Two Weeks in Politics: the Prayer Breakfast & the Leadership Contest. # 84. 19/07/2022
Two Weeks in Politics: the Prayer Breakfast & the Leadership Contest.
The Prayer Breakfast.
Surely not even the most faith-filled of the organisers of July 5th National Parliamentary Prayer Breakfastcould have expected such a dramatic outcome - a Cabinet minister resigning, a Government toppled. Since both the preacher and the Cabinet minister were from ethnic minorities, the event is a rich source for thinking on the intertwining issues of faith and race, and of secularisation.
A preliminary point is to commend the organisers of the Prayer Breakfast for an excellent event. There were crunchy old and new hymns with substantial content; reverent and thoughtful prayers, and a sermon that was a socially conscious development of the great Philippians 2:5-11 passage. The event was neither triumphalistic nor twee, neither frantic nor frozen; simply a modest, thoughtful act of worship.
So why the dramatic impact? Les Isaac’s sermon was not ‘black preaching’ in the sense that Bishop Michael Curry’s sermon at the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s was: preaching which always runs the danger in secular Britain of being filed under ‘Culture’ rather than ‘Faith’. It was rightly ‘urban’ and socially conscious given Les’s role as the founder of Street Pastors, but overall it was faithful, unshowy and scripturally rooted. It ended not with a thundering climax but rather meekly. Sajid Javid told Sophie Raworth on the Sunday Morning programme that what prompted his resignation letter was Les’s stress on ‘the importance of integrity in public life’ (which may make it one of those common instances where someone’s take-away from a sermon is not directly derived from its content). It would be interesting to know how strongly Javid was impacted by the sole off-piste part of the service – the silence with low-key music following the sermon, which for many may well have created a palpable sense of God’s presence.
Having said that Les’s sermon was not ‘black preaching’, I would like to explore my sense that it wasn’t quite ‘white preaching’ either. What do I mean? Perhaps, that for those of us coming from a deeply secularised, western background trying to speak of Jesus outside the enclave of a church service can easily make us feel exposed and vulnerable, like a child talking about their fantasy friend, so that we too easily wrap a film of irony or entertainment or academic seriousness or forced piety over our presentation. We are too conscious that, as recent research has shown, people don’t want us to talk about Jesus. Les, I think didn’t have those inhibitions (they may just be a problem peculiar to me!) so that he could speak of Jesus unfiltered, heart to heart, with serious impact.
I think it may also be significant that his respondent wasn’t a white westerner either. Whilst Sajid Javid’s religious faith is unknown and private, his background is Muslim; one might guess of a straightforward piety that believes religion should be taken seriously. Thus his account to Sophie Rayworth was simple and direct. Am I wrong in thinking that not many white Englishmen, even quite devout ones, would have been so direct in a major television interview? Here also, for us the desire to avoid personal exposure, to faff, to privatise and to generalise would have led to an obscuring of Javid’s intensely personal and yet public, and in many eyes naïve, account of his specific moral, even religious crisis. The English don’t do that sort of thing.
In writing the above I have been speculative, and possibly erroneous. Nonetheless an extremely important and wholly unexpected event in the life of secular Britain has happened in the context of Christian worship, primarily involving two people from ethnic minorities. Life in multi-ethnic Britain has hidden eddies and currents far deeper that is usually recognised.
The Conservative Party Leadership.
(as at mid-day, Tuesday 19th July).
The times they are indeed a-changing. Three years ago having five white men vying for leadership of the Conservative Party was normal and unexceptional. Now, in a quadrant divided up along male/female and pale/dark axes, the male/pale section is empty rather than having a full house.
The first observation to make on this is simply that multi-ethnic societies throw up all sorts of surprises, anomalies and statistical quirks, which is something to delight in. It affirms that we are dealing with real, live, unpredictable, unusual human beings, not lifeless tokens moving predictably around a chess board.
Nonetheless the gender and ethnic diversity amongst the Conservative contenders is not sheer accident, but stems very much from a specific policy choice – that of David Cameron in 2005 to diversify the party’s roster of parliamentary candidates. The result is an increase in Conservative minority ethnic MPs from 2 in 2005 to 22 in 2019 (6% of the party’s MPs). Even more startling is their rise in the Cabinet, holding 7 (or 22%) of the 34 posts – due either to simple talent, or Johnson’s socially liberal instincts, or to his inclination to favour those he saw as less likely credible threats to his leadership. But on any interpretation the fact that there is now a serious possibility of the Conservative Party choosing an ethnic minority person (even possibly an immigrant woman) as their leader is an astounding change from three years ago. What’s happened?
I take the ‘George Floyd effect’ seriously. Whilst I have been irritated by articles and talks that routinely mention him; and I was not deeply touched by Black Lives Matter protests; and I am irritated by commentators making glutinous platitudes whilst footballers take my time by taking the knee; and I was somewhat condescending about the sudden, recent proliferation of black people in tv adverts (Blog 52, 02/11/2021), and yet: all this has had a big impact. It has worked! White people now very largely see the presence of non-whites in this country as unexceptional, and believe that racism is a problem that ought not to exist, even if more often in theory. Only thus is it possible for swathes of Conservative MPs to find it thinkable that a non-white person could lead them into the next general election.
However it is explained, the nature of the present Conservative leadership contest compared with that of three years ago represents a startling and dramatic change in the climate over ‘race’ in Britain.
