How Is This News? - Part One

A Cardinal is against abortion, because the Catholic Church is against abortion, believing it to be murder, so that Catholic politicians who vote for it or who fail to vote against it are held to be in mortal sin, and therefore cannot (except in proximate danger of death) receive Communion without having been to Confession and received sacramental Absolution, which latter cannot be given if the priest knows that the penitent intends to commit the same sin again. How is any of this news? The opposite of any part of it would be news, but this isn't.

How come "being elected to represent the whole constituency", as that principle in being interpreted in this case, never applies to anything else, nor ever to any other category of MP? And notice how the principle that no Parliament can bind its successors apparently does not apply to this 40-year-old Act, just as it apparently does not apply to legislation giving effect to the (Tory) Treaty of Rome, the (Tory, indeed Thatcherite) Single European Act or the (Tory) Maastricht Treaty, and just as it apparently does not apply to any of Blair's dramatic constitutional changes.

Everyone should read Ann Farmer's Prophets and Priests: The Hidden Face of the Birth Control Movement (London: The Saint Austin Press, 2002; ISBN 1 901157 62 8). Ann is yet another of us homeless asylum-seekers from New Labour.

On Any Questions, we were treated to Tony McNulty banging on about "the separation of Church and State", which simply does not exist in this country. Indeed, any exclusion from political life of religion in general (insofar as there is any such thing as "religion in general"), and of a very robust Christianity in particular, would have precluded the emergence of all three political traditions.

After all, what else does anyone imagine gave rise to them? It certainly wasn't class. Disraeli's doubling of the franchise created working-class Toryism (and thus the modern Conservative Party) long before the Labour Party existed. It was that former phenomenon, which never dropped below forty per cent of the working-class vote before 1997, which enabled the Tories to win any election in the twentieth century, never mind most of them. Of the only three working-class Prime Ministers ever, two have been Tories, and the third was Ramsay MacDonald, Labour's only ever working-class Leader. And so one could go on.

All three British political traditions are strictly class-inclusive (and, very closely relatedly, strictly constitutional) as a first principle, a first principle derived, like all of them, from a decidedly pre-liberal Christianity. Alas that no party now properly, if at all, embodies any of those traditions, so that a Home Office Minister can speak of "the separation of Church and State", and a whole Any Questions panel can condemn a Cardinal for urging Catholic politicians either to oppose abortion or to refrain from Communion.