The Election - thoughts at Grey’s Monument

This is a bit longer than usual. You’ll understand.

For the first time for decades, I didn't stay up all night to watch the election results. By the small hours of the night the outcome was as clear as the day. Perhaps I should have been on my knees during the watches (I blogged about praying for the election last time). Instead, I went to bed. And slept quite well in the circumstances. I woke early and for an instant thought I heard someone say "behold, it was a dream". But it wasn't. It was the morning of 24 June 2016 all over again.

What do I say about this election result, I asked myself as dawn broke. Today is St Lucy’s Day, 13 December. It used to be the shortest, darkest day of the year in the unreformed Julian Calendar of John Donne’s times, inspiring his famous Nocturnal about “the year’s midnight”. How apt! Was Boris Johnson teasing us when he chose this particular date? He is, after all, a lover of classical antiquity.

But Lucy was the Roman girl-martyr who brought light into dark places, hence her lovely name. The play on darkness obscuring light and light penetrating darkness fascinated Donne. Light and dark come into things in elections, I thought to myself. Altruism dragged down by naked self-interest, narrow tribal loyalties pierced in our best moments by an awakened conscience and a deeper feeling for humanity - there’s a real dark-and-light chiaroscuro in our thoughts, emotions, speeches and behaviour at election times. It’s what we should expect at liminal times like these, but the strength of my own feelings never fails to take me by surprise.

Here’s what I posted on social media from my bed. 

So the UK is going into exile. I must accept Brexit & live with it. It will be bitter for me personally & I think, taking a long view, for the nation collectively. The biggest mistake made by Labour & the LibDems? Agreeing to a General Election at all. That decision was a disastrous misreading of the signs of the times. And of the capacity of both party leaders to win trust on the nation’s doorsteps. Good people of all faiths & political views must now come together for the sake of the planet, for the sake of peace & for the sake of the poor. We must keep hope alive.

I chose those words carefully. And felt better for writing them. Yes, it will be bitter, I thought, not just because of Brexit, but for all the other reasons so many of us feared a landslide like today’s, especially on account of the poorest and most vulnerable people in our nation. Yet there’s a difference between feeling what we feel and acting out those feelings. I’ve consistently campaigned in this blog on the foundation that the clear command is to love our neighbour, and indeed, our enemy. Perhaps today poses precisely that challenge, not to harbour resentments and hatreds towards those for whom this has been a day to rejoice while some of us feel like strangers in a landscape we barely recognise as our political and cultural home.

It would have been easy to gaze at the TV news all day. But we decided instead to get out of the house and go into Newcastle to look for Christmas gifts for the family. We walked up from the station along Grainger Street. There, ahead of us, presiding over the city’s Christmas market, was the statue of the 2nd Earl Grey on top of his Monument. I felt a surge of admiration for this man, one of Northumberland’s greatest, who was Prime Minister from 1830-1834. In times as fractious and turbulent as our own (read George Eliot’s Middlemarch, set in the early 1830s - I blogged about her recently), Lord Grey championed and saw enacted the Great Reform Act of 1832 that abolished rotten boroughs and launched the long, fitful journey towards universal suffrage. 

What would this lover of civil and political liberty have made of today, I wondered? I’ll leave experts to comment on an unreformed electoral system that (among other oddities) gives us an outcome in which a Tory landslide of 365 seats can result from the votes of a few hundreds of thousands of voters in swing constituencies while in total, more people across the UK have voted against the Tories than for them. I think the good Earl would say that electoral reform is still a work in progress. There’s no hope of progressing it in the next 5 years, but I believe election results will lack firm credibility and ownership for as long as Parliament fails to address this fundamental problem. 

But wandering among the Christmas shoppers, I didn’t want to dwell on these challenges. Nor did I want to engage in a long post-mortem or play the blame game about the failure of Remainers to get our act together. Later, certainly, we need to think very hard about what went wrong. But not now. What was needed today was to reflect, ponder, and pray about how to manage disappointment and bitterness, and live with a result many of us had feared, yet dared to hope might be averted. Maybe I should have practised disappointment more, like Diogenes famously exploring futility by praying to a lump of rock. All of life, we have to learn to “live with”. It’s a mark of being adult that we make some progress along the path of graceful acceptance when things don’t go our way.

