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To be frank, the bishops of England and Wales have left themselves open to the opposite accusation: of not really having a coherent political strategy on abortion at all. Of course they are "against abortion". But what, given the complex state of public and private morality in a secular plural democracy at the start of the twenty-first century, does that mean?
Do they want the law of the land to send people to prison for wilfully destroying a human embryo at any stage of its existence after the moment of fertilisation, on Day One for instance? Do they want that to be the law even if a majority of the population disagrees? A recent article by Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor in the journal of the English Bar, Counsel, seemed to suggest exactly this. The cardinal argued that it was for judges to use the European Convention on Human Rights (now part of British domestic law) to give embryos the full protection of the law from conception to birth - presumably without further reference to Parliament. One need hardly point out that were the courts ever to do anything so unlikely, the overwhelming public outcry would force Parliament to legislate immediately to reverse the ruling.
There are no such short cuts to a Catholic abortion-free Promised Land. Part of the reason for the impasse is the Catholic insistence that human life begins at fertilisation, and that that is all there is to be said. Thus an embryo in the first day of its existence has the same moral status as any other human, born or unborn, child, adult, whatever; and destroying it is therefore equally wrong. And so the "morning-after pill" has to be condemned because it too destroys human life. But is this a belief that Catholics really hold? For instance, it is well known that a high proportion of embryos are spontaneously miscarried - sometimes so early on, the woman is hardly aware she is pregnant.
If the bishops were convinced that every such outcome was as tragic as a cot death, where are their urgent demands for massive investment in medical research to prevent miscarriages? I have never even heard it suggested. And why does no formal Catholic church ritual exist for the dignified disposing of the human remains of one of these early spontaneous abortions? (Women who have had miscarriages might be interested if there was. They suffer, but the Church does not suffer with them.)
The non-Catholic public does not believe that early embryos are complete human beings that should be given the full protection of the law from the moment of fertilisation. Until not so long ago, the status of the human embryo was not settled in Catholic theology. The papal encyclical Evangelium Vitae in 1995 was intended to close off that option, with a spin from church authorities suggesting the ruling had quasi-infallible status. But a judgement of the magisterium resolving a disputed point cannot be regarded as binding on non-Catholics. For only by the light of the Catholic faith itself can Catholics know that their Church has an infallible teaching authority. Catholics have no right to impose their religious views on the consciences of others.
Nor can Catholics know, infallibly or otherwise, where the fine should be drawn between those immoral acts which should be punishable by the criminal law, and those which should not. Adultery is wrong but it is not a crime, nor, as such, is prostitution. Sex with minors has been illegal at various times in various cultures, below an age varying from 12 to 21. This is not to deny the force of the argument that one of the purposes of the law is to protect the weak and innocent. That is persuasive, but not, by itself, decisive. The law has other purposes too.
Catholic arguments about abortion law reform, in which I would include most public statements on the subject made by bishops, tend to be rigorous in the moral sphere, but not thought-through enough when they deal with the law and politics. As advice to electors just before an election they suffer from the disadvantage that they have not been proofed against the sort of objections I have rehearsed above, which Catholics are certain to encounter as soon as they open their mouths on the subject.
That seems to be because there is a curious inhibition about discussing abortion in the Catholic community in Britain on any except absolutist terms, with no room for debate. That may be comforting, but it isn't a realistic strategy for persuading the majority of the population that the time has come to tighten the law. But were the bishops bold enough to say that abortion within the first four months of pregnancy, while always wrong, should not come under the provisions of the criminal law, then people might start to listen to the rest of what they had to say about it. And a real dialogue could start. But would Rome allow them to? That is another matter.
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There is a lesson here. An important part of Labour's platform in the general election is the "radical" transformation of public services. The transformation proposed is not just about how they are paid for, and how much. It is also about how they are managed. And crucial to that is the relationship between the particular public service and those who work for it. Above all, it is about what they feel about themselves, and hence how they feel about their customers.
"Staff" is not quite the right word. Waitrose is owned by John Lewis, whose employees are called partners. They are the shareholders, and they own the business. It is this alone which explains the different self-image of those who work in Waitrose, and in turn, their different attitude to the customer.
How can Britain's public services fundamentally reshape their relationship to the public? This is the question governments have been asking themselves for 50 years. It has to be by capturing something of that spirit of partnership which overcomes the traditional alienation of the employee, so that he once more "owns" his own effort and feels himself to be working, so to speak, for himself. The Gospel text here must surely be that most radical but neglected social encyclical of the present pope, Laborem Exercens. It is the only treatment I have seen, secular or religious, which comes anywhere near the heart of the matter. It deserves far more study than it has received - especially by the Treasury and the TUC.
The idea of a contact of employment, as we now understand the term, is not something written in natural law. It derives from an 18th century English codification of the relationship between master and servant, subsequently put through the mincer of the industrial revolution. It is, as Marx saw, inherently alienating. The employer "buys" the labour of the employee, who therefore no longer owns that part of himself. In return he is paid money, the least amount he will accept for continuing to work. In most cases the employer is not a person at all, but a human artifact which is equally a post-industrial legacy of the 18th century: a corporation limited by guarantee. owned by and run for the benefit of its shareholders.
The alienation and conflicts of interest which are built into this arrangement are not confined to the private sector of industry. When large sections of the British economy were nationalised in the postwar years, it was assumed that this would overcome the need for endless battles between employees and managers. The "workers" would henceforth be guaranteed - "the full fruits of their industry" instead of that share of it remaining after the "capitalists" had taken their profits. Yet industrial militancy in the nationalised coal. rail. steel and motor industries continued as before. It was a strike in the public sector - coal - which brought down Edward Heath's Government in 1974, and the Winter of Discontent in mainstream public services which saw off James Callaghan in 1979. Public ownership was clearly no answer to employee alienation.
Nor is money. It is precisely now that the Government has embarked on a quantum leap upwards in investment in schools and hospitals that teachers and doctors have decided to strike (or "resign from their contracts- in the latter case). And hidden between the lines of recent Treasury thinking about the reform of the public sector. also implied in Tony Blair's speech on public sector reform on Monday. is the realisation that part of the problem is structural. Britain's public services are not well managed, nor are staff well motivated (despite Mr Blair's ritual compliments about how brilliant they all are). The demand for more money is usually a symptom of being browned off rather than hard up.
The Government has two ideas, both promising ones, neither of them the complete answer. The first is to dissolve the hard demarcation between the private and public sectors. New specialist hospitals - "operating factories" is one unkind name for them - will be set up to provide clinical services free to the patient but paid for by the taxpayer. And for once, it will not matter who owns the plant or signs the cheques. The second, implied in Mr Blair's talk of the NHS being decentralised and of local units being managed by the doctors and nurses who work in them, suggests he is inching towards a co-operative, partnership model of operation and ownership rather than the traditional employee-employer model which presupposes (and hence creates) conflicts of interest.
Not the least of the problems standing in his way is the attachment of trade unions to a conflict model (trade unions are equally a product of the industrial revolution and of its tug of-war between capital and labour.) Whether they have the imagination to invent new paradigms for the new situation, or continue to see industrial relations as the endless battle of workers against owners, is the greatest challenge they face. or as Archbishop William Temple once put it, the opportunity exists "so to arrange affairs that the demands of social justice and the dictates of self-interest coincide". If that is the goal, then Laborem Exercens is the route map. I would recommend it to Mr Blair.
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They both deserve better than that. As a nation, we take our dislike of politicians to unreasonable lengths. One of the few to have any sort of popular following was the late John Smith, leader of the Labour party in the early 1990s, whose grave on the island of Iona has become such a magnet for pilgrims that nearby gravestones have had to be moved away lest they be damaged by the crowds. But maybe he was not around long enough to incur the odium that goes with the office. For automatic unpopularity is actually built into the British political system. We pay one set of politicians to run the country, and another set to abuse them at every turn. And then we insist on giving them more or less equal attention.
Let us suppose we did the same with religion, and we paid someone prominent to be Leader of the Spiritual Opposition. Let us suppose that according to the principle of religious balance, every time the Pope or Archbishop of Canterbury said anything, the media would be obliged to go straight round to the anti-Pope or anti-Archbishop and report his cynical sneers. "Well, he would say that, wouldn't he, what with a papal or synod election coming up - this man will do anything to make his wretched administration look better than the unholy shambles it is, but I don't believe a word of it and neither does God..." etc. Is that likely to make the public more or less respectful of His Holiness or His Grace? And if they replied in kind, would that do wonders for the standing of the Reverend Leader of the Opposition? Or would the public instead conclude that all religious leaders were much of a muchness, all of them crafty liars in it for what they could get?
So when the Catholic bishops of England and Wales declared in their last pre-election statement in 1996 that "an attitude of cynicism towards those engaged in public life is one of those tendencies against which we feel we must speak out", they were right enough, but crying for the moon. The fault lies not just in the need for democracies to have alternatives. It is a particular fault of the adversarial Parliamentary process in a constitutional monarchy. In the United States, as elsewhere, once the President is elected he is regarded as everybody's president. No such process of uniting behind the political leader occurs in Britain: in fact the system is designed to frustrate it.
And it is not so much the simplification of politics down to slogans and soundbites the bishops should be complaining about, as they did in 1996, but the media's tendency to reduce it all to personalities. Not real personalities, either, but the falsified and distorted tv version. None of the people who dismiss Mr Hague as a "wally" - which is apparently now the most common buzz-word for him in focus groups - know him personally. None of those who dislike Mr Blair for being "out of touch" and "arrogant" have any direct basis for that judgement. They are merely going by how they come across on television.
The worst recent example of this distorting mirror effect was last year's presidential election campaign in America, where Al Gore scored badly for being "wooden", and George Bush did rather well for being "friendly". Only a tiny proportion of those holding such opinions had ever met the guy in question. By such means do elections become mere personality contests (and the world has to live with the consequences). In fact Mr Gore is said by those who know him to be far more amusing and charming in person than the tv cameras ever manage to convey. Nor is the real life William Hague a real life wally by any stretch of the imagination. This is the politics of illusion, created by cathode ray tube.
Some will say that Tony Blair nevertheless deserves to be held in ill-repute simply because of his undoubted reliance on so-called spin. But anyone working on a national newspaper when the word "spin" first entered the political and journalistic vocabulary can confirm that the journalists started it. "Give the story a spin" as an instruction from news editor to political writer in the mid 1980s meant pitching it so it bounced to left or, more usually, right (by analogy with what a slow bowler tries to do in cricket). In spinning a story, bias is added to the ungarnished facts, as in "The Government's handling of the crisis descended further into chaos yesterday when ..." A spin doctor is someone who tries to correct (ie doctor) this spin, in order to make the story more or less flattering, as in "The Government's handling of the crisis received a boost yesterday when..." So the press invented spin. not the politicians. Spin-doctoring was invented in self-defence.
