This Easter has seen unprecedented British headline coverage about the opinions of some of our unelected leaders – the clergy.

Moral Interventions Over Easter

The Archbishop of Canterbury warned against international greed for oil, power and territory and he gave a doom-laden indication of the collapse of civilization.

The evangelical Bishop of Rochester plugged into the economic mood by attacking greedy bankers.

These two moralistic interventions paled into insignificance next to an unprecedented direct attack by the Catholic Church in Scotland on controversial embryo research legislation.

Blairite support for the Catholic Church has always been a function of its appeal to the rightwing Irish-origin Catholic English and Scots working class.

The link became obvious over the weekend as we saw what could only be interpreted as a pre-emptive strike by known Blairites in support of Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor.

Rumours of a major Cabinet reshuffle designed to dispose of some troublesome Blair ‘leftovers’ made have had something to do with this but such mundane concerns would not have been uppermost in the Cardinal’s mind. 

His position, like that of his Anglican colleagues, was one of principle and it resulted in some very irritated scientists accusing Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor of failing to understand the science of embryo research.

Trying to Reverse History

All this palaver shows a new confidence in the Churches.  They now operate within a political climate that encourages faith interventions because cultural issues have been re-introduced into wider discourse ahead of traditional economic interests. Tony Blair opened this door and they have stepped through.

This return of traditional culture to the debate could become a dead end. If anything, it might fuel the argument of the BNP that culture is the political issue. We could point to fringe Wodenist web sites that would add a fiery racial paganism to the national political mix (although the vast majority of English pagans are assiduously a-political).

But, even in the mainstream, there is ever-increasing nonsense coming from all sides in discussions of ‘Britishness’, ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘identity’. 

The proposed oath of allegiance to the Crown received a particularly negative reaction and not just from Republicans: it was seen as presumptuous that any true-born Briton should be asked to prove his inner duty with an oath.

Britons know where their allegiance lies in a rather blood-and-soil way that despises intellectual analysis.

We now have Government commitments to flag-flying, to soldiers wearing their uniform in the street (not a popular idea with some base commanders trying to keep their squaddies out of trouble on a Saturday night in Biggleswick-under-water), a 'Dad's Army' for national security and (today) a rather nice but odd tribute to the Bevin Boys.

The common theme in all this is a Government looking backwards to a mythic 1940s. It is giving up on the early Blair attempt to create a new and 'modern' national identity. It thinks, perhaps, that it can inspire us to wartime spirit over the fate of 'our boys' in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Government seems angered by a perceived lack of a patriotism. But loyalty to this Government is not comparable with the true Churchillian message of 1940. 

Churchill got loyalty from the people because his loyalty was to the people, Conservative and Labour alike, when the country needed to be unified against a real threat after the class struggles of the 1920s and 1930s.

This is important. In the 1940s, the Crown stayed in the country and did not scuttle. A Government of national unity united the classes. Churchill spoke for the country in the House of Commons in 1940 and mounted a national interest coup within his own Party.

The New Labour Government is, unfortunately, closer to the Chamberlain Government - in office but no longer in power and having misjudged both the international and the economic situation.

The Cynical View & The Golden Age

To be cynical, however, much of this nonsense, which is the butt of humour throughout the land, is also about the Labour pensioner vote in the run-up to the May local elections. 

By reminding over-65s of the values of the 1940s (even if they could have been no more than toddlers), the Government perhaps thinks that it will hold on to old Labour loyalties and just swing it for Labour if the disenchanted and bored younger generations decide to stay at home.

These interventions tell us that the traditional British identity that sustained the war effort in the 1940s, and which the much-despised Enoch Powell saw collapsing in the 1970s, is now terminally ill. This attempted resuscitation is of a corpse.

Whether used cynically as a last shot at the tag end of Labour's vote or as an honest attempt to recreate some mythic golden age - from the Dick Van Dyke school of British history - it is an attempt to plug into a tradition that has gone.

