Chapter 51 - 55
Chapter 51. On Politics 1964-74
As I start to write this section (December 1995), Tony Blair’s Labour Party (‘New Labour, New Britain’) is some twenty or so points ahead in the opinion polls: of that more later. But I am reminded of the wave of goodwill that flowed towards the Labour Party led by Harold Wilson in 1963-64. Maybe the best example of this was, for me anyhow, was a conversation with Cliff and Peg O’Carroll when we were on holiday in Whitsands in the summer of 1964. The election campaign had started: the O’Carrolls had always voted Tory - homeowners, fearful of Labour’s “reds under bed”, and opposed to state control of industry - and of schools in which Cliff taught. I remember being amazed when Peg said that she hoped that
And while the Tories seemed to be ‘old fashioned’ - with a Scottish landowner (Home) succeeding Macmillan as party leader and Prime Minister - Wilson seemed to be in tune with the times. The youngest Oxford don ever, the youngest Cabinet Minister since Young Pitt, a respected economist, he spoke fervently of bringing Britain through “the white hot heat of the technological revolution” that had begun to take effect. So many people claimed that they saw him not merely as ‘the cheeky chappie’ (which he was) but as the man best fitted to solve
But the result of the election of October 1964 showed that not all that many people were willing to trust him and his Labour colleagues. For when the House of Commons met in October, Wilson’s majority over the Tories and the Liberals was a mere 4 - to become a smaller 3 when his Foreign Secretary (who had lost his seat in the General Election) lost a safe Labour seat which had been vacated by Will Blythe so as to allow Patrick Gordon Walker to take a seat in the Commons.
Why such a small majority, and in what seemed to be such favourable circumstances? Some clearly feared that
But, maybe more significant than these ‘political’ issues, were the changes that had taken place in British society in the 1950s and early 1960s. And, because our family had been, and would be, affected by those changes, the election of October 1964 has some relevance to the Lane story. As early as 1960, the perceptive election-watchers, David Butler and Richard Rose, had written of the eroding of “old class distinctions”:
“Less than a decade ago [say 1953 or so], cars, holidays, abroad and television were the perquisites or a minority of the middle class. Before the war [1939], in many working-class areas, the home had few amenities. An individual’s life often centred around communal meeting places - the street [where we talked and, as children, played], the pub, the fish-and-chip shop [where we played ‘put and take’ with, among other, Clive Jenkins], the cinema [maybe twice a week], the union, the chapel [or, in our case, the church and its Hall], or perhaps the Co-op hall [where I learned how to debate].
But now [1959-60] in new homes, the living room has become more attractive than the pub and TV provides more entertainment than the cinema. With a car or a motor cycle and sidecar [which the O’Carrolls had then], it is not necessary to wait for a works [or Church] trip to go to the seaside. With the disappearance of many of the most obvious distinctions between middle- and working-class, the sense of class conflict has been reduced.”
If you read the story this far, you will know that the Lanes (and Welches, Roblins and others) had been beneficiaries of the social mobility that
Dick Crossman had had a brilliant
“I was impressed by his brilliance, until Hector McNeil [a Foreign Office Minister in Attlee’s 1945 government] reminded me, “It’s easy to be brilliant if you are not bothered about being right.” Crossman had a heavyweight intellect with a lightweight judgement. He was an exciting teacher and would have made a magnificent successor to Laski at the London School of Economics. As a politician, and even more as a Minister, he left much to be desired.”
Denis Healey himself was another intellectual, although he learned - and merited - the title of the ‘old brute’ because of his treatment of opponents. Soon after our move to Wallington in 1964, and having written several pieces for the Fabian journal Socialist Commentary, I was invited to a Commentary day school which was addressed by Healey, then Minister of Defence, and another intellectual heavyweight, Roy Jenkins. Jenkins was Minister of Aviation but not yet in the Cabinet. I remember coming home to tell Teresa “I have just seen and heard the next two Labour Prime Ministers.” Not the first time I was wrong in prophecy.
But the most important ministers, after Wilson himself, were more earthy men. George Brown, a protégé of the Transport and General Workers Union, had been MP since 1945, had held junior ministerial office in the Attlee government and had been Deputy Leader of the party since 1960.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer was Jim Callaghan, MP for a
“His crucial mistake - which prejudiced his first six years at office [1964-70] - was not to devalue sterling before a change in the exchange rate was forced on him [in 1967]. That was... the product of his financial conservatism.”
As a candidate for local elections and as a worker in national elections (1966, 1970, 1974 - February and October) I canvassed in both middle class areas (Sutton and Wallington) and working class ones (notably in Colliers Wood). I never met any voter - pro- or anti-Labour, who thanked us for Hattersley’s ‘libertarian government’. However, I do remember even our own supporters poking fun at the more idiotic remarks of our Leader: “Rhodesia is my Cuba”: “yesterday I talked on the phone to nineteen Commonwealth Prime Ministers”: “A political leader should try to look, particularly on television, like a family doctor - the kind of man who inspires trust by his appearance, as well as by his soothing words.” Too many of our people saw that Wilson was more concerned for ‘image’ than for reality, more worried about attacks by ‘the Tory press’ than with policy, strategy or achievement.
Mind you, he could rightly claim that he proved that it was possible to fool many of the people for some of the time. In March 1966 he won a landslide victory - which we helped celebrate with the first of our election night parties to which we invited our (mainly Tory) friends as well as the solitary leftie, Gerald Coleman. In May 1966 opinion polls showed that
Ah the joy of it all. But - and proportionately - the bewilderment as, with the second economic crisis of July 1966 - the whole edifice collapsed. Wilson lost his reputation of ‘political magician’ and the Party had to suffer four long grinding years of by-election defeats, the cowardly withdrawal of the much trumpeted paper In Place of Strife with its proposals for trade union reforms, the botched and costly devaluation of sterling in 1967 and the almost total absence of policy, strategy or achievement of any lasting merit.
Wilson and his fellow-intellectuals might have claimed their own list of successes. There was what Denis Healey called “the musical comedy” invasion (by the Metropolitan Police) of the West Indian
Neither Peter (born 1966) nor Damien (born 1968) would thank me for labelling them ‘
We held our usual election night party that June, confident that the hapless Heath would be defeated by our Leader. I remember best two things of that evening. One was Gerry Coleman (the only other Labour man in the room) standing with me to watch the first results come in.
In the run up to the election the Tories had held a series of high level meetings at Selsdon Park Hotel in Sanderstead, which I drove past on the two or three days I went to College each week. ‘Selsdon Man’ was the headline version of the summary of Tory policies; tax cuts, spending limits on education and health department, no aid to declining industries, no aid to depressed (or, ‘Development’) areas. It was, in fact, Thatcherism without the lady’s leadership - although she won her first spurs as the Minister of Education who ended the provision of free milk for children over seven years of age (“Thatcher, Milk snatcher” yobbed the mob.) But Heath was no male version of the Iron Lady. Within a year, his incapable Chancellor, Anthony Barber, had increased by a factor of ten the aid given to the ailing Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, nationalised the bankrupt Rolls-Royce and paid its debts, handed out more aid than ever to the Development Areas - and printed over £4 billion of paper money to pay for new roads, houses and schools. Small wonder that inflation (some 18 per cent in 1970) roared away even faster. The doubling of oil prices in 1973 merely added fuel to that inflationary fire in spite of the government’s U-turn with its setting up a Prices and
Incomes Board, which was meant to help bring down the rate of inflation.
But workers led by militant leaders such as Jack Jones (TGWU) and Hugh Scanlon (AEU) and others, forced employers to concede wage increases to at least match the rise in prices - which ensured that inflation kept on rising. In January 1972 the miners, led by the moderate Joe Gormley, defied the government’s decision (that there should be no increase in miner’s wages), went on strike and caused a fuel shortage at the electricity generating stations. Heath climbed down, the miners got their wage increase and had their appetites whetted for more. In January 1974 the miners versus government battle was resumed. Again the government refused the wage demand, miners went on strike, electricity generating stations were starved of fuel - and we had the so-called ‘three-day week’ as the output of electricity was cut, street lights were turned off, shops, offices and industry had to close down for over half the week.
And in the middle of this chaos Heath called a General Election (February 1974). He was heard to remark that “
The result of the election showed that most voters were saying “a plague on both your houses.” For while Labour won an extra 14 seats (winning 301 overall) and the Tories lost 33 (winning 297 overall), the balance of power in the Commons was held by Jeremy Thorpe’s Liberals with 14 seats (a gain of some 8 since 1970). For three days Heath tried to cobble together an agreement whereby the Liberals would sustain a minority Tory government in power. In vain: on Monday Harold Wilson became Prime Minister again - but that’s another part of the story.
