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.

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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.

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A government of principle should have given these rights whether or not they were popular simply because they were right. But now the government has been forced to see that the public does care about rewarding honourable service honourably.

Let us hope that — in these crisis stricken days — Great Britain will rediscover those values of honour for which it was once known the world over. Britain is great not by being an uncompromising fortress against the world, but by paying its debts.

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Michael Martin could easily have clung on. By common agreement, the major parties never put up candidates to contest the Speaker’s seat, so he could have carried on drawing his MP’s salary and expenses long after the last of his critics had fallen by the way side. Instead, he has chosen to begin to turn the tide of public trust. Martin is not Poseidon, and does not rule the waves. But neither is he Canute. His example will put pressure on other MPs to face reality and either announce that they are standing down at the election — as Douglas Hogg has done — or stand down right away, as some surely should do.

As I said right at the beginning of this crisis, as long as MPs pretend that all are equally guilty, the question of trust cannot be resolved. Some MPs have done nothing wrong. Even if they claimed for expenses that the public might not like, they did so entirely within the rules and without any profit to themselves. Some of them have been ridiculed or lambasted in the press. This is simply unfair and wrong. Instead of calling ‘shame on you’, we, the public, should perhaps be saying ‘shame on us’. But other MPs have clearly played the system to leave them with money in their pockets at the end of the day. Even if this was within the rules, it is clearly wrong. The point of expenses is that they reimburse, not that they enrich. Some MPs who will coincidentally become richer as a result of the way property prices have changed have announced that they will return any profits to the taxpayer. This is honourable. But those who ‘flipped’ their second homes, or bought dilapidated properties, did them up at the taxpayer’s expense, and then sold them on at a profit, must not be allowed to get away with simply paying the money back. Even if it was within the letter of the rules, they knew that what they were doing was far, far removed from anything that could be justified to the electorate. They should never have been able to justify it to their own consciences. And there have been MPs who have engaged in behaviour which bears all the hallmarks of fraud against the taxpayer.

Just as Michael Martin has taken the honourable route and left, MPs who have played the system, or who have claimed dishonestly, should resign their seats now. Just as MPs seemed unanimous in calling for the Speaker to go, they should now — if they have done such things — be willing to go themselves.

MPs who have claimed extravagantly — for swimming pools, tennis courts, moats, and so-on, need to examine themselves. Douglas Hogg is at one end of the scale — whether or not his claim was within the rules, the ownership of a moat is an extravagance that the public should never have been required to fund. At the other extreme are MPs who have simply bought needed items at a higher price than most of us would be willing to pay. Who should decide their fate? The answer, of course, is the electorate. Those who recognise that they really cannot justify their actions can take Hogg’s route. Those who believe that they can will have the opportunity to do so at the General Election.

But before we have a General Election, I believe firmly that we should have a Special Election — a single day on which all of the by-elections triggered by MPs taking the honourable route — the Michael Martin route — and resigning their seats are fought. Contesting all of these on one day would be cathartic for Britain. In my view, it is a necessary and essential step in the process of restoring the public trust without which there is simply no democracy, only a kleptocracy — government by thieves.

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There are three things which, if I hear them trotted out just one more time, are going to make me scream. MP after MP (though not all MPs, but more on that in a moment) have been lining up to put forward the same three messages which — lets face it — have little connection with the actual truth.

First, and I’ve talked about this before, “It’s the system which made us do it”. I can’t understand how anyone intelligent enough to be elected to parliament can also believe that all the rest of us are too dim to see straight through this one. The Sun has characterised this as very close to ‘we were only following orders’. But, actually, it’s worse. Nobody ordered MPs to play the system for their own profit. Nobody told them that their careers would be blighted if they didn’t play along with the rest. No matter how badly the expenses system was constructed (and it, or an earlier version, has been in place long enough before it fell into such disrepute), an honest parliamentarian could behave entirely honestly within the system. I’m going to raise the example of Jack Straw again. I’m doing this because he is not a member of my party, and therefore I can have no advantage in holding him up. Straw made a mistake with his expenses, discovered it himself, and paid the money back himself. True, the system did not prevent Straw from getting it wrong. But it also did not prevent him from putting it right. I fully believe that, once all the facts are out, it will turn out that there are many other genuinely honourable members who have also behaved entirely correctly, no matter what the system did.

