Elizabethans

The influence of Christianity is even more striking on the left of British public life. Harold Wilson said that the Labour Party owed more to Methodism than to Marx. When it came to mid-twentieth-century Labourism, he was absolutely right. He himself had been brought up, not quite as a Methodist, but as a Congregationalist (the man who followed him as Prime Minister, Jim Callaghan, was a Baptist) and was married in a chapel to the daughter of a church minister. In later life, he said that his religious views explained why he thought that high unemployment was immoral. The radical-egalitarian aspect of Christianity, the sense that everyone owes obligations to everyone else, and that everybody is equal in the sight of God, runs through modern politics as a constant, nervy source of virtuous disturbance.

Even atheists who went on to lead the Labour Party, such as Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock, had strong Christian nonconformist connections – Foot’s through his Plymouth family and Kinnock’s through Welsh chapel culture. John Smith, who followed them, was a devout Christian. Among politicians we shall come to later, the effect of the New Testament on Tony Benn was profound and transforming. Tony Crosland was brought up in the strict Plymouth Brethren tradition and, although he rebelled against its puritanism, ‘thy brother’s keeper’ remained central to his political vision. Shirley Williams, another politician with a strongly ethical view of the role of politics in society, came from a devout Roman Catholic background.

Tony Blair, whose religiosity concerned his advisers throughout his political career (‘We don’t do God,’ instructed his spokesman Alastair Campbell), converted to Roman Catholicism after he left office. He had been brought to a closer understanding of Christianity’s political implications by an Australian priest while he was a student at Oxford, and later came under the influence of the Christian philosopher John Macmurray. In a speech to the Labour Party conference in 1995 he explained what religion meant for him: ‘I am worth no more than anyone else, I am my brother’s keeper, I will not walk by on the other side. We are not simply people set in isolation from one another, face to face with eternity, but members of the same family, same community, same human race. This is my socialism.’

His successor, Gordon Brown, was the son of a Church of Scotland minister and retained a close interest in the importance of the New Testament. In a book devoted entirely to the political use made of Christ’s Good Samaritan parable, the writer Nick Spencer concluded of the Brown version, following the financial crisis of 2008, ‘This was the Good Samaritan as justification for state intervention. The travelling Samaritan has become the multi-billion-pound British government, stepping across the treacherous financial road and binding the wounds of a damaged and vulnerable public with billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money.’

So, is this something or nothing? If Christianity, indeed the same stories from the New Testament, can be used by Margaret Thatcher and Gordon Brown for almost opposite political conclusions, should we conclude that religious influence in British public life is meaningless? I am not arguing that, as a result of their faith, politicians were translated into junior members of the angelic horde – that they never fibbed or acted immorally. But it is possible for a way of thinking to be so widely distributed and so influential that we barely notice it.

In the case of Christianity in twentieth-century British life, its ‘everywhereness’ is the point. Millions of people who might not have been motivated by political philosophers had a moral imagination formed by the New Testament – by Sunday school, Bible class, church parades. This, consciously or otherwise, made them see the democratic system as more than a way of pursuing their own economic advantage. The Queen forthrightly referred to her religion in her Christmas messages, but for many millions of her subjects who didn’t even go to church, Christianity was the ethical water in which they swam. For politicians of the centre-left, striving to make life more successful and tolerable for poorer fellow citizens, the impulse for their ideas did not come primarily from reading Friedrich Engels or Das Kapital, from Marcuse, Gramsci or Fanon, but from an early and immersive dunking in the four evangelists.

The Christianity of elective politicians is only the start. Consider the influence of Lord Soper, the prominent Methodist leader, on the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; of Bruce Kenrick, the founder of Shelter and also a minister in the United Reformed Church; of the Rev. George Macleod and his Iona community in Scotland; of the Quakers who helped found Oxfam. But even bearing all of them in mind, we only begin to scratch the surface of the impact of the New Testament on British social policy in modern times. As we shall see, the hugely popular Eagle boys’ comic was a consciously Christian undertaking, created by a Southport vicar. Religious influence lingered long after church congregations had shrivelled. During the coronavirus crisis of 2020, the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby and other Church of England priests delivered their services and sermons online. It seemed that ten times as many people were watching and listening as regularly attended physical churches, all of which were then closed.