Before leaving the Heath era behind, a note that Gerard was born in 1971 - a ‘Heath baby’, poor lamb. His baptism took place during an evening Mass celebrated by the College Chaplain, Fr. Michael Downey, who all those years ago had read me the riot act when I tried to get Christopher into Keyham school. It’s a small world. Fr. Mulholland, our parish priest, allowed us to have Fr. Downey celebrate the Mass and Baptism which was followed by a party where friends from the parish and College came to help us celebrate the christening of what turned out to be the last of our nine.
Chapter 52. Closing Coloma - 1978
In July 1973 Christopher left home to go to the Novitiate of the De La Salle Brothers in Eccles: ‘like father, like son’ or, in Simon’s words, “Maybe that’s why God called you to leave the Brothers, so that you could give Him your son or sons.” Maybe. In a later section I hope to deal with the question of vocations, the falling numbers of young people volunteering to enter religious life or the priesthood, and the state of the post-Vatican 2 Church. Here merely to recall the joy, pride, pleasure and deep sadness I felt on that day when all of us went to Euston Station to see Chris off.
The first of the chicks from the nest - or ‘one of the little deaths suffered by parents of maturing children.’
Meanwhile, back at the ranch:
That rapid inflation was not all down to
agreed to limit future wage demands in return for the government delivering a series of pro-union social reforms. In October 1974 with the country recovering from the three-
day week, with inflation-driven rises in living standards and with the ‘ungovernable’ unions seemingly in his pocket, Wilson called another election in which Labour won 319 seats, the Tories some 277, Liberals 13 with minor parties in Wales, Scotland and Ulster making up the rest of the Commons. Not an overall majority, but more than enough for
...we had tried to abort it in 1964...[but] Concorde went ahead to play its part in destroying the ozone layer and undermining government finances in both
Government money was poured out in other attempts to save industries and jobs. The National Enterprise Board was set up with the express purpose of spending taxpayers’ money to help industry. It saved British Leyland with a subsidy of £2,800 million (and then watched the car industry being wrecked by official and unofficial strikes), and Chrysler with a subsidy of £200 million (only to see it taken over by the French firm Peugeot, a few years later.)
You will see that, even in 1989, Denis Healey wrote of “£1,000 million.” By then, of course, most of us would have written “1 billion” - as if that made the sum look the less. Healey may have wanted to draw attention to the vast amounts that were involved in subsidising Concorde’s development. It is difficult now to understand past values of money. But, as an indication of recent changes, I note the following prices for some editions of one of my own books:
1974: £1.75; 1984: £4.25; 1994: £8.95
Healey might also have written off the Benn-inspired subsidies on several over-manned and inefficient industries: coal (£2 billion), steel (£4 billion); (railways £2 billion) and so endlessly on. It was small wonder that inflation continued to rise, that we imported much more than we exported, and that the value of the pound continued to fall in the financial markets.
Militant industrial unions seemed able to safeguard their members’ interest, threatening (or indeed holding) strikes in campaigns to win above-inflation rate wage awards. Workers in the public sector were less fortunate, year on year. Government had almost total control over their wages and salaries. Various commissions and committees were organised by government to try to remedy the relative fall in the public sector workers’ place in the pecking order. Lecturers had one such ‘catch up’ commission headed by a former Labour minister, Douglas Houghton. And from Houghton came, in 1974, a catch-up award of, would you believe it, 47 per cent. In down to earth terms, this meant some £13,000 a year instead of some £9,000 or so: I know that, by the standards of the monopoly-money salaries earned by our banker-sons and others, £13,000 seems like poverty (for inflation has continued to eat away at money values). But, in 1974-75, and in practical terms, this massive increase made major differences to our standard of living: I gave up lecturing for the Extension Department of the University (so no more night time treks to
By the spring of 1975 it was the turn of my Tory colleagues at Coloma to mock. They could point to the failure of the much-vaunted Social Contract with the unions to deliver the expected lowering of inflation. They noted, cynically, that the Chancellor, Healey, had delivered three budgets between February 1974 and April 1975: were Budgets to become a three or maybe four times a year spectacle? Writing in 1989, Healey noted:
“In February the going rate for wage increases was already thirty per cent, although inflation was only [only, forsooth] twenty per cent. By June inflation had risen to twenty six per cent and a wages policy for controlling wage increases was now an absolute pre-condition for saving the economy as a whole.”
But, as the pound went into free fall against the dollar and other currencies,
“to ask for a package that would counter inflation is like a child asking Mummy to do something to stop it raining.”
For
“We reject panic solutions.”
The next day the pound collapsed to its lowest level ever, and a panic-stricken Healey forced the Cabinet to accept his ‘package to counter inflation.’ Of that more later.
For, while Healey was struggling with the problems of inflation and falling currency values, his colleague, Shirley Williams, as Minister of Education, was calling for a cut back in the number of students entering teacher-training programmes. Now that the 1947 ‘birth rate bulge’ babies had almost left school, the country would have a surplus of place in schools and, inevitably, a surplus of teachers. Since the birth rate had continued to fall since 1947, the country needed to train fewer teachers than in the recent past. Lord James, Chancellor of the new
We suffered from three weaknesses as far as the future was concerned. Ours was one of the few single-sex Colleges. In a belated effort to remedy this defect the Principal had allowed a small intake of mature male students. It was a staff exaggeration which said that these had to be ‘married, lame, halt or blind.’ Certainly we made no effort to get young males into the College: Catholic fears died hard. On the contrary I, and others, were sent from the college as so many missionaries to try to recruit additional female students. I enjoyed a week-long trip to
Our second weakness was that we were, compared to other London Colleges, fairly isolated. The train service to and from
And so I had to tell my colleagues that it seemed inevitable - from James and the ensuing discussions - that we would be one of the many Colleges that would be forced to close. In the event, the Hierarchy negotiated (on behalf of all the Catholic Colleges) with the Ministry and announced the order of closures. We were among the second list of closures - one of the 48 Colleges to be closed. I had known that this decision was inevitable: I had warned my colleagues of it. But this did not soften the psychological blow I suffered when the fatal letter went up on a Friday:
“No new intake in September 1976: a run-down which would end when the 1975 intake completed their courses in July 1978 when the College would close”.
Long before that letter went up, we had had a plethora of documents - from the Department of Education (as it was then called), from our union, NATFHE, and from interested colleagues in Colleges named for closure in July 1977 - i.e. the first six to be closed. Among these was
In essence the government offered a deal which gave us roughly the same deal as had been offered to local government officers whose careers had been affected by the massive reorganisation of local government in 1972, which abolished many ancient counties and created the many oddly named: in 1995-96 we are on our way to undoing some of the barminess of that Heathite reform, so that there will be again some correlation between County Cricket tables and the local government map of the country. That 1972 deal had been worked out by some official surnamed Crombie, so that ‘Crombie’ became the shorthand for the deal. I am ashamed to admit that I know nothing of him other than his surname, because in view of the deal he arranged - and which, now, was applied to our case - I came to the view that he ought to be called to the attention of the
Naturally, I was most interested in how Crombie would affect me, given that I would be 53 years old in July 1978. I knew, from a
So, with little chance of a new job, what was Crombie for me - and for the many others in Coloma of about my age? First there was the government-fixed redundancy lump sum - which turned out to be enough for us to buy a Rover car in 1978. Then there was the two-sided retirement pension. Two-sided, because one monthly payment would be made based on the actual number of years of service: I had started pensionable service only in 1953, so that by 1978 I would have some 25 years to my account. But the second payment would be the Crombie element. This said that I would get an extra year of pensionable service credited to me for each year I had done after my 40th birthday. This gave me some 13 extra (or ‘enhanced’) years. So I could look forward to a pension based on 38 years of service. If I had been 54 when we closed, I would have had 40 such years - the maximum allowed to teachers and lecturers, whether ‘Crombied’ or not.
Then, the second Crombie gift. Whereas, at 65 years of age, a retired teacher/lecturer would get one-eightieth of his final salary for each year of pensionable service (giving most people a half salary as a pension), Crombie gave us one-sixtieth of our final salaries until we reached the age of 65, when, naturally, the one-eightieth rule came into effect. But at that stage we would get the normal old age pension, which more than made up for the reduction in the total pension.
Finally there was a third Crombie gift. The twin-tracked pension would be inflation-proofed or ‘index linked’. When this had first been negotiated, unions had wanted the link to be with the rise in wage rates. Heath’s government, mistakenly - at least in the short term - decided that the link should be with price rises. The government feared that unions would continue to get above-inflation wage increases and hoped that by linking our pensions to prices and not wages, it might be able to limit the cost of the generosity of the saintly Crombie.
