Post-election musings

[anglomedved]

13 May 2010

I have been spending more time than I perhaps should have meditating on social, political and economic structures.

We have just passed through the rather unpleasant game of the British general election.

One of the most difficulty things in things politics is the gap between the theory, and the values supposedly undergirding it, reality, where much of this undergirding disappears. Theoretical value is that everyone has the right to an equal say, and that anything with the desire and stamina can enter into the political process.

Reality (in the UK) is that what we have is two or three 'balls of power', with their succession within them based on co-option, confirmed every so often by the people via general elections. Probably the strongest, and certainly the most stable of these balls of power is the Conservatives, not least because they come from the social classes which have considered it their right and due to be in command, and to be well rewarded for this (in terms of how far they can bend the system to maintain a certain base of wealth and the concomitant flexibility). I fear that, in the English system, the Liberal Democrat junior coalition partners are going to fall foul of this.

The reality elsewhere in Europe is not dissimilar. In Belgium, we have our own power class, much of which is the descendants of 19^th century industrial dynasties, often inter-married with the local aristocracy, which sees power perhaps less in political terms, but which is dead set on preserving its heritage from depredations of excessive redistribution. I suspect the private banks, in particular one I often work for ("wealthy people looking after wealthy people's money”) of playing a key role in this system. In France too, the élite class is dead scared of ‘real’ democracy, 'populisme' as it calls it.

There is nothing necessarily morally wrong in this ‘quasi-democratic’ set-up from a Christian standpoint, providing that society retains a reasonable degree of stability, that we are 'godlily and quietly governed', and that a basic provision of education and health care is provided. The danger lies in when the proclaimed values (an equal say for everyone) and the reality are too far apart. However right these values may sound in theory - and however terribly 'un-Christian' it would seem today to question them – the gap remains. Enough for people to talk about a ‘lie’, to be disaffected and opt out of the process. It is therefore imperative that we as Christians should be very careful in the support we give to the ‘democratic' concept. We have no interest as a Church to be martyred for someone else's half-truth.

Traditionally, there has been a sort of tacit social agreement between the 'haves' and the 'have nots' - that the 'haves' are allowed to have, providing the 'have nots' do not become too indigent.  This agreement has been broken in much of Europe. The blame comes on both sides: the 'haves' have often been totally unconcerned with any duty towards the rest, the 'have nots' have been too demanding and punitive, as a result of which the ‘haves’ no longer see themselves as bound by the social obligations that go with wealth, and have moved their wealth out of harm's reach. It would be instructive to know what percentage of the wealth of the Belgian upper class is essentially still in Belgium, and what percentage is in the Far East.