I have to confess I’ve struggled to get quite as emotionally caught up in this as some people. Those of us who stand for parliament do so with an underlying notion of public service. Of course we want our party to win. And there is always personal ambition: we want to be in there, making the decisions, with our fingers on the turning of the world. But nobody would go through the five weeks of gruelling punishment, preceded by four years of selection and campaigning, preceded in turn by how ever many years of becoming involved and going through a candidate approval process, unless there was more than simply the desire for our team to win.

Nick Clegg was always honour-bound to make his decision in the nation’s best interests. Anything less would have simply ruled him unfit to be a party leader.

The only question was: what decision would be in the nation’s best interests?

I will put my cards on the table: after last year’s expenses debacle, and this year’s scandal over the Ashcroft million, electoral reform seems to me to be one of the nation’s most important and pressing concerns. The result of the General Election — no clear majority in parliament, nothing like a majority in the popular vote (Tories polled only 12% more than Lib Dems, lest we forget, but gained more than five times as many seats) — demonstrates very clearly that the public are not satisfied.

But, although pressing, electoral reform is not the most pressing concern. I do not accept the view of the scaremongerers that Britain is about to go the way of Greece. David Cameron has already had to eat his words that a hung parliament would spell economic disaster. But it is true that the economy is right at the top of the list of things that need to be fixed now, and fixed right.

A coalition with Labour was always a long-shot, and Clegg was right to honour his election pledge and talk first to the party with the most votes. But he was also right to at least attempt a deal with Labour. This was not treachery, as some of the Tory press and some of my own correspondents have suggested, but a necessary and entirely honourable step: Clegg was duty bound to explore both feasible possibilities as he decided for the United Kingdom who should be the next prime minister.

For the record, I think it would have been possible to do it. (I do not say that it would have necessarily been the best thing, but I do say that it would have been possible). Those who argued that this was undemocratic forget the very shaky ground on which they stand: Labour and the Lib Dems between them gained more than 50% of the popular vote, although, because of our misrepresentative system, this was not quite 50% of the seats in parliament. Labour certainly seemed ready to promise a much swifter, much surer route to electoral reform. And Gordon Brown nobly was willing to accept Nick Clegg’s other election promise — that, whatever happened, Brown would not continue as Prime Minister.

But it was Labour MPs themselves who made it quite clear that they had no real interest in staying in government. From the point that (then, still) government ministers went on the record in public stating this, the chances of a deal with Labour were over.

Many Lib Dem voters find the coalition with the Conservatives distasteful. I personally remained on good terms with all the candidates in the Stratford election, except for the BNP who never attended any of the debates and with whom I never spoke. But there have been instances where Tory attacks were brutal and unfounded. And we have endured the jeers and scorn of the Tory press barons for more than a generation.

It is certainly true that very few will have voted Lib Dem with the aim of putting David Cameron in government.

But Nick Clegg still had to put the nation’s interest ahead of his own. The choice between a Conservative minority government which would be almost certain to fall in recriminations within six months, in which time it would have made little real progress in tackling the economic crisis, and none at all in electoral reform, or a true Lib Dem Con coalition, was one that simply could not be made in any other way from the way it has been made.

The solution is not perfect. David Cameron could have divested himself of the lacklustre George Osborne. If having Vince Cable as chancellor was too much to swallow (though it would have pleased the nation, and the markets), Ken Clarke was waiting in the wings, the only member of Cameron’s team who had ever served in a senior role in a government. There could have been (and should have) a commitment to a referendum on true electoral reform, not merely the disproportional Alternative Vote (AV) system. If the Conservatives believe that the public has no appetite for electoral reform, then they should have agreed to a referendum on the real issue. If they were willing to accept a grudging compromise and no more, they should have offered a simple bill on AV as Labour did, and left it at that. The nation is to be put to the trouble and expense of a referendum without being allowed to vote on the real topic of discussion.

Nonetheless, the prospect of an autumn election has receded to the horizon. Cameron’s lightweight team will be strongly bolstered by 5 Lib Dem cabinet ministers, and a total of 20 Lib Dems across his ministries.

Lib Dem fortunes at the next election will almost certainly suffer, and there will equally certainly be a spate of recriminations and even member-resignations. And this is the true mark of Nick Clegg’s leadership: at personal cost, he has put the interests of the nation first.

Related posts

• We should reform now, but we cannot transform until we agree what politics is for (0)
• Enough of the talk, time for some action (0)
• Cameron promises every kind of change except actual change… (0)
• Wrong answer too late. (0)
• Responding to the BNP (0)

Back last summer, I took part in a fact-finding tour of Armenia, organised by World Vision. We spent part of one day at the museum of the Armenian Genocide. This was an atrocity which took place during and after the first world war, when, according to Armenian sources, 1.5 million died. Turkey continues to deny that a genocide took place, and, putting the figure at 300,000 and maintaining that the deaths were a result of a number of factors, but without a guiding, national Turkish attempt to destroy the Armenian people. Whichever way you look at it, one thing that both Armenians and Turks agree on is that many died from starvation and the other privations of being forcibly evicted from one part of Turkey and sent somewhere else.

Of course, nobody with any actual authority is going to pay the slightest bit of attention to what Nick Griffin says — especially now that his party has failed to find any other friends in Europe. But the rhetoric of placing people in mortal peril, and then making the most perfunctory gesture at saving them, is eerily reminiscent of the Armenian holocaust.

