Let’s not make saviours out of Sunak or Starmer

Politicians do not live up to messianic billing.

Cameron Wiltshire-Plant

Cameron is training to be a vicar in the city of Leicester.

Looked down upon by crowds in galleries, a politician stands amid a throng of supporters

Kier Starmer at Scottish Labour's election launch.

Pam Duncan-Glancy via Twitter.

It was 2015 and I thought Ed Miliband was the saviour of the free world. Remember, this was before Covid and Brexit and Trump, and politics seemed so binary and easy. Left-Right. Government-Opposition. Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown. Monoliths in my teenage eyes.

The excitement of the novel 2010 hung parliament and the injustice (as I saw it) of Nick Clegg (remember him?) ‘getting into bed’ with David Cameron instead of Gordon Brown had carried me all the way to the A-level Politics classroom. I was watching Ed attempt to tell Jeremy Paxman that, hell yeah, he was tough enough. A hung Parliament threatened again, until it didn’t. The Conservatives won enough to govern and the hope swelling in my breast was trodden down by spending upper sixth watching Donald Trump sweep to power.

I have learned enough since then not to cast Sir Kier Starmer in the same mould. Sunak’s snap election is not a choice between two saviours, but two politicians compromised by the grit of reality and the inheritance of a set of global circumstances.

Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, figures held up for their political savvy and economic foresightedness respectfully. To put it mildly, they did not live up to their messianic billing.

Often, we can make these political figureheads into messiahs, those who will come on a wave of hope to fix the nation’s problems, govern wisely, and bring unity. Perhaps, approaching July 4th, these feelings are intensified.

There is much in these pages excellently denoting the deliberate co-opting of Christ for nationalistic political purpose, and I am suggesting that we are often willing collaborators, bringing a religious devotion to our ideology and those which propound it: “If only it were insert politician who were running the country, then everything would be much better!”

This almost cultic reverence was present in some circles surrounding both Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, figures held up for their political savvy and economic foresightedness respectfully. To put it mildly, they did not live up to their messianic billing. For others, this devotion was saved for Thatcher, Blair, Cameron, Corbyn.

A word of wisdom to my teenage self? Passion for politics is no bad thing, but devotion to human ideology is misplaced.

Rishi Sunak and Sir Kier Starmer do not quite have the same star power, with Starmer especially coming across as the more doughty-and-dependable type. But it was ever thus. Human nature is inherently cyclical, and we swing from one archetype to the next, always in the hope that the next one in will do a better job than the last.

The messiah is of course a Jewish concept, the awaited one who will deliver them from their enemies and lead them to a state of peace. Many have claimed to be the awaited one, but only one has convinced a multitude. We read of Jesus of Nazareth in our carol services every year that the government will be on his shoulders and the greatness of his government and peace will have no end. At the end of this year in which a new government is formed, perhaps these age-old claims have increased significance. They invite us to look beyond the immediate and the physical, to look beyond those names who dominate headlines, claiming to be the one who will deliver change and reverse decline.

Saint Paul has some wise words for those of us wondering how we can engage with a political world feeling more divisive and divided than ever. He tells us to pray for our government, whether you want Labour or Conservative and end up with the reverse. It is a tough job, and he tells us to give due honour to those who lead us, engaging with politics, giving it the respect it is due. But looking to politicians for deliverance? St Paul would call that folly. He only had one saviour.

For deliverance, we must look beyond the territorial and the electoral, to one who does not promise vote share or positive polling, but sacrifice and justice; to one who comes to us not with populism or popularity, but with lowliness, humility, and integrity. A word of wisdom to my teenage self? Passion for politics is no bad thing, but devotion to human ideology is misplaced. Do not put your trust in the cycle of human proclivities, but in the one whose government will have no end.

Column

Assisted dying

Care

Comment

14 November 2024

4 min read

Proposed euthanasia safeguards insult our NHS

We must defend a collective sense of care and generosity.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A gable end mural depicts a nurse in scrubs and a mask turning and looking towards the viewer.

A mural of an NHS nurse during COVID, Manchester.

