Category: Politics

THE INSPIRATIONAL COURAGE SHOWN IN A MOSCOW COURT LAST WEEK.

December 16, 2022 /

In February 1966 Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuly Daniel were tried for ‘anti-Soviet agitation’ in a Moscow court and sentenced to seven and five years in labour camps. Their satirical writings had offended the state. Their trial was reported around the world[1] and provoked an international reaction and inspired others in USSR to take a stand against their rulers. It led to a wider dissident movement which stood against state repression in USSR. Ilya Yashin stands firmly in this tradition. On 9th December 2022 he was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison for a series of posts in May about the murder and torture of Ukrainian civilians by Russian troops in Bucha[2]. This is the report from The Moscow Times of his speech from the dock[3]:-

“….Ladies and gentlemen,
You have to agree that the phrase “the defendant’s last word” sounds very sombre as if after I speak they’ll sew my mouth shut and forbid me from ever speaking again.

Everyone understands that this is precisely the point. I am being isolated from society and imprisoned because they want me to remain silent, as our parliament is no longer a place for discussion and Russia must now silently agree with any measures its government takes.

But I promise that as long as I live I’ll never make peace with that. My mission is to tell the truth. I’ve spoken it on city squares, in television studios, in parliament and I will not cease to speak it from behind bars either. As one classic author put it: “Lies are the religion of slaves and masters. Truth is the god of the free man.”

Your Honour, I have a principle that I’ve followed for many years now: do what you must, come what may. When the hostilities began, I did not doubt what I should do even for a second.

I must remain in Russia, I must speak the truth loudly, and I must stop the bloodshed at any cost. It physically pains me to think how many people have been killed in this war, how many lives have been ruined, and how many families have lost their homes. You cannot be indifferent. And I swear I do not regret anything. It’s better to spend 10 years behind bars as an honest man than quietly burn with shame over the blood spilled by your government. Of course, Your Honour, I’m not expecting a miracle here. You know I’m not guilty, but I know that you’re pressured by the system. It is obvious that you will have to issue a guilty verdict. But I hold no ill will toward you, and I wish you no ill. But try to do everything that is in your power to
avoid injustice. Remember that it’s not just my personal fate that depends on your verdict — this verdict is against the part of our society that wants to live a peaceful and civilized life. The part of society that, perhaps, you belong to, Your Honour.

I’d also like to use this platform to address Russian President Vladimir Putin. The man responsible for this bloodbath who signed the “military censorship” law, and according to whose will I am currently in prison.

Mr. Putin, when you look at the consequences of this terrible war, you probably already understand the gravity of the mistake that you made on Feb. 24. No one greeted our army with flowers. They call us invaders and occupiers. Your name is now firmly associated with the words “death” and “destruction.”

You brought about a terrible tragedy for the Ukrainian people, who will probably never forgive us for it. But you’re not just waging a war on Ukrainians — you’re at war with your own citizens, too.

You’re sending off hundreds of thousands of Russians to war. Many will return disabled or lose their minds from what they’ve seen and gone through. To you, this is just a death toll, a number in a column. But to many families, this means the unbearable pain of losing a husband, a father or a son.

Hundreds of thousands of our citizens have left their country because they don’t want to kill or be killed. People are running from you, Mr. President. Can’t you see?

You’re undermining the basis of our economic security. Your switch to a wartime economy is turning our country backward. Have you forgotten that this policy already led our country to ruin in the past?

Let this be a voice crying out in the wilderness, but I’m calling on you, Mr. Putin, to stop this madness right now. We need to recognize that our policy on Ukraine was a mistake, to withdraw our troops from its territory and to reach a diplomatic solution to the conflict.

Remember that every new day of the war brings new victims. Enough.

Finally, I want to address the people who have followed these court proceedings, who have supported me for all these months, and who are anxiously waiting for the
verdict.

My friends! No matter what verdict the court gives, no matter how tough that verdict is, this must not break you. I realize how difficult it is for you right now, I realize that you feel hopeless and powerless. But you must not give up.

Please do not give into despair and don’t forget that this is our country. It is worth fighting for. Be brave, do not retreat in the face of evil. Resist. Stand your ground on your street, in your city. And most importantly — be there for each other. There are many more of us than you think, and together we have enormous power.

Don’t worry about me. I promise to endure my tribulations without complaint and that I won’t lose my integrity. In turn, please promise me that you’ll not lose your optimism and won’t forget how to smile. Because the moment we lose our ability to find joy in life is the moment they win.