There were ‘limiting’ parts of the Crombie package. Anyone who took a job in the public sector of education would not be allowed to receive both his new salary and his Crombie-termed pension - although one could take a job in the private sector, get the salary and also hang on to Crombie. So, too, you could get a non-educational job and hang on to Crombie - or, as in my case, get royalties from writing and continue to get Crombie.
These were the outlines of Crombie as they affected older men and women - of whom we had many in Coloma. The position of younger people was less favourable: what would happen to, say, the thirty-eight year old Peter Thorpe, a scientist? Would he find a job? Would his new salary plus his small pension be equal to his lecturer’s pay? And we had many such younger people in Coloma.
So, in our many staff meetings we were asked to take many issues into account. Naturally, there was each individual’s own position. Then there were the positions of his colleagues is his department - one third of whom would have to go in July 1976, while another third would have to go in July 1977. There were also the needs of the students to take into account. How would they fare if, for example, all the mathematicians left to get jobs - to safeguard their own individual positions? Clearly it was not going to be easy to work things out.
One of the things that surprised me was that few people - including my London Welsh friend Alun Davies - understood the terms of Crombie. Alun had many tales to tell of trying to find work when he came out of College in 1933. He, and other Welsh teachers, were helped by Welsh heads who would arrange for a teacher to take a day or two of (with ‘flu or some such) so that Alun or someone could be called in for a day or two - so becoming eligible for unemployment pay for the rest of the week. We often laughed over his stories of waiting outside Tooting schools for heads to twitch curtains as a sign that they could come in while he phoned the local education office for permission to take on a supply teacher. In the heady 1960s and early 1970s, such stories whiled away the time it took for us to get to London Welsh at
In the event Alun was persuaded by his fellow-mathematicians that he ought to be the first to go from that department. So he went with 2/3 of his salary (forty years of service) index-linked to price rises. Now be became, happily, entangled in the fate of
In July 1975 Healey announced a series of cuts in government spending (and so ended the Keynesian dream) while also getting the TUC to agree that, for 1976, there would be an agreed wages policy: there would be a flat £6 a week increase for everyone earning up to £8,500 a year - which was then some two and a half times average earnings, and 4 per cent. increases for the rest.
And, for those of us still at work at Coloma, that was what we got as a salary increase in 1976. But Alun Davies, and the others who’d gone with their Crombie, got a 26 per cent increase in their pension - in line with the rate of increase in prices. Similarly in 1977 when government and unions agreed a four percent increase in wages and salaries, inflation was then some 18 per cent - and Alun got that as an increase in his pension. Small wonder that when he came back for yet another of the annual retirement parties, he said, “Gosh, Pete, you were right about Crombie. I’m getting more in retirement than if I’d stayed at work.” A crazy world, my friends.
In 1978 the unions refused to accept pleas by Callaghan (now Prime Minister following
Callaghan, in what turned out to be his last speech to a TUC Conference, invited the delegates to consider that it if they rejected the appeal for wage limitation, and if they pursued their demands for above-inflation wage increases, then they would sooner or later, have to face the Thatcherite alternative of high unemployment as a cure for inflation. Sid Weighell lamented that too many of his colleagues in the TUC General Council wanted to “get their noses further into the trough” of higher wages, ignoring the plight of those workers whose unions might not be able to win for them such high wage awards. Bill Sirs, of the Ironworkers federation, was one who rejected the Weighill argument and who opposed Callaghan’s call. It was sadly satisfying to listen to Sirs in 1981 after his union had lost a long and costly strike and saw the privatised steel industry shed something like two-thirds of its workforce. “If we had listened to Callaghan, this would never have happened,” he said - as he went off into an inflation-proofed retirement.
In July 1978 came the College’s last days. Part of the building was to be taken over by the Diocese to become a Comprehensive school. The old, Tudor, building was bought by a German, who had set up what he called
We were asked to submit CVs and examples of any publications we may have had to our credit. I suggested in my application that since I had taught degree level Russian and British Modern History I might be considered for a post. I sent across several books I had written, including, for some odd reason, the ‘O’ Level Revision in Economics book which had been my first publication all those years ago.
Several members of staff got called for interviews and offered part-time jobs: Vin Howard was to teach French, Jack Connolly to do some lecturing on Education as was May Rugg. I was asked to take charge of the Economics Department. My oath. I gently explained that the book which the boss held in his hand was meant for ‘O’ Level students. “Ah”, he breathed, “we won’t be going to that high level here.”
And that was my first introduction to American style, module-led degrees, which I came to dismiss as “green shield stamp” degrees. Remember Green Shield Stamps? The idea has been half-resurrected by Tesco and other supermarkets with their club cards and reward for loyal spending. Green Shield Stamps were issued by all sorts of stores, stuck in books which could be exchanged for all sorts of goodies: parishes which worked hard at it might get enough books to buy a parish a mini-bus. I saw the American degree as a similar “stick it in your book” system. Students took dozens of courses over a period of four years, got a mark for each course (“the stamp”), filled their “book” with enough passes and so got their degree. Such an eclectic system: a low level course in economics, a course in novel writing, or simple arithmetic, spoken French...and so on almost ad infinitum.
Almost all the students came from the
Looking ahead a little: after we moved to
The German ‘boss’ was an inventive man and he encouraged others to be equally inventive. Suggest a course, outline a set of ten or so topics and heigh presto, you could teach another ‘Green Shield Stamp’ programme. I got bold under this free wheeling regime. I suggested that we ought to offer an MA in either or both of International Relations and International Economics. An enterprising Indian lawyer was already running an MA in International Law and I lectured some of his students as part of their programme. He and I drew up a syllabus for the International Relations MA - and got it approved. It was a wow:
We had twenty or so students, all with first degrees from a variety of institutions other than Schiller: American wives of expatriates based in
A student had to lead a seminar each Friday afternoon, and most of them did it well. When it was Jean Clair’s turn, I went to the lecture room just before starting time to find him at the blackboard which he had divided into two. Down on side he was making a list. I asked him what he was about. “Well, down one side, as you can see, I’m listing the things my parents hoped would come after we got our independence. Then down the other side I’ll list the realities of life as we now live it.” And he did. And he used the lists as guide lines for a superb lecture.
On the one side there was Democracy: Freedom: Rising living standards: African Unity...and down the other side there was Dictatorships: abysmal living standards: Corruption: Tribal warfare... It was the most heart-rending hour spent by that group of students. When it was all over and they had left, I said to Jean Claire, ‘If I had given such a devastating talk on life in modern
I got a vivid example of the ‘corruption’ when I met a Nigerian diplomat. This meeting was the result of a phone call from the college to ask whether I’d act in loco parentis for a Nigerian student whose parents were anxious that he do well at Schiller. I agreed to meet the father on Friday when I had finished my teaching. To my room came a giant of a man who flashed me his card - English-trained solicitor, Barrister via one of
Unhappily even the best of scams has to come to an end. In 1984 the boss finally managed to find some body or other in the
Chapter 53. 1978-79 And On To Thatcher’s Bournemouth
In July 1978, with the closure of
Worse was to follow - in terms of ‘props’, because during the next six months or so I was to see the weakening of another major prop with the beginning of that unthinking, almost infantile, determination by an increasing number of Labour people to destroy the Party and its credibility. As to the weakening of the third prop - my Church - that too was going on almost simultaneously. But I can’t write about both the party and the Church in one go. So here, for what it’s worth, is how I watched the Labour Party destroy itself.
In October 1978 the TUC Conference rejected the pay policy put forward by Callaghan and Healey. This, as I have already said, called for a 5 per cent limit on pay awards for 1979. The motion to reject this policy was moved by the new right-wing leader of the engineering union, Terry Duffy and not, as one might have assumed, by a left-wing maverick. This, as Healey wrote later, was “the clearest possible proof that we were heading for trouble that winter.”
Not that ‘trouble ahead’ seemed likely in October itself. Indeed, opinion polls, which had shown Thatcher’s Tories with a four per cent lead in August, gave Callaghan’s Labour a seven percent lead in October. Moreover, and important in an increasingly ‘presidential-style’ politics, Callaghan was far more popular than Thatcher. Callaghan would have done well to have called an autumn election. Instead he decided to carry on with the now slim majority and his dependence on the Lib-Lab ‘pact’ which ensured the winning of Commons’ votes.
