ONE OF Thatcherism╒s most startling gifts to British society is to have thoroughly politicised it. Little now occurs, in large reaches of public and sometimes private life which does not have political importance and is not subjected to a test of its relevance to the prevailing ideology. This may be a condition more normally associated with Marxist socialism than with Conservatism. But it has happened; and it is the context which gave birth to the Bishop of Durham╒s shocking sermon at his enthronement.
Consider the areas where a political test ╤ a test of commitment to Thatcherism ╤ now applies with an intensity never known before. First there is the Civil Service. No civil servant can rise to the top without having proved his or her positive adherence to the government╒s objectives.
This has a personal dimension. The Prime Minister╒s blackball, often cast on instant acquaintance, can ruin a man for life. It also has institutional effects. Civil servants now find themselves abandoning their customary role of testing the practicality of the politicians╒ objectives to destruction, and serving up instead the advice they know ministers want to hear.
Political domination extends from Whitehall far across the public service. From health authorities to every kind of quango, a species of Thatcherite has been encouraged to colonise the outposts. Large quantities of blameless volunteers have been abruptly displaced in favour of candidates presumed to have a better grasp of what the government is trying to do.
Or consider the nationalised industries. The qualification for service there is no longer belief but disbelief. What are now required are not managers who welcome public sector activities but those who regard them, even where privatisation is not on the agenda, with apologetic scepticism. Evidence of enthusiasm ╤ a condition not entirely lunatic, and not inappropriate on, for example, the railways ╤ must be kept firmly under wraps.
Education is another field where the political imperative is working its way through the status quo. School curricula are being re-examined for their relevance to work, which may be politically neutral, but also for the ideology of nationhood they habitually present, which is not. At the Open University, allegations of a left-wing aspect to the teaching of economics and sociology attract ministerial concern. ╥Peace studies╙ become a new hate-object for the intellectual policemen.
And there is even politics of a kind in the Church of England. Long before the Bishop of Durham there was the Bishop of London. Admired by the prime minister, a preacher of sound right-wing persuasion, Dr Leonard was appointed amid much controversy but with her compelling support.
All this has a justification. It may not be equally persuasive in every case, but as an approach to the objectives which Thatcherism pursues, it is fully intelligible.
These objectives are, within the limits of the term as it can apply to British parliamentary democracy, revolutionary. The Conservative party makes no secret of this. It proudly flaunts its purposes in every speech which denounces the past and every treatise which attributes British decline to the errors and complacency of the post-war consensus. It sees the artifacts of this consensus wherever it looks in public life, and the state of mind which sustained it at work in large tranches of productive industry.
Led by Mrs Thatcher, it remains utterly determined to challenge the consensus. Indeed, to any detached student of government, its ability to cling on to this determination, despite five debilitating years╒ grappling with power, is one of the rarest and most impressive features of the Thatcher government.
Implicit in this, however, is a more radical change. The rules of engagement in public life have been rewritten, in particular, the concepts of neutrality and objectivity, so dear to the civil service mind and so close, some would say, to the very essence of British civilisation, have been abolished.
Thatcherites see them as a fiction: a mask for unacknowledged prejudices which in truth add up to the poison of social democracy. Starting with Whitehall, they think, and spreading through the entire sediment of British cultural, political and economic assumptions, is a set of beliefs, masquerading as neutrality, which must be exposed and destroyed. In another parallel with Marxism, Thatcherites presume that anyone who is not plainly with them is secretly against them: an enemy of the state.
By their lights, they may be right. But unfortunately for them they cannot choose the rules they want to change. When governments start attacking the consensus and show they mean to wreck it, other people ╤ its custodians, if you like ╤ start behaving differently as well. For them too, the rules of conduct which previously dictated smoothness and inoffensive caution, alter. When government has ceased to be a healer and becomes for its own good reasons, a fighter, others begin to fight back accordingly.
Thus, first there was Lord Scarman. A few days ago, he put up a new constitutional doctrine, that civil servants might possibly owe a duty to something other than the political imperatives of the moment. For one of the most senior judges in England to advance this while a court case was about to begin which will test that very proposition was itself surprising enough.
But Lord Scarman, a most scrupulous jurist, cannot have been moved to such irregularity for frivolous reasons. He was making a serious point, which articulates the anxieties of a lot of public servants. Are they required by the constitutional textbooks to be nothing more than obedient cyphers of a prime minister who can get away with almost anything on the back of an immense parliamentary majority? Or does their calling, on this new environment, need a new rulebook.
Similarly with bishops. Dr Jenkins╒s attack on the government╒s conduct of the miners strike has caused the gravest offence. It broke all the rules. By episcopal standards, it was highly uncivilised and grievously controversial. The bland decorum which is supposed to infuse a bishop╒s enthronement was shattered.
But it is the government which took the gloves off first. Having decreed neutrality not to exist, it can hardly rely even on bishops and judges to grope for it and continue to adopt its reassuring plumage. Ministers sowed the wind. They are reaping the whirlwind.
Conservative MPs who have fulminated against Bishop Jenkins therefore look more than usually silly. I think it is true that, as reported, he was less hard than he should have been on Mr Scargill╒s responsibility for violence. But by asserting that government ultimately has the responsibility for healing and not dividing society he was making an appropriately priestly utterance in the forthright idiom which Thatcherism has made the currency of public debate.
Especially fatuous is the contention that he should not have spoken because he knows nothing about the coal business. One of the by-products of the fiercely politicised society which this government has created is that most political questions are up for discussion by anyone who cares to make a contribution.
One does not need to be an expert to debate an idealogy nor an economist to discuss pit closures nor a policeman to delineate the principles of law and order. The miners╒ strike has become the dominating fact of British life this year: The social, legal, moral and economic questions it raises have by now become wholly apparent to intelligences a good deal more exiguous than that of the average bishop. Why, even Tory backbenchers can understand them!
If they do not like the words of the bishop and the judge, they should reflect on what called them forth. It is a new world, from which earlier proprieties have been banished. The fabric of society is being torn apart, as Thatcherism said it should be. Isn╒t that the point of the revolution? Consensus politics have been replaced, jubilantly, by adversary politics. But the government╒s problem is that it cannot handpick its adversaries. And when the neutralists and non-combatants rise up, all we hear is the pathetic cry of foul.