This leads on to four points:
1. The key issue is even more clearly that of economic justice not racial justice.
Kemi Badenoch was a strong supporter of the Sewell Report, including working to have its proposals implemented. The Report was notorious for down-playing the importance of race as in itself a factor in disadvantage, over against social class, culture and family structures. Thus Sewell argued for measures which benefitted all disadvantaged groups, not just ethnic minorities. Memorably it quoted Sunder Katwala that ‘we are doing better over race than over class’. A not dissimilar emphasis has come from the Guardian columnist Kenan Malik who has written that he does not care whether or not the next prime minister is male and pale as long as he addresses a raft of social, not specifically racial, injustices. Sewell and Malik may produce very different lists of what they think should be done to promote greater equality but both recognise that ‘race’ is not a foreground issue. Conservative success in bringing to the fore minority ethnic politicians, without making an issue of it (it has not been mentioned in any of the debates) has meant that the left knows it would be tactically disastrous for them to major on the issue. ‘Ideology has trumped identity’ commented Jonathan Friedland in The Guardian, and a good thing too. The very serious issues facing us are over choices of economic ideology, so that preoccupation with various sorts of identity are a time-wasting distraction.
Badenoch’s views on both race and economics are clearly influenced by the black American conservative Thomas Sowell, both by downplaying the significance of race but also in echoing his views that there are never ‘solutions’ to problems, simply interventions which create new problems. But sadly, this ‘small state’ response to society marked by a gross and growing disparity between a small (and international) circle of super-rich and widespread poverty offered very little hope for improvement or change. All of which underlines Labour’s continuing failure to make clear, constructive policy proposals about how the disparity might be addressed.
2. The African-Caribbean population is untouched by this.
The ethnic variety of the Conservative leadership candidates should not be over-estimated. Of the original eleven, five were of South or West Asian backgrounds, and one from West Africa. People of Caribbean background were nowhere near consideration. Bulking up ‘BAME’ people obscures significant lacunae (as with Church of England bishops). So paradoxically it is possible that the outcome from the murder of a poor, black man in the USA is that it is more possible for someone from a wealthy South Asian background to become Prime Minister in Britain.
Prof Gus John asked in the Jamaican newspaper the Gleaner: “Why should I rejoice because ‘massa’ has recruited a bunch of house negroes and handed them whips to keep me in bondage and under control?” But by deliberately choosing to live in the past John, and those who think like him, have forfeited their right to speak into the present. By holding onto the ‘Massa’/plantation paradigm he is holding on to a ‘two sides/winners & losers’ paradigm of race which is clearly obsolete.
When Barak Obama was running to be President in 2008 some young black men from Chicago were interviewed about his prospects. He would never become president they asserted – ‘they’ would never allow it! I have wondered since whether these men welcomed his victory, indicating that the unspecified resistant ‘they’ is not the force they thought it was (though it made a strong fight-back under Trump); or whether Obama’s progress suggested that their own lack of progress lay more in their own hands than they had told themselves. (Bear in mind that Obama didn’t have a Black American background). Black intellectuals such as Glenn Loury or John McWhorter are emphasising how downplaying a black sense of potential agency set against a racist ‘them’ (aka ‘systemic racism’?) undermines and damages the possibility of self-motivated improvement for black people.
So the strong possibility of Britain having a minority ethnic Prime Minister may or may not be good news for African Caribbean people. Either now ‘the colour of your skin doesn’t matter’ or ‘the social context you come from holds you back”.
3. ‘Woke/Culture Wars’ debates are a dead end.
The lazy-minded grouping of ‘race’ and ‘gender’ as similar sorts of issues is a conceptual nonsense that has gone on for far too long and done serious damage to our understanding of race. (A possible future blog). Sexual di-morphism is scientifically based and biblically affirmed. Neither source supports ‘racial’ or ethnic differences, beyond what is peripheral and based on social processes.
So when Kemi Badenoch rejects ‘culture war’ policies of gender self-identification in debate with Penny Mordaunt she is adopting a conservative gender policy whilst herself, as a possible black woman immigrant Prime Minister, being a prime example of the victory of the ‘woke’ assertion that race ought not to be of any importance in how we assess or appoint people. Quite simply race and gender are very different issues, and to think that people’s attitudes to both are likely to follow the same progressive/liberal/conservative policies (as the press often seems to) is simply a failure of serious thinking, and ‘culture wars’ is lazy shorthand for several quite differently configured social issues.
4. We don’t know what the electorate thinks.
A survey by UK in Changing Europe (June 2020) of the values of MPs, councillors, party members and the electorate found that on ‘Social Values’ Conservative MPs were more liberal than the average voter, indeed only slightly less liberal than the average Labour voter. Presumably the enlarged awareness and understanding involved in being an MP broadens horizons. So the fact that Conservative MPs have no problems with the next Prime Minister being from an ethnic minority doesn’t predict that the more authoritarian minded party membership will see things in the same way when they come to choose. Nor that come the next General Election the electorate will be as liberal-minded.
General elections are often swung by a small percentage of votes. If, say, only 3% of the electorate are racist and will not on any account vote for a minority ethnic Prime Minister, then that could quite possibly swing the next election against a (Sunak-led?) Conservative Party. That is, we could have the strange prospect of a Labour Government installed on the basis of a sliver of racist voting against a socially liberal Conservative Party. Even those of us who delight in the paradoxes that a multi-ethnic society generates would find that a very bitter drink to taste.
(8 pm update: Kemi Badenoch is out. Nonetheless her Yoruba family name of Adegoke means "the king/crown/royalty has ascended/gained advancement", whilst Kemi means ‘God cares for me’ so it is likely there are still good things in store for her.)