Why the Prime Minister should swear this new oath

A proposed new constitutional instrument is a hopeful recognition of the human condition.

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is assistant priest at Holy Trinity, Sloane Square, London.

Keir Starmer stands in the House of Commons and recites an oath from a card held up in front of him.

Starmer swears allegiance to King Charles III, September 2022.

Thank the Almighty, the General Election is over! We have a Prime Minister. We have another cadre of MPs, some old hands and many Young Turks, all ready for the excitement of Parliamentary procedural intrigue and (hopefully) hungry to exercise their power for the betterment of their constituents. As a nation, we can all breathe a sigh of relief. We have emerged, blinking, into the sunlight of what I can only hope is five years of a milder political climate.

What happens next?

Well, today, every MP, new or old, will swear the Oath of Allegiance to King Charles III. This is not optional. Anyone refusing to do so cannot exercise their rights as an MP and will not receive their salary. Ultimately, the refuseniks can have the reality of their election voided. The wording of the oath excels in comprehensive brevity:

I swear by Almighty God that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty King Charles, his heirs and successors, according to law. So help me God.

The Monarch is anointed as the protector of the realm, always seeking what is best for Great Britain, and so to swear an oath to be faithful to the Monarch is to swear to seek the best for their realm. It is all perfectly simple and logical.

But is it enough?

It would seem that swearing fealty to the Crown is no longer enough. Now the PM must specifically swear not to lie to the Sovereign and the nation.

Some would argue not. Our political life has been marked by controversy for as long as I have been old enough to be politically aware. MPs expenses, the coalition Government, the Brexit referendum, parliamentary gridlock, Downing Street lockdown parties…Liz Truss! It’s all been like a circus, except all the animals are dead, the clowns just sit around screaming and crying, and the tent burns down. Trust in our political establishment could hardly be lower. Perhaps in light of this, a couple of constitutional scholars have mooted the idea of an extra oath - one for the Prime Minister.

Professor Andrew Blick, of King’s College, London, and Baron Hennessy of Nympsfield have written an open letter, on behalf of The Constitution Society, inviting the new Prime Minister to swear an additional oath specifically for their office.

The oath is intended to act as a confidence booster - an extra promise that the most powerful MP in the land will abide by the conventions of our constitution: Cabinet Government, The Ministerial Code, Civil Service Impartiality, etc. In an effort to restrain the darker impulses of the PM, the oath would also mean swearing to uphold the seven Nolan Principles: Selflessness, Integrity, Objectivity, Accountability, Openness, Honesty, Leadership. It would seem that swearing fealty to the Crown is no longer enough. Now the PM must specifically swear not to lie to the Sovereign and the nation.

In a moment of unattractive despair, I can’t help but let out a depressed sigh.

Yet, I also have hope. This new constitutional instrument would, on the surface, be a morose admission of defeat. We can no longer assume honesty in those who wield the most power and influence. Look deeper and you see a fascinating, and hopeful, recognition of the political (and human!) condition.

The very act of swearing an oath is itself a virtue. It is an act that puts one face to face with absolute truth, goodness, and beauty.

I find this new oath fascinating, and rather cheering, in spite of all my previous electoral gloom, because it clearly speaks to the human need for the transcendent and the eternal. So often our politics seems to be mired in the drudgery of the immediate: will the economy grow in the next quarter, will NHS waiting lists diminish by the end of the calendar year, will the crime stats be favourable any time soon. We rarely hear of any ‘vision’ for our country the looks to the horizon - not even the decade, let alone the voyage into the forever. Yet this oath does just that!

It does so in two ways.

Firstly, by seeking to enshrine the Nolan principles, it recognises the distinction between ‘values’ and ‘virtues’. Values have the veneer of the absolute but are far too easily jettisoned when necessity dictates. Commitment to a value is good, but is in constant competition with other values: openness battles the need for state-secrecy, honesty’s sword is often broken in the face of obfuscation’s onslaught, etc. The holding of values is a static thing, which can wilt and die in the burning heat of reality. A virtue, on the other hand, is something which must be constantly practiced and nurtured. A virtue always looks to its ideal form - a universal perfection of honesty or selflessness. Swearing an oath to uphold the Nolan Principles means committing to operating by them every day, and so allowing them to grow in the individual, becoming easier and easier to live by until the practitioner of virtue struggles NOT to operate in their eternal light.

Secondly, the very act of swearing an oath is itself a virtue. It is an act that puts one face to face with absolute truth, goodness, and beauty. The act of making an oath recognises that our lives and deeds are not simply contingent moments in the pitiless march of time, but that they resound in the halls of eternity.

I think this is why Jesus warns people against swearing oaths in the fifth chapter of the Gospel according to Matthew. When reading this warning in the light of the serious, radical, and even hyperbolic speech that comes before, it is clear that Jesus doesn’t want us to avoid making promises, but that he realises just how bad we are at keeping them. Swearing an oath (invoking eternity, the absolute, the divine!) means that when we break our oaths we diminish ourselves in the face of God.

“Let your word be ‘Yes, Yes’ or ‘No, No’; anything more than this comes from the evil one.”