Believe me, Russia will one day be free and happy.”[4]

  1. Alexander Ginzburg, a journalist, compiled a report of the trial which circulated secretly in USSR called “The White Book” and was arrested and sentenced to 5 years in a labour camp along with 3 others whose trial was recorded in the book “The trial of the Four”. All these defendants made courageous speeches from the dock. ↑
  2. See https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/dec/09/russian-opposition-figure-ilya-yashin-jailed-for-denouncing-ukraine-war accessed 16/12/22 ↑
  3. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/12/07/people-are-running-from-you-mr-president-cant-you-see-a79626 accessed 16/12/22 . The article ends “This is an edited version of a translation provided by Novaya Gazeta Europe. The views expressed in opinion pieces do not necessarily reflect the position of The Moscow Times. The unedited translation of Novoya Gazeta Europe is at https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2022/12/06/people-are-running-from-you-mr-president-cant-you-see-en ↑
  4. For more information about Mr Yashin see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Yashin. Thanks to the “Battleground” podcast for alerting me to Mr Yashin’s speech https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/battleground-ukraine/id1617276298 ↑

 

GOVERNING LIKE THIS IS DAMAGING…. WHAT NOW?

October 24, 2019 /

British politics has become so tribal and so polarised that the following thought experiment will be very difficult for most people but please try it:-

Imagine Mr Johnson’s government asks you for a list of policies that it should pursue. You provide that list and the government immediately agrees to pursue all the policies on your list and that existing policies will be abandoned if they contradict your list. Would this government’s methods of governing be acceptable if it was pursuing your chosen policies?

My answer to that is a clear “NO”. No matter what the merits of one’s chosen policies might be, the collateral damage Mr Johnson’s method of governing is inflicting is too great.  Here are some examples;-

● The Government is using ‘Downing Street Sources’ to spread lies and smears. Read this article https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/british-journalists-have-become-part-of-johnsons-fake-news-machine/ which gives specific examples. (This is not only an unwise way of doing business: it is also short sighted.  What happens if we get so used to hearing lies and misrepresentations from the media and politicians that even when they tell the truth we won’t believe them?)

● The Government refuses to use moderate language and is content to inflame tensions by inflammatory and aggressive language. Mr Johnson knows how to use words: journalism was his trade. The frequent use of images and language of war is not just distasteful: it is a step towards inciting violence. 

 

● If the Government perceives a short term gain is to be had, it does not shrink from adopting questionable methods to obtain that gain. Unlawfully advising the Queen to prorogue Parliament is a case in point. Treating the judiciary, parliament itself and MPs with disrespect are further examples.

The Government is acting as if the end justifies the means. It doesn’t.  If the ends justifies the means for a government why should not the same be true for others– no matter how far right, far left or extreme?

I emphasise that I am not making any point about the merits or otherwise of the Government’s aims and policies. My point is that HMG’s method of speaking and acting is objectionable and is doing harm that will take a long time to repair, if it can be repaired at all.

Nearly everyone approves of democracy and democratic institutions but this government’s way of governing assumes that democratic institutions are self-healing and everlasting. History shows that they are not. They can decay from the inside. The Government’s methods are causing such decay at a rapid pace. 

When democracy dies democratic institutions lose substance even whilst preserving the appearance of not having changed.  Thus there may still be Courts that sit with Judges who have the same robes but if judicial independence is lost or if the courts are too expensive or inaccessible (because the decisions are made by the home office and no effective review available) true justice fades.  Parliament may still meet in the iconic building of Westminster but if capable and diligent people are unwilling to serve as MPs because of the abuse that would go with the job what then?  If there is no easily available way of obtaining reliable news what chance of reasoned debate or meaningful choices without which democracy becomes impossible?

Read The Windrush Betrayal and you encounter a tyranny of the bureaucracy against defenceless innocent people. Read Refugee Tales III and you encounter similar bureaucratic tryanny against refugees.  Try telling them that they have the right to protection from the Court.

If you can stand the painful shame of it, watch the evidence given to the Public Accounts Committee in December 2018 by a Windrush victim and you will catch a glimpse of how rights can become hollow once decency and civility are eroded.

Decency and civility are being replaced by a very different and brutal way of governing and its not clear how this can be stopped.  There is a common thread that runs through the Grenfell tragedy, the Windrush betrayal and the marginalisation of many needing state assistance: that thread is an uncaring, even brutal, way of governing that fails to listen to cries for help.

