Weekly Comment

Sunday, November 20, 2005

Friendly Fire

This week the Taliban tendencied Hierarch of Nigeria attempted to de-throne the Archbishop of Canterbury. In a crude letter to the Archbishop allegedly signed by 17 ‘Primates of the South’, these ornaments of global Anglicanism wrote to Archbishop Rowan Williams in disturbingly discourteous and confrontational terms. The Archbishop recently spoke to the Southern Primates at their meeting in Egypt, and the letter takes him to task for having an inadequate understanding of the Bible, and particularly for his failure to treat biblical texts literally. As we have come to expect from these men obsessed by sexuality but apparently oblivious to the poverty of their people, or justice for those of them who are oppressed, the bulk of the letter focuses on the ‘sin’ of homosexuality. It goes on to upbraid the Archbishop for failing to tell the churches of the global north that they will not be invited to the Lambeth Conference of 2008 unless they truly repent The tone and implication of the letter is that Archbishop Williams is unfit to lead the Anglican communion. Even cruder than the letter itself however, were the gutter political tactics the Southern Primates employed by releasing the text of their letter through various conservative websites before the Archbishop of Canterbury who was presiding over the Church of England’s General Synod, had even received it, let alone had time to consider its contents.

I was distressed to see amongst the signatories to the letter, the name of the Most Revd Clive Handforth, Presiding Bishop of the Anglican Church in the Middle East. Now, Clive was British Chaplain in Beirut when I was British Chaplain in Haifa and although the political situation made it impossible for us to visit one another directly, we met at regional clergy conferences in Cyprus. I found him to be a modest man of great integrity, qualities which I encountered again in the United Kingdom when we had both returned to work there, and Clive held senior posts as Archdeacon of Nottingham and later, Suffragen Bishop of Warwick. Clive’s endorsement of the Primates’ letter on behalf of Arab Anglicans struck me as being so out of character that I was minded to immediately put pen to paper and write him a stern letter chastising him for his action and challenging his integrity.

Fortunately before I could complete the letter, Clive himself posted a general response which appeared on the Internet. “It is most regrettable”, Clive wrote, “and in no way helpful to the Church’s mission, that a personal letter, which should have been confidential, was broadcast in this way”. He affirms the Archbishop of Canterbury’s contributions to the discussion in Egypt as positive and constructive and goes on to express further concerns about the way the Primates' letter was drafted, the fact that he did not give permission for his name to be associated with the letter, and also suggests that some of the other Primates had similar misgivings. What is needed now is for some of these men to also publicly declare their dissent but in the case of the African Archbishops, none has thus far demonstrated the ability to stand up to the bullying tactics of the Hierarch of Nigeria. But Clive has at least done us all a service by alerting us to the scheming, manipulative, abusive and undemocratic world these men inhabit.

The Guardian newspaper was concerned enough to devote an editorial to the event. Under the title Anglicanism: Sex and Schism, this editorial claimed that the terms of the letter to the Archbishop “challenge him to break either with their own brand of conservative Anglicanism, or with that of the liberals of the north. Is Anglicanism to be a responsive, culturally sensitive and expressly inclusive religion, or a universal and fundamentalist church?” Three cheers! This for me, is the heart of the issue. The editorial concludes citing C S Lewis, a hero of the evangelical right, who averred that sexual sins were the least important; “If Dr Williams is to safeguard the Anglican communion, then it is time to insist that a doctrinal point about sexual orientation cannot be allowed to threaten it with extinction”, sentiments with which I and most of my friends concur.

On Saturday in its Review Section, the Guardian offered a number of people the opportunity of commenting on the UK Government’s controversial plans for legislation to curb incitement to religious hatred. This may appear to have little bearing upon the current tensions in the Anglican Communion, but one of the invited commentators manages to make the connection. Philip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials trilogy and hailed as the twenty-first century Tolkien, was a colleague of mine at Westminster College Oxford. He taught children’s literature, I taught applied and community theology. In his article, Philip explores the problem of ‘identity’ and asks whether identity is a function of what we do, or of what we are, or both. He then offers a series of eight propositions including What we are is not in our control, but what we do is; What we do is morally significant, what we are is not; and Praise or blame, virtue or guilt, apply to our actions not to our ancestry or to our membership of this group or that.

Philip Pullman comments that the Anglican Church has been characterised throughout its history by its broad-mindedness and tolerance, and that this extended to those of its members, lay and clerical who were homosexual, so that this was not an issue “of public discussion, denunciation, exposure, justification, confession, condemnation, punishment”. But the issue suddenly after all this time now looks like splitting the Anglican communion in two because “the zealous faction has been feeling its power and is beginning to exercise it” with the stress on being rather than doing. "Believers", he says, "can become addicted to the gamey tang of the absolute, the pungency of righteousness, the furtive sexiness of intolerance". Thus the celibate Jeffrey John was prevented from becoming Bishop of Reading because “it was what he was that matters, not what he did. If you ‘are’ homosexual, then even if you live an entirely celibate life, you will still be tainted and abominable and unfit to belong to the clergy”. Such an attitude, he believes, leads to a cognitive dissonance, with people claiming an inner identity which is quite unrelated to their actions.

