Let those people stay! – why Iraq's Christians need a province, shared with other minorities

Last September I became one of the first British MPs to visit Northern Iraq since the invasion in 2003. There I saw and heard for myself the plight of this amazing community of persecuted Christians, known as the Assyrian-Chaldeans.

Being one of the most ancient Christian communities in the world, they still speak a form of Aramaic – the language in which Jesus himself preached the Gospel.

I was lucky enough to get a slot at the last minute for the last Tuesday of Westminster Hall debates this session, as another MP had pulled out. People of faith might say this was providential. At any event, it enabled me to make the case for government action to help the beleaguered and persecuted Christian minority of Iraq.

We had an interesting debate, attended by the Shadow Foreign Office spokesman, David Lidington. I spoke about my experience of visiting Iraq and meeting victims of what I called an ‘anti-Christian pogrom’:

[Commons Hansard: 16 Dec 2008 : Column 26WH]:

'It was emotional and moving to go into the ancient villages in the Nineveh plains and visit ancient monasteries that have been there for the best part of 2,000 years. I saw the tomb of the Old Testament prophet Nahum and read what he wrote thousands of years ago:

“Your people are scattered on the mountains with none to gather them.”

How extraordinary that those words are still true today and that those people are being scattered and persecuted.

When I went to the Nineveh plains, what struck me was that there was a sense of security in those ancient, entirely Christian villages. I met many displaced people who had come up from Basra and Baghdad to settle in the Nineveh plains, and I heard some absolutely heart-rending stories. I met a young girl who had lost her parents and her sister—they were murdered. I met a widow who had lost her husband and was now caring for a disabled son. Her husband was murdered in what can only be described as an anti-Christian pogrom. A quiet, cool and collected lady was sitting there listening to the appalling stories, and she finally came and told us her story. Her husband was a deacon. On the way back from church, he was killed—he was blown up by a bomb—and then her daughter disappeared. At that stage, she broke down and burst into tears, and we could not carry on the interview. We subsequently heard that she had never seen her daughter again. Imagine the anguish of that lady: she lost her husband, who was killed in a roadside bomb, and then her 18-year-old daughter, who disappeared and was probably murdered.

Those are just three of the many terrible stories told by ordinary people who have no interest, and have never showed an interest, in politics. They just wanted to get on with their lives in the suburbs of Baghdad but have had to flee to what they consider to be a kind of safe haven in the Nineveh plains.'

I finished by mentioning the inspiring words of Canon Andrew White, the immensely courageous Anglican Vicar of Baghdad. 93 members of his congregation have been killed just in this year alone, but his church is still expanding:

[Commons Hansard: 16 Dec 2008 : Column 29WH:

'… when someone asked him what kept his congregation going, he said that it was love between the members of his congregation.'

Anybody interested in reading the full Hansard text of the debate can find it on the following link.

www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmhansrd/cm081216/hallindx/81216-x.htm

Once you get to the page, just click on ‘Christians in Iraq’ at the top of the screen.

Let our head teachers get on with their job

Once again, the National Curriculum is to be changed, according to a review by Sir Jim Rose, the former head of inspections at Ofsted.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/nolpda/ukfs_news/hi/newsid_7770000/7770469.stm

Why can our political masters not learn an essential truth? You can’t micro-manage education from the centre.

Head teachers just need to be given the power to organise their own curriculum, hire and fire their own staff and admit and exclude their own pupils - as their professional judgment informs them.

Parent power will then ensure that schools prosper, as happens in the independent sector.

The very idea, of course, of giving people that much freedom is anathema to this Government.

Sex and the family here and abroad – lessons from the home and the pulpit

Fellow Cornerstone MP Philip Davies secured a fascinating debate on Sex Education last Wednesday. Faced with the well-worn argument that as Holland has the sixth lowest rate in the world of teenage pregnancies and as Dutch children get told all about sex in primary school, so if we want to get our rate - the world’s second highest - down we should follow the Dutch example, he came up with some telling counter-arguments.

The strongest was perhaps the fact that Italy, which has an even lower rate of teenage pregnancies than Holland, has “almost no sex education in its schools”. But, as Philip also pointed out, Italy and Holland do have some important things in common: the family unit is stronger and divorce is much less frequent than here. Children in Holland are five times less likely to live with a single parent than here.

UNICEF says the UK is now the worst place for a child to grow up; and of course, as Philip reminded us, our welfare system, with its fast-tracking of housing applications for teenage mothers, positively encourages many to see pregnancy as an escape-route from an unhappy home.

So we in the UK could learn much from the Dutch and Italian attitude to the family.

But could we also learn something from America – not from their rate of teenage pregnancies, which at the top of the world league, exceeds even our own - but from a certain clergyman?

‘From the pulpit, evangelist sends out call for more sex.’

That was the recent headline in my International Herald Tribune:

'And on the seventh day there was no rest for married couples. A week after the Reverend Ed Young challenged husbands and wives among his flock of 20,000 to strengthen their unions through Seven Days of Sex, his advice was – keep it going' …

“This is not a gimmick or publicity stunt”, Young said. “Just look at the sensuality of the Song of Solomon, or Genesis. ‘Two shall become one flesh’ Or Corinthians: ‘Do not deprive each other of sexual relations.’"

