Substantive Digression: Are All Tories In Fact Bastards?

There's a very good story about an elderly Blitz veteran who was caught up in the 2005 London bombings. As he was being taken to hospital, he remarked "Don't worry: I've been blown up by a better class of bastard than this!" 

It almost certainly never happened, but it is still a very good story.

I have a book on my shelf by Mr Enoch Powell. When he wasn't quoting the Aeneid at people who probably wouldn't be able to identify quotes from the Aeneid, he wrote some very interesting essays on the Christian Bible. 

One of the essays in the book had a significant effect on my own intellectual and spiritual development. The essay is called Bibliotary. He's writing about Jesus's prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. Saint Mark, he day, goes to some lengths to establish that Jesus has walked some distance away from the disciples, and that the disciples have fallen asleep. Mark can't possibly know what Jesus said; there were no witnesses. He must have made it up. "The narrative and its truth is not that of history; it is that of poetry, or imagination". At some point, some early Christian imagined that Jesus was reluctant to die and introduced it into the story. The question isn't "why did it happen like that?" but "who imagined it happening like that, and when, and for what reason?"

Never mind if the great man's reasoning is correct. (C.S Lewis thought that the evangelist was recording the first few words the witnesses overheard, just before they fell asleep.) The point is that Powell's essay was the first one I read which showed me that you could have a critical approach to the Bible without being a debunker: that you could be a Christian and still treat the Bible as a collection of texts with a history.

Granted, most of his religious theories are plain wrong. He insisted on the priority of Matthew -- the idea that Matthew's Gospel was written first and that Mark's shorter text is a rather inept summary of it. No reputable scholar would now subscribe to this theory: the battle lines are between those who think that Matthew and Luke independently expanded Matthew and those who think that Luke used Matthew directly. But Powell's essay on what he calls the archaeology of Matthew was the first time I had seen someone putting verses from one gospel alongside verses from another gospels and making informed speculations about why they differ.

He also had a theory, that I could summarise but won't, that Jesus was executed by stoning rather than by crucifixion.  [1]

The book is called Wrestling With the Angel. I have a large print of Jack Kirby's drawing of a super-heroic Jacob wrestling with a Celestial angel above my writing desk. I very much hope that is just a coincidence.

Having this forbidden tome in my collection, I have, in fact, also read the political chapters. Some are better than others. I am very unpersuaded, for example, by the argument that since the Church can't do miracles, it has no right to read into the story of the Feeding of the Five Thousand a moral imperative to feed the poor; although I kind of take the point that clergy who think that the main point of Jesus healing the blind man is that National Health opticians are a jolly good idea are stretching their texts.

The essays on nationhood and immigration seem to be coming from rather a different place from "rivers of blood". I don't know whether we should think in terms of clever man who once lost his temper and said some vile things, or a vile man who was good at hiding behind a veneer of scholarship. The Birmingham speech is, of course, indefensible. But the essays I have read seem to be coming from a more intelligible position. 

A country is a group of people with a shared identity: it is defined by it's institutions; flag, Queen, church, literary canon. I would add, though he certainly would not have done, the BBC and the NHS. Also folk music. What makes you British is not your passport or your nationalisation papers or even a good score in a multiple choice citizenship test. And it's not who your parents were and what colour your skin is. It's whether or not you identify with those institutions. You can absolutely be a British person with Ruritanian heritage. What you can't be is a British Ruritanian. And you definitely can't be a British person who feels loyalty to the Ruritanian flag and holds Ruritanian street festivals and feels more affection to Prince Rupert than to King Charles. I don't know if Powell would have admitted the existence of British Communists or British Republicans. I strongly suspect that if you scratched the surface you would find that the Conservative Party was one of those institutions that defined your Britishness. All real Americans support the Republican Party because if you don't support the Republican Party you are not a real American. 

There certainly is or was a widespread belief among the clergy that the Established Church of England was a national Church. If you are English you are a member. If Evangelicals had been allowed to insist that people getting baptised and confirmed and buried had to make some profession of Christian faith, they would have reduced the Church of England to the status of a sect.