British 'pluck' would return quickly enough if jackboots really did threaten to land beneath the White Cliffs of Dover but the nearest jackboots are those of American lawyers extraditing British businessmen and European policemen (soon) chasing some Kosovar gangster.

As we saw in the last posting, no-one believes that the country is at risk from external forces - even terrorism has been downgraded to a level below that of a bad dose of the 'flu. 

The biggest threats to the well-being of any British citizen are probably petty criminals, blind economic forces, the weather and the government itself. We will probably need a Roosevelt, not an ersatz Churchill.

Faith Leaders Fill the Vacuum

The new interest in unelected faith leaders and in the forms and principles of politics rather than its content seems to be intensifying just before that moment in history when (to adapt Brecht) morals will once again be replaced by the demand for bread.

The World Food Programme has already launched an ‘extraordinary emergency appeal’ for $500m to avoid rationing food aid because of spiraling costs. 

The newspapers are full of what would have been accepted as the partial collapse of capitalism in the 1930s but for which there is no longer any public language now that Marxism has been discredited.

The seriousness of the economic situation is only just beginning to sink in. If we wipe away the hysteria, it is probably just a correction in global capitalism, one that is shifting resources from the West to the emerging world. Capitalism is far from dead.

But what do the victims do? The impotence of an earlier generation of victims - in the 1930s for example - could be channelled into collective revolt centred on secular ideologies. 

We had communism and fascism but also the Popular Front, the New Deal and the re-organisation of the British centre-left that led to the welfare state (and was endorsed by a generation of conservatives after the event).

This time around it is different. The parties of the centre-left have colluded in the system that has broken down. Nor is it just a case of a struggle for power within the dominant part of the global system. 

The victims, if the crisis goes too far, could be watching an increase in Arab, Chinese and Russian wealth as they are scrabbling over scraps. There is no precedent for this unless it be the collapse of Arab, Mughal and Chinese dominance before superior Western technology.

What may be dying is not so much capitalism but the asumption of Western dominance within the capitalist model. The belief of social democrats and neo-conservatives alike that a working capitalism requires a ‘pale pink’ liberal democracy to work adequately may be tested and found wanting.

And if the assumption that liberal mass activism in the West on behalf of (say) Sudanese, Tibetan or Burmese victims of state capitalism proves (as we believe will be the case) to be futile, then the bitterness of defeat may have domestic effects of which we can, as yet, know nothing.

Cloud Cuckoo Land

With no domestic secularist redistributionist political strategy of any credibility left within the West, any anger at failures in government is becoming sullen and disengaged - or it is turning ‘spiritual’ which is like saying that it is living in cloud-cuckoo land when it comes to restraining the rapacity of the rich and powerful.

Non-democratic restraint of the powerful is only possible through the sorts of authoritarian cultural intervention that, of course, only make the most rich and powerful more so.

The Dalai Lama's strategy of spiritual persuasion may preserve Tibetan culture and perhaps create the conditions for an accomodation with Communist China - he and his successors can simply out-sit the Central Committee in theory - but it is a strategy that still requires a strong China or its complete collapse from extraneous pressures.

What it is not is a liberation strategy and the major pro-Western religions have developed strongly passive and conservative strategies for protecting their own people, waiting on change (such as the Vatican exploitation of weakness in the Soviet system) rather than developing forward strategies.

The Vatican, for example, moved out of this space in Latin America in its effective condemnation of liberation theology and preference for developmentalist Opus Dei models - both Protestant evangelism (spiritual) and Bolivarism (political-material) filled the space.

Now, it is probable that impatient Tibetan nationalists are making their own history. 'Spiritual' leaders either have to discipline their own radicals or go with their flow. In every such case, a failure of 'auctoritas', the mentality of Augustine or the Inquisition, must lead to schism.

Once secular democracy ceases to constrain within liberal boundaries, spiritual leaders become 'tainted' either by the need to draw blood for their people or adopt a strategy of accommodation with power. The worst case is when secular power is used to destroy the schismatics - a common Catholic trick but not one likely to appeal to the Dalai Lama.