By December the militant unions were showing their strength. Damaging strikes led to Ford workers getting a 17 per cent pay award. And when the government proposed to impose sanctions on the Ford Company, five left-wing MPs abstained and so ensured the government’s humiliating defeat. Moss Evan’s Transport and General Workers Union called a strike of road hauliers and oil tanker drivers in support of claims for increases of 25-30 percent. On our TV screens we saw bearded men huddled around braziers on picket duty - allowing some to think that ‘the Red Revolution had begun.’
In January it got worse. Alan Fisher’s National Union of Public Employees came out on strike in support of claims of up to 40 per cent. Rubbish piled up in streets, grave-diggers refused to bury the dead, ambulance drivers refused to answer calls: maybe Heath was right and
Just before Christmas 1978 I took part in a debate in the Mitcham Labour Party which proposed that we supported Callaghan and Healey in their call for wage limitations. The leading opponent to that motion was Alan Fisher of NUPE. A victim of his own verbal diarrhoea as much as of the oxygen of publicity he enjoyed, he was no master of logic. “My men don’t want 5 percent: 5 per cent of nuffink is nuffink,” he intoned. “We want 20 per cent.” When I asked him “Alan, what’s 20 per cent of nuffink?” He turned on me angrily and yelled, “Don’t be effing clever with me, sonny.” But he won the night’s debate and the local Party voted to support NUPE’s demands.
The exaggerated claims of NUPE, NALGO and other public service unions could not be met by government and local authorities. However, firemen, ambulance drivers, teachers and other public service workers did force the government to pay up to 9 per cent wage increases. These never matched the awards won by the more powerful unions facing private industrialists, so that the relative position of such public service workers continued to decline - as some of us had tried to warn Fisher would be the case. Too, inflation crept up again from between 7 and 8 percent to 10 percent, with the ‘promise’ (threat?) that it would rise even faster.
The fall of the Callaghan government had about it an element of farce. In November 1977 the government had been forced (by Commons arithmetic) to bring in a Bill offering devolution to both
Callaghan might have asked for - and maybe might have got - a vote of confidence: Major adopted such a policy after his government had lost a vote on European Policy in 1994. But Callaghan was, wrote Healey later, “tired and dispirited” as he had every right to be after the long ‘winter of discontent.’ Healey remembered him as being ‘sick to death of the continual compromises required for our survival as a minority government; I think he would rather have lost than be condemned to a repetition of the previous three years.’ And so, Callaghan called a general election for May 3rd.
No election night party in the Lane’s that night, and no optimism. And the outcome proved that our pessimism had been warranted. Labour’s share of the vote had been 36.9 per cent - its lowest since 1935. The Tory share had risen from 35.7 percent (in October 1974) to 43.9 per cent. Labour won only half of the trade unionist’s vote: the Tories gained a third of that working class vote. Thatcher finished with 71 more seats than Labour and an overall majority in the Commons of 41. So began what turned out to be ‘the long Tory ascendancy’ during which the Labour Party self-destructed at an ever-increasing rate: but that’s another story.
By this time (May 1979) I had enjoyed a sharp increase in earnings from writing and lecturing, and benefitted even more from the work of the ever-friendly Dick Ledger. It was he who suggested that Mum and I ought to consider moving house so that we could get additional tax relief from what he advised us to get - a larger mortgage. At this time, too, both Simon and Clare were getting ready to go to University, Damien was finishing St Elphege’s where Gerard was finishing the infant’s part of his schooling. So, on the one hand we had Ledger suggesting a move, on another hand we would soon have only three children at home full-time, while (on the third hand?) those children’s schooling would not be over-harmed by a move from Wallington. So we set about house-hunting. Damien in particular enjoyed going through the ‘For Sale’ parts of the Daily Telegraph where he found ‘ideal houses’ in all sorts of weird and wonderful places - swimming pool, tennis court, Jacuzzi...he loved it. Often these houses were in very rural, even isolate, places. So we got used to Mum’s chant, “I’d feel like a sitting duck out there.”
If we were to move from Wallington we wanted to be somewhere nearer Whitsands while, at the same time, being within easy reach of a good school for the boys. So we looked at properties in and near
We had a pleasant day with the Catholic family living in the house: one played the organ in
After we got back to Wallington we decided that the price was not right for us, so we continued to look around. Finally we began to look at houses in the Wallington/Carshalton area - to satisfy at least Dick Ledger’s desire to get us into a more favourable tax position. After one such house inspection, both Mum and I agreed that, at the prices then being asked, maybe
Then it was back to Wallington to arrange the sale of our own house. Previously there had been talk of the area being redeveloped and neighbours had tried to organise a joint sale to a developer of three adjacent houses. Ledger showed me that our corner position made us, in development terms, the ‘owners’ of the half-street which planning authorities would take into account when determining how many ‘units’ could be built on the proposed site. He told me to demand such and such a price from the proposed developers: this annoyed the neighbours and the deal fell through. Now we were to sell - and suffer all the horrors which went (and go) with selling. There were the curious who came to see what we had to offer: there were the crooked (a Greek I remember in particular) who ‘got the money, no sweat: hear from me in a day or two’ and disappeared for ever: there were the dismissive who seemed alarmed at what eight children had done to a house (recalling Jennie’s phrase: “Lanes don’t live in houses, they wear them out.”) Finally, we thought, an agreed sale - just in time for us to move here for the start of the school year in September 1979. I should have known that the Lord never meant us to be rich. The proposed buyer - who, in fact, turned out to be the ultimate buyer, - used our absence from the now empty house (to which we had given him the keys) to grind us down - by delaying signing, by demanding payment for electrical work...while we paid a mortgage on both Bournemouth and Wallington and additionally the interest on the bridging loan needed to buy this house. Why had I been so generous to the Johnsons with my ‘no interest on £15,000.’? By the time the sale of Wallington finally went through we had spent some £3-4,000 on added interest and other charges. But, in God’s long run, it hasn’t mattered, has it? And, as if in reward the boys did well in their school, my earnings continued to rise, and we found ourselves enjoying life in the Avenue and, above all, in the parish - but all that’s another story.
Chapter 54. Thatcherism 1979 - 83
Everyone who saw it must remember Margaret Thatcher’s entry into Number 10 Downing Street in May 1979 and the gentle voice with which she paraphrased the prayer of St Francis:
“..where there is hatred let me bring your love.
Where there is injury, your pardon, Lord
And where there’s doubt, true faith in you.
Where there’s despair in life let me bring hope.
Where there is darkness only light,
And where there’s sadness ever joy.
A more unconvincing piece of schmaltz it would be hard to find: maybe Capone in praise of law and order, or Nobbie Stiles on ‘football as a gentleman’s game’? For this was no ‘Channel of Peace’ that was to lead the Tories for the next eleven years: nor was there any attempt to bind up any of society’s wounds. Indeed, the ‘Iron Lady’ (as she was to be dubbed by the Russians) was to declare that “there is no such thing as society; there are only individuals.” Not so much a breath of fresh air: more a gale was to sweep the political, economic and social scene.
She described as ‘wets’ those Tories - in and out of her cabinets - who still hankered after the corporist thinking that had dominated political life since 1951. Indeed, so common had been Tory and Labour policies on many issues that someone had concocted the word ‘Butskellism’ as its description - linking Labour’s Hugh Gaitskell with the Tory Chancellor Rab Butler with his need for state intervention in industry, state aid to ailing industries and hard-done by people, and, as a result, the use of taxes to soothe many of society’s ills. “Managing the continuing decline” was how one writer put it, accepting that
Out would go such pessimistic corporatism. In came the notion that individuals should be encouraged (forced?) to stand on their own two feet and that ‘the market’ should decide the fate of people, firms and industrial areas. The old protection of ‘the producers’ would be replaced by concern for ‘the consumers’, who would be given greater freedom to choose how they spent their money (by massive tax reductions for the wealthy) and how they ran their firms (as trade unions were emasculated).
I had come up against this individualist philosophy as the result of using some of the publications of the
Thatcher’s Chancellor was Pat’s former debating rival, Geoffrey Howe - whose grandfather had helped form the first union for Aberavon ironworkers: another bloody convert (or traitor?). His Chief Secretary was Nigel Lawson, who had long been a Keynesian but who now discovered the ‘truths’ of monetarism: yet another convert. And, whether willingly rabid or whether impelled by the Josephite Thatcher, they brought in the fateful budgets of 1979-82. Direct taxes were cut, mainly to the benefit of those who had paid 80 per cent of more on their bloated incomes. To recoup the lost revenue (as Howe charmingly if naively admitted) VAT rates were doubled, making that regressive tax even more burdensome for the less well-off and leaving the average tax payer little, if any, better off. To try to limit the amount of money and credit sloshing around in the economy, interest rates were raised - at one time to 15 per cent, making life even more miserable for housebuyers, industrialists with bank loans and millions of credit card owners.
