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Diary of a (Maybe) Retired Pastor

Tag: UK Politics

  • This Labour Government Disappoints

    mayberetiredpastor

    This Labour Government Disappoints

    Where there is no prophecy, the people cast off restraint …

    Proverbs 29:18a Old Testament, The Bible.

    The timing of the government’s publication of its immigration whitepaper (proposed legislation) was clearly a response to the astonishing success of the anti-immigration Reform party in the recent English local elections. The whitepaper’s emphasis on dramatically reducing immigration and the timing of its publication clearly demonstrates a government that is reacting to populist feeling rather than seeking to shape national debate.

    Reducing the number of legal migrants can be a legitimate government policy but what is missing is any sign that the consequences are being clearly addressed. The aim is simply to reduce the numbers as rapidly as possible to some arbitrarily small number. The care sector has already loudly warned that reducing their ability to hire staff from overseas will mean closures in a sector that is already woefully inadequate for what we need as a nation. All year, the universities have been cutting courses and reducing staff as they try to plan around the major reduction in income as overseas student numbers plummet. Then, there is the growing financial burden of paying for the nation’s pensions. This currently represents around a half of the total welfare budget (1) and is only going to grow bigger as more and more people reach retirement age. And there is the NHS. Despite the increase in funding in the autumn statement, the NHS this year is planning to cut thousands of clinical staff in order to balance the books (2). Decimating the immigrant workforce means decimating the income tax paid by that workforce. How, then, are the nation’s pensions to be paid for? How, then, are we to pay for enough doctors and nurses in the NHS to stop playing catch-up? How do we replace the lost income of universities? How do we prevent closures of care homes?

    It comes down to money. After reducing the immigrant workforce is the government going to invest enough money into these sectors to induce the UK home workforce to take up these jobs or to cover the loss of income? But for the government to invest more money into these sectors taxes will have to rise. It is this conversation that the government refuses to have with the electorate. How much are we willing to pay in taxes so that we can have effective public services, good pensions, and reduce the need for immigrant workers?

    The Bible pithily points out that in the absence of prophecy a nation ends up in disarray. In the Bible, of course, prophecy is tied particularly to the wisdom and truth of God. But we do not need to specify divine inspiration to see that this applies in our time and place. Truth and wisdom, divinely inspired or not, is an important aspect of good government. Where a government will not offer truth and wisdom to a nation, particularly in debating public policy, there will be disarray. In the specific case of the UK, the choice between good public services and long term benefits for seniors and how much we are willing to pay, either directly through taxes or indirectly through immigration,  needs to be made clear and be part of the national debate. Instead, this government (as, indeed, the previous government) seems content to react to populist sentiment rather than lead national debate. The resulting national disarray as public services and benefits shrivel in the vacuum simply nurtures extreme and false sentiment. Many of us had hoped for something more worthy from a Labour government.

    1. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/benefit-expenditure-and-caseload-tables-information-and-guidance/benefit-expenditure-and-caseload-tables-information-and-guidance#social-security-spending-in-the-united-kingdom-and-the-welfare-cap acc. 30.5.25
    2. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/may/09/nhs-hospitals-england-cuts-financial-reset

  • Assisted Dying Bill, UK

    mayberetiredpastor

    Assisted Dying Bill, UK

    44 It was now about noon, and darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon, 45 for the sun stopped shining. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two. 46 Jesus called out with a loud voice, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” When he had said this, he breathed his last. 47 The centurion, seeing what had happened, praised God and said, “Surely this was a righteous man.”

    Luke 23:44-47, New Testament

    I was asked about this one evening over dinner with friends. As predicted in an earlier post (1) a bill to legalise assisted dying has been presented in this new parliament. The government is not taking a position on it so there is genuine debate taking place with ministers offering differing opinions.   Wes Streeting, the Secretary of Health and Welfare has taken an interesting position (2). In opposition, he was in favour of legalising assisted dying but he is currently saying that he will not support the bill because what needs to happen is to build-up our palliative care provision so that there are genuine end-of-life care options for people.