In many ways, reading the novels of the period seems to show that respectability was as strong in the Britain of the early years of the Queen’s reign as in the heyday of her predecessor Queen Victoria. Respectability, loathed or admired, is important in the early comedies of Kingsley Amis, as in the somewhat bleaker novels of his friend Philip Larkin. Jim Dixon, anti-hero of Lucky Jim (1953), a horny drunk, knows that his professional fate lies entirely in the hands of his professor and is constantly threatened by his own misbehaviour. He too had to worry about his equivalent of the factory foreman or the passing priest. Respectability mattered. In a famous attack in the Sunday Times, Somerset Maugham wrote of Amis’s characters: ‘They have no manners and are woefully unable to deal with any social predicament. Their idea of a celebration is to go to a public house and drink six beers. They are mean, malicious and envious … Charity, kindliness, generosity are qualities which they hold in contempt. They are scum.’

Britain of the 1950s was also an overwhelmingly white society, with only small numbers of immigrants from the Caribbean arriving in London and a few Midlands cities. The arrival of so many black American GIs ahead of the invasion of Europe had introduced many white British communities to their first dark-skinned neighbours. The overall reaction was mildly enthusiastic. There was considerable British hostility to the American ‘color bar’.

But these were visitors. Visitors who were just passing through were easier to respond to than settlers. The docking of the Empire Windrush in 1948, bringing 492 West Indian immigrants to Tilbury and now celebrated as the real beginning of multicultural Britain, drew the following rebuke from eleven Labour MPs – Labour, not Conservative – to the then Prime Minister Clement Attlee: ‘The British people fortunately enjoy a profound unity without uniformity in their way of life, and are blessed by the absence of a colour racial problem. An influx of coloured people domiciled here is likely to impair the harmony, strength and cohesion of our people and social life and cause discord and unhappiness among all concerned.’

There were smaller Chinese, African and Indian communities in the East End of London and some port cities. For the majority population, the Empire was still largely an abstraction – something people went across the seas to ‘serve’, not a policed global system whose unwinding would have big repercussions at home. Newspapers and political parties, except for small numbers on the far left, regarded the Empire as an almost unqualified good, an achievement British people should be proud of. Until 1958 (it was renamed by the then Prime Minister Harold Macmillan) Empire Day was celebrated every March, with decorous parades, speeches and church services. From the Prime Minister downwards, people spoke unselfconsciously about ‘the British race’, and regarded foreigners as humorous, dangerous or merely unfortunate. Blacked-up ‘minstrel’ entertainers featured on television; gollywogs were cuddled by small children and advertised by jam makers; newspaper cartoonists used racial stereotypes which would be unprintable today.

The British of 1952, in short, were a quietly religious, homogeneous, stratified, socially conservative, proud and comparatively closed-off country. Compared to today, they were much less connected with the European continent, socially, culturally and in terms of personal wealth. The middle classes didn’t have boltholes in the Dordogne. The working classes had never been to Spain – unless they were part of a tiny minority who had been fighting for the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War.

In this much more local world, people had less information at their fingertips. Perhaps, therefore, they concentrated harder on what they did know – memorized verses and songs, local nature lore and childhood stories, worn smooth and made familiar by repetition. Books, to be borrowed from libraries, and much more densely written newspapers provided a slower, more thoughtful way of spreading information and opinion. Television news, and radio news too, was calm and dry. Outside a few shadowed streets in a few city centres, where a few men lurked, pornography was little known.

