The Trouble with Elections

This coming Thursday we face a general election for the UK parliament which on this occasion seems more than ever fraught with intrigues. As a Christian anarchist I ought to boycott the election entirely because classic anarchists insist that to invest any credibility in the corrupt electoral system is to collude with our powerful oppressors. But the Roman Catholic priest who introduced me to anarchism adopted the view that if we did vote, it ought to be for the party which offers the best opportunity for creating a milieu in which new ideas and proposals can be freely expressed. In the case of my electorate, Brecon and Radnorshire, the choice was easy. The Liberal Democrats hold the seat with a majority at the last election of only 800 over the Conservatives. So my vote goes to the Liberals firstly because they offer the possibility of space to think afresh, secondly because it was the one major party to oppose the war in Iraq, and thirdly because I have no wish ever to live and work under a Conservative government again.

There are too many actions of Margaret Thatcher which I cannot excuse or forget: her decision to go to war over the Malvinas (known here as the Falkland Islands); her championing of the infamous Clause 28 which prohibited schools from discussing homosexuality as an orientation and lifestyle; her creation of a bureaucratic management style in higher education which saw in my case the percentage balance of student contact hours to administrative tasks fall from 80:20 to 25:75; her rejection of the Church of England’s report on urban poverty, Faith in the City, as Marxist rubbish together with her admonition that the Church steer clear of politics and focus only on spiritual values; her cynical use of St Francis’s prayer as if it gave the seal of approved to her social and economic ideology; her insistence that ‘there is no such thing as society’ and in the latter part of her prime ministership, the increasing hubris which prompted her use of the royal ‘We’ as on that famous occasion when she announced ‘We are a grandmother!’. The list is endless.

Elements of the media are suggesting that in this election the Conservatives have become the ‘nasty party’ principally because they have called upon the skills of the Australian guru who has helped engineer John Howard’s electoral successes in that country. They have been running a campaign impugning the honesty of Prime Minister Tony Blair over both the intelligence and legal advice upon which he based the decision to go to war in Iraq. So on numerous occasions we have seen the leader of the Conservatives, Michael Howard, in addition to raising the traditional war cries of the Right in favour of the creation of bigger prisons and a greatly enlarged police state, and against immigration and asylum-seeking, publicly declaring Blair to be a serial liar. I happen to think that Blair did deliberately deceive this nation in order to go to war. After all, under his leadership Britain has gone to war now on seven occasions so he seems to have a taste for it. I don’t have a problem with Blair being called a liar, just with who it is in this case who is calling him a liar and offering himself as the perfect model of integrity.

Under the lacklustre successive leaderships of John Major, William Hague and Ian Duncan Smith, the Conservatives have lost three elections in a row, something deeply discomforting for a party that considers itself born to rule. Much as I distrust Blair, I distrust Michael Howard even more, particularly as he said this week that he would have gone to war in Iraq under any circumstances just to get rid of Saddam Hussein. I have only once heard Howard speak and that was when he was serving as Minister of Employment in the Thatcher government. The occasion was a day conference organised by the Institute of Directors, one of the bastions of capitalism, to discuss the morality of the capitalist system. The main speakers were the American Roman Catholic academic Michael Novak, the Chief Rabbi, the Bishop of Oxford and Howard. Whereas the other speakers, amongst whom there were clear disagreements, were able to carry forward a conversation in a civilised manner, all Howard could do was rant about the conservative management of Britain’s economy, this mind you at a time when unemployment was soaring and poverty increasing. There was something deeply troubling about his demeanour which was crystallised for me when one of his Cabinet colleagues, Ann Widdicombe, scuppered his first attempt to gain leadership of the party by declaring that there was ‘something of the night’ about him.

In addition to Howard’s abusive style of personal politics, there are other machinations at work in this election. The UK Independence Party, largely made up of disaffected Conservatives who want to see the British Pound retained as the UK’s currency and to have Britain withdraw from the EEC, did unexpectedly well at the European elections at the expense of the Conservatives. And they are campaigning hard again and will hopefully, particularly in the case of my electorate, draw votes away from the Conservatives. Then too the ostensibly non-political Countryside Alliance, which is trying to have the Labour governmen's legislation banning the time honoured upper class ‘sport’ of fox-hunting lifted, appears to have fathered a covert organisation that is working on behalf of the Conservatives in marginal seats to see sitting Labour members defeated. British elections seem to be won or lost in the marginal seats and this year they are attracting even greater attention.