Which is pretty much just a posh-school version of Norman Tebbit's infamous cricket test. A person whose parents came from Ruritania can certainly be English; but a person who cheers for the old country in a England vs Ruritania Test Match clearly doesn't think of himself as English. And if he was properly English he would know that cheering at Cricket matches isn't the done thing. [2]

Now: many people have spotted that the current Tory leader and several of the contender to replace him have dark coloured skin. Several of them are second generation immigrants: Rishi Sunak's parents were Punjabi; Suella Braverman's came from Mauritius and Kenya; Priti Patel's parents emigrated to England from Uganda; Kemi Badenoch was born in the UK but grew up in Nigeria. 

Nothing in Rishi Sunak's Prime Ministership became him as the leaving of it. Outside Downing Street on the day after the election he spoke movingly of how a second generation immigrant, albeit a very rich one, could rise to the highest office in the land; and how his young children had placed Diwali candles outside 10 Downing Street. That was one of the reasons that Britain was the greatest nation in the world, he said. 

Bravo, said I. If only you'd spoken like that during the election, I might have voted for you. 

Note: I would not in fact have voted for him.

But during the election, the Tories very much nailed their colours to the anti-immigration mast. The dotty scheme about putting asylum seekers planes to Rawanda was the main thing they wanted to talk about in the election and the main stick with which the right wing press wanted to beat Kier Starmer. 

So a lot of liberals were naturally tempted to say: "Ha-ha. You think there are too many immigrations and want to send them back where they came from. But guess what! Your parents were immigrations! Bet that never occurred to you before! Gotcha!"

But this seems to be fully covered by Powell's theory of virtuous institutions: which he himself regards as the essence of Conservatism. The opponent isn't dark skinned people or people who say "Allah" rather than "Jehovah". The opponent is multiculturalism. There are good immigrants and bad immigrants. The good ones have totally identified with Britain; the bad ones still see themselves as French and Irish and Ruritanian. If I am correct about the Established Church, it is perfectly consistent for someone whose actual faith happens to be Buddhist or Hindu to sincerely believe that "our" country was built on Christianity; that "our shared" Christian values define who "we" are; and that Muslims are watering down "our" identity. The old joke turns out to be political position: the question isn't whether Rishi Sunak is a Hindu; the question is whether or not he is a Church of England Hindu. 

And I don't really get the whole nationalism thing. I think of myself far more as a "person" than I do "a white person". Which is why I am perfectly happy for football to come home, but don't particularly mind if it doesn't. I grok that it is easier for a white person to say that he doesn't do race than for a black person, in the same way that it is easier for a cis-male person to say that he doesn't do gender than for a woman or a transgender person. I can't get my head round the mindset of someone who is annoyed every single time a non-white is shown eating a big mac in a McDonalds commercial. I don't know what is going on in the head of someone whose reaction to Ncuti Gatwa or Paapa Essiedu or Chadwick Brosnan or Kamala Harris is to talk about "box ticking" and "DEI appointments". 

That's the answer to "can you be friends with a conservative". If by "conservative" you mean "a person who says 'us' when he means 'light skinned' people and 'them' when he means 'dark skinned people'" and wants his country back, then no, I don't think I could be.

But I look at the current Reform party and the current Tory party and then I look at Enoch Powell.

And I think "In ye olde days, we used to have a better class of bastard."

[1] Why is Pontius Pilate so important to Christian tradition? Why do people in church to this day chant "crucified under Pontius Pilate" rather than, say "betrayed by Judas Iscariot" or "buried by Joseph of Arimathea"? Answer: because it was essential for the early Christians to pinpoint the time of Jesus's death. You could prove that Jesus was the Messiah because the Passion coincided with the time table laid out in (a particular interpretation of) the prophecy of Daniel. Time and time and half a time and all that that entrails. It is highly unlikely that the historical Jesus's death really did cohere with those particular texts. So Pilate must have been retrospectively written into the story for didactic purposes. But if Pilate is a ret-con -- and if there is no evidence outside of didactic Christian sources that he was even involved -- then do we have any reason to think that the Romans were involved in proceedings at all? Don't the texts make it clear that it was the Jewish authorities thought that Jesus must die, must die, this Jesus must die, because he was a blasphemer and threatening to their position? The Gospels acknowledges that "Pilate" was relatively uninterested in the case. So it doth follow as the night the day: the historical Jesus was killed by the Jews, not the Romans. And only the Romans crucified.

[2] And through the world over, each nation's the same/they've simply no notion of playing the game/They argue with umpires, they cheer when they've won/And they practice beforehand which spoils the fun.

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