Anglican Mainstream

By Adrian Hall, Religious Intelligence

The Bishop of Durham has strongly criticised Government plans to "rush" ahead with constitutional changes to “distract” attention from other problems.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown last week announced plans that would include ending the self-regulation of Parliament by the summer and then pressing ahead with reform of the House of Lords.

Bishop Tom Wright, responding to the proposals, accused Mr Brown of using the need to clean up the expenses system as a Trojan horse to smuggle in other proposals and launched a stinging attack on “career politicians”.

Following Mr Brown’s statement, Bishop Wright said: “The public are bound to see this sudden rush of proposals as sheer displacement activity to distract attention from recent events which have happened on all sides of the political spectrum.

“Many of us believe that we urgently need reform. However, suddenly to rush through a programme in this way cannot be the right way to do it.”

He said that “character” and not just regulation was needed to clean up “indiscipline that has gone on in so many areas of public life”.

And taking part in a later Lords debate on constitutional reform, Bishop Wright warned: “It is alarming that the Prime Minister is using the need to clean up the expenses system as a Trojan horse to smuggle in major constitutional proposals, threatening to force them through in a rush.

“If even a Government in happier times, with no whiff of scandal or internal division, were suddenly to propose such a package, we would be startled: how much more when this is bound to appear as a diversionary tactic, a displacement activity, a desperate attempt to flail around in the water as the sharks close in?”

But he said that his criticism of the Government did not imply support for any other party as he regarded with “equal suspicion” Liberal Democrat calls for proportional representation and Tory calls for a general election.

“These do not address the problems in hand — either the problem of the breakdown of trust in Parliament, or the problem of the constitution,” he said.

“They both assume that if we only voted again, or voted differently, the sun would come out from behind the cloud and everyone in the country would smile again.”

Bishop Wright agreed with Mr Brown that “leigitimacy does not arise just from having people vote for you”.

He added: “Legitimacy is also sustained by doing the job and being trusted. Public consent and approval can come through the ballot box, or in other ways.

“When you do not get the second form of legitimacy, sustained trust, people lose interest in the first, the ballot box. That is why more people vote in Big Brother than in general elections.”

He said that the question of legitimacy had an effect on reform of the House of Lords.

“Voting matters, but doing the job matters even more,” he told peers. “The belief that only elected members can have any sort of legitimacy, or that once someone has won a vote it gives them carte blanche to do whatever they like for the next five years, rings extremely hollow when it is precisely some of the elected members in the Commons who have brought the system into disrepute.

“Our whole political system has encouraged career politicians who have never run a farm or a shop or a school or a ship, and who lurch from Utopianism, which gets most of them into politics in the first place, to pragmatic power-seeking, which is what they turn to when Utopia fails to arrive on schedule.

“The suggestion that we should solve our present problems by electing more people like that to replace the widely experienced specialists on these benches shows how out of touch some people are with the real problems.”

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