Why Did They Resign? Political leaders and election fallout

Why did Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg believe they had to resign after their parties' election defeat?

What they each said in their own way was: 'I take responsibility as my party's leader for this outcome, and therefore I must resign'. Both men acted with dignity. We should respect that. As Malcolm says of the executed Cawdor in the Scottish Play, 'nothing in his life became him like the leaving it' (thanks to a Twitter follower for reminding me of that famous speech in Macbeth). I'm aware as retirement comes down the slipway that leaving an office well is just as important as arriving well and inhabiting it convincingly.

Someone tweeted that it's noble, and gospel-like, to lay down your life (and career) for your friends. That's far better than politicians who cynically lay down their friends for their lives, as Jeremy Thorpe said of Harold Macmillan's Night of the Long Knives (thanks to a comment on this blog for that). I am sure that both men acted out of the best instincts in resigning. And doubtless the widespread British enjoyment of seeing leaders brought low has been satisfied. But my question is, did they have to take this drastic step? Might it not have been better if they had carried on for a while, picked up the pieces, help their party reflect and regroup and begin to find a way forward?  Isn't a crisis the real test of leadership?

I was discussing this with a friend who is a seasoned politician and well-versed in the relationships between political leaders and a mercurial public. She said that this is just how it is in British politics. Like football managers and CEOs in business, it's the results that count. If your club is relegated, or your business outturns take a hit, it's not easy to survive as a leader. There is a drive to purge out the old, begin afresh. It's a fact about most revolutions in history. There is a crisis. The leadership are blamed or blame themselves. They have to go, either at their own volition or the enforced will of others.

But the dynamic is more complicated than that. The 'blame' culture we know a lot about infects not just the collective behaviour of a group like a political party, but also its leaders' own sense of self. It isn't necessarily conscious. In such a culture, it's easy for leaders to say to themselves, 'this is my fault' - even if it isn't - because of the projections the group will put on them. I'm aware that when people accuse me of failing in some way, letting the side down, I default to assuming that they must be right about. Then I feel I should take responsibility and blame myself. I am intuitively aware that if I do this, own up and apologise, a kind of catharsis will take place. The situation will be righted again, cleansed of the malign influence that caused it to wobble. Even if I am not to blame!

This is the well-understood phenomenon of scapegoating. A victim is made to 'carry' the wrongdoing of a group and is banished to the wilderness, a far-off safe place where defilement can no longer damage the community. The Old Testament has a lot to say about this: the scapegoat is one of the ways in which the Hebrew people were to find reconciliation healing. It's among the images the New Testament uses to depict Jesus banished to die 'outside the camp' and take our sins with him. The French theologian Rene Girard has written extensively about this ritual 'mimetic' way of dealing with social wrong and disorder (for instance in his book Violence and the Sacred). By loading a victim with 'blame' and driving it out, stability is restored.

Political parties, like all organisations(including the church), can behave like this when under threat from real or imagined disorder in its midst. It's how the far right thinks of immigrants and asylum-seekers. It has to be 'their' fault. The principle is: the social group must recover stability if it is to survive. Find a victim who will take this burden off everybody else. As I say, these forces are often unconscious. They seem to have been at work in the Labour and LibDem parties in the aftermath of the election.

Paradoxically, when a leader says 'it's all my fault', he or she can collude with a kind of self-aggrandisement that a moment's thought will show is misplaced. These days, political parties, like churches, are organisations of consent. You can't be a leader and indulge in command-control and the fantasy of omnipotence, not if you want your party to flourish. Mainstream political parties, including Labour and the Liberal Democrats, are places of keen open debate. It's not, I'm sure, that mistakes weren't made in some policy areas. All I'm saying is the leaders can only go where the organisation is willing for them to. Of course good leadership means expanding horizons, offering new directions of travel. Managing change is difficult and painful. But ultimately, it's the organisation that takes responsibility for it. Especially when it prides itself in believing in democratic values.  

So I want to say to Ed and Nick, neither of whom I know personally: don't carry this responsibility on your own. Don't blame yourself. Don't buy into the scapegoat mentality and go out into the wilderness. Don't imagine that you were omnipotent enough to fail by yourself. You did your best for your party, and didn't act out of self-interest. You conducted decent campaigns and as leaders performed credibly. You largely held the trust of those you led. You could have stayed on and been part of the long hard process of reconstruction. You can still contribute to that journey in important ways. I hope you will, for the good of democracy and the political life in our nation.

The Election and the Ascension: a theological meditation on leadership

Three days since we went to the polls. How long ago it seems. But far from the election clearing the air, the atmosphere is still febrile. Time will tell whether things will stabilise or whether the nation will find itself pulled apart by social forces that may not be contained for much longer.