I have argued strongly that we need to begin to re-calibrate our language in politics. The arrival of the BNP means that we need to soften some of the jibes and insults we have tossed at each other over the years, in order to have words with which to describe their policies. We should do this in any case, simply because they bring politics into disrepute: it is time for the British political class to grow up and leave the playground behind. I don’t want to refer to Nick Griffin as purely ‘evil’. As of yet, he has not (at least, to my knowledge) organised violent attacks on people, nor has he ever had the national moral authority to make the slightest difference to how we run our courts, our police, our public services, or, most importantly, our immigration policy. But this new rhetoric leads me towards using the word ‘evil’ to describe what he is about.

In one sense, it is good that Griffin is now unmasking himself, as a pedlar of malevolent, unworkable fantasies.

But in another sense, he has taken the British national political conversation into territory it has not seen since before the Second World War.

And this is bad. Very bad indeed.

Share/Save

Related posts

• We should reform now, but we cannot transform until we agree what politics is for (0)
• The politics of hate (0)
• Telegraph may have paid £300,000 to criminals for scandal leak, it emerges (1)
• Taxpayer, voter, citizen or stakeholder? (0)
• So, should Christians vote for Christian parties? Here’s why not… (0)

It was Aristotle ((Politics, Book V)) who suggested there were six kinds of government — three good, and three bad. Good governments, he suggested, were monarchies, aristocracies and polities. Bad governments were tyrannies, oligarchies and — indeed — democracies. That’s probably an arrangement which would surprise most modern people, but Aristotle uses the words in a slightly (or entirely) different sense. A monarchy, to Aristotle, was government by a single benign ruler, whereas tyranny was a government by a single, selfish, ruler. Aristotle’s monarchy had no particular connotations of hereditary monarchy, though he probably would have naturally seen things in that light. After all, he was tutor to Alexander, who rose to power because his father was Philip of Macedon. Aristocracy, to Aristotle, was government by the few noble — that is to say, by those who were better, more virtuous, more able to govern. We would probably talk about a meritocracy. An oligarchy was government by a few who acted selfishly. A democracy was government by the commoners, acting selfishly, whereas polity was a society governed by all for the benefit of all. Or more or less. You don’t want to spend too much time in Aristotle, because he goes on to expound the importance of slavery as an institution.

Fast forward a couple of thousand years, and we see the American presidential system showing some signs of the single, benign ruler. Some would say that Tony Blair was taking us fast down that route when in office. Let’s explore that for a moment. The problem with a single, benign, ruler, is that he can still be singly, benignly wrong. It’s a brave man today who would defend the second Iraq war, but, at the time, it was clear that Tony Blair really believed it was the right thing to do. The Blair government was often accused of spin and playing games, but it was when Blair acted in good conscience and with enormous conviction that he made the greatest mistake of his premiership. Blair talked incessantly, at least in the beginning, about a stakeholder society, and this is a notion which fits well with his style of premiership. The single ruler will make the decisions, but everyone has a stake in their outcomes, and so we ought all to behave well together, because this will result in better outcomes.

The term ‘stakeholder’ betrayed — I think — more of the Blair agenda than it was intended. If you have ever used the simple business tool the stakeholder analysis, then you will know that stakeholders are categorised by their interest and their influence. Those with high interest and high influence are engaged, those with low interest and high influence are kept informed, those with low interest and low influence are, simply, ignored. In a stakeholder society, the monarch, overlord, president, executive prime-minister, or what you will, makes judgements about who he can safely ignore, and who he must assiduously court — in other words, his courtiers. Take away the ruffs and frills of the court of Elizabeth I, and you see something alarmingly close to the stakeholder economy which existed under the government of Tony Blair in the time of Elizabeth II.

I suspect nobody alive today would defend aristocracy as a form of government if that meant allowing hereditary peers to lead us. But our civil service — a shadow government if ever there was one — is a meritocracy: a self-selecting government by the few brightest and best. We could argue about how bright and how best civil servants really are, but their entire framework, recruitment process and rewards system is designed to promote the most able at the expense of the least able. Given the amount of power which senior civil-servants wield, we should accept that, at least to some extent, we live in that very aristocracy.

But think again. An oligarchy is government by the few acting selfishly. But this is exactly the way in which we behave when we describe ourselves as ‘the taxpayer’, at least, if we do so to distinguish ourselves from benefit-claimants, asylum seekers, children in school, students in college, or pensioners. I’m always astonished when I hear people describe themselves in those terms, but I hear it often. Do we really believe that payment of taxes makes us more able or deserving of being allowed to run the country? And, if we do so, do we really want to make money the measure of all things? One would hope not. But, in the light of the recent MP expenses and second-jobs scandals, we give a strong impression that the only thing we are looking for in our politicians is cheap, value-for-money, bargain-basement politics. I don’t, won’t, and never have defended MPs who pilfered the public purse for personal profit. But the more we focus on that particular aspect of their conduct, the more we push ourselves into the mould of a tax-payer oligarchy.

We protest, strongly, if anyone tries to suggest that democracy is not the best thing there can be. Certainly, as a Liberal-Democrat, I would strongly assert democracy over monarchy, aristocracy and oligarchy. But perhaps we should side with Aristotle a little. When voters vote selfishly, we see the tyranny of the 51% majority. Voters can arbitrarily choose parties — such as the BNP — whose programme involves the removal of the rights of minorities. Voters can arbitrarily vote to punish the very wealthy, or, indeed, the very poor. As elections come up, politicians may posture on taking away the benefit rights of single mothers, or gypsies, or the under 25s who appear to be not working hard enough to find a diminishing number of jobs. If we see ourselves purely as voters, and we vote on a purely selfish basis, we discover very quickly the limits of the social contract.

