Charterhouse Chronicle

Frank Longford
IT IS NO USE supposing that a man or woman's Christian beliefs provide any clue to their politics. To their morals, yes. Anyone who publicly announces that he or she is a believing Christian can be, in my experience, relied on to aim at a Christian standard of conduct. They would fall into sin occasionally. Usually sexual sin, but still they will be aiming at a Christian standard of conduct.
I am not, of course, suggesting that there are no good people who are not Christian believers. Some of them, like the Bloomsbury set, would have a different code. But, some of them, like Clement Attlee, whom I have described as an ethical giant, would be models of Christian behaviour. Clem Attlee, it will be recalled, when asked "Are you a Christian?" replied in his clipped way: "Accept the Christian ethic. Can't stand the mumbo jumbo." "Are you an agnostic?" "Don't know." "Do you believe in the afterlife?" "Possibly."
But such exceptions do not affect my submission that if a person is a practising Christian you expect a higher standard of conduct than if he or she isn't But it is quite different with politics. When you hear that a particular politician is a devout Christian there is no reason to suppose that he or she belongs to one party or another. When Gladstone, the greatest of all Liberals, died in 1898, the Conservative Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, said of him: "He kept alive the soul in England. He was a great Christian man." Salisbury, like all the Cecils, including the present Lord Cranborne, Leader of the House of Lords in the last Conservative Cabinet, was himself a strong Christian. In the Labour Party the non-conformist influence was always powerful till recent times. And today we have a Prime Minster, Tony Blair, whom I have described as the most explicit Christian since Gladstone. He goes to Mass regularly, though still an Anglican. i4is wife is a devout Catholic. He sends his children to a Catholic school. Many of us hope and pray that he will become, in due course, the first Catholic Prime Minster.
I will not travel across the Prime Ministers of the present century except to say that, on the Conservative side, we have seen two notable Christians in Harold Macmillan and Alec Home. No one doubts Margaret Thatcher's Christianity. One of John Major's closest advisers has Ellcsured me that he is a good Christian t in his English fashion he does not about his religion. On the Labour side I can still recall George Lansbury at the Labour conference of 1935 lifting the audience to their feet in his peroration: "As Jesus Christ said in the Garden — those who take the sword will perish by the sword. There I take my stand and there, if necessary I'll die." But Ernie Bevin swept him aside with a still more powerful utterance: "I'm not going to have George Lansbury hawking his conscience all round Europe." And Lansbury did not last much longer as leader. I'm sure that Cardinal Heenan, who came to know Harold Wilson well in Liverpool, would have testified to his Christianity. Jim Callaghan met his beloved wife Audrey in a Sunday school. Many years later he told me that after a long interval he had resumed saying his prayers and I'm sure he has retained the practice ever since. So, there we are. The historical record supports my original proposition that a man or woman's Christianity is no clue to their politics.
But, how do I feel today about my bold statement when I joined the Labour Party in 1936? "I'm a socialist because I'm a Christian," a statement I have repeated more than once in recent times. I would still assert that my understanding of Christianity leads me inexorably to be a member of the Labour Party. But I do not have to look far to see better Christians than myself in all the parties. At the risk of being invidious I mention, to take only a few examples, Baroness Young, former Leader of the House, and Baroness Cox, Conservatives. It was the latter who persuaded the House and ultimately Parliament to include a specific reference to Christianity in a major education bill. I think of the wheelchair heroines, Baroness Masham and Baroness d'Arcy d'Neath, and other Crossbenchers like Lord Hylton, Lord Alton (a very welcome newcomer) and Lord Northbourne (all five Catholics). On the Liberal side there is Shirley Williams, as I always will think of her (a Catholic). On the Labour side the Chief Whip David Carter and Lord Stallard (both Catholics) and Lord Archer, a former Labour Law Officer.
I attend two prayer groups inspiringly led by two Anglican hereditary peers, Lord Ashbourne and Lord Elton. A less formal group has just been started by a welcome new Labour peer who, of course, belongs to no political party. There are, of course, our much-prized 26 bishops.
How can it be that the moral teaching of Christ can lead to such different political conclusions? I will illustrate my reply from an article written by Charles Kennedy, aspiring to the Liberal leadership, in The Times recently. He told us that "in a generation" the standard of life of the poor had improved by 57 per cent and that of the rich by 103 per cent. He concluded that this was seriously wrong. But Conservatives can always argue, as The Times did many years ago, that wealth is like heat. It is only when it is unequally distributed that it produces work. In other words the improvement in the lot of the poor would not have been possible if the wealth of the rich had not increased much faster. The argument will never be settled whether by Christians or by non-Christians. When I say that I am Labour because I am a Christian I am referring only to the way that my individual conscience works. Today there are five members of the Cabinet who belong to the Christian Socialist Movement, led of course by Tony Blair. Whether New Labour will prove itself in the end more or less Christian than Old Labour remains to be seen. I have a great personal confidence in Tony Blair but I do not rule out the possibility that, after my time, there may yet be a Conservative Prime Minister who is a fine Christian.