“Pythonesque preaching from Church of England top brass is of no practical help in this economic mess”, Simon Jenkins has written in The Guardian.
His comment continues:
Bishops who start losing an argument take refuge in prayer. Others take refuge in “ethics”. For weeks both have been deployed in an as yet fruitless assault on the immorality of the credit crunch and capitalism generally. No stone has been left unthrown. Editorial writers have waxed eloquent and a terrible mess has been created on the steps of St Paul’s. Bland has fought bland in a media extravaganza, more rag week than rage week.
It has awaited only the great cliche from on high, and on Sunday it duly came. Labour’s Ed Miliband declared the shenanigans “a wake-up call” and a “crisis of concern”. The army’s former chief, Lord Dannatt, added his pennyworth with a “loss of moral compass”. The Church of England hit back with a cry to “do what is right”. My brain gradually softened.
The only duty liberal tradition owes democracy is not to pretend the complex can always be made simple. The British economy has entered a period of low growth, in which many will feel poorer than before. This is not because bankers were suddenly godless, the rich venal or the poor feckless. The reason is that for over a decade at the start of the 21st century Britons wanted to live better than they could afford, and borrowed in the hope that tomorrow would pay off the debt. Governments behaved likewise, and in spades. It may be consoling to blame a greedy speculator or an idle regulator. But every borrower was speculating, not least those who bought houses with other people’s money, hoping that the price would rise to compensate.
The response of religion and ethics has been a feast of abstract nouns. A crisis is declared. Capitalism is “at fault”. The cause is greed, wealth, inequality. Giles Fraser, who has resigned as the canon chancellor of St Paul’s, intones the paradox of freedom, that the more we are free, the more we are in chains, except he does not mind if the chains belong to government. The archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, new whirling dervish of the left, cries woe and woe again, and writes an article for the Financial Times. Miliband, whose guilty tribe might benefit from a period of reflective silence, miraculously discovers “a gap between people’s values and the way our country is run”.
Indulging the protest movement excuses liberals from the obligation to plant a row of beans, let alone think. Anyone prepared to put on a silly mask and shout “hang a banker” in front of a portico is excused a thousand years in purgatory. The BBC pats campers’ heads and calls them by their first names (imagine if they were BNP protesters). Ageing commentators blink away tears of nostalgia for days when they marched against Vietnam and the bomb. The Church of England gives an almighty belch and smiles, as if it were dispatching the Children’s Crusade. All have abandoned Bernard Crick’s cry, that the purpose of politics is “to make old platitudes pregnant”.
It is near pointless to seek practical proposals in this ethical fluff. Fraser recalls days when “bankers and traders worked face to face” with clients, as if St Paul’s should set up a farmer’s market in credit default swaps. He attacks companies for saving their souls “by giving charity to photogenic kids and orchestras”. What about his photogenic campers and their V-for-Vendetta masks?
The church’s favourite banker, Ken Costa, declares that “maximising shareholder value should no longer be the sole criterion” for company performance. What criterion does he have in mind: government edict, family aggrandisement or executive pay? The archbishop wants to see fiscal “fairness and a sense of proportion” – magisterially undefined – yet dips a toe into the water with a Tobin tax. His Grace should spit it out. Why not tax the super-rich at 80%?
The old campaigners against nuclear weapons and “wars of choice” had clarity of purpose. They knew what they wanted and we could agree or disagree. But war is simple, economics difficult. London has been reduced to the level of Savonarola’s Florence. It has slumped into pious simplicity, with the people seeking only somewhere to scream and someone to burn. They needed a scapegoat and a press officer, and outside St Paul’s happened on both.
Since the dawn of democracy many have felt disenfranchised and out of the loop of power. This is no less so when government is complicated, assailed by global circumstance, public opinion, lobbyists and the media. The craving to howl abuse is understandable. But those in positions of leadership, including churches, have less excuse. This week’s church report on financial ethics burbled on like a Monty Python sermon, favouring “a solid foundation for future engagement and highlighting issues where action might be taken …”. It is not ethics anyone can use. It is Auden’s “folded lie, the romantic lie of the sensual man in the street”. It is no help to practical government.
Practical government needs help. Getting out of the present mess will be the hardest peacetime challenge to confront any group of politicians in modern times. Judgments are required on probabilities. Budgetary caution must be balanced against demand stimulus, protection against open borders, helping Greeks against taxing Germans. Financial policy must level out speculative cycles and restructure banks to internalise risk. Economic policy must assess the evil of recession against the evil of inflation.
These technical balances may be loaded with ethical assumptions, but I have yet to come across an ethical contribution that is not a cop-out. We are asked what Jesus would say. It really does not matter. We are told that money should not be a number one consideration in the City. Why not, in a bank? The campers claim to want “structural change towards authentic global equality.” I imagine most people do, in theory. Fraser sees “ethics as a state of solidarity with other human beings”. I am sure he is right. Next question.
This empty philosophising goes nowhere. Now as never before the mediating channels of democracy – parliament, parties, local government, universities, unions, media – need participation and strengthening. They cannot be short-circuited by a yell from the street, the shortest route to dictatorship.
Britain is not Egypt or Syria, or even poor Greece. It is a reasonably mature and open society. Its predicament is the result of an intellectual catastrophe within the policymaking community, a catastrophe as yet un-atoned by inquiry. It will be resolved only by hard graft within Britain’s political institutions. Liberal opinion knows that, yet it plays to the gallery and pretends that gestures and slogans can change the world.
See Jim Wallis on renewing Wall Street’s values in Today’s Blog