Blogging through the night – follow Ekklesia’s rolling election blog

Posted on by symonhill

Tonight, I’ll be tweeting and blogging throughout the night as the general election results come in.

Rather than blogging on this site, I’ll be contributing to the rolling election blog run by Ekklesia, the Christian political thinktank. The blog is already rolling, with frequent brief insights and observations on election developments. I’m honoured to be blogging alongside an impressive team of progressive Christian contributors.

Ekklesia has been exploring the role of values and beliefs in the election, emphasising that an election is only one event in democracy, exploring innovative approaches to politics and encouraging people to “Vote for what you believe in”.

Although it’s not always possible to add comments on Ekklesia blogs, please feel free to respond to me by commenting on here, tweeting me at @SymonHill or emailing me at symonhill@gmail.com. If you’re on Twitter, please use the hashtag #Votebelief to refer to Ekklesia’s election coverage or rolling blog.

You can also make a donation to Ekklesia and help us to keep awake!

Predictions about the Green Party

Posted on by symonhill

I’m often cautious about making election forecasts, but when it comes to the Green Party, I’m unusually confident about my predictions.

Firstly, the Green Party of England and Wales (particularly in England) will achieve better results than it has ever done in a General Election. The Greens are likely to hold Brighton Pavilion. Even if they gain no other seats, they will come second in a fair few. Their percentage of the national vote will be higher than ever before. They are, to be honest, starting from a pretty low point. Given their rise in the last year or so, it would take a heavy setback for them not to achieve their best result.

Secondly, the Green Party will not do as well as the hype has suggested. From the way that some talk, you’d think the Greens were expecting to storm into Parliament with a whole gang of MPs. In reality, even the most optimistic Greens do not expect the party to win more than three seats at the very most.

Thirdly, much of the media will focus on the second point and not the first. Headlines saying “Greens fail to live up to the hype” and “Disappointment for Greens” are pretty likely, as the right-wing press overlooks the reality that the party has achieved its best ever result.

Given the media’s obsession with personalities, and the tendency to equate leaders with parties, some will then go on to write stories along the lines of “Bennet’s leadership questioned as Greens lick their wounds”. So let’s remember: read the figures, not the headlines.

15 UKIP candidates and two Tories accidentally pledge to oppose Trident

Posted on by symonhill

Fifteen UKIP candidates and two Conservatives have signed a statement that commits them to opposing the renewal of the Trident nuclear weapons system. Unfortunately, they appear to have done so by accident.

Indeed, those who produced the statement seem to have overlooked the meaning of what they have written. The Christian Party has produced a so-called “Declaration of British Values”, which they have asked candidates of all parties to sign.

The declaration includes the following sentence:

“I will not participate in nor facilitate abortion, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide, euthanasia, or any other act that involves intentionally destroying innocent human beings.”

Forty-one candidates have signed the declaration, including two sitting Conservative MPs –
David Amess and Bob Blackman – and fifteen UKIP candidates (most of the others are from the Christian Party or Christian People’s Alliance).

All warfare involves taking innocent life, although supporters of wars insist that this is unintentional. Nuclear weapons, however, cannot be used without killing millions of innocent people. It is illogical to argue that they are “only a deterrent” – they will not deter anyone if it is not possible that they may be used.

Of course, the signatories will insist that they were thinking of abortion. Some who refuse to facilitate abortion are happy to facilitate the creation of weapons that would kill thousands of unborn children – and millions of others.

UKIP’s Christian group accuses gay people of ‘recruiting’ children

Posted on by symonhill

One of the nastiest accusations against gay people is the claim that they “recruit” children with the intention of turning them gay. In Britain, most groups that oppose LGBT rights, even the fairly extreme ones, tend to avoid making this claim explicitly. However, it has now turned up on a leaflet distributed by the group called Christian Soldiers of UKIP.

Christian Soldiers of UKIP is a group set up by Christians who belong to the UK Independence Party (UKIP). The UKIP leadership has described the group as “authorised but not official”.

