National Life: Shared Values and Public Policy Priorities

Lord Glasman Excerpts

Friday 2nd December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Glasman (Lab)]

My Lords, I offer my appreciation for both the office and the person of the most reverend Primate, although I must say that when I say those words “the most reverend Primate” it does sound a bit like an evolutionary category, and I cannot quite get that out of my mind. I also express my appreciation of the recent book that I have just read, Dethroning Mammon, which offers up the real space for what I wish to say today. I really agreed with the general direction of what the most reverend Primate said about moving away from this concept of values always as a list. The curse of the list is a philosophical curse—you have different things on the list that contradict each other, and then you write another list before you laminate it and stick it up in primary school classrooms as a way of directing attention. The most reverend Primate has moved in completely the right way in moving into this idea of practices and then virtues.

Very occasionally, I am criticised by people on my own side for working so closely with the Church, as I have done throughout my life on issues such as the living wage and limiting usury. I always reply in the same way: at least Christians and people of faith do not believe that the free market created the world and that it is something inherited and anterior. Of course, it must also be said that neither did the administrative state create the world, and I really appreciated the balance the most reverend Primate gave on that. I would also say that I love liberty much too much ever to be a liberal, and the reason for that is because of the emphasis put, which he did quite correctly, on institutions and practices. The thing when we are talking about British values is how we care for our covenantal inheritance. These institutions are inherited: the law is one crucial part and the Church is another, along with autonomous self-governing universities. We used to call these intermediate institutions that nurture virtue the body politic.

I would call virtue good-doing rather than do-gooding. It is a way of excellence of practice. When the most reverend Primate talks of hospitality and generosity, these are not values but a way of relating to other people. These are practices that can be done well. As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ely said, the notion of character embedded in institutions is the most precious part of our inheritance, through which we protect liberty and democracy. That is why we should really concentrate now.

I had a very funny conversation with a Member of the other House, Michael Gove, who said to me, “What we need with Brexit is a quickie divorce”. I asked him, “A quickie divorce like Henry VIII wanted a quickie divorce?”. There is a certain lack of historical understanding of where quickie divorces can lead—that one obviously led to the Reformation. This is what we have to think about: what is the covenantal inheritance that needs to be embedded in a self-governing nation, which is what we are to be?

One of the ways of doing that is definitely, as the most reverend Primate said, through the notion of the common good. A certain precondition of the common good is not to despise or dehumanise people who voted for Brexit as racists and nationalists but to try genuinely to engage in renewing the institutions that assert this fundamental point that the Church has always been faithful to, which is that human beings are not commodities. The madness of neo-liberalism is—as I said, I love liberty much too much to be a liberal, and I am much too conservative ever to be associated with the party opposite—the idea that human beings and nature are commodities to be bought and sold and find their price, which is an idea that is as wicked and pernicious as the idea that the state should control and administer the very nature of the person. It is precisely the intermediate institutions —the schools, the universities, the Church, the unions, the law—that protect the nature of the person from their domination by these two external forces. That is essentially the path.

The really crucial virtue that I wish to concentrate on is one that has been protected by the Church and neglected by us, which is that of vocation—the idea of good-doing and having a calling. A very terrible thing about our country is that in 1832 we protected the notion of vocation for lawyers, doctors, dentists and accountants but abolished it for plumbers, carpenters and engineers. There was a free market in those manual crafts, and we made the distinction between a profession and a vocation, and we degraded the concept of vocation essentially to mean unskilled or semi-skilled labour. I share with your Lordships the fact that we never hear in football the notion of a “vocational foul”, but we certainly hear of the “professional foul”. We saw the degradation of our professions in the crash, where accountants paid by companies were writing things off and concealing massive deceit, exaggeration and vice. If we can extend this concept of vocation institutionally through the idea of the building of character through an inheritance of a skill and a trade, then we can talk about internal regulation, rather than external regulation, and the pursuit of a common good embodied in the covenantal institutions of our inheritance.

Among those, this Parliament is supreme, where we have the representation of workers, of capital and—one of the glories of our House—of the common good between the religious and the secular. The common good derives from the very strong stress on vocation and virtue in our institutions, without which we are always prey to incoherent lists and the domination of both the market and the administrative state.