Article
Character
Ethics
General Election 24
Politics
Trust
7 min read

The problems Keir Starmer faces are not just political - they are spiritual

His greatest battle may be the fight for our trust.

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

Downing Street

The beginning of a new government is a bit like the beginning of a new football season.  Nothing yet has gone wrong. The future seems full of promise. The grim memory of last season is in the past. Hope is in the air.

Keir Starmer, in his early speeches as Prime Minister, sound some familiar notes. He speaks of “a weariness in the heart of a nation, a draining away of the hope, the spirit, the belief in a better future that we need to move forward together.” While not quite Margaret Thatcher’s invoking the spirit of St Francis in 1979, Sir Keir was reaching for something deeper than the practicalities of politics, for bigger themes, more resonant ideas. Yet there was one note that caught my eye, not just in these speeches but also before that in the election campaign – a theme that cropped up often – the need for trust.

On the day after the election, when the confirmation came through that Labour had won, in an early morning speech to supporters delivered at the Tate Modern, he said this: “Make no mistake, this is the greatest test for politics in this era – the fight for trust is the battle that defines our age.”

Keir Starmer has put his finger on something. As Martin Kettle in the Guardian put it, “Whether you approve of Keir Starmer’s election strategy or not, it is a matter of observable fact that he has centred it upon the regaining of trust.” The Labour manifesto claimed that “over the last 14 years, trust in politics has been shattered.” It went on: “sleaze and scandal have eroded trust. Just as corrosive has been the inability of politicians to keep promises made to the British people.” Among the main reasons the Conservatives were roundly rejected were the actions of Boris Johnson’s inner circle, who partied in Downing Street while families were avoiding each other and staying away from their parents’ funerals (I know – I was one of them). I'm not sure that he and his party realised how corrosive and damaging that was to public trust in government and the Conservatives in particular. Perhaps now they know.

Trust is built when politicians keep their promises and deliver what they say they will over the months and years. It wilts in the presence of political in-fighting, bets placed by election candidates, or unfulfilled boasts to save the NHS.

Hope and trust are vital things for human life. We cannot live without them. And it’s not just in politics. The Church of England has had its own troubles with trust in recent times. A report, debated at General Synod, lamented the lack of trust in the Church, setting it in the context of a general lack of trust in institutions in our society.

Starmer understands that trust has to be earned. “This lack of trust,” he said outside No 10 Downing Street, “can only be healed by actions not words.” And trust takes time. Trust is built when politicians keep their promises and deliver what they say they will over the months and years. It wilts in the presence of political in-fighting, bets placed by election candidates, or unfulfilled boasts to save the NHS.

However, to be fair to politicians, trust has not only to be earned, it also has to be given. And we have become less trusting as a nation. The IPSOS Trust Index reveals that politicians, the media, bankers and advertising executives are our least trusted institutions. An ONS survey in 2023 revealed that trust in political parties, the media, local government, and international organisations was at its lowest level for years. A survey of over 36,000 interviews across 28 countries revealed “a world ensnared in a vicious cycle of distrust, fuelled by a growing lack of faith in media and government. Through disinformation and division, these two institutions are feeding the cycle and exploiting it for commercial and political gain.”

To break what it called the ‘cycle of distrust’, it recommended demonstrating tangible progress, focussing on long-term thinking and providing credible information. Yet I wonder if the problem lies deeper than that.

Trust is a habit. It is like a muscle. The more you exercise it, the more it tends to grow. Yet the paradox of trust is that without trustworthy objects in our lives, it becomes hard to exercise that muscle. A child growing up with parents who regularly deceive and lie to him, promising but not showing up to sports events, hinting at presents that never actually turn up, quickly learns that trust doesn't work. The disappointment is too great to bear. Cynicism works better. He learns to take everything with a pinch of salt, to be wary of promises, and that a guarded attitude where the default position is not to believe is a safer option. 

In a broken and fallen world, trust is a fragile thing. Some people and institutions will be more trustworthy than others, but even the best will get things wrong...

The problem politicians face is that politics, as they say, is the art of the possible, and along the way, whether due to financial constraints, or the need to do deals with allies, political opponents, or (more likely for Starmer, given the size of his majority) within your own party, compromises have to be made, promises ‘re-aligned’ if not actually broken, which is where distrust starts to creep in. Nick Clegg famously made a promise that his party would never increase student fees, yet in the cut and thrust of actually having to govern, he had to break that promise, and his version of the Liberal Democrat party never recovered.

