I have for many years wondered where contributors to Thought for the Day came from. I hope that even those who are friends of mine will forgive me for saying that they were rarely well-known before they were given this prime slot, and that even within their fields there are others at least as distinguished. I expect the "faith leaders" to be invited to sit in a "reformed" Upper House to selected by much the same means, whatever it is.
So, from my own lot, do not expect Fr Aidan Nichols OP, Fr Ian Ker, Fr John Saward, Fr Tim Finigan, or anyone like that. In which case, who, exactly? Dispensations would be granted from the canonical ban on clerics sitting as civil legislators, if the clerics in question met Rome's rightly stringent criteria of orthodoxy. After all, that ban is nothing very ancient: Catholic priests originally predominated in the House of Lords.
But the dinner party circuit presumably employed by Radio Four would almost certainly produce no one whom Rome would countenance dispensing. Ringing up, say, the Editor of The Tablet is a surefire way of producing a list of frankly unacceptable candidates.
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Your really great friend is not on TftD so much now, but then he is in his eighties.
ReplyDeleteWhat, no Ordinariate?
ho! Ho! HO!
ReplyDeleteWhat about electing the Upper House? Let clerics stand like everyone else & if voters support them, in they go.
I once annoyed a Labour Party functionary no end by explaining that, no, I had not watched some televised interview with Blair, since I had been at that rather famous friend’s birthday party. Oh, the look on his face...
ReplyDeleteHow about 12 full-time, fixed-term parliamentary voices of the United Kingdom’s Christian heritage, whom the media could easily and usefully dub “Apostles”? Plus 12 full-time, fixed-term parliamentary voices of moral and spiritual values generally? Each of us would vote for one candidate, with the top 12 elected at the end. Casual vacancies would be filled by bringing in number 13 and so on. This would be more than fair. The question is the best way of ensuring that that voice is heard.
Just as the question is the best way of perpetuating the second chamber’s breadth, especially its political breadth. Turning it into a bolthole for all those Lib Dem Minsters who are about to lose their Commons seats is not the way to go about that.
An elected second chamber would have a Conservative-Lib Dem majority on a permanent basis. Thank goodness that there is still some part of our parliamentary system from which it remains possible to speak from outside the nasty but inevitable union between, on the one hand, what has always been the anti-parliamentary New Left and, on the other hand, the sociologically indistinguishable New Right’s arrival at hatred of Parliament as the natural conclusion of its hatred of the State.
From that union, together with the SDP’s misguided Alliance with the Liberals around their practically Bennite constitutional agenda, derives the Political Class’s desire to abolish the House of Lords.
For those who keep such scores, the House of Lords has a higher proportion of women, a higher proportion of people from ethnic minorities, a broader range of ethnic minorities, and far more people from working-class backgrounds generally and the trade union movement in particular, than can be found down the corridor.
More significantly, and despite the very hard efforts of successive governments, it also retains a broader range of political opinion, more reflective of the country at large. But that is under grave threat, both from the party machines and from the way of all flesh.
The future composition of the House might be secured, at least in part, by providing for each current Life Peer, at least who attends very or fairly regularly, to name an heir, by no means necessarily or even ordinarily a relative, but rather a political and a wider intellectual soul mate. That heir would become a Peer upon his or her nominator’s death, and would thus acquire the same right of nomination.
Oh, and as for the Ordinariate, they couldn't get onto Thought for the Day or into the ranks of the Lords Spiritual as Anglicans, and they won't manage it as Catholics, either. Traditional Anglo-Catholics, and Conservative Evangelicals, are treated as quite, quite, quite beyond the Pale.
ReplyDelete