The perennial question of whether Britain should scrap its first-past-the-post electoral system, in which governments win power on a minority of votes – the so-called ‘tyranny of the minority’ – in favour of some alternative is being discussed with even greater fervour this election. This is in part due to the steep rise in voter apathy, with many people feeling either that the main political choices are no choice at all, or that big government has become so unwieldy that the individual voice is of no significance. Commentators seem much more serious this year in discussing the introduction of alternatives such as Australia’s compulsory voting with people fined for not registering a vote, or even, Heaven forbid, a system of proportional representation like that in New Zealand!

A Union Takes a Stand

The Association of University Teachers, the union of which I’m a member, has always served me very well. So when Westminster College, the Methodist College in Oxford on whose theology faculty I worked in the 1990’s, decided that its faculties of Education and Theology should merge with Oxford Brookes University with both the loss of Methodist identity and the redundancy of some staff, the Union’s advice and representation were invaluable in negotiating my redundancy payment. It also came to my aid in a different matter. As a resident Tutor with pastoral responsibilities on site and provided with a College flat, the College’s Personnel Officer assumed the right to tell me who I could and could not have to stay in the flat. I insisted that my Union representative should be present at this discussion, and the Personnel Officer quickly discovered his reverse gear.

Although formally retired and in receipt of a teachers’ pension, I’ve returned to academic work on a part-time basis at Lampeter University, and remain a union member. This week at its annual conference, my union took the controversial step of boycotting two Israeli universities, Haifa and Bar-Ilan because it regards them as being complicit in the abuse of Palestinians in the occupied territories. The boycott had been called because Haifa University is alleged to have placed restrictions on the academic freedom of any staff who speak out against the current Israeli government’s policies, and Bar-Ilan is alleged to have links with a college in the disputed settlement of Ariel. There are also allegations concerning the prestigious Hebrew University, but the Union is taking no action in this case until it has been thoroughly investigated.

I can’t tell you what the boycott will actually mean in practice as that is to be revealed in a mailing which the union will shortly be sending out. But as one might expect, the announcement of the boycott alone has prompted fierce reactions. Sources within the Palestinian Authority have warmly welcomed it as a gesture of solidarity with Palestinian people and their ambitions. The Palestinian founder of the Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel says that the union’s action makes it “acceptable to compare Israel’s apartheid system to its South African predecessor”. The apartheid image is a common one amongst Palestinians who remain aware of the close links that the Israeli government established with the South African apartheid regime, to the extent that it is still alleged that the Israelis were assisting the regime develop a nuclear capability.

There have been the predictable responses from the Jewish community with the deputy Israeli Ambassador in London noting that “the last time that Jews were boycotted in universities was in 1930s Germany”; the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs declaring that the decision is “misguided and unbalanced in the extreme”; the Board of Deputies of British Jews denouncing the boycott as “blinkered, irresponsible and dangerous”; and the Union of Jewish Students in the UK calling upon the government to establish a full enquiry into the obvious extremism amongst both staff and students on British campuses.

There is dissent amongst the university community as well. The association representing university employers has raised the issue of whether the boycott is contrary to laws relating to contracts, race and religious discrimination, as well as to the spirit of academic freedom. The representative body of vice-chancellors of British universities has similarly condemned the action. What remains clear in all this is that any criticism of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians continues to provoke deep passions.

I know Haifa University quite well. When I was living in that city in the 1970’s a colleague and I would several days a week, very early in the morning, motor from our base in Wadi Nisnas up Mount Carmel to the University’s spectacular site, to play a few sets of tennis before motoring back down to a city beach for a quick dip in the Med before breakfast. We were at that time members of a team working with the Christian community on development projects in that city and we forged strong links with the University, and in partnership with its Sociology department conducted the first social survey of urban Arabs undertaken since 1919. There were many disturbing findings in this piece of research including evidence that Israeli agents were promoting drug use amongst young urban Arabs, allegedly so that their communities could be characterised as dysfunctional.

Our team also became involved in education issues, converting an abandoned Anglican hospital into a hostel for young Palestinians, many of whom had come into the city from rural areas in search of education, and had been forced to sleep rough on the streets. We quickly became aware that while limited access to tertiary education was available at technical college level, there was virtually no possibility of Arab students gaining entry to Haifa University. All this of course was in that era when Israel sported a ‘socialist’ government under Golda Meir, which ought to have been ideologically committed to equality of opportunity. But Golda of course had notoriously declared that no such people as Palestinians exist and since that time, with governments lurching ever further to the right, I cannot imagine that the educational opportunities for Arabs have improved much in respect to Jewish universities.