    Wes Streeting’s re-positioning correctly identifies dignity as the key issue – what does a dignified end of life look like? Those advocating the bill feel that suffering – particularly the physical and mental suffering accompanying terminal illness – takes away dignity and therefore it should be avoided by actively choosing to end life before their dignity is lost. This position equates suffering with loss of dignity. But human experience through the ages demonstrates this is a false equation. We only need to remind ourselves of Christ’s own death on the cross to realise that suffering does not have to mean the loss of dignity. Christ’s dignity on the cross led to the Roman officer in charge of the crucifixion to cry out in worship.

    The voluntary ending of one’s life to avoid suffering seems to be the counsel of despair, as if it were a battlefield where a wounded soldier is put out of his misery by a comrade who can see no other way of helping. It is the bleak confession that there is no hope, no possibility of joy.  But the hospice movement has demonstrated that even in terminal illness it is possible to find joy and hope (3). A ministerial friend who has journeyed with families through terminal illness under hospice care testifies to the hope and joy that good end-of-life care can bring. There is genuine dignity. Wes Streeting’s re-positioning simply highlights that we need to provide more capacity in hospice care so that people are guaranteed positive end-of-life care.

    Legalising assisted dying would represent a significant cultural shift. Fundamentally, it is a statement that we do not believe in the worth of sustaining a life that, from a utilitarian point of view, is less useful than that of a fully fit, productive person. This, of course, is what makes disabled groups strongly against assisted dying and it is hard to see how the unspoken thought that “granny should do her duty and go for assisted dying so that we can get on with our lives unburdened” can be avoided as time passes if this legislation is passed.

    The sponsor of the current bill points to the stringent safeguards built into the bill to ensure that only those who are terminally ill and about to die, and who are under no coercion, are allowed to access assisted dying (the method is actually assisted suicide). But already, other groups who are subject to incurable disease but not in imminent danger of dying are agitating to be allowed the same choice. It is inevitable that such groups would eventually be given access to assisted dying. The Canadian experience, where access to assisted dying has expanded to encompass more and more groups with fewer and fewer restrictions over a very short period of time is instructive.  

    Who is not unsympathetic to the concerns about suffering that those facing terminal illness have – after all, who welcomes suffering? – but it does seem that assisted dying is fundamentally more about despair than dignity. Our dignity and worth are not simply values we hold subjectively, internally isolated from the world, but exist in the relationships that we have and nurture in our communities and, ultimately, in the eternal, loving gaze of God who created us.

    1. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx276lwn6n2o
    2. https://diaryofamayberetiredpastor.blog/2024/06/22/to-die-or-not-to-die/
    3. Rachel Clarke, Dear Life: A Doctor’s Story of Love, Loss and Consolation, Little, Brown Book Group (30 Jan. 2020)

  • Interesting Times

    mayberetiredpastor

    Interesting Times

    20 “If the Lord had not cut short those days, no one would survive. But for the sake of the elect, whom he has chosen, he has shortened them. 21 At that time if anyone says to you, ‘Look, here is the Messiah!’ or, ‘Look, there he is!’ do not believe it. 22 For false messiahs and false prophets will appear and perform signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect.

    Mark 13:20-22, The New Testament

    We, unfortunately, live in interesting times as the apocryphal Chinese curse goes (1). For all their appeal to a mythical  “Great Britain” that used to be, the far right of contemporary politics is steadily eroding the ethical and moral underpinnings of the post-World War II  consensus that never again should the horrors of Belsen and Auschwitz, and the ideologies and policies leading to them, be seen. Out of that conviction the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, closely followed by the European Declaration of Human Rights, was born. Giving effect to these declarations the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) were established. But we see senior Conservative politicians openly campaigning to repudiate the ECHR so that we can treat desperate migrants in any way we wish, unconstrained by the very laws that Britain itself helped to establish after the war. The cry is that we as a nation should be able to determine what is right and what is wrong without interference by an outside body (the irony is completely lost on the Far Right!). Two generations on from those who marched in horror into Belsen this generation of politicians has forgotten that countries can go badly wrong and bodies such as the ECHR were established to prevent that from happening.

