Conference season begins in earnest this week, with the Liberal Democrats gathering in . Not without good cause, it will proceed with much handwringing about the parlous state of our public institutions and allegedly diminished levels of public trust and engagement.
Political parties have continued to haemorrhage members.[1] The electoral system is frequently criticised, we have an increasingly over-powerful executive set against an ever-weakening Parliament, and now financial institutions are widely seen as semi-corrupt or severely incompetent and yet are heavily propped up by the state. Insult was added to injury this year when we realised that, systemic problems aside, many of our representatives in Parliament have engaged in practices which, while not strictly speaking illegal, carry a faint air of corruption. People have long distrusted politicians as being ‘out for themselves’, but now this accusation has taken on a new and very concrete shape.
Now that the reputation of the political class is genuinely tarnished, acknowledging public anger and the need for change seems calculating rather than cathartic. Nevertheless, over the next three weeks each Party will assure us that it is the one not only to reform Parliament and renew the political process, but also to take the hard decisions on the road out of recession and to curb the culture of excess in the financial institutions.
Playwright David Hare, author of The Power of Yes (a dramatisation of last year’s economic collapse based on interviews with leading financiers, and due to open at the National Theatre next week), considers a wider lack of public virtue to be the root both of what he sees as the pusillanimous approach of our politicians to the regulation of financial markets and of last Spring’s expenses furore.
Last Tuesday, when debating the cultural implications of the global financial crisis one year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers with historian Simon Sebag Montefiore and the Archbishop of Canterbury on Newsnight, Hare argued that the pervading sense of public resentment against politicians and bankers resides in the knowledge that “each of these tribes were in it for themselves … If everybody believes that everybody is simply rooting for the tribe to which they belong, then notions of the common good become incredibly difficult to enforce”. He went on to say, “[to] public figures, we don’t ascribe any virtue at all...there’s nobody to whom we turn in this situation, because we believe that everyone is in it for themselves”. In other words, the public square has been shorn of the pursuit of the good and reduced to a competition of interests or, in Harold Lasswell’s famous definition of politics, the business of who get’s what, when, and how.
This raises the very awkward question of who we will trust to lead the way in restoring the threadbare public institutions and on what principles they could proceed. In this mood, the public will wearily regard the prospect of politicians fiddling with the constitution, electoral systems, the administration of Parliament or the regulation of the banks (let alone the running of semi-nationalised banks) with the same enthusiasm the Football Association would show at the prospect of allowing Premiership footballers to referee their own matches. There is an acute need for forms of public leadership which could convincingly claim to represent the public interest and not, in Hare’s terms, the interests of one particular tribe in a fracturing public square.
What are the options? Some suggest that Independents offer a ray of hope: non-professional politicians, coming to the table with a fresh pair of eyes and a clean pair of hands. But no matter how hot their crusading zeal burns, these individuals will struggle to mount a challenge in or to a system so weighted in favour of the established parties.
Might we turn to the media? No: while effective in deconstructing the motives and actions of existing public figures it is not desirable that it should then become an advocate for alternatives.
And while we might aspire to see the general public reengage with political structures and processes, some reflective commentators have noted that the public has itself colluded in the breaking down of institutions. As David Marquand has argued, “the crisis is not the work of greedy bankers, lax regulators or corrupt MPs alone: they are only grubby flotsam floating on much deeper currents…we, the ‘people’, are also part of the problem – that the real culprit is the hyper-individualistic, materialistic hedonism of the entire culture, popular at least as much as elite”.
Is then the church, the Christian tradition or indeed any faith tradition part of the answer? Discuss. Against this possibility speaks the unfortunate fact that the church in its institutional forms is no longer seen, in Archbishop Temple’s memorable phrase, as a society which exists for the benefit of its non-members, but as yet another tribe rooting for itself.
This is partly down to the fact that the Christian tradition can no longer claim that it holds the ring or provides the criteria by which arguments or policies could be adjudicated. However, it is also partly a rod that Christians have shaped for their own backs, most obviously when they have entered into litigation in defence of employment rights, presenting themselves as an injured minority and seeking to mobilise support through campaigning organisations; the Christian community begins to look like just another interest group.
When advocating the case for involvement, never mind any form of leadership, of the Christian community in the public square, we must be increasingly careful to show that we are not seeking the advantage of our particular club, but that we carry with us a coherent and attractive vision of the common good.
Paul Bickley is senior researcher at Theos.
---
1. Labour Party membership is down over 40% since the admittedly inflated 1997 peak, according to conservativehome the Conservatives are down over 20% since 2000, and the Liberal Democrats have experienced a fall of similar magnitude between 1999 and 2006).