A general election campaign is about to begin, and the British electorate is about to overdose on all the above political vices and vicissitudes, plus others. But this is how democracy works - badly (but as Churchill said, all the alternatives are worse). The wise will go along with it, but not pretend it is perfect. Only the foolish - and television presenters - will mistake it for reality.
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Would Muriel Gray have been be allowed to say what she said about Blacks, Jews or Muslims? The Guardian would surely proclaim that the minimum requirement for the conduct of a plural society is that criticism of any such group within it should not go so far as to hold it up to loathing, contempt and ridicule, nor provoke actual hatred towards it (which may amount to the same thing). The fact that she did not feel that normal standards restricted what she could say in the case of Catholics suggests that she feels that they in particular - uniquely, perhaps - have no place in a plural society. Why is The Guardian willing to lend its name to such a contradiction of everything it stands for?
The horrific accompanying cartoon showed a paedophile priest - with horns - reaching down lasciviously towards two frightened small children. One was almost reminded of some of the more grotesque anti-Semitic cartoons from the Nazi's infamous Der Sturmer magazine. In her article, Gray argued that the recommendations of Lord Nolan's report into child abuse in the Catholic Church ought to be imposed by law. "His stating the bleeding obvious, that this corrupt, hypocritical and decadent institution needs grown-ups from the secular world to try and prevent any more children suffering at its hands, is merely to be taken up on a voluntary basis. To precis for those of you too busy to plough through it what it says is: 'Aaaargh! Stop shagging children, you bunch of perverts. Or else ... well, nothing actually."' She goes on to say that "there is little point in making polite suggestions to an institution whose arrogant behaviour both domestically and globally is so tainted with hypocrisy and duplicity. The only way to protect children is to introduce water-tight compulsory legislation. "
She is wrong in that word "only', but it is an arguable point. What prevents it being taken seriously is the surrounding hysteria. It is relevant to record that the Nolan Commission, with a majority of non-Catholics among its members, was set up by Archbishop (now Cardinal) Murphy-O'Connor after his own admitted failure to deal satisfactorily with one priest accused of abusing children. Any fair-minded person would think that the cardinal was doing his best to make amends for past failures, and that was the tenor of press coverage - Gray excepted - next day.
But her display of extreme prejudice is not the main point. She is entitled to her opinion. The real question is why The Guardian published it. Its editor, Alan Rusbridger, should not be dismissed as an anti-Catholic bigot. He employs Catholics, and lets them have their say (though quite what they could say to neutralise the odium stirred up by Gray is hard to imagine). But he provides the forum for a constituency of opinion in Britain that one might describe as left-liberal-secular. Its residual religion is no-popery.
When Gallup surveyed public opinion before the papal visit in 1982, it found almost unanimous support for Pope John Paul's mission among Catholics, substantial support among members of the Free Churches, and Anglicans split about 50-50. An identifiable group of urban, Labour-voting non-church members was the one serious body of opinion against. Contrary to what had been expected, there was hardly any religious anti-Catholic sentiment around any more. Instead there was this secular segment of opinion - Guardian Man, someone said at the time - whose existence had not previously been noted.
The Guardian, formerly The Manchester Guardian, was once the Nonconformists' newspaper. The Nonconformist churches were more Protestant than the Church of England, and hence more hostile to the Catholic Church. A century ago the Nonconformist churches, which we now call the Free Churches, had more church-going members than the Anglicans. But they have declined enormously in numerical strength. So the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those turn-of-the century Protestants are no longer in touch with those churches as living institutions.
It seems they have abandoned their doctrines, but preserved their prejudices. Had they still been in contact with the churches of their forebears, they would certainly know that relations between the Catholic Church and the Free Churches have been through an extraordinary revolution over the past 35 years and they are now the warmest of friends. The average Methodist or United Reformed Church minister today would be embarrassed and ashamed to be associated with Muriel Gray's wild attack, while their predecessors of a century ago would be nodding in agreement.
It is an astonishing failure of the liberal ethos The Guardian stands for that it gives an airing to such deep prejudices, amounting to bigotry, from which the rest of society has long moved on. Of course the Catholic Church cannot be immune from criticism. All it is entitled to ask is that the facts be accurate and the comment be fair; and over a period, balanced. Is that too much to expect of an otherwise great newspaper?
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The fake sheikh was a pretend client, introduced to her as part of a shameless tabloid sting operation. The News of the World was trying to stand up allegations that she and her business partner, one Murray Harkin, were trading on the royal name and that there was something seedy about Mr Harkin which made him an unsuitable companion for royalty. In both respects they were right, but so what? Why the paper thought it mattered enough to go to all this trouble is unclear. Given the blurred line between fact and fiction in the tabloids these days, where soap opera stars are treated as real people and royal personages as soap opera stars (and where a Countess of "Wessex" actually exists) perhaps their aim was no more than the entertainment of their readers for the unstated benefit of the Circulation Department.
But the showing up of minor royals in a bad light is certainly not unhelpful to the antimonarchist agenda of the News of the World's Australian-American proprietor, Rupert Murdoch. A little ridicule can do a lot of damage. Those who manage the affairs of the royal "firm", as the Duke of Edinburgh once famously called the Windsor dynasty, have to work on the assumption that the tabloids are now lurking behind every door with maximum cunning and minimum scruple. This factor is as much a threat to the survival of the royal line as the presence of Stuart pretenders abroad and Jacobite supporters at home was to the 18th century Hanoverians. Once the public concludes that the tabloids and the royals deserve - or even need - each other, the battle is virtually lost. The fact that the Countess's business was public relations, and that the preoccupation of public relations is with the mass media, only adds to the impression of dangerous liaisons all around.
Buckingham Palace is rethinking the rules concerning the commercial activities of royalty. Countess Sophie crossed an invisible line, and has had to stand aside from her business. There are two conditions which would make the position of British royalty fundamentally untenable. The first would arise if they were collectively seen to have become little more than a subsection of the spoilt super-rich. Last summer's pictures of Prince Andrew lolling about on the deck of a luxury yacht with what the papers called "topless beauties" represent exactly that fatal ambience of languid decadence. Care needs to be taken, therefore, to ensure that the next generation of British royalty, personified by Princes William and Harry, does not become damaged goods.
One has only to recall that the wretched Murray Harkin - who has since resigned - was trapped by the News of the World into admitting the occasional use of cocaine to appreciate the wide use of illegal substances among the "beautiful people" of the PR industry. The same is true of the super-rich. Trusting to the sense and good character of those with blue blood may not be enough. And whether one much cares if Britain becomes a republic or not, the circumstances in which the change happens could have a profoundly damaging effect on the national character.
The second fundamental criterion for the continuation of the monarchy is its equal commitment to, and acceptance by, all classes, races and conditions of men and women in Great Britain. If the royal family became equated with a "white Anglo-Saxon" definition of Britain, it would have become a source of division, conflict and destruction. The Queen herself has not been as bold in this respect as one would have wished, though Prince Charles, through his admirable foundation the Prince's Trust, has more than made up for it.
Nevertheless there is more ground to cover where religions are concerned. The credal equivalent of a white Anglo-Saxon racial definition of the nation symbolised by its royal family is an exclusively Anglican one. There are leading members of the Church of England who are aware of these dangers. But such is the inertia of their rank and file, coupled with fear of moving to unknown territory, that it cannot be assumed the royal family will receive the relief it needs from that direction.
Maybe the providential purpose of the presence of a "royal mistress" - as the tabloids invariably describe Camilla Parker Bowles - is to act as a loosener of the established royal-religion relationship, to prize open the possibility that it might one day be reshaped more broadly and appropriately. But whether that can happen this side of a truly cataclysmic royal crisis is something I am beginning to doubt. This is not a bad week to recall that in human affairs things often have to hit rock bottom before they can recover. Crucifixion comes before Resurrection. The British monarchy may first have to die, in order to rise again. Perhaps that shout of triumph of the British Empire, "God Save the Queen!", needs to be recycled as a humble petition for aid in time of emergency, Gethsemane style. God save her, indeed.
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His charge is similar to that made by his wife, the journalist Barbara Amiel, some while ago. Conrad Black is a Catholic, also owner of the Jerusalem Post (and part owner of the Catholic Herald). Ms Amiel is Canadian like him, but Jewish and well-connected in the Jewish community in Great Britain.
That provides the most likely explanation of Mr Black's outburst. Having presented a paper on the British mass media at a Jewish-Christian symposium in Cambridge last weekend, I was well positioned to hear what important members of the Jewish community in Britain thought about all this. They are very nervous. They feel vulnerable, not least because latent anti-Semitism could find plenty to latch onto in the present conflict. Jews find it very hard to distinguish between legitimate gentile criticism of a specific Israeli Government policy (criticism they may privately agree with), and a more general hostility aimed at all Jews regardless. Part of the reason is the deep emotional bond Jews feel with Israel. In that state of mind, objectivity can feel like disloyalty.
Where does the truth lie? It is surely beyond dispute that a nightly television image of uniformed Israel soldiers shooting at Palestinian youths throwing stones, with a fatality score very disproportionately in favour of the Israelis, is about as bad a public relations message as one can imagine. It is as if Bloody Sunday - when British paratroops shot dead 14 unarmed Irish demonstrators in Londonderry - had become a permanent fixture of the news agenda. This anti-Israeli impression is by no means offset by the frequent Arab terrorist attacks aimed at Jewish targets. Many of those who joined the IRA in the 1970s did so because of Bloody Sunday.
This is to explain, not to excuse the latest terrorist outrage. Palestinian youths throwing stones are undoubtedly part of a co-ordinated plan to destabilise the peace process, and in so far as one result was the recent replacement of the (relatively) peaceful Prime Minister Barak with the (relatively) warlike Prime Minister Sharon, the plan seems to be working. Furthermore, we may reasonably suspect that some of those who want to destabilise the peace process oppose it because it implies Arab acceptance of Israel's right to exist.
To that extent, the real conflict is within the Palestinian camp. Israeli reaction (or over-reaction) - just like British reaction (or over-reaction) in Northern Ireland in the 1970s - is merely a tool to be manipulated in that internal battle. It is also possible that some of the incentive for destabilising the peace process is not dislike of peace itself, but of this particular peace (which required major concessions on the Palestinian side). But in extreme situations, middles get squeezed.