    This drifting away from the ethical and moral anchors of the post-War years is no more clearly illustrated than by the decision of the Prime Minister to absent himself from the main D-Day Landings event for world leaders.  I feel sure it wasn’t deliberately intended as a signal that Britain was now distancing itself from those anchors, but it demonstrates the relative importance in his mind, and of the advisors around him, of that post-War consensus.

    Why does this matter? If one of the major architects of the post-War consensus is seen to be now walking away from that consensus and detaching itself from the moral and ethical anchors of that consensus then others will feel able to do the same. The result is that Putin felt able to invade Ukraine and once again wage war on European soil after decades of peace. It means that Israel has been able to inflict huge suffering on civilians in Gaza with impunity in its pursuit of the destruction of Hamas. It means that the moral force of the EHCR and the ICC is necessarily weakened. Nations and their governments feel free to behave as they please without accountability of any kind.

    It is the greatest irony that the nation that had a central role in overturning the worldwide norm that slavery was simply a regrettable fact of life, and which was a major architect of the system that holds governments and nations to account for their actions  should be turning its back on the latter. These two are the diamonds in the history of Britain that could justify the epithet “Great” as the politicians of the right like to use it, and yet they are seeking to consign at least one of them to the rubbish heap of history!

    Britain has not yet broken entirely with the consensus it helped to establish after the Second World War, but one wonders if, after this General Election, the new government will seek to repair Britain’s commitment to that consensus or whether the rot which has set-in under the outgoing Conservative government will be allowed to continue. Will we hold to the ethical and moral anchors of the post-War years or will we yield to the Siren calls of those who would unleash our baser instincts?

    1. The supposed Chinese curse “may you live in interesting times” appears to have no basis in fact, or, at least, there is no record of such a curse that has been found https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_times acc. 27 Jun 2024 16:04

  • Reform the House of Commons

    mayberetiredpastor

    Reform the House of Commons

    At this, the administrators and the satraps tried to find grounds for charges against Daniel in his conduct of government affairs, but they were unable to do so. They could find no corruption in him, because he was trustworthy and neither corrupt nor negligent.

    Daniel 6:4

    So, the manifestos of the major parties have been published and some of you may be wondering if I secretly authored the Green Party manifesto. The answer is no – but maybe they’ve been reading my blogs! I have voted Labour consistently all of my adult life (with one or two exceptions) but you might have noticed that I’m unimpressed with the present offering of Labour. Therein lies a problem with our democracy.

    At school, I was taught that government proposes and parliament (i.e the House of Commons) disposes – that is, the government proposes the laws it wants to enact and the House of Commons decides whether or not to allow the government to enact those laws. But in our modern parliament that is a myth. In reality, the government both proposes and disposes, that is, whatever the government decides it wants to do it can if it has a parliamentary majority, and because of our first-past-the-post system of election governments almost always have a majority.

    Government gets its way because MPs are completely beholden to their political parties. Individual MPs rarely actually read or examine the proposed legislation (that only happens in the Lords!). The parties instruct their MPs how to vote and MPs are punished if they step out of line. The only path to progression as an MP is through the patronage of your party. If you constantly go against the party line you do not progress as an MP and may even be refused permission to stand as a candidate at the next election (witness the Labour Party debacle over Diane Abbott). The patronage of the political parties is wielded over the whole career of the individual MP from consideration as a candidate right through to whether you can hold position in government or one of the powerful committees in Parliament.

