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Organ Appeal At St Giles we hear sounds from the organ that our predecessors, including Byron, Shelley and John Soane, have heard for more than three hundred years. This historic organ urgently needed sympathetic restoration more>

For more than twenty days now the newspapers and media have been running stories about MPs’ expense claims. What should our attitude as church people be to these reports? Denunciation of the moral decline of our legislators and rulers, seems a common line. Sin is certainly alive and well, and it is perhaps reassuring to know that there are watchdogs waiting to scent out and reveal misdoings of the great, if not the good. Ever since the printing press was introduced in Europe printers and publishers have seized opportunities to expose greed and corruption amongst politicians and rulers. Many of the magnificent mansions treasured by the National Trust and English Heritage and visited by millions were funded by political careers subsequently revealed as shady, and sometimes ending with attempts at impeachment. This, of course, does not excuse confusions by current Members over funding second homes, and provision of Palladian duck houses for lakes, but it may help to put the allegations against our current legislators in context.

Sin is such a complicated subject. As exposed MPs have pointed out, they have not broken any rules; mostly just tested the limits of the rules, and stayed within them, while having gone over what might be thought to be moral boundaries. This nicely illustrates the tension between law and morality.

Should we enjoy sin, or at least the exposure of others’ alleged misdoings? I fear that there are probably not many of us who have not at least chuckled at the exposed embarrassments of some of our legislators, and exposed our lack of compassion for the unfortunate. Envy, as one unfortunate MP commented may even come into it.

Upon what evidence should we base our righteous denunciations? Someone stole the disk on which all this titillating information was stored, and someone else paid for it. Sin is compounded, but perhaps this action was for the greater common good, to expose the weakness and wickedness of our legislators. Perhaps we should be grateful for the generous altruism and public spiritedness of our media and newspaper proprietors in wishing to purify our public life. Perhaps it did not cross their minds that well crafted headlines would not attract our attention and increase their sales, putting more money in their pockets whilst keeping down the overheads of running their newspapers by just employing a few journalists to comb through the purloined expense claims of MPs, having made redundant most of their professional journalists, and diverting our attention from even the state of the economy, and complex issues in approaching local government and European let alone the muddles and horrors on the international scene, where the continuing tragedies of the lives of our neighbours in Sudan, the Congo and Zimbabwe have disappeared from the scene. It is also useful for the media to take the opportunity to remind legislators that, though they may be elected, perhaps by only a relatively small proportion of the electorate every five years or so, it is really the proprietors of the media, who live in tax havens, beyond the reach of any freedom of information legislation, who really understand our needs and priorities best, and have the best interests of our society and nation at heart.

Proportion may also be an issue. Has our parliamentary democracy really been brought into disrepute, and members of parliament been utterly discredited? Apparently, so far, only about 120, out of more than 600, MPs’ expenses have been combed through. Have we weeks’ more exposures to await, or are the great majority of our legislators modest and reasonable in their expense claims? And, so far as we know, compared with legislators in some other countries, and previous scandals here, our present MPs are not falling for the blandishments of bribery and lobbyists. Perhaps we should be grateful for this and not be panicked into feeling that our legislature and parliamentary democracy is in ruins and requires immediate radical reform.

Jesus said, ‘Judge not that you be not judged.’ and ‘Let him that is without sin cast the first stone’, and encouraged us to pray ‘forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us’. These are difficult enough words to take seriously in our private lives, but they also have application in public life, not, of course, to condone sin, but to help us to see the complexity of sin in our society, and to discourage us from thanking God that we are not as other people, if we are tempted to moral self-righteousness and so further compound the muddle of our world, and forget the forgiving nature of God. Forgiveness in society, I am afraid, would be a topic for another Newsletter.

Bill Jacob.

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