This is the new world that seems to be emerging in the wake of weakening hold of Western liberal democracy over its peoples. Men of faith are having to assert their values because they fear the vacuum created by liberal failures of will and policy.

Faith and Power

There is a political version of natural selection. Faith can combine with secular power and secular power can appropriate faith in this struggle. Faith associated with secular power can soon gain predatory dominance over multi-faith and decentralised democratic or localist alternatives.

The price of Catholic domination of Western culture was an accomodation with that rather dark character (read his life story) the Emperor Constantine, while cuddly old Anglicanism required Henry VIII to exist at all. Luther famously allied himself with the magistrates against Church and peasants.

Faith-based auctoritas is all about reining and destroying competitors for power and not about material redistribution of either economic or political resources.

The secular pitch implicit in auctoritas, as in Augustus the greatest of such figures, is that order does not redistribute power or wealth but it increases, through its stability, total wealth.

'Spirituality' often craves such order precisely because its mission is not material - at the most it wants to open up the space for charity, the free spirit of giving.

Stability means authority. Faith leaders are unelected and are authorities. The tendency towards the politically authoritarian in faith cultures is unmistakable.

But just as Emperors used the language of the Republic and Communists used the language of Democracy, so our frightened authoritarian faith-orientated betters are using the language of Liberalism when they mean something very different. 

Communitarianism and Authoritarianism

Gordon Brown has been bitten hard in his political ankle by Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor. He speaks of his faith (as his predecessor did) and the Cardinal has called his bluff - or rather contrasted one faith (Scots Catholic) with another (Scots Protestant).

Once Blair and Brown had introduced the language of rights and duties and of communitarianism, they were on a slippy slope towards accepting 'auctoritas' as a legitimate basis for politics in opposition to the 'demos'. 

Duties imply something external or essential to the individual. This, in turn, philosophically, implies that essentialism must have an interpreter beyond the relative and the contingent - an authority who one accepts on the basis of faith.

The recent proposal for compulsory voting is typical of the new stealth authoritarianism from an anxious elite. Instead of changing political forms to engage the public in the system by transforming it, the public are to be forced into a duty of engagement. 

This too is a culture of faith where 'oughts' are to govern what is. We ought to owe allegiance to the State or vote and so we must be made to demonstrate that we have fulfilled our duty.

This mentality has not existed in British politics since working people managed to shake off the squire and the parson over a hundred years ago.

The British public has walked away from politics for some very good reasons (including the preachiness of its current leadership) but, like Hitler in the Bunker in 1945, the politicians are blaming the people instead of themselves.

They are now arranging 'reforms' to buttress a busted system rather than thinking through why people are walking away and whether sovereignty truly resides in the people or in the machine.

The universal answer to this within the British elite remains that sovereignty resides in the Crown, but of course this no longer means our attenuated and basically decent Monarchy. 

It means a somewhat busted political class in Parliament, created out of central party lists, whose sole purpose is to supports competing Executives on the orders of their respective Party Whips.

The next stage is that traditional party allegiances themselves will collapse. 

The Tories have already tried to confuse matters by calling on trades unionists to reconsider their allegiance to New Labour, part of a strategy to remind Leftists just how disillusioned they are with a right-wing Labour Party.

This is so much nonsense too. The best that will happen from such tactics is the sullen withdrawal of natural supporters of all three traditional parties until the political class tries to hold back the dam of resentment, not only with 'fixes' like compulsory voting but transfers of funds into their own coffers through state funding.

In the end, voters will be legally bound into forms of behaviour they despise and resent as their taxes subsidise second rate professionals who act as mere liaison officers with the Executive, the real winner from such trickery.

Churches and Liberal Extremists Fill the Gap

Given that some of the more illusory aspects of British democracy have become ever clearer since the mass march of 2003 over Iraq, it is understandable that the Churches can seem no less legitimate than the policians and that they have an opportunity to meet the deficit.

The logic is for political factions to seek alliances with faith leaders. These may jointly demand a more intensive implementation of the new morality of rights and duties that seem to impinge more on the victims than on the creators of the almighty mess that most citizens see looming ahead.