    Before 1832 there was a system of “rotten boroughs” in the UK. The MPs for those boroughs were nominated by powerful people who owned the boroughs and consequently the MPs were beholden to those powerful people. This particular system no longer exists but has been effectively replaced by the patronage of our two party system. The MPs we elect are not answerable to us but to their party. This is every bit as corrupt as the old system of rotten boroughs.

    Constitutional reform is not on the agenda of any party (Why would it be? It’s not in their interests!) but that we need it to properly reflect our views and achieve better governance and management of the country is, in my view, unanswerable. But what sort of reform do we need?

    Parties as prospective governments need to be separated from MPs as representatives. Much as in the US, we should vote directly for whichever party we believe should be entrusted with government, but MPs need to be elected separately to parliament. Candidates for MPs should be funded and overseen by the state and not by the parties and their election should be by a form of proportional voting. Political parties offer themselves for election as the government by first-past-the-post voting. Once in government they can propose their legislative programme to MPs who are no longer beholden to their parties (if they are members of a party) and neither parties nor government can require MPs to vote in any particular way.

     This is just the barest sketch of a reform. For very many people, including myself, our present system does not work very well. No party programme entirely satisfies all our aspirations for ourselves or our communities, and we have no genuine representation by our MPs who, as individuals, might give the nuances  to legislative discussion that we desire. We need constitutional reform, but what needs to be reformed is not the House of Lords but the House of Commons.

  • Why Is Tax Bad?

    mayberetiredpastor

    Why Is Tax Bad?

    4 for [government] is God’s servant for your good. … 5 Therefore one must be subject, not only because of wrath but also because of conscience. 6 For the same reason you also pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, busy with this very thing.

    Romans 13:4-7

    41 He sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. 42 A poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which are worth a penny. 43 Then he called his disciples and said to them, ‘Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. 44 For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.’

    Mark 12:41-44

    This week’s political headlines in the UK have been dominated by the accusation that the Labour party’s spending plans would result in families having to pay an extra £2000 in tax. Apart from the dubious method of calculation and the sleight-of-hand  trickery to  make it seem as bad as possible, the real question it throws up is why should this be considered a viable method of attack by one party against another? That it is so considered is clear, Kier Starmer and the Labour Party have been vehemently denying this claim all week.

    We have a very poor and corrosive attitude to tax in our political culture. Even amongst Christians it is generally held as a bad thing, at best a necessary evil. Yet the New Testament clearly defines it as a something required by God. Taxes are to be paid in order that the authorities can work for our good. Of course, the tax burden needs to be shared fairly across the population and it is very much the case that the tax burden is very unfairly shared in the UK. But none of this alters the fact that taxes in principle are to be welcomed for the benefit of all, as required by God.

    Fairness is an important principle in the levying of tax. One consequence of our corrupt attitude to tax is that government resorts to hidden taxes so that we cannot easily see how tax is being raised. So, the tax-free allowance has been frozen for the next several years by the present Conservative government and this will not be changed if the Labour Party were to be elected in July. It means there will be a significant increase in tax raised over the next few years, but those paying more tax will be those currently earning less than £125,140 a year. Everybody above that will not be paying any more tax! Similarly, proposals by the present Tory government to abolish inheritance tax (estate duty) only benefits those wealthy enough to have more than half-a-million pounds to pass on, those that don’t wouldn’t pay inheritance tax anyway.  Once again, the wealthiest carry less of the tax burden.  

    If we were able to have open and dispassionate debates about tax and spending we could see much better how the tax burden was being shared across society. But as it is, the Tory Party seek only to relieve the very wealthy of their obligations to the rest of society – and to do so in a way that the rest don’t notice it – and the Labour Party is too scared to address the issue openly.

  • God, Mammon, and Paula Vennells

    mayberetiredpastor

    God, Mammon, and Paula Vennells

    “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.