But whatever is on the agenda, what we want to be reassured about in our political leaders is that they have not been elevated far above our sight and our common human experience.  We need to know that they are not absentee incumbents but still belong to our world, still get their hands dirty, still share our hopes and fears for the future.  We all know how risky high office can be; we have seen it corrupt men and women, and some of us know from within how easily we begin to have inflated ideas about ourselves and our power. 

Thursday is Ascension Day. I think it holds up a mirror to all who find themselves exalted in public places.  ‘Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord?’ asks one of the psalms we shall sing.  ‘Those who have clean hands and pure hearts; and has not lifted up their mind to vanity, nor sworn to deceive their neighbours.’  That rite of entry into the sanctuary may especially have been meant for the Israelite king to remind him of his place in the divine scheme of things and not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think. 

In his ascension, Jesus mounts the throne of his glory. But it is not the ‘happy ending’ to an earthly career, the tidy closure we would like to see at the end of the story.  Nor is it the restoration of an earthly kingdom as the disciples so much wanted, or even the promise of it.  Still less is it that he has abandoned us as if he had disappeared, though it may seem like that as we gaze like the disciples into an empty sky.  It affirms what Jesus has been proclaiming throughout his ministry, that God reigns, and he calls us to embrace his reign with joy and become subject to it.  It affirms that the exalted Christ ‘fills all things’, as the Letter to the Ephesians puts it. It affirms that it is our own destiny to be exalted with Christ, and that is wonderfully to glorify and ennoble our human nature.

But we need to get 'glory' in perspective. The ascension is of a piece with everything Jesus has been to us in his incarnate life. The scriptures speak of his exaltation in the imagery of the coronation of the kings of Israel. But if we follow that imagery back to its source we are drawn back to the obligations of kingship as well as its privileges.  The king is to be loyal to the covenant between God and his people; indeed, he is there to guarantee all that it promises: peace, wellbeing, justice, the care of God’s humble poor. 

In one of the psalms (82) God sits in a cosmic court with all the heavenly beings gathered round him for judgment.  Are these beings worthy of their exalted status, to be called elohim, gods?  The test is simple.  ‘Give justice to the weak and the orphan; maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute; rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.’  It is the mandate for wise and just government in any age. But they fail it dismally.  ‘How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked?’ So they are toppled from their thrones.  ‘I say, you are gods, nevertheless you shall die like mortals and fall like any prince.’  To be dethroned is the destiny of those who aggrandise themselves, who forget who they are and to whom they owe account.   In Jewish tradition this saying is applied to corrupt leaders who have forfeited the right to govern.  They have ascended the hill of the Lord, only to fall from the pedestal by the sin of pride.  

The exalted Christ is not like them.  For he bears the imprint of the nails on his body, and takes us with him into God’s very heart. The Letter to the Hebrews says that even in its imagined heavenly realms, he is not ashamed to call us his brothers and sisters. He can help those because he himself was tested by what he suffered. Jesus is not simply one of the elohim in the psalm but is above all other principality and power.  Yet, exalted though he is, he is always present to the lowliest of his family, the hungry and naked, the voiceless and the poor, those whom St Matthew calls ‘the least of these my brothers and sisters’  

So humility and service characterise the ascension of Jesus. There is no pomp and ceremony, no whirlwind or fiery chariot or a fanfare of trumpets. He was and is the Son of Man who healed the sick and spoke kindly to the neglected, who washed his disciples’ feet, agonised in Gethsemane and went out to die.  Any other messiah would not have been born in a stable, executed between thieves, raised secretly behind a stone, or ascended without ceremony on an obscure hilltop with only a handful of witnesses to tell of it.  Only this Messiah could bear the marks of the nails in his glorified hands and feet and be pictured as a Lamb upon a throne.  Only this Messiah could be both priest and victim and make his approach to us in lowly bread and wine so that we might welcome him, and exalt him in our hearts. 

 

I call this kenotic ascension. The word means self-emptying. For Jesus' way of exaltation is in the spirit of the whole story we tell about his abasement I which he takes the form of a slave and lays down his life for his friends. As he says in the upper room, 'I am among you as one who serves' - not only in his days on earth but always. The foot washing affirms for all time that it isn't Olympian grandeur that God cares about. It's self-giving service of every kind that is exalted and blessed in the gospel, because in the imitation of Christ, truth and justice are honoured, mercy and peace meet together, and in the movement of self-giving love, the poor are not forgotten.