The liberal-democracy in which we live, or, at least, the one in which some of us live, is made up not of stakeholders nor taxpayers nor voters, but of citizens. It is the Aristotelian ‘polity’ — a state where all participate in governance, for the benefit of all. Our participation is irrespective of the amount of taxes we pay, and also irrespective of the extent to which we contribute towards the particular kind of society that our overlord believes is best for us. Whether we have high interest or low interest in the government’s favourite programme, we can, and should, play an active role in our public life. And we should do so irrespective of whether a particular politician promises us personal advantage over our neighbours.

Taxpayer, voter, citizen, stakeholder. Just words. But their use in the daily dialogue of media and politics fundamentally shapes our perceptions. Do we care most if our MPs claim more or less expensive, or do we care most (without ignoring their expenses) whether or not they are good MPs? Do we care most that politicians offer us more, or do we care about the general good of society? Are we content to let our ‘betters’ run the country, while we enjoy the Olympic Games, Big Brother and low food prices (circuses and bread, thus)? To what extent are we prepared to use our voices and our votes to protect the unpopular — the group which is always the most vulnerable in a democracy.

We should choose our words carefully.

Share/Save

Related posts

• Responding to the BNP (0)
• Are single issue parties the answer? Not exactly… (0)
• Who now can claim that the Daily Telegraph helped democracy? (0)
• Telegraph may have paid £300,000 to criminals for scandal leak, it emerges (1)
• Michael Martin shows remarkable honour (0)

When I was sixteen, I once told my (then) girlfriend “I really hate mods”. Mods, at that time, were not first year Oxford University exams, nor modifications to video games or other software, but were the fashion alternative to ‘rockers’. “Oh dear,” she said. “I don’t hate anyone”. We later split up, and while I, through many pathways and byways, became a politician, she successfully pursued her dream of being a diplomat. Of course, I didn’t remotely ‘hate’ mods. I didn’t even really know what mods were, and it turned out later that some of my friends were mods. But, at the moment, it seemed to establish me more as a ‘rocker’ if I said I hated them.

Many years later, I was having dinner with my ex-fiancée (not the same person as the former girlfriend) and another friend. I mentioned that I was going into politics, and, knowing that she was a skilled and passionate person, I asked if she would consider running my campaign. “Oh.” She said. “Which party?”. “The Liberal Democrats,” I replied. For a moment a shadow appeared to pass across the sun (which was impossible, because we were in a Chinese restaurant in Soho where the sun never came). All the Oxford-London fell from her voice, as she said in horror, with as deep a Rhondda valley accent as I’ve ever heard from her: “The LIBERALS?” She appeared to rise to her feet (though she has since assured me that she did not), as she said again, in a voice which seemed to fill the restaurant with centuries of astonished grief and hurt. “THE LIBERALS?”

She later confided in me that it wasn’t the Liberals she hated (we’re actually the Liberal-Democrats), but the Conservatives. She later went off and joined the Labour party, and became a Labour parliamentary and European candidate. We’re still friends, and, no, this was not why we split up, which was, in any case, ten years earlier.

Especially in politics, we use the word ‘hate’ rather freely. But there are times when our distaste for our foes is really no more than ‘I hate Marmite’, and times when it is rather more. Ann Widdecombe famously said that she went into politics to fight socialism. ((She also, equally famously, appeared on Doctor Who in support of Simon Pegg’s John Saxon, aka The Master. If she had waited long enough, she could have joined Tony Blair’s New Labour to fight socialism.)) I always found this odd. If she had said ‘to fight communism’ I could have understood it. But socialism? Really? I remember that hatred between the Socialist Workers Party and the National Front in the 70s. And, of course, the undisguised hatred of the National Front for anyone who did not look exactly like them. As Britain, we somehow learned during the 1970s that hate based on race, then known as ‘racialism’, but now known by the catchier term ‘racism’, was simply wrong. But, in 2001, it suddenly became fashionable and acceptable to hate one particular category of foreigner, the ‘bogus’ asylum seeker. It didn’t take long for the term ‘bogus asylum seeker’ to be melded in the popular conscious with, simply, ‘asylum seeker’, so that anyone who came to these shores fleeing persecution could look forward to disdain, disgust and derision from those they met.

It’s always easier to get people to do things if you can stir up strong passions. Hatred of the BNP will doubtless bring many people into politics over the next few years. But hate is a uniquely destructive attitude. It causes us to obsess over our enemies, to see conspiracy theories, to misinterpret innocence, to categorise other people into the hated group simply because they look or sound similar. Hate causes us to mistrust, to pre-judge and to misjudge. It develops double standards in ourselves, which become embedded in a persona of hypocrisy. It causes us to skew our own positions. When we hate, we lose sight first of truth, then of honesty, and, finally, as the rot really sets in, of plausibility. We see the entire world as a battle between what we hate and what we use against that which we hate. As times moves on, those who refuse to take sides garner even more of our malice than those who are the original object of our detestation.

Hatred twists the most normal, sensible people into a horrific parody of themselves. I’ve found things written about me on websites, or said about me in meetings, by people who have never met me, never heard me speak, and (possibly) never read a word I’ve written. And yet, simply because I belong to one party rather than another, they see me as fair game for whatever they choose to throw. But these same people are, in their ordinary lives, quiet, sensible, law-abiding, the kind of person you would be quite happy to see as a magistrate or a school-teacher, or (until you found out), your town councillor.