World opinion - in the shaping of which the British media, the BBC in particular, is an important player - is also a tool in this internal Arab debate. Neither stones nor car bombs will drive Israel into the sea. But the long-term delegitimisation in world opinion of Israel's right to exist could be a significant first step in that direction.
Is there, though, a serious body of opinion in Britain, including the British media, which shares this view of Israel's right to exist? Or is Conrad Black just chasing shadows, while at the same time trying to prevent fair and open discussion of Israeli policy? I think what he has hold of is a half-truth. The legal basis for Israel's existence, not least through a resolution of the UN in 1948, is as good as any other state and better than some. If Israel's very existence were at stake, the whole world would have an obligation to come to its aid. But what has always concerned a section of opinion in Britain is the morality of the way Israel came into existence, rather than its legality.
Many British soldiers and administrators in the old Palestine Mandate had direct experience of a nightmare they will never forget. There was a factual basis for it (which Israel itself has been slow to come to terms with), though the experience may also have been tainted by inherited prejudice. With this collective British memory comes a sense that the trajectory of 1948 is still in being. Acting out of insecurity and of being "ourselves alone" - the origins of which everyone who knows European history can understand - the majority of Israelis do not seem to know when the time has come to stop bullying their Arab citizens, refugees and neighbours, and make peace with them.
Thus the Palestinians were asked to accept what looked to outsiders like a poor deal, half-heartedly offered, all too eagerly withdrawn. And behind this stands a curious Israeli indifference to Palestinian suffering - including a willingness to turn the suffering on and off, for instance through periodic blockades of Arab-controlled territory, as a calculated instrument of policy. That is bound to have a dreadful effect on Israel's reputation abroad. Mr Black does not need anti-Semitism to explain it. Nor does that mean, however, that anti-Semitism is altogether missing from it.
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So we can henceforth expect to see a lot of column inches - some stuff and nonsense, some true, and no way of telling the difference - devoted to his female friends. Presumably, someone has already performed the duty of giving him the most important constitutional lesson of his life so far. He will have been warned: do not date Catholics. Because if he dated them, he might fall in love with them; and if he fell in love with them, he might want to marry them. That is not allowed. He must confine his amours to Anglicans, atheists, Jews, Buddhists or Confucians.
The same will apply when Prince Harry reaches his own majority in a year or two. This is the direct consequence of the Act of Settlement of 1701, which lays down that any heir to the throne who becomes or marries a Catholic - the law quaintly says "papist", which is meant to be insulting - becomes, for purposes of the royal succession, legally dead. They drop out of the queue, and those behind move up. The great majority of people in Britain, I am sure, would regard that restriction on William's choice of partner as an unwarranted intrusion into his personal life. On that basis, the Act is no longer tenable. The latest public figure to reach that conclusion is the Attorney General, Lord Williams of Mostyn, who is widely tipped to be the next Lord Chancellor.
The Act was never likely to be amended merely out of solidarity with Catholic hurt feelings, however. It is true there is a good head of steam building up in Scotland for that reason, but to capture the public's imagination fully, the theoretical constitutional issue needs personalising. William's choice of girl-friend has the right sort of tabloid appeal, especially if the gossip columnists start to link him with any particular Catholic girl. But it would be crass to wait until that happens. With the world media's attention focusing on her, repealing the Act without admitting the real reason would be acutely embarrassing (not least, for William himself).
But what if he did marry a Catholic, and what if they then had Catholic children, themselves heirs to the throne? Even assuming the establishment of the Church of England was still around, the difficulty of a Catholic acting as Supreme Governor of that church should not be exaggerated. The Supreme Governorship involves no actual governing. Such discretion as the monarch retains over the church's internal affairs, for instance over senior appointments, is nowadays exercised strictly on the advice of the Prime Minister (who the law already allows to be a Catholic).
The real problem is at the level of symbolism. English polity of church and state still presents "church" and "state" as two facets of the same reality, the English nation in its temporal and spiritual aspect. Though it excluded Catholics almost by definition, in the past this fusion has been of great help to the evolution of English civilisation and English culture. It made the English nation Protestant to the very core.
As Linda Colley noted in her pioneering work Britons (Vintage Books, 1996) the ideological identification of the nation with the church went furthest when the powers-that-be were trying to eliminate the Jacobite threat in the 18th century. They hoped to establish the new Hanoverian dynasty as God's choice to rule his Chosen People (as the English - gradually being subsumed into the British - were being encouraged to regard themselves). Even the national anthem, written about that time, serves this ideological process by its direct reference to the election of Saul as King of Israel: "And Samuel said to all the people, See ye him whom the Lord hath chosen, that there is none like him among all the people? And all the people shouted, and said, God save the King." (1 Samuel 10:v24 AV)
All this mythology is still lodged somewhere in the national subconscious, though few nowadays realise the extent to which parallels were regularly drawn between the history of the Protestant English and the history of the ancient Hebrews. These deep religious roots of English national identity have tendered to wither as the national religion itself has gradually lost its following, but nothing much has replaced them. In the absence of a viable alternative, the nation tends to revert to the last time it had any sort of answer, namely the post-Reformation borrowing of Hebrew ideas of a national covenant with God, and of divinely instituted kingdoms and kingship. And that, ultimately, is what is at stake symbolically in the Act of Settlement.
Thus the Act stands in the way of the English growing up and becoming like other modern nations: a people with a clear contemporary sense of who and what they are. The English are hampered by having to rely on a mythological identity forged in the 18th (and to some extent, the 16th) century, for reasons that people can no longer recognise as having any meaning for their lives. Repealing the Act would be far more than a step towards constitutional modernisation, therefore, which also usefully relieved Prince William of one possible source of heartache. It would be a moment of truth, healing and growth for the whole nation, which could go out and find itself again.
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Which brings us, of course, to the subject of Lent. I have a thought, which needs polishing before it becomes a full-scale thesis, that Lent is a preparation for death and that both Lent and death have something to do with taking out the adjectives. The noun in question is "I" or "me", the name I use for my ego. Adjectives are all the things that have grown around it over the years that make my "I" better than your "I". Before we are fit for heaven we have to lose the adjectives, and purge the "I" back to its pure unqualified simple nounness. It is a genuinely frightening thought, which is why we find death itself frightening. Me without my adjectives. Scary.
Under the mercy of God, we can do something to make it less so. I once heard a professional writer described as somebody who was prepared to delete his finest passages for the good of the whole piece, which included making it the required length. So if all the adjectives have to be taken out to fit us smoothly into the space prepared for us, why leave it to the last minute? We can start removing adjectives before our copy even gets to its Owen Hickey - whether a heavenly or earthly version - and save him the trouble. But this is where the pain starts.
Shortening a page of text can be a truly Lenten experience. It is often our favourite bits, our best literary flourishes, finest figures of speech, choicest alliterations, that are most ripe for the chop. This is when writers suffer on the rack. Movie directors say it is some of their best work that has to hit the cutting room floor first, for it was shot for its beauty, its display of cinematic virtuosity, not for its relevance to the plot. The re-issuing of a version of a film known as the "director's cut", which has recently become a Hollywood fashion, does sometimes show us his self-indulgent flights of fancy which were taken out from the commercial version not because they had no merit but because they had too much, and the art detracted from the story. The adjectives got in the way of the nouns, which was Graham Greene's point.
So Lent is the time for an attack on our adjectives, in advance of the final cutting that has to be done to make us fit for the sight of God. By adjectives I mean all those things that surround and flatter our ego, tying us to earth and therefore holding us back from heaven, especially our material possessions but also our possessive relationships. I have long pondered the wise but baffling saying that "loving means letting go", which is particularly relevant to parents as they watch their children grow into adults. And I have just experienced the entirely inevitable and peaceful death of my own mother aged 91, which is another example of "loving means letting go." We had to let go of her; she had to let go of everything. At the end, the prose of her life was as bare as it is possible to imagine. By our own end, we too will have to let go of all our pleasures and treasures. But to say there is then nothing left is the opposite of the truth. What is left is all that ever mattered.
Lent is a time to practice dying by degrees, letting go of some things we love for a while so our souls learn the trick of it, ready for the real thing. The great mystery here is that the more we let go, the more we become what we really are. And that which we really are is holy. It is all the accumulated dross with which we surround our egos that makes us unholy. Hold a bit of dirty metal in a white-hot flame, and all the impurity burns away, leaving the metal clean and pure. That has always been a nice metaphor for what happens in purgatory. But it equally applies to what can happen in Lent, and indeed to any penitential process, seasonal or not. Which is no doubt why the Catholic Church allows time off purgatory, in the form of indulgences, for those who follow its formal penitential exercises. They have done some of their time, as it were, in advance of sentence.
Meanwhile those who give up something for Lent are making a down payment on giving up everything when they die. And with the advance payment credited to our account, there is less to follow and death is not quite so frightening. As I said, it is only a theory of mine. But I am already working on the sequel - why we should give up adverbs for Holy Week.
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In their own way, such events as this are as important for Christian-Jewish relations in Britain as the Pope's sensational visit to Israel last year was, internationally. The field marshal's brief but moving speech of acceptance was a kind of understated British version of the prayer the Pope inserted in a niche of the Western Wall in Jerusalem.
"God of our fathers, You chose Abraham and his descendants to bring your name to the nations," the Pope had prayed. "We are deeply saddened by the behaviour of those who in the course of history have caused these children of yours to suffer. And asking for forgiveness we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood with the people of the covenant." In a paper read at a dialogue between a Vatican delegation and leading Jewish scholars in London last May, the distinguished Biblical scholar Dr Clemens Thoma emphasised four points arising from this prayer. He said the Pope had recognised the Western Wall as a place of God's special presence; the Pope had witnessed to the continuing covenant between God and the Jewish people; the Pope had professed that the God of Israel, the God of the Covenant, is the God who grants our prayers; and the Pope had appealed to Christians to remember their kinship with the Jewish people.
There is a long agenda ahead arising from these four propositions. As the Catholic theologian John Pawlikowski acknowledged at the same conference, many Christians are still stuck with a supersessionist mentality - the belief that the Church has taken over from (superseded) the Jews as the Chosen People, who therefore have no further purpose in God's scheme of things. It is salutary to note that what the Pope said in that prayer was already implied in the Vatican II decree Nostra Aetate as long ago as 1965. Yet many of the routine Sunday readings between now and Easter, and many a sermon too, will again reinforce a potentially anti-Judaic pre-1965 picture of what the Church thinks of the Jews.