Nigel Farage and his colleagues insist that they do not share the group’s views on sexuality.  Nonetheless, they are prepared to work with them. They have certainly not disowned the “Christian Soldiers”.

I wrote on the Huffington Post a few days ago about UKIP’s links with right-wing Christian lobby groups such as Christian Concern. Earlier this week, Nigel Farage launched UKIP’s “Christian Manifesto”, which offers to defend Britain’s “Christian heritage” and the “rights” of Christians who want to discriminate against gay and bisexual people.

The latest comments from UKIP’s Christian Soldiers shows further evidence of the party’s willingness to tolerate homophobia.

The leaflet in question is an attack on sex education in schools, which it claims is seeking to “normalise” same-sex relationships. The leaflet’s writers declare, “The state is allowing the sexual grooming of our Primary School children for same-sex attraction”.

This leaflet was distributed during at least one hustings event in East Anglia (without the organisers’ permission). I would be interested to hear from anyone who has seen it, or any similar leaflets, elsewhere.

In their leaflet, UKIP’s Christian Soldiers state:

“What the LGBT is achieving, of course, is a recruitment drive. As such people cannot reproduce their own kind, they must recruit among the young and this is best done among children in schools, the younger the better.”

Presumably the Christian Soldiers of UKIP believe that heterosexuals can “reproduce their own kind” by giving birth only to children who turn out straight.

The leaflet includes the lyrics of songs and dances for young children that imply a celebration of a same-sex marriage or unclear gender identity. On the grounds that the children change “partners” during the activity (as they surely do in lots of activities), the leaflet adds the note, “Multiple partners made to seen normal”.

The Christian Soldiers of UKIP state:

“Ideally, we should work towards the removal of all ‘sex education’ from state schools.”

They then go on to link increased sex education with a rise in teenage pregnancies and abortions. No evidence whatsoever is cited to back this up.

Marginalised and minority groups have always been accused of harming children. Most famously, European Jews were for centuries accused of kidnapping and crucifying Christian children (the blood libel, as it’s commonly called). However, early Christians were also accused of drinking children’s blood. Recently, child abuse in the UK has attracted more attention when the perpetrators have been Asian and the victims white, with racists linking the horrific abuse of children not to the people who committed it but to whole ethnic or religious groups.

At the same time, recent years have given ample evidence of how child abuse is often overlooked when the perpetrators are powerful or respected. Child abuse should be tackled regardless of the perpetrator, not used as a means to attack social minorities.

Christian Soldiers of UKIP, in their leaflet, quote Jesus’ comments about not harming children. This is outrageous. They want to deny children the chance to learn about life, to consider different ethical views for themselves and to grow up to form healthy, loving, consensual relationships free from prejudice and narrow gender roles.

I could call on UKIP to disassociate themselves from the Christian Soldiers, but I’m not going to bother. UKIP’s tolerance of homophobia is already clear. Christians, however, need to do a better job of rejecting it.

Let’s remember that some of those who have been handed this vicious leaflet may not have read or heard many other comment from Christians on sexuality. If we don’t do a better job of speaking up, it may be the only Christian perspective on sexuality that they encounter.

Resisting Trident during the general election campaign

Posted on by symonhill

I’ve written a couple of articles lately about the role of Trident in the general election campaign.

One was for Waging Nonviolence, an international website about nonviolent activism, based in the US. It’s written with a non-British audience in mind. Given the nature of the site, it assumes that most readers will be anti-Trident. It is a discussion of strategy and tactics in resisting Trident.

The other was on the Huffington Post and was a more general reflection on the role of Trident in the election campaign, particularly as it affects the Labour Party.

Labour need to stand up and say they’ll scrap Trident

Posted on by symonhill

Trident is trending on Twitter. At present, it is the Number One trending topic in the UK.

Opponents of Trident have been hoping for years that Trident would become an election issue. It is ironic that it has hit the headlines because the Conservatives have decided to talk about it.

In saying this, I’m not downplaying the efforts of thousands of activists who have stepped up anti-Trident activism in recent months, blockading bases such as Aldermaston and Faslane and spreading opposition to Trident in their local communities. Nor am I dismissing the efforts of anti-Trident parties, such as the Greens, the Scottish National Party (SNP) and Plaid Cymru.

