CofE bishops - doing the right thing (at last)

Watching the Church of England do the right thing can sometimes feel like watching a dogged oil tanker reverse into a tight parking space at night, with no wing mirrors and an upside down map. It'll get there eventually but its not clear how and it can take so many different attempts arrival seems unlikely.

This week a platoon of bishops signed a letter to the Observor calling on the government to pass a series of ammendments to its proposal to cap benefit payments to families. About time, of course, and the church has not been silent on the government's work so far, but this still marks a significant departure. This is partly because it includes a series of additions to improve the proposal, highly specific and drafted with the help of a major charity. They all look eminnently sensible. It is also partly because 18 bishops signed the letter, a rare and impressive show of unity, although one which does you wondering why on earth the others didn't.

And what a joy it is to see the right wing papers have to cope with a sensible, thoughtful and intellectual reproach from the heart of establishment England against an extremist government. In the wake of the St Paul's protests (ongoing) which saw an out pouring of bile from the Sun, etc, it is nothing short of delightful to find that the church is not fearful of doing the right thing in the face of bigotted unpopularity.

Why the powerful must be corrupt - and what to do about it

I am naturally hostile to any conception of politics or society that rests on an 'us and them' mentality, essentially because I doubt it to be true. There is usually so much middle gournd, such a long ladder between top and bottom, that to divide it at some point and cast the the ends as naturally opposed seems arbitrary. We all have more in common than we have differences - the fundamentals of our physiology are not illusory in this respect, even as wealth or geography create appalling inequalities we all find ourselves in essentially the same predicament as human beings.

Even the division between owner and worker seems more slippery than ever before in the age of digital communications and pension funds; my bank was one of the ones which went under spectacularly, had to be propped up by the government and is now paying its employees astonishingly well, I just feel happy if my interest rate stays about inflation. But the revelations of recent weeks about links between News International, the Metropolitan Police and the government reveal a degree of interpenetration that would surely surprise even the most jaded observer. Each provided funds, personnel and information to the other; restricting it from other institutions and neglecting their prime motivation. The structural imperatives of democracy, elections, the maintainance of law and order and the pursuit of readers and profit formed themselves quite naturally into a closed circuit running to its own logic which even the most heinous of actions against principal figures in the chain could not break (I think here particularly of how Rebecca Brooks ill treated Gordon Brown over the death of his son).

In this it seems overwhelmingly not only that a 'rogue reporter' is to blame, nor even a few 'evil' newspaper proprieters, but rather a huge number of people willed into a kind of automatic amorality by the unavoidable implications of capitalism and a tall hierarchy of power. Power, I think, does corrupt; not because the people who hold it are turned bad, drunk on their own superiority, although this does happen often enough, but because they are forced to act in certain ways to maintain their position. They have the capacity to resist, but not the power to resist and hold their position. Their fault was in choosing ambition and survival over integrity. It is a challenge given to almost all of us on a regular basis - admit to an unfashionable belief, quit an immoral job or call out a loved family member. We get stuck behaving how we are meant to behave, not how we ought to behave.

Should we expect our politicians to give up principles in favour of pragmatism, in a Machiavellian manner which the Tory party has always been proud of, or to fight for what is right in the sure knowledge that to do so will force them out of the system and deliberately undermine it? The latter is surely preferable but I suspect that the best alternative might be to remove the hierarchy of command and the narrow class of power-holders altogether. If the struture doesn't work, ditch it. Is it possible to give unto Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's or must the former, ultimately, ruin the latter; or the latter ruin the former? Let's instead abandon a situation where one or the other must take place - let's get rid of Caesar and let SPQR back in on the act of government.