Unemployment rose above three million for the first time since 1933, and twenty per cent of British industry was destroyed. It was Americans who coined the term ‘the rustbelt’ to describe the decaying areas of what had been old industrial
I wonder what Pat, now with the Lord, made of Howe’s recklessness? I had a chance to reflect on that in the spring of 1980 when we had the local (and Catholic) MP, David Atkinson as a guest at our Catenian evening.
As we went from our business meeting to the dining room where Atkinson waited for us, the President came up and asked if I would propose a vote of thanks after Atkinson’s address. I was still a new boy in the large Circle and was both surprised and flattered. So during dinner I jotted down a few words on a menu which, I hoped, would help me say something intelligent. Atkinson gave his spiel to ‘the faithful’ - for most of the Circle had voted Tory in the recent election. They murmured approvingly as he went on about the tax reductions, the rights of the individual and the spur to development that had been provided by the new government which, he claimed, had already been ‘a success’. He sat down to a round of applause and that quiet smile which is still his hallmark.
I explained to the gathering why (in my opinion) I had been asked to propose this vote of thanks. They would know, I said, that many Indian business men have on their cards, “B.A Punjab (failed)” - for they were anxious to show the world that they had, at least, got to University even if they failed to get a degree. I was like those Punjabi failures. For, having been a Labour candidate, I had the right to have on my card “MP (failed)”. But, I said, I now understand why I had failed. For I could never have managed to explain why raising the rate of inflation from 10 per cent to 21 per cent was ‘a success’. Atkinson growled that he “wanted the right to reply to this,” only to have the President smile at him as he said, “You’ve had your turn, my friend.” Near me sat Tom Kilburn - rara avis, as he was a fervent socialist in this den of Tory iniquity. “Go for him, Lane,” he yelled as he laughed. But I asked the men to remember the difficult life led by their MP: separation from families for much of the week - with the attendant risks of either or both of alcoholism and divorce (which poor David suffered years later). I asked them to pray for our Catholic MP as he carried out one of the aims of the Bishop Casartelli - to have Catholics play a leading role in public life. So, in the end, David was mollified, and we became somewhat more than nodding acquaintances. This relationship was strengthened years later when Teresa became a Catechist to these children as they prepared for their First Communion. Back to the government. Thatcher was determined to limit, if not destroy, the many vested interests which controlled chunks of economic and social life. And, as the years went by, she was brave enough to take on the medical profession (with her NHS reforms), the lawyers, teachers (with her ill-thought our and many-sided educational reforms), the nationalised industries and their reliance on subsidies - and, maybe best remembered, the trade unions. She had seen how they had made Heath’s life a misery (‘
She faced the greatest hostility from unions representing workers in the nationalised industries. These were the first to be affected by cuts in government spending and attempts to limit wage increases. One by defeated one, she took on the trade union barons: Bill Sirs and the Iron and Steel Federation had to endure a major strike in 1980, accept defeat and, later, watch as the much truncated steel industry was privatised. A smaller, more efficient steel industry now (1996) employs a fraction of the many thousands who had made British Steel a by-word for inefficiency, poor quality and reliance on subsidies. Then it was the turn of the National Union of Railwaymen and the Associated Society of Locomotive-men and Firemen - the rail unions which thought of the rail system as a subsidy-cushioned form of welfare state for the producers. They, too, had to endure a long strike in the summer of 1982 and, later, to watch as the industry was prepared for privatisation.
Private industrialists, too, learned how to stand up to the unions, most notably perhaps in Murdoch’s battle with the various print unions whose ‘Spanish practices’ had made Fleet Street a by-word for corruption and over manning by over-paid workers ‘The Battle of Wapping’, which followed the shift of the Murdoch press from Fleet Street, ended in the total defeat of the various craft unions.
“Privatisation”: as Shakespeare almost had Lady Macbeth say: “Who would have thought the old word to have had so much life in it.” The selling off of state-owned (and often highly subsidised, over manned and inefficient) businesses began in a small way with the sale of Amersham, but went on to ‘do’ for British Airways once as bad a modern Iberian Airways, now “the world’s favourite airline and making an uncommon profit”), British Steel, British Coal, British Telecom...and even to-day, the first stage of the British Railway system. Macmillan later lamented at “the sale of the family silver...” which earned a nodding laugh from his fellow-peers. The old actor had clearly chosen to forget how much taxpayers’ money had had to be poured into keeping that ‘silver’ in the family. Too, he ignored the growth of efficiency which followed privatisation in almost every case. Maybe he would have had more to say if he’d been around when the government managed to get the public to hand over money for what its money had once created (the water boards, electricity and gas boards) and for what was never the government’s in the first place - notably TSB. But as a once and former chancellor, Macmillan ought to have appreciated the windfalls brought by these many privatisations to the Treasury which was thus helped in its task of bringing down the levels of direct (if not indirect) taxation. He might also, as a world statesman, have chosen to note that, once Thatcher had set the ball in motion, the rest of the world seemed to follow suite. Even that arch-Socialist, Mitterand, was obliged to do his own U-turn in 1982 and set about privatising even recently nationalised industries and firms. And like
It had not been so in February 1981 when that ‘Lady’ was still trying to form a government of ‘dries’ while still having to include many unreconstructed ‘wets’ in her cabinet. In the autumn of 1980 the Coal Board told the government that the market for coal had collapsed (in the face of the drive for fuel economy, the industrial recession and the importing of cheap foreign coal) and that, unless the government increased its subsidy to the industry (already some £600 million a year), many pits would have to close. Following a meeting between the Board and the National Union of Mineworkers on
Thatcher knew that the electricity generating stations had insufficient stock to cope with a long coal strike. She, and others in the Cabinet, feared that, if the miners came out, then transport workers and railwaymen would come out in support in what would be a resurgence of the old Triple Alliance. Within a week she had climbed down: the Board was allowed to extend its borrowing limits (i.e. to be further subsidised) so that unprofitable pits could stay open; electricity and gas boards were forced to buy British coal and stop the importing of cheaper foreign coal. Scargill could justifiably claim that the miners had defeated the
government - as it had done in 1973-74.
In 1984-85 Thatcher had her revenge on the hubris-ridden Scargill who, in 1981, succeeded Gormley as President of the NUM. I remember meeting Atkinson, our Catholic Tory MP at one of the Masses celebrated to prepared children (including his) for First Communion. I said that (by the time we spoke) Scargill was heading for a massive defeat. “Ah”, said the quite Atkinson,” we spent a long time preparing for just that.” And reading the memoirs of Lawson, Tebbit, Walker and other ministers who were in the Cabinet after the election victory of 1983, I came to appreciate the extent of those preparations. Coal stocks at generating stations were built up so that there was little likelihood of power cuts even in a prolonged strike. More stocks were piled at pit heads from which, even if rail workers refused to work, private lorry companies would be able to shift the coal to power stations. More power stations were switched from being coal-fired to become oil-fired - using oil from British companies which got their oil from the
It was his Board which, in February published a list of pits deemed ‘uneconomic’ and doomed to closure. Scargill, who had tried, but failed, on three earlier occasions to get support in a national ballot, now used a legal, but dubiously so, interpretation of the union’s Rule 43 to give official backing to strikes in the militant areas of
Lorries by the hundred were brought in to shift coal to power stations: clashes between lorry drivers and miners’ pickets became very violent: police forces throughout the country were called in to send men to the striking areas and/or to prevent the influx of miners from non-striking areas into striking areas in support of their colleagues.
In February, prior to the strike, Scargill had told miners that there were only eight weeks’ stocks at the power stations. By the end of March, after the strike had lasted three weeks, he claimed that there were only 9-10 weeks supply... and so on into error after error. For the fact was that, as Walker told Thatcher, there was never less than a year’s supply, and, by the time the strike ended, there was a two-year’s supply of stocks at the stations.
Many miners, mainly in the
And where was the Labour Party in these first Thatcher years? In 1972, while Heath seemed to be about to lead the Tories in a rightward direction (‘Selsdon Man’) I wrote three small books for Batsford, one on each of the three main political parties. In the final lines of the Past-into-Present of the Conservative Party, I argued that, if Heath maintained that rightward trend, then, inevitably, there would be calls for the Labour Party to move further to the left. Indeed, in a fourth small book, Political Parties (1972) I used a contemporary cartoon which showed a Crusader-knight figure handing Wilson a crusading sword marked SOCIALISM.