 

We who are in ministry need to remind ourselves of this, whether we are in the service of church or state or serve in any other representative role. Public office holds many pitfalls: the higher we climb, the better we become known, the more proficient we become, the more we are at risk of the sin of pride and the further there is to fall. But Jesus' exaltation models a more excellent way of leadership. St Theresa famously said that we are the only hands and feet Christ now has to do his work in the world.  But not as an absentee or remote sovereign. Far from it. The ascension affirms that he leaves the world only so that he can be present to it for ever. 'It is good that I go away.'

 

It's this quality of 'presence' that we all need, especially in our leaders, as together we endeavour to construct a society that serves the common good and thereby points to the promised kingdom.

Voting with Head and Heart

I'm conscious that apart from a few tweets, I've not said much about the election. 

With two weeks to go, I'm thinking how dull this election campaign seems to be. There's a curious lack of passion about it, not much evidence of fire in the belly either of our political leaders or in the way we ourselves talk about it. Yet we keep being told that it could be one of the most defining of elections for decades. On its outcome may depend the future of the United Kingdom and whether or not we remain in the European Union. Yet we have heard only a little about the former and next to nothing about the latter despite one of the parties branding itself in relation to Europe. Nor have we heard much from our leaders about how they see Britain's place in a changing world order, or the global threats of conflict, climate change and terror, or even what kind of nation we aspire to be in five or ten years' time and how we address exclusion and poverty in our divided society. 

Is it that these Big Concerns don't stir the hearts of the electorate because they don't win votes? Or maybe (God forbid!) they don't greatly stir the hearts of most of our politicians either? In a famous poem 'The Second Coming', W. B. Yeats warned that 'the best lack all conviction'. But we shouldn't lay this indictment only at the doors of politicians. Our leaders mirror the conviction, or lack of it, that we ourselves demonstrate. If we're casual or indifferent in politics, we're going to get a politics that is itself casual and indifferent to so much that ought to matter intensely in the world we find ourselves living in. It worries me that this doesn't seem to be featuring in the election debates I've overheard so far.

It's not that domestic issues don't matter. It's right that we are clear about what our elected representatives would do with the economy, taxation, immigration, education and the NHS. But it's hard not to suspect that self-interest isn't colouring the way we're all talking about them, candidates and electorate alike: what's in it for me? In TV interviews with 'ordinary' voters, very few seem to have anything to say about global concerns, a politics of care, social justice and the common good. Are journalists not pressing these bigger questions hard enough, I wonder? I'm chairing the hustings in Durham next week. I happened to meet one of the constituency candidates recently and warned that if no one else voiced these questions from the floor, I would be. 

A few weeks ago the House of Bishops' published an admirable pastoral letter. We could all do worse than read it once more a fortnight before we cast our vote. Contrary to what some sectors of the press were saying when it was issued, it doesn't tell us to vote this way or that. What it does is to highlight the things we should all care passionately about if we see ourselves as citizens participating in a democracy. It challenges us about where our values lie. It proposes how we might bring Christian insights to bear upon the electoral choices we must make. It asks where God might be in our common life as a human family, a nation, a society.

The letter echoes something that G. K. Chesterton once said. He remarked that the trouble with British elections was not that the whole electorate couldn't be bothered to turn out and vote. It was that the whole elector didn't either. He meant that even if we cast our vote, we may only do it half-heartedly, like Yeats' 'lacking all conviction' Perhaps if we are honest, we don't care too much about its outcome or reckon it can change anything. 

But voting is like prayer. What matters as much as the act itself is what we do next so that it makes a real difference. This is how people of faith should believe in the election, and take part in it: with all of our heads and all of our hearts. And yes, definitely: with every prayer we can muster. 

Ash Wednesday, the Bishops and the Election

It's tempting to conclude that when the Daily Mail and the Sun scream at you, you've probably done something right. At least, you've been noticed. That can't be a bad thing.

But it's Ash Wednesday. We should give up cheap jibes for Lent. The House of Bishops has issued a Pastoral Letter. It's what bishops do. But you have to wonder whether the fierce reaction from some parts of the media comes from people who have bothered to read even a few lines of it. Sad to say, the voice of sweet reason is already being drowned by shouts of outrage and foul play.

What has motivated the letter? The Bishops write: 'the church has an obligation to engage constructively with the political process, and Christians share responsibility with all citizens to participate in the democratic structures of our nation. We offer these reflections because we believe the gospel of Jesus Christ is enormously relevant to the questions which the coming Election will throw into sharp relief'. 

Straight away I am struck by the tone. It is not strident or hectoring: here is a contribution to a debate that is offered. The letter is part of a conversation, not its conclusion. Throughout, the register is: we want to listen, to participate in the public business of helping to frame minds and hearts before an election. We hope that in turn you will want to hear what we have to suggest. They could have added 'in all humility' because there is something genuinely modest about the way this piece is drafted. 

