READING THE CHURCH of England’s pre-election manifesto, Who Is My Neighbour? drained me of so much Life Force that I had to abandon it at page 32. Only after a recharge could I return to finish off the remaining 20 pages a few hours later. I kept myself going by thinking of the irony that I was reading it in the Guardian, the house journal of the atheist intelligentsia.
For all its neutral posing, it’s not much more than an episcopal tract for the left, who love to drag up the example of the Jesus they don’t believe in whenever they want to elevate their morality to a more spiritual plane: “What would Jesus say about tax avoidance/gay marriage/low pay/inequality/people on benefits/immigrants and Ukip?”
Well, I know what he’d say about welfare and employment: “if any would not work, neither should he eat” (2 Thessalonians v3). Those are actually the words of Paul, but I’ll assume he was on message with the Lord. Anyway, it sounds like an old-fashioned Conservative message to me: either get on your bike or starve. That’s not popular with the left these days even though their Bolshy hero Lenin adapted it for his revolution, “He who does not work shall not eat.” The ironies just keep coming.
‘Who Is My Neighbour’ ticks the major boxes of political orthodoxy, from the environment and consumerism to community, the European Union, poverty, inequality and austerity.
Who Is My Neighbour ticks the major boxes of political orthodoxy, from the environment and consumerism to community, the European Union, poverty, inequality and austerity. Occasionally it seems to sense a reality outside the bubble, making a nod towards the idea of limited or dispersed government, for instance. Indeed, it begins to sound almost Burkeian, with its plea for more “little platoons” in public life, what it calls “intermediate institutions…a lot bigger than the family but far smaller than the state,” and, crucially, “informal and independent…small enough not to need every activity to be codified.” But that would never get past the health and safety brigade. Or the EU.
Such popping out of the box is infrequent, unfortunately, and normal programming is always swiftly resumed.
IT’S NOT THE predictability of the content that I find irritating; it’s the tone, the assumption that the writers of these screeds are the ones in the know and have somehow been chosen to create a new vision of society.
It’s an essential part of a debate that only happens inside the bubble of the political, social and intellectual world but not in the world where it really matters, ie, that of the public, whose “communities” the elites are always talking about. “Let’s have a debate,” they say, only to close out the very people who need to be doing the talking. “We want a dialogue about immigration,” say the bishops, knowing full well that the dialogue should have taken place decades ago and that whatever is said now is just a smokescreen to hide the fact that the politicians want to appear to be doing something while carrying on exactly as before.
And so they keep going on about what kind of society “we” want to build. Well, most people don’t have a particular “vision”, they have no thought of “building” a society. What most of them want, I suspect, is a society very much as it is now but with jobs, decent schools for their kids, affordable housing, good healthcare and a police force to protect them from criminals.
What they don’t want is more statist interference and the constant whingeing of certain groups for special treatment. What they don’t want is to see their country, their home, transformed around them without their consent. They don’t want to end up feeling like strangers in their own land. They never voted for their country to be turned into a “community of communities”, because it was not a choice they were offered.
Many parts of the bishops’ letter could easily have come straight from the Guardian or the Journal of the RSA. And when it receives the approval of one of the former’s regular journos for its “open rejection of neo-liberal principles” you know its declared political neutrality is as transparent as tracing paper under which you can read “Vote Labour”.
So for all its good intentions and ecclesiastical credentials, Who Is My Neighbour? is just another belch in the echo chamber of bien pensant Britain. I won’t risk depleting my Life Force by reading it again.