I was both surprised and flattered to find that my four political books were reviewed by an eminent historian-MP, John Mackintosh. And that the reviews appeared in he prestigious Parliamentary World, a sort of in-house journal for politicians worldwide and for students of politics. Mackintosh took me to task for suggesting that Labour was about to take a leftward turn. He prophesied that, within the year or so, the Party would be dominated by middle-of-the-road men of the calibre of Roy Jenkins, Dick Taverne, Shirley Williams and others of that ‘liberal’ stripe.
In fact both Mackintosh and I were to be proved wrong: Heath did not maintain his rightward drift. Indeed, in a series of U-turns he tried to make his government the very model of a Keynesian one. So there was no need for
Having torn up my party card in the ‘winter of discontent’ I was not privy to the debates which began within days of the 1979 election. But I have read the memoirs of Healey, Owen and others, as well as listened to Benn, Hatton, and others. In local wards, local constituencies and in meetings of the parliamentary party, the left argued that Labour had lost to Thatcher because its manifesto had not been sufficiently ‘socialist’. No one tried to explain how such a shift would win back the workers who had voted Tory or who had not bothered to vote at all. No one on the Left was prepared to consider that many unionists had turned against their leaders during 1978-79 when, additionally, millions of voters had come to see that a Labour government did not have any inherent right to the loyalty of those leaders and their more militant followers. And when Benn, now the darling of the left, proposed that a future manifesto should include a proposal to nationalise the leading 25 companies in the country, neither he not any of his minions dared answer Healey’s riposte “Do we want Marks and Spencer to be as efficient as the Co-op?” His remark was described as “being in very bad taste.”
The ability of the left to gain control of both the Labour Party and the Unions was helped by the widespread apathy among traditional Labour members. In many local constituency parties and in many union branches as few as fifty might turn up for an annual general meeting and even fewer turn out for less important evenings. As early as 1973 (when
Militant and the other radical groups wanted the Leader to be chosen by an annual delegate conference and not by MPs alone. Such a conference would also have the right to fix the future programme for a Labour government, and not allow either the executive or the MPs to determine such a government’s programme. MPs would have to obey their constituency parties - and have to submit to regular (annual?) re-selection by the tightly knit groups which controlled the constituency parties. Prime among the future policies for any Labour government were to be the scrapping of
Along with many other disillusioned and former members of the Party I watched the Party of Attlee, Bevan, Gaitskell and Wilson tear itself apart in the winter of 1979-80. I read about Consultative Committees on the Party Constitution, about proposals for a dog’s dinner of an electoral College which would choose any future leader after Callaghan, and about the calling of a Special Conference for February 1981 to approve the many changes now proposed. Clive Jenkins (of Aberavon chip shop and eleven-plus failure fame) boasted that one effect of the proposed reforms would be to ensure that Denis Healey would not succeed Callaghan.
As I read his remarks I was reminded again of a trade union leader who had attended an adult education class which I had run in
Benn didn’t stand in this election: ‘In view of the decision of the Party as to the Electoral College, it would be ‘illegal’ to take part in this MPs-only election.’ The result was that, after two elections, Michael Foot (139) had defeated Healey (129) and was the new Party leader. Healey believed that several of those who were shortly to leave to form the Social Democratic Party had voted for Foot - maybe in the hope of forcing Healy to join them when they had formed their new group.
Healey took his defeat well, announcing to a cheering mob of MPs that he would be delighted to serve as Michael’s deputy. As he wrote later: “I glanced at Tony Benn. His face was ashen. I knew I had done at least one thing right.”
So it was under Foot’s shambling leadership that the party held a Social Conference at Wembley in February 1981. This managed to make an even more messy dog’s dinner than had been originally proposed for the Electoral College. This reduced the MPs share of the College vote to 30 per cent, as Jenkins wanted. In typically union-mangled fashion, Terry Duffy of the engineering
To the average voter - who is uninterested in politics once an election has been held - the almost continual Party strife of 1979-81 must have resembled something along the lines of a medieval theological argument: “how many angels can dance on the point of a pin?” must have seemed more logical than arguments over proportions of Electoral College votes. For myself, I am still uncertain which most affected me: was it the sight of Jenkins foaming on TV as he was outwitted by Callaghan in October 1980? Was it his gloating over his manipulation of the vote in February 1981? Was it his anger at Healey’s quick assumption of the Deputy Leadership - a spoiler for Benn’s chances? For sure, the bitter internal (but heavily publicised wrangling) must have convinced millions of people that the Party - whether led by Callaghan, Foot or Benn - was not fit to govern the country.
That anti-Labour sentiment showed itself after Owen, Will Rogers, Shirley Williams and Roy Jenkins had founded the Social Democratic Party. Within days, another dozen Labour MPs had defected, with another 14 to follow their example within the year. By the autumn of 1981 opinion polls gave the new party some 50 per cent of the vote, with Labour getting 25 per cent and Thatcher’s unpopular government a mere 23 per cent. She was paying the price for the 3 million unemployed, the laying waste of British industry and the selfish individualism of her taxation policy.
Thatcher’s fortunes were restored by the Falklands War which began on 2 April 1982 during which ‘the Iron Lady’ drove her reluctant colleagues, doubting Service Chiefs and others, to organise a task force and, with US help, a supply system so that, after an uncertain start, the Argentineans were defeated and the Falklands restored to British rule. The press, in particular the tabloid press, waved the patriotic card - and helped gain for Thatcher the support of ‘the Falklands Factor’. She herself claimed that that ‘Factor’ was merely the natural consequence of her approach to politics and economics:
“We have ceased to be a nation in retreat. We have instead a new - found confidence - born in the economic battles at home, and tested and found true eight thousand miles away. Printing money is no more. Rightly the Government has abjured it. Increasingly the nation won’t have it...That too is part of the Falklands Factor.”
Following the Victory Parade over which she, and not the Queen, presided, opinion polls gave her 46 per cent of the vote, with the newly-formed Liberal-Democratic Alliance getting 24 per cent; the honeymoon with the new grouping was short-lived. Labour got 27 per cent of the poll - bad enough, but better than the 15 percent given to Foote in answer to a question on “Who would make the best Prime Minister?”
In April came a popular budget and the lowest rate of inflation for fifteen years, which raised Tory support to some 49 per cent in opinion polls, far above the level Thatcher had held prior to the 1979 election. So it was no surprise when she called an election on May 9th - but that’s another story.
Chapter 55. The Waning Of My Church.
First, some solid figures, before we get to the argument.
Table 1. Catholic progress in England and Wales, 1944 – 94
| | 1944 | 1954 | 1964 | 1974 | 1984 | 1994 |
| Catholic population | 2,372,074 | 2,939,900 | 3,827,000 | 4,162,942 | 4,220,262 | 4,404,690 |
| Mass attendance | No figure | 1,886,600 | 2,114,219 | 1,752,730 | 1,512,553 | 1,190,207 |
| Baptisms | 71,604 | 92,380 | 137,673 | 80,587 | 71,698 | 75,236 |
| Conversions | 8,722 | 11,920 | 12,348 | 5,253 | 5,146 | 6,205 |
| Marriages | 30,946 | 37,921 | 45,592 | 36,566 | 28,061 | 18,344 |
| Priests | 6,030 | 6,800 | 7,714 | 7,453 | 6,816 | 5,845 |
| Ordinations | 178 | 219 | 230 | 146 | 92 | 72 |
| Churches | 2,683 | 3,837 | 4,429 | 3,703 | 3,899 | 3,803 |
| Schools | No figure | No figure | 2,888 | 3,094 | 2,790 | 2,463 |
| First Communions | No figure | No figure | 90,776 | 87,592 | 53,873 | No figure |
| Confirmations | No figure | No figure | 89,984 | 69,884 | 47,084 | No figure |
In many ways the Irish picture is even gloomier:
Table 2: Vocations to Priesthood and Religious life, 1966 and 1996.
| | 1966 | 1996 | % decrease |
| Diocesan clergy | 254 | 52 | 79.5 |
| Religious Orders | 390 | 39 | 90.0 |
| Sisters | 592 | 19 | 96.8 |
| Brothers | 173 | 1 | 99.4 |
| Total | 1409 | 111 | 92.1 |
And the decline (or waning) is universal - a sad reflection on the meaning of the word Catholic (i.e Universal). Mass attendance figures for a sample of countries illustrates the point:
In
In
In
In the
All the above are ‘Sacraments’ - that is, outward signs of an inward decay. We could, of course, pick any number of other statistics to make much the same point: the number of teenage pregnancies; the number of under-16 abortions; the percentage of our children in Catholic schools who come from one-parent families, and so on. The point I want to make is that this isn’t a case of Pa developing his customary ‘pessimistic’ outlook on life - as Damien, and others, would maybe suggest. Nor is it a case of Post-Traumatic Syndrome - i.e the old man having the eebie-jeebies because of the year-long crisis he endured over his cancer operations. Indeed, if anything, my experience in that awful period made me more appreciative than ever of the wonder of my children’s love, the support I had from a parish community and from a wider Catholic world. But the stark fact remains that the figures on the above tables, and those which I suggest earlier in this paragraph, indicate that my church is in decline - if not, as some suggest, in terminal decline. (See Malachi Martin, The Windrush House).