After mature consideration, Cornerstone’s steering group has decided not to advise David Cameron to make the Rev. Young’s suggestion a central plank of Conservative Party philosophy!

But now that recession and depression is upon us, perhaps our lives will become less work-focused and hectic. Undoubtedly, married couples in England work harder, stay longer at work and have less time for each other than they should.

Cornerstone believes that economics, indeed politics itself is not the answer to everything.

I am amused that often the most ambitious politicians, when asked what was the happiest moment of their life answer “The birth of my first child” – a simple joy available to the poorest and least powerful in society.

Cornerstone believes that, ultimately, home life, community and shared tradition are much more important than any of the economic theories swirling around the Pre-Budget Statement.

The Jewish refugees from Hitler – a model for immigrants today

Edward Leigh MP
I was very struck by the moving testimonies this week from Jewish survivors of the Kindertransport which saved their lives as they were plucked from Germany in 1938. I’m a great admirer of the way that Jewish immigrants settled into this country, and they should be a model for all immigrant groups.
One of them, who became a successful businessman, John Silbermann, born Manfred, put it well when he said: “What worries me is that at the moment we have an element of immigrants who want to change the country: keep your religion by all means, keep your identity, but don’t try to make the country conform to your standards. We all accepted Britain as it was. We didn’t try to change it. Our duty was to become British.”
This is the right balance. People of Muslim faith are very welcome here. Their religious devotion can be inspiring and their values in many cases preferable to those of an increasingly chaotic secularised Britain. But they need to want to become British and accept our British way of life and our tolerant, easy-going outward-looking attitudes.

The challenge now for the Conservative Party

Edward Leigh MP

Thank God, Cameron and Osborne renounced Labour’s spending plans last week. We were like passengers who had to decide what’s more dangerous: stay on the runaway coach or leap off and risk a broken leg?

Well, now we know. The coach is careering full-tilt over the cliff, and if we had not jumped off and been given a few bruises by the establishment commentariat, we would now be heading for political oblivion. The scale of Government borrowing projected for next year, £118 billion, is staggering; more than we’ve ever let ourselves in for in history: around £4,682 for every household in the country.

What point would the Conservative Party have had if we had endorsed this? What purpose would we serve? For months, no, years, we on the Tory Right have begged our leadership to steer our own course. Ours is a party of fiscal rectitude or it is nothing. As for the cut in V.A.T., we can argue that’s the worst thing to do. We must oppose it. Who can argue against the fact that high marginal tax rates have destroyed the working-class culture of thrift and work?

If tax cuts are needed now, thresholds should have been raised to take people out of paying tax altogether and encourage them back into work, to spend their money as they have to.

How will it help the poor to give them a few pence more off consumer items they don’t need?

As for the promised tax rise for the “rich” – i.e. people who create wealth – this all adds up to a picture of a return to the Callaghan years.

I firmly believe the corner is turned and the Conservatives are on the way to victory. We now have to work out how we’re going to achieve the same outputs for a lot less spending. This is an enormous challenge for an incoming Conservative government. We need to work on it now.

Let’s break out of our religious ghetto

Edward Leigh MP

I like to read foreign newspapers. It puts our own affairs into perspective. I was in Italy a few weeks ago, and was amused to see that apparently Silvio Berlusconi was the architect of global recovery. There was no mention of Gordon Brown.

When I buy French newspapers I find Nicolas Sarkozy is Bush’s right-hand man and Gordon figures nowhere. Recently I have been getting the International Herald Tribune every day. Needless to say, there is no mention of George Osborne’s travails. The truth is that he is a clever hard-working politician who is not (yet) in power. No story there. As for “yachtgate” – a guy who is in opposition receives no money from a Russian billionaire – the biggest non-story of all time!

I notice this week however in my Herald Tribune that the Queen of Spain has been criticised for an interview she gave. Apparently she was less than fulsome on gay rights. Immediately, the roof fell in and she has been caricatured as another embittered conservative Catholic. No mention here of all her sterling good work over many years.

I do think, though, that religious people need to be wary of being caught this way. The enemies of religion like to caricature believers as homophobes obsessed with divorce and abortion. We should not allow ourselves to be positioned this way. It is religious people who run AIDS centres; who care for the poor; who oppose wars.

But religious people need to break out of their ghetto and explain how religion can enlarge the mind, make it more, not less, tolerant, more aware of the needs of others. As important as some of these traditional issues are, there are many more important. For instance, our belief that wars - whether in Iraq or elsewhere - seldom solve anything.

Has science made religion obsolete? –

Edward Leigh MP

This week I spoke at my old university Durham, opposing the motion “This House believes that Science has made Religion obsolete”. We won the vote. It’s done by acclamation there, which is not very scientific! But here’s the speech:

First we should be clear what we are talking about. I believe that you can be both a scientist and a theist. I oppose this motion. This motion is not “God does not exist”. It is, in effect “Science explains everything”. It doesn’t. As Albert Einstein said: “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”

In other words, science can explain the How; it tells us about the What. It cannot explain the Why. Some scientists therefore conclude there is no Why, because science cannot tell us about it, rather than seeing this as a limitation of science.

Take the example of a court of law: the forensic evidence – the science – can tell us a lot about what happened, and how it happened. But it cannot tell us the motive – the Why – always an important item of evidence.