And that brings me to the second line. MPs are lining up to say that ‘all of us are guilty’. This might sound extremely altruistic — a sort of ‘I am Spartacus’ moment. But, in truth, this is a trick that small children learn in school. If everyone says ‘we all did it’, then nobody gets punished particularly harshly. Or at all. But it is palpably untrue. There are already evidently MPs who did not play the system, did not make a profit, and did not make claims for ridiculous items. Then there are MPs who made claims which are, quite frankly, comic. How many Tory MPs does it take to change a lightbulb? But, no-one is suggesting that the MP in question was selling off lightbulbs down Camden market at the public expense. The MPs that claimed for things which benefited themselves rather more than the public should be censured. Their constituents should know what was going on. But the electorate can judge them. Then, it appears — and I would be the first to want to give these MPs a chance to defend themselves — that there have been MPs gaming the system, or even breaking the law, to make a personal profit at the public expense. In my view — but I believe it is shared by many — in my view, these MPs should simply resign. They should not resign and re-stand for by-elections. They should simply go, and not come back. And they should do it soon. That, and that alone, will restore any measure of public confidence.

It may seem a noble gesture for MPs to stand together and say they were all equally guilty. But all this does is to protect the truly guilty. As a nation, we deserve better.

And, finally, MPs are trotting out a line about failing to grasp the public mood. This is simply astonishing. Th public mood is exactly not the issue. The public mood right now is angry because (at least some) MPs have been deceiving us in secret for years. But would the crisis genuinely be less serious if the public were pre-occupied with, say, a health crisis, or the recession? Of course not. The crisis exists because of lies and dishonesty. The crisis is not out here in the nation, but there, in Westminster. Something is rotten in the state of Britain.

The public are angry, and they are right to be angry. But it would not make things right if the public suddenly lost interest and forgot about it. If MPs genuinely cannot see that the problem is not with ‘presentation’ or ‘sensing the public mood’, but with claims and actions which should never have taken place, then they lack the most basic judgement of statesmen and women. Some things are wrong, whether anyone notices them or not. And this is one of them.

As at the time of writing, Lib-Dem MPs have not been implicated in any of this. I sincerely hope that none will be. But even if they are, I would make the same call: MPs who are found to have exploited the system for profit, in the buying and selling of goods, or the acquiring of monies to which they are not entitled, should go, and they should go now. This is not a call for a General Election, but rather a Special Election: even if half the House has to step down, it should.

As far as I’m concerned, MPs who have made daft, ill-considered or farcical claims can stay. They will face their electorates in due time. But those who have defrauded us cannot stay. My sincere hope is that, when the dust has settled, this group will be few. But few, or many, parliament is no place for them.

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On the surface of it, this sounds like the classic story of political hubris: public pressure forces a politician to champion a moral cause, only for them to be found out as a culprit. It’s the old story that dogged John Major’s ‘Back to Basics’ campaign, although Major himself wasn’t found out until years later, and, in any case, by ‘Back to Basics’, he really meant returning to Conservative economic basics, not basic moral values.

Far be it from me to defend the Conservatives, but on this occasion I need to come out and say that this story is not the simple one that it appears to be, and that Caroline Spelman deserves a fairer hearing, and a second chance.

We could talk about it being ten years ago, at a time when things were less clear cut, we could talk about the fact that it appears that the nanny genuinely did a bit of phone answering and message taking, and we could talk about the fact that Caroline Spelman was a new and inexperienced MP, who probably got some bad advice from someone. We could also point out that, if she hadn’t taken a stand to clean up the Tory party, nobody would even be talking about things that took place ten years ago.

I’m not convinced that any of those things stand up on their own, and I’m not convinced that, if they don’t stand up singly, that they have any value cumulatively.

However, there is one thing which puts this story in a completely different light from the Conway, Chichester and other scandals we have seen.

It is this: Caroline Spelman stopped what she was doing of her own accord. This is absolutely crucial, and none of the media commentators seem to have recognised its importance. Spelman was not threatened with blackmail to make her stop, she was not put under party discipline to make her stop, she did not receive angry letters from her constituents, or face tough questions from journalists, or a series of high profile media stories. She looked at what she was doing, decided that — whatever advice she had been given before, whatever anybody else was doing, and whatever the personal benefits of carrying on — it wasn’t right, and it wasn’t going to be part of her lifestyle as a politician.

Some would see this as an admission of guilt. In fact, it is an all too rare demonstration of moral purpose.