What about the other side? There is no doubt that the pope's Western Wall prayer made a deep impression on Jewish opinion. It was in this new climate that the remarkable Jewish statement Dabru Emet, which Dr Edward Kessler wrote about in The Tablet two weeks ago, became possible. We can only wonder at he ability of 150 leading Jewish scholars to set aside two thousands years of suffering at Christian hands in order to see the Christian faith clearly enough to judge that Jews and Christians worship the same God, draw authority from common Scriptures, and accept the moral principles of the Torah. This, for mainstream Jews, is a giant leap forward, and raises all sorts of further questions (not least, what is the purpose of Christianity in God's plan for mankind?)
Thus both faiths are slowly making room for each other in their internal theology. Catholic rethinking has reached the stage of contemplating a two-covenant theory: God's covenant with the Jews running alongside God's covenant with the Church. But a lot more hard work will be needed, not least a review of the validity of John 8:44 (where Christ is made to state that the Jews are the children of the Devil). The Church may have to exercise its prerogative to say what is and what is not in the canon of scripture, and delete that dangerous passage.
Jewish thinking, meanwhile, can accommodate any number of covenants (as long as they all have small "c") - there are 48 within Judaism, and non-Jews are already said to be bound by the covenant with Noah. But to see God's initiative at work in the ministry of Jesus, and regard a new Covenant (with a capital "c") as being established by his death, is going a lot further than that.
Dialogue between Catholics and Jews often seems like dialogue in the space between a rock and a hard place - the rock being the Church's claim to be, in some sense, the New Israel, and the hard place, Zionism. The Dabru Emet statement was a little unrealistic about the degree of Christian acceptance of the Jewish religious claim to Israel. Jewish scholars must by careful not to take at face value fundamentalist Protestant support for Zionism, which is often part of a Millenarialist theology whose next step is the conversion of all Jews to Christianity.
Does mainstream Christian recognition that the Jewish covenant is still in force mean that Christians are obliged to recognise Israel as the Jews' God-given homeland (notwithstanding Palestinian claims to the contrary)? Before answering, Christians must be entitled to ask what Jews mean by "covenant" in such a case. Is it, for instance, dependent upon justice? The price of Christian recognition of a religious basis for Israel's existence (apart from the pragmatic and legal basis already conceded) may turn out to be a settlement that brings true justice and peace. Otherwise, how can Christians begin to see it as the work of God?
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Some half a million copies of a Tory pamphlet are being distributed to church members and others, a measure doubtless designed to step over the mainly liberal leaderships of the major denominations to speak directly to their allegedly more conservative grass-roots. These overtures could result in the correction of a least one recent historical anomaly - the disenchantment with the Conservative Party of virtually all the major religious bodies in Britain prior to the last election, in spite of their being the bodies most likely to be conservative (with a small c) in their basic attitudes to social and moral issues.
What really turned them off was Thatcherism, the principle that radical free market solutions to society's economic and social problems were to be preferred above all others - which were to be treated as deeply suspect. Thatcherites defined themselves as "dry", and the churches were populated by "wets". Margaret Thatcher had invented a new orthodoxy and a new establishment, made up of those who were "one of us". Church members, especially Anglicans, found their brisk banishment from the top policy table deeply offensive. With Labour, however, they feel they have regained at least some of the high ground. They will not vote Tory just to be pushed off it again.
Using a newly reinvigorated Conservative Christian Fellowship as his vehicle, Mr Hague set out not long after he became Tory leader to consult religious leaders on where the Conservative-church relationship had gone wrong. He soon discovered this distaste for Thatcherism, and to give him credit he set about turning party policy round to the extent that his party is now no more Thatcherite than Labour (that is to say promoting free market solutions if and when they work, and not because they are morally or philosophically superior). But one might describe this not so much as wooing the religious vote as wooing the whole country. It was not only church members who found the Old Tory obsession with market forces off-putting and sometimes quite frightening.
It will not help the Tories to have abandoned their old mantra "public-sector bad, private-sector good", however, if they merely replace it "public-sector bad, voluntary-sector good." Yet that is the implication of their new-found desire to emphasise the role that charities and religious-based groups could play in welfare provision. One way or another, the Conservatives have to learn to love the public sector for itself warts and all.
Their new passion for the voluntary sector, interesting in its own right, is not going to do them any good if the public sees it is just another face of the traditional Tory distaste for public services. Far from being a vote winner, it would damage them.
There is another more searching objection. There are indeed Evangelical groups eager to expand their welfare provision, who see that public subsidy from a Conservative Government might enable them to do so. Those expectations the Conservative Christian Fellowship have seized upon. But I see not much evidence that the mainstream churches, with their already large investment in welfare work, are also clamouring for greatly enhanced support from public funds. Indeed they have problems with the degree to which they have already become an adjunct of local or central government's social services. As recently rehearsed in articles in The Tablet, even with the best will in the world this can threaten their distinctive character. Finding good quality staff with the right religious qualifications is already a major headache, which would grow worse if they grew bigger.
Is it fair to ask whether the Evangelical groups that Mr Hague has in his sights have in the past had problems securing local authority funding? And is this because they were not prepared to sign up to non-discriminatory employment policies and welfare practices which Labour or Lib-Dem councils often insist upon (the discrimination in this case being with regards to sexual orientation)?
Mr Hague is in danger of assuming that a certain resemblance between some of the priorities of some religious groups in Britain and the main thrust of the Christian Right in the United States means that he can argue from one to the other. There is no Christian Right in Britain - even the Conservative Christian Fellowship strikes me, in American terms, as more compassionate liberals than compassionate conservatives.
Where for instance is the death penalty, in their platform? The right to carry guns? Where is the locking up of one third of the young black male population as the answer to drug-related crime, where the 99-year sentences without parole for armed robbery? Where in Mr Hague's manifesto is the wholesale dismantling of "socialist medicine" - which is what any true American Conservative would call our beloved National Health Service? Where the repeal of the Abortion Act? Of course, nowhere; even though Mr Hague's Catholic health spokesman, Dr Liam Fox, has said he "prays" for such an outcome. Mr Hague would be wise to remember that a truly Bushite Tory Party would sink without trace at the next election, whether it flew the flag of compassionate conservatism or not.
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Popes deserving to be called great have no been plentiful since Leo and Gregory of that title, but the present occupant of St Peter's throne may justly deserve to be known one day as John Paul the Great. Once we can view it with a little historical hindsight, his turn at the wheel of the barque of Peter may begin to look almost as providential for the future of Christianity as the Second Vatican Council itself - and there is an intimate relationship between that council and this Pope. Nevertheless, under his administration the signal sent out has sometimes been confusing, even contradictory. At times it is even as if we have been dealing with two popes at once. At times he has almost seemed to want to reverse the council, and plunge the Church back into the rigidities and conflicts of the Counter-Reformation.
This strange double-vision effect was noticed by the late Peter Nichols, for many years the Rome correspondent of The Times and doyen of the foreign journalists accredited with the Vatican. He spent the week of the papal visit in 1982 in England, writing a daily diary for his newspaper. So different was the tone of the Pope's preaching to the British from what he was used to in Rome that Nichols coined the name "John Paul III" to describe him. This born-again Pope among the British had more than just a flavour of John XXIII about him, an element lacking from the stern authoritarianism which had become his characteristic style back in Rome.
The 1982 papal visit appeared to be the exception to the rule. After the Liverpool National Pastoral Congress in 1980 and the subsequent international synod on the family, the late Cardinal Basil Hume and Archbishop Derek Worlock had started to worry that the Church was going backwards and that even the modest loosening of the reins that they had managed to achieve was likely to prove too much for the Vatican. That seems to be the reason why the vision of the congress was never quite translated into action on the ground.
Before and since, episcopal appointments made by the Vatican in countries as varied as Brazil and Austria seemed calculated to screw the lid down tight. To be blunt, second-rate men of no imagination and little pastoral talent were being promoted all round the world because they were deemed safe. A great deal of lasting damage was done. Hume and Worlock sensed the danger of the same thing happening on their patch (though as it turned out, it didn't).
No less worryingly, the papacy of John Paul II gave great encouragement to Opus Dei, an institution about which the English hierarchy has long held serious misgivings (justifiably in my view). Its tentacles seemed to have penetrated throughout the Roman Curia - Octopus Dei, it has been dubbed. It was particularly associated with the so-called Restorationist tendency in the Catholic Church, the thing they wanted to restore being the situation prior to Vatican II.
This contradiction at the heart of papal policy has been on view even in the past few months. At the start of the Jubilee Holy Year, the Pope invited the Archbishop of Canterbury to participate on equal terms with him in the opening of the holy door in one of the major basilicas in Rome. This symbolism of a new start to old and troubled relationships was even more dramatic when he inserted a letter into a niche in the Western Wall in Jerusalem, asking God's forgiveness for Christian sins against the Jews. Such episodes encouraged a wave of warmth towards the Catholic Church such as has rarely been seen before. Suddenly all things seemed possible.
Then just as suddenly, nothing seemed possible, With his personal authority - which be was later at pains to underline - the Vatican issued its intransigent declaration Dominus Iesus, which gave enormous offence to those who had so recently been won over: Jews, Anglicans, almost everyone. Rumour has it that Opus Dei had a hand in it. Yet this was a Pope whose studies in phenomenology had convinced him of the importance of a truthful relationship between act and meaning. The presence of Dr Carey at the door-opening ceremony at St Paul-without-the-Walls was unmistakably a sign that the Pope regarded the Anglican Communion as a sister Church not least because the third equal participant in the ceremony was an Orthodox Metropolitan. And yet this sisterly respect, of immense emotional importance to Anglicans, was flatly contradicted by Dominus Jesus not many months later.
Now we have Novo Millennio Ineunte, very much a "John Paul III" kind of document. It is a puzzling situation. The one thing we might expect from someone of Karol Wojtyla's intellectual power is coherence - joined-up government - rather than an ecclesiastical version of the classic hard-cop, soft-cop routine. At least we can decide which of the two versions of this papacy we recognise as authentic and for the sake of our own coherence, stick with that. And there is no doubt it is Novo Millennio Ineunte which deserves to be regarded as his inspired and uplifting vision for the Church's future.
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In past years her style has tended towards a travelogue or holiday-snaps approach - the "that's me in a new hat taking flowers from a little girl" sort of thing that means a lot to those who were there at the time, not much to the rest. It was plain PR for the monarchy and the royal family, complete with thanks to all those people who spend their lives in the service of others (the conveying of which, on behalf of the rest of us, is one of modern monarchy's prime duties).
