National Life: Shared Values and Public Policy Priorities

Lord Bishop of Oxford Excerpts

Friday 2nd December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Harries of Pentregarth (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, am most grateful to the most reverend Primate for initiating this important and timely debate. It is just what our fragmented and disorientated society needs at the moment. It also resonates very strongly with the recommendations of Living with Difference, the report by the Commission on Religion and Belief in British Public Life—of which I was a member—chaired by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss. This reads:

“At a time when so much is dominated by the sole value of individual choice, faith leaders and other opinion leaders need to initiate discussions on the values, political and personal, they have in common with each other and with the humanist values of the Enlightenment. A national conversation should be launched across the UK by leaders of faith communities and opinion leaders in other ethical traditions to create a shared understanding of the fundamental values underlying public life”.

Some take the view that there are no shared values, or at least that it is impossible to identify them. A strand running through Dostoyevsky’s great novel The Brothers Karamazov is the line:

“If God does not exist, everything is permitted”.

This was, of course, the starting point for John-Paul Sartre and the post-war existentialists. It is not a view I share. Everyone, whatever they believe or do not believe, has some inkling of the good, some capacity for moral discernment, some ability to take others into account. It is part of what is meant by being made in the image of God, from the Christian point of view. The Jewish tradition has its own equivalent in the concept of the Noachide laws, according to the Talmud, the seven imperatives given to all humanity. So does Islam. As for humanism, the very name indicates the possibility of values and virtues simply by reason of our shared humanity, as does the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The most reverend Primate’s Motion is in two parts. The first concerns the values underpinning our national life. Some of these are very basic but, however basic, I suggest that they are now being seriously eroded. The front page of one newspaper not long ago was taken up with two stories. One was that the Oxford Dictionaries’ international word of the year is “post-truth”, a word whose use increased 2,000% in 2016 compared with last year. It seems we live in a post-truth society, but an absolute requirement for any society is the assumption that most people most of the time mean more or less what they say. Without that, there could be no trust and no possibility of human relationships. Of course, people select facts to suit their case and put their own spin on things, are “economical with the actualité” as was once famously said, but have we now really given up the idea that truthfulness, as such, matters?

The other story concerned a man who ran a very aggressive tax avoidance business costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of pounds. When confronted with this he simply said that,

“everyone’s moral compass is different, isn’t it?”.

Well, no. The outer casing may be different, but what makes a compass a compass is that the pointer is always drawn towards magnetic north. There is a magnetic north, there is such a thing as truth and there is that in us which is drawn towards it, however glazed-over the glass on our personal compass might be. There seems to be a desperate need in our society to recover and reaffirm the most basic moral values, without which there can be no human community at all.

These values, of which I have selected only one—truth-telling—are both personal and political. Sadly, the untruths told recently in both the referendum and in the American election can only further erode people’s confidence in political statements. At its most basic, we need to recover confidence in what a political party might say in its manifesto. Does it actually mean what it says?

These values take political shape in discussion about British values. Here I have a concern, expressed by the commission—and, indeed, much more widely—about the way that teaching on British values has been introduced into the school curriculum. I am a passionate believer in those values and I want them to be taught in our schools and to underpin our national life. According to Ofsted, these are,

“democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs and for those without faith”.

The worry is that these values have been championed with a very heavy emphasis on the qualifying word “British” and as part of the counterterrorism strategy. Because of this, some communities have felt “othered” by their introduction into the syllabus—alienated rather than included. I strongly agree with what the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, said about this. They are indeed British values and I am deeply grateful that they are, but they are not only British. We should emphasise that these are shared values and they can be nurtured by the insights of all religions, as well as by those who do not belong to any.

The noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, and the noble Lord, Lord Stone, suggested that each society and each age must find its own values. Rather, I suggest that certain values are actually fundamental but their implications have to be worked out in every generation. Taking the obvious example of equality, that is fundamental to the Christian faith. We are made in the image of God. We are equal. But the implications of that in relation to race or women or people of different sexual orientation have to be worked out in different generations, and we gain some insights—at least we hope we do—into those implications.

The first part of the Motion concerns the values that underpin our national life, the second part their role in shaping public policy priorities. Here we are on more controversial ground. If we take the most fundamental values of liberty, equality and human community, here I differ slightly from the most reverend Primate—my most esteemed and revered Archbishop—who suggested that these were ideologies with which we need not bother. Rather, I suggest that those three values of the French Revolution are actually deeply rooted in the Christian faith and the historic legacy of this country. Liberty, equality and human community have been crucial in shaping our society. I further believe that they can be widely affirmed by people of all faiths and none.

We have always been divided on the public policy implications of these values in a way that the French revolutionaries of 1789 did not perceive but which is obvious now to us. I see no way of obtaining an easy agreement on the political implications but we have to work at it. The simple point I want to make is that we can at least be united on the values from which these policies come.