There are many people in Britain who are dismayed at the events taking place in the political arena. At the heart of everything that is taking place is an overconfident but, apparently for many, inspiring leader in the person of Boris Johnson. This blog is not going to be a critique of all that has happened since Boris became Prime Minister, as others are doing that pretty adequately in the Press. I personally came to a realisation that I would never be able to regard him as an effective leader when he started becoming friendly with Donald Trump. Evidently, he believed that a personal relationship with Trump would be a way to ease the problems of Brexit. New trade deals with the States would be our economic salvation in the post Brexit world. There were two problems with this idea, both of which will probably prove fatal to Boris’ calculations. The first is that Trump himself is in an incredibly vulnerable situation as President. As the law-suits pile up against him, it is by no means certain that he will be able to run for President in 2020, let alone win the contest. The historian in Boris must have realised that it is foolhardy to rely on such a volatile and unreliable partner. We are seeing almost daily how some of Trump’s allies (e.g. John Bolton) become enemies, sometimes in the space of hours. Politically speaking how can anyone do business with such a fickle flaky partner? The second more serious issue concerns Trump’s ethical record. As someone who seems to have little interest in telling the truth, Trump is hardly an obvious person to do business with. His capacity to lie must surely make it extremely difficult to pin him down in any future negotiation. While Trump may see Boris as a trusted ally in terms of his political style and outlook, how will this ever assist our Prime Minister if he is attached to a man who is not only a stranger to truth and honesty but actually seems unable to recognise them? The extent of the corruption that permeates Trump’s political record is so great that anyone who comes anywhere near him seems liable to be contaminated by its contagion. Boris’ attempts to make such an individual into a political ally may prove fatal to his own long-term future in politics.
Every time a person of dishonesty or corruption takes over in an organisation, it will affect every corner of that institution. History will probably declare that the heroes of Boris’ time in office are those who refused to go along with his proguing of Parliament, including my local MP, Rory Stewart. Integrity will always resist being sucked into a situation of compromise and collusion. That seems to be the fate of most of the Tory MPs who have allowed their better selves to be seduced by the prospects of power and influence in the future under the leader Boris Johnson.
Looking at the Church of England at present it is unclear whether or not a similar struggle for the hearts and minds of the senior levels of leadership is currently taking place. Over the past twelve months the most appalling revelations about the behaviour of clergy abusers have been revealed. We have also heard of the participation of lawyers and management reputation companies in protecting the image of the Church. In some cases, bishops themselves have actively resisted the attempts of survivors to be heard. None of us knows exactly what conversations take place at the twice-yearly meetings of the House of Bishops. We can, however, assume that the issue of managing the reputation of the Church has been discussed. From the outside perspective, it would seem that the ethical and Christian approach requires a complete opening up and confession of the many failings of the past. I am sure that some bishops would support this kind of honest way of dealing with the past. It would of course prove incredibly expensive both in financial terms and in the human cost involved in resourcing the acts of reparation. The other side of the argument would be the one that seems to prevail at present. This approach to the problem is all about minimising responsibility, pushing away survivors as much as possible and generally living in a state of denial about how appalling the scandal has become.
In any kind of management structure, including the Church, we have the term, corporate responsibility. This states that the decision of a committee, from the Tory Cabinet to a village PCC, is binding on all members. This will require that any members who strongly disagree with the corporate decision keep their mouths firmly closed and not reveal what has happened to the outside world. This principle works reasonably well in the corporate world but it breaks down when there are strong ethical issues under discussion. Boris chose to sack Tory party members who resisted on ethical grounds to his actions. The corporate responsibility model blew up in his face because the pressure on his opponents’ consciences became too great. Something similar may well happen in the Church of England. It is hard to imagine that there are no rebels among the 42 Diocesan bishops. Some may well want to protest at the corporate responsibility model that forces them to keep quiet when, arguably, ethically dubious decisions are being taken on their behalf. To take one small example of an unethical and un-Christian event taking place in the past few months. At the IICSA hearing, Justin Welby was invited by a lawyer to apologise to Matthew Ineson, sitting behind him, for his treatment by the Church. The Archbishop failed to respond. Clearly there were other unseen forces in the room which were controlling his conduct. Whether they were management advisers, publicity folk or lawyers, the Archbishop was being controlled and prevented from performing a simple ethical response to Matt.
For the Church of England to have a chance of regaining its reputation for honest integrity it has to emerge out of the grip of the unseen forces that seem to bind it at present. The honest and ethical ones among our leaders must be allowed to speak openly about the appalling events of the past. The Reviews of particular episodes of abuse must be allowed to proceed without any hindrances and follow the principles set out so memorably by Kate Blackwell QC on the Sunday programme. But I want to end up on a positive note. There is a new broom that has recently arrived in the Safeguarding world in the person of Melissa Carslake. Her position and seniority as new Director of Safeguarding gives her the chance to change things radically at the centre. It will still be a tough task for her. If I am right to see the Archbishop’s performance at IICSA being manipulated by hidden forces, Melissa will, no doubt, have to battle these very same forces in order to prevail and bring back honesty and integrity to the Church of England. It ought to be abundantly clear which path will promote the Church’s long-term health, but hitherto many of our Church leaders have failed to recognise this. Once again, we pray for truth and light.
Send out thy light and thy truth that they may lead me: and bring me unto thy holy hill and to thy dwelling. Ps. 43: 3
Excellent points, Stephen.
The Court of Session in Edinburgh has held the prorogation of Parliament to be unlawful, and has set it aside, at the same time strongly criticising the Government.
