Alexander Bowen: Why does Starmer think the ‘faithist’ place for Bishops is staying in the House of Lords?

Alexander Bowen is a trainee economist based in Belgium, specialising in public policy assessment, and a policy fellow at a British think tank.

 The Hereditataries are no more – or at least in a month and a half, when this sitting closes, they will be no more. Gone with these hereditary peers then is the last of our living link with 1341 – the first Parliament to meet with the Church and the Peerage separated from the rest.

These peers had survived five religious settlements, four civil wars, one in which the other chamber disbanded it for being “useless and dangerous” and executed its de facto leader, the transition from farm to factory, however many ‘people’s budgets’, and even, unlike for example Saddam-Hussein, Tony Blair, but they could not survive Keir Starmer. After one thousand years it would be Keir Starmer who would stand up for the working man’s right to be quasi-useful in a quasi-useful body – so long as said working man had furnished him with quasi-tailored suits or quasi-effective comms advice.

I, for what it’s worth largely agree with these governing crusaders, in outcome if not in spirit, the presence of hereditary peers was indeed largely bizarre. Appeals to the ‘living embodiments of one-thousand years of history’ and tales of the Norman Conquest are pleasant enough, when the Bayeux Tapestry arrives in London I shall be one of the first in the egregiously long queue, but the legitimacy and purpose of a governing system is defined by the outcomes it delivers for the era in which it operates not by the symbols it once devised. Those outcomes are, as I think we can clearly see, in the category of ‘not good’ at best.

Where I object however to Keir’s culling is in its inconsistency. If our great modernisers are to commit to their own long march through the House of Lords, removing the 92 hereditary peers, then ought they not on their own principles – that these Lords were unrepresentive, unelected, appointed elites with little merit – turn their weapons to the Lords Spiritual? Do they really serve any greater purpose? Why then do they remain?

On any historic basis they ought to be a perfect target for a Labour government committed to symbolic scalps – fox hunters, hereditaries, private schools, farmers with excessively large landholdings. Do Bishops in their Palaces not warrant the same treatment? Was the Church of England not once said to be the Conservative Party at prayer? If for Sieyès Starmer the third estate is everything then why only dismantle the second?

It is, I think, largely because the Church of England has for its part adopted a kind of ecclesiastical Starmerism – doing much to win over those with little interest in it, and little to keep those who have been its demographic. As a shadow for Starmer’s 12 per cent approval, the Church enjoys its 2 per cent attendance.

It is an idea mostly clearly embodied in the concept of ‘Faithism’,  that is the belief that faith underpins communities, and their religious practices are, if not identical, largely interchangeable with history condensed into peculiarities.

It is a vision of religion I find slightly bizarre, not least because it seems to be underpinned by assuming your own view of religion is the view of religion, but it is a position that is at least rational. That we have special privileges that we would like to keep and that we can only reasonably defend them amongst our sort if we also extend them to sufficiently docile ‘co-religionists’. It is a kind of spiritual rent seeking – collaboration, potentially sincere, but nonetheless defined by a common attempt to ward off secularism. Like all cartels however, it is not one designed to serve the public interest.

Now I would not presume to know what is in the public’s interest as far as religion is concerned, faith cannot be measured nor evidenced, that is after all the point of faith, but it is at least worth looking at what the alternative to ecclesiastical Starmerism looks like. France and Québec offer that alternative – an alternative where instead of all faiths being privileged, none are.

France for its part defines itself as a secular country and actually means it. The Jules Ferry Laws remove religion from state schools – applied to Britain it means no more lying to nuns to try and get into a better school through the religious quota and no more Trojan Horses. The 1905 Law on Separation of Church and State – apply it to Britain and it means no more religious symbols in the public place, no more religious organisations for civil servants, no more voting in Churches or campaigning in mosques, and it means religious figures being as accountable as anyone else for inciting hatred.

Keep going further to 2004’s law banning conspicuous religious symbols in schools or 2021’s separatism law letting the government supervise and shutter religious groups that attack the basic values of France. Québec for its part has Bill 21 – preventing public religious affiliation by state employees, Bill 94 – preventing public religious affiliation by anyone who interacts with schoolchildren, and now Bill 9 banning public prayer.

That latter bill may be one well worth taking note of given the most discussed subject of the last week – Nick Timothy’s call to ban the public iftar in Trafalgar Square, a position that was naturally criticised by the Church of England’s faithist leaders. Nick Timothy, whatever one thinks of his specific conclusion and whatever wants to propose as a speculative motivation, though I don’t frankly think it particularly matters, is at least asking the right question. If the public square is our collective good, can it be privatised for one faith even temporarily?

The Church of England in preserving its privileges may say yes, but the rest of us needn’t.