Similarly, John Lennox in his book God’s Undertaker uses another example to illustrate the same thing. Aunt Matilda is baking a cake. Science will be able to tell us the ingredients used to make the cake, but it will not be able to say why she is making it (for her nephew’s birthday).

The question of the existence of God, from a rational point of view, is a topic of philosophy, and has been for several thousand years. It’s not a topic of science.

The question of design in nature is a philosophical question, not a scientific one, again from a rational point of view.

But even if you don’t accept this, if you think that there is no way that reason can be used to point to the existence of God, then you must at least accept that it is a question of faith. Science cannot disprove, or prove, the existence of God. God, and our belief in him, are questions of faith. That is my personal position.

I am a religious person who has throughout life grappled with an absolute, certain belief in the existence of God. However, I find value, great value, in religion and its practice. I find that if I make a leap of faith, things come right; they fall into place.

I call myself an “assumist”. I just have to assume that God exists. I cannot prove it, or disprove it.

Mary Midgley, a philosopher and a non-believer, puts it this way:

Belief or disbelief in God is not a scientific question, a judgment about physical facts in the world. It is an element in something larger and more puzzling – our wider worldview.

She attacks what she calls “scientism”, a belief that science explains everything. Clearly it cannot.

Religion is seen by many as the enemy of science. It should not be. Religion is, and should be seen as, an attempt at explaining the unexplainable; science as a way of proving the provable. Religion and science are not enemies. They are fighting different battles on different battlefields.

Pope Benedict in his Regensburg address went out of his way to defend science, and to promote a rational view of religion. Of course, religion can always be attacked by praying in aid some of its promoters. But I am a creationist, in that I believe that there must have been a Prime Mover.

As Pope Benedict put it earlier this month to a gathering of scientists at the Vatican:

In order to develop and evolve, the world must first be, and thus have come from nothing into being. It must be created, in other words, by the first Being, who is such by essence.

As Shakespeare’s King Lear says, “Nothing will come of nothing”. But I do not believe that the earth was created 6,000 years ago. Revelation does not tell me this; nor does my reason. By the way, 40 per cent of US scientists – people who make their living by science – agree with me; 45 per cent do not believe in God. So scientists are more divided than any of us.

Rather than the caricature of God drawn up by Richard Dawkins – a facile and bigoted alien – I am more attracted to Einstein’s vision:

My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe forms my idea of God.

I am not asking you students seeking new worlds and knowledge to believe in God or not. I am only asking you to have an open mind. Constantly struggle to discover the truth. It will take a lifetime. Seek the truth. Keep an open mind.

Reject this arrogant motion.

I leave you with C.S. Lewis:

If Naturalism is true, every finite thing or event must be (in principle) explicable in terms of the Total System.

Remembrance and Resurrection

Edward Leigh MP

I have just been watching the Remembrance Day Parade, the 90th anniversary of the end of the Great War. How unbearably moving it was to see the last three survivors at the Cenotaph. Difficult not to shed a tear at the thought that, of the five million who served, only these three amazing survivors are left.

November 11 was also the feast-day of St Martin of Tours. In the summer we stopped by at Tours for lunch. The Cathedral is fairly modern. Incredibly, St Martin’s tomb (he was born a pagan about 316) was lost and then found again by a local antiquarian in the nineteenth century. The old Cathedral had been destroyed, and by careful research he worked out where the high altar might have been and discovered it.

A true tale of Resurrection.

Martin, of course, was the soldier in the Roman Army who gave half his cloak to a near-naked beggar. “I was a stranger and you made me welcome, naked, and you clothed me, sick, and you visited

Dying Well

Edward Leigh MP

Parliament has once again this week been discussing “assisted dying”, i.e. euthanasia.

I don’t want to go through all the arguments, just give a couple of personal experiences.

I met recently with a patient suffering from Alzheimer’s. I was looking after him in a hospital ward for a short time. I can’t say where. Or who he was. True, I could do nothing for him. Everything I told him he forgot within a couple of minutes. But he did so much for me. He seemed so angelic, at peace, even holy.

I was profoundly moved. The simplest, most intimate tasks to help him seemed so important, and he said one thing that has stuck with me: “What I can’t stand is cruelty.” I suppose supporters of euthanasia would argue his life was fulfilling no purpose for himself. I doubt that, but even if that is true, it was fulfilling something very important for his carers and his family.

My second experience was with my mother. By the last three months she had no physical quality of life whatsoever. She could not even move in her bed, let alone out of it. She was in pain. If euthanasia was available, as she only thought of others, she might have said: “I am only a burden, now is the time to end it.” But what a tragedy that would have been, because she read and talked to the last, and died peacefully and within a day, of pneumonia, with her family around her. There were no agonising decisions to take. It just happened.

Of course every experience is different, but the very old have so much to teach us. Everyone accepts that the most poignant moment of all the Remembrance Day parades was when 112-year-old Henry Allington tried and failed to stand up to lay his wreath.

Gaudium etsi laboriosum (“Joy in spite of hardship”).

Four services, one desire

Edward Leigh MP

I went to four very different church services over the last ten days. The first was at Polzeath in Cornwall, where we stayed for the weekend during half-term.