I’m grateful to Philip for this reflection because it goes some way towards explaining the behaviour of the Hierarch of Nigeria and his acolytes who lay claim to some kind of moral high ground in terms of ‘being’, while exhibiting a total lack of Christian morality in the matter of ‘doing’.

Sunday, November 13, 2005

A Word in One's Ear

The sources of advice we rely upon are crucial to the decisions we reach This is especially true of politics as Prime Minister Tony Blair discovered to his cost when this week for the first time under his leadership, Parliament voted against a piece of legislation he had brought before the House. The proposal that the police could hold suspected terrorists without trial for ninety days, rather than the current fourteen days, had all along been controversial, with many parliamentarians feeling that people’s civil liberties were at stake. Britain has a long history of tolerating dissent and its laws on protesting, policing, trial and imprisonment reflect that tolerance. In the vote on Wednesday night a significant number of Labour politicians crossed the floor to vote with the opposition, and the rest is history. Parliament agreed an amendment which allows the police to hold suspects without trial for twenty-eight days, but no more.

The Prime Minister has lost a great deal of credibility in the process, and the bottom line today seems to be whether his authority hasn’t been so eroded, that he is from this point on a lame-duck leader. For the first time we saw members of his party, back-benchers in Parliament mind you, not members of his Cabinet and inner circle, speaking of having suffered from his bullying tactics for too long. One used the word hubris to describe the ethos surrounding the man at the moment.

As usual on matters of security, Tony Blair predicated the proposed ninety-day legislation upon information which, of course, he was not permitted to divulge to the public. The police and security services had apparently had a word in his ear to the effect that in cases of suspected planning to commit terrorist acts, they needed at least ninety days to question the persons and assemble the evidence. Parliament was clearly not willing to accept this ‘evidence’ at face value and raised a series of questions about its reliability and the process through which the police had reached their ninety-day conclusion. I am sure I wasn’t alone when I predicted what Tony Blair’s tactic would be when the debate over detention laws heated up, but it was with a sense of disbelief that I saw it happen. As a last-ditch argument he informed parliament and the nation that only that day the police had had a further word in his ear and informed him that a two more terrorist plots had just been foiled. He urged members of the House to defend the brave men who had foiled the plots rather than heed a minority of disaffected parliamentarians concerned to protect the civil liberties of the few rather than the liberty of the nation.

For many in Parliament this distrust of the Prime Minister goes back to the manner in which he advanced the case for the war in Iraq on the basis of reliable intelligence and the conviction that Britain had a duty to rid the world of people like Saddam Hussein. Today we all know that the words of wisdom the security services whispered in Blair’s ear were at best baseless and at worst lies. An ever increasing body of Parliamentarians feel that they were misled during the run-up to the invasion and no longer trust the Prime Minister to speak unequivocally.

Tony Blair’s motivations and behaviour at that time came under further scrutiny this week when the former British Ambassador to the US, Sir Christopher Meyer published his memoirs and gave interviews to the press. Sir Christopher, let it be said, is an admirer of President Bush and remains in favour of the Iraq war, and is being criticised for breaking civil service protocol by letting us into secrets about the Bush/Blair relationship. He is the first ‘insider’ who participated in the planning of the War in Iraq who has given us insight into what went on for example, in the crucial meetings and conversations that Blair had with President Bush. Meyer paints an unflattering picture of Blair together with members of his cabinet who participated in Washington talks, suggesting that they were in such awe of Bush’s Washington establishment that they readily capitulated to the American agenda. That agenda was always driven Meyer alleges by the neo-conservative concept of regime change, rather than as Blair presented it, the removal of weapons of mass destruction which were forty minutes away from Britain and probably pointed in our direction. If Blair had any reservations about the neo-conservative agenda, it apparently took only the President’s word in his ear to lay them to rest.

The former ambassador also makes some startling admissions. As a supporter of the war, he accepts that Britain and America are now on the horns of a dilemma. This is in part due with the failure to examine a broad enough range of possible outcomes. He accepts that the task of rebuilding Iraq is now virtually impossible and that the continued presence of Coalition troops in the country is motivating the insurgency. Further than this, he dismisses Tony Blair’s claims that it was not the Iraq war which exposed then UK to terrorist attacks arguing that there is sufficient evidence around to show that home-grown terrorism has been to a degree fuelled and radicalised by what Muslims have seen happening in Iraq and fear may happen elsewhere. For Sir Christopher, terror on our doorsteps is the price we have to bear for our involvement in this necessary war.

Where does this problematic legacy leave Tony Blair? There is a groundswell of opinion at large, and I suspect with in the Labour Party as well, that the Prime Minister having signalled that he will be handing over to a new leader, probably Gordon Brown, prior to the next election, is now personally weakened. This in turn weakens his legislative programme, and indeed the Labour Party as a whole.

A word in your ear, Prime Minister. If you really want to see the Labour win a fourth term of office, go gracefully now, before the integrity of the Party becomes fatally compromised.