If dim throbs of Elgar are by now hanging over these sentences, we must remember that ours was always, also, a contested country. Dissidents, whether sexual-minority groups or angry young men and women using new styles of clothing or music to cock a snook at their parents, were increasingly obvious as the wartime norms eroded. Communists and militant trade unionists – and, from the mid-1950s, anti-nuclear campaigners – were visible and much discussed. There was rising worry about inner-city gang violence.

Any would-be recorder of this period, therefore, is faced with a problem. Because the stories of the numerous rebels against an essentially conservative, stratified and rationed society tend to be colourful and specific – frankly, more exciting – there is a serious danger of forgetting the majority view. Oh, look! There is Sir Bertrand Russell sitting with his philosophical legs crossed as he protests against the Bomb. Look! There are some Teds in their dead-cool drainpipes and crêpe-soled shoes; and there’s Lonnie Donegan twanging away at a skiffle club … And so, because our attention is stolen by the unusual and the vivid, the cavorting heralds of different futures, we fail to notice the calm majority – all the young people having serious conversations in Christian youth groups in the Midlands; the millions of Labour voters who admired stodgy, unprogressive mainstream leaders such as Herbert Morrison or Bessie Braddock; and all the households listening, not to the new rock ’n’ roll, but to show tunes and swing bands.

Yes, everything was changing – but gently and piecemeal, in rivulets and plashing borders, not in one brightly coloured waterfall. Wartime disciplines slowly eased. For every would-be satirist who resented National Service, there were scores of youngish middle-aged men meticulously polishing their shoes, proudly maintaining shorn hairstyles and supping mild ale on a Friday night at the British Legion. There’s a common misconception that, having voted in a socialist government in 1945, the British were speeding towards the more open, liberal, rebellious country we became later.

But this is nonsense. There was no logical connection between the policies of the post-war Labour Party and the waves of liberalization which began a shift in values towards where we are today. The nationalization of the steel industry and the abolition of corporal punishment in prisons do not go hand in hand; nor do changes to the law on adultery and abortion have anything to do with a more progressive income tax policy; nor indeed does the end of hanging connect to a regime of trade union rights. The dominant figures of the left, from Clem Attlee to Ernie Bevin, were social conservatives – indeed, by today’s standards, deeply reactionary.

Many other countries, from post-war France and Italy through to Britain’s closest Commonwealth allies, Canada and Australia, stayed more conservative for longer. Nothing about British liberal reform was inevitable. Indeed, had there been a rolling political revolution after 1945, in which the Labour movement had gone much further than the creation of the National Health Service and limited nationalization and stayed in power for several decades, then Britain would probably have been a more socially conservative society than it has proved. The great sexual scandals of the middle part of the century and the rise in anti-establishment satire were products of Tory years, not of Labour ones. The angry young men of literature turned out to be men of the right, not of the left.

Yet somehow the left came to take ownership of social changes that went much wider than the agenda of earlier twentieth-century governments – the sexual revolution, the pushing back of the punitive state, the use and tolerance of drugs and an unmistakable decay in social and religious hierarchies. This was the achievement of a small number of individual politicians, of whom the most important were never Prime Minister themselves – Tony Crosland and Roy Jenkins.

They were reacting to a weariness in post-war Britain, and an anti-establishment frustration which has been a constant in British politics from the 1840s onwards. We have never been a particularly stable society. But a relatively small number of people saw their chance during the first part of the Queen’s reign to push a shift in values and did so. Along with Margaret Thatcher, who saw herself to some extent as their nemesis, they were the most influential of Elizabethan weather-changers. And much of their thinking came from over the Atlantic.

3

A WORD ON AMERICANS

The most obvious division in British public life is between left and right. But the division between social conservatives and social liberals is just as important, and not the same. And in its influence on British social attitudes during Queen Elizabeth’s reign, the impact of America cannot be overstated. Later, we will see how important the US-hating Enoch Powell would be when it came to the great argument over Britain and Europe. We will also see how fears over the violence and crudity of American culture grew in Britain during the 1950s and 1960s. But before all of that it’s important to reflect on the vast admiration for America felt in the decades after the Second World War; and to recall that this was felt even more strongly on the liberal left than on the conservative right.