This had been an old Methodist chapel. Everyone was most welcoming. The service couldn’t have been more “modern”. “Happy-clappy”, my wife would say, although it was in fact very restrained. Not even a Bible-reading. But the most interesting thing about this church is that it’s called the “Tube Station”. The altar is in the shape of a surfer’s wave! The entire back of the church is taken up by a coffee-bar. Indeed, the church is a coffee-bar during the week. Before its transformation the church‘s congregation was a mere handful. Now it regularly attracts 100 people during the summer.

The lesson: Christianity has to get out of its ghetto and find people in their interests. In this case, surfing. But Christianity can still stay true to its roots.

On Monday I went to a normal (i.e. vernacular) daily service at the Brompton Oratory. I like the Mass there, traditional, no frills, no sermon, over in twenty minutes. It was All Souls’ Day and there was a second and third Mass of the day, the latter in Latin according to the Tridentine Rite. One forgets how soothing the old Low Mass was. The priest with his back to one, no verbal audience participation. Just an encounter with the Eucharist.

On Thursday I was in Christchurch Priory for evensong. A glorious Anglican church, steeped in majestic architecture, but very simple prayers. One of the great gifts to world civilisation is the Anglican tradition of evensong. I always ask my agent to let me go to evensong in Lincoln Cathedral. He rarely lets me. He says the schedule is too busy. But one’s life should never be too busy to go to evensong in one of our cathedrals.

On Sunday I was in Gainsborough Parish Church for our Remembrance Sunday service. I’ve been going most years for the last 25 years. By about ten years ago, the congregation was dwindling and I thought as memories faded so would the service fade away. But recently there’s been a revival of interest as a result of our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The large Georgian church was packed. The service was very moving, with superb singing, particularly the prayers. Previously a bit formulaic, this time they were good, with a background of the chant “Peace I give you/Peace I leave you./Be not afraid”, almost like a Taize chant.

Religion, then, is not an abstract thing. It’s immensely calming and reviving within life. So let Richard Dawkins spend his millions on plastering buses with signs saying “There’s probably no God”.

The insistent desire to meet Him and be close to Him is deep within most human beings – within all of us, the Church maintains. When we are thirsty we can drink, when we are hungry, we can eat. But why should so many of us hunger for something that doesn’t exist? And why should this hunger produce so much of the greatest art, music, poetry and architecture?

Maybe the very obsessiveness with which Dawkins denies God’s existence is a sign of the effort required to suppress such a deep human desire.

He exists for me, at least in my own mind, and perhaps on that Dawkins and I can agree.

Opportunity for Cameron

Brown’s new line of attack is an opportunity for David Cameron

Edward Leigh MP
For obvious reasons, people have been looking at polls in America in recent weeks. As for polls in this country, one for Comres found last week that 58 per cent of voters say the Government should deal with our current crisis by cutting taxes.
And it seems Labour is listening. Last Thursday the Chancellor himself not only said he would not put up taxes but that he wanted to put money into “people’s pockets” to help them weather the recession.
Apparently Labour MPs are urging him to use extra borrowing to give tax relief to poorer workers in next month’s Pre-Budget Report.
One may not approve of the extra borrowing at a time when the Government is so far in the red, but to propose any tax-cut at all at present is an obvious ploy to outflank us Tories from the Right.
Crude maybe, but effective.
Gordon Brown has recently taken a new tack. He used to say David Cameron was “PR not PM” – all style no substance. Now he says he’s a right-wing “wolf in sheep’s clothing”.

But I think this is healthy for our politics. It enables us to clarify the outlines of what we stand for, and give voters a clear choice between two distinct visions of what is best for our country.

In the current financial climate, one way to play to our strength – to show that being “right-wing” is actually the best way out of our current troubles - is to make the case for smaller government.

All over Europe, other governments are bleating after Brown the Keynesian shepherd.

We should show that wolves have their virtues.

The Embryology Bill

The Embryology Bill – treating human beings as spare parts

Edward Leigh MP
The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill had its Third Reading in the Commons last Wednesday, and we on the pro-life side breathed a sigh of relief. The Government’s disinclination to have further debate on abortion amendments gave us a crumb of comfort that at least the abortion law would not get any worse in the immediate future. And Northern Ireland was spared having our abortion regime imposed upon it.

But the Bill is still horrific. As I said in the House, commenting on the philosophy at its heart: “I believe that human embryos are emphatically not just blobs of cells; they have the entire genetic make-up of a human being.” That is a matter of scientific fact, but also of wonder. It is perfect matter for a meditation on the astoundingly delicate intricacy of our biological creation – whether or not one believes in a Creator.

“I believe not that they are potential human beings,” I added in the Chamber, “but that they are human beings with potential. … There is something very dangerous”, I warned, “ in what we will undoubtedly do today. We are making ourselves less than human, in a sense, by viewing one part of human creation as a thing, a spare part” …
“Of course,” as I continued, “[early embryos] are microscopic—a grain of sand—and that is perhaps why we can view them as a spare part. However, when I thought of them as a microscopic grain of sand, as it were—as something that was not in any way recognisably human—I was reminded of this passage from Dostoevsky. In addressing the brothers Karamazov, the prior of the monastery says:
“Love all God’s creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.”’
A blog is not the place to go into detail about a complex Bill, but consider its proposals on “saviour siblings” created to provide tissue for a brother or sister; for IVF children expected to grow up under the legal pretence that their mother’s female partner is in fact their “father” (a law which Humpty-Dumpty could have made); that animal-human hybrids and chimeras may be created just to keep scientists’ options open.