I am not being fair to the Archbishop of Canterbury, I know this, and certainly not to liberal Anglicanism but leaders of other faiths, Jewish, Muslim and Catholic, are now in danger of setting the agenda because of the collapse in trust in secular democratic leadership.

Faith-based politics, and its offshoot which is an aggressive anti-faith politics, are becoming a worldwide phenomenon.

The Dutch are now preparing for the back-lash expected in the Muslim world as right-wing liberal extremist Geert Wilders releases his assertively anti-Islamic film in a direct challenge to implicit Muslim censorship of Western freedoms. This anti-faith intervention is a back-handed compliment to the rise of faith-based politics.

The Dutch Government and others have asked Wilders to desist but he seems adamant that the film will be released, probably on the internet, before the end of March. No-one knows (other than himself) what exactly it contains.

What we do know is that it will accuse Islam and the Koran of representing a fascist ideology. We have to oppose the release of this film simply because we consider it provocative bad manners but we consider both sides – banners and promoters – to be as bad as each other.

Most of the pragmatic establishment on both sides of the fence is rallying around pre-emptive diplomacy to miminise the effects of an 'irresponsible' internet release of a film that is expected to result in at least some deaths – whether of rioters or Dutch troops in Afghanistan.

It is not a case of Wilders being prepared to die for his beliefs but of his being prepared to have others' die for his beliefs - the true sign of the fanatic. The Grand Mufti of Syria (a moderate) has warned the European Parliament of ‘global consequences’ – 100 died in the Muhammed cartoons riots in 2006.

This genie will be let out of the bottle as a reaction to the faith explosion – a few extremists in one tradition will now provoke another tradition and inspire a counter-extremism that will soon bring 'chickens home to roost'.

Folk Memories & History Books

Faith is becoming a player again and faiths tend to have central figures who speak with authority - not Sunni Islam and Judaism perhaps, but certainly the Pope, the Dalai Lama, the Iranian Grand Ayatollah and the Archbishop of Canterbury. None of these were voted into office - nor was the local priest, rabbi or imam.

As democracy falters and congeals, there is an unreported faith-based realignment of political forces in which the Vatican, many Western liberal secularists, Saudi conservatives and Jewish interests are tending to combine against any accommodation with Radical Islam and, implicitly, with the Shi’a and anti-Western Leftism/state nationalism.

The Bin Laden threats against the Papacy (in the context of the Muhammed cartoons), scarcely reported in the UK, are taken much more seriously in Europe, especially Italy, than in the UK. There is a logic to Al-Qaeda resentment of the Papacy. It may seem an absurd logic but it works from their assumptions. 

The Vatican is much concerned with the fate of its brother Christians (especially In Iraq), it has come, with some difficulty, to a final accomodation with the Jewish community after centuries of collusion with anti-semitism, it has a recent historical role in collaboration with the US in destroying the rival ideology of communism (and so may reasonably be considered collusive in any US war with Islam) and, now, the Vatican and the Saudi and Qatari authorities appear to have come to an 'understanding' on opening churches on their respective soils.

A faith in alliance with your secular enemies - to Al-Qaeda, the Vatican is a natural target.

This is a new and still only vaguely defined cold war between those defending settled faiths and those promoting new and expansive faiths, or newly radicalised versions of old faiths that appeal to the politically excluded and perhaps, one day, to the hungry.

The economic infrastructures underpinning these new tensions will become clearer over time but secular authorities are faced with a new difficulty that hungry peasants and workers will not be led by alien communists but by traditionalists. 

In the war on terror, just as you might fight fire with fire, so conservative traditionalists become assets, rise in influence and undermine liberal secularism by demanding equal say on 'moral issues' (which have a tendency to expand in scope with time).

Liberal social democrats are particularly ‘screwed’ by what is happening because liberalism is, for the first time in history, now being protected by traditional conservative interests against ‘fanatical’, as the liberals see things, redistributors of power and resources.

