God and Mrs Thatcher (44 page)

Given the Anglican leadership on sanctions, it was thus more than a little embarrassing when the Church of England’s own economic
entanglements in South Africa were revealed. The Church Commissioners, who oversaw its investments and crucially its pension fund, had over £1 million in companies that operated in South Africa, including Leyland, ICI and General Electric. Midland Bank, in which the Church had £600,000 worth of shares, also had loan arrangements with the Pretorian government. The Church, somewhat legitimately, was accused of both condemning and profiting from organisations with interests in South Africa. Even if the Commissioners dissociated from companies with substantive investments in South Africa, this was not a solution: what of those companies with subsidiaries? Of the 146 British companies in which the Church was involved, sixty-seven had some direct or indirect investment in South Africa.
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In 1990, the Bishop of Oxford, Richard Harries, decided to take the Church Commissioners to court to ensure that its investment portfolio was in accordance with the Church’s teaching. The case hinged not on what was deemed a legitimate Christian investment, which is of course a slippery concept (changing attitudes towards smoking had proved that), but on the precise relationship of the Commissioners to the Church.
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The court ruled that the Commissioners’ policy was sound and yet the whole debacle marred the Church’s spiritual struggle against apartheid. The issue had also shone a light on the complexities of the modern global investment system and the near-impossibility of having a ‘clean, ethical’ policy.

As important as the AAM and the Church were in opposing apartheid, it was internal events within South Africa as well as the end of the Cold War (specifically the settlement of Namibia and Angola in 1989) that ensured the regime’s demise. Important, too, had been the resilience of the US Congress in passing the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, which had prompted a flight of international capital out of South Africa (which was always more important than trade) and seriously destabilised the South African economy. Within Britain the anti-apartheid cause demonstrated the left in a rare moment
of unity in the 1980s while Anglicans, both behind the scenes and as the public face, were crucial in transforming the cause into a broad-based movement. The British government may not have bowed to pressure in this instance, but the AAM would prove to be the blueprint for transnational mass movements in this new era of global politics.

When Nelson Mandela and Margaret Thatcher both passed away in 2013, it really did feel as though the curtain had finally fallen on the twentieth century. But while Thatcher was the subject of division, Mandela was universally mourned. All grieved for a global icon who had once been dubbed a terrorist but was now lauded as the world’s benevolent grandfather. While Mandela was raised on a plinth, Thatcher underwent repeated decapitation. Both leaders could be said to have been politicians of integrity, but, while there was no question over the legitimacy of Mandela’s cause, Thatcher’s crusade remains mired in moral ambiguity. Perhaps it was because Thatcher stood for humanity as it is – individualistic, self-interested and parochial, whereas Mandela stood for what it aspires to be: a figure the embodied courage, justice and reconciliation. The future doctrine of humanitarian interventionism would adopt the language, lessons and methods from the anti-apartheid cause in South Africa; it is little wonder that Mandela is the figure who all modern leaders aspire to emulate.

THATCHER WOULD OFTEN
speak of international aid in the same derogatory terms as the domestic welfare system, as encouraging an unhealthy relationship of economic dependency. ‘If a person can’t afford to keep himself he can’t afford to keep his neighbour’ was Thatcher’s response to a question on Britain’s aid budget to the
Catholic Herald
in 1978.
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Thatcher certainly subscribed to the maxim that ‘charity starts at home’, explaining in a letter to the Bishop of
Warrington in 1979 that the government’s priority was to get Britain’s own finances in order first, which it duly did by cutting the aid budget by £50 million.
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Thatcher was not the first prime minister to cut Britain’s aid budget, the Wilson government had reduced it in 1976, the year of the IMF bailout, the difference was that Thatcher framed her case of trade over aid as a moral one. Tellingly, she never felt the need to set out the ethical justification for Britain’s arms trade, which expanded exponentially under her watch. On the matter of trade, Margaret Thatcher also seemed unprepared to concede the distinctly ‘unfree’ and unfair of nature of the existing trade arrangements between developed and developing countries. A point that pop-star-turned-charity campaigner Bob Geldof cornered her on in a brief exchange at the
Daily Star
awards in 1985:

International attention had been shifting towards the developing world well before Geldof took up the cause. The Brandt Report published by the World Bank in 1980 and chaired by the former socialist Chancellor of West Germany, Willy Brandt, sought to address the economic
disparity between the northern and southern hemispheres. The report did not drastically diverge from established academic thinking, but it had the effect of pushing international development to the forefront of the agenda of both domestic governments and global organisations, especially the United Nations. Margaret Thatcher, unsurprisingly, was not sympathetic to the report, which in her view positioned the West as exploiters and capitalism as an exploitative system. Brian Griffiths came to the same conclusion, writing in 1981, that he considered it an attempt to impose a ‘global welfare state based on an automatic system of taxation’.
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Edward Heath (who had served on the Brandt commission), in a rare moment of contact with Margaret Thatcher, wrote to her with some advice for a forthcoming conference in Mexico, which was convened to discuss the report – Thatcher did not follow her former boss’s guidance.
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The fact was that Thatcher was more likely to concur with Anthony Parsons, the UK’s representative at the UN, who in his valedictory dispatch on the ‘bizarre world’ of the United Nations concluded that its ‘central premise’ of ‘North/South dialogue’ had ‘degenerated into a sea of meaningless words’ with aid programmes that were ‘top heavy and slow moving’. Nor did Parsons think it was an area in which the Soviet Union took much interest (and by implication nor should the West). According to Parsons, the UN role required ‘resistance to stupefying boredom’ and the ‘patience of Job’.
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For the churches and Christian organisations that had been campaigning on poverty in the developing world for the last twenty years, the Brandt Report was welcomed. Like
Faith in the City,
its findings were distributed to the parishes through a study pack complete with cassette tape (narrated by Edward Heath) and a trading game. For those in the pews, the cause of international aid was a less contentious issue than domestic poverty given that it was less overtly political and was thus more easily categorised as a legitimate sphere of Christian concern.

Given the success and growth of organisations such as Christian Aid and CAFOD since the 1960s, it was perhaps easy to accuse Christians
of ‘abandoning faith in the next world for certainties about the third world’. John Gummer was certainly of the view that humanitarianism had replaced evangelicalism as Christians’
raison d’être
even though his government were guilty of encouraging this phenomenon. Christian Aid, for example, saw its income rise from £5.5 million in 1979 to £28 million in 1989, largely due to it receiving government support for the first time.
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Gummer could be accused of making a facile point, but in some senses the charge was a fair one. Over the course of thirty years, Christian relief organisations had become noticeably less evangelical, began to hire non-Christians, and engaged in political lobbying as well as professional advertising. These organisations, both secular and Christian, were certainly beneficiaries of the growing public consciousness about poverty in the developing world in the 1980s, but this had very little to do with secularisation or politicisation; it was chiefly down to a new phenomenon in contemporary culture: the humanitarian celebrity.

Gone were the days when coked up pop stars threw TV sets out of hotel windows; the ageing rockers of the ’80s were now to be seen on TV, banging their fists on the table in moral earnestness, pleading to viewers ‘Give me the F***ING MONEY!’ Live Aid in 1985 was not the beginnings of the VIP crusade against global poverty; this perhaps could be dated back to George Harrison’s concert for famine relief in Bangladesh in 1971. But it was only in the 1980s, with the emergence of Live Aid as well as Children in Need and Comic Relief, that such causes significantly galvanised both the press and public. Ironically, Live Aid had all the markings of a Thatcherite parable: the uniting of the Anglo-American world, capitalism contributing to the greater good, and one man determined to enact change against an establishment that did not want to know. Geldof later admitted a degree of affinity with Thatcher: ‘She lashed out with her handbag at every institution she saw; the monarchy, the old Tory Party, the old Labour Party, the trade unions. She was a punk.’
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Although Thatcher may never have realised it, Bob Geldof was a living embodiment of her
idealised vision of the individual: a Good Samaritan who refused to pass by on the other side.

Few could have predicted that what started as a Christmas single and a pop concert would give rise to a culture of international humanitarianism, which over ten years would prove as much a magnet for popular appeal as any Thatcherite call to self-interest. No longer were such causes confined to a minority group of left-wing or Christian activists, but, with the help of a show-business-obsessed media, was a cause that was able to arouse an impressive amount of national outrage and united action. The British public raised more money than the government for the Ethiopian famine relief with the Treasury actually profiting from the VAT receipts from the Christmas charity single. In the long term, celebrities would become much more successful in rattling the nation’s conscience than either clergymen or politicians. In the aftermath of the Miners’ Strike,
The Times
observed that Live Aid ‘felt like the healing of our own nation’.
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The comparison was a logical one, for these endeavours did inspire a new type of solidarity, which had very little to do with old politics, ideology or religion but satisfied the British yearning for unity and community in a fractured age and made that much more attractive with a sprinkling of stardust. Clergymen may have been chosen as the figureheads of the Miners’ Hardship Fund in 1984, but it would be celebrities who would subsequently take up the cross.

Conservatives had not yet cottoned on to the strength of popular feeling and political potential that such causes afforded, but Labour and the Alliance had. In 1987 Labour pledged to double the aid budget within five years and create a special department for overseas aid. Live Aid, it has been said, was much more influential than the Miners’ Strike in the formulation of Tony Blair’s socialism and as Prime Minister he would prove himself particularly able at tapping into this new celebrity-driven, humanitarian-inspired solidarity. By the late noughties, largely as a result of public pressure, the maintenance of Britain’s international aid budget would become the one issue on which there would be cross-party consensus.

RELATIONS BETWEEN THE
Foreign Office and the Church continued to operate along the same lines as they had done at the start of the Cold War in the 1950s: as an exchange of information rather than of pressure. A FCO diplomat continued to sit on the Church’s International Affairs committee, while all bishops received FCO briefings before their foreign visits. Archbishop Runcie himself was in regular contact with the Head of the Soviet Department in the Foreign Office, partly because of his close relations with the Russian Orthodox Church (he had chaired the Anglican-Orthodox Commission in the 1970s). Nor did the Foreign Office object when Runcie sent envoys to the international gathering of religious leaders at the Moscow Peace Conference, unlike in the US where the State Department reportedly urged the Catholic bishops not to go and even the Vice President personally tried to dissuade Billy Graham from attending.

The same year, a delegation from the Church of England toured the churches in Eastern Europe, which included a trip to Zagorsk, the home of the Russian Orthodoxy and a stay in the British embassy in Moscow (‘my bathroom is like the Booking hall at St Pancras Station and the water flowed as slowly as the tickets do there’, observed one of the party).
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It appears not to have been a serious diplomatic mission rather a nosing around to check the pulse of Christianity behind the Iron Curtain. Reporting on the healthy state of the Russian Orthodox Church, Rev. Paul Oestreicher noted with some surprise: ‘There is no sign of a dying church here’ with congregational numbers more considerable ‘than would be found in English parish churches – or even Cathedrals – on a week-day evening’.
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