This year there was a bit of that, but she chose mainly to concentrate on the religious meaning of Christmas for her personally. These things are not easy to do. There are a million wrong notes waiting to be struck, all too few right ones. She is an Anglican by conviction as well as by law, and the style her church's leaders choose on these occasions is often patronisingly ingratiating towards God, patronisingly manipulative towards people. Maybe the Queen has been studying how not to do it from them. Plainly, she was not out to score points. Hang the ratings. If people wanted the Queen's Christmas Broadcast this year to be the television equivalent of a warm mince pie, they were disappointed.
It was not "This you must believe, it will do you good" but simply and rather touchingly, "This I believe." She acknowledged straight-forwardly that not everyone was a believer and not every believer a Christian. But recognition of the spiritual dimension of life went beyond such categories. "Many will have been inspired by Jesus' simple but powerful teaching," she said, "love God and love thy neighbour as thyself - in other words, treat others as you would like them to treat you. His great emphasis was to give spirituality a practical purpose...
"To many of us our beliefs are of fundamental importance. For me the teachings of Christ and my own personal accountability before God provide a framework in which I try to lead my life. I, like so many of you, have drawn great comfort in difficult times from Christ's words and example."
If this was just a promotional video for the Anglican faith, it certainly didn't look like one. In the holiday snaps section of her broadcast she was indeed seen chatting to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York ("her" archbishops, I suppose we would have to say). But all they talked about was her visit to the Pope last autumn (from which, Dr Carey we heard concluding, many other churches would have drawn great encouragement - though it was by no means obvious why he thought so). Again we saw in the clips her almost maternal concern for the infirm but saintly pontiff. There was little doubt which church leader the Queen rated the more important. It was a sign that Buckingham Palace is well aware of the realities of Christian life, and that the answer to Stalin's sarcastic question - "How many divisions has the Pope?" - though it may not be legion, is certainly "More than Dr Carey."
Nor was it completely irrelevant that the previous day, Dr Carey himself had referred to the issue of establishment more neutrally than has been his custom, saying there was a "real argument" to be had about it. One wondered if he has recently had such an argument with the Queen. For there is a problem here, for both of them. The more the monarchy is associated in the public mind with the role of the Supreme Governor of the Church of England and all that the Act of Settlement implies, the more the issue of disestablishment becomes entwined with the issue of republicanism.
The numerical decline of the Church of England obviously calls in question the continuation of its established status. And because of the Act, furthermore, the monarchy cannot expect all that much support from an otherwise potentially sympathetic Roman Catholic population. So if the established Altar falls, might it not pull the Throne down with it? If the Queen has made the calculation that disestablishment is bound to come sooner or later, then the right strategy is surely to start separating the Crown gently from the establishment now, finding the right critical distance that does not set it too loose nor tie it too closely.
If that is her analysis, then this was a brilliant moment to play her hand as an individual lay Christian believer - not as God's anointed, not as the head of the church, not even as a prime-time celebrity endorsement of Dr Carey's product, but as one who, like everyone else, struggles to find meaning and value in her life from wherever she can, while showing due respect for those who find it elsewhere. It seemed to be the beginning of the reshaping of the concept of a Christian monarch to suit a more plural society, one without an established Church of England as such but with an Anglican faith, alongside others, alive within it.
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By Clifford Longley
The Daily Telegraph December 27 2000
THE BEST DEFINITION of a liberal in the unflattering sense was given in a cartoon in, I believe, the New Yorker magazine some years ago - pre-Guiliani, presumably. An elegant lady was looking down at a chap on the ground, bruised and bleeding after being mugged. She exclaimed: "Whichever poor soul did this to you must need an awful lot of help!"
It sums up exactly the "soft on crime, soft on the causes of crime" approach of the stereotypical liberal. But of course the joke is a compound one. The New Yorker is itself a liberal journal, and the premise of the cartoon must have been that its readers would enjoy poking fun at a caricature of themselves.
It is not possible to be soft on the causes of crime, or even tough on the causes of crime, without some idea what those causes are. This is where the plot gets very muddy, not just for supposed liberals but for everyone. But of all the possible causes of a decline in orderliness in society, the presence or absence of police officers on the beat must come fairly low down the list. To argue for more police as the solution to crime, as some have seem inclined to do, is a counsel of despair. Ditto tougher prison sentences.
Perhaps despair is where we are at. Having recently become one of 30,000 lay magistrates in England and Wales it is an emotion I am increasingly familiar with. But in a naturally orderly society, you don't need police, nor courts. In a disorderly society, on the other hand, the capacity of the police and courts to stop street crime is fairly marginal. Ask any policeman, and it is safe bet he will mention the importance of parents long before he suggests there ought to be more people like himself. "We are", as one of them said to me not long ago, "in damage limitation at best."
Which takes me back to about 1982, when I was invited to take part in a seminar organised by the British Council of Churches on the general theme of "After 1984" - the reference to George Orwell's symbolic date was deliberate. The usual suspects were there, bishops and archdeacons, professors of theology, chairmen of important church committees, plus a sprinkling of outsiders like myself of whom the most unusual was a senior police officer from Scotland Yard. Over a drink, I tentatively inquired whether he had come to the wrong place.
He had come because he had formed the view that the decline in religious belief in British society was a threat to the social order. The better the police understood it, the better they would know how to cope with it. And where better to understand it than in the company of distinguished people whose very livelihood, not to mention total world-view, was threatened by that decline?
I didn't think he found us very useful. Neither in 1982 nor in 2000 did the British religious establishment have any idea what was causing the decline in religious belief and practice in Britain (or indeed, in the whole Western world) or what to do about it. What characterised them 20 years ago, however, was a kind of soporific liberal optimism. They had great faith on modern society. It was getting far more things right than wrong. Their only sadness was they felt increasingly not part of it, but watching from the side.
What was completing lacking was any sense of foreboding that the marginalisation of the beliefs and traditions they stood for was likely in the long run to do great damage to the modern society they admired. The policeman saw correctly that religion is a form of social control which has the great advantage that it is largely self-applied and almost entirely internalised. The churchmen, I think, regarded social control as a Bad Thing. How different were the Victorians, who saw religious belief as an essential factor in maintaining the stability of society. To that extent, 21st century Britain looks like an experiment designed to prove the Victorians right.
This factor is most potent in the bringing up of children, where a modern policemen is likely to point his finger first. We have moved from a society which had a set of over-arching truths and values, true for everybody, to one where truth and value have become strictly personal, even private. There is "your truth" and there is "my truth." The point could be illustrated by quotes from politicians of any party - in some respects John Major's Government was more politically correct than Tony Blair's - but take this recent one from Tessa Jowell, minister for employment and women, talking about whether the Government should endorse marriage as the preferred family pattern. "I don't think parents want to be told what to do; they want to be given the opportunity to choose what is right for them and their family," she said. (I seem to remember a Church of England report a few years ago said more or less the same).
So now make up our own rules. It is such thinking that has undermined the confidence of modern parents, who have begun to doubt whether they have the right to pass on their values to their children. If parents wants the opportunity to choose what seems best for themselves, what do they say to their children when they claim the same thing? Why not do under-age sex? Why not take drugs? Why not grab someone else's mobile phone? Why not carry a knife? "Because a policeman will get you" is not very convincing.
In the old dispensation, the moral and legal authority of a parent (and in loco parentis, a teacher too) rested invisibly on the authority of the community and of the State, and through that, ultimately, to God. It was not often spelt out, but it was universally sensed as the cultural background radiation.
No longer. Certainly there are clever people able to work out a system of moral values for themselves based purely on rational and humanistic philosophical principles. But tired and harassed single mothers waiting for a bus to go home to her children are not among them. She is living an impossible life, and has been stripped of what she needs to do it properly. I sometimes wonder whether the comfy liberal consensus of the top clergy I met in 1982 - indeed which I partly shared - wasn't the prime author of the law and order misfortunes which now beset us.
And it took a copper's eye to spot it. The rest of us were looking in the wrong direction, enjoying a relaxing game of "coming to terms with secularisation" which has been the constant theme of religious discourse in Britain this last half century.
In his speech last week he even identified one of them - Polly Toynbee, columnist on The Guardian - who promptly claimed that to be condemned in such circumstances was a badge of honour. But while Ms Toynbee is usually supportive of the Government, what most liberals say about Labour (exactly contrary to Mr Hague) is that it is "the most illiberal Labour government ever". They of course are the people Mr Straw was complaining about - "Soft on crime, soft on the causes of crime", to reverse a famous Labour battle-cry.
There is no text book definition of a liberal in the confusing sense being used here, which is the sense in which the word has long been used (almost always as a term of abuse) in America. In traditional politics, a British liberal is a supporter of the Liberal Party, now absorbed into the Liberal Democrats. They became known as liberals largely because their party supported free trade in the 19th century. But they were also the party of the Nonconformist conscience, which brought in the beginnings of the welfare state. In traditional economics, however, a liberal is a free marketeer, not someone likely to have a social conscience at all. For him it is almost a religious principle that the more each individual is free to pursue his own interests, the better it will be for society.
Thus we find liberals on the right, holed up in places like the Institute of Economic Affairs; liberals in the centre, belonging to the Lib Dems; and liberals (now the most common usage) to the left of, and never tired of bemoaning the illiberalism of, the present Labour government. The Guardian is the natural habitat of that kind of liberal, but apart from Ms Toynbee when she is being unusually ironic, they do not usually admit to the name. A liberal does not believe he is a liberal: he believes he is right (and that is why liberals are often among the least tolerant of people).
What these various versions have in common is resistance to social control, whether of the means of commerce or production, in the case of an economic liberal, or of personal behaviour, as in the case of a modern "social liberal". Social control usually exists because of the fear that left to their own devices, people will behave badly and harm themselves and each other. Economic liberals will push for profit at the expense of people; the other sort of liberal will want to relax the laws which restrict sexual behaviour, say, or drug use.
In so far as they have a common philosophical position, it is largely Pelagian - that there is no Original Sin, no dominant human tendency to be bad rather than good, and therefore no need to protect people from what non-liberals see as the darker side of human nature. More freedom is the cure for every human ill. Because a liberal opposes constraints applied in the name of society, liberalism and individualism go together (and this is also something that unites the economic liberal on the right with the social liberal on the left). Liberals are not strong on solidarity. Needless to say, the Catholic Church makes most liberals very uneasy.
For all that, they are necessary; the fact that they tend to exaggerate the benefits of freedom should not drive us in the opposite direction. Freedom is God's most precious gift to humankind. As the Pope said in October in his apostolic letter appointing St Thomas More as patron saint of politicians, "The defence of the Church's freedom from unwarranted interference by the state is at the same time a defence, in the name of the primacy of conscience, of the individual's freedom vis-à-vis political power. Here we find the basic principle of every civil order consonant with human nature." Even the Pope, it seems, is half way to being a liberal.