The Grey Monument bears witness to a man who, despite endless frustrations and discouragements, channelled his energies into what would help the nation flourish. In our time, this has to mean rebuilding the sense of being one nation again. As I said to begin with, we owe it to the planet, to world peace, and to the poor who are always with us, to come together with all people of good will to renew ourselves to pursue what is just and right and good. And to keep our hope alive.

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Maybe one way in which we do this is by learning to act more out of trust. Or (to paraphrase something Bishop Michael Ramsey once said about prayer), if it’s too soon to start trusting people again after these political storms of the last three years, at least to want to. And if even that’s too much to contemplate, to want to want to. 

Yes, there’s so much that’s wrong with our politics, both the decisions we are making and the way we are making them. We are right to challenge falsehood, mendacity and the casual disregard for careful process when we see them. We are right to be angry for the sake what’s good and true. But we must examine our motives, and make sure we’re not feeding self-righteousness. Nurturing blame and bitterness gets us nowhere. What’s needed is to help a grown-up public conversation to begin again on the basis of our common humanity. We need to make a presumption that our conversation partner wants the best for others, not the worst, that they care for their fellow human beings, for the needs of others, and for the future of the world just as we do. 

Anglicans call this the “charitable assumption”. It undergirds good pastoral practice. Yes, it strains credibility sometimes, when we wonder if others are as honourable as we’d like to think they are, yet I do believe it’s a vital principle of courteous, graceful, good-neighbourly behaviour. It entails, for example, attentive listening in the spirit of “maybe I can learn to see it your way; and is it possible that you could come to see it mine?” That’s not to equivocate about our hard-won principles, only to understand them in the context of the bigger picture which is always more complex than the simple binaries we love so much. As Bishop John Habgood once said, it’s all very well “being prophetic”, as long as you see all sides of a question. Or try to.

I was touched and moved by something my daughter wrote today to our family WhatsApp group. She’s allowed me to share it here. We had been in touch with our children to ask how they were feeling about the election. She replied:

I feel ok - perhaps that it is my role to promote a sense of steady-ness for those around me who are very upset. But you know, I am a super-rational pragmatist. 

I also feel that I too learned a lot from watching the Tory victories through the 80s and early 90s, something about coping with the disappointment, even tho I didn’t understand it. 

I feel relieved that the waiting and dreading and liminal is over. That in itself releases new energies eventually. And on that we do need to be out of this Brexit impasse so that attention can be spend on domestic agenda. So I understand that vote.

And I feel that it is better to know what you don’t understand about your country than not know. Not that we, in our liberal bubbles  know now, but we need to learn. 

And we need to be kind to ourselves and to everyone we meet, especially those whose opinions we don’t understand and especially those who are marginalised. And we need to listen to those people whose opinions we don’t understand and expand our bubbles. 

That’s what I think. But yes. Obviously awful, but we don’t know what this will mean. And we do know that there are a lot of young activists coming up, that the generation emerging is not like the generations before it so things will shift. we need to learn and to listen, to mentor and to work in whatever way we can to generate communities in which people can listen to and learn from those with whom they might fundamentally disagree. And we need to borrow coping strategies from those places for whom this kind of political marginalisation is the norm - who can ONLY rely on the state to frustrate and disempower them, which is still probably most places in the world . 

Perhaps it is denial, but I am still just grateful to have a vote and a state that provides any protection or health care at all. 

So we also need to be grateful. Not least because we are not the people who will be most marginalised by this decision. And maybe that sounds a bit selfish, but we need to try to appreciate what we have, and have a good Christmas together and emotionally nurture and sustain each other.

I will never lose faith in the power of love, of community, of relationship and of the collective. Aluta continua! Weep today. And the work of rebuilding starts again tomorrow.

So well said. Meanwhile, the leaders of the Methodist Church have also found just the right words for today. They have published an Open Letter to the Prime Minister following his return to office. This is church leadership at its best. They speak for me.

More to come (if you can bear it) as we go on trying to understand where we now find ourselves after the election.