    Matthew 6:24 (RSV)

    Here in the UK, the public inquiry into the Post Office scandal which has been described as the greatest miscarriage of justice in English legal history is reaching a climax. The former CEO during the most important period of the scandal, Revd. Paula Vennells, has begun giving her testimony to the inquiry. For Christians the fact that she was, and is, an ordained minister in the Anglican Church adds an extra dimension to the scandal – how is it that a Christian Minister could be at the helm of such a miscarriage of justice? In fact, a little reflection on church history, both in the past and more recently, will remind us that Christian ministers are by no means immune to the grossest violations of integrity and justice. But that does not excuse us from asking the question why should that be?

    I have quoted one of Jesus’ most famous sayings above. The alert reader will notice that I have used the old Revised Standard Version (which I grew up with) in which the counterpoint to God is Mammon. Modern translations will translate “Mammon” as “riches” or “wealth”. This is quite reasonable since “mammon” was indeed used to mean just that. But Jesus’ contraposition of the word to “God” confers, it seems to me, something more to the word. It implies a deeper spiritual significance. We are not talking about mere riches but the spiritual powers behind it. The Apostle Paul warns us that it is not against “flesh and blood” that we struggle, but against “principalities and powers”, that is, spiritual forces.

    I feel sure that mere money did not sway Paula Vennells. She was indeed well paid as the CEO of the Post Office and felt obligation to the Post Office and she worked hard to fulfil her duties. But in doing so she failed to notice that her devotion was slowly drifting away from God and to the spiritual powers underlying the riches of the position of CEO. Instead of serving God, she served the spiritual powers behind the position of CEO and so she became blind to the ordinary people who were suffering at the hands of the Post Office – her hands. She had become devoted to the Post Office.

    Paula Vennells is not unique in this. Christian leaders everywhere have fallen to this subtle idolatry. Whether it is a church, an evangelistic ministry, or some other kind of work or organisation, as wealth starts to figure large around the office of the leader the powers behind that wealth start to exert their subtle influence on the Christian leader. Whether it’s in defence of the church, the ministry, or the NHS (say), or, indeed, simple greed, slowly the institution or organisation or the office itself  begins to usurp the place that belongs to God in the heart of the leader. The result is that people become mere assets, units of resource, or any of the other euphemisms that we use to disguise the fact we no longer regard people as bearers of the image of God but only as resource units worthwhile only in so far as they have value to the institution or the satisfaction of our greed.

    Paula Vennells story is a stark reminder to us of the subtle perils of idolatry for Christian leaders once wealth and riches start to accumulate around their office and organisations. We need to remember that as leaders we serve God through serving people. Because we are leaders much of that service is through the institution or organisation, but that must never blind us to the purpose of our leadership – to serve the people we lead, it is through that that we honour God.

  • Here’s A Thought

    mayberetiredpastor

    Here’s A Thought

    Now, here’s a thought. Like everyone else I suppose, I get advertisements on my Facebook Feed. Unlike some, perhaps, I don’t particularly mind them, in fact, quite often I learn about useful things on the market I might not otherwise have known about (I’m a sucker for those useful looking gadgets that claim to be able to solve that very problem you didn’t know you had until that ad!) so, I hardly ever block ads.  

    Over the last year or so, I have started seeing ads. for private healthcare plans. For about £23 a month they appear to guarantee no waiting times for hospital procedures should you ever require them. I’ve not gone into the fine print so don’t really know what sorts of procedures are covered and what aren’t, doubtless there are many caveats and conditions, certainly they talk about surgery and operations, but this set me thinking.

    It’s no secret that the NHS is suffering from long waiting times for elective procedures, and reducing if not eliminating the waiting times is a major political goal for every party. These private health care ads. are basically suggesting that the cost of eliminating waiting times is £23 a month. If we multiply this up by the UK working population of around 33 million (1) this  comes to £9.1 billion a year. So, at the cost of £9 billon a year waiting times in the NHS could be eliminated, or so these ads. imply.

