You Can’t Separate Politics and Morals.
*
Daily Mail
Thursday, May 11-2006.
by
Stephen Glover
TONY BLAIR’S Cabinet
reshuffle is predictably already running into difficulties. Ruth Kelly, who has
taken over John Prescott’s several ministerial responsibilities, is being
attacked on two fronts.
On the one hand, it is pointed out that her criticism of
middle-class families who resist government plans to build new homes sits unhappily
with her opposition to a string of new housing developments in her own
constituency. As
Local Government Minister, Ms Kelly is now in charge of planning regulations.
At the same time, she is attracting even greater flak from
the gay lobby. For reasons difficult to fathom, in addition to her local
government portfolio she is also described as Equality Minister. This means
that she is supposed to ensure that we all have equal rights.
Because she is a member of Opus Dei, a Roman Catholic
movement that has explicitly criticised homosexual liaisons, it is suggested
that she is unlikely to give homosexuals a fair crack of the whip.
There is little doubt that Ms Kelly accepts the opus Dei
line on homosexuality. When asked whether it is a sin, she has refused to give
a straight answer. In the Commons, she
has missed a total of 12 votes on homosexuality since 1997.
In May 2002, she voted for an amendment to a Bill that
would have allowed unmarried heterosexuals couples to adopt while excluding
same-sex couples.
Millions of people will be secretly, or not so secretly in
agreement with Ms Kelly’s views. Until 40 or 50 years ago, they would have been
held by the vast majority. The Gay lobby is too eager to paint her as an
antediluvian nutter.
BUT what concerns me are
not the rights or wrongs of her views BUT her defence of them. On Radio Five
Live two days ago, she again refused to say whether she considered
homosexuality a sin. This is what she
said:
‘I don’t think its right
for politicians to start making moral judgments about people…What I think the
question is, is what are my political views…As a politician I think everyone
should be free from discrimination.
IN OTHER WORDS, Ms Kelly
is specifically separating politics from morals. She has her moral views, and
she has her political ones. Morally, it
is pretty clear she is opposed to homosexuality. She could hardly not be, given
the position of Opus Dei, indeed of current Roman Catholic Church teaching.
According to Jack Valero, a spokesman for Opus Dei in Britain:
‘Homosexuality is a
condition that people can’t help, but the homosexual act is sinful.’
YET while holding this
moral view Ms Kelly also says that she believes homosexuals should enjoy equal
rights.
Why
does she think this?
The likely answer is because it is a political necessity
for her to do so if she is to retain HIGH OFFICE.
She
believes one thing; she then acts in a way at odds with that belief.
Many of us have conflicting views in our minds at the same
time, or behave in a manner that is at variance with our beliefs. It is
certainly common for people who have moral misgivings about homosexuality to
treat individual homosexuals on an equal footing with heterosexuals.
This is partly a question of politeness and partly a matter
of social survival. We could hardly get by in life if we were to get on our
moral high horse every time we encountered people of whose behaviour we might
privately disapprove.
But what might be forgivable, or at least understandable,
in our own relations with others cannot be so easily excused in a high
politician who wields great power.
A minister who believes that morality and politics are
separate and mutually exclusive activities is liable to act in a bad and
possibly dangerous way. At its most extreme, this sort of dislocation enabled a
man like Albert Speer, who certainly had a moral sense, to condone or ignore
the barbarities of the Nazi regime in which he was a senior minister.
In
an admittedly far less dramatic way, isn’t this divorce of the moral from the
political one of the defining features of New Labour?
Tony
Blair presents himself as a highly moral, Christian person whose well-thumbed
copy of the New Testament [let alone the Koran] is never far from his
side. YET he displays a love of wealth
that is hardly a central tenet of Christian belief; and, as this country has
learnt to its cost over Iraq, he has a very contingent attitude to TRUTH.
MORALITY, for Blair and Ruth Kelly, is conveniently a
private affair. In the harsh light of political reality, both of them are ready
to disregard their moral precepts or, most spectacularly in the case of Mr
Blair, to act counter to them while still - preposterously- claiming the MORAL
HIGH GROUND.
OF COURSE, I do not say that politics is only a matter of
MORALITY, only that the two should not be treated as though they have nothing
to do with each other.
There are many humdrum political issues, which seem far
removed from moral concerns:
Ms Kelly’s belief that we should build more houses in the
[already] overcrowded South East cannot be said to be more or less moral than
the opposing view.
Other issues more obviously engage our moral values.
Should
there be a Death Penalty?
Should
we alter the Abortion Laws?
Is
the re-distribution of Wealth desirable?
When
is War justified?