However, it is worth noting that the Conservative Party would not have sought to make Trident a headline issue today if they did not consider it an opportunity to gain support.

This is rather bizarre, given that opinion polls consistently show that a majority of the British public are opposed to Trident renewal, especially at a time of austerity and spending cuts.

The situation with Russia and Ukraine may have affected this figure to a limited extent. Michael Fallon’s rhetoric this morning may gain the Conservatives a few votes from the “defend our nation” tendency. Such people talk as if everyone in the UK had the same interests and the same concerns, whereas it seems to me that the British and Russian people have more in common with each other than with their own governments. It is the global super-rich who are robbing and threatening us all, as more people are coming to realise.

However, issues of “defence” feel like safe ground to Conservative politicians such as Michael Fallon. Both Tory and Labour members look back to the 1980s, when Labour’s opposition to nuclear weapons was blamed for its election defeats.

A good many voters going to the polls this year – those aged under 32 – were not even born at the time of the Conservative landslide in 1983. Many more of us – those between 32 and 50 – were born but not old enough to vote. The very youngest people who will vote on 7 May were born in the week after Tony Blair became Prime Minister in 1997.

Please don’t get me wrong: I’m not dismissing those voters over 50 who did vote in 1983. They make up a sizeable chunk of the electorate. But many of them have moved on from the 1980s, whereas the Tory and Labour leaderships seem not to have done so. The Conservatives think they can gain support by banging out about “defence”. Labour are frightened and are desperately pleading that they too will retain Trident and defend Britain.

When I say “Labour”, I mean the Labour leadership. It was recently discovered that three quarters of Labour candidates oppose Trident. The question, as a friend of mine put it, is whether three quarters of them have backbones. Will they simply give in to the Tory pressure?

In 2013, Ed Miliband showed real guts by leading his MPs to vote against bombing Syria. In recent days, he has made strong progressive points about “non-doms” and other forms of tax dodging. Why will he not have the courage to say what the majority of the public believe and commit himself to scrapping Trident?

It’s great that Trident has become an election issue. Let’s not leave it to politicians and the mainstream media to decide the way it is discussed. We need to increase the pressure on Labour candidates to take an anti-Trident position. Let’s not forget for a minute that we must put pressure on SNP candidates to ensure that they really do make Trident a red line issue. And we need to be out on the streets, in our communities, our faith groups, our trades unions and online, making the case against Trident.

Parliament is due to make a decision on Trident renewal next year. We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to stop it going ahead, making the world safer, leading the way on disarmament, and spending £100bn on something worthwhile at a time of spiralling poverty and imminent climate chaos.

Britain has never been a Christian country

Posted on by symonhill

Happy Easter!

As Christians around the world mark Easter Sunday and celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, there are some who are using the occasion to demand that Britain needs to turn the clock back.

The right-wing lobby group Christian Concern has published a survey suggesting that 73% of the public believe that Britain has become “less of a Christian country” since the general election five years ago.

This suits Christian Concern in their attempt to push their two main messages: Firstly, that Britain should be a Christian country. Secondly, that Britain is no longer a Christian country.

David Cameron has also been known to employ such language, albeit from a different angle. In his Easter address this year, he insisted that Britain is still a “Christian country”. His address, which  made no reference to Jesus, seemed to confuse “Christian values” with middle class respectability.

I have on many occasions challenged groups such as Christian Concern to explain how Britain was “Christian” when its leaders were involved in the slave trade, when its representatives were committing genocide in Tasmania and when its troops were setting up concentration camps in South Africa. They have never answered this question.

I have little idea of what a “Christian country” is supposed to be. Jesus never said anything about establishing Christian countries. This is hardly surprising, given his general hostility to political and religious authorities. But if a “Christian country” is supposed to mean a country based on Jesus’ teachings, then Britain has never been a Christian country. Nor has anywhere else.

Judging from their press release today, Christian Concern seem to think that Britain is “less Christian” because of the legalisation of same-sex marriage. Jesus’ teachings on poverty, violence and power, about which he said a great deal more than sexuality, seem not to concern them.