I am one of that generation of Catholics whose education and formation took place in the confident
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
To be a Catholic, was very heaven.
And yet, and yet, within a few short years it (whatever ‘it’ was) had almost disappeared and, in the ensuing years, has continued to slip away, so that the Church of 1958 - its confidence, dominance, size, manpower, loyalties - now seem almost pre-historic.
In 1966, while I was enjoying the non-power of being Political Education Officer for the Mitcham Labour Party, one of my close colleagues was the Party agent, David Dines. He was, at best, an agnostic, at worst, an atheist. But it was this ‘outsider’ who wondered, to me, “What is your Church doing?” He had always seen it as “the Rock of Gibraltar” - probably angry at its anti-Soviet stance. And now, he said, it seemed to him that, in the froth of the Second Vatican Council, we were throwing away the certainties in exchange for a pottage of argument, the destruction of tradition and the attempt to make the Church a torn-apart debating society. Not for the first time, “the onlooker saw more of the game than did the participants.” Regretfully, and belatedly, I have come to see that David was right, and I now take the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) as the divisive watershed dividing my experience of Church, and the cause of the waning thereof.
The Council was called into being by the universally popular, roly-poly Pope John XXIII (1958-1963). He announced his decision to call a Council in an address he made on the feast of the Epiphany (
“In order, therefore, to knock down ancient walls between the Church and its contemporary world, in order to open the windows and doors of this Holy Church to modern man and so that the spirit of Christ’s love may once again be poured out over all men in all countries, we have decided to summon an ecumenical Council here in our Vatican, to begin its work not later than 1964.... Our aim; a renewal of God’s love among his children...”.
That it did not turn out as the loving and optimistic John had hoped, he himself made clear shortly before his death when he said;
“They have stolen my Council from me.”
Who ‘they’ were, and how they ‘stole’ the Council, goes a long way to explain the waning of my Church.
But, in the ‘glad, confident morning’ of 1959, and in the years of fervent preparation for the Council, there was no room for pessimism or doubt. For almost four years (1959-1962), various Vatican-based Commissions prepared a bevy of proposals (Schema) for consideration by the Council when it assembled. These were sent to Cardinals, Archbishops, Bishops, Abbotts and others for their consideration and observations, which were incorporated into the Schema which were sent out for further comments and which were amended again and again in the light of these international submissions. Rarely, if ever, had there been such a consultative and long-drawn out process. And, seemingly, it had been a successful process, so that John XXIII was able to announce that his Council would open on
Before the Council gathered, we had had to learn a new word - peritus, Latin for expert. Few, if any, of the members of the Council had the ability, time or energy to study the complicated documents coming from the Vatican Commissions. Too few of them had enough Latin; most had forgotten the philosophy/theology/biblical studies and the rest which they had studied as young students. So each of them had acquired a peritus as consultant, adviser, guide and friend with the job of studying the documents, providing appropriate responses, and to accompany the Council members to
Some Council members had chosen the same expert-advisors, most of whom were drawn from ‘professional’ clergy - lecturers at Catholic centres of higher study such as the
Thus it had been in, for example, the 16th century when a handful of anti-Papal ‘reformers’ had changed the face of the European centre of the church when, in England, for example, a ‘Cambridge Mafia’ of Cranmer-minded clergy produced the new theology and an Anglican Church. Similarly, a handful of Girondist Republicans had manipulated the French Revolutionary Assembly in the early 1790s only to be out manoeuvred by a Parisian-based group of Jacobins a year or two later. In our own century, Lenin’s small Bolshevik Party had seized power and gained absolute control of the Russian Empire and, under the slogan of ‘democratic centralism’, left Stalin in a heritage which he used to impose his own savage rule over the nations of the
Thus it was with John’s Council. A handful of periti from France, Belgium, Holland, Germany and Italy campaigned for the condemnation of Papal authority (‘no more of Pius XII’), for the watering down of traditional Catholic belief in the hope that this might make the Church more acceptable to ‘the Modern World’ or to, at least,
that handful of Christian leaders who claimed to speak for that ‘World’, and for the handing back of ‘the Church’ to ‘the People of God’ - whatever was meant by that term.
Led by Cardinal Suenens, there was an attack in the first session of the Council on Pope John’s proposal for a vote on the various Schema: as I’ve said, these had been written and several times re-written to take account of the views of Council members, so that the Pope and his bureaucracy had some right to expect that the proposals would go through almost on the nod, with the Council lasting, maybe, some six months or so. In one rowdy session after another, the proposed Schemas were rejected, as the vocal minority gathered support for the notion that, now the Council had gathered, ‘everything was up for grabs’.
A saddened John XXIII died (1963) long before his beloved Council came to an end (1965). But even by 1963 it was clear to him and other Catholic-minded observers that there was taking place the de-Catholicisation of the Church, as advocates of ‘integrated humanism’ (whatever that meant) pursued the spirit of that Modernism, which had been condemned by Pius X in 1907 as a grave heresy, which wanted Church doctrine and practice to teach in one age what had been condemned in prior ages, in order to evolve and adapt itself to modern times. Although all clergy, on ordination, had to take an oath disavowing Modernism, the heresy had not been killed off, but merely driven underground to fester and spread its poison among Bishops and theologians, in seminaries and university faculties. Under the influence of ‘widely acclaimed theologians with impressive records’ such as Hans Kung, Yves Congar, Edward Schillebeek, Boff and others, the spirit of the Modernist heresy infected the Council, seemingly stronger than it had been in the time of Pius X.
Maybe unconsciously, Pope John XXIII had sent out two political signals both of which were welcomed by the liberals in the western Catholic Church. In 1962 he persuaded the leader of the Italian Christian Democratic Party to ‘open the door to the Left’ by allowing the Marxist-based Italian Socialist Party to share in the country’s government. This was a betrayal of the work of Pius XII and former Prime Minister de Gasperi, which had helped save post-war
The attack on ‘Papalism’ - or, as some ecumenists called it ‘the Roman fact’ - was engineered by a multi-faceted group. There were the Catholic ecumenists who, under Cardinal Bea, ran the Secretariat for Christian Unity. He went on a series of journeys across
This merely reflected Jesus’s commission to Peter: “Thou are Peter (or Petrus or Pierre - all meaning rock) and upon this rock I will build My Church.” Such reality did not meet the optimistic ambitions of those - on both sides of the religious divide who hoped that unity might be merely a ‘kiss and make up’ business. The initial claims for the Anglo-Roman Catholic Commission (ARCIC) were largely based on such false optimism: the subsequent failure of the Commission to reach agreement on, for example, the nature of the Eucharist and Papal Infallibility, ought to have come as no surprise to students of history. However, even the near-death position of ARCIC did not prevent Cardinal Hume tell a gathering of Church leaders at Swannick about the “equality of the Churches” - whatever that might meant.
And the ‘insiders’ attack on the Papacy and Papal authority has continued. In December 1997 a German Jesuit, Klaus Schatz led a seminar in
“If only we could get rid of the ‘Roman fact’, this Papal claim to be the Vicar of Christ,” they seemed to say, “then we would find it easy, or at least easier, to come together in a One World Church.” And, no doubt, have the same vigour, growth, clarity of belief and moral influence as has, for example, the Anglican Church, forsooth.
The now-retired, but still ambitiously active Cardinal Suenens, had earlier made his contribution to the campaign to diminish the position and power of the Pope. He called for the creation of four Popes, one for each quarter of the globe. Such modesty: why not one for each continent? country? diocese? parish?
Indeed, in 1996, a movement calling itself We are Church called for even more. One of its English leaders, Laura Winkley, said, in December 1996; “We used to be too deferential to the Bishops and the Pope, but that is going. We are the people of God, we are all the Church, and we are demanding equal participation. The Bishops can come with us or not, but these remedies must be implemented.”
