Week 18 2014

Tendring Topics…….on line

Bravo David Cameron!

            It isn’t very often that I find myself leaping to defend David Cameron our Prime Minister from his critics. In fact, I don’t think that it has ever happened before and it may well never happen again.  I do however wholeheartedly agree with him that Britain is a Christian country and we should celebrate that fact.  I would qualify that declaration though (and I think that Mr Cameron would agree with me on this point) by asserting that Britain is not only a Christian country; but it is a Christian country in which adherents of other faiths or of no faith at all, are not just tolerated but welcomed. They are given exactly the same rights and privileges as Christians to practise their faith, to build places of worship and religious teaching, to bring up children in that faith, and to encourage and accept converts from any other religious tradition or from none. 

            That is surely one of the reasons why the fact that we are a Christian country should be celebrated.  At least during the past 1,000 years it is only in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and in countries with a Christian tradition, that people of all religious faiths have been able to worship, teach and proselytise on equal terms, and  can expect to enjoy the protection of the state in doing so..

            There have, of course, been a number of countries in which folk of different faiths have lived together in peace in the past – in Moorish Spain for example, or Bosnia under Turkish rule – but always the adherents of a minority faith were second-class citizens. Those wonderful examples of Moorish architecture you may have seen in southern Spain were almost certainly built by Christian slaves.  In 1980 my wife and I toured what was then still a united Jugoslavia.  In Sarajevo we visited a Mosque and a Serb Orthodox Church.  Both were open to tourists and worshippers.  The latter though was behind a high wall so that during the period of Turkish rule the Muslim majority need not be visibly conscious of the infidels in their midst.  It took Marshal Tito’s godless (but springing from a Christian tradition) communist government to give tolerance and equal state recognition to followers of the Serb Orthodox and Croat Catholic traditions and to Muslims.

            In the Middle East there were countries, among them Iraq, Syria and Egypt, which although predominantly Muslim, at one time had considerable Christian minorities. They were prohibited from making converts from among their Muslim neighbours, but otherwise thrived and prospered.  All of that ended as a result of Britain’s blundering foreign policy, particularly with Tony Blair’s and George Bush’s disastrous – and illegal – invasion of Iraq.  Now, throughout the Middle East, Pakistan and much of Africa, Christians survive in fear for their livelihoods and their lives – emigrating where they are able to do so, and adding to the growing number of asylum seekers.  In Saudi-Arabia, Christian faith and practice are banned absolutely, only the most extreme Muslim worship and practice being permitted.  But Saudi Arabia buys our weaponry and we buy their oil – so their intolerance and contempt for human rights are tolerated, and visiting Saudi royalty are treated as honoured guests!   That is not something of which we should be proud!

            It is true that in Britain Christians have done terrible things both to each other and to others in the past.  I don’t think that we need to reproach ourselves too much about the medieval crusades.  Muslim armies had invaded Christendom (in Spain)  before those crusades and, advancing from Constantinople (Istanbul) to the outskirts of Vienna, long after them. The Crusades had, at least in the first instance, the surely laudable objective of ensuring that Christian pilgrims could visit in safety the holy places in Palestine. 

            The same cannot be said about the torture and burning alive of heretics in medieval Britain, about which the godless Lord Byron wrote, ‘Christians have burned each other, quite persuaded, that all the apostles would have done as they did’.  Nor about the witch hunts and witch hangings of the 17^th and 18^th centuries, and of Christian involvement in the slave trade.  None of those practices can possibly be excused though it must be said that it is quite a long time since a heretic was burned or a witch hanged in the UK, and Christian Britain was among the first countries to ban slavery and to use its navy to stamp out the slave trade.

            In the recent census only just over half those who responded declared themselves to be ‘Christian’. That was a majority, if only a small one – but I know of people who certainly hold Christian values and Christian beliefs but hesitate to describe themselves as ‘Christian’ because they fear that that would associate them with the inquisition, witch hunts and over-eager fundamentalist doorstep evangelists today!  

            But today’s numbers of professed Christians are only one of the reasons why we may claim that Britain is a Christian country.  Christianity has shaped our history over the past 1,000 years.  It has enriched our language.  We all know what is meant by ‘A Judas’, ‘a Good Samaritan’, ‘a Job’s comforter’, ‘a Delilah’,  ‘Petering out’, ‘David and Goliath’, ‘Adam’s ale’, ‘Old as Methuselah’, ‘Antediluvian’, ‘a Martha or a Mary’, ‘a voice crying in the wilderness’  - there are many more, all directly linked to the Old or New Testaments of the Christian Bible with which during my childhood and youth almost everyone was, at least to some extent, familiar.

            Nowadays the Christian Church sometimes acts as the prophets of the Old Testament did and points our rulers, concerned only with worldly values, towards compliance with the will of God.  Archbishop Runcie incurred the wrath of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher when his service of thanksgiving after the Falklands War remembered the Argentine as well as the British dead, wounded and bereaved. ‘It was like a Quaker Meeting’ she is said to have complained.  That suggests to me that the Archbishop had got the service about right!