It is with this experience in mind that I personally applaud the action my union has taken this week. There are times when the freedoms we academics cherish so much need to be extended to those whose situation of oppression and degradation allows them no freedoms, least of all access to education. So I find myself echoing the words of the union member who co-authored the motion calling for the boycott. “I am proud today to be a member of a union that is prepared to stand up for human rights around the world”.

On Virtue

When twenty years ago I participated in a training of trainers workshop on critical social analysis, which was becoming an important tool in the field of development education in which I was then working, one of the facilitators urged us to make certain we read the reflections of those with whom we profoundly disagree. He insisted it was important for us to know exactly what the political, economic and religious opposition were saying. Although I still find this an uncomfortable pursuit, I try to maintain it because I’ve learnt the value of discerning where those with whom I am at odds are coming from.

So one of the websites I visit from time to time is VirtueOnline, run by a man with the intriguing name of David Virtue. The site claims to be ‘The Voice of Global Orthodox Anglicanism’ and to be read by more than a million people each year. Its style is deliberately confrontational. It doesn’t want to engage in reasonable dialogue with anyone, but convinced that the views it promotes are both ‘Anglican’ and ‘True’ takes to task is an unrestrained and abusive way, those with whom Virtue disagrees principally Episcopal Church bishops whom he characterises as frauds and liars.

VirtueOnline is obsessed with homosexuality, which raises questions about the psychological disposition of those who subscribe to its extremist views on this and other subjects. According to Stephen Bates in his book A Church at War, it was Virtue who bombastically announced at the Episcopal Convention in the process of confirming Gene Robinson’s election as Bishop of New Hampshire, that he had found the ‘smoking gun’ that would guarantee Robinson’s defeat. This was an allegation that Robinson was associated with an Internet gay porn site, something which after due investigation turned out to be false. Of course there has been no apology for this, or any other false claim that has appeared on Virtue’s website which seems incapable of admitting that it can get things wrong.

This week the website took on the Church in Wales, of which I am a member, and in particular Archbishop Barry Morgan’s presidential address to a recent meeting of the Church’s Governing Body. Under the headline ‘Archbishop Launches Attack on Anglican Church’ Virtue claims that Archbishop Barry ‘launched a shocking condemnation of his own Church’. Virtue also noted the dreaded ‘h’ word in the Archbishop’s address, claiming that the Archbishop ‘used the opportunity to turn the focus of the Anglican Church once again on the issue of homosexuality’.

VirtueOnline in fact gives a completely distorted view of the contents of the Archbishop’s address. To begin with, the first half of the address is devoted to discussion of the ‘make poverty history’ campaign and the need to seriously address poverty both at home and abroad. But poverty is not something that appears high on VirtueOnline’s hierarchy of virtues or vices and thus attracts no mention.

When later in the document the Archbishop addresses the issue of sexuality, he records that in February he participated both in the meeting of the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches, and in the Anglican Primates’ meeting in Ireland. He devotes time to outlining the studious, dialogical, and consensus-building way that the WCC has proceeded with the task of engaging in study of human sexuality mandated at its 1998 Assembly. There is an implied critique here of the way by contrast that the Anglican Primates have approached discussion of the issue, which, he says, has been more of ‘a verbal slanging match’. The WCC process was marked with ‘openness and became encounters with sacred humanness’ because, as the Archbishop puts it, ‘people felt able to speak openly and honestly because they were listened to with respect and understanding’.

So what he advocates as essential within the Anglican Communion debate ‘is not a theological rant or a throwing of verbal grenades at people who happen to disagree at our own particular positions, but a reasoned, balanced discourse of some of the issues involved and the giving of space and time to every kind of viewpoint . . . . If the Church of God can’t conduct a debate in a civilised way when it claims to be a reconciled and reconciling community – what message does that give to the world? We cannot as a Church call for compassion, peace and justice in our nation and in our world if we as Christians do not exemplify those virtues in our own lives and in our dealings with one another’.

Amen to all that! And Amen too to Archbishop Barry’s taking to heart the Lambeth and Primates’ concern that we ‘listen to the experience of homosexual people, be committed to their pastoral support and see their victimisation or diminishment as abhorrent’ and initiating a process in the Church in Wales which honours those undertakings. Would that more bishops, particularly those in the so-called ‘south’ – the churches of Africa, Asia and Latin America - were willing to treat the possibility of dialogue this seriously. Unfortunately their rampant homophobia does not allow them to meet with lesbian and gay Christians, even were they able to identify them. Many of the African Bishops I know maintain, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that homosexuality is a ‘disease’ brought by white colonists to an Africa which had no history of it. The dialogue which Archbishop Morgan pursues in faithfulness to the Gospel, sadly remains an impossibility for most of the so-called ‘orthodox’ churches of the South as well as for VirtueOnline.

