The Commentary

A new political era has dawned with the advent of a Tory/LibDem coalition government following the hung parliament produced by the recent General Election.

In its May issue, Prospect magazine published a set of fascinating statistics comparing Britain in 1997 when New Labour came to power with how things stand now. The population has increased from 58 to 61 million. The number of foreign-born people granted permanent right of residence in the UK in those years was 1.6 million. The public debt as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product has increased from 42.5% to 62%. The gap between rich and poor has grown. In 1998 the poorest 1% of people in Britain earned 18.1 times less than the richest 1%. By 2008, that figure had increased by almost a third to 26.6. House prices have rocketed. In 1997, on average a house cost 3.7 times the median annual wage; now it costs 6.5 times as much. But the enormous increase in government spending on health from £44.5b to £110.5b over this period has doubled the number of nurses in the NHS and drastically reduced waiting times for operations.

It is a mixed picture. However, the percentage of people who agree that ‘Britain is becoming a worse place to live’ had risen from 40% in 1997 to 71% by 2008.

One nation

As the new government faces the challenge of the giant national debt, one of the primary concerns is that we pull together as a nation and face the crisis with a degree of solidarity. But what makes for a united nation?

It does not come about by trying to make everyone the same. The failure of Communism teaches us that. It was only when the Labour Party embraced the middle class, dropped Clause IV insisting on the common ownership of the means of production and gave up on ‘class war’ that it regained popularity.

Lord Hailsham, writing in 1978 at a time when people were asking, ‘What’s gone wrong with Britain?’, wisely commented as follows: ‘We need to restore the concept of limited government which makes it possible for coherent minorities to exist within a single society undivided in spite of diversity. We need to accept and encourage social as well as political pluralism. We need to adapt our thinking over policies and political institutions in such a way as to make a single nation possible within the wide and embracing shelter of tolerance under a liberal law. But this means an end to imposed uniformity by political, fiscal or social pressure.’*

This vision of a non-interventionist government providing a secure framework within which people can be free to live their lives is not too dissimilar from that of St. Paul (1 Timothy 2.2). The Labour Government pursued forcing secular uniformity on us and so further divided the nation. Perhaps the Tory/LibDem coalition, having to embrace both left and right, will give more freedom and so unite us.

Praying for politicians

Politicians have lost public confidence. Only 65% of those eligible voted on May 6. The scandal of MPs’ expenses and the fact that so much power (especially over jobs and immigration) has been ceded to the EU by successive governments without the UK electorate ever being consulted has not helped. Gordon Brown’s extraordinary gaffe, caught unawares on microphone, describing Gillian Duffy, an ordinary Labour voter who asked a tricky question, as ‘a bigoted woman’, has left many people asking if that is how most politicians describe the non-politically correct masses. With this background, Paul the apostle would call us to pray for those in power, that our land might be healed.

* The Dilemma of Democracy: Diagnosis and Prescription, Collins

Healing the nation?

One nation

Praying for politicians

John Benton

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