After the election – what is wrong with UK politics

By Andy Flannagan

The Apostle Paul, in the 12th chapter of his letter to the church in Rome, said this, “For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you.”

We are perhaps used to applying this instruction to our personal lives, but I wonder if the multiplication from thousands of us reading this verse should also have implications for our corporate lives. Is it possible for a nation to think “more highly of itself than it ought”?

It’s a question that has loomed large in my head and heart during this election campaign.

A large amount of commentary (both amateur and professional) has been in the territory of ‘a plague on all their houses’, and the same could also be said of the elections in the USA and France.

Why don’t we like explanations for what is going wrong in our world where we are part of the problem? The increased screen time and anxiety that lockdown gifted us made our “common” ground that much more fertile for conspiracy theories and what can only be described as radicalisation. We are then even more attracted to simple explanations where “someone else” is to blame, whether that’s Bill Gates, George Soros, Big Pharma, the Deep State, or any other concoction. They leave us unable to see the plank in our own eye. For example, our own participation in an unbridled free market which has led to record levels of inequality in land, housing and wealth. Or our collusion in the dislocation of sex from covenantal relationships.

Or our participation in the lifestyle choices that are drinking our planet dry of its resources. Or our participation in lazy nationalism and exceptionalism that somehow imagines ourselves as more intelligent or moral than the rest of Europe.

We prefer the other type of explanations where everything is the fault of other people. Those immigrants. Those woke lefties. Those bankers. Those politicians.

It is an appealing and comforting thing to find your ‘rightness’ by naming someone else’s wrongness. George Bush famously named the “Axis of Evil”, writing off millions of people in one easy catchphrase. More accurately Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said this “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained”

It is often the same on a micro level when we complain about the leadership in our church or the rest of our family, unable to accuse ourselves of our complicity in stagnation, as we scroll through a social media feed rather than serve our community.

GK Chesterton is famously reported to have sent a very short letter in response to a newspaper article asking “What is wrong with the world?” (though it may in fact be apocryphal) “Dear Sirs. I am”.

As Executive Director of Christians in Politics, I inevitably get a lot of email during an election campaign. Our mantra is that “politics is for life, not just elections” but I am still thankful for the raised awareness that an election season brings. But there are some recurring threads in my inbox that illustrate some of what has been happening at the interface of faith and politics in the UK.

Many of my dear friends in the Conservatives have been aghast at what has taken place over the last few years in their party. They quote the steady loss of serious, evidence-based, fair-minded Tories like Caroline Spelman and Alastair Burt (interestingly both believers) only to be replaced by those who follow Nigel Farage into small-boat-shaped obsession.

The Conservative party in the UK is now waking up to the reality that if you collude with some fiction for electoral gain, the nonsense may eventually eat you alive. Moderate republicans in the USA have sadly seen this same dynamic play out over the course of the last decade.

There is an ill-wind blowing through the UK, and jubilant Labour supporters would be wise to note it, rather than be anaesthetised by a landslide victory. Simple slogans and simple explanations are becoming all too palatable. And as the negative impacts of Brexit continue to hamstring the UK economy over the next few years, it will be increasingly tempting for some to embrace the easy lure of blaming other people.

Labour may lose those voters who can grab hold of ‘identity issues’ like transgenderism and immigration more than they can hold of the complexities of economics like credit creation, single markets or transaction taxes. Without allowing social conservatives or even social moderates to still feel at home in the Labour party, Labour will become akin to the hollowed-out progressivism of the Democrats in the USA, rather than a broad- based movement, and the rise of Reform may be inevitable.

Reform UK has been especially tempting to Christians here in the way that Trump is in the states.

That has been particularly clear during this campaign from my post-bag. My heartfelt plea is this – no matter how frustrated you are with mainstream politics, don’t buy what another dodgy second-hand car salesman is selling. Integrity matters in leadership. I see none there. ‘Telling it like it is’ on both sides of the pond is often shorthand for casual racism and the ego-driven exploitation of frustration. Real leadership stretches us beyond our prejudices rather than reinforcing or even igniting them.

That’s what Jesus constantly did. He pointed out how perhaps there was something to love and admire in ‘the other’ (for example in the story of the Good Samaritan), rather than pointing out how ‘we’re right’ and ‘they’re all wrong’. It would have been easy for him to pull off that sort of populism. The rapturous, relieved, welcome of Palm Sunday made that an easy option. When it became clear that he was also here to challenge the people of Israel, rather than just critique the Romans, Jesus’ own people chose Barabbas. In the wave of populism sweeping the US and UK, I hear the strains of ‘give us Barabbas’ inspired by self-serving media barons and Russian bot-farms masquerading as whispering Pharisees. Sometimes we are part of the problem. And sometimes the problem is us. That doesn’t mean self-flagellation and denying some of our great history as a nation. It just means praying and hoping for a little bit of Christ-like humility.

There has also been a lot of talk about growth as an explicit goal in this campaign, and we would do well to remember these words of Lesslie Newbigin, “Growth for the sake of growth….is an exact account of the phenomenon which, when it occurs in the human body, is called cancer.” Our rampant consumption and rapacious need for more is what fuels growth (even if that is fuelled by a multi-billion dollar advertising industry), but again we don’t want to hear that we may be part of the problem.

The other underlying current at play in this campaign has been novelty. Newspapers are full of news – that which is new. You can’t fault them for that. But news is inevitably not the whole story and should not be our full diet of information. If we only eat novelty via social media or other media, we should not be surprised that we then vote for novelty just because if we’re honest we are bored with the present lot. It is however an extremely powerful force. Knowledge of this power was demonstrated by Labour’s choice of ‘Change’ as their strap line. But just campaigning on change means you may not have people still with you as the speed of change increases and our attention spans shorten. They may want to change you too before long. So I am crying out for our data inflow to be full of more than just what is ‘new’, and also consist of some ancient wisdom. Call me a grumpy old man, but we need more slow books and less fast screens.

Another common thread is the cry of the Christians who feel politically homeless – unable to condone what they see as the “cruelty” of Conservative asylum policy, but unable to endorse some of Labour, the Liberal Democrats or Green’s more socially liberal agenda.

Labour would be wise to not presume the loyalty of those who have just voted to get rid of the Conservative party. Those votes may have been about incompetence as much as values. They would be wise to recognise that the centre of gravity of the country is probably a tad left of centre economically but a tad right of centre on social issues. Don’t mistake boredom and annoyance for progressivism. Ironically it exposes some of the philosophical shallowness of lazy progressivism. Back to novelty. Something is better purely because it is new. I will never forget how well this was crystallised at a Labour party fringe event, when a shadow cabinet member was questioned about abortion. Their response was “Oh I think that’s a 20th century issue, not a 21st century issue”. No discussion on the merits of the issue or legislation. Just a declaration that if it’s new it must be better. That if we are given maximum freedom, that history tends towards goodness. That naïve, sunny philosophy is falling apart all over the world in light of the reality of our fallen nature.

Which brings us back to the start. In this next parliamentary term, might we engage wholeheartedly in an integrated way in the presumption that we are all fallen, rather than shouting in our holier than thou way from the sidelines?

I’ve got news for you. You already are compromised. The petrol you put in your car is supporting some fairly shocking Middle Eastern states that oppress Christians and oppress women. The crystals in your mobile phone have been mined using slave labour in Africa. Your pension is probably supporting arms manufacture. So the question is not, “Should we get involved?”. We are involved. From supermarkets to broadband, we are colluding.

What is wrong with politics in this country?

I am.

Andy Flannagan is Director of Christians in Politics