Wait for a Second Commissioner
From Mr Martin Sewell
Sir, — It is more than a month since the General Election, and nobody can deny that the new Government, elected on a platform of “change”, will have been very busy sorting through its “to do” list, and prioritising the urgent from the merely desirable.
Given the constitutional position of the Church of England, the delayed appointment of a Member of Parliament to answer questions for and on behalf of the Established Church is, nevertheless, both odd and a matter of concern.
I accept that, even with a huge majority, a goodly number of MPs are are neither eligible nor desiring of the post: some are of other religions or none; others will be needed to populate many other governmental positions.
The available talent pool is accordingly very shallow, even before we exclude those who do follow church affairs and do not want to become an apologist for a leadership that has made controversial or bad calls on many issues from safeguarding to multiple exclusions of the minorities and the vulnerable.
If we have to wait too much longer, one is bound to ask whether the time has come for disestablishment to free up both sides to mind their own business unencumbered by the complexities of taking up legislative time with the niceties of Canon Law.
MARTIN SEWELL
General Synod member for Rochester diocese
8 Appleshaw Close
Gravesend
Kent DA11 7PB
The Lords Spiritual and their communications
From Mr John Hobson
Sir, — While sections of the Church of England may be pleased that the Lords Spiritual will seemingly remain untouched or otherwise unreformed by the new Labour Government (News, 26 July), it is, nevertheless, surely time that the highways, byways, and processes of this anachronistic aspect of our governance were better explained or otherwise put under the spotlight.
During the period of the last Government, after careful thought, I wrote personally and individually to all members of the Lords Spiritual with widely held concerns about the Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill.
Five bishops replied to me as the legislation moved through the House of Lords, all replies being meaningful and engaged. In the event, the legislation ran out of time once the General Election was called.
But what struck me — and has stuck — was the lack of any apparent protocol that an individual writing to bishop-lawmakers can expect to be followed, demonstrated here by the 21 whose offices were presumably too busy, uninterested, or unclear whether or not a bishop was required to reply on a subject or even to send an acknowledgment.
JOHN HOBSON
The Rectory
Prince Charlie Street
Oldham OL1 4HJ
Zionism and the C of E
From Mr Jonathan Coulter
Sir, — On 2 August, the C of E issued an unambiguously bold statement, endorsing the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ’s) advisory opinion of 19 July, that Israel’s occupation is illegal. It also spoke of the human dignity of the Palestinian people and their fundamental right to self-determination and demanded that governments reaffirm unwavering commitment to all ICJ decisions (News, 9 August).
This is music to the ears of CAMPAIN, which has for the past 16 months been asking the Church to listen to those, including many non-Zionist Jews, who are highly critical of Israel. At the same time, we shrink at the magnitude of the task ahead. The Church needs to undo a century of failing to speak out against the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
This started under the pre-war League of Nations Mandate, when Britain revoked tenancy rights that peasant farmers enjoyed under the previous Ottoman administration, and subordinated to Zionist interests the Palestinians’ right to representative Government. But this is not just a matter of history. The Sunak Government gave Israel the green light to bomb Gaza back into the stone age, and the Starmer Government continues supplying it with arms.
The Church issued this statement only after ten months of pitiless bombing, forced displacement, and starvation. It needs to go much further, undoing the damage caused by its silence during 100 years of injustice and, in recent times, its attempt to ingratiate itself with a ruthless pro-Israel lobby.
JONATHAN COULTER
Secretary of CAMPAIN (www.campain.org)
21 Stanstead Close
Bromley BR2 9DS
Peaceful protest: not the same as public nuisance
From Mr David Lamming
Sir, — Contrary to the assertion by Symon Hill (Letters, 26 July), the right to peaceful protest is not under legislative attack; nor, in any of the recent protest cases, is there an issue of religious liberty.
Roger Hallam, and the other four “Just Stop Oil” members recently sentenced to terms of imprisonment at Southwark Crown Court, were not sentenced for just “planning a protest on the M25”, but for the offence of conspiracy intentionally to cause a public nuisance. The jury, who convicted them, heard evidence of the “huge” disruption caused by the protest over four days in November 2022, when protesters climbed, or attempted to climb, on gantries over the motorway. Every sector of the orbital motorway was affected.
In his sentencing remarks, Judge Hehir listed the impact on “ordinary members of the public” caught up in the disruption, including people who missed funerals and someone suffering an aggressive form of cancer who missed an appointment and had to wait two months for a new date. The total economic cost of the disruption was put at £769,966 and the policing cost at more than £1 million.
The judge took into account guidance given by the Court of Appeal in an earlier similar case (R v. Trowland [2023] EWCA Crim 919; [2024] 1 WLR 1164), in which sentences of three years’ and two years and seven months’ imprisonment, though “severe”, were upheld as being neither manifestly excessive nor a disproportionate interference with the defendants’ rights of freedom of expression and assembly.