Take that influential woman Shirley Williams. The Labour, and later SDP, politician had a determined self-certainty which came from her intellectual and privileged upbringing. She was the daughter of the famous 1930s writer Vera Brittain, and was brought up in a Chelsea household where the Indian independence leader Jawaharlal Nehru and H. G. Wells were visitors. But her popularity as a politician came from her style, a breezy, no-nonsense rule-breaking informality that set her apart. A good example of it came in 1966 when she was appointed a minister in Harold Wilson’s government, at the Home Office in charge of, among other things, pornography and prisons. There have been many prisons ministers. None of the others decided to have themselves incarcerated for a few nights as a prisoner to see what it was actually like.

Shirley Williams persuaded the authorities to send her to Holloway women’s prison, her identity kept secret. This was a time when there was much newspaper comment about prison life being too easy and comfortable. In order to experience the lifestyle for herself – the smells and sensations, the food and the boredom – the Minister of State posed as a convicted prostitute:

I did go through the business of being accepted into the prison, stripped and searched, given prison clothes, endlessly laundered and totally lifeless, and put in a stained and grubby cell. I had to explain to my cell-mates … what I was in for. I decided the hardest to check up on, was prostitution, so I told them I was ‘on the game’. The ‘game’ extended to a wide spectrum of women, from the elegant mistresses of Mayfair to the cheap £5-a-go end of the business around mainline stations such as King’s Cross and Victoria … I found the conversation highly enlightening.

This gave her a special authority back in Whitehall, and she became a particular expert on the poor quality of toilets and showers in female prisons.

So where did this airy readiness to ignore the normal way of doing things come from? The answer may simply be her temperament – by her own account, even as a young girl, Williams was tousled, impatient and unruly. But it’s equally likely that she became a liberal rebel partly because she was educated not in Britain but, during the war, in America. Because her mother was a well-known pacifist and her book Testament of Youth was loathed by the Nazis, Shirley Williams’s parents were on a Gestapo blacklist to be eliminated as soon as the Germans had invaded Britain.

Vera Brittain was determined to stay on and rally her fellow pacifists: she decided, though, that her children should be sent to the United States for safety. Brittain had done pre-war lecture tours in the US. Friends she had met from Minnesota sent her a telegram which simply read: ‘Send us your children.’ Williams and her brother were dispatched across the Atlantic, despite the threat of U-boats, to a farm outside Minneapolis. There they were exposed to a land without obvious class divisions, and a culture far less formal than contemporary Britain’s. Williams later wrote that, in her three years as an evacuee, ‘I lived in a classless society, whose members shared the same accent and the same values … the walls between the social classes were porous … Money and talent would enable one to traverse them. The absence of accent as a defining feature enabled Americans to present themselves as whatever they wanted to be.’

This sunny world, without crabbed, confined divisions, would greatly influence British liberals (though they seemed strangely blind to America’s extreme racial divide). It wasn’t simply America’s greater material wealth – the domestic labour-saving gadgets, the lavish food, the bigger cars – that impressed post-war visitors. It was also the informality and democratic optimism that was so alluring. This was primarily transmitted not in films or books, but person to person and family by family.

Anglo-American relations were intimate as much as they were official – evacuated children, billeted GIs and their brides, and family friendships made between serving officers during the war, which lasted well into the 1960s and beyond. Beyond all this, there were the scholarships and the lecture tours which introduced ambitious young Britons to America – Jack Ashley had been one example. British student bodies regularly sent their best debaters to argue their way around the US during the 1950s and 1960s. The Rhodes Scholarships founded in 1902, designed by the imperialist mining magnate and politician Cecil Rhodes to bind together the Anglo-Saxon world through postgraduate study at Oxford University, were followed by similar programmes, taking Britons in the opposite direction.

