³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ

Good morning.

When all the results are confirmed there will be 650 members of the new parliament. They will understandably be filled with a huge feeling of excitement, but also, I hope, a sense of trepidation, for much will be expected of them. We have voted for them, and put our trust in them that they will do their very best for the country. We have given them power and in our democratic system they are in the end accountable to us the voters. But there is something even higher than the electorate. In 1774 Edmund Burke said to the electors of Bristol that it was his duty to do all he could for them but ‘ his unbiassed opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the law and the constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable.’

It is quite rightly a very high view of the political vocation. Not all the new MP’s will share Burke’s view that their mature judgement and enlightened conscience is ‘a trust from Providence’. But for those who do share that view the daily prayers in Parliament, both in the Commons and the Lords, will be especially meaningful. One prayer addresses God with the words ‘from whom alone cometh all counsel, wisdom, and understanding; we thine unworthy servants, here gathered together in thy Name, do most humbly beseech thee to send down thy Heavenly Wisdom from above, to direct and guide us in all our consultations’

But whether MP’s are able to make that prayer their own or not, I believe that now is a time for a new seriousness of purpose; indeed for a new moral purpose. We tend to shy away from using the word moral in our public discourse for fear of being judgemental. Interestingly however not long ago both Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak used the word, the former saying he would make tackling knife crime a ‘moral mission’ and Rishi Sunak describing the infected blood scandal as ‘a decades-long moral failure at the heart of our national life’ We do not want to go back to Victorian times with its sense of moral righteousness combined with its moral blindness in so many areas, but a new moral seriousness, combined with a sense that we are all frail and fallible would be a good start for the new parliament. Jesus put the challenge very starkly.

From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded.

Show less