Whether Caroline Spelman knew what she was doing was wrong or not when she started doing it, she reached a point where she decided she should not be doing it, and stopped. Some people might say that this is all very well, and might let her off the hook technically, since it supports the claim that she was unaware she was breaching the rules, but still does not excuse her setting herself up to clean up the affairs of other Tory politicians. In fact, it is exactly the moral quality which someone needs who wishes to challenge others to follow her example: “if you become aware you are breaching the rules, stop”.

Have we learned nothing from 2000 years of the New Testament. Or, for those who bitterly oppose the moral teaching of Jesus Christ having any role in modern society, have we learned nothing from twelve years of Harry Potter? We cannot take the magic of Hogwarts into the real world, but Dumbledore and his second chances have a lot to teach us.

In an ideal world, all politicians would all be perfect all of the time. But in the real world, it’s not just that not all politicians will be perfect, but that all people will be imperfect. Again, that’s something we could have picked up from faith, or children’s literature, if we didn’t have the perspicacity to spot it ourselves. In the actual world we live in, it is far more important to have politicians with the integrity to change what they do when they realise they are doing it wrong, than to have politicians who have never yet been found out. It is exactly the quality of ‘carrying on until you are found out’ which is the essence of sleaze, although it is usually then followed by ‘denying it as much as possible’.

In this, Caroline Spelman has also shown that she is different from the sleaze brigade: she has voluntarily referred the matter to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards.

It may seem rather surprising that I am defending a Tory here. But my fear is that Caroline Spelman will go the way of Estelle Morris — someone who didn’t feel she was good enough at her job to stay in politics (despite some quite substantial evidence to the contrary), and left, making way for those who really were not good enough. If Caroline Spelman stands down as Tory Party Chair, and subsequently as an MP, she will not be replaced by a Tory who is more honourable, merely by a someone who is better at appearing honourable.

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• Process — what do we know about the author’s creative and literary process? Will this affect the way we approach the novel, or is it irrelevant in this case?
• Publisher — did the publisher or another intermediary have a role in shaping the novel? Again, is this important?
• Public — how did the public at the time respond to the novel, and did this have an impact on the novel?
• Posterity — how have people since responded to the novel, and does this change its importance?
• Politics, philosophy and polemic — is the author informed by a particular world-view, and are they seeking to use the novel to impose this upon us
• Priorities — what does the author think is important in a novel (if we know this?)

• Purpose — collecting the aforementioned together, why did the author write?

•  How the story is told
  • writing style
  • context
  • characters
  • plot/storyline
• What themes and underlying messages emerge
• Who the author was writing to
  • Generally a lot of information is contained in the novel about the assumptions the writer is making about their readers
  • Background information can help to fill this out
  • In critiquing a novel from another time or another country, it is particularly important to understand the intended reader, because assumptions from your time and your culture can be quite misleading
• What the author was trying to achieve, and how well it was achieved

 Of course, in real life, you rarely get asked to just critique a novel. You are much more likely to be asked to answer a question. The really good questions often focus on authorial intention, which gives you a way in. Sometimes they focus on the reaction of the original readers, perhaps by comparing it with the assessment of later critics. The less good questions will tend to dive straight in at the themes or messages level, which can make it hard to reach a point any deeper than that. The very least helpful questions are the ones which limit you to analysing one or two characters, or commenting on the writing style, or the description, or, heaven help you, on the story line. However. When faced with a question, there is only one thing to be done: informed by all the background, and by what you know of the story, characters, context and style, what you have been able to deduce about the audience, and your surmises about authorial intention — with all that in mind ANSWER THE QUESTION. No examiner ever gave points for answering a different question from the one set.

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The (so-called) ‘Scottish Christian Party’ is contesting the Scottish elections with a mixture of old-fashioned Calvinism and modern right-of-centre politics. Great Britain — and especially Scotland — has a long and honourable tradition of Christians in public life, but, unlike much of mainland Europe, there is no tradition of ostensibly Christian political parties. It is true that some Christians — in common with many voters of all faiths and none — have lost confidence in mainstream political parties. But has the time come for specifically Christian parties to call on the support committed believers, or should Christians seek to involve themselves in mainstream parties? And what about this particular ‘Christian’ party?