Not all politicians are like this. In fact, it seems to me that it is more often supporters of politicians rather than politicians themselves who pursue hatred as a vocation. After I first stood for public office — as a councillor, in a seat I couldn’t win, and didn’t want to if I did — the Labour councillor who did win came up to me and said ‘Well done lad’. After the 2001 General Election, the Tory MP who won the seat came up to me and told me that he thought it was highly likely I would become an MP sooner or later, and gave me some advice on my campaign. Not sneering, measly-mouthed advice, but sensible, valuable advice, which he had learned himself, and which I have taken to heart.

All politics is made up of temporary alliances of people who agree on some important things, and disagree on others. Part of the reason we are locked into a seemingly endless cycle of boom-and-bust electoral landslides in the UK is that our parties have become virtual armed-camps. The rhetoric of Prime Minister’s Question Time makes this quite apparent. You cannot pretend a man is the devil one day, and then plan with him how the country could be served and improved the next.

Whenever I talk about this, people start to be nervous. “If we cannot hate, should we just roll over and let our opponents have whatever they want”, they start to say. Of course not. But we need to rediscover our vocabulary. We can disagree, dispute, rebutt. We can dismantle a flawed policy, discredit a misleading piece of information, decry an unworthy attitude. At times we may denounce an opponent who has, for example, claimed for a mortgage that did not exist. Not hating barely has an impact on the range of means by which we can oppose. You can love and respect someone, and yet be quite clear they are entirely wrong. You can recognise the good in someone’s motives, and yet also recognise they are completely incompetent. And you should. The duty of opposition is to oppose. It is an honourable duty, and serves the public good. But no good is served by hating them ((that is, hating a person — it is entirely right to hate injustice, hate people trafficking, hate cancer, and so on)).

It is time to take the malice out of British politics.

Share/Save

Related posts

• In the nation’s interests (1)
• Wrong answer too late. (0)
• Which David they choose will determine the campaign we fight (0)
• Are single issue parties the answer? Not exactly… (0)
• Tricky moment for the conscience party (0)

Today, the Equality and Human Rights Commission has begun a legal challenge to the BNP for its constitution and membership criteria. Speaking on Radio 4′s PM programme, the BNP’s Griffin claimed that his party was exempt under sections 26 and 27 of the Equality Act 2006. However, the Commission has pointed out in its letter the BNP does not satisfy the criteria for a membership organisation which exists for the benefit of its members.

Griffin, I think, failed to register the irony of his remarks. He declared unequivocally that the British National Party existed for the benefit of the ethnic minority English people, who were discriminated against by society. First off, English people are not an ethnic minority. According to the 2001 census, 85.7% of the population are the native ethnicity referred to as ‘White British’, while the CIA Factbook suggests that 77% of the UK population are English. But, rather more ironically, does Griffin’s party purport to represent the interests of English people, or, as the name suggests, British people? If British, then it should surely include all those with British citizenship. Or else he should be required to change its name to the ‘White British Ethnic Party’, since he can scarcely claim that his party is a ‘national’ party, if its aim is to exclude a part of the nation. If he really means only the white English, he should change the name to ‘White English Ethnic Party’.

During his Euro-election night speeches, Griffin suggested that people coming from other cultures to Britain should be required to adopt our culture, or should be required to leave.

Let me therefore replay this challenge to the BNP. Britain is a multi-racial, multi-cultural society with laws protecting all for the benefit of all.

If the BNP is unwilling to adopt our culture and obey our laws, its leaders and members should simply leave the country. I am not strictly sure which countries would welcome them.

But, there’s always Rockall.

Share/Save

Related posts

• Responding to the BNP (0)
• The politics of hate (0)
• Telegraph may have paid £300,000 to criminals for scandal leak, it emerges (1)
• Taxpayer, voter, citizen or stakeholder? (0)
• So, should Christians vote for Christian parties? Here’s why not… (0)

1 Christian parties do not stay Christian for long
We don’t have a history of Christian parties in Britain, but they have lots of them in mainland Europe. The problem is, that it’s fairly hard to identify what the ‘Christian’ component of the Christian Democrats is. This is a problem which has particularly taxed the Dutch, whose own struggles with ‘Christian’ parties that were no longer Christian enough, resulted in a baffling 23 distinct Christian parties during the last hundred or so years. A fascinating timeline of their mergers, splits and acquisitions is presented in this Wikipedia article. Christianity grew up as a counter-culture within the Roman state, and flourished despite intense persecution for around 300 years. It was Constantine, the only emperor to be proclaimed in Britain, who proclaimed toleration for Christians in 313 AD, followed later by the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the empire. We can argue backwards and forwards about the real impact of this, but, certainly, by the fall of the Roman empire, a great many practices, symbols and philosophies from the pagan world had been adopted into Christianity, and the track record of supposedly Christian emperors was, to say the least, patchy, when it came to implementing the teaching of Jesus Christ.

Clearly, in the modern world, no Christian party is going to advocate persecution of non-Christian minorities, or crusades to recover lost ‘Christian’ lands, but the history of a too-close union between Christianity and political power is that the, quite soon, Christian regimes and Christian parties lose the Christian distinctive, and become just like other regimes and other parties. For Christians — such as myself — this creates huge problems. Get into any argument with atheists about the existence of God, and they are certain to bring up the Crusades and the Inquisition as examples of the malign impact of religion on the world. The solution to this problem is to challenge them to identify exactly how the philosophy and practices of the Crusades and the Inquisition were derived from the teachings of Jesus. In fact, they derived almost exclusively from the philosophy and practices of the Roman empire. But, at this point, we, as Christians, need to step away, and accept that applying the label ‘Christian’ to really any brand of politics creates enormous risks for the faith itself.