On Good Friday, we remember Jesus’ execution at the hands of a brutal empire with the collusion of the religious establishment. On Easter Day, we celebrate Jesus’ resurrection, in which God breaks through the cycle of violence and reveals that the power of love and liberation will ultimately triumph over the evil, oppression and injustice. Today, let’s seek to follow – however imperfectly – Jesus’ example of loving resistance and active nonviolence. This means challenging the powers of this world as well as allowing ourselves to be challenged. It has nothing to do with “Christian countries”.

Christian Concern’s general election campaign: Distorting the Gospel

Posted on by symonhill

With the general election coming up, there are a range of websites and other resources to help Christians to engage with the issues. My favourite is of course Vote for what you believe in set up by the Ekklesia thinktank, but I am rather biased, given that I’m an associate of Ekklesia.

Nonetheless, there are some other good sites. Many complement each other, while some come from different perspectives, which is fair enough.

I feel slightly sick, however, having just looked at the general election website of Christian Concern, a homophobic right-wing lobby group that sadly has influence over churches beyond its own extreme position.

The site lists “four key areas” that Christian Concern claims serve as a “litmus test” for society.

The first is “Family”, by which they mean a defence of the nuclear family and opposition to same-sex marriage. Nuclear families as we understand them today did not exist in Jesus’ time. Jesus himself does not appear to have been overly keen on biological families generally, insisting that “whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3, 35).

The second is “Foundations”, which seems to refer to protecting Britain’s “Christian heritage”. Britain has never been a country based around the teachings of Jesus, however powerful churches may have been at certain points. Does preserving a certain set of cultural practices have anything to do with living out the Gospel of Jesus?

The third is “Liberty”, by which they mean liberty for Christians. Christian Concern make artificial connections between a wide range of cases that supposedly show discrimination against Christians. Some are about over-the-top uniform codes. Most are about the supposed right of Christians to discriminate against others (usually same-sex couples). Jesus never taught his followers to demand rights for themselves that they deny to others.

The fourth is “Life”, which begins with the promising line “How we treat the most vulnerable in society speaks volumes about what we really value”. Is this the point at which Christian Concern will declare their opposition to austerity, their outrage at food banks, their solidarity with the homeless, unemployed and low-paid?

No, of course not. It’s all about abortion. Christian Concern think they can stop abortion simply by banning it. If they really want to reduce abortions, they need to tackle the causes, challenging poverty and sexual abuse, amongst others. In coming years, we are very likely to find that cuts to disability services have led to an increase in the number of abortions of disabled babies. But while Christian Concern will not say a word against these cuts, I’m not willing to take their claims seriously even on the question of abortion.

Let’s not forget that Christian Concern is an organisation whose leaders have refused to answer questions about the allegation that they held a strategy meeting with Tommy Robinson when he was leader of the far-right English Defence League.

The Bible says far, far more about poverty and violence than it does about sexuality and marriage. This is not to say that marriage and sexuality don’t matter. The Bible makes clear that they do matter. Jesus’ teachings about love and liberation apply just as strongly to sexual matters as they do to others (although I argue that they lead naturally to support for loving same-sex relationships, not opposition to them).

But how can anyone claiming to apply a Christian voice to an election completely ignore poverty? How can they insist that an unborn child should be born but say nothing about the chances of that child being killed in warfare? How can they demand the “right” of Christians to discriminate against gay and bisexual people but not defend the right of disabled people to equality and respect? How can they talk of the supposed destruction of Christian values but have nothing to say about the very real destruction of our God-given environment?

Jesus began his ministry by saying he had come to bring “good news to the poor” (Luke 4,18). Luke tells us he said “Blessed are you who are poor… Woe to you who are rich” (Luke 6, 20-24). In Matthew’s version, Jesus blessed “the poor in spirit” (Matthew 5,3) – that is, those who side with the poor. The majority of Jesus’ parables concerned economic themes. He spoke of a kingdom in which the first would be last and the last first.

