Taking us for Fools - April 2022

Fines, crimes, lies and scandals almost every day from a Tory Government rapidly spinning out of control. Can we find the moral power and solidarity to overcome?

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I love this country. Principally its landscapes and peoples. However. There is something wrong with this country.

You feel it when you go to work and pass homeless people on the streets.

You feel it when you arrive at work and check your latest payslip - you haven’t had a real salary increase for years and yet there are new taxes and increases to your Student Loan.

You feel it on lunch break, when you go to the local supermarket and you see there is a basket where you can donate food. You remember that there are food banks in this country, one of the richest in the world.

You feel it when you see a Police officer and you wonder, would they kidnap, rape and murder my partner or sister? Would other officers photograph their corpse and share them around WhatsApp groups as they are promoted for their actions in the War on Drugs?

You feel it on your way home when you give some small change to someone begging. On the coins is the imprint of a woman's head. It is the Queen’s. She rules you. She is a frail old woman, but millions swear fealty to her and thousands would actually die for her. She sits atop a vast pile of wealth. It is the product of the historical dispossession of everyone else.

You feel it back in your home, which is now a cold place and wrapped in unsafe cladding. Your landlord does not know who will be covering the costs to replace it with something legal. He’s increasing the rent this year.

You feel it when you watch the evening news. The leader of the country has lied. They have been caught in the lie. They have lied about lying and they are lying again now, to you and everyone else. You know he’s lying. He knows you know he’s lying. You know he knows you know he is lying.

What can we do in the face of such impotence, such inequality? Since I read it, I’ve thought often about Angela Nagle’s April 18th Substack on “moral power, confidence and passion”. What do you do, she asks, when ‘you truly have no power, no control over the means of producing power and no means of getting it?’

Moral power is like a spell that can make people act against all other considerations, endure poverty, oppression, prison sentences and even hunger strikes without breaking. It has the power to demoralise opponents by planting the seed of guilt and self-doubt in them. Once those under the spell of moral certainty have their own moral community who they answer to, all attempts to disempower them from the outside become more fuel for power.

Nagle’s piece, published for the Easter weekend, stirred something very troubling in my atheist soul. Has there been an Op to discredit organised religion? Who benefits from the massive decrease in religiosity in western societies? It is not the impoverished masses.

This month politics and religion clashed when the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby criticised the government’s plan to send some asylum seekers who arrive in the UK on a one-way trip to Rwanda. The archbishop raised “serious ethical questions” about the policy in his Easter Sunday address and said it cannot “stand the judgement of God”. In the sermon, he said “subcontracting out our responsibilities” was “the opposite of the nature of God”.

Johnson hit back in a private address to Conservative MPs in parliament after he was forced to apologise repeatedly over the fixed-penalty notice he received for breaching coronavirus laws. The Church of England’s head of news, John Bingham, said if the reports of Johnson’s behind-closed-doors comment were true it was a “disgraceful slur”. Publicly, the prime minister accused Justin Welby of having “misconstrued” the policy of sending some asylum seekers to Rwanda. How would Jesus construe the policy?

I don’t attend a church, so I don’t know if the sermons are still about personal salvation and love for others rather than more explicit politically themed sermons for societal transformation. But it’s been clear to me since Occupy St Paul’s that religious leaders are in favour of some things which our political leaders are not. 

Could a religious base in the United Kingdom act as one to impact the socio-political moment? There is a recent lesson from history on the power of religion in western politics - you might not like it. It is the story of how White Protestant evangelicals switched their allegiance to Ronald Reagan in 1980. 42 years later and the Republicans are stuck with a passionate base that liberal America claims is out of touch with the rest of the country. 24 of those years have seen Republican Presidents. The lord giveth and the lord taketh away.

‘Faith’ in oneself and one another, for a cause, a set of beliefs, is an ancient form of political solidarity by any other name. Can we, the citizens of this country, create solidarity from apathy? Our system of Representative Democracy and Party Politics keep us in rival camps, but will that endure through economic and environmental collapse? With Direct Democracy, one can vote unencumbered by party political ideology. 

In Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel The Ministry for the Future, the sci-fi author (and assumed atheist) has a few characters ponder the need for a ‘new religion’ an ‘earth religion’. Clearly meant as a call for Gaianism to step up and seize the moment. Robinson, sees a future requirement for an organising principle to help civilization survive ecological catastrophe. One outside of and above politics.