The Government’s response is that it will appeal the Scottish decision to the Supreme Court of the UK. The appeal will be heard by nine Supreme Court judges. This link to ‘Law & Religion UK’ provides more detail:
http://www.lawandreligionuk.com/2019/09/11/brexit-court-of-session-declares-advice-to-prorogue-parliament-unlawful/
At least with politicians we get to vote them out.
“History will probably declare that the heroes of Boris’ time in office are those who refused to go along with his proguing of Parliament, including my local MP, Rory Stewart.”
Possibly. However, it might also be argued that the sainted 21 were wanting to blackmail HMG into a ‘compromise’ which would make the whole Brexit exercise superfluous, since the WA – that spuriously ‘honest’ compromise – makes the UK a rule taker and binds it to a set of invidious economic circumstances, perhaps indefinitely. Essentially the 2016 referendum legislation delegated decision making to the electorate, and a majority of those who voted gave a direction to Parliament which it has refused to fulfil, despite having indicated that it would. Whilst I hold no candle whatever for Johnson (seldom has a man more devoid of ‘character’ reached the summit), who has been more wanting in integrity?
Almost the only person to have analysed the essential incompatibility of the UK with the EEC was de Gaulle: http://aei.pitt.edu/39396/1/PSGE_WP8_5.pdf. After the failure of the EDC in 1954 there could be no integration without France; in view of escalating agricultural surpluses and the strength of the farm lobby, France had to be baited into by Beyen/Spaak into the nascent EEC with the CAP: unlike the UK (where agricultural support was financed, progressively, by taxpayers), agricultural subsidies in the EEC were financed regressively by consumers. Importers paid: Germany and Italy bore the cost.
Since 1849 the UK had a cheap food policy, despite the distances much of its food travelled. France wanted the UK in only as a counterweight to Germany, and Germany wanted the UK in to help fund the CAP. Accession forced the UK to move from a cheap food policy to a dear food policy and imposed VAT in lieu of the less ubiquitous purchase tax, at the same time as the oil shock. Unions bid up wages to compensate their members for their declining real incomes. This made UK manufactures uncompetitive on world markets, savaging industry. A flood of [German] imports followed, and the promised ‘dynamic effects’ to UK industry were absent. Union unrest led to Thatcher, and the sharp turn to financial services, with the escalating inequalities that entailed.
A current account deficit must = a capital account surplus; the UK entered the EEC in surplus; it has run a deficit almost ever since for the reasons stated above; assets must be sold to yield a capital account surplus. So much has been sold that the UK has become, by degrees (& ironically), a quasi-colonial economy. The danger of the WA is that it entrenches this state of affairs in perpetuity (as the EU knows). Under international law a treaty can only be denounced for a fundamental change of circumstances; the WA embeds the status quo so cannot be denounced in law.
Perhaps demission should be revoked, but could clergy of all stripes not reflect on the fundamentals before articulating their views?
Cogent as ever, Froghole. There’s plenty of calumny to go round, it seems to me. My brother, who has an economics degree always reckoned that the EU was a way of France and Germany, who were net producers, selling their goods to the UK. It’s a useful perspective. But it doesn’t cover retiring to Spain, or getting your strawberries picked by Romanians. The European governments think that being trading partners will prevent WWIII. And who wouldn’t want that? Modern philosophers like Yuval Noah Harari might agree. Frankly, I’m not persuaded of that, but I do think, being friends is better than being enemies!
Many thanks. I think that, amidst all the sound and fury (which invariably signifies nothing) we are losing sight of the fact that the issue the UK has with the EU is, to some extent, structural. We are dependent upon paths established in the 1950s, which are not necessarily set to our advantage (but as Alan Milward proposed, the EEC was all about the exploitation of national advantages). Indeed, the point of the EEC was to allow national champions larger home markets so as to allow them to realise their potential, and so prevent zero sum bargaining via war. However, it was also about affording France security; in the late 1940s it was evident that the UK did not wish to sanction the Balkanisation of Germany (as many wished in Paris): France realised that its security would be better afforded by means of a supranational arrangement with the Germans (after all, Germany had the coal but not the ore, and France had the ore but not the coal). As soon as Alphand proposed such an accommodation with Germany in 1947 (even before Schuman) the UK had become marginal to power politics in Europe, because with a Franco-German affiliation the notion of a balance of power became redundant. All subsequent attempts by the UK to interpose itself in this relationship have been doomed to failure, whether within or without the EU. And to some extent French security and German political rehabilitation have been achieved at the economic expense of other member states.
In the 1940s and 1950s a lot of work was done on common markets by the likes of James Meade, Jacob Viner, Gunnar Myrdal, Bela Balassa, etc. The upshot of this work was that common markets promote ‘circular and cumulative causation’, i.e., existing weakness, specialisms and strengths are amplified. The fate of the UK since 1973, with the fall of manufacturing (resulting in crummy service sector jobs and social stress) and the rise of finance are evidence of this.
I am not in the least convinced by Leave arguments, which are based on so much wishful thinking. However, Remain is essentially a plea for the economic status quo (since path dependency within the EU is such that ‘remain and reform’ has not proved possible, except on a very slow and incremental basis). Each camp therefore presents its own moral problems.
The Church used to provide a good deal of serious economic thought (Berkeley, Tucker, Jones, Whately, Whewell, etc.), but that spring has run dry. I wonder whether, if we had a William Temple available today, the Church would have been able to provide some moral compass to the debate, based upon a clear understanding of the background and structures of the relationship between the EU and the UK. Instead we have witnessed the Church resort to a litany of banal, vapid and frequently meretricious cliches, which can be safely ignored. In this sense, the failure of the Church to provide anything substantive to the debate has been symptomatic of its wider bankruptcy and irrelevance.
I imagine that people know by now that the Supreme Court (an enlarged panel of eleven justices) has unanimously held that the prorogation of Parliament was unlawful.