I am sure that my own interpretations of Jesus’ teachings are mistaken in all sorts of ways. We all make errors. We are all influenced by our preconceptions and desires. Seeking to follow Jesus is a moment-by-moment challenge. Like many others, I fail all the time. Please let me emphasise that I do not expect all Christians to agree with me. I learn a great deal from those who don’t.

This does not mean that I can sit back while a group claiming to be a Christian voice in the general election use that voice to ignore the growth of poverty and inequality (thereby helping them to grow) and to stir up homophobia. Surely it is barely possible to come near to any understanding of Jesus’ teachings if we wilfully ignore the centrality of issues of wealth and power to almost everything that he had to say.

To speak of the Gospel without reference to poverty is not simply to twist the Gospel. It is proclaim another gospel all together .

Grassroots activism and the Leaders’ Debate

Posted on by symonhill

Leaders’ Debates are always going to be unbearable on some level. The petty attacks, the narrowness of the discussions, the very limited time span, the tendency of some people to think that shouting loudly constitutes debate (meaning Nigel Farage in this case).

Nonetheless, it could have been a lot worse. Compared to the equivalent debates in the 2010 election, this one included reference to some relatively progressive ideas. There was talk of scrapping zero-hour contracts, cracking down on dodgy landlords, building more houses, ending NHS privatisation and challenging energy companies. While Farage blamed everything on immigration, the panel did not generally dance to his tune and for once his nasty xenophobic agenda failed to dominate the discussion.

I’m not being naïve. Discussion of progressive policies does not necessarily mean that they will be introduced, even if those who promoted them come to power. Also, things could have been considerably more radical. It’s a shame that in the education discussion, no-one challenged the power of fee-paying schools. Capitalism was not attacked explicitly. Only one leader (Nicola Sturgeon) repeatedly mentioned nuclear weapons.

This won’t stop me being glad that progressive ideas came up more than might have been expected. They may even have shifted the election debate slightly to the left (though this partly depends on which bits the media choose to focus on, and I’m not holding my breath).

So why did these progressive ideas come up in the Leaders’ Debate?

Partly, of course, it was due to the presence of three leaders to the left of Labour (Natalie Bennett, Leanne Wood and Nicola Sturgeon). Wood did a good job of challenging xenophobia, telling Farage to be “ashamed of yourself”. One of the best quotes of the evening surely has to be Wood’s comment, “It was not Polish care workers and Estonian bar workers who caused the economic crisis. It was bankers.” All three of them rejected the notion of austerity, with Sturgeon saying we can’t “afford any more austerity” and Wood saying Miliband offered only “austerity light”.

While none of these three went as far as I would have liked, I think we have a lot to thank them for.

Yet some of the progressive ideas were emphasised by Ed Miliband: ending zero-hour contracts, cracking down on corporate tax avoidance, raising the minimum wage, tackling private sector rent levels. I don’t believe that these things came up simply because Ed Miliband feels strongly about them. Indeed, when he became leader four and a half years ago, he had barely mentioned most of them.

These issues became noticed because of the work of people at the grassroots, in their communities, high streets and workplaces, speaking up and taking action. Corporate tax-dodging was noticed by the media and mainstream politicians only after UK Uncut took nonviolent direct action in tax-dodging shops in 2010-11. Zero-hour contracts and fuel poverty have been the focus of campaigns backed by trades unions, faith groups and others around Britain. The state of private sector renting has been a disgrace for decades, but the efforts of campaigning groups have combined with criticisms of rising house-prices to make people like Ed Miliband realise that challenging it can be a vote-winner.

Whether Labour – or for that matter, the SNP or others – will stick to these policies after the election is another matter. That’s why we will need to keep up the pressure after 7th May. But the fact that they are even talking about them demonstrates the effect that grassroots activism can have.

Elections are only one small part of politics, only one event in democracy. Real democracy means using our power whether or not an election is on. That’s why we need to keep campaigning after the election – through pressuring politicians, through direct action, through protests, boycotts and strikes, through living out our values where we find ourselves.  When we vote we hand over only some of our power, temporarily, to the people we elect.