Any restriction on one person's freedom has to be justified as necessary for the defence of another person's freedom. My freedom to walk down the street without being stopped by a policeman and searched for hidden weapons has to be curtailed to protect your freedom to walk down the street without being robbed or stabbed by me. But it has to be proved there is a connection, otherwise the interference with my freedom is essentially tyrannical. Giving the police the power to stop and search just so they can throw their weight around - or worse, pick on Black people to make them feel unwelcome - is intolerable.
In order to prevent that happening, every restriction on personal freedom ought to be subject to constant questioning. Mounting that challenge is what liberals do best. And some of the time they will be right. Restrictions which were necessary some time in the past may have outlived their usefulness - but they will not be removed unless someone makes it their business to challenge them. No doubt the royal monopoly of fish weirs was at some point in time justified - but once it no longer served the common good, Magna Carta had to remove it. Even the barons of Olde England were liberals, once.
Moral panic is the disapproving name given by sociologists for the process of scapegoating that often occurs after a particularly shocking event such as a child murder. It usually involves finding the actual culprits or some other easily targeted group, loading them with the sins of the rest of us and driving them out into the wilderness. That is what happened to the killers of James Bulger nearly eight years ago; it happened again with the killing of Sarah Payne in Sussex earlier this year, though in the absence of an identified murderer blame was heaped on anybody with a conviction for any offence against a child.
After the murder of Damilola Taylor in Peckham, however, this is not happening. Arresting three youths for it will not make much difference. This killing has resonated with a deep level of anxiety right across British society about the way parents are bringing up, or rather failing to bring up, their children. There is a general sense that a few years back, a major wrong turning was taken but no-one is quite sure what it was or what to do about it. Control was lost. Nobody knows how to bring it back.
In the comments of politicians, police officers, teachers, councillors, youth leaders and everyone else with any direct experience of these issues, one keeps hearing the expression "in the last 18 months." I have lost count of the number of times this phrase has cropped up. So what happened 18 months ago or thereabouts? Is there a clue in the timing?
In the last 18 months, children born at or after the passing of the Children Act in 1989 have begun approaching adolescence and reaching secondary school. The Act no doubt did many good and necessary things for the protection of children against adult abuse, but in the course of doing them it put into effect a fundamental shift in the relationship between parents and their children. It turned the natural parent-child relationship into an artificial tug-of-war between two sets of rights. As the child grew older its rights increased and the rights of parents correspondingly diminished.
At the same time it turned parenting, so to speak, into something done by permission of the authorities, as if mothers and fathers henceforth would have to have licences to do what they do. And a licence can be taken away. Every parent now knows that at any moment, they can be overridden by a social worker.
This cultural shift, replacing "natural" parenting with "parenting by permission of the state", was a profound change of concept, and it altered the way parents felt towards their children. The resulting loss of parental confidence made the disciplining of children extremely difficult, a difficulty which builds towards a crisis at about the age they reach puberty.
There is talk now of the need to appoint a statutory Commissioner for Children's Rights to give this formal shape. This has continued the trajectory set by the Children Act 11 years ago. Again that may be good and necessary as a remedy for child abuse, which heaven knows is far too prevalent, but it has had the side effect of further undermining the authority of parents over their children. And this applies to all parents, not just the minority who abuse.
A second factor greatly compounds this unintentionally perverse effect of the contemporary stress on children's rights. The moral foundation of society is now built on the shifting sands of moral relativism. You have your truth and I have mine: you do what feels right for you and I will do what feels right for me. This uncertainty is particular true of patterns of family life, where we are afraid to declare any type of family as normal in case it stigmatises the rest as abnormal. Only last weekend Tessa Jowell, the minister for employment and women, was reported as saying that the Government would be wrong to hold up marriage as the preferred model for family life. "I don't think parents want to be told what to do; they want to be given the opportunity to choose what is right for them and their family," she said.
But if parents don't want to be told what to do, why is it right for them to tell their children what to do? This letting go of anchors does not apply just to marriage versus cohabitation, to which Ms Jowell was trying to limit it. The same principle applies to drug-taking, under-age sex (including getting pregnant), doing homework, going to school, treating teachers with respect, and having a care for other people's property. Street robbery by children between the ages of 10 and 13 has become one of the greatest headaches for the police, with mobile phones the favourite target. But there has also been a sharp rise in vandalism and general nuisance, bullying, knife carrying, misbehaviour on public transport, contempt for older people and petty theft of various kinds, by the same age group.
It is hardly surprising that the British are becoming frightened of their own children. That dreadful parable The Lord of the Flies has at last come to roost among us. It describes a group of children running amok without adults, and hence without authority. The difference is that we do have adults. But without authority.
So the Dome it was, though two of them had been there already with school parties. Anyone who knows primary-school children knows that they are creatures of fashion. Wild horses would not persuade them to chose to do something not acceptable to the playground peer-group. Regardless of the dedication of the mass media to the cause of ridiculing the Millennium Dome, word has evidently not reached the under-elevens.
A day at the Dome is indeed a day to remember. The structure is gigantic, far larger than I had imagined it, and more beautiful too. The heart of every visit is The Show, a spectacular aerial ballet cum trapeze-artist cum bunjie-jumping cum firework display performed several times a day in what must surely by the world's tallest Big Top. Around the edge, if that is not too minimal a word for a swathe some 100 yards wide, are the various buzzing and humming zones and amenities that constitute the displays. Each is housed in a structure, some akin to real buildings, some far more fantastical, that are arrestingly modern and state of the art in design, construction and content.
In the eyes of a child, unprejudiced by adult political point-scoring, it is an amazing wonderland. But I took my prejudices with me - I do read newspapers - and realised how easy it would be to scoff rather than praise. A few of the exhibits and displays are memorable, but the average is more than a little disappointing. Even The Show, for all its three dimensions, is a trifle flat. They dance modernly, if that is the word, to an accompaniment of relentless and graceless pre-recorded pop (and if The Tablet misprints that as pap I do not mind). For all the high-wire skill of the aerial choreography, I honestly cannot imagine anybody being moved by it.
The aesthetic effect is rather neutralised by one of the dancers being in a wheelchair. Very worthy, inclusive and politically correct, but visually fatal. Oh for a bit of Swan Lake! I watched the faces of the children around me. They were curious and polite rather than absorbed or entranced. One had dozed off. At whom was all this effort aimed? Whose taste is it?
What the children did not know and I do is that the Dome cost some £600 millions of public funds, in the form of lottery money. This enormous sum could only be justified on the grounds that the project would become a unique statement, as importantly representative of national identity as, say, St Paul's in the 17th century or the Houses of Parliament in the 19th.
The argument about the Dome has lately become a miserable accountancy dispute about whether the target of 12 million visitors was or was not ever feasible. The much more important argument, albeit about things harder to measure, is about why it has failed by such a spectacular margin to embody the national spirit, point to the future, inspire a new sense of Britishness, capture the best of native design and creativity, display the very essence of Cool Britannia, make foreigners sick with envy, and so on.
All these claims and more were made for it before it opened, but gradually they have been dropped as people realised that they were, in all truth, far-fetched. Only the dome building itself is in that league, which gives a certain justice to this week's announcement that it is likely to be the only part of the project to survive beyond the end of the year when it is sold to house a business park.
The uninspiring mediocrity of most of the Dome's contents throws a new light on the row, before the Dome opened, as to what presence religion should be allowed to have within it. In so far as the Dome was a comprehensive semi-official statement about national identity and destiny, the right of religion to a worthy presence was perhaps worth fighting for. The Dome having failed utterly to capture the national imagination in that way, it is clear the issue wasn't worth all the fuss. Amidst all this Post-modernism falling short of its pre-Millennial boasts and ambitions, the understated presence of a religious zone seemed an awkward hint of something otherwise absent. I would have preferred it not to be there at all.
Somewhere in the unfolding of the Dome concept, the dangerous assumption was made that the enormous building would somehow fill itself, once London's Beautiful People, the capital's art and design intelligentsia, were mobilised to the task. And that what would emerge from their collective genius would be inspiring, coherent - and enduringly meaningful. But the secular artistic mind has somehow lost all sense of the transcendent.
The politicians may be excused for taking this self-regarding metropolitan elite at its own evaluation. But what they have in fact achieved is less than the sum of its parts. I can only conclude that if the Dome is representative of our national culture, there is something desperately hollow at the heart of it. Faith Zone or not, good day out or not, what they have put together on the Greenwich peninsular is an exciting cacophony of bells and whistles signifying nothing very much. For which we paid about £500 million more than it was worth.
Hence the much reported remark of the Archbishop of Canterbury the other day, to the effect that Britain had become a nation of atheists, does not ring remotely true. The mood of Britain on religious matters is far removed from the one I have just outlined. What characterises the majority British approach to traditional religion is apathy, ignorance, and a profound lack of curiosity. Bored by RE in school by the age of 10, most adults are just as bored by it 20 or 30 years later. Atheists are like those old-time musicians who hated rock and roll and wanted it banned. The British, in contrast, are tone-deaf. They care neither for one side of the argument nor for the other. In so far as they are interested at all, it is in luck, fate, superstition, "your stars" in the newspapers, and the irrational sentimentality that surrounded the cult of Diana.
Nevertheless what Dr Carey actually said was more subtle than the message reported. The particular component of popular belief that he likened to atheism referred to the after-life. Instead of believing that death is both a continuation and a new beginning, people now regard it as the end. Because it is final, people look to the medical profession to prolong it at almost any cost. "Many people," he told his Channel Isles audience, "are acting as if doctors can cure all ills and even postpone death forever. But of course doctors know they can do no such thing. Only a society that has lost real hope could imagine that they could."
But if I did not recognise his ill-reported account of Britain as a nation of atheists, I did not recognise this, his actual portrait of Britain, either. He has the cause and effect exactly the wrong way round. Thanks to antibiotics and similar medical advances, doctors can now treat most of the diseases that used to cut life short. What medical pioneers had in mind, there can be little doubt, was stopping small children losing their mothers and mothers their small children, and all the similar calamities of pre-war family life. But the unintended result is that doctors now have an armoury of weapons effective also against the diseases of old age. Penicillin was not discovered in order to cure 85-year-olds of pneumonia. But once it existed, that is what it had to be used for.