A general election is coming but a change of government would not necessarily repair the damage that is now being done. The government’s methods, along with other factors beyond the government’s control, are poisoning the wells.  A new ‘normal’ is being established which is far from normal. This is easiest to see by considering the same phenomenon in the USA where Trump’s behaviour now has to be shocking to a degree before it even registers as unusual. What once would have caused outrage now causes barely a comment of disapproval.

Please use the comment facility or the email link on the left to suggest:-

  • How can we encourage our politicians to work in ways that build up trust and mutual respect?
  • How can we persuade our politicians that using language that promotes goodwill and compromise is something we respect and value?
  • How do we get the message across that the end does not justify the means?

 

“THE POST”: NOT THE FULL STORY…

January 22, 2018 /

‘The Post’: not the full story.

This is an entertaining film. It’s a compelling story, well acted and with a strong ‘feel good’ factor. It is interesting to speculate why it has been produced at this particular time and why it resonates in 2018. It is unfortunate that the film fails to record the depths that Nixon and his men went to in a quest for revenge.

“The Post” tells how, in 1971, President Nixon stopped The New York Times from publishing ‘The Pentagon Papers’ only for The Washington Post to take up the story. Eventually the US Supreme Court ruled by a majority of 6 to 3 that the constitution of the US gave both papers the right to publish.

Why all the fuss?

The “Pentagon Papers” were a top secret study by the Pentagon of government decision-making during the Vietnam War. The Papers were hugely damaging to President Nixon (among others).

We don’t have to guess why the Pentagon Papers troubled Nixon and his inner circle.  We have a transcript from the Nixon Tapes, recorded in the Oval Office on 14th June 1971[1]:

HALDEMAN: Well this thing too is clear, it seems to me it-it hurts us in that it puts the war back up into a high [unclear] tension level, but the facts in it

NIXON:Hurt the other side

HALDEMAN: Don’t hurt us politically so much-they hurt the others-but what they really hurt-and this is what the intellectuals-and why the motivation of the Times must be is that it hurts the government

What it says is…to the ordinary guy, all this looks like gobbledygood, comes a very clear thing: [unclear] you can’t trust the government; you can’t believe what they say’ and you can’t rely on their judgment; and the-the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because it shows that people do things the president wants to do even though it’s wrong, and the president can be wrong”

Why ‘The Post’ feels good in 2018.

Justice Hugo Black’s ruling contained some choice words about the importance of an independent press:-

[T]he injunction against “The New York Times” should have been vacated without oral argument when the cases were first presented … . [E]very moment’s continuance of the injunctions … amounts to a flagrant, indefensible, and continuing violation of the First Amendment. …{ When the Constitution was adopted, many people strongly opposed it because the document contained no Bill of Rights … . In response to an overwhelming public clamour, James Madison offered a series of amendments to satisfy citizens that these great liberties would remain safe … . In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfil its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. }The Government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell. … [W]e are asked to hold that … the Executive Branch, the Congress, and the Judiciary can make laws … abridging freedom of the press in the name of ‘national security.’ … To find that the President has ‘inherent power’ to halt the publication of news … would wipe out the First Amendment and destroy the fundamental liberty and security of the very people the Government hopes to make ‘secure.’ … The word ‘security’ is a broad, vague generality whose contours should not be invoked to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the First Amendment. The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security … . The Framers of the First Amendment, fully aware of both the need to defend a new nation and the abuses of the English and Colonial governments, sought to give this new society strength and security by providing that freedom of speech, press, religion, and assembly should not be abridged.[2]

From the start of his Presidency, Trump and his White House have sought to discredit the press and waged war on any media which dare to challenge him. Trump’s instinct for media management is uncanny. He is a genius at this. He has no regard for truth whatsoever – to him it is an irrelevance.

“The Post” reminds us of a time when newspapers were influential and when Courts could restrain a President seeking to sell the Public a lie. The film brings hope that the same might happen again. However, the game has changed and the constraints on government power in 1971 are less effective today. In 1971 news was spread by the physical delivery of printed words. The Papers themselves were around 7,000 pages of documents which were photocopied by Daniel Ellsberg who gave copies to newspapers. Some of the best parts of the film show The Washington Post’s newspaper setting department and the presses rolling, newspapers being bound and boxed and loaded onto trucks for delivery around the US. Today quality newspaper circulation is ever diminishing. Digital media are creating a new world in which the reader can have access to mountains of raw material but most of us lack the expertise to evaluate that material or to put it in context. Worse still, we don’t know which sources we can trust.