Over the last years, we have seen the spectacle of American presidential candidates scrabbling to present how ‘Christian’ they are. But, with the exception of Jimmy Carter (and, we hope, Obama), their actions once inside the White House have shown no particular Christian influence. If the only purpose of having ‘Christian’ parties is to bring out a captive vote, which can then be treated in a cavalier fashion, just as Tony Blair was able to treat the left-wing vote, then we would be better off without such parties.

2 Christians are called to be involved in mainstream society
Jesus called his followers to be salt and light in society. Through the pages of the New Testament, we see the early Christians engaged in all manner of ordinary, secular jobs. One of them was a city administrator. At no point do any of the New Testament writers suggest that Christians should distance themselves from secular politics. Going a little further back, the book of Daniel presents a clear picture of godly action by a civil servant and later prime minister in a thoroughly pagan regime.
The moment that we create Christian parties, we put a dilemma before Christian voters: should we vote for the best candidate, or should we vote for the Christian party. In some cases we may even be faced with the challenge of voting for the best candidate who is a Christian in a mainstream party, or the Christian party candidate.
Great Christian politicians such as Gladstone and Wilberforce were Christians active in ordinary mainstream parties. Their influence was much greater because they were involved in regular politics.
At the European elections, which traditionally favour minor parties, less than a quarter of a million people voted for the Christian parties, and their average vote was just 1.64%. But even if all regular church-goers had voted for them, they would not have attracted more than 10% of the vote. Of course, with a low turn-out, as we saw for the last election, 10% of the total electorate, if every church-goer voted, would be 20% of the actual vote — enough to put a Christian MEP into every region, but nowhere near enough to make those MEPs any more than an irritation, in the way of UKIP or the BNP.
For Christian politicians to have an impact on the society in which they live, they need to work with non-Christians. Which, of course, is exactly the way of things in business, the public sector, and most of the voluntary sector. And that means being in parties made up of many kinds of people.

3 Protest votes of any kind do not work
And that brings me to my third point. Everyone likes to make a protest, and the protest vote has a long tradition in British democracy. But not a very healthy tradition. Labour voters protested in their droves at the Euro election by simply not bothering to vote. The result? Two BNP MEPs were elected. And, rather worse for Christians, these BNP MEPs actually claim to speak for Christians. As I have pointed out in a previous article, they have no credentials for doing so, and they have no track record which would support it. However, the result of all the protest voting that took place is that the BNP got seats, whereas the Christian parties got none. I struggle to believe that all the people who voted for non-mainstream parties were happy to see the BNP elected. Nonetheless, the English Democrats, the Christian parties, and Socialist Labour were each worth an average of around one and a half percent, with the others all together probably worth another couple of percent between them. Even if these votes had been evenly distributed across the three mainstream parties, it would have been enough to keep the BNP out.

I am, personally, a committed Christian, and I joined a mainstream political party because I believe that faith does matter in politics. I certainly wouldn’t agree with anyone who suggests that you should keep religion out of politics. This is a frankly baffling and illogical perspective: why should we arbitrarily reject one part of our society from having a role in our common life. We might as well suggest that scientists should keep out of politics, or musicians, or dog-owners, or people who drive particular kinds of motor-cars, or people who do not drive at all. But, just as I would advise against a ‘Science party’, or a ‘Musicians’ party’, or any other kind of single-issue or special-interest party, I would advise Christians who want to have an impact through the democratic process against Christian parties. No party can possibly have a monopoly on Christians, nor can any party guarantee its future to the extent that it can be sure it will always behave in a scrupulously Christian way. History — and mainland European politics — is littered with too many examples of people who believed passionately in what they were doing, but were also entirely wrong.

Share/Save

Related posts

• Responding to the BNP (0)
• Are single issue parties the answer? Not exactly… (0)
• Why Gordon Brown should watch Doctor Who (0)
• The politics of hate (0)
• Telegraph may have paid £300,000 to criminals for scandal leak, it emerges (1)

But a lot of people were secretly very pleased.

Should we be? Should they have egged the BNP?

Although it feels terribly emotionally satisfying to have the leader of Britain’s most odious party subjected to public humiliation, what we have actually done is play into their hands. Griffin will go back to his supporters and tell them how we (the public in general) denied him his rights. What happened will exactly confirm everything he is telling people. The BNP want martyrs, and they will do whatever they can to be seen to be unjustly persecuted.

Hitler used similar techniques. The criminal actions of his followers were not done in secret in order to shift blame elsewhere. Rather, he used opposition to his advantage.

We must give Griffin no such advantages.

Would any newspaper have given sympathetic coverage to Griffin’s press conference? Not remotely. Was it then necessary to prevent it from going ahead? No.

For better or for worse, we, the nation, have elected two extreme-right wing racist MEPs. I say we, because everyone who did not vote is complicit in their success, and everyone who has contributed to the disrepute under which mainstream politics now stands — be they journalist, politician, or pub pundit — has contributed to the voter apathy which allowed the BNP in.

We have given the BNP a platform, and we cannot legitimately take it away from them.

But we do not need to. The easiest way of destroying the BNP’s credibility among those it is trying to woo is to let its leaders speak out. Their racist diatribe is not just offensive, it is also nonsense. Put Griffin on the spot a few times, and he will discover that the sharp tools of journalism are far too penetrating for his limited defences.