The discovery created the ethical imperative, not the other way round. I suspect that very few 85-year-olds want their lives prolonged for ever just because, as "tacit atheists", they do not believe in an afterlife. Many would doubtless prefer doctors to get out of the way, so nature could take its course. They are in a sense beneficiaries, in a sense victims, of the fact that while we have cured most of the medical catastrophes that lead to sudden death, we haven't cured old age itself. The new condition that awaits most of us is gradually increasing infirmity, minus actual disease. It is surely not something we ever insisted on.
The Archbishop of Canterbury has a tendency to invent an almost-Britain, a place that does not quite exist, in order to justify teachings that while true in their own terms, never find any recognisable target in the real world. That is surely why he was assumed to have said that "Britain had become a nation of atheists" - because that corresponds to something people can relate to. In papers like the Guardian, and even to a lesser extent the Telegraph, reports of his speech reduced the atheist lobby to triumphalist euphoria, only muted once they realised the internal flaws (as above) in what he was really saying.
What also began to emerge was one or two clues as to what it is about religion that so enrages atheists. They dislike above all the smug proposition that to be moral, you have to believe in God. They see religion as persuading people to be good by promising them rewards in the afterlife, threatening them with eternal punishment if they misbehave. They believe religion flourishes by removing the existential angst at the heart of human experience: that we all have to die; and once we die, we are no more.
These are all interesting questions I would like to hear the Archbishop of Canterbury lecture on. I would like to hear him tell atheists, for instance, that it is often at precisely the moments we need religious assurance the most, that it becomes most elusive - to talk about the trials of Job, or about how Jesus himself faltered in Gethsemane. Faith may conquer fear, but often only after fear seems to have won.
I would like to hear him say, a la Karl Rahner, that there is "tacit theism" present in even the most outspoken atheists, whenever they take an action for the benefit of those who will be alive after they themselves are dead. I would like to hear atheists praised for their remarkable nobility of spirit whenever they do unselfish acts without believing in any reward to come, or any God who must be obeyed. Above all I would like to hear atheists thanked for taking religion so seriously. If only there were more like you, I can almost hear Dr Carey saying. Calm down, come in, and let us talk. Almost... but not quite.
What characterised the reporting was an attitude of "How far can we twist this to make it look absurd?" rather than "What are they trying to say that we can make sense of?" (with a touch also of "How can we use this to damage the Government?") With the hindsight of a returned holidaymaker, and having now studied the report itself, I have to say that the commission members were indeed ambushed unfairly, but failed to take even elementary precautions to prevent it.
Thus the report's remark that "Britishness has racial connotations" was widely misrepresented as saying "Britishness has racist connotations". In a subsequent article about the misreporting, Robin Richardson, the report's editor, declared: "The difference between the words 'racist' (used by the media) and 'racial' (used by the report) is surely entirely obvious." But there is at least an argument they actually meant "racist" - for instance as in "institutional racism." And this is a report which elsewhere draws attention to the difficulties of language in this area, and how easy it is to be misunderstood.
Their argument was that "Britishness" usually brings to mind images of white people, which is one of the ways that non-white people living in Britain are made to feel excluded. They say it was purely descriptive, but surely some sort of racial prejudice was being alleged, on the part of those who insist on imagining the British as white? Racial or racist: it is a fine point.
Parts of the introduction by the chairman, Professor Bhikhu Parekh, also lent themselves to similar misunderstandings. Discussing whether equality is enough, he declares: "Since citizens have differing needs, equal treatment requires full account to be taken of their differences. When equality ignores relevant differences and insists on uniformity of treatment, it leads to injustice and inequality". With goodwill, one can gloss what this muddle means; but it can easily be misrepresented as arguing for racial favouritism or worse.
What is so pleasing about this report is its optimism. It is not a catalogue of racial grievances. It declares Britain to be more racially harmonious than most Western societies, it assumes things will get better not worse, and it addresses constructively real obstacles to further progress. It moves right away from the prevailing American model, which one might call the post-Jim Crow tradition. The uncritical importation into Britain of an American theory of race relations has done more harm than good. That shift is undoubtedly because of the growing influence in Britain of writers and academics from the Indian Sub-Continent (like Professor Parekh), who do not recognise themselves by the term Black and who are in Britain out of choice (or increasingly, their ancestors' choice). A post-colonial immigration theory of race relations needs to be quite different from a post-slavery theory of race relations.
The report also breaks new ground when it recommends great caution in the use of expressions like "ethnic" and "minority". It prefers a model of British society consisting of a "community of communities" - multi-culturalism - but held in tension with the rights of individuals ("community of citizens"). This isn't the last word, but it is helpful. And it takes the stress off skin-colour, which has been very unhelpful.
One limitation of the "community of communities" model is the sheer disparity of size of the groups we are talking about. The white majority, if we have to use such language, makes up about 93 per cent of the whole. How can the white majority culture not be dominant, in such a setting? And can that white majority be expected not believe that its culture is in some way superior to the others? And why is that so wrong?
The second limitation concerns the ill-definition of the concept of community itself. I belong to a dozen or more communities - groups from which I draw some part of my identity based on family, work, faith, neighbourhood or voluntary associations of various kinds - and reserve the right to move in and out of them. The Runnymede report has in mind communities defined partly by faith and partly by national origin. That is an improvement on defining them by exclusion or persecution, which is how the definition of racial minorities has tended to work in America. But for immigrant groups it is only likely to be valid for the first and perhaps second generation. Increasing numbers of born and bred British-Asians or Black Britons are choosing not to belong to any community except the mainstream one.
As for Toni Morrison and Chester Himes, their stripping bare of the true horrors of racism in America left me shocked and reeling. I had not realised how close racial politics was to sexual politics, the lynch-mob combination, in that savage arena. And once, as I left the beach beside the blue Mediterranean, I saw a couple strolling blissfully hand in hand, one white, one black. I guessed they must be British, and I was mighty proud.
This personalisation of religion is part of the zeitgeist, and it is pointless complaining about it. Indeed, part of the international success of the present Pope is because of his personality, just as it was part of the national success of the late Cardinal Hume. One could even argue that this was how a religion based on the Incarnation ought to be. But there is a danger in the zeitgeist too. One regularly finds people who make their political decisions on whether they "like" Tony Blair more than William Hague (or dislike them more, as at present), or who favour or reject the idea of monarchy depending on whether they happen at the moment to feel warm towards the Queen or Prince of Wales. It makes for a very fickle and superficial climate.
How much of this fits the recent scenario at St Francis of Assisi in Notting Hill, West London, I am not qualified to say. What is clear is that the proposed replacement for Father Oliver McTernan, known affectionately to millions for his gentle Irish tones in countless Thoughts for the Day on Radio 4, did not go down well at his first parish meeting. Representations were promptly made by regular worshippers to Archbishop Cormac Murphy-O'Connor to think again. The appointment was not persisted with, and last weekend a new name came forward which is much more likely to make the congregation happy.
Father McTernan, who has gone to America to study, is said to have increased the congregation by a factor of three or four, and practised a progressive and inclusive ministry with strong emphasis on lay collaboration, social justice and racial harmony. From the evidence available I would go so far as to say his people genuinely loved him. One is bound to ask how much of their resistance to his first replacement was a kind of displaced grief at his loss, and the wish to assuage it by having as his successor someone as like him as possible.
One can't blame them for that. The real issue needing to be scrutinised here is the role of the archbishop. His willingness to respond to the parish's complaints suggests that he was already uneasy with the diocesan procedure, whatever it is, for moving parish priests into new parishes. There seemed to be a lack of consultation, possibly because the system was based on the old assumption that it was the clerical collar that mattered, not the man who wore it.
Some of us have reminded Archbishop Murphy-O'Connor - I hope with sufficient tact - that as chairman of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission he put his signature to such statements as "because of their baptism and their participation in the sensus fidelium the laity [ought to] play an integral part in decision-making in the Church" (The Gift of Authority, ARCIC II). (We have to add the bit in square brackets to give it the sense ARCIC no doubt intended). And his response to the St Francis protest does seem to be in the spirit of those promises. The next step has to be to review the diocesan appointments procedure in the light of them. Some degree of prior consultation has to be built in.
Otherwise there is a risk of injustice. The archbishop's reaction raises the question whether what happened was fair to the first priest put forward. It does not appear the man was faced with whatever complaints against him there were, nor allowed to answer them. Many another Westminster priest must have very uneasy, hearing what had happened. Were all parishes in future to be allowed a crude veto over new appointments? Would a conservative parish be entitled to protest at someone they thought too liberal? And does this precedent drag the Catholic Church towards the Anglican situation, where to make sure the clergy fit the congregation the patronage of the living of St Mark's is owned by the (Low Church) Church Society, and the patronage of St Mary's nearby by the (Anglo-Catholic) Church Union? Why not go the whole hog, as some Free Churches do, and let a parish advertise for a new priest, draw up a shortlist, conduct interviews, and vote? It might even be fairer, if a little less Catholic.
But consider a parish in New York which had a wonderful white-haired old Irishman as its pastor, the embrace of whose brotherly love from the pulpit extended to the female garment-workers from thereabouts in their bitter disputes with the sweat-shop bosses. The area gradually became gentrified, the down-trodden moved on, and his replacement was a suave opera-lover who would not have dreamt of offending the sensibilities of his increasingly wealthy parishioners.
"Horses for courses", the vicar general doubtless said happily to himself, "...another satisfied parish". Only up to a point, Monsignor O'Copper, only up to a point. There is a real Catholic can of worms here.
The recent Vatican document Dominus Jesus, which has caused far more offence to non-Catholics and non-Christians than can ever have been intended, does not go this far. Because it was designed to warn Catholic theologians against relativism, against arguing that all religions are equally valid as vehicles of personal salvation, it stressed the distinctiveness of Catholic Christianity from all other systems, not the overlaps and similarities. That is a great pity. Not least because of the painful history of the matter, other faiths than the Catholic one needed to be told first how highly they are esteemed, not why they are defective. They know they are not the same as the Catholic faith - they hold the Catholic faith to be defective too. But saying so is not terribly useful.
I was once introduced to the leader of world Jainism, and indeed spent some time alone with him. He possessed mystical gifts, and after going into a short trance to meditate upon the state of my soul, told me that the most serious defects in my spiritual life could best be repaired by increasing my devotion to the Virgin Mary. Who could disagree?
But what struck with me most was the conversation we had about Jesus. He was a student, or more exactly a scholar, of interfaith similarities and differences. He knew many holy men and women of many faiths. He had discovered that whenever such a person first looked into the life and teaching of Jesus (of Nazareth, as he called him), there was very soon an extraordinary moment of recognition. They saw vividly that he was, so to speak, in the same business that they were in but uniquely good at it. This shared appreciation of Jesus and his teaching - quite apart from the doctrines with which the Church had surrounded him - set him apart in all the religions. There was no other figure from any other faith that all could look up to in this way. He was, so to speak, the one and universal holy man.