A little while ago, I interviewed Esau McCaulley, an African-American theologian and New York Times columnist with a fascinating backstory. His childhood in the backstreets of Alabama was complicated by an intermittently absent and unreliable father, whose promises were broken again and again. Esau learnt to approach the world with wariness, burned by broken promises. Yet somehow, through the determination of a good mother and the steady influence of a local church, he learnt to trust again. As he put it: “others must own their scepticism, and I my trust, both of which arise out of deeply held convictions about the nature of reality.”

Like Starmer, McCaulley has put his finger on something. The question of whether or not we believe ultimate reality can be trusted lies beneath our cultural tendencies towards trust or mistrust. Ultimately, trust needs a transcendent object. In a broken and fallen world, trust is a fragile thing. Some people and institutions will be more trustworthy than others, but even the best will get things wrong and when those people and institutions that we have trusted implicitly let us down, it is the hardest fall of all.

Judaism and Christianity, in particular the latter, have made a big deal about faith and trust. The Bible is not a list of pithy, timeless aphorisms, but consists of a story across time – and as we saw, trust takes time. One of the central characteristics of the God of the Christian Bible is faithfulness across time. It tells the story of a God who makes a world with a regularity that can be trusted, where the sun rises and sets, light follows darkness, where the fluctuations of a dynamic planet are contained - hence the symbol of the rainbow as a sign that God will not ultimately destroy his creation. When the creation is disrupted by a primeval act of rebellion by the very species that was intended to care for the creation, God promises to send a rescuer from out of that very species to redeem it, a promise fulfilled in Jesus Christ. It then promises the as-yet-unfulfilled hope that the world will one day be healed and brought to its fullness. We do not yet see that, but on the basis of promises previously kept, we are invited to trust. The narrative arc of the Bible is a story that is designed to inculcate trust.

Contemporary spirituality does not have such a focus on faithfulness in time. An appeal to ‘find our spiritual centre’, to ‘accept the present moment’ may bring a temporary sense of peace and serenity. It doesn’t rebuild trust. Because trust, as Keir Starmer has recognised, is built slowly over time by trusting in someone who proves themselves trustworthy.

Having such a transcendent horizon of faith tends to build the muscle of trust. It turns the dial from the default of distrust to that of trust. It becomes just a little easier to handle the disappointments of broken promises in this world because ultimate reality can be trusted.

All this tells us that the deepest problems we face as the new government begins its work are not just political - they are spiritual. I for one hope and pray that Keir Starmer's government will be as trustworthy as he hopes it will be. It would be wonderful if they can rebuild a sense of trust in politics. But there are limits to what politics and politicians can do. They cannot ultimately heal our hearts from the damage done to our ability to trust. Only a faithful God can do that.

Starmer is, well known as an atheist. In seeking to build trust, he has hit the right note. In identifying trust as the key issue of the day, he is perhaps unknowingly reaching out for the God he doesn’t believe in, but who builds trust in those who do.

Essay
Comment
Politics
10 min read

England needs a written constitution that defends against populism

A new resolution acknowledges what forges a sense of right and wrong.
A wide angle picture shows a king and queen on thrones before many people in ceremonial clothes.
The Opening of Parliament.
Roger Harris/House of Lords, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

New Year is often a time for reckoning and resolutions. Nations, no less than individual persons, would benefit from such an annual reckoning with themselves.  

If in life we must always strive to find some Aristotelian ‘golden mean’, between recklessness and timidity so it is in the life of states and nations. Many countries have been brought into ruin by the excess of misdirected appetites and wrongly-ordered desires: demagogues inflaming the people; oligarchs seeking to turn the res publica – the ‘public thing’ – into their own personal fiefdom. Revolutions, corruption and public lassitude are the wages of such sins. Ultimately, it ends in the death of the state itself: the collapse of all legitimate authority into warring gangs, while refugees flee, if they can, to the borders. 

Many countries, conversely, go through their lives in cowed timidity, until they end up in an old age of regret, having never achieved their full potential. These nations do not necessarily collapse, but slowly decline – unable to reform themselves, locked in a vision of their past that was better than their present or any imaginable future.  

 England is at risk of both these dangers. On the one hand, a reckless reactionary populism, which has long laid dormant, but has been unleashed since 2016. It threatens to abandon all prudence and overthrow all restraint, to attack the civil service and the courts, to reject Human Rights, to corrode civic discourse, and to set aside all procedural propriety, until we end up sodden in the gutter of despotism. On the one hand, a persistent constitutional conservatism stands in the way of the necessary, long overdue, reforms which would breathe life and vitality back into an old, tired, country, and would give our institutions the strength to resist such destructive forces.  

