We must be single-minded in the pursuit of justice

As a woman educated at three excellent convents I do not lightly disagree with even one bishop, let alone a whole conference of bishops. The Bishops’Conference of England and Wales has produced a document, Cherishing Life, which deals outstandingly well with marriage and sexuality, pro-life issues of abortion, euthanasia and human embryo protection, war, and our responsibilities in voting.
But there is one paragraph which seems to me unhelpful to say the least. It says: “Voting in a general election should seldom if ever be based on a single issue, because elections are concerned with a whole range of issues very many of which are concerned with life and with human flourishing.” It goes on to quote the bishops’ document of 1996, The Common Good: “A general election must never be confused with a single issue referendum.” No definition or examples are given to clarify “seldom if ever”. The next paragraph does encourage us to “consider” candidates’views and give “priority to issues where innocent lives are at risk”, but is that enough?
I believe that single-issue politics can sometimes be both appropriate and effective. In the south of the United States in the 1960s it was single-issue voting which won civil rights for black people. Lifelong Republican supporters voted for procivil rights Democrats, and vice versa. Would you consider that an important enough issue for single-issue voting? I would. There were other important questions at the time, not least the threat from Communism, but this was a grievous injustice in their own country, and they made it a priority. Is the deliberate killing of 600 unborn babies every day in our country a less important question?
Yes, there are plenty of other important matters — health, education, justice for the Third World and our own poor, family support, proper treatment of refugees — but these all depend on the right to be allowed to go on living to enjoy them.
Would you vote for a party which had genuinely effective policies providing for all the above, but which excluded some people (slaves, women, those of one particular colour or race or creed or age or ability) from these benefits?
I must, of course, declare an interest. I am the leader of a party which is often called — I might almost say often accused of being — a singleissue party. The ProLife Party stands for absolute respect for all human lives from the very beginning as a single cell until a natural death.
It may seem strange after my defence of single-issue politics to say that the ProLife Party is not a singleissue group. The Labour Party started as a single-issue party concerned with working men’s rights against their employers. It quickly found that workers and their dependants made up such a high proportion of the citizens of this country that policies on most aspects of life followed naturally. Pope John Paul II continually reminds us that the right to life is the basic right on which all others depend. This belief in the sanctity of human lives leads inevitably to beliefs and policies on the whole of life, affecting not only Britain or Europe but the whole world.
The bishops have told us quite properly that we should not vote for a party with racist policies. Is this not a kind of single issue in reverse? And why is racism alone to be the touchstone? Why do they not tell us that we should not vote for parties or candidates supporting abortion or euthanasia or human embryo destruction? Many of the ProLife Party’s candidates, including me, took to politics for the first time in 1997 because we found that candidates in our constituencies were all pro-abortion, so that we were effectively disenfranchised. Human deaths and misery have certainly been caused by racism and by the war in Iraq. If there were another war raging at the same time in the Britain, taking a toll of 600 lives each day, having continued for 35 years with no end in sight, would not a sense of proportion tell one that ending this war was by far the most urgent necessity?
And if it turned out that growing doubts had become well-researched proofs that the war, far from benefiting those in whose interest it was fought, was actually harming them in enormous numbers and injuring the whole nation, would it not seem even more urgent to end it? This is exactly the case with abortion.
There is another war in which thousands of early human embryos are deliberately or carelessly destroyed in experimentation or IVF or by abortifacient so-called contraceptives including the morning-after pill. Again the supposed beneficiaries are being harmed in mind and body.
The first, early skirmishes about euthanasia are threatening to escalate into another bloody battle.
The European Union is pouring millions every year into providing contraception and abortion in the developing world. Sometimes this is coercive, as in China and Peru. Always it is a waste of money urgently needed for clean water, medicine, education and help with agriculture. Sometimes it is counterproductive, when the provision of condoms leads to an increase, not a reduction, in sexually transmitted infections. Is it not racist for the countries of Europe, worried about their own slumping birth rate, to spend so much money trying to prevent Africans and Latin Americans and Chinese people having babies? Is there not a whiff here of 1930s nastiness about “inferior races” and “the unfit” out-breeding superior white intellectuals?
Why is all this not felt to be important enough to call for single-issue voting?
Which brings me back to the point that the right to life is so basic that the ProLife Party, like the Labour Party before it, and even more so, finds that there is hardly anything which is not affected by its beliefs. Several people have enquired crossly why the ProLife Party’s leaflets (the pitifully few we can afford compared with the millions sent out by richer parties) say nothing about the Iraq war. Of course, being pro-life, we are against anything likely to take innocent lives. But it is a matter of proportion. Others are speaking against the Iraq war.
But the ProLife Party is the only party putting these other wars, against the most vulnerable human beings on Earth, where they belong, in the very forefront of the political scene.
If we object to single-issue voting, might the Lord say to us on the Day of Judgement, “I was in danger of death in my mother’s womb and you voted to kill me”?
ProLife Party candidates are standing in the Eastern, Southeast and Northwest Regions in the forthcoming European elections