“The Post” is a ‘feel good’ movie because it ends with a reference to Watergate. There is no need for the film to say more about Watergate: the audience will bring to mind ‘All the President’s men’ and leave the cinema feeling that even Presidential power can be held to account by the printed word, backed up by the rule of law.

The part that feels less good and was not in the film.

The film would probably have felt less good but been more true to history had it told what happened to Daniel Ellsberg, the defense analyst who leaked the papers to the press in the first place. Ellsberg was charged with offences that would have carried a sentence of 105 years in prison. His trial was halted by Judge Bryne on 11 May 1973 because of events which the Judge said ‘offend a sense of justice’ and ‘have incurably infected the prosecution of this case”.

 

 

Among ‘the events’ that the Judge was referring to was a government authorised burglary. In August 1971, two months’ after the conversation between Nixon and Haldeman quoted above, Nixon’s deputy assistant, Egil Krogh, two former FBI agents and a member of National Security Council staff met secretly. Together they planned to break into the office of Mr Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, Dr Lewis Fielding in the hope of finding documents which would enable them to discredit Mr Ellsberg. According to Mr Krogh, John Ehrlichman, assistant to the President, authorised the break in ‘if done under your assurance that it is not traceable’[3]. The two ex FBI[4] agents broke into the psychiatrist’s office, forced open filing cabinets but, according to Mr Krogh, they found no documents relating to Ellsberg. However, according to Ellsberg his file was found[5].

Many years after having served his time in prison for his part in this, Mr Krogh reflected:-

“The premise of our action was the strongly held view within certain precincts of the White House that the president and those functioning on his behalf could carry out illegal acts with impunity if they were convinced that the nation’s security demanded it. As President Nixon himself said to David Frost during an interview six years later, “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.” To this day the implications of this statement are staggering.  …

[After conviction and serving time in prison] I finally realized that what had gone wrong in the Nixon White House was a meltdown in personal integrity. Without it, we failed to understand the constitutional limits on presidential power and comply with statutory law.”[6]

It says a lot for the integrity of the US Government prosecutors that it was they who revealed the existence of the break in to Mr Fielding’s office to the Judge. One can imagine the pressure on them to conceal such devastating information.  How easy it would have been to ‘accidentally lose’ or ‘overlook’ the offending documents.   (Since drafting this blog the BBC has reported that in 2014-2015 in England 916 people had charges dropped over a failure to disclose evidence.  This begs the question of how many cases went ahead notwithstanding a failure to disclose evidence)

The man who inspired Daniel Ellsberg.

Randy K

Ellsberg drew inspiration from a little known American pacifist activist: Randy Kehler who refused to fight in the Vietnam War. Kehler knew that his conduct would lead to a prison sentence and in August 1969 he gave a speech at a conference at Haverford College. Ellsberg was in the audience and described his reaction:-

“And he said this very calmly. I hadn’t known that he was about to be sentenced for draft resistance. It hit me as a total surprise and shock, because I heard his words in the midst of actually feeling proud of my country listening to him. And then I heard he was going to prison. It wasn’t what he said exactly that changed my worldview. It was the example he was setting with his life. How his words in general showed that he was a stellar American, and that he was going to jail as a very deliberate choice—because he thought it was the right thing to do. There was no question in my mind that my government was involved in an unjust war that was going to continue and get larger. Thousands of young men were dying each year. I left the auditorium and found a deserted men’s room. I sat on the floor and cried for over an hour, just sobbing. The only time in my life I’ve reacted to something like that. …

Randy Kehler never thought his going to prison would end the war. If I hadn’t met Randy Kehler it wouldn’t have occurred to me to copy [the Pentagon Papers]. His actions spoke to me as no mere words would have done. He put the right question in my mind at the right time.[7]”

An ordinary person who few have ever heard of, Randy Kehler, gives a talk to a small group of people in an obscure university .  The way he lived his life lit the fuse that inspired Daniel Ellsberg.  Years later Ellsberg’s actions inadvertently set in train a course of events that, through many twists and turns, eventually led to Watergate and the President’s resignation.   “The Post” is a timely and inspirational film but captures only a small part of the story.  Ellsberg’s story is as newsworthy as the story of “The Washington Post”.  We need to be reminded that seemingly insignificant people who live lives of integrity, standing for truth, make a difference.  