            It says much for David Cameron that he continues to proclaim his Christian faith despite the fact that in recent months his government’s policies towards the poor and disadvantaged have been strongly criticised by the leaders of all Christian traditions. I disagree with virtually every other statement he has made and almost every policy of his government.  But - like him, I believe that we live in a Christian, but uniquely tolerant and welcoming, country – and that this is something that we should celebrate, and for which we should thank God.‘

Hier stehe ich.  Ich kann nicht anders!’

            ‘Here I stand.  There is nothing else that I can do’.  Thus spoke Martin Luther, the ‘father of Protestantism’ as he expounded his reformist doctrines.  Writing, for the first time ever, in support of David Cameron as he declared his Christian faith, I found myself wondering where I really stand on the burning political issues of the 21^st Century. I know that I am an opinionated old man, but what do those opinions amount to?  Am I a really a closet revolutionary, a well-meaning but somewhat woolly-minded liberal, or could I possibly be at-heart a true-blue Tory?  Where do I stand on the political spectrum?  Well, here are some of my deeply-held convictions:

             I believe that there should be a steady reduction of the income gap between the wealthiest and poorest of our countrymen, and that our government should work towards a society in which no-one’s income is more than ten times that of anyone else’s. Steps towards this would be a shift from indirect taxation (VAT and Excise duties) to direct taxation (Income tax and death duties), and a revision of the income tax system to ensure that we all pay the same percentage of our income in tax. I believe that those who move to tax havens overseas to avoid paying income tax in this country, should automatically forfeit their British nationality and their right to a British passport. I’d also like everyone to have a fair wage and to give of their best without a ‘target' and without a promised bonus as a bribe!  I'd like to put behind us a system in which the poor are forced to work hard by the threat of starvation and homelessness; and the very wealthy are persuaded to work by the promise of an enormous bribe. We must get rid of this 'expecting an enormous bonus', culture.  It is infinitely more damaging both to individuals and to society than the 'benefit culture' that members of the government are so keen to eradicate.  

            I believe too that we should scrap our nuclear weapons and nuclear submarine fleet and that the role of the armed forces should increasingly be that of dealing with the results of civil and natural disasters (earthquakes, fires, floods, civil conflicts, failure of private enterprise contractors, and so on) and the evacuation or rescue of their victims.

 I’m clearly a ‘loony lefty’ – well to the left even of ‘Old Labour’!

            I am though also convinced of the reality and threat of Global Warming, and of humankind’s responsibility for it. Accepting this and attempting to respond positively to it over-rides all other political concerns.  I think we should redouble our efforts to explore and exploit renewable energy sources and believe that wave and tidal power, surely much more dependable than that of the sun or the wind, have yet to be fully exploited.  We should be working towards the total ending of the use of fossil fuels. Fracking should be made illegal throughout the UK.  Those convictions surely put me squarely among the ‘Greens’.

The Scandinavian model – Queen Margrethe II of Denmark disembarks from her Royal Yacht in London Docks, as she visits and encourages the Danish athletes at the 2012 Olympics.  Photo by my elder son Pete.   

           

But..........I also believe in the merits of our constitutional monarchy (though I’d prefer the informality of the Scandinavian model) and I am certainly not a republican.   I think that there is a lot to be said for the selective education that made it possible for folk like me to climb out of the ‘aspiring working class’ into the lowest levels of the ‘middle class’.There clearly is something the matter with our educational system.  Michael Gove, Education Minister, seems desperately eager to put it right and I wish him well in that task - but he really has a knack of upsetting everybody from the NUT to his own 'old Etonian' colleagues!

 Although I think that women should be able to aspire to any job in the United Kingdom (even those of Archbishop of Canterbury or York if they’re the best candidates for the job) I also think that making a comfortable and happy home, and bringing up children ‘in the way that they should go’, can be a perfectly satisfying and fulfilling career for some women. It is a career that they should be encouraged to follow if they wish to do so. I have no doubt that the best person to guide and guard a child from infancy to adolescence is not a child minder or a nursery school but the child’s mum.

Children are bound to be neglected if both parents are in  full-time work.  Mum and dad will  be away from home all day and when they get home there'll be a meal to be prepared, housework to be done and private mail to attend to..   They are really very fortunate if they can find the time and energy to listen to their children's concerns and help them with their homework.

 In the 'bad old days' when I grew from childhood through adolescence to adult life, folk married before they lived together, and didn't marry until the potential husband's income was sufficient to support a wife and family.  I really wouldn't wish to return to those days.  Then though, there would always be either dad or mum (all right - so it would most likely be mum!) at home when a child or young adolescent came home from school . Consequently there was much less juvenile crime, and schoolchild pregnancies, juvenile 'social diseases' and juvenile drug-taking were virtually unknown.

Some of my thoughts on these issues are probably 'to the right'  of those of many Conservatives! 

         Oh yes – and I’m an unashamed Europhile and a Federalist!  Every political party (except of course UKIP) has a few of us. Can you wonder that, in ‘first past the post’ elections, I no longer seek for a candidate I’d like to see win. There won't be one.   I look instead for the candidate I most want to be rejected and vote for the candidate most likely to defeat him or her!