This list is not exhaustive, but any one of these will be a grotesque violation of human dignity at its most vulnerable. So this Bill is unprecedentedly anti-human. It seems to be founded on a tissue of lies about our true nature. Some of its provisions clearly strike at the roots of our natural family bonds.

These wartime lines by Louis MacNeice, seem strangely prescient:

I am not yet born; O hear me,Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God come near me.I am not yet born; O fill meWith strength against those who would freeze my humanity, … would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with one face, a thing, and against all those who would dissipate my entirety, would blow me like thistledown hither and thither or hither and thither like water held in the hands would spill me.Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.Otherwise kill me.

(Prayer Before Birth, 1944)

The Bill goes back to the House of Lords this Wednesday (22), for peers to review it. Let us hope and pray that its opponents in the upper house can at least, to adapt St. Thomas More’s words, "so order [it] that it be not [so] very bad."

Tomorrow I will propose ways for the Conservatives to take the fight more effectively to Labour.

The Most Outspoken Speaker

St Thomas More, MP: the most outspoken Speaker

Edward Leigh MP
I will not condemn any other man’s conscience, which lieth in their own heart far out of my sight.

Sir Thomas More

Thomas More, who was declared by Pope John Paul II to be patron saint of statesmen and politicians, is a man all MPs should celebrate, whatever their religious convictions. It is to him that all members of Parliament owe an eternal debt of gratitude, for it was he who, as Speaker, won for us for the first time the right to freedom of speech in debating any subject. This is nowadays known as ‘parliamentary privilege’. Because of him, we can, in Shakespeare’s words from King Lear ‘speak what we feel, not what we ought to say’.

Thomas More really is a saint for our time. One doesn’t need to descend into hagiography to see him as a fine example for all politicians. Of course he had his faults. After all he was a successful lawyer and politician. Is it possible for anyone to rise in our professions without any blemish? Nor do we need to go to the other extreme and dismiss him as a narrow-minded bigot and burner of heretics. True, he did burn some, as his modern-day detractors keep reminding us. But to condemn him for that is to take him out of his context and his century when religion was central to everyone’s life and government was a kind of theocracy. The authorities felt they had to enforce orthodoxy. Before we get too critical perhaps we could recall those modern-day magistrates who enforce laws against racist comments on the grounds that the equilibrium of society is upset by them. Or consider the laws against Islamist preaching that inspires terrorism. Heresy was then seen as a threat of that order and worse. In Germany an uprising inspired by Protestant notions, known as the Peasants’ War, led in More’s lifetime to terrible bloodshed.

But enough of this carping. The true genius of Thomas More’s memory and why he is immortalised is because he stood up for what he believed in. In a sense his stand and that of Fisher is all the more extraordinary because what Henry VIII was proposing was not so outrageous. After all it was considered one of the greatest disasters that could befall a nation for a girl to inherit the crown. Henry knew that if Mary was to succeed him and marry say the heir to France or Spain, England and her freedom would literally be her dowry. The sensible course for Catherine would have been to retire quietly to a convent after failing in her most important job of providing a male heir. Only two great public men, More and Fisher, stood against the notion that England must have a male heir. Their obstinacy in the face of all their peers is glorious. No doubt too the prospect of execution concentrated the minds of many of their friends, and the fact that alone of all the courtiers and bishops More and Fisher refused to renounce their beliefs even if it led to the scaffold has ensured that they are remembered when all the others are forgotten.

One last canard should be laid to rest. It is alleged that More wanted to be a martyr. In fact he used all his lawyerlike skills to put off the evil day. One is left with the inescapable conclusion that he was just a sincere man who could not renounce his religious beliefs for a political, even a national, convenience. Why can we not delight in and applaud him and hold his memory sacred?

Recently More has become more topical as once again the state starts to impose its morality on the churches in order to stop what it sees as discrimination.

At the heart of Henry VIII’s great matter was an issue concerning marriage and the family. This is not the place to debate the merits or otherwise of the Blair government’s insistence that the Catholic Church open its adoption agencies to gay couples. Suffice it to say that Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Birmingham came out with a Fisher-like statement that needs preserving for posterity:

Those who are elected to fashion our laws are not elected to be our moral tutors. They have no mandate or competence to do so. And the wise among them would not wish it either.

In the context of the dispute the Archbishop of Canterbury famously declared that ‘Rights of conscience cannot be subject to legislation.’

But there’s a broader reason why modern politicians should celebrate the life of Thomas More. We live famously in an age of spin. But we are more worryingly in an age where Parliament is remarkably quiescent to the executive. Most MPs appear more interested in the dubious delights of office than in speaking their minds. Perhaps this has always been so, but at least in the past there were more MPs of independent means. Now more and more MPs have had no career outside of Parliament. They have little alternative earning power, no second career, and often no managerial experience, so becoming one of the Queen’s Ministers is their only real chance of making a mark.

Very few - in fact only two - men in public life, More and Fisher, were prepared to stand up for their beliefs against Henry VIII. Sadly very few today are prepared to stand against the orthodoxy of their own parties. That’s why more and more people are becoming bored, disillusioned and apathetic about politics. It seems to make no difference. All the parties seem much the same.