There is a poetic justice in allowing the BNP to discredit itself. And it will, it we do not play into its hands. If we prevent them from speaking, it will give the impression they have something to say that is so potent we do not dare allow it. By permitting them to speak — which we must, if we are not to abandon the very democratic principles on which we stand — we give them exactly the rope they need to hang themselves.

And we should.

Share/Save

Related posts

• Telegraph may have paid £300,000 to criminals for scandal leak, it emerges (1)
• Are single issue parties the answer? Not exactly… (0)
• The politics of hate (0)
• Taxpayer, voter, citizen or stakeholder? (0)
• Responding to the BNP (0)

First, we must put the BNP success into context. If they were a worthwhile party with a positive contribution to make, we would no doubt be congratulating them on two seats. But they are two seats out of 69, and the BNP managed to attract just 6.2% of the national vote — less than the total of other minor parties. Even if you add the BNP vote to the UKIP vote (something which UKIP would strongly protest), 75% of the population still voted for pro-European, not anti-European parties. Looked at on its own, 93.8% of people voted against the BNP.

Second, we must understand that the BNP result is an artefact of our particular form of Euro-election system. When given the choice of systems, Britain opted for the D’Hondt system — the least proportional of all the ‘proportional’ systems on offer, and the closest available choice to the UK’s standard museum-piece first past the post system. Critics of proportional representation are bound to be saying that the BNP would not have got seats under a true first-past-the-post system. But, equally, they would have gained no seats under the Single Transferable Vote (STV) system which most believe to be the fairest and most obvious — at least to the voter. Under STV, each voter ranks the proposed candidates in order, until they have no further preference. Given the make up of the vote last week, it is fairly clear that the BNP would have picked up almost no second or third preference votes. Far from allowing the extremists in, STV would have kept them out.

Third, we must recognise that we have only ourselves to blame for this debacle. British politics has functioned on a constant diet of back-biting and sneering, both from the media, and by politicians themselves. We have lambasted each other as incompetent, destructive, and sometimes even as ‘evil’. Now that we are facing electoral success by a party that is neither democratic nor, in any ordinary sense of the word, benevolent, we need to re-calibrate our language.

I grew up in the Thatcher years, when we were inclined to refer to her party as ‘fascist’. But they were not fascist, and never would become it. The Conservative Home website has a long blog & comments denigrating the Lib-Dems, and accusing us of being ‘liars’. Lib-Dems are not liars. We tell the truth the way we see it—as we should do in a free democracy. Tories may not agree. But that does not make us liars. Everyone has been lambasting Gordon Brown. I was on a TV show on Sunday with a Conservative candidate who, before the show, accused Brown of destroying the British economy. Brown did not destroy the British economy. And, no matter how expedient it might be for us to suggest that he did, to do so plays into the hands of the real fascists.

Likewise, spurred on by the media, the public has been educated to accuse all politicians of being liars, cheats and free-loaders. Journalists may write tongue-in-cheek, but the man in the street believes it to be true. But even politicians who have been found to have cheated on expenses are only part-dishonest. I should certainly not like to see them returned to the House of Commons, and I believe that they should have cleared the air by resigning. But that does not mean that Mrs Kirkbride and Ms Blears have not been working hard for their constituents for a very long time.

Contrast this with the BNP. Just scratch a BNP leaflet or website, and you find deceit right beneath the surface. Dig deeper, and lies and violence, as well as the arbitrary suspension of the human rights of those of whom they disapprove, are written right through their rotten hearts. As a committed Christian, I find the way in which Nick Griffin profaned the name of Jesus Christ in his speech on Sunday night to be an abomination. He claims to be speaking for Christian values and a Christian country, but everything he stands for diametrically opposed to the teaching of the carpenter from Nazareth.

So where should we go from here? The BNP know exactly where they are going. They will use every opportunity to milk the European system for funds, publicity and credibility. They will demand air-time as their democratic right, even though what they will be advocating is the dismantling of democracy. Their strategy has been building up to this for years. Why else would they contest European elections, when their whole ethos is anti-European and anti-internationalist? Their smug victory was bitter enough, but the aftermath will be far worse.

Our response, then, must be equally coherent and consistent. Otherwise, they will build on this to put them in a position of even more appalling strength at the next election.
First, the forces for good in politics must reinvent and reinvigorate themselves. No matter how much they are depending on the income, Members and Ministers who have been irretrievably tarnished by the expenses scandal should go. Parliament should vote soon to create a mechanism for them to resign immediately without loss of their resettlement grants — no matter how much that might irk the public — in return for their swift exit. If this is genuinely impossible, and I do not really understand why it should be, then they should announce now that they will be standing down. We do not need public humiliation and hand wringing — that would only serve the BNP and other extremists — but we do need action.

For us, the candidates and voters for the new parliament, we must bind ourselves not only to a code of conduct in regard to our expenses, but also in regard to our use of language and our conduct of business. The bickering, jeering atmosphere of the House of Commons, since it was first put on radio and subsequently television, has done a great deal to undermine public trust. We must simply stop backbiting, stop running negative, personal campaigns, not digging up any possible piece of dirt (proven or otherwise) to vilify another individual whose only genuine crime is daring to stand for a party not our own.

Second, we need a new, albeit unwritten, contract between the media, the public, and the politicians. Newspapers are, of course, under tremendous pressure, since their means of revenue generation has been dramatically eroded with the rise of the internet. It is unsurprising that they have leapt to whatever means of pumping up sales and increasing publicity that they can find. But politics is not the same as reality TV, and the house under Big Ben is not the same as the house of Big Brother. The constant caustic attacks on everyone who dares to put their head above the parapet are burning away our national life.