As Lady Justice Carr (now Lady Carr CJ) said, in giving judgment, those rights “fall to be balanced against the general interests of the community, including the economic wellbeing of the nation and the rights of members of the public to go about their daily lives safely and without illegal interference”. Judge Hehir referred to the gridlock on the whole of the M25 which the defendants intended to cause and “devoutly hoped to come to pass” as an aggravating feature in assessing their offending as more serious than in the Trowland case. The defendants can (and no doubt will) seek to appeal against the length of their sentences as too severe, but they cannot justifiably claim that they inhibit the right to peaceful protest.
One further point. Mr Hill finds it “frightening” that people can be imprisoned in the UK for longer than many sexual offenders and other violent criminals “for planning to take part in non-violent direct action” and fears that “before long . . . any of us could face imprisonment for acting on our consciences.” Acting on one’s conscience does not give anyone the right to cause the harm to others that the motorway “protest” occasioned, and is certainly not “loving one’s neighbour”, as the clergy involved in some of the protests would be preaching as part of the gospel message.
DAVID LAMMING
20 Holbrook Barn Road, Boxford
Suffolk CO10 5HU
Nightingale story touches an ecumenical nerve
From Mr Paul Shaw
Sir, — In connection with your report on the exhibition at Cromford Mills in Derbyshire, examining perceptions of Florence Nightingale (News, 26 July), I write to you about the statement: “Letters show that she [Nightingale] objected to nuns’ trying to convert soldiers on their deathbeds.” This is potentially misleading on a contested issue.
Popular accounts of Nightingale and the Crimean nursing campaign often fail to acknowledge that Religious Sisters made up a large part of the nursing contingent who accompanied her to the Crimea, and who made up later reinforcements. Historians such as Evelyn Bolster, Maria Luddy, and, more recently, Terry Tastard have, over the years, sought to do justice to the centrality of Religious Sisters to the Crimean nursing campaign.
For instance, of the original party of 38 nurses who went out in October 1854, 24 were Religious Sisters, both Anglican and Catholic, comprising members of three Anglican communities — Miss Sellon’s Sisters of Mercy, the Park Village community, and the Nursing Sisters of St John the Divine — and also Roman Catholic Sisters of Mercy from Bermondsey under Mother Mary Clare Moore. Of the second party of 46 sent out in December 1854, 15 were Sisters of Mercy, mainly from Ireland, under Mother Mary Francis Bridgeman.
Sadly, the nursing campaign was not free of internecine conflict on religious and national grounds, and aspects of Nightingale’s management of the nursing contingents was and continues to be a matter of controversy among historians. What is clear, however, is that the Religious Sisters who were present firmly denied being involved in “proselytising” the patients under their care with their religious beliefs, and no such allegation has to my knowledge ever been proved.
It is clear from the historical record that there was distrust and contention between Nightingale and Bridgeman, but Bridgeman is on record as saying that “she had given her word not to interfere with the religion of the non-Catholic patients, and rather than violate that word . . . she would willingly undergo any martyrdom.” One of Miss Sellon’s Sisters, Margaret Goodman, later wrote: “I freely confess that I should never think of disturbing a deathbed by bringing controversy to its side.”
An important witness is Fanny Margaret Taylor (1832-1900), who converted from High Anglicanism to Catholicism while serving as a volunteer nurse in the Crimea, and later went on, as Mother Magdalen, to found a Catholic religious order, the Poor Servants of the Mother of God (SMG). Her conversion was wrought not by proselytism, but primarily by the example of the faith of the Irish Catholic soldiers, and by her perception of the nursing efficiency and compassion of the Irish Sisters of Mercy, as was recorded by her biographer, F. C. Devas.
Instead of being disturbed by supposed proselytism practised by the Religious Sisters, Taylor was outraged by what she believed to be false accusations of this levelled against them by some of her own co-religionists.
PAUL SHAW
SMG Central Archivist
St Mary’s Convent
10 The Butts, Brentford
Middlesex TW8 8BQ
Naval naming suggests RAF has gone soft
From Lt. Cmdr Lester May RN (Rtd)
Sir, — The RAF has upheld a complaint from a religious adherent and dropped 14 Squadron’s nickname, “Crusaders” (News, 9 August). Eighty years ago, HMS Crusader and HMS Saracen wore the White Ensign, a flag displaying two crosses of St George. In 1926, my father served in HMS Saladin, named after the famous Muslim leader who fought Crusader states. The destroyer captain would surely have given Able Seaman May short shrift had he complained about the ship’s name.
Naval and military leaders should be robust, ready to fight, if necessary, and win. The air marshal responsible for this decision is as much a snowflake as the complainant. It’s no way to run an air force.
LESTER MAY
24 Reachview Close
London NW1 0TY
Primate’s far horizons
From the Revd Paul Burr
Sir, — The Archbishop of Canterbury is right that Christians should not get involved with the far Right. But nor should Christians get involved with the far Left, though the Archbishop is currently seeking to re-shape the Church by radical socialist ideology, identity politics, itself a serious “offence to our faith”. The Archbishop says that reconciliation requires that “misuse of privilege and power are put aside”: isn’t there a famous saying somewhere about motes and beams?
PAUL BURR
The Vicarage, The Common
Swardeston, Norwich NR14 8EB