In 1925 Edward Harkness, one of America’s richest men through his family investments in Standard Oil, founded the Harkness Fellowships, bringing British students to study in the US. Among the post-war beneficiaries were a vast range of opinion-formers, including Alastair Hetherington who edited the Guardian from 1956 to 1975, Harold Evans, editor of the Sunday Times, the BBC broadcasters Alistair Cooke and Bridget Kendall; the writers Hugo Young, Jan Morris, David Lodge and Adrian Wooldridge; Geoff Mulgan, who ran policy for Tony Blair in Downing Street; Howard Davies, the Bank of England mandarin and Director of the London School of Economics; and Mark Damazer, Controller of BBC Radio Four – as well as innumerable politicians, composers, surgeons, scientists, historians and artists.

The Thouron Awards were established in 1960 to create a special relationship between Britain and the United States through exchanges between British universities and Pennsylvania University. Among its British beneficiaries was Norman Blackwell, another head of the Downing Street Policy Unit; Sir Paul Judge, who created the Judge Business School in Cambridge; Sir Mike Moritz, the California-based billionaire Welsh investor who supported education in Britain; Robert McCrum, the British journalist and author; and Sir Robert Cooper, one of the key British figures at the European Council on Foreign Relations. Bit by bit, name by name, personal life story by personal life story, the British and American elites were being quietly tied together in ways generally undiscussed by historians.

This was particularly true of politics. After the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, the then Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, helped create Kennedy Scholarships, sending Britons to Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology in JFK’s memory. The Trustees of the scheme read like a gazetteer of the modern British establishment with Kennedy Scholarships appealing strongly to the politically ambitious. Beneficiaries included Ed Balls, the Labour shadow Chancellor, who served in the Treasury under Gordon Brown; the former cabinet minister Yvette Cooper; the former Tory International Development Minister Alan Duncan; the former Labour Foreign Secretary David Miliband; the former Labour Environment and Culture Secretary Chris Smith; and William Waldegrave, cabinet minister under Margaret Thatcher; and influential journalists such as Stephanie Flanders, former economics editor of the BBC, Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor of The Economist, and Anatole Kaletsky, the columnist.

This knitting together of the elites goes both ways, of course. The Marshall Scholarships were created by the British Parliament in 1953 as a ‘living gift’ to the United States to say thank you for its generosity in the post-war Marshall Plan, which had helped rebuild Europe. Its beneficiaries have included members of the Supreme Court and US Congress, American cabinet members and no fewer than four winners of Pulitzer prizes. President Clinton was just one of the many American winners of a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. At a slightly lower level there are the more specialized programmes, such as the Lawrence Stern Fellowship, which brings British journalists to work for the Washington Post for one summer, and again, a vast number of prominent British broadcasters, newspaper editors and writers have benefited from that.

Now that’s a long list. But it’s here for a reason. It is easy to forget the importance of the life-changing effects of awards made to people at the most malleable periods of their lives. At a time when they are also ambitious and successful, the effects cascade over into society at large. We can spend a lot of time talking about the impact of Hollywood films, but changing the perspective of the future editors, politicians and judges can be more powerful still. This is genuine ‘soft power’, pushing its long, well-manicured fingers through British life.

Decades before politics-obsessed young Britons became entranced by the liberal fantasy of the television series The West Wing, American democracy was tugging gently but persistently at the British class system. Many older Britons noticed, and didn’t like it. They would point out the danger of exchanging a system based on caste and convention for one based crassly on money. In 1972, following the student demonstrations of the late 1960s, a British mimicry of American counterculture protest, Angus Maude, a Tory MP who would later serve in Mrs Thatcher’s cabinet, complained that ‘As we try to grapple with our major imports from America – violence, drug taking, student unrest, the hippy cult and pornography – our own permissive leftists have been hailing them as signs of progress.’