More shouldn’t then just be the patron saint of politicians. He should be the patron saint of politicians who are prepared to sacrifice ambition for what they believe in. He is then very much a saint for our time.

The above text is an extract from ‘St John Fisher and St Thomas More – the bluntest of bishops and the most outspoken Speaker’, a chapter by Edward Leigh and Alex Haydon in English Catholic Heroes, published last month by Gracewing. It is available via the publisher’s website on the link below.

http://www.gracewing.co.uk/

You can also order by telephone on 01568 616835

David Cameron delivers the goods

Edward Leigh MP
Congratulations to David Cameron on his party conference speech. His best yet. Solidly right-wing, it could have been delivered by Margaret Thatcher. I loved the bits on marriage, sound money, strong defence and respect for the law. Some of his lines on political correctness and the nanny state were really stunning. Gut Conservative stuff.

This is not meant to carp, but there are areas where we need to develop our policies a bit. First, our leading politicians, Labour and Conservative, talk too much about themselves. Statesmanship is about ideas, not celebrity.

Second, Heathrow is one of our greatest international business assets. We do need a new fast railway line, but we need also to allow Heathrow to remain the biggest international airport in the world. International travellers won’t want to take even a high-speed railway to a regional airport for their interconnections.

Next, top marks to Michael Gove for our new education policy of widening school provision. The reasons why independent schools work is because they are allowed to do what they want. Heads in the state sector must be given the same freedoms, to hire and fire, and also to choose what pupils they want in their own schools. In fact, if heads were given such freedoms, most schools in the state sector would change little in the academic range of their pupils, but they would evolve immeasurably for the better.

Then, we need to be sharper on the NHS. It is not a religion. Most of us pay thousands of pounds in tax for it during our lives and then have no rights when we get ill. For a start, people must be allowed to top up their NHS provision if a drug is withheld because of cost.

Both in education and health we need to end the rigid divide between state and private. Which is why we need education vouchers and tax relief for private health insurance.

Cut Loose

Now is the time to cut ourselves loose from the Government’s “spend and borrow” approach

Edward Leigh MP
As Gordon Brown said in his Conference speech on Tuesday “There’s a lot to be serious about.” This was put over as a jocular way of celebrating his famous dourness. But whilst he went through a brief mea culpa over the 10p tax fiasco, he was content to lay all the blame for our current economic problems on the volatility in international markets.

This will not do.

Not when the finances of the government he heads and whose purse-strings he held for the last decade are in their current parlous state. Government borrowing is at record levels. A few months ago the Chancellor was predicting he would borrow £120 billion over the next four years. Now he is saying he needs an extra £20 billion. £7 billion will be needed next year alone. Meanwhile the budget deficit is over 3 per cent of GDP. That is the worst figure of all industrial economies, excepting Hungary, Pakistan and Egypt[1]. After fifteen years of global growth. That is nearly three times the EU average. As a result, the European Commission has initiated disciplinary proceedings against the UK.

So perhaps Alistair Darling was not exaggerating very much when he said we could be facing the worst downturn for 60 years.

Last summer he warned us of the need to tighten our belts, invoking the dangers of a wage-price spiral reminiscent of the 1970s.

But as Prime Minster the reputedly prudent Gordon Brown still wants to spend like a renaissance prince on the public sector. This at a time when the Governor of the Bank of England has had to write to his Chancellor about the inflation rate soon rising to an expected peak of 5 per cent; when unemployment has risen by 81,000 between May and July, to 1.72 million, and the prices of food, petrol and utilities have all risen massively.

The OECD’s economic outlook report says the Government’s options for coping with the crisis are limited by its own profligacy. It speaks of “excessively loose” fiscal policy in past years of strong growth. Now, it says the deficit will climb “significantly above” 3 per cent of GDP, so risking a breach of the sustainable investment rule next year as net government debt shoots towards 40 per cent.

On top of all this, the Prime Minister’s latest wheeze is to provide free nursery places for all two-year-olds. On the basis that there are 600,000 two-year-olds in the country, that is likely to cost over £1 billion. His socialist reflexes react to hard times with yet another hand-out.

And now Ed Balls promises free school meals for all primary school children. It has been widely reported in the press that this will end up costing around £1 billion a year.

We have before us the appalling prospect of an incoming Conservative Government being forced to put up taxes in 2010. We cannot be the victims of a scorched earth approach to public spending. It would be disastrous if an incoming Conservative government had to raise taxes. As Bush senior and John Major found, Conservative governments that raise taxes long-term are dead Conservative governments.

We Conservatives must now cut ourselves loose from the ball and chain of Labour’s tax-and-spend approach. We should do this by making a concerted intellectual case for why spending must not be allowed to increase any further; indeed, why it should, where possible, be restrained.

Part of our historic role as a party should be to manage the public finances with prudence and thrift. We should be explaining now how we are going to deliver public services more efficiently and with greater value for money. As long as the economy grows over a cycle it is still possible for a Conservative government to deliver lower taxes and better public services, and this case must be made – and made now.

To this end, I welcome the recent announcements that George Osborne is currently reviewing our spending plans, and that he will set out the results of this review next year.