One Wedding and a Funeral

I’ve been subjected to a television extravaganza this weekend, what with the late Pope’s funeral and the marriage of the Prince of Wales to Mrs Camilla Parker-Bowles.

First then, the marriage which is surrounded with controversy. There is a constitutional crisis revolving around what Mrs Parker Bowles – famously referred to as ‘the Rottweiler’ by the late Princess Diana – will be called should Charles one day become King. The Prince’s press office (always referred to in the media as ‘Clarence House’) in an effort to stem the rising opposition to this marriage said that she would be taking one of Charles’s titles and be known as the Duchess of Cornwall. But last week in Parliament it was revealed that she would be perfectly entitled to use the title ‘Queen’ should she choose. To prevent her from doing so new legislation would have to be put in place, and nobody is suggesting that course at the moment. And later in the week it was reported that Mrs Parker Bowles will formally become Princess of Wales upon her marriage no matter what title she elects to use. But of course, Clarence House has been aware of this all along, and it is typical of its disdain for the general public that it should have pretended otherwise.

Charles is on record as saying that he wishes the British public would show him more compassion. But following his inability to understand the offence his long standing relationship with Mrs Parker Bowles caused his wife, and his unfortunate remark that he wasn’t going to be the first Prince of Wales not to have a mistress, many of the public are simply fed up with him. His plea shows how out of touch the monarchy is with the people. Given the iconic status afforded Princess Diana despite her own failings, one cannot see this situation changing.

It is not surprising in these circumstances that the dreaded word ‘republic’ has appeared in the press coverage again. An increasing number of people regard the usefulness of the monarchy only for its potential for boosting tourism revenue as hundreds of thousands of people flock to this country to view ornately dressed soldiers performing the Changing of the Guard, or to take a guided tour of one of the many grandiose buildings which the family owns. In Britain, the monarchy is too big a money-earner to jettison without careful consideration.

It’s different for those of us from ‘colonies’ like New Zealand of course, where the idea that our liberal democracy needs as its head of state, a British descendant of a German royal house, is ludicrous. Had the Queen taken, as most of her commoners do, the family name her spouse had adopted, she would have become Elizabeth Mountbatten, or more correctly Battenburg, for that was the original family name anglicised during the first world war to dispel anti-German sentiment. I have absolutely no objection to Camilla being known henceforth as Mrs Charles Battenburg. The present Queen (God bless her!) should be the last head of state for both the Commonwealth and the United Kingdom and the last Supreme Governor of the Church of England. If we must have heads of state, they should be persons who are role models and who understand and respect their people. Mr and Mrs Charles Battenburg simply don’t possess those qualities.

As for the Pope’s funeral, we haven’t witnessed such a spectacular farewell for a personage for many years. It is said that four million pilgrims flocked to the Holy City for the ceremonies, most of them of course unable to get anywhere near St Peter’s Square. It was certainly a moving occasion with a great deal of unexpected crowd participation and many banners calling for the immediate beatification of John Paul II.

A great and beloved leader for certain Roman Catholics he may have been, but as one Roman Catholic colleague said to me yesterday, ‘he set the Catholic Church back a hundred years’. We should never forget that despite his many achievements and, as I said last week, his constant stand against violence and war, he was responsible for first slowing, and then virtually putting a stop to the development of ecumenism and Christian unity and banning the use of the phrase ‘sister churches’. He withdrew permission to teach theology from some of the Church’s most distinguished theologians including Eduard Schillebeeckx (Christology) Hans Kung (Ecclesiology), Yves Congar (Ecumenism), Leonardo Boff (Liberation Theology) and Charles Curran (Moral Theology). He excommunicated Father Tissa Balasuriya for writing a splendid book Mary and Human Liberation. He removed French Bishop Jacques Gaillot from his diocese for opposing the Church’s teaching on condoms in relation to HIV/AIDS, and homosexuality. These men were prohibited from teaching not because any errors had been discovered in their work, but because of the opinions they had expressed, and this introduced a new criterion into Catholic orthodoxy. He proved incapable of relaxing the Church’s rules on contraception in order to alleviate the ravages of AIDS in Africa, or of addressing the pain of women called to the priesthood but denied ordination. The man who opposed authoritarian politics in Poland and throughout Eastern Europe, contradictorily established an authoritarian regime at the heart of the Vatican. And that is why many of my Roman Catholic friends are praying that a very different kind of Pope will be elected his successor.