Mural Republic

It was, I believe, the late political satirist Simon Hoggart who coined the Law of the Ridiculous Reverse, which held that, if the opposite of a statement is plainly absurd, then it was not worth making in the first place.

This law comes to mind when Labour MP Kim Leadbeater promises that her Assisted Dying Bill will have the “strictest safeguards in the world”, one of which is that those patients who have ordered their fatal dose “would be allowed to change their mind at any time.”

Where, exactly, has it ever been suggested that an individual, having asked for an assisted death, would not be allowed to change their mind? I’m just wondering which legislator or medical professional has proposed that once a lethal draught has been prescribed then there is no turning back.

I’m struggling to picture the circumstance in which a terminally ill patient is pinned down and killed, the last words that they hear being: “I’m sorry Mrs Simpkins, but everyone’s gone to a lot of trouble. You asked for it and you’re jolly well going to get it.”

This is important because, apparently, being able to change your mind about asking for help to kill yourself is one of the strictest safeguards in the world. I hope Ms Leadbeater will forgive me for pointing out that this doesn’t really stack up.

And what’s serious about it is that it’s also a massive straw man argument. The clear and rather devious implication is that one of the arguments being made against the introduction of an assisted suicide law is that patients won’t be able to change their minds about it, which I think we can all accept simply isn’t a fact at all. It’s absurd – a Ridiculous Reverse.

So I’ll defend the NHS with a religious fervour. To my mind, healthcare is a holy mission. We meddle in law with the Hippocratic Oath at our very deep peril.

It’s also hugely contemptuous of the medical profession in general and rude to the NHS in particular. That’s because there’s a snide impression behind Leadbeater’s comment there may be hundreds of budding Harold Shipman out there, but her powerful safeguards are going to protect us from them.

We’re in danger of becoming inured to this kind of insult from politicians directed at the NHS. And it’s worth exploring why they might think we need to be protected from unscrupulous doctors and nurses. In this case, one possible reason is that the NHS isn’t being particularly helpful in giving the euthanasia enthusiasts what they want.

Doctors and their staff have plenty of ethical objections to assisted suicide. But leave those aside for a moment. At the practical level, the NHS has made it clear that it doesn’t have the infrastructure to operate a policy of assisted deaths safely. And it can’t afford to set one up. So a government that introduces assisted suicide is going to have to organise and regulate its own assisted death agency.

“Oh,” the assisted dying lobbyists seem to exclaim, “we’d presumed you’d do as you’re told.” Just hand out the hemlock. Take your instructions from the legislature.

But the NHS is better than that. And it’s that kind of high principle that so infuriates feckless politicians. It was the late Nigel Lawson who said, somewhat ruefully, that the NHS “is the closest thing the English have to a religion”. The right wing of politics regularly tells us it’s time to renounce that religion.

To worship the NHS as a religion would, literally, be idolatrous. But it’s not so to acknowledge its religious qualities. Just look at the word – the Latin religio means something like “good faith”, the essence of who we are, what makes us good.

The NHS, in its post-war incarnation, has been central to who we are as a people and what defines us. It’s something to do with our collective sense of care and generosity to one another. Its members, like our national Church, make up a single body.

This is not to co-opt the NHS as the medical wing of the Church. It’s no part of the NHS’s brief to proselytize – rather the reverse; Christian medical staff have been in deep disciplinary trouble for evangelising. It is a profoundly secular organisation.

So the NHS emphatically isn’t in the business of propagating the gospel. But that’s not to say that we can’t be in the same business. Many priests have stories of their most affirming work being in the company of people of other faiths or of none.

The NHS’s proud heritage is to offer treatment free to anyone at the point of access. Put another way, it will seek to heal anyone who comes to it. I make no apology for saying that sounds familiar.

So I’ll defend the NHS with a religious fervour. To my mind, healthcare is a holy mission. We meddle in law with the Hippocratic Oath at our very deep peril.

And when NHS professionals tell us where we can stick our assisted suicides, I respectfully suggest we give it our solemn attention, rather than patronisingly offering a Law of the Ridiculous Reverse.