I also look forward to what he will say at the Conservative Conference today. It is understood he will set out the Party’s plans for gradually reducing the share of GDP consumed by government. That is also a very positive development.

But above all I hope he makes it crystal clear that we Conservatives cannot be tarred with the brush of this Government’s woeful wastage of taxpayers’ money.




[1] The Economist June 2008

Save the Language of Jesus

Politicians must act to save the language of Jesus

Edward Leigh says that only an Iraqi Christian province can preserve the Assyrian Church
I have just spent a memorable week in northern Iraq as a guest of the Assyrian Christians, becoming the first British MP to visit these people in the lawless land north of Mosul since 2003. When we think of Christianity here in the West we conjure up an image of cosy medieval churches set in green fields with polite elderly congregations, or perhaps majestic cathedrals. What I saw in Iraq was a reminder of Christianity in its raw early form.
Here are the last speakers of Aramaic, the language of Jesus Christ. Here I saw the tomb of the Old Testament prophet Nahum, with its Hebrew inscriptions on the old stone walls. This prophet’s brief book describes, in somewhat lurid terms, the overthrow of Nineveh. It is the Lord’s vengeance upon the Assyrians as the enemies of God’s people. Ironically, the words he applies to the pagan Assyrians could now be applied to the Christian Assyrians of Iraq: “Your people are scattered on the mountains with none to gather them.” If they continue to be evicted from the Nineveh Plains, where they have always lived, then their language too will fade away.
Then there is the suffocating heat, unrelieved in Ramadan by even a glass of beer, the undercurrent of violence and oppression, the small flat-roofed houses, the bare ancient churches devoid of any ornament and the ancient liturgy.
I heard some harrowing tales of Christians being killed and kidnapped in Baghdad following our invasion. I am even more certain I was right to vote against an invasion which has caused so much misery for minorities in Iraq.
I spoke to a number of displaced widows who shared their tragic stories. One woman told that her husband had been kidnapped and a $15,000 ransom demanded. Although she paid, her husband was never returned and is presumed dead.
Another widow’s husband had been killed by a bomb and she has been left to care for their son and two daughters, one of whom has Down’s Syndrome. Another told me that her husband had been killed by a roadside bomb in 2006, while he was returning from church. A few days after her husband’s death her daughter was kidnapped. At this point she started crying uncontrollably and we had to end the interview. I later learned that her daughter has never returned and is presumed dead.After this I spoke to a young Christian woman who lost four of her family members in 2004. When she lived in Baghdad Muslim extremists had put leaflets through her family’s letterbox, calling the Christians “pigs” and telling them to leave or be killed. A few days later they attacked her house and killed her parents and sister. One of her brothers disappeared and she believes he returned home while the killers were still there and was kidnapped. There is no news of her missing brother and he is presumed dead.
Sometimes I find British politics inward-looking and petty. When I go to places like northern Iraq I feel new life coursing through my political veins and I am determined to stand up for these minorities. This decimated community is under pressure from many sides. Over 700 Iraqi Christians have been killed since 2003 and half have left Iraq, leaving perhaps about 400,000 Christians in Iraq. Over 95 per cent of them are Chaldo-Assyrian, the descendants of the Assyrians of Old Testament times. They are the indigenous people of Iraq, with a continuous presence in that land for over 6,000 years. Today, probably more than at any other time in their long history, the Assyrians are in grave danger of disappearing altogether from their ancient homeland.
The average Iraqi faces many risks but Christians are exposed to even more: they have to deal with the additional threat of attacks from Islamic extremists, who want to drive them out of Iraq, kill them or force them to convert to Islam; attacks by insurgents who mistakenly view the Christians as close allies of the “Christian” West; abduction by kidnappers who think that the generally well educated Christians are more wealthy than other Iraqis; and having large areas of their land – and many of their houses – misappropriated by neighbouring Kurds in what appears to be a systematic attempt to take over Christian-owned land and drive Christians out of the Kurdish region. At least 58 Christian villages have been partially or wholly misappropriated by Kurds.
I visited many during my stay and was told by the Christians how their land and houses and sometimes even their sources of water had been taken by the Kurds. In every case the Kurdish authorities failed to ensure that the misappropriated property was returned. In some cases it has even been the ruling Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) who had seized it. For example the KDP office at the Christian village of Kany Masy was built on Christian-owned land without the owner’s permission. In the area under Kurdish Regional Government control an environment of impunity prevails, where Christian-owned property is viewed as “up for grabs”. The KDP is even encouraging Kurds from abroad to come and settle in the region as part of their systematic attempt to Kurdify the entire area and squeeze out the Chaldo-Assyrians.
While there is no danger of the Sunnis, Shias or Kurds vanishing from Iraq, there is a risk that this may soon happen to the Assyrians unless their security situation improves and they receive much more support. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reported that Christians made up 36 per cent of Iraqi refugees in Syria, although they only comprised about four per cent of Iraq’s population - further evidence that Christians suffer disproportionately.
The West, particularly the US and Britain, must step in to protect the last remnant of a Christian minority in Iraq, lest they go the way of the Jews, who were all evicted. We need to give them their own province in the Nineveh Plains. We need to warn the Kurds that continued encroachments of their land will not be tolerated. Iraq’s leading Christian political party, the Assyrian Democratic Movement (ADM) have long called for a self-governing province to be established for the Chaldo-Assyrians, situated in and around the Nineveh Plains, as these lands form part of the Assyrians’ ancestral homeland and are still heavily populated by them.
The ADM have received the highest number of votes from Iraqi Christians at elections, indicating that their call for a province is supported by the majority of Iraq’s Christians. This province would provide better security for Christians and encourage many Iraqi Christian refugees to return and live there. If the Assyrians do not get their province then the KDP will probably eventually annex the Nineveh Plains to Kurdistan and the Assyrians will soon die as a nation.Edward Leigh is the Conservative MP for Gainsborough. Readers can help the Christians of Iraq by sending a cheque to the Assyrian Aid Society at 36 Crossway, London W13 0AX. Readers may also write to their MP, urging them to contact the Foreign Secretary and ask the Government to give more support to Iraq’s Christians, including support for the Chaldo-Assyrians' request for a self-governing province.
This article was published in the latest edition of the Catholic Herald (October 3).