Attachment to the Culture of Life

Terri Schiaro’s husband insisted that she wanted to die; Terri’s parents fought a rearguard action through the courts over many years, to have her artificially fed despite her vegetative state. Last week, two weeks after her feeding tube had been removed by doctors, and while her parents were still engaged in court battles, Terri died. The question of how long people should be kept alive when according to medical opinion there is no hope of recovery became a focus in the news.

Terri’s parents are Roman Catholics and on the day of her death a priest appeared on American TV chastising her husband for a lack of compassion and Christian responsibility. Two weeks ago in my comment on abortion as an election issue, I said that many of the pro-life people I encounter are interested only in preserving the life of the foetus and do not campaign on the ending of life in other circumstances, particularly war. So is it perhaps a good sign that this priest appeared on TV campaigning against the ending of Terri’s life?

It is the question of what constitutes a natural death which is the problem here. Ten years’ ago my mother, who was in her eighties, suffering from advancing dementia and in a private nursing home, suffered a major stroke. This was not the first stroke she had undergone, but it was the most serious and although I flew out from the United Kingdom to New Zealand to be with her, by the time I got there she had slipped into a deep coma. Her doctors wanted to artificially feed her and also recommended she be shifted away from her home town to a hospital where she could receive physiotherapy. As a family we decided that she should remain where she was, given liquids, and allowed to die naturally and peacefully. Death came some days later, and the doctor put on her death certificate as the cause of death, not ‘stroke’ but ‘extreme dehydration’. I interpreted that to mean that we her family were somehow responsible for my mother’s death by not allowing her to be artificially fed, or in her comatose state, to be subjected to physiotherapy.

So I understand many of the issues Terri’s family were facing and particularly whether to allow nature to take its course, or whether to artificially or technologically prolong life.

There are thousands of similar cases every year. But the Terri Schiaro case received more publicity than most when President Bush intervened and had Congress pass special provision to have her case reviewed. On BBC television the day Terri died there was a news item which reported, “President George W Bush, who offered his sympathies to her parents, said he was attached to a ‘culture of life’”. I imagine he would say that this attachment springs from his embrace of a particular form of born- again and conservative Christian discipleship.

I would like to know more about the President’s attachment to the culture of life. Like many pro-lifers, he excludes from this culture a great many instances, including all those prisoners who were executed in Texas while he was Governor of that State, all the women and children who died in Iraq victims of ‘collateral damage’, and those dying daily in other parts of the world either as a result of his aggressive foreign policy, or from the endemic poverty which is a by-product of American isolationism, trade protectionism and refusal to accept the ecological provisions of the Kyoto agreement. When we have a single human being like Terri in the frame the issue of who accepts responsibility appears more clear-cut. But when we put a mass of people into the frame, the question of who is responsible is obfuscated.

So does the President bear any responsibility for the 152 executions while he was Governor of Texas? Can we hold him to any degree responsible for the 10,000 gun deaths in the USA every year? Or the 27 children who die every day of poverty in the USA because the President in his budget slashed support for child welfare programmes? Does his refusal to support a decrease in the amount of toxic arsenic allowed in drinking water, or his slashing of funding to the Environmental Protection Agency, both ostensibly a result of his support for the large oil companies, make him responsible for deaths incurred by those actions? And on the global scale, does the President’s refusal to see the USA reduce toxic emissions implicate him in the deaths of more than 160,000 per year from global warming? Does his declaration of war on Iraq render him accountable for the 30,000 Iraqi soldiers who died there and the estimated 100,000 civilians? The latter figure is disputed because the USA does not take civilian body counts. Do we hold him accountable for these deaths, or excuse him on the grounds that this is how it is in the world of pragmatic politics?

As I write this it has been announced from the Vatican that Pope John Paul II is dying. Although I profoundly disagree with aspects of his theology and politics as well as with his authoritarianism, here is a man who did consistently advocate a culture of life and always spoke out for human dignity and against violence and war. He made it clear to Tony Blair and probably to President Bush also, that to go to war against Iraq would be a crime against humanity. And if what we are told is true, the Pope has not sought to have his life prolonged, but has serenely accepted the approach of death and for the first time in Papal history has demanded that his vulnerability and suffering be exposed to the world’s media. Compared with this man, President Bush’s claim to be attached to the culture of life is an affront to humanity.