I am not suggesting that our papers and broadcasters should become anodyne, saccharine, mouthing platitudes for the sake of the ill-educated. But the duty to hold government to account must be balanced with a duty to contextualise, to explain, and, above all, to propose workable alternatives.

Third, we need to redefine our national project. Since the 1980s, the direction of Great Britain has been — almost without a voice of dissent — maximised prosperity, at the expense of all other things. Anybody speaking out against greater prosperity would have been seen as a lunatic.

I am not, of course, extolling the virtues of poverty. I’ve been poor, and I’ve been rich, and I know which one I would pick any day of the week. But prosperity at all costs has placed an intolerable burden on government to deliver what is not in its gift. We relentlessly relaxed rules on lending, reduced supervision of the financial sector, made it ever easier for people to borrow and enter bankruptcy, and we made every possible arrangement to encourage people in the belief that you are what you own, and your only worth is financial worth.

The personal tragedy of Gordon Brown is that he was remarkably adept at stoking up the prosperity when the world was in boom, so that Britain was one of the greatest long term beneficiaries of the decade of plenty. And he has been — at least as far as international commentators are concerned — remarkably good at stitching together coalitions to limit the damage of the recession. But the public have no patience for this. The public want ongoing, endless prosperity, of the kind they have got used to. Even if the rest of the world was collapsing while Britain endured a mild slump, the public would still be calling for Brown’s blood, because we as a nation, and he, while chancellor, have programmed ourselves to see the success of a government solely in economic terms.

I do not intend to dwell on wasted opportunities. We are where we are. But unless we define our national programme in other terms — call it social capital, if you are on the left, or call it community spirit, if you are on the right, or call it spiritual renewal, if you are from a faith background — then we will inevitably and periodically return in each economic cycle to a point where the electorate believe the government has entirely failed them, see no prospect of better from the other mainstream parties, and are willing to entertain the claims of those who are quick to point the finger at scapegoats, and quick to advocate a simple ‘make sense’ plan, which (in fact) will not result in the return of the prosperity that the public seeks, and will further destroy the threads that hold the fabric of society together.

It is time for those of us who believe in a radically different agenda from that put forward by the BNP to begin long term, effective and altruistic political action.

Time to stand up and be counted.

Share/Save

Related posts

• In the nation’s interests (1)
• Decade of distrust reaches an end (0)
• Telegraph may have paid £300,000 to criminals for scandal leak, it emerges (1)
• So, should Christians vote for Christian parties? Here’s why not… (0)
• Are single issue parties the answer? Not exactly… (0)

But the truth is, Nick Griffin is not a Christian, and he appears to have very little idea of what a Christian is like. I’m left wondering if he has ever met a Christian, and, if he has, has ever taken the trouble to ask them what they believe.

Lots of people of Griffin-like persuasion try to hide behind the argument that the Bible ‘can be interpreted in lots of ways’. But this is utter rubbish, and people who make this kind of argument show that they really have little interest in interpreting the Bible at all.

A bit less than 2,000 years ago a man called Jesus, from Nazareth, announced an entirely new deal. His teaching included love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you, keep forgiving. His illustrative stories includes the famous story of the Good Samaritan — deliberately constructed to challenge deep seated racism. He mixed with the outcasts of society.

Not long afterwards, the followers of Jesus were named ‘Christian’ — initially a derogatory term. It was more than three hundred years before Christianity was accepted as a state-recognised religion. In its formative years, Christianity made no claims to ‘own’ any state or country.

If Griffin had bothered to read the New Testament, he would find a book which urges that we do not judge each other, but he would also find a book which both judged and condemned everything that he stands for.

Normally, on that basis, I would not presume to accuse or judge any politician on Christian standards. But by presenting himself as a voice for ‘Christian values’, Griffin brings himself under the full and heavy condemnation reserved by Jesus of Nazareth for hypocrites.

Griffin, you do not speak for us, we utterly repudiate what you stand for. In future, simply cease from trying to attribute your racist rubbish to anything connected with Jesus Christ or the faith he founded.

Share/Save

Related posts

• So, should Christians vote for Christian parties? Here’s why not… (0)
• Responding to the BNP (0)
• Blair’s Faith Move Misguided (0)
• The Lion, the Box and the Hobbit (and a Wizard) (0)
• Ten settings that love books (0)

Reform is long over due, and the question is not really any more whether it will take place, but how far it will go. At the one end, David Cameron would like to change as little as possible and shift the bulk of changes away from MP remuneration. At the other end, persons such as myself believe it is high time for a fair voting system, a ban on MP second jobs, an expenses system which pays genuine expenses and nothing more, public accommodation for MPs, and an outright ban on profiting from the public purse. These are largely the views shared by Nick Clegg and Vince Cable, names which are curiously untarnished by the current crisis, and who therefore doubly should be listened to.

Reform is all very well (and, very, very essential), but we are missing something more important and more profound. Even if the Daily Telegraph had only been able to point to light bulbs, trouser presses, scotch eggs and the costs of genuine mortgages on second homes which had never been flipped, where the mortgage arrangements had been made to place the least burden on the public purse — even if this had been the case, many people who still have been very angry.

As a general rule, people are angry at politicians, and (in my experience) even angrier at people who are trying to get elected as politicians but who have not yet succeeded. Last year a man stopped me and asked me if I was opposed to some local piece of Tory nonsense. I said I was. This did not satisfy him. “Would you be opposed to it in all possible circumstances?” He asked. I asked him what he meant by that. He insisted that I give him what he called a ‘straight answer’. I tried to explain to him that he could probably come up with some kind of circumstance in which I would change my view, but that I was, as things were, completely opposed, and in any probable circumstance, likely to remain so. He wasn’t at all satisfied, and told me that it was typical of politicians not to give a ‘straight answer’.