  1. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu//NSAEBB/NSAEBB48/oval.pdf ↑
  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._United_States citing New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. at 714-20. ↑
  3. See Krogh’s article sated 30 June 2007 in The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/30/opinion/30krogh.html ↑
  4. Nine months later the same two, G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt broke into the Watergate Building on Nixon’s behalf and were caught red handed. ↑
  5. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-worlds-most-famous-filing-cabinet-36568830/ ↑
  6. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/30/opinion/30krogh.html ↑
  7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg ↑

Education and Society: Welby rattles National Secularist Society.

December 19, 2017 /
On 9th December 2017 the National Secularist Society (“NSS”) tweeted  “In attacking secular schools over their ‘lack of values’ yesterday, it appears the Archbishop of Canterbury was channelling Hitler!”.

This suggests: (a) that the NSS has no regard for historic accuracy and (b) that the Archbishop’s speech to the House of Lords has touched a raw nerve. Here is the heart of it:-

“A major obstacle, though, to our education system is a lack of clear internal and commonly held values. We live in a country where an overarching story which is the framework for explaining life has more or less disappeared. We have a world of unguided and competing narratives, where the only common factor is the inviolability of personal choice. This means that, for schools that are not of a religious character, confidence in any personal sense of ultimate values has diminished. Utilitarianism rules, and skills move from being talents held for the common good, which we are entrusted with as benefits for all, to being personal possessions for our own advantage. …”

This succinctly captures what has happened, not just in education, but to our society as a whole. The Christian religion is being shepherded into a more hidden space, behind closed doors and restricted to being a matter of private belief. The public sphere is being left to be occupied by unconstrained utilitarianism where ‘the inviolability of personal choice’ has become a ‘trump card’. The results are ugly and are all around us. It is a brave person who calls it as it is—Welby is brave.

Welby gives a brief summary of history to demonstrate that a universal system of education, free for all, was pioneered by Christians through the “National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Establish Church in England and Wales”. Welby then offers an alternative to the rule of utilitarianism:-

 

“At its most basic, for the past two centuries the Church of England has looked to promote an education that allows children, young people and adults to live out Jesus’s promise of life in all its fullness. That means enabling every person not only to grow in wisdom and to learn skills but to develop character and the spiritual, intellectual and emotional resources needed to live a good life, as an individual but also in a community….

The aim of the founders of the National Society was to be universalist, unapologetically Christian in the nature of their vocation and service and committed to the relief of disadvantage and deprivation wherever it was found. Ours must be the same. Two hundred years on, the role of the Church of England in education can be to encourage and support excellence and to provide a values-based education for all, with a laser-like focus on the poorest and most deprived. That means a renewed vision that focuses as much on deprivation of spirit and poverty of aspiration as did our forebears on material poverty and inequality.

What follows from that is a clear move towards schools that not only deliver academic excellence but have the boldness and vision to do so outside the boundaries of a selective system. The Church of England’s educational offer to our nation is church schools that are, in its own words, “deeply Christian”, nurturing the whole child—spiritually, emotionally, mentally as well as academically—yet welcoming the whole community. I pay tribute to the immense hard work of heads, teachers, leadership teams, governors and parents associations who make so many church and other schools the successes that they are. With the strong Christian commitment of heads and leadership teams, the ethos and values of Church of England schools, which make them so appealing to families of all faiths and none, will be guarded and will continue.”

That the Archbishop of Canterbury should prefer Christian values to utilitarianism is hardly surprising: so why was this speech sufficient to make the NSS howl? Could it be that secularists have become so used to the unchallenged dominance of their own voice that it has come as a shock to hear a voice advocating ‘unapologetically Christian’ values as a public good?

It is a long time since any mainstream politician or parliamentarian publicly successfully challenged the supremacy of utilitarianism by pointing to Jesus Christ. No wonder that the NSS do not like it. It is not often that we are reminded of the Christian heritage that formed the foundation of so many public services. I doubt the NSS enjoyed that much either.   Nor will they have relished the insights brought by the former Chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks’ speech:- 

“. … At the dawn of our people’s history, Moses assembled the Israelites on the brink of the Exodus. He did not talk about the long walk to freedom; he did not speak about the land flowing with milk and honey; instead, repeatedly, he turned to the far horizon of the future and spoke about the duty of parents to educate their children. He did it again at the end of his life, in those famous words: “You shall teach these things repeatedly to your children, speaking of them when you sit in your house, when you walk on the way, when you lie down and when you rise up”. Why is there this obsession with education that has stayed with us from that day to this? It is because, to defend a country, you need an army, but to defend a civilisation, you need schools. You need education as the conversation between the generations.

