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Will Hutton is a journalist & writer who I have long admired. I think he is thoughtful and considered & generally has something worthwhile to say. I have reproduced his piece for the Observer.
Observer 22 Feb 2015 – Will Hutton: Don’t condemn the Church. Who else argues for the common good?
There
are doubts and debates at the highest level of the civil service
about the cost of Trident.
On balance, officials and chiefs of staff still support it, not least
because cancellation would irrevocably remove one of the last props
of Britain’s great-power status. But the case is not open and shut.
The cost verges on the impossible, with unpalatable and irrational
choices forced on the rest of our military capability to pay for a
weapon system that will never be used. It is closer to a 51/49 call
than the wider debate recognises.
Yet
when the Church of England’s bishops urge that the question be
publicly discussed as part of a grownup debate about the future of
our country and the quest for the common good, they are dismissed by
right-of-centre commentators, Tory MPs and some ministers as a bunch
of closet leftists making a political statement. They should get out
of politics, and stop making unsolicited interventions like last
week’s letter, Who is my neighbour?, directed to the people and
parishes of the Church of England.
Read
the letter yourself and make your own judgment on whether
this is a leftist tract pockmarked with mistakes, or a necessary and
compelling intervention from one of the country’s last remaining,
if diminished, sources of moral authority. What has moved Anglican
leaders to write is the distressing condition of so many of the
people that the church encounters in its daily ministry – living,
increasingly, in a society of strangers, as the leaders would say,
often lonely, uncertain about the prospects of a career or to what
extent the social bargain will help them out. The Church of England
is one of the last few institutions in touch, through its parishes,
with the entire country. Before a general election whose result will
be fateful for state and society alike, the bishops feel compelled by
their faith to spell out the need for politics to recover the
language and conviction of serving the common good.
This
is inconvenient for our political leaders, especially for those in
government. The majority of the country may no longer have faith, but
those who lead the church do – and they remind the rest of us of
our forgotten Christian roots. The whole point about Jesus Christ,
state the bishops, was that he came to Earth and experienced the
human condition before meeting a painful death. “Christians
everywhere and throughout the ages,” they write, “have prayed, as
part of the Lord’s Prayer, ‘Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done,
on Earth as in heaven.’ That is why politics and the life of the
Christian disciple cannot be separated. That is why the church calls
its members to play a full part in the political life of the nation.”
The
Christian quest for “at-oneness”, they argue, with each other and
God, can only be achieved in a spirit of respect, neighbourliness and
a mutual search for the common good. This means demanding that
politics starts addressing big questions – “a richer
justification of the state, the purpose of government and a more
serious way of talking about taxation”. They accuse the parties of
failing to offer “attractive visions of the kind of society and
culture they wish to see, or distinctive goals they might pursue.
Instead, we are subjected to sterile arguments about who might manage
the existing system best. There is no idealism in this prospectus.”
They
cite Attlee in 1945 and Thatcher in 1979 as examples of the kind of
politics they have in mind – both politicians in their view nuanced
in their idealism (Attlee as a statist respecting voluntarism; and
Thatcher as a pro-marketeer respecting the social responsibilities of
business) as they tried to serve the whole country. Now, however,
they suggest, we need a new breadth of vision that can address the
problems and realities of today’s Britain. It is not on offer.
The
bishops are a last redoubt of moral authority that insists on the
primacy of a public realm that serves the common good – for all the
pushback from Tory MPs and ministers mocking their emptying churches,
accusing them of being left sympathisers or reminding them, as the
prime minister did, that growth is bringing the jobs and job security
they crave. None of these responses spoke the language of common
good, or even accepted it as a premise for political action. We live
in a world where the utterances of a Stuart Rose, former-chair of
Marks and Spencers, or even private-equity magnate and tax
exile Stefano
Pessina, about what is good for business – good for mammon –
have become the new moral authority.
In
his important new book, Mammon’s
Kingdom, David Marquand charts the decline of the constituencies
and individuals that once joined together, however imperfectly, to
act as vital countervailing voices to those of private market
interests. Some, like the trade unions, have had decline thrust on
them by changed employment laws and economic structures along with
media demonisation, but have also not risen to the challenge of
changed times with a reframed purpose and rhetoric. Professionals who
try to speak for a public interest from a position of disinterest –
teachers, doctors, climate-change scientists, social workers, civil
servants – are now derided as necessarily money-seeking or
partisans. It’s as if everyone knows that everyone else is
self-interested, pushing the point of view they hold that benefits
them. There is no possible attainable objectivity or impartiality –
another reason to abolish the BBC or degrade the civil service. The
only objective truth is what might contribute to “wealth
generation”.
Centres
of local and civic power have been denuded of resource – they might
dare to exercise taxing or planning power that a Lord Rose or Mr
Pessina would consider anti-business. And lastly, Marquand argues,
too many intellectuals, writers and academics seem reluctant to
engage in the risks of public argument. And even if they did, the
gatekeepers for expression are firmly in the hands of the
centre-right consensus. All that is left is organised religion and
when it does speak out, as it did last week, it speaks for palpably
declining congregations.
Mammon
now rules, declares Marquand. But he thinks that the rediscovery of a
richer discourse of the common good will necessarily be drawn from
religious traditions, even writing as he does as an unbeliever. The
bishops have not let him down. They cite Saint Paul’s letter to the
Philippians as an inspiration that should bind believers and
non-believers. “Whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever
is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is
commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything
worthy of praise, think about these things.” They long, they say,
for a more humane society that reflects Saint Paul’s injunction –
a better politics for a better nation.
Amen, you might say, to that.
We each have a responsibility to be well informed about the issues. We have a responsibility to question the politicians we vote for from a knowledge based vantage point. Our votes each count. We cannot abnegate responsibility. If we do, we deserve all that we get. Each of us is powerful when acting together.
This will be a critical election for all sorts of reasons. Make your voice heard above the baying of the politicians.