Nations, like people, can experience decisive moments of what might be termed repentance. When they wake up in the gutter – their capital city bombed, their army disbanded, their people starving – they can turn from the paths which took them to that place, and find a newness of life, a new hope, embodied in a new constitutional order. This is what Germany, Italy and Japan did after 1945. They can also experience a kind of conversion, away from false principles to truer ones, as much of Central Europe did after the fall of the Berlin Wall.  

I am using theological language here to describe merely civic and political attitudes, which is always a dangerous thing to do. It would be a misreading of my intent if one were to conclude that I conflate a well-ordered polity with the Heavenly City. Nevertheless, a well-constituted polity, in which freedom and justice, peace and the common good, are not only treasured but actually – to some practical extent – achieved, is an inestimable blessing. We should strive to obtain it.  

A well-constituted polity is based upon the principle of ‘public government’. The state is a public entity, belonging to the public, in which public office is a public trust to be used for public ends, and where citizens in public life must be faithful stewards of the public good, for which they are responsible to the public. 

Democracy is our shorthand term for this arrangement, although it is a rather clumsy one. Democracy, properly understood, is not unlimited majority rule, nor the unconstrained rule of the person elected by the majority. It is, rather, a complex political system that combines representative and responsible government with civil liberties and the rule of law.  

Populism is a caricature of democracy. Populists attempt to undermine the barriers that restrain abuses of power. Their attempts to weaken the judiciary and civil service, sideline those who disagree with them, infringe fundamental rights, centralise power, and restrict public dissent, must therefore be seen as attacks on democracy. They put arbitrary power into the hands of particular persons. 

England’s position is not that of Germany in 1945. It might, in some ways, be analogous to that of Central Europe in the 1990s. Much of England today looks like I remember my first visit there then: the same grey faces, the same cheap clothes, the same visible effects of bad housing, bad food, and lack of opportunity. If anything, England is worse off, because at least those countries had hope of better days ahead. No one yet has imagined an English future better than its past.  

England has been let down by a failed ideology – that of neoliberal capitalism, which, as Dr Abby Innes points out, is every bit as rigid and doctrinaire as the official Marxist ideology of the former Communist states. England has been let down, too, by decades of corrupt, incompetent, short-sighted and careless government. The symptoms of misgovernment can be seen in England’s economic record, its social problems, its crumbling infrastructure and over-stretched public services.  Outside the Customs Union and the Single Market, England is isolated from its European neighbours.  The country is not living up to its potential.  

This should spur us to consider the weakness of English democracy. As currently established, the state often fails to serve the common good. The English do not live in a well-constituted polity with ‘public government’ as its foundation, but in a fiefdom-state that has been cut, privatised, deregulated into near oblivion.  

If it were only a matter of specific individuals, or of one party, the problem could easily be fixed. But the country has not only been let down by this government or that government, by this party or that Prime Minister. It is the system of government, the constitutional order as a whole, that has failed us. 

Restoring England’s hope for the future, its prosperity, and its quality of life, must begin, then, with the improvement of English democracy, and that with a refoundation of its constitution. This is hard to hear, because, as Mr Podsnap put it in Charles’ Dickens 1864 novel Our Mutual Friend, ‘We Englishmen are very proud of our constitution, Sir. It was bestowed upon us by Providence. No other country is so favoured as this country.' It is hard to admit that something is broken, when once it was so highly prized – indeed, so intrinsically bound up in England’s sense of national identity. 

The Westminster Model of democracy is not without its virtues. Its origins can be traced far back into English history. Yet it did not develop into maturity in England alone. Bagehot was carried around the world, read under palm and pine, and drilled into the ruling classes from Vancouver to Colombo. The Westminster Model owes much to Magna Carta and Simon de Montfort’s ‘Model Parliament’ of 1295, but it owes just as much to the developments of the Victorian age: (nearly) universal suffrage, political parties, manifestos, and the establishment of a permanent, professional and non-partisan civil service.  

The transformation of Empire to Commonwealth ended British rule, but not the British way of ruling. Westminster Model democracy had to be set down, of course, into a written, supreme-and-fundamental law, through which all the essentials were faithfully reproduced. If you want to discover the Westminster Model of democracy at its peak, read the constitutions of Belize or the Solomon Islands.