This is not a command to avoid promises and promise keeping, but a radical call to live one’s life always in the light of eternity, so that even the simple ‘yes’ is the truest oath one can make.

We need leaders - political and otherwise - who can offer the human soul something more than simply an uninspiring roadmap for five years of moderate economic improvement. We need leaders who can inspire the nation with a vision of eternity. We need leaders who point us to that horizon of the absolute where we do not see individual good acts warring against the forces of apathy and indifference, but see the Good itself illuminating our every moment with hope and joy.

Perhaps an oath - an admission that there is meaning beyond our momentary finitude - is the best way to inject a bit more universality and meaning into a political system that has left this author feeling quite so cold so far.

I shall pray for our new Prime Minister, and for all our new MPs. I shall hold them before the face of God who is beyond all immediate concerns and pray that they may have the vision of our eternal destiny ever in their minds and in their hearts. I shall earnestly intercede that they recognise that their oaths are not simply a formula of words, but a positive spur to lead us into a future that never ceases to grown brighter and brighter with the light of our eternal destiny.

Article

Culture

Digital

Fun & play

18 March 2024

4 min read

Fun is dead

When video games turn play into work, we need to play without fear of consequences.

Simon Walters

Simon Walters is Curate at Holy Trinity Huddersfield.

A woman stand in front of a large video screen displaying the Space Invaders title, hold her hands out in front of her.

Photo by Andre Hunter on Unsplash.

Imagine there’s been a sudden change in plans. The evening meeting is cancelled at the last minute, or your friend is sick and can’t come round. There are no looming tasks that need doing, so you set out to have some fun. What do you do?

Karen Heller’s recent article in the Washington Post suggests that we don’t really know how to answer that question. ‘Fun is dead’, proclaims the headline, and her analysis is simultaneously insightful and depressing. Weddings have become stressful extravaganzas, holidays require a constant stream of activity, retirements should have a purpose and a plan. Our fun, our play, requires a reason to exist. Can we have fun without it having some larger purpose? Can we play without needing to post it on social media? Everyone else, it seems, is having much more fun than we are.

Take video games. You might think this ought to be the very definition of a playful activity, one with no particular end or purpose in mind. But even here, it seems we don’t know how to have fun without some type of incentive. Conversations about video games online are frequently so self-serious and toxic that you’d be forgiven for thinking that it was a matter of life and death, not differing preferences about fun. Some of the world’s biggest games – things like Fortnite, Genshin Impact, and EA Sports FC – give rewards to players who turn up to play every day. It sounds generous until the psychological hooks of these methods grip you far past the point of fun. Players talk about not being able to sustain more than one of these types of games, because otherwise they won’t be able to keep up. What starts as play quickly turns into a form of work.

The world of play is a world of grace, where we are free to find pleasure in an activity on its own merits.

I am as much a sucker for this method as the next person. I find myself drawn to games which start out as free and fun, but the fun inevitably seems to turn into a chore that I cannot dislodge. There is an unwritten pressure to turn up to play every day to complete daily tasks and keep up with the competition. I end up feeling guilty for wasting my time playing games, and anxious to keep up with what’s required when I do. No wonder, with all these contradictory pressures on play, I find myself more often than not vegetating in front of Netflix rather than really playing.

This is all a bit of a first world problem and might seem like another depressing indictment of modern society, but perhaps it shouldn’t be that surprising. As humans, we are always looking for some way to justify ourselves, some way of finding proof that what we do matters. Play, by contrast, demands that we step into a different sort of world. The world of play is a world of grace, where we are free to find pleasure in an activity on its own merits, and not for anything we might get from it in the end. Play, in its best sense, is purposeless apart from the joy of playing. "When we try to give our playful activities some wider purpose for why they matter, we are turning them into something else."

The world of the Christian faith is not often seen as a playful one. It seems so very serious, dealing as it does with matters of life and death. But within the serious world of the Church, a space for play emerges. After all, it is first and foremost a world of forgiveness from what we have done wrong in the past, present, and future. This forgiveness takes away the fear of failure. Whether I am greatly successful or not I am loved and forgiven by God. This is God’s gift, which cannot be earnt and cannot be lost.

The result, perhaps surprisingly, is that I am free to play, because I do not need my play to achieve anything for me. As the theologian Simeon Zahl puts it,

In play a person is free to engage with the world creatively, actively, energetically, but without fear of ‘serious’ consequences. The Christian is free to play with things that once seemed deadly serious, to find delight in what were formerly objects of fear, and to take themselves much less seriously.

In the world of video games, this idea is perhaps most clearly seen in the games produced by the Japanese game developer Nintendo. Their games, from Mario to Zelda, epitomize a vision for gaming which is driven by creating joy for whoever is playing, and not unnecessarily burdensome tasks. One of their best games of last year, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, doesn’t offer a prescriptive path for how players should approach its challenges. Instead, the player is given a toolkit and set loose to use it in the world as they see fit. The result is a sense of joyful freedom, a feeling that its world is full of delight and even silliness. It gave me some of the most fun playing games in recent years, without me even coming close to finishing it.

It's this playful attitude that I want to take into the rest of my life. What would it look like for us to see the world as a playground rather than an exam hall? The result wouldn’t just be a lot more fun. I think it would also be deeply Christian.