Antidisestablishmentarianism

Melanie McDonagh (a Catholic, unless I am very much mistaken) takes issue with Phil Woolas, who seems to think that having bishops in the House of Lords is the esse of Establishment, much as there are those who imagine that the Act of Settlement has anything to do with Establishment, which in fact it post-dates by a century and a half.

The sheer objectionable nature of a church whose doctrine was whatever the Crown, and so eventually the Crown in Parliament, said it was at the given time, has been an enormous force for the creation of a pluralistic society, and thus by necessity a representative democratic political system, in this country. Without it, there would have been neither the Nonconformist Conscience (because there would have been no Nonconformists) nor Catholic Emancipation (because Rome really was a long way away in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, so some accommodation really would have been reached by those who still felt themselves Catholics, as if feelings mattered here, and who would consequently have had no need of Emancipation in 1829).

But all of that has only the most tangential relationship to bishops in the House of Lords. They were there before the Reformation. Indeed, with the abbots and priors of the still-undissolved monasteries they formed the majority of the members.

Still, the principle of giving representation to this Realm's Christian heritage as such, and to moral and spiritual values as such, could perhaps be better implemented today, if only because so many barely lukewarm articulators of such concerns have been (though are not so much of late, but that could change perfectly easily) bishops in the Church of England.

So, 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.