This link, of faith and revolt and of faith and authority, has not been important in the West since the Early Modern peasant revolts and, after these were suppressed, inconvenient tribal insurgencies.

So, the past is not dead at all. Understanding some of these developments in international affairs still comes down to folk memories and to what has been taught in history books for partisan reasons.

We may, for example, think that early sixteenth century resistance to the Ottoman Empire in the European East is irrelevant today, yet it has been a central factor in the forms and content of recent murder and mayhem in the Balkans.

Northern Ireland used to be our native object lesson in the burdens of history but, with the collapse of a two power Cold War system that was keeping histories buried and in check, out they come again – and, in many cases, so they should.

Strange Alliances

All sorts of strange alliances and political positions are now emerging, based less on what we think we want for ourselves (as with traditional interest politics) and more about defending ourselves against what we think others want from us.

Arabs have created a narrative, with some justification, of dispossession, based on the proven conduct of white settlers in the massive white migrations out of Europe in the nineteenth century.

The Russians are rediscovering their Orthodoxy and their role as the Third Rome. Latin Americans reject Marx for Bolivar. Americans seek to extend their constitutional arrangements extraterritorially. 

The list of adaptations of local history to international relations is endless - we are moving backwards in time to an international politics that would be more familiar to diplomats operating before the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 than after it.

Even within the UK, liberal Protestants tend to be much more sympathetic to the general thrust of Muslim sentiment than Jews and Hindus, while minority right-wing Anglicanism tends to have emerging country or radical evangelical aspects.

The struggles around Livingstone's Mayoral candidacy owe a great deal to the melt-down of his rainbow politics as representatives of opposing ethnic groups start tearing into each other.

Not a lot of this is rationally considered - tribes associate or disassociate on 'faith' and the cultures involved are closer to those of football club supporters than reasoned debaters. Where is all this leading? Well, the first thing to say is that economic crises also bring out certain types of spiritual leader.

This will upset some people but Hitler was, for his people, briefly a spiritual leader and, post-war, a small esoteric clique represented by Savitri Devi and Miguel Serrano, and in a far more detached manner, Julius Evola, have sustained that 'spiritual' vision, despite the mainstream blanket ban on letting much wind of it come out into the open.

Communism’s eschatology and iconography were religious in its inspiration and Marxism has always been more powerful as a faith rather than a creature of analytical reason.

There is more of this to come. The radical religious elements in the resistance to colonialism and imperialism have now displaced the tendency towards accommodation and (relative) reasonableness of the first fifty years of struggle because accomodation and reasonableness delivered bugger-all.

Yasser Arafat and George Habash, even the ‘evil’ Saddam, appear ‘pale pink’ next to the ‘blood red’ of Shia and Sunni martyrdoms. If the Left Hand Path is triumphing, it is because the Right Hand Path failed to deliver justice.

Roosting Chickens

As the Reverend Wright said, ‘chickens are coming home to roost’. When the true instincts of the people are better expressed by Archbishops with a 2,000-year apostolic succession than by elected politicians, then there is something going very wrong with Western liberalism.

A recent Prime Minister who wore religion on his sleeve yet declared a bloody war and left office to take large sums from bankers is not the authentic product. We all sense it. A shallow man of straw. The new Prime Minister is a sincere 'son of the manse' but his ethic seems a world away from the sophisticated a-moral liberalism of his English subjects.

Perhaps this is why Barack Obama and, to a lesser extent, John McCain are so interesting – for all their flaws, the public detects that both men have some moral core that is in tune with the Western tradition at its best and that has been sadly lacking in the fanatical egotistical and power-crazed networks of the small people who have ruled the West recently.

If so, the fashion for religious leadership within the West may well pass because it is merely there to fill a vacuum and, when that vacuum is filled with tough competent leaders who are more than 'spin', then we can all get down to secular business again.

But, without being too apocalyptic about the collapse of civilization (pace the Archbishop of Canterbury), it is probably wise to bet on a ‘time of troubles’ ahead while secular democracy gets its house in order.

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