HOW many bishops, we wonder, have looked with envy at Labour’s majority over the past weekend? Huge dissatisfaction with the Conservatives and/or the inadequacies of the first-past-the-post voting system (both factors were in play) contributed to a landslide, giving Sir Keir Starmer and his colleagues a mandate to, well, do stuff. At this point, exactly what “stuff” they do is relatively immaterial. Rejected Tory MPs, including the former Prime Minister Liz Truss, have blamed electoral defeat on their inability to “deliver”, a more elegant — but equally vague — way to describe their inability to do stuff.
As for the new Government’s policies, it would be worrying to be governed by a party that attracted just 34 per cent of the overall vote, were that party less centrist. As it is, several of the initiatives announced in this first week might have come equally from the Greens or the Liberal Democrats; and a number of the Conservatives’ policies will be left untouched, at least for now. We would welcome it if the issues to be tackled stopped being treated as political at all. Improving the nation’s health, providing better housing, even immigration — these are logistical or financial problems capable of attracting consensus among reasonable parliamentarians.
By contrast with the General Election, the General Synod is a model of democracy. Under the Single Transferable Vote system, voters every five years are able to indicate a range of views: “I like Candidate A best, but I wouldn’t mind Candidate B; C, not so much.” As a consequence, and after some fancy footwork by electoral officers, the Church can be confident that the clergy and lay members of the Synod are truly representative of the candidates who stood and the electors who voted for them.
Perhaps this is why, paradoxically, the General Synod resembles the political system in France rather than in the UK. Proportional representation favours minorities. The dominance of single-interest campaigning produces a Synod in which the balance is alarmingly unbalanced. Fortunately, as in the world at large, there are many issues deemed apolitical. Over the weekend in York, we saw large backing for many important but uncontentious decisions. On sexuality, however — long the litmus test of what one side, irritatingly, has taken to calling “orthodoxy” — the margins are painfully narrow — far narrower, surveys suggest, than in the wider Church. Getting stuff done in this area is thus a tortuous and unhappy business.
One answer might be to look to the new Government for inspiration: not its majority, but its rhetoric about putting the nation before party. The trust report debated in the Synod describes how party spirit is rife in the Church. In contrast, participants in the recent Living in Love and Faith weekend in Leicester have spoken of the responsibility that they felt to the wider Church to find agreement. Would that this sense of responsibility permeated the Synod more thoroughly, and also the organisations attempting to influence it.