John McCain – Giving people “the opportunity to reach their God-given potential”

Edward Leigh MP

The Palin bounce

One swallow doesn’t make a summer of course, but an Obama victory no longer seems a safe bet.

The Palin phenomenon is obviously having an effect. In front of the cheering crowds of Republican supporters who interrupted her speech to chant or whoop every few minutes, the moose-hunting “pit-bull” was clearly in her element. She lapped up the applause with a broad grin. Old McCain looked slightly uncomfortable with the same experience. But although his speech was never going to have the novelty value or the star-quality of Palin’s tour de force, it struck me as an excellent expression of true Conservative values.

A touch of Churchill

His tribute to his mother, who, “96 years young”, was in the audience to hear him was to British ears perhaps a little cloying. Nonetheless, her belief “that we’re all meant to use our opportunities to make ourselves useful to our country” showed that his patriotism was something he’d taken in with his mother’s milk. It was perhaps a conscious reframing of JFK’s “Do not ask what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” McCain developed the patriotic theme throughout his speech, saying of his support for the troop-surge in Iraq at a time when it was highly unpopular: “I’d rather lose an election than let my country lose a war”. There was a touch of Churchill in that remark. My own opposition to the Iraq war is well-known, but I respect those who differ on principle.

McCain of course continued the themes his running-mate had launched into in her speech, including the determination to get rid of big government: “All you’ve ever asked of your government is to stand on your side and not in your way” - a soundbite memorable for its simplicity, a speechwriter’s triumph.

Other themes which I warmed to were his approach to education: “We’ll help bad teachers find another line of work….Empower parents for choice!”, and energy independence: “We’ll drill now!”

Pure Cornerstone

But it was when he started on a quietly passionate litany of “We believes” that I was most enthused:

“We believe everyone has something to contribute, and deserves the opportunity to reach their full God-given potential.

We believe in lower taxes, spending discipline and open markets.

We believe in rewarding hard work and risk-takers, and letting people keep the fruits of their labour.

We believe in a strong defence, work, faith, service, a culture of life, personal responsibility, the rule of law, and judges who dispense justice impartially and don’t legislate from the bench.

We believe in a government that unleashes the creativity and initiative of Americans.

A government that doesn’t make choices for you but lets you make choices for yourself.”

If you change “Americans” to “the British”, I could happily have delivered that section of the speech myself. It is pure Cornerstone.

Of course it was inevitable that McCain would return to the theme of patriotism at the end. The contrast of his war record with Obama’s lame disclosure that he once considered military service but decided against it as the Vietnam War was coming to an end was bound to play to McCain’s strengths. And, whatever your politics, the fact that he resisted the temptation to get out of a wretched jail early on account of being an admiral’s son is an impressive signal of character. So when he said that after the experience of being supported through torture and imprisonment by the encouragement of his fellow-captives and comrades-in-arms, “I wasn’t my own man any more, I was my country’s”, it was no mere speechwriter’s soundbite. It rang true.

As did his statement that “nothing brings greater happiness in life than to serve a cause greater than yourself.”

He may lack Palin’s pizzazz, but, like her, John McCain has the great virtue of authenticity. His experience, both military and political should also count for something. His character has clearly been tested in the crucible of his Vietnam ordeal.

The race for the White House just got a lot more interesting.

Sarah Palin - putting the Government on the side of the people

Westminster politics had left me feeling a little jaded as the summer recess came upon us.Then the other day I watched Sarah Palin’s address to the Republican National Convention, accepting her nomination as running-mate to John McCain.Now I feel absolutely reinvigorated.Palin’s heartfelt defiance of the East Coast liberal elite and its media cheerleaders will resonate with many voters in this country.With fierce pride she stood up for ordinary “small-town” people.Millions of them in Britain are yearning for relief from the expensive burden of Labour’s big-government approach.Palin’s desire to “put the government … back on the side of the people” was clearly spoken with utter conviction.Her record of cost-cutting during her time as Governor of Alaska bears this out.And her celebration of her marriage and family - while admitting that it “has the same ups and downs as any other” - was heartening.She spoke movingly of her Down’s syndrome son - “ a perfectly beautiful baby boy”; in Britain doctors pressurise women to abort such children. But as a Christian pro-lifer she would never consider doing so, any more than her teenage daughter will abort her grandchild.If she was a British politician, she’d clearly be a natural member of Cornerstone!