The rejection of written constitutions has been a prevailing English conservative principle since Burke. However, it leaves us defenceless against authoritarian reactionary populism. 

The irony is that those who are most comfortable with the imperial legacy are also those who are doing most to destroy public government at home. While fetishizing ‘The British Constitution’ and ‘Our Eight Hundred Years of Unbroken History’, the populist right rejects the principles and the values upon which that achievement rested. Just as they seek to create a pastiche of 1950s Britishness (absent of strong workers’ rights, strong unions, a generous welfare state, and publicly owned utilities and services), so likewise they seek to create a pastiche of the 1950s British Constitution, without the self-restraint, moderation, decorum, public service ethos, and high levels of social trust and cohesion, which made that system of complex unwritten rules work.  

The Blair-Brown reforms of 1997-2010 are a particular target of reactionary ire. The Human Rights Act mitigated, although it did not remove, the absolutism of Parliament. It gave the people who have little voice under a purely majoritarian system – ‘the weird, the wicked, the weak’ – a means by which to challenge the exercise of power. Devolution broke the prevailing English notion of British uniformity: it not only allowed Scotland and Wales to have a (muted) political voice and some (tightly constrained) freedom to craft their own policies, but also forced England into a reckoning with its own national identity. So far, this has played out mostly through the doubling-down on what the former Labour MP and scholar of English identity John Denham calls ‘Anglo-centric British nationalism’. The Tory – and Reform UK – constitutional agenda is obsessed with restoring the unlimited power of Parliament and of reinforcing the Anglo-centric British state. 

As we can see, from every NHS waiting list to every pothole in the road, the Anglo-British state is no longer working very well. It has all the vices of its past, and few of its virtues. A return to the pre-1997 status quo ante is impossible – it would be like trying to retake Hong Kong. Parliamentary absolutism tempered by the ‘good chaps’ theory is no longer a viable option. Either we must accept an untampered absolutism – which is the agenda of the reactionary populist right – or else we must deepen constitutional reform, and arrive at a new constitutional settlement which accepts that the British Imperial state, oriented to the needs of maritime imperial commerce, is over, and that an English nation-state, oriented to the common good of the ordinary people of England, is now needed.  

This entails a new, democratic, constitutional foundation. Small-c conservatives might baulk at this. The rejection of written constitutions has been a prevailing English conservative principle since Burke. However, it leaves us defenceless against authoritarian reactionary populism. Moderate, sensible, responsible conservatives should learn to think differently about written constitutions. Paradoxically, constitutionalism strengthens the state. By bounding and limiting state power, and providing a robust system of responsibility, accountability, and restraint, constitutional government actually enables the state to draw upon a deeper well of public legitimacy.  

What would English identity look like, if it were forged between the Channel and the Tweed, and not between the Nile and the Irrawaddy? What might an English constitution look like, and what values and principles might inform it?  

A constitution for England must recognise that England is a society of many faiths and none. It is, however, an acknowledgment that Christianity has forged and formed not only our institutions, but also our understandings of right and wrong. 

In addressing the last of these questions, the Christian tradition has much to add to the conversation.  

Christian theologians and political philosophers have spilled a lot of ink, in the past two millennia, on questions of good government, on the relationship between church and state, and what it means to be a Christian and a citizen of an earthly state.  

There seems to be an assumption – amongst both supporters and opponents of written constitutions – that a written constitution would have to be based on secular values. This stems, in part, from our ignorance of our own Westminster Model constitutional tradition. The constitutions of the United States and of France might be strictly secular, but the constitution of Antigua and Barbuda claims to be ‘founded upon principles that acknowledge the supremacy of God’, while that of Tuvalu explicitly refers to ‘respect for Christian principles’.  

This is not a bid for theocracy. A constitution for England must recognise that England is a society of many faiths and none. It is, however, an acknowledgment that Christianity has forged and formed not only our institutions, but also our understandings of right and wrong. To give all that up would produce an ethical vacuum in society, which will be filled only with ever more grotesque forms of exploitation.  

The cardinal ethical principle of constitutional democracy is a recognition of human dignity. At the origin and foundation of all institutions, and laws, and norms, we find ourselves having to cling to the fundamental command that Christians call the Golden Rule: ‘Do unto others as you would have others do unto you’. If we abandon that principle of human dignity, there is no solid ground on which to build a decent, well-ordered, democratic polity. Perhaps then we can build a new ‘Jerusalem’ in England’s grey and drizzly land. 

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