I want to use the word formation to describe the tenor of the letter. It is not, as the Bishops are at pains to remind us, a shopping list of approved policies. Rather, it's an attempt to shape the minds of the electorate so that at the very least, the challenges facing us can be accurately identified and the terms of a real conversation agreed. 'Decent answers to the questions facing the nation will only emerge when politicians start to promote a dialogue with the people about a worthwhile society, how individuals, communities and the nation relate to each other, and [about] the potentials and limitations of politics in achieving such ends.'

What does a Christian mind bring to the debate about the future of our nation? The first thing is the belief that it matters to God, and must therefore matter to us. G. K. Chesterton famously said that the problem with British elections was not that only a small part of the electorate voted, but that only a small part of the elector voted: so little was the lack of conviction about politics and public faith. The Bishops want us to cast our vote, not in a routine, token way, but by giving the whole of ourselves to this privileged task of decision-taking in a free democracy. 

Formation in citizenship will motivate us to think and talk about 'a worthwhile society and what it means to serve the common good, and how politics helps serve that end'. The Bishops are not dreaming of the unattainable ideal of Athenian democracy under Pericles. They do however dare to hope that we can shed our cynicism and start believing in politics, politicians and political processes again. 'This letter is about building a vision of a better kind of world, a better society and better politics. Underlying those ideas is the concept of virtue – what it means to be a good person, a good politician, a good neighbour or a good community.' That's a good example of how the letter is motivated by a spiritual concern for citizenship, inspired by the theological ideas of justice and compassion in pursuit of the common good.

Are we a 'society of strangers', or are we a 'community of communities it asks? And here's the bit the hawkish press don't like. 'There is a deep contradiction in the attitudes of a society which celebrates equality in principle yet treats some people, especially the poor and vulnerable, as unwanted, unvalued and unnoticed. It is particularly counter-productive to denigrate those who are in need, because this undermines the wider social instinct to support one another in the community. For instance, when those who rely on social security payments are all described in terms that imply they are undeserving, dependent, and ought to be self-sufficient, it deters others from offering the informal, neighbourly support which could ease some of the burden of welfare on the state.' If you examine the context, you'll see that this is not, however, left wing rhetoric, but is based on the vision of David Cameron's 'big society'. What has happened to that noble idea, the Bishops ask, that 'richer narrative of the person-in-community' as they put it? 

The letter suggests that 'virtues are nourished, not by atomised individualism, but in strong communities which relate honestly and respectfully to other groups and communities which make up this nation'. And what is true of the nation in itself is also true of its relationships within the wider world. ' Our politicians have been reluctant to talk openly with the electorate about Britain’s relationships around the world, the realignments of global power, a realistic role in securing a stable and peaceful world order and the tools we would need for the job. In short, we should reflect more deeply on Britain’s role in generating an international community of communities.' 

Part of this is maintaining the UK's current commitment to allocating 0.7% of GDP to overseas aid. 'For any party to abandon or reduce this commitment would be globally irresponsible in pragmatic terms as well as indicating that the moral imperatives of mutuality and reconciliation counted for nothing.' But it has to do with being an active player on the global stage. The Scottish Referendum and its aftermath are an object lesson in taking great care in this area and not succumbing to the quick fix. And although the Bishops don't commit to a view about Britain's role within the European Union, they do underline our 'belonging' to this continent, a clear message to those who would dismantle our historic and cultural links too hastily.

This blog can only hint at the insight and good political sense that the House of Bishops' letter demonstrates. They have read with accuracy the state we're in. I can't recall a document from that source that was so intelligently written and that spoke with a fairer voice. Whoever drafted it should be congratulated. Sometimes, when I read what comes out of 'the centre' I want to protest: 'not altogether in my name'  Not this time. I believe it speaks for all Christians, indeed, all fair-minded citizens of our country, whatever their political views, in setting out the matters that ought to concern us in the run-up to the election. So I urge you to read it for yourself. Share it with others; make it the theme of a Lenten study group. 

The letter ends where it began, with St Paul in his letter to the Philippians, words that may 'help to defend us against the temptations of apathy, cynicism and blame, and instead seek – because we are disciples of Jesus Christ who long for a more humane society – a better politics for a better nation. Whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.'  Amen to that, I say. What better way to launch this season of Lent with its invitation to reflect more deeply, seek truth, practise charity, deepen the ties that bind us together, and learn to be God's people once again?

You can find the Bishops' Pastoral Letter at: 

https://www.churchofengland.org/media/2170230/whoismyneighbour-pages.pdf