Sunday, November 06, 2005

Going Ballistic

The British Government is talking about replacing its aging Trident nuclear missile system with something more sophisticated. The current nuclear deterrent can be launched from a fleet of submarines, one of which is on constant alert 24/7 in some naturally unspecified part of the world. Each of the four nuclear-powered submarines carries sixteen American built Trident missiles, and each missile can be equipped with up to eight nuclear warheads. Each of the 128 warheads is five times more powerful than the bomb dropped upon Hiroshima in 1945. That’s an awful lot of fire-power, but who and where is the enemy?

Britain’s Defence Secretary John Reid is a little hazy on that subject. Given that the Russians have joined the Western alliance and are to all intents and purposes on our side now, the threat from them can certainly not be as great as during the Cold War era. Perhaps we need to be wary of nuclear weaponry already in the hands of so called “rogue states”. Israel perhaps? Or do we need updated nuclear weaponry to further the War on Terror? All the Defence Secretary seemed prepared to say was that “We face a range of threats at this moment – running from individual acts of terrorism through to nuclear threats. We need a range of responses that include special forces right through to nuclear threats”.

The defence establishment is reluctant to enlighten us on where these challenges may emanate from, on the grounds that our national security might be compromised. Thus the Ministry of Defence has refused requests under the Freedom of Information Act for documentation on the costs of the new weaponry. Nor will it become party to any discussions about what nuclear weapons are for. It simply argues that there is “strong public interest” in Britain maintaining a “credible nuclear deterrent”. The government is going to permit a parliamentary debate on the subject, but will not allow our elected representatives to vote on the issue, presumably on the grounds that those who serve the military machine know best, and we all ought to trust them. It is a peculiar understanding of democracy and the democratic process if parliament can be excluded from voting on important matters of life and death.

In many respects the argument for nuclear weapons is reduced to the childish response “He’s got one so I want one”, and the bizarre conviction that the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction somehow makes our world a safer place. Critics have been quick to point out that the £25 billion that updating the weaponry will cost could be better spent elsewhere by providing 20,000 hospital consultants, 60 new hospitals and 800 new schools, or if one is interested in bread and circuses, ten lots of Olympic Games.

It’s times like these that I’m glad to be a citizen of a small nuclear free island nation in a nuclear free Pacific. New Zealand’s nuclear-free policy emerged from debate in the late 1960’s about the wisdom of augmenting primary reliance on hydro-electric generation of energy with nuclear fuelled generators. In 1976 a Royal Commission was established to enquire further into this question. It was inundated with petitions from communities opposed to the nuclear option and its report suggested that there was no need to embark upon a nuclear programme until possibly the twenty-first century.

Since that time the New Zealand public’s anti-nuclear stance has become even more pronounced. This was largely triggered by the regular visits under the ANZUS defence protocols of American warships to New Zealand harbours, and by the refusal of the US military to declare whether these vessels carried nuclear weapons or were nuclear powered. Large-scale public protests, including flotillas of small leisure craft, began to greet each arriving battleship. Citizens were galvanised into making New Zealand nuclear-free by declaring one’s own home to be in the first instance nuclear free. My mother, who to that point had never protested about anything, asked me to get her a nuclear-free sign which she displayed prominently: “You are Entering a Nuclear Free Property”. This and other campaigns caught the public imagination encouraging people to believe that they could make a difference.

That difference became apparent to the world when in 1987, the New Zealand Labour Government passed its Nuclear-Free Zone, Disarmament and Arms Control Act, which amongst other things prevented visits by nuclear-propelled or nuclear-armed vessels. The Government was henceforward able to decide whether to admit to New Zealand waters a vessel that may or may not be carrying nuclear weapons. This had never been done by any other country before or since. The United States was predictably angered by this legislation and unilaterally declared that New Zealand was no longer part of the ANZUS alliance. So irate was US Secretary Casper Weinberger that he declared that the American government would have to go over the head of the New Zealand government in order to appeal directly to the people. Many, myself included, noted that one US government-supported ploy was its endorsement of the noted Christian evangelist Luis Palau, whose “Gospel” message at a series of crusades was that New Zealanders were in mortal peril and should seek the protection not in the first instance of God, but of the American nuclear umbrella. US attempts to change the New Zealand legislation continue to this day, the most recent being its embracing of Australia but exclusion of New Zealand in free trade conversations.

Had Casper Weinberger had his finger on the public pulse of New Zealanders he would have been more cautious about his imperialistic utterance. Polls vary but all show that between 60-70% of New Zealanders remain committed to a nuclear free future for their country. Even the opposition National party, which had hoped at one point to capitalise on pro-American disaffection with the Labour legislation, has had to adopt a nuclear free stance. Had it not done so it would have been unelectable.

New Zealand didn’t stop at putting its own house in order, but went on to advocate a nuclear-free Pacific, and to press for anti-nuclear legislation in regional and international forums. It’s a shame that Britain at this juncture in history could not look to the New Zealand experience, and begin to move towards a nuclear-free future for her citizens. And sadly, to this day New Zealand remains the only country in the world to have enshrined in legislation a non-nuclear policy.