    But wait a minute, I hear you cry, the population of the UK is something like 67 million people, why have you multiplied by only 33 million? Well, not everybody requires hospital care all at the same time and these healthcare companies must have done the sums as to what would it cost to have zero waiting times for those willing to pay and for them to make a (probably) excellent profit. So I think multiplying by the working population will give us a reasonable stab at what it would cost to eliminate waiting times in the NHS. And, it’s just a thought!

    How much extra tax would we all have to pay to do the equivalent of taking out this monthly healthcare plan for zero waiting times in the NHS? The annual cost of the healthcare plan is £276. Average income according to the Office for National Statistics is around £35,000 (2). Taking into account the tax-free allowance this means an average tax increase of 1.2%, of course, some would pay less and some would pay more. It would be the government’s job to balance out the tax increase fairly between the less well-paid and the more well-paid, but an average 1.2% doesn’t seem much of an ask to eliminate waiting times. And that’s the beauty of doing this kind of thing through tax. By sharing the burden, all of us can benefit at a cost we can afford. A private scheme only benefits those who can afford it.

    £9 billion just happens to be the amount of surplus the Chancellor apparently had at this year’s budget. What did he choose to do with it? Devote it to eliminating the waiting times in the NHS? Of course not, he decided to use it to reduce the National Insurance  rate by 2%! What this means is that, going forward, the government has £9 billion less annually to spend on the NHS and, as a result probably, waiting times will get longer! Just a thought.

    1. https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-9366/CBP-9366.pdf
    2. https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/bulletins/annualsurveyofhoursandearnings/2023  acc. 23:32, 12.4.24

  • I Don’t Do Gift Aid Anymore

    mayberetiredpastor

    I Don’t Do Gift Aid Anymore

     This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, who give their full time to governing. 7 Give to everyone what you owe them: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honour, then honour.

    Romans 13:6-7

    We are in the fortunate position of being able to make donations to various charities. Of course, we give to our church and have always Gift Aided it, but we also try to support other causes. Lately, I have ceased ticking the Gift Aid box on the donation forms. Gift Aid is an option to include the tax that you would have paid on the donation so that instead of going to the government it goes to the charity. It occurred to me that the more we Gift Aided, the less of our taxes would be retained by the government and, hence, less would be available to fund public services. At a time when all our public services are financially compromised the government needs all the taxes it can get to keep them going! So, I have stopped adding Gift Aid to our donations.

    We need a different national conversation around tax. Our major political parties are locked into a “reduce taxes at all costs” paradigm. As a result, we see our public services crumbling and the government constantly finding new ways to increase tax revenue without appearing to do so. Consequently, our tax system is unfair, unbalanced, and inadequate. And it is opaque in the extreme! Certain sections of the media will stridently trumpet the historically high rates of taxation we are experiencing but (with the exception of one or two bodies) fail to point out that our taxation is no heavier than the average of similar European countries even at these historically high rates. The only winners of our tax system are the extremely wealthy.

    Our politicians treat us as children believing that we cannot hold an intelligent and mature conversation about the cost of public services and the amount of tax that needs to be raised in order to have good public services. They believe that we can be fobbed-off with constant reductions in general taxation and not make the connection with failing public services. Taxes have to rise and the extremely wealthy have to pay more in taxes.  This has to be done openly and transparently (i.e. income tax) and not through Faustian mechanisms designed to obfuscate and deceive. Of course, restoring public services and improving public services after years of deliberate financial starvation in order to fund tax-cuts cannot be done overnight. The Junior Doctors’ dispute is testament to that – restoring a 35% cumulative loss in pay is not feasible overnight but the present government, dogmatically wedded to reducing taxes, cannot provide a long term path to restoration that  might resolve the dispute.  But will the Labour Party, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves in particular, be bold enough to grasp the nettle and start to talk honestly about taxation and the cost of restoring public services? So far, the signs are not encouraging.