Be as bad as you like, but be sure to call an inquiry
By the weekend, the Conservatives had achieved the feat of making their own funding become just as much ‘the issue’ as Labour’s. The papers were full of sharp-looking loans which the Tories, as much as Labour, had received from the capitalist class.
The Prime Minister and his allies had succeeded in making any scandal appear bipartisan. So much so that Mr Blair felt safe enough to set up an ‘independent inquiry’ not into how he and Lord Levy had financed New Labour, but into how all parties were financed. His friends were able to put it about that it was time to ‘move on’ and to have a ‘serious debate’.
It was a brilliant stratagem. It also told us much about the times in which we live. Rich and powerful malefactors, provided they can associate themselves with one of the two main political parties, preferably the party in office, can escape trouble by having their activities politicised. If they have obviously been trying to buy or sell peerages or secure contracts by contributing to a party, and they are found out, they can claim it is merely ‘an issue’, not a potential offence against either the law or good behaviour. The answer is not that they should be prosecuted or incur odium, but that we should all ‘move on’ to a ‘debate’.
Recent malefactors, proven or alleged, must be annoyed that this tendency in society has arrived just too late to save them. Certainly, had the dates been a few years different, Jeffrey Archer would have been able to say that he gave this prostitute cash and set in train a sequence of events which sent him to prison for perjury. ‘But the incident raises the broader issue of how Britain finances its prostitution industry, and indeed makes it necessary for its alleged clients to commit perjury. Lord Archer welcomes the setting up of the inquiry, but fears that “it might not go far enough” and suggests that the terms of reference be broadened.’ (People always say that sort of thing when inquiries are set up.) Then again, ‘Mr Maxwell concedes that stealing from his pensioners was perhaps not the best way for him to finance his standard of living, but questions whether there is any alternative, bearing in mind that he is a complete crook. Nonetheless, he is keeping an open mind as to whether the inquiry can suggest a better way forward. Meanwhile, he has contributed to the debate by dropping dead, being murdered by Mossad or killing himself.’ But for the moment there should be an inquiry among Tories into how an issue favourable to them has gone missing.
Was Norman Kember reluctant to thank the soldiers who rescued him? Certainly, when he expressed his thanks eventually he prefaced them by emphasising that he deplored ‘the use of force’. He did not differentiate between lawful force, as exercised by the soldiers who rescued him, and force in general. He could have said that he deplored the necessity of force. Then we could all have agreed with him. But he did not.
The founder of his religion would have been able to clarify his thinking. Luke (vii: 6–9) and Matthew (viii: 5–13) tell of Jesus and a centurion. This soldier sends word to Jesus that a slave especially dear to him is dying. ‘Say in a word,’ Luke has the centurion ask in his message to Jesus, ‘and my servant shall be healed.’ The centurion draws a similarity with Jesus’s powers and his own as a soldier: ‘For I am also a man set under authority, having soldiers under me: and I say unto one, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh....’ In other words, he hopes that Jesus will use his word of command to heal the slave. Luke continues: ‘When Jesus heard these things he marvelled at him... “I have not found so great a faith, no, not in Israel.”’ That is, not even among Jews is there so great a faith as that which this gentile shows. Jesus thus pays a soldier as great a compliment as he pays anyone in the entire New Testament. He heals the slave. He does not preface his remarks by deploring the use of force — the use of force being, in the last resort, the centurion’s profession. If he disapproved of that profession he would have said so. Jesus was not slow to make known his disapproval of the way some people earned a living, such as the money-changers whom he drove out of the temple — itself a use of force. Had he disapproved of soldiering as such he would have told the centurion, as he did the practitioner of a certain other profession, to go and sin no more.
Not that either Jesus or the centurion justified the use of all force. It had to be lawful. In the Authorised Version the centurion does not say that he is a man set in authority, but under authority. Only the law has the authority to command his services as a soldier. In saying that he is also a man set under authority he does not presumptuously imply that he and Jesus are equals. He merely recognises that Jesus is under the authority of God just as he as a soldier is under the authority of a lawful earthly ruler; perhaps Caesar, perhaps Herod Antipas the Gospels do not say. But the authority must be lawful, otherwise he would not hold the centurion’s rank.
Presumably Mr Kember and his friends would argue that our soldiers in Iraq are not set under a lawful authority since the war is illegal. But that is another subject. If one is against ‘the use of force’, one should be against it whether it is legal or not. Mr Kember’s difficulty, as a Christian, is that the Authority whom Luke quotes did not seem to agree.
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