But the truth is, I gave him a straight answer straight away. He then changed the question to the point at which no meaningful answer could be given. Why? Possibly he’d seen Paxman do this on television, but, deep down, I think he was secretly disappointed that I had given him a straight answer, and wanted to find some form of the question for which there could be no straight answer, which would then justify his belief that, if I was in politics, I must be trying to trick him.

The funny thing was, this was a man who had never voted, and probably has not voted since.

Do we somehow, for some cathartic sociological reason, need a class of people who are always in the wrong, no matter what they say? Now that people are uncomfortable about sexual, racial, gender, disability or religious stereotyping, are we down to the ultimate outcasts, who can comfortably be blamed in all circumstances without the risk of the critic being criticised for his criticism?

There must surely be more to it than that.

I went to have a meeting about the budget a few weeks ago, with none other than Vince Cable. The first thing he said was that MPs really don’t get to comment on the budget. The budget is set by the government, and either accepted or rejected as a single piece of legislation. Here was the man who probably (and by popular agreement) understands more about our economy than anyone else in Britain, and yet he can have no useful input in setting the budget which is the government’s fundamental economic instrument.

The truth is that parliament is still locked into a medieval mindset, where the will of the crown is put forwards by legislation, and the only restraint on the power of the crown is also legislation. Therefore, all that parliament can do is make laws. In practice, the group in parliament with the greatest number of votes also gets to be the government, which has essentially limitless executive powers (since we have no written constitution), except as limited by parliament’s legislation, or, more likely, by the constraints of time, money, and a guess about what will play well with the electorate.

But very few people, when they talk to would-be MPs on the doorstep, enquire about what legislation they are thinking of passing. Rather, they want to know what they will do if they are in government. This is touching, but fanciful. Most MPs will never be in government, because, even if their party wins a majority, they themselves will be required to play the part of more-or-less loyal backbenchers, or possibly and at best, after the modern fashion, junior ministers who are a sort of lower management between cabinet and civil servants.

Is this really what we want? We are frequently told that the real work of parliament happens in committees, but this is not really the case. In the European parliament this is much more true, but in Westminster, at least in recent years, it seems that committees only have power to embarrass the government, which can still push through its programme if it wants to.

Those who advocate our ‘winner takes all’ style of government claim that it makes for strong governments, and anything else makes for weak government. But this is not borne out by history. Rather, what we saw with both the Thatcher and Blair governments, is that they won initially with big majorities and a huge amount of enthusiasm to unite Britain, seize the day, and do what must be done. But, as their time in office progressed, they gradually ran out of ideas. Thatcher’s reign ended in the debacle of the poll tax, and Blair, though he had the sense to get out while the going was good, would have finished up in the double crisis that Gordon Brown now finds himself in. With nothing to renew them, governments run out of good people, and so are forced to put progressively less suitable (but politically sound) people into key positions. Instead of the campaigning Clare Short, and then the (largely famous because of his father) Hilary Benn, we now have Douglas Alexander as minister for international development. Peter Mandelson, so closely identified with the original Blair victory, has wandered in and out of government, finally finding his way into the Lords. Estelle Morris, the last Secretary of State for Education that anyone can remember, quit the job because she didn’t feel up to it. John Prescott had to go. And so on. I don’t particularly mourn the loss of these people (well, perhaps Estelle Morris a little bit), because, by and large, I feel they were essentially bad at their jobs. But the bright constellation of Blair’s inner circle is now dimmed. Instead of prudent Gordon Brown we now have Alistair Darling, instead of the bright Blair smile we now have dull Gordon. Thatcher’s mob fared no better. By the time John Major came to office (but not, as was often pointed out, to power), there were very few left who could command the public’s respect.

And yet, parliament ought to have been able to attract the brightest and the best from all walks of life. So how come we don’t seem to be able to put together a half decent government?

It is high time for the British system to be transformed. We don’t run an empire any more. We don’t have local landowners representing the interests of their illiterate tenants. We are not trying to hold back the power of the barons, or of an unruly monarch with a penchant for raising taxes to fund more battle ships. Our system is full of checks and balances, but they are largely checks on the wrong things, and balances to forces which no longer exist.

Ask most voters to explain the way in which the Lords, the Commons, the Crown and the Courts interrelate, and they will look at you baffled. But this is not because voters are uninformed, uninterested or unintelligent. The system itself is ludicrously complicated, functions poorly, is hopelessly inefficient, and, as we have too often seen, results in the misapplication of poorly drafted legislation for a result far from the original intention. No wonder voters are apathetic. It would be like asking them to vote on who should drive a train that has no engine, or who should wash the dishes when there is no water.

There is now unprecedented energy in Britain for the debate on what politics is for. But we seem intent on diverting it into a discussion of whether the BNP will benefit from the protest vote, and how poorly Labour might do in a year’s time. These are interesting, to be sure, but bring us no closer to the fundamental reforms without which the last month in politics has been no more than an exercise in mass prudery.

Share/Save

Related posts

• In the nation’s interests (1)
• Enough of the talk, time for some action (0)
• Cameron’s False Step (0)
• Cameron promises every kind of change except actual change… (0)
• Telegraph may have paid £300,000 to criminals for scandal leak, it emerges (1)