Christianity is not a political faith. The early Christians were a tiny minority, frequently persecuted, often despised, who had almost no political influence for the first three centuries of their existence (which is another reason why the Da Vinci Code is entirely implausible, but that’s another story). This contrasts sharply with the context of the Old Testament, which was written down in a culture which expected the people of God to be ruled by the word of God. For this reason, when Christians have been in a position to establish rules for how society operates, they have often either tried to separate the church from the state — recognising the non-political nature of the New Testament — or they have looked specifically to the Old Testament for inspiration.

However, even if it were desirable, it is simply not possible to lift instructions for a semi-nomadic life in Palestine’s early Iron Age and put them in a 21st century context. In fact, even by the time of the New Testament this was already a problem, and Jesus Christ frequently pointed out that the religious leaders of the day had applied a literalistic interpretation of the letter of Old Testament law, and missed the spirit of that law.

The Scottish Christian Party is clearly in the ‘Inspired by Old Testament law’ camp. There is a lot of sense in some of this. Faced with the increasing burden of stress, they propose the restoration of a day of rest. Faced with the increasing burden of consumer debt, they propose the cancellation of unpaid debt after seven years. to some extent, this reflects some of the proposals of Ronald Sider in ‘Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger’, which was one of the key influences on the Jubilee 2000 campaign.

But the Old Testament is silent on many other issues. For example, the SCP policy on Venture Capital is:
3. Venture Capitalism
The Scottish Christian Party supports local wealth generation with an emphasis on local entrepreneurs rather than handouts to multinational firms. We will encourage joint ownership schemes where venture capital rather than grants would be made available by local government. Profits from successful ventures would be ploughed back into new ventures. We will support incentives including business rates holidays and business mentoring for start-ups.

This may well be a very sound policy — but it is not in any sense a ‘Christian’ policy. On Tourism, their policies include:
Visitscotland as an organisation should be downsized and reformed as a small co-ordinating body with direction and control coming from the ATBs. (Area Tourist Boards)

There are a good many other policies like this. Some are eminently sensible — concentration on renewable energy, management of fisheries — but they are not in any sense ‘Christian’.

More controversially:
9. Prisons
The Scottish Christian Party believes that the much needed extra prison capacity should be purchased from developing countries for the purpose of catering for Scotland’s medium Security Prisons. This should take the form of building state of the art prison facilities in developing countries that wish to host Scottish Prisons.


Aside from being lifted (in reverse) straight from the plot of the Rowan Atkinson film Johnny English, this particular policy reveals something strange and disturbing about SCP. It reveals a contempt for the rest of the world which parallels the pronouncements of the British National Party. This is completely at odds with the teaching of Jesus Christ, and the tenor of the rest of the New Testament, including St Paul’s famous pronouncement “in Christ there is no Jew nor Greek, no slave nor free, no male nor female…” ((Galatians 3:28)).

The Jubilee Debt campaign has shown the impact that taking Christian faith into the political arena can have. Equally, this year we are reminded of the work of William Wilberforce in applying Christian principles to oppose, and eventually abolish, the slave trade. There are committed Christians in all the mainstream political parties, and their actions are informed and often guided by their faith.

However, for a single party to effectively claim a monopoly on Christian politics, and to call on Christians to support it on this basis is a serious problem. It is not only bad for politics, it is also bad for the Christian faith.

It is bad for politics because it makes a false claim on the loyalty of Christians. The use of the word ‘Chrstian’ in its title urges believers to vote for it, without the need for scrutiny of its policies.

It is bad for Christianity because it makes a large number of implicit — and false — claims about how Christians should think and behave. Although Christians do not live in the Old Testament world, they are called on to make sense of their lives in the light of the Old Testament (and the New Testament). But there is not one, universal, blueprint for how this should be done. In its one-sided application of a very few Old Testament principles, SCP attempts to side-step a Christian’s own conscience and reason. Rather worse, by ‘filling in the gaps’ with perhaps (or perhaps not) emininently sensible policies, SCP creates confusion about what is Christian and what is merely plausible. Worse still, it claims an authority for these policies by association. An authority they in no sense deserve.

It is a matter of deep regret that politicians in all parties have lost the respect of many voters. But if Christians want to change that, and to have people in the Westminster, Scottish, Welsh and European parliaments, who deserve their respect, then they need to get involved in mainstream politics. In a nation where just one person in tend attends church regularly, a Christian party is never going to form a government, or even be a key partner in a coalition.

What is more important — and this has been proved over the last centuy in countries with a tradition of ‘Christian’ political parties — assigning the name ‘Christian’ to what is no more than a collection of purely human policy and prejudie does violent discredit to the Gospel.

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