We ought to be very proud about what is happening on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral at the moment. It’s the politics of the people and if we are lucky it will be the shape of things to come. Vested interest, money, tense argumentative gatherings, principled objections and resignations are all what real politics are about. The impact has been positive in raising the issues. What needs to be demonstrated now is how those issues can be safely (and safely is important here) negotiated to some sort of positive and empowering conclusion.
Over the last thirty years, we have lost the art of politics. We have found ourselves imprisoned in a consensus that says markets know best, that the only response is simply that our future is determined by the playing out of market forces. Despite some of the brightest minds in the Church and beyond developing highly insightful critique there has not even been the slightest dent in the consensus. What has happened to us all is that we have slowly lost the art of doing politics – not the manipulative position-taking of Westminster – but the principled negotiation about how we live together peacefully and create relationships that let us all flourish.
It’s good – even though it probably doesn’t feel like it to those involved – that the Chapter of St Paul’s has had such a public disagreement. Thank God there is at least one example where people can hold different views without violence or the false compromise of most of the stuff that passes for politics in our ‘democratic’ institutions. This is a real sign of hope in the changes we are seeing around us at present in the economy and wider society.
We live now in what can best be described as a market state in which the economy and our systems of government have merged into one. We see signs of this everywhere - in care homes and hospitals in the NHS, where quality of care is secondary to price, in the way the benefits of the very poorest are cut to bail out banks, in the way even very basic freedoms have to give way to financial considerations. On one level, of course, there is nothing wrong with markets - they give us what we need to get on with our lives and they appear the least oppressive way to distribute goods and resources. The flaw in the thinking is to believe that they can do everything. If all of us are to flourish, markets must always be subject to the wider control of politics - here understood as the will of the people. This is a difficult thing to do - to be brave enough to ask difficult questions about what sort of world we want to live in and then see them though – and at St Paul's we have seen just that.
The real issue here, though, is the recognition that the Market State is focused around the single-minded pursuit of wealth. The ferocity of this pursuit of wealth has left us exhausted but it has also deprived us of the trust, the generosity and the compassion that really do underpin well-being in a good society. The whole structure of what we have at present in our society is aimed at keeping itself going and maintaining things much as they are. Most people are wary, pessimistic and cynical about where we are headed but still they wait in the hope that something or someone will come along to save them. The way things gets challenged is through good quality politics - the negotiation of difference, the challenging of vested interests, the living our of principles and the recognition that it's values rather than money that makes us flourish – in fact just the sort of debate that has been going on in the Chapter at St Paul’s.
At Church Urban Fund we have realized that the only way this will come about is when people recognise that the future is in their hands. The idea that all we can do is wait for things to change is a recipe for more of the same. It's as people wrestle control back, and take seriously that it's only by their own agency that things will change, that we will begin to shape a better future. The issue is simple. We lack control: we need to take it back. We are up for this: come and join us.
