. Although few recognised it at the time, UKACIA’s failed legal bid cast an exposing light on Britain’s model of secular multiculturalism. Sociologist Tariq Modood has correctly judged that the Rushdie affair was a crucial turning point, in that it put the spotlight on long-held Muslim grievances and revealed the failures of the existing multicultural legislation. In demographic terms, Britain had become a multi-faith nation in the early 1970s, and yet it was not until the late 1980s that the religious (rather than racial) dimensions of this social change were addressed. As Modood has argued, diversity and legislative protection policy up until that point had been conceptualised around a racial (and secular) framework, underscored by a white/black dualism, which completely overlooked the notion of religious identity.
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Secular multiculturalism, therefore, could (and indeed did) co-exist quite happily alongside the continual prioritisation of Christianity in law. The shortcomings of this situation were blatantly exposed by the Rushdie affair, for it revealed the lack of legal redress for the nation’s second largest religious minority, the limitations of multiculturalism and the problems concerning the privileged place for Christianity on the statute book in a secular plural nation.

In seeking to try Rushdie for blasphemy, the UK Action Committee on Islamic Affairs had sought legitimate means through the courts but had found that they had few forms of redress or even alliances in the political or legal sphere. The Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd, consistently refused pleas for an extension of the Blasphemy Act to include non-Christian faiths. This was not out of any commitment to the existing law but because Hurd considered the Rushdie case as one concerning freedom of expression and foresaw the potential legal difficulties in establishing the appropriate boundaries for religious offence.
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These were perfectly rational reasons, although subsequent utterances by Hurd and his junior minister, John Patten, questioning the loyalty and ‘Britishness’ of the Muslim community, also suggested that the Home Office saw the problem as Muslim unwillingness to assimilate
into British society. The Labour Party meanwhile was divided: those MPs with constituencies in Muslim areas understandably advocated the right to protest, but the majority fell into line with liberal opinion in defending the author.

The debate over changes in the blasphemy law had been debated long before Rushdie had even begun the first draft of his novel. In the early ’80s an Ecclesiastical Committee headed by the Bishop of London had recommended to the Law Commission that the common law offence of blasphemy should be abolished and replaced with a law of religious offence protecting all religions. Calls for reform had largely been inspired by Whitehouse’s successful case against
Gay News
– the first prosecution for blasphemy for fifty years – which had left the Anglican hierarchy more than a little embarrassed and the Law Commission pressing for change. The Church’s proposals aimed to scrap the idea of blasphemy in respect of God and to legislate on ‘religious offence’ in order to protect believers; legalisation they justified as necessary in a plural society. The Law Commission instead advocated that the Blasphemy Act be abolished and not replaced. The government, however, failed to initiate any changes as the Blasphemy Act remained intact. It was to prove a fatal mistake.

When the furore erupted, Archbishop Runcie recognised that the book was unlikely to be banned but thought it wise to legitimise Muslim complaints. The Church of England’s aim was to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Islamic leaders, which it did chiefly by setting up an Anglican–Muslim consultation party to consider a reformulation of the Blasphemy Act.
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Andrew Brown of
The Independent
was unimpressed and mocked the Church’s naivety: ‘There is no better and more effective way of disarming a potential book-burner than to take him to tea at Lambeth Palace and draw him into endless Anglican conversation.’
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Brown’s comments, though, were a little unfair. The fact was that Muslim groups welcomed the archbishop’s invitation especially at a time when the press, the political and legal establishment
and secular intelligentsia were so hostile. The same was true in Bradford, where the local bishop, Robert Williamson, while condemning the tactics of the protestors and the legitimacy of the fatwa, struck a cohesive chord by bringing religious leaders and police together to help ease tensions.

The Rushdie controversy came to be seen as one of British liberal values versus an uncompromising and un-British Islamic fundamentalism, but this concealed what was actually happening; a growing dualism between the sacred and the secular in a plural democracy. This was only reinforced when the Chief Rabbi, inter-faith forums and the Roman Catholics also backed the right of religious offence. The
Satanic
Verses
controversy directly challenged both liberal tolerance and Christian privilege, but it became less about the latter and more about the former as the debate developed into one about the rights and recognition of the sacred in a secular liberal country.

The Church’s new position, as
primus inter pares
on a multi-faith platform, had the effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the notion of establishment. As Bishop John Habgood explained in a letter to
The Independent
in the wake of the Rushdie affair, the Church of England was necessary precisely because it acted as a protector and enabler of religious pluralism within the nation.
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The rationale behind establishment was being reconfigured once more; the Church of England was no longer the spiritual head of a nominally Christian nation (as Habgood had argued in the early 1980s), but the chief religious representative in a secular plural society. There were obvious problems and contradictions with this position, especially as it rested on a notion of Anglican dominance, but rather surprisingly it was not challenged by other faiths. The Islamic cause for equality before the law did not start with disestablishment as previous struggles by religious minorities had done. The main obstacle to Islamic integration was secularism not Christianity, for in the words of Tariq Modood: