Finally, the Church admits: We were wrong on Thatcher
BISHOPS yesterday admitted that the Church of England was wrong about Margaret Thatcher.
In a paper that amounted to a sweeping U-turn in the Church’s longstanding Left-wing attitude to poverty and the welfare state, they declared that it ‘failed to see the moral vision that informed Margaret Thatcher’s administration’.
Their acknowledgement that the late Tory Prime Minister was driven by ‘moral purpose’ contrasted strongly with the view taken by the bishops even last year, when before the general election they were severely critical of her legacy.
Yesterday, in a discussion document endorsed by Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby and Archbishop of York John Sentamu, the leaders of the Church backtracked on their opposition to Thatcherite principles and Tory benefit reforms. Instead of demanding higher benefit spending and criticising the market economy – the default position of most Church leaders for more than three decades – they said that ‘we should support welfare policies which create incentives for work’.
They praised the current Tory Government’s attempt to make work pay better than a life on benefits, backed the new Universal Credit benefit that is designed to make that happen, and said they wanted ‘political allies on both sides of Parliament’.
The softening of the Church’s hard line on welfare follows its intervention in the 2015 election campaign. Three months before polling day the bishops published a ‘pastoral letter’ which was widely seen as an invitation to the faithful to vote Labour.
Church of England leaders broke with Margaret Thatcher more than 30 years ago when in 1985 they published Faith in the City, a report which condemned her government for inflicting intentional hardship on the poor.
It called for benefit increases, heavy spending on job creation and the expansion of council housing in place of Mrs Thatcher’s ‘right to buy’ scheme. Even last year Dr Sentamu praised Faith in the City, and in their pre-election intervention the bishops condemned Mrs Thatcher again.
They said that ‘Thatcher’s market revolution emphasised individualism, consumerism and the importance of the corporate sector to the extent that, far from returning to Victorian notions of social responsibility, the paradigm for all relation- ships became competitive individualism, consumption and the commercial contract, fragmenting social solidarity at many levels’.
Yesterday’s paper, prepared by a Church official, the Reverend Dr Malcolm Brown, and endorsed by the 59 bishops and advisers of the CofE’s House of Bishops, backed down over Mrs Thatcher.
It said: ‘Recent welfare policies, whilst sometimes clumsily implemented or ill- communicated, are not without moral purpose.
‘Just as Faith in the City failed to see the moral vision that informed Margaret Thatcher’s administration, and therefore failed to engage coherently with that vision, so we must avoid the trap of seeing present policy direction as motivated solely by economic concerns.’ A senior Tory source said: ‘Finally, the Church of England recognises that this Conservative Government is right to reform welfare so that work always pays.
‘With record numbers of people in work, rising wages and welfare spending under control, we are delivering a system that is fair for those who use it and those who pay for it.’