Following yesterday's links to Guardian articles both by my friend Phillip Blond and by A C Grayling (with whom I suspect that I'd get on if I ever met him, unlike, say, Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens), the reason why, pace Grayling, we still need both religious and specifically Christian representatives in our reformed legislature is precisely to give voice to traditions such as those articulated by Blond:
"elements from the radical conservative past - where figures such as William Cobbett, Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin argued for a working class self-sufficiency, or English Catholic writers such as GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc argued that only widely distributed ownership could resist the dispossession and destruction of rabid capitalism."
How might this be gone about? In place of 26 bishops, how about 26 representatives (all politically independent, of course), 13 specifically of the United Kingdom's Christian heritage, and 13 of moral and spiritual values generally? This would be far more than fair: if the aim were simply to reflect the population at large, then seventy-two per cent of such seats would be reserved for Christians.
Elections would be on a national basis. From each list of candidates, each of us would be able to vote for one candidate, and the highest-scoring 13 would be declared elected at the end. Vacancies in the course of a Parliament would be filled by simply bringing in number 14.
This should be done within a wider restoration of the original purpose of the second chamber, to provide representation territorially (i.e., in county terms, the origin of hereditary peers), to furnish parliamentarians who were responsible to and for the country as a whole rather than any locality (life peers), and to give voice to the nation's Christian heritage and moral and spiritual values (historically, of course, the same thing, even if never since the Reformation contained in any one ecclesial body alone).
If there had only ever been one hereditary peer per county, he had lived there when not at Westminster, its name had been his title, and he had been strictly independent of party, then there would never have been a problem.
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Interesting reasoning! We need Catholics in Parliament because the most leftwing Government this country has ever had is still not lefting enough!
ReplyDeleteRiiiight!
Not in the good ways, no. Not in the ways that used to make Catholics vote Labour. The Catholics cost New Labour Crewe and Nantwich, and cost New Labour Glasgow East. But they won't get the message. They can't.
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