In the
On the other hand some 44 students from a small Catholic school in Virginia, collected 90,000 signatures from supporters of their declaration: “We do lovingly believe and defend every single teaching of the Holy Roman Catholic Church, as defined, protected and taught by the magisterium and the Holy Father, the sole vicar of Christ on earth.” Maybe, just maybe, Laura Winkley of We are Church is right when she says “Our dear Church is in its death throes.” Her remedy, and that of the liberal - humanists, ex-priests, ex-nuns and others, is for a further shoal of reforms; “the reforms of Vatican Two have not gone far enough.” One might (but won’t) almost sympathise with Suenens, Kung and the other Modernists: to be outflanked; poor things, and by a motley collection of (mainly) lay people.
The fervid activities of those Vatican 2 Modernists was, as was the earlier heresy of Modernism itself, predicated on the notion that ‘change was all; that tradition was to be subverted.’ In much of their thinking they were children of their time. For in the secular world, or worlds, of the post-1965 period, traditions were swept aside. There was the campaign against the ‘suburban semi-detached with its neat garden - prisons for the creative soul,’ according to followers of the much-vaunted Corbousier with his prattle of ‘cities in the sky’ - or, as we knew them, tower blocks. Such liberating places; such ‘community-creating’ structures; such nonsense. Then there was the (generally female-led) campaign against the traditional family. “Autocratically paternalistic”; “destructive of children’s individuality”. Instead, with much bra-burning, people were encouraged to “experiment”, “wife-swap”, “taste and see that ‘freedom’ is good.” So virginity-losing girls wore yellow golliwogs on their blouses; schools put condom machines in school foyers; sex education - with explicit demonstrations - became the vogue. The upshot? A BBC programme in October 1998 which, having looked at the “Sex Bomb” years of the 1960s and 1970s, concluded, in the fourth programme that the results had been “much unhappiness, desertion, teenage pregnancies and abortions, and an ever-growing number of children growing up in poverty to join an underclass.”
I have already written of the rejection of tradition in the field of education. Out went learning of tables, spelling, grammar, structured curricula .... and in came, oh blessed words, “creativity, topic work, child-centred learning..” The result? In 1997 over half the children leaving primary school at the age of eleven, have reading ages expected of eight year olds. Small wonder that “New Labour” has become avidly supportive of old-fashioned (i.e. traditional) methods. But, since the younger teachers are deficient in maths and spelling and grammar, even Blairite campaigns may be ineffective. As I’ve written before, “Quis custodiet custos?” which, in teacher-speak may be translated as “If the teachers can’t, how can they show the children how to?”
Suenens, Kung, Congar and the rest of the glitterati of
Hywel Williams described John Major’s chief adviser as
“.... like Waugh’s Trimmer, a man of his hollow times, [whose] interest was in package and process, not in content and policy.” (Guilty Men, Conservative decline and fall, 1992-1997)
He could have been writing about the small minority who were responsible for most of what emanated from
As to seminaries: here we enter the theatre of the absurd. In October 1998 Fr. Michael O’Connor, 35-year-old professor of dogmatic theology left his post at the
But the President of Ushaw College is ‘not despondent’ at O’Connor’s flight, nor at the absence, for the first time in living memory, of one student from the seminary’s home diocese, Hexham and
In an article from which I take the above (Catholic Herald,
“The first act of a new rector of an English seminary was to ban overnight guests from students rooms. Presumably this radical move had not occurred to his predecessor, who snoozed on as young women (and men) trooped out of the seminary just as the milkman was making his rounds.
One Catholic college in England is said to be rife with drug and alcohol abuse ... students regularly take ecstasy in their rooms ... the College authorities turn a blind eye, fearing that if the young men with broad grins on their faces are sent down, the college may lose the generous local authority grants paid for each student.
At a Scottish seminary, one student proved that he was more than equipped for ministry in the inner city by hospitalising another, giving him what was later described by witnesses as ‘a good kicking’.”
Vignettes here of the outcome of that
“The smoke of Satan is wafting around the altars of the Church”
If this were indeed so, Paul VI ought not to have been surprised. It was, after all, he who had allowed Cardinals, who were also Free Masons, to take control of a number of
A second major venture of Paul VI was to appoint a Commission to report on the Catholic teaching on birth control. In
And, reflecting the society from which they came, the majority of the Commission reported in favour of a change in Catholics teaching, only to have the Hamlet-like Paul VI rejecting their findings with his encyclical Humanae Vitae (1968).
This was the last encyclical he wrote, although he ‘reigned’ until 1978. One possible reason for his reluctance to ‘go public’ again may have been the almost universal attack on his promulgation throughout the Catholic world. Cardinals and Bishops wrote to explain that “the individual’s conscience should be the judge of what was right,” a harking back to that Protestantism of the 16th century which had split the western Church. In confessionals, many, if not all, priests, advised those who came to them for advice to make up their own minds. For the majority of lay Catholics, their minds had already been made up, and too many, unable to accept the hypocrisy called for, voted with their feet and effectively ceased to practice.
If 1968 was ‘annus horribilis’ for Paul VI with its revolt against Humane Vitae, he went on to make ‘confusion worse confounded’ in 1969 by allowing a decree to be issued which suppressed the Tridentine Latin Mass (although that traditional Mass had been supported by the delegates at the Council) and which imposed the Novus Ordo Missae on the Church. This New Mass was the product of a Commission chaired by the Free Mason Bugnini. He had chosen 9 people to form the Commission, 6 of whom were Protestants while the 3 Catholic members were members of the Kung-led “liberal tendency”. While Paul VI refused to accept some of their initial productions, he was persuaded that “in the name of ecumenism” he ought to allow more changes than he seemed willing to make in the liturgy. And, willingly or not, he gave approval to a liturgy which was welcomed by Protestants, since it accepted their thesis that the Mass is a “meal” and a mere “memorial”, while downplaying, if not explicitly denying that the Mass is a “sacrifice” and “the unbloody renewal of the bloody sacrifice of Christ on
This major break with Catholic tradition was part of that de-Catholicising process which had been going on since 1965. Parishes had already been ‘stripped’ of most of the sodalities and guilds which had helped knit them together while also promoting a spiritual life. Out, too, had gone most of the old devotional practices, processions and hymns. In place of the latter came an influx of guitar-backed songs in which the music vied with the words for banality, with the almost universal Kum by yar as a template.
Following the introduction of the New Mass there came the process of re-ordering of the physical structure of the interior of our Cathedrals and churches. The altar was re-named ‘the table’, the priest became ‘president’ who led ‘the people of God’ in a ‘celebration’. To draw attention to the ‘table’ and the ‘president’s chair’, out went the tabernacle, with the Blessed Sacrament removed to sometimes inaccessible places: I remember searching in a Spanish church for the tabernacle and being unable to find it. Out, too, went altar rails (‘Why should people humiliate themselves and kneel? They ought to stand up as befits the integrated humanists they are - or ought to be.’). In a widespread ‘stripping of the altars’ which would have been applauded by Cranmer, Cromwell and other leading Protestant reformers, out, too, went statues, confessionals (‘to be replaced by comfort-making ‘Reconciliation Rooms’) and in many places, old-fashioned pews which were replaced by fold-up chairs - easily removed and re-used as the church became a dance-hall or something.
All this, it was said, would make our churches and our Church, more ‘accessible’ to Protestants, and so further the ecumenical movement. Tell me about it. Go back to the tables at the start of the chapter and wonder whether a Phillipono Bishop (Lazo) didn’t better have it right. In a letter to John Paul II (May 1998) he claimed that the process now at work was
“From Catholicism To Protestantism, From Protestantism To Modernism, From Modernism To Atheism.”
Now, in 1998, do we see John XXIII’s ‘outpouring of the Holy Spirit’? right with his vision of the ‘smoke of Satan’?
And to finish, some lines sent to me by lady with whom Teresa and I enjoyed pilgrimages to the
On the parish priest leaving us to get married (4 Dec – 1996) (in Advent) St Michael’s, Leigh Park:
JUST BE!
Vows blown to the wind
Discipline removed
Chastity removed
Jesus pushed aside
Good Friday on the eve of Christmas
Above, at Church
There’s
mass for Bunty
In Thanksgiving - 5 years
Below,
She’s there
At home
Sick in body - hurt in mind.
The sign of the cross
‘Help me Lord’
Refuge .....
Psalm 131
‘I know you love me’
Alone with her thoughts
Being the Rock
Pain of Jesus felt
Hurts of Jesus lived
She ponders
And
patiently waits
for
The word of God on people’s lips
Havant
posted by therealtonylane at 2:04 PM
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