Where is the Church leadership? This is no time for vacillation - David Behrens
Pat McFadden’s words had the ring of Neville Chamberlain about them. “For the first time in many years, we have to actively prepare for the possibility of the UK homeland coming under direct threat, potentially in a wartime scenario.”
Of course, Chamberlain would not have used an Americanism like ‘homeland’, but it was the substance that mattered, not the semantics.
Mr McFadden is Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and his predecessors in that office have underwritten every war since the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. There may be another of those on the way.
The consequences don’t bear thinking about. We didn’t raise our children to be sent to war, to be cannon fodder in a slaughter brought on by no fault of theirs. We thought we had learned that in 1918 and again in 1945.
But what would a war on today’s home front look like? Who would staff the defences? If history tells us anything it is that the peasants are always the ones in the firing line.
The parallels with the revolt of the 14th century are quite startling. There had been a great pandemic, the Black Death, which had upset the natural order; taxes were rising to pay for war and there was economic and social upheaval. Something had to give.
We had a peasants’ revolt, of sorts, last summer when the peasants were at their most revolting: setting fires outside a hotel full of asylum seekers in Rotherham and marauding around other towns with union jacks on their faces. Some of them will be out of prison now and should a new Home Guard become necessary it will be the likes of them who will fill its ranks. A Dad’s Army for the absentee father generation.
In the heatwave of last weekend, they decamped by the thousand to the beaches and bars of Southend, where I watched from the relative sanctity of a wedding reception: Essex lads and ladettes, tattooed up to their foreheads, off the leash and on the lash and all I can say is that if this is the recruiting pool for the armed forces we may as well surrender now and get it over with.
It’s a good job that military personnel are not chosen in the same way as the Yorkshire cricket XI used to be, or the England football team still is: the best candidates would be rendered ineligible. Of those that were left, three-quarters would be confined to their barracks on disability benefits with the rest demanding to work from home.
This is not just a British malaise. Donald Trump’s longed-for show of force to mark his 79th birthday and the 250th anniversary of the US Army looked more like a Morris dance than the spectacle of military precision he was expecting. Americans have known conscription more recently than us (though not Trump himself: he avoided the draft five times) but even to them parade-ground discipline is a lost art. At least there was a touch of postmodern irony: his parade was bankrolled by a cryptocurrency broker.
We don’t know where this assimilation of the military into daily life will lead but we all know what led us to where we are and it is something we are powerless to stem: the pursuit of power by despots for political, territorial or religious ends. So perhaps it is helpful that in Britain at least, the last of those incitements has burned itself out.
The crashing silence of the Church of England on the defence debate – and indeed on the other pressing moral issues of decriminalised abortion, child grooming and assisted dying – is a measure of the almost complete withdrawal of organised religion from our country. Each of those subjects is currently before parliament; wouldn’t you have thought the Church would have a word to say on at least one of them? In a secular society like ours, that is really its only purpose.
On the question of grooming, it is fatally compromised by the in-house abuse scandal that saw Justin Welby forced out as Archbishop of Canterbury last November and other bishops tainted. But that alone should not stop it speaking out on the implied threat to mobilise our children and grandchildren. The world is so frighteningly out of control right now that by the time Welby’s successor is appointed in the autumn it may be too late.
You might wonder why it is taking so long to find his replacement – especially after the Catholic cardinals took just two days last month to elect their new pope. The Church itself points to inclusivity; it must consult and build a consensus, it says.
But that’s a euphemism for vacillation and this is no time for that. If there is no moral compass to guide those who seek to find their way, they will turn to the false gods of online influences and therein lies anarchy. Even in 1381 they knew that.