Whatever the society, the culture or the faith, we need to teach our children, and they theirs, what we aspire to and the ideals we were bequeathed by those who came before us. We need to teach them the story of which we and they are a part, and we need to trust them to go further than we did when they come to write their own chapter.

Weighed and found wanting

We make a grave mistake if we think of education only in terms of knowledge and skills—what the American writer David Brooks calls the “résumé virtues” as opposed to the “eulogy virtues”. This is not woolly idealism; it is hard-headed pragmatism. Never has the world changed so fast, and it is getting faster every year. We have no idea what patterns of employment will look like in two, let alone 20, years from now, what skills will be valued, and what will be done instead by artificially intelligent, preternaturally polite robots.

We need to give our children an internalised moral satellite navigation system so that they can find their way across the undiscovered country called the future. We need to give them the strongest possible sense of collective responsibility for the common good, because we do not know who will be the winners and losers in the lottery of the global economy, and we need to ensure that its blessings are shared. There is too much “I” and too little “we” in our culture, and we need to teach our children to care for others, especially for those who are not like us.

… The world that our children will inherit tomorrow is born in the schools we build today.”

Welby is right when he points out that we live in a country of competing narratives. I am glad our country allow narratives to compete. I am also glad that people of no religion and people of all religions are equally welcome and equally free to express their views.  Little by little and bit by bit it, however, the voice of the secularist has been drowning out the voice of the person of faith. The voice of the Christian has been driven from the public space – an unintended consequence of a well-meant quest for tolerance and equality. The law is busy getting itself into a muddle as it seeks to use the concepts of equality and non-discrimination to mould a tolerant society. It won’t work because these concepts are an insufficient basis for building community. Anti-discrimination legislation may restrain behaviour that would otherwise destroy society but it will not inspire behaviour that builds up society and bridges gaps between communities.

It is especially good to hear a clear Christian voice from Parliament because we are becoming a society which allows people to hold private religious views but denies people the freedom to express their religious beliefs in the way they live. (Consider for example the Ashers Baking Company case and the closing of Catholic adoption agencies for the sole reason that they refused to place children with same sex couples). There is little point in having bishops in the House of Lords unless they are willing to tell us what difference following Christ makes to the matter under debate.

Unconstrained utilitarianism (promoting the greatest happiness of the greatest number[1]) is a seductive philosophy. It sounds so reasonable. It commends itself to our times because it appears to provide a way of living that is not divisive: it can be applied without reference to any particular religion. Yet experience shows that unconstrained utilitarianism provides only a very shaky foundation for society. Consider these examples:-

1. Utilitarianism turns it back upon the vulnerable other. When faced with helpless refugees the utilitarian test has been re-defined so as to permit their exclusion. It now promotes ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number of us’. ‘Us’ typically being defined by reference to the citizens of a National State. By contrast the biblical faiths commands us to love our neighbour as ourselves (irrespective of colour, country of origin etc).

2. Utilitarianism won’t answer the “If I don’t do it someone else will” dilemma. When tempted to act dishonestly or otherwise against one’s better judgement, utilitarianism provides no restraint. The argument that ‘it won’t make any difference because someone else will do it anyway’ has no effective utilitarian counter. By contrast the bible teaches that God is all-knowing and that we will be answerable for our actions upon a day of judgment.  We live to serve Him and our entire lives are played out to an audience of One.  The story of Job demonstrates this and Jesus teaches this by His example as well as by His words

3. Utilitarianism can disguise self-interest as if it were a public good. Is it coincidence that we have an ever widening inequality and ever more grotesque excessive pay? This week it was reported that the top three executives at Persimmon are to receive more than £200m between them and up to £800m is to be received by the companies’ top 150 managers. Excessive pay of this order is not in the interests of society as a whole. The huge disparity between the national average remuneration and the pay of the top 1% is divisive and a de-motivator. Unrestrained utilitarianism does not seem capable of restraining shameless greed.

So a big THANK YOU to Justin Welby for reminding us of the unique contribution made by Christians to the education system and for pointing us to the life-giving quality of the teaching of Jesus. A small ‘thank you’ goes to the NSS for their gratuitously offensive tweet, without which Welby’s message would not have reached as many people as it has.

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  1. I acknowledge that this is an inadequate and crude summary of utilitarianism. ↑

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