ABSTRACT
Humiliated by the September 1938 Munich agreement between Chamberlain and Hitler, T. S. Eliot wrote in The Idea of a Christian Society: We could not match conviction with conviction, we had no ideas with which we could either meet or oppose the ideas opposed to us. People can see how neatly Eliot’s comments suit the early 1990s, another decade when the British seem to be motivated, financially and educationally, by a pile of unrelated objectives, rather than any central moral aim. In responding to her current political context, a teacher the author know is fond of saying that Margaret Thatcher ‘drove her back to God’. What she means, is that there must be more moral, more just, values than those held by the governments that ruled in Britain from 1979. But a return to what a fashionable and sentimental vision sees as a past of national religious observance will not lead to morally-based behaviour.