For Catholics to exploit for partisan purposes this remarkable perception of Jesus from the vantage point of other faiths would be both counter-productive and offensive. It ought to suggest another line of inquiry altogether. How does it come about that religions other than Christianity can intuitively recognise the Founder of Christianity in this way, and what does it tell us about them? They were ready for Jesus before they met him, as it were. That can only mean the Spirit of God is already working within them, teaching them what true holiness is and how to recognise it - indeed, how to practise it.
That begins to explain the instinctive sympathy and sense of communion that spiritual teachers and leaders of different faiths feel for each other, or so I have heard, especially when in each other's company. It is why Catholic monks and Buddhist monks, say, are so much at home with each other. This gives an altogether fresh and contemporary meaning to the phrase Communion of the Saints.
The Vatican II document on other faiths, Nostra Aetate, declared: "The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions." That was a great advance in 1965, but now it sounds question-begging and somewhat grudging. It is time we asked ourselves what Vatican II did not: what is God's real purpose in creating a whole plurality of religious universes with which to lead men and women towards Himself? One possible answer is that they exist to illuminate, correct and purify each other. That gives them their necessary role in the overall scheme of salvation.
If all religions are under the inspiration of the same God, we will find His unique fingerprints on each of them - but not necessarily on every part of them. It should be possible to work out which aspects of each faith most closely resemble or overlap aspects of other faiths, for it is there we will find evidence, so to speak, of the divine modus operandi. Chief among these will be their shared moral values, and their teachings on holiness, on the way of faith towards enlightenment, rebirth, sanctity, extinction of self, obedience unto death, crucifixion and resurrection, or whatever we call it. This is the common heart of all religion. So it is here we can be most confident that we have found the Divine fingerprints. And just as we Christians would expect (though we should mention it as quietly as possible), it is exactly from hereabouts that other faiths look out upon Jesus and recognise Him instinctively as one of their own.
If God wills salvation through other faiths, then other faiths must contain whatever is necessary for salvation. Begin to discover what they have in common, and we may begin to discover what that is. By such means each religion - Catholicism included - can be helped to distinguish what is essential within itself from what is secondary.
This approach need not compromise the unique and exclusive claim the Catholic faith makes concerning Jesus Christ, the safeguarding of which so exercises the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. But it does suggest that dogmatic expressions which have been moulded by Western thought-forms may need to be re-expressed in the light of Pope John XXIII's famous distinction: "The substance of the ancient doctrine of the deposit of faith is one thing, and the way in which it is presented is another."
Soon after, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Police Federation, which represents junior ranks in the capital's police, complained that officers were inhibited from properly policing Europe's biggest black carnival for fear of being called racist. This was, he claimed, yet another hangover from the Stephen Lawrence case.
One of the murders occurred in the course of what is known as "streaming", when a gang surges through a crowded place snatching valuables as they go. Streaming is likely to be discouraged by a heavy police presence. But the police cannot be everywhere. In denying the Police Federation's claim, a senior Scotland Yard officer produced arrest figures to show that they had been more active at the carnival this year, not less. It is the sort of difference of opinion that will never be resolved, for there is just enough evidence to confirm prejudices on either side. And this is a subject replete with accusations of prejudice: on the one hand, of racial prejudice by the police; on the other, that all police are racially prejudiced.
Stephen Lawrence, a young black student who was stabbed to death by a white gang at a bus stop in South East London, was not killed because of police prejudice. But had the police reacted more competently and less prejudicially, there might have been a successful prosecution of the perpetrators. The fact that there was not, according to the findings of the subsequent judicial inquiry, was due to "institutional racism" in the police service.
In a nutshell, the Police Federation charge is that to avoid being accused of institutional racism again, Scotland Yard has put out word that officers should go easy on black street crime. In particular they should not "stop and search" on suspicion that someone is carrying drugs, stolen property or a weapon. The reason this is a race matter is because the police are alleged to stop and search black people disproportionately. The suggestion is that the wider use of these powers might have discouraged young black men going armed with knives, which might even save lives (white as well as black).
What does seem plain, however, is that the Metropolitan Police is institutionally divided about racism. Senior officers now agree that their service is - or at least until very recently was - institutionally racist. They accept that crimes where the victim was from an ethnic minority group were not always taken as seriously as when the victim was white. In the Stephen Lawrence case, the police misread the situation because they applied racial stereotypes to it and assumed the victim had somehow brought his fate on himself. Other mistakes based on racial stereotyping were made further along. Procedures have since been drastically overhauled to prevent this happening again.
Meanwhile some junior officers resent what they regard as a slur on their honour implied by the expression institutional racism, and this grievance appears to lie behind the Police Federation's comments on the Notting Hill carnival. It is not that they want to be allowed to be racist, but that they deny they ever were. In an attempt to move the debate onto more productive territory, the Home Office minister responsible for the police, Mike O'Brien, has argued that the term institutional racism is no longer appropriate to a police service that is attempting to change its ways, as the London police clearly are.
In the same pamphlet - Institutional Racism and the Police: Fact or Fiction? (Institute for the Study of Civil Society, £4) - the liberal historian and journalist Michael Ignatieff makes the even better suggestion that what the police ought to concentrate on is the issue of competence, not racism. Misreading the situation after the Lawrence murder may have been due to racial stereotyping, but all stereotyping is incompetent policing, racial or any other.
This rings a bell. I recently came across a case in which the police had tried to overpower a young (white) man apparently acting aggressively. They thought he looked tough and menacing. The police did not stop to question him, just took him at face value. It later transpired that they had arrived just after he had been set upon and beaten by a gang of four other youths (also white) who had fled the scene. That was why he was behaving strangely. He was later acquitted of assaulting the police.
The stereotyping here was not racial: but had he been found dead instead of alive and kicking, the police would have jumped to the same wrong conclusions as they did in the Lawrence case. On the other hand, purging the police of institutional racism would not have helped them deal with him better. There was prejudice against him because of his appearance, but it was not racial prejudice.
Ignatieff is right. "The purpose of the police is to provide equal protection under the law," he writes. "Training the police is a matter of training them to treat people as individuals and not as genders, races or classes."
Not all readers are so sympathetic. One recently informed me that it was apparent "that your knowledge
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LAYLINES
The Tablet December 23 2000
by Clifford Longley Who'd be a liberal?
FIRST LABOUR'S HOME SECRETARY Jack Straw famously attacks "Hampstead liberals" for moaning about his law and order policies. Then along comes Tory leader William Hague, who makes out that its Labour's "liberal elite" that has destroyed police morale in the wake of the Macpherson inquiry.
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LAYLINES
The Tablet December 9 2000
by Clifford Longley Lords of the Flies
Another killing, another moral panic... Yet this time the word panic is more than usually appropriate. The cruel murder of a ten-year-old Nigerian boy on a run-down housing estate in south London became the focus of the nation's worst fears this week. The culprits are alleged to be three black youths of similar age, but for once there has been a broad sense of collective blame.
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LAYLINES
The Tablet November 25 2000
by Clifford Longley Someone loves the Dome
IT WAS ENOUGH to warm the cockles of Tony Blair's heart. I had offered to take her three children off my daughter's hands when their school was inconveniently shut for a teacher-training day. I asked them what they wanted to do and ran down the familiar list of London possibilities: the Science Museum, the Tower, the Eye, Tate Modern, Madame Tussaud's. Only moderate interest. Well, how about the Dome? Obviously granddaughters do not read newspapers. They jumped up in the manner of footballers who have just scored, punched the air and danced round the room chanting "The Dome! The Dome! The Dome!"
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LAYLINES
The Tablet November 11 2000
by Clifford Longley Walking with atheists
ATHEISTS ARE NOT CONTENT just to disbelieve. The fact that others do believe strikes them as outrageous. God makes them angry. They take the greatest delight in rendering the content of religious belief in the absurdest terms. Rational they are not, despite the rationalist flag they fly. True atheism comes with visceral attitude.
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LAYLINES
The Tablet October 28 2000
by Clifford Longley A true British race row
WHILE I WAS sunning myself on a beach reading Toni Morrison and Chester Himes, the grandmother of battles about race relations was taking place in the media back in Britain. The Runnymede Trust report on The Future of Multi-racial Britain was comprehensively trashed before publication in a leak in the right-wing Daily Telegraph, which dismissed it as "sub-Marxist gibberish". Other papers followed, with even the left-leaning Guardian adding its ha'penny to the critical furore. So when I got back from the sun I was able to experience the controversy back to front, as it were, first taking in articles from members of the Runnymede Trust - declaring indignantly that they did we say what their enemies alleged they said - and gradually moving to the day the story broke.
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LAYLINES
The Tablet October 7 2000
by Clifford Longley When the laity are revolting
A GENERATION AGO it wasn't done for Catholics to switch from St Agatha's to St Gertrude's just because the priest was more to their liking. It was the mass that mattered, not the "quality of the experience". A great many Catholics remain loyal to their local parish church for just such reasons, but more than ever, others shop around. The result, of course, is that a particularly charismatic priest attracts worshippers from further afield who like his style. When it becomes necessary to replace that priest, the bishop and his advisers are faced with a situation of extreme delicacy. Substantial numbers of the faithful can be alienated at a stroke, if the replacement is a clumsy choice.
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LAYLINES
The Tablet SEPT 23 2000
by Clifford Longley The universal holy man
DESPITE THE SOMETIMES large differences, the Catholic Church has lately become convinced that those who sincerely seek God within other faiths will never be disappointed. What they seek is not some product of their imagination, not the devil in disguise, but the God we seek too, the one true God.
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LAYLINES
The Tablet SEPT 9 2000
by Clifford Longley More incompetence than racism
STATISTICALLY, THE MOST LIKELY victims of violent crime committed by young black men are other young black men. It was not such a surprise, therefore, that in the two murders committed in separate incidents in the closing hours of the Notting Hill Carnival in West London this year, one male victim was Afro-Caribbean and the other, British Asian. Eye witnesses described the assailants as black.
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SACRED AND PROFANE
The Daily Telegraph SEPT 8 2000
by Clifford Longley Goodbye to all that, Dear Reader
THAT ADMIRABLE NOVELIST Piers Paul Reid once wrote of this column that it "manages to be at the same time lucid, intelligent, stimulating and provocative." He was writing in the Catholic Herald, and this was a rare public glimpse of one of the more private pleasures of being a columnist - responses from readers.