This Modern Issue

While this site has occasionally been critical of Luciana Berger, and may have cause to be so again, she was once doughty against food poverty, corporate evasion of health and safety legislation, and the Cinderella status of mental health provision. On smoking in cars with children present, she even managed to legislate from Opposition.

And yesterday, while it would have been better if the House of Lords had simply denied Second Reading to the Assisted Suicide Bill, especially since two thirds of speeches had been against it, Baroness Berger delayed its Committee Stage until after the report of a select committee that will take evidence from a roll call of its opponents.

Everyone is talking about Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe's speech, which was horrific but utterly unsurprising. The real scandal was Lord Carey of Clifton. "I voted against Lord Joffe's Bill in 2005, but then, as I went deeper into the subject, I began to realise that the Christian faith had very little to say directly about this modern issue," was bad enough. But Carey concluded, "I pray that both these institutions [the House of Lords, and the Church of England], which I hold so dearly for the importance of their roles in public life, do not risk our legitimacy by claiming that we know better than both the public and the other place."

Oh, well, same old George Carey. How is his abiding presence as a legislator any more acceptable than Peter Mandelson's? Yet he remains the most prominent of that type which is now rather out of date, a sense in which he continues to exemplify it. I refer to Liberal Protestants with Charismatic backgrounds, who assume that their own experience is theologically normative, and who work from there.