In all these cases there is scope for equally moral people
to disagree, or even to arrive at opposite conclusions. What we can ask of OUR
politicians, though, is that when they confront these issues they should do so
in a way that is consistent with THEIR sense of MORALITY.
If Me Blair had done this, he would NOT have taken us to
WAR over IRAQ on a massive LIE, or worshipped at the shrine of the appalling Silvio
Berlusconi.
And it is surely an indication of some sort of MORAL lapse
in Ms Kelly for her to propose a policy, namely the relaxation of building
controls and the building of more houses, after objecting to similar
developments near her own home on many previous occasions, the last as recently
as April 2004.
We are entitled to change our minds, but when a minister so
suddenly revokes her previous approach, we are bound to suspect her of acting
out of low political motives.
Whether
she is right or wrong about homosexuality is not the issue.
Ms Kelly believes that homosexual acts are wrong. She therefore presumably believes that
homosexuals CANNOT enjoy the same rights as heterosexuals. And YET she is required in her new office to
ensure THAT THEY DO SO.
This suggests to me either that Ruth Kelly is rather
stupid, which in view of her high intellectual attainments may seem an unlikely
theory. OR, more plausible, she is potentially dangerous, and
characteristically Blairite, sort of hypocrite, holding to one set of beliefs
while she gaily - no pun intended- contradicts them in the pursuit of power.
* *
Over
100 years ago a Prime Minister of England - William Ewart Gladstone was acclaimed
for his
Moral
stance, which were ingrained into his character. The following words are from
John Morley’s Life of Gladstone.
‘He was one of the three
statesmen in the House of Commons of his generation who had a gift of large and
spacious conception of the place and power of England in the world, and of the
policies by which she could maintain it. Cobden and Disraeli were the other two’.
On his day after his
death, in each of the two Houses the leader made the motion, identical in
language in both cases save the final words about the financial provision in
the resolution of the Commons: -
That an humble Address be presented to her Majesty praying
that her Majesty will be graciously pleased to give directions that the remains
of the Right Hon. William Ewart Gladstone be interred at the public charge, and
that a monument be erected in the Collegiate Church of St Peter, Westminster,
with an inscription expressive of the public admiration and attachment and of
the high sense entertained of his rare and splendid gifts, and of his devoted
labours in parliament and in great offices of state, and to assure her Majesty
that this House will make good the expenses attending the same.
*
The language of the
movers was worthy of the British parliament at its best, worthy of the station
of those who used it, and worthy of the figure commemorated. Lord Salisbury was
thought by most to go nearest to the core of solemnity: -
What is the cause of this unanimous feel? Of course, he had
qualities that distinguished him from other men; and you may say that it was
his transcendent intellect, his astonishing power of attaching men to him, and
the great influence he was able to exert upon the thought and convictions of
his contemporaries
But these things, which explain the attachment, the adoration
of those whose ideas he represented, would not explain why it is that
sentiments almost fervent are felt and expressed by those whose ideas were not
carried by his policy.
My Lords, I do not see the reason is to be found in
anything so far removed from the common feelings of mankind as the abstruse and
controversial questions of the policy of the day. They had nothing to do with it.
Whether he was right or whether he was wrong, in all
measures, or in most of the measures which he proposed - those are matters of
which the discussion has passed by, and would certainly be singularly inappropriate
here; they are really remitted to the judgment of future generations, who will
securely judge from experience what we can only decide by forecast.
It was on account of considerations more common to the
masses of human beings, to the general working of the human mind, than any
controversial questions of policy that men recognised in him a man guided -
whether under mistaken impressions or not, it matters not - but guided in all
the steps he took, in all the efforts that he made, by a high moral ideal.
What he sought were the attainments of great ideals, and
whether they were based on sound convictions or not, they could have issued
from nothing but the greatest and the purest moral aspirations; and he
is honoured by his countrymen, because through so many years, across so many
vicissitudes and conflicts, they had recognised this one characteristic of his action, which never
ceased to be felt.
He will leave behind him, especially to those who have
followed with deep interest the history of the later years - I might almost say
the later months of his life -he will leave behind him the memory of a great
Christian statesman.
Set up necessarily on high - the sight of his character,
his motives, and his intentions would strike the entire world. They will have left
a deep and most salutary influence on the political thought and the social
thought of the generation in which he lived, and he will be remembered not so
much for causes in which he was engaged or the political projects which he
favoured, but as a great example, to which history hardly furnishes a parallel,
of a great
Christian man.
WILLIAM
EWART GLADSTONE
Feb 18 -1897- Returns to London from Cannes
Feb 22- Goes to Bournemouth
March 22- Death of Mr Gladstone
March 26, 27- Lying in State in Westminster Hall
March 28 -Burial in Westminster Abbey.
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