Why has Keir Starmer acquired the epithet “Undertaker”? Perhaps because he has deliberately “buried” elements of Corbynism in the Labour Party, to ensure Labour’s “electability” in our first-past-the-post system. A more representative system could allow for a far more creative political debate, even given the inevitable complications and uncertainties of government by coalition. And any possibilities of de-centralisation to bring politics nearer to communities are usually suppressed by talk of the need for “state security”.
Or is it because the pit-falls, mishaps and mistakes of the first 90 days of government have been seized on by a hostile media who, in the absence of a real parliamentary opposition, have made propaganda a substitute for truth and fair reporting (updating Pilate’s question, “What is truth?”-John 18, verse 38)? This was always to some extent the case with the media, but seems to be more so today, making it harder to get to the truth, and sometimes turning historiography into hysteriography (as a Freudian slip in our discussion put it!).
Or, finally, because of Britain’s continuing support for Israel, as it pursues its increasingly genocidal actions in Gaza, without any apparent demand to work for a just solution with Palestinians as a condition for that support (and that is not to ignore the real challenge of dealing with those on either side who increasingly see the total expulsion of the “others” as the only viable way forward to achieve “peace”).
Our reading was Isaiah chapter 42, where the “servant of God” is called to “not grow faint or be crushed until s/he has established justice in the earth”; and be a “light to the nations, to open the eyes that are blind” (a blindness that has often been deliberately created, as John Milton said in his ‘Apology for Smetymnuus’: “They who have put out the people’s eyes reproach them of their blindness”). But then the chapter goes on to complain “Who is blind but my servant, or deaf like my messenger whom I send”? – even those called to be God’s people are afflicted by the lack of vision destroying the community.
Four CofE Bishops (later endorsed by the Archbishop of Canterbury) wrote to the Guardian about the dispossession of West Bank Palestinian families (certainly one trigger for the October 2023 attack by Hamas). But a recent CounterPunch article argues that the roots of the conflict are far deeper, and Franciscan Non-Violence Spirituality suggests that “What I resent, or perhaps even detest, in another, comes from my difficulty in admitting that this same reality lives also in me.” (see the links below for both).
However, it is foolish to imagine that adopting some form of spirituality will easily eliminate all conflict and warfare from the world. Present-day and future conflicts are more likely to be about competition for resources than about ideology, especially since the world’s population has doubled in the last half-century. Though we are sometimes reluctant to address this out of fear of appearing racist, there is typically a lag of one or two generations between the decline of infant mortality and the fall in the birth-rate. Future upheavals will force governments to face these questions, for example over migration, even if, as Hein de Haas suggests in “How Migration Really Works”, the consequences are not as straightforward as sometimes thought (see the link below).
It is clear that the task of “establishing justice in the earth” will not be easy, whether for individuals, for churches or for governments (not that it ever has been).
Weblinks
The four bishops’ letter: https://anglican.ink/2024/09/23/bishops-letter-to-the-guardian-we-must-resist-the-injustice-of-west-bank-occupation/#google_vignette
CounterPunch article:
Franciscan Non-Violence:
https://cac.org/daily-meditations/being-peace-making-peace-weekly-summary/
Hein de Haas on Migration:
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/455478/how-migration-really-works-by-haas-hein-de/9780241998779