Shortly before the election, Keir Starmer said that action to prevent knife crime was a “moral mission”. Not long before that Rishi Sunak had described the infected blood scandal as “a decades-long moral failure at the heart of our national life”. What was unusual about those two statements was the use of the word “moral”. For decades we have shied away from using it in our public discourse for fear of being thought judgemental or found to be hypocritical. But with the new government and its sense of serious purpose perhaps the time has come to acknowledge that this presupposes a sense of moral purpose.
We are used to hearing about errors of judgement, mistakes or lapses, but not of a moral failure, let alone moral failure at the heart of our national life. But it is a phrase that might equally be used about the Post Office scandal, the Hillsborough disaster, or the Grenfell tragedy. And the churches, with their failure to deal properly with sexual abuse, are not exempt.
In modern life we endlessly discuss the economic cause of our woes and the psychological nature of human behaviour – and these are highly relevant. But when you have taken into account all the economic, social and psychological factors, there is still the individual who has a choice to make, and that choice will often have a moral dimension. “The uniqueness of the Ego is the fact that no one can answer in my stead,” as Emmanuel Levinas put it. People sense that we are moral beings but as a society we are reluctant to talk about it.
Recently, Salman Rushdie wrote: “God did not hand down morality to us. We created God to embody our moral instincts.” From a Christian point of view, just the opposite is the case. God is a god of moral beauty and searing truth, and it is because we are made in his image that we have moral instincts.
Nobody could have had more understanding of and pity for wrongdoers than Dostoevsky, who for four years was imprisoned with some of Russia’s most brutalised criminals. He thought that no judge, jury or he himself had any right to think themselves morally superior to them. Yet he was passionate that every human is morally responsible for their actions.
There was a time when everyone learned the Ten Commandments by heart, and many churches had them written up on either side of the altar. That has long gone. But as George Orwell argued, because of the influence of Christianity, there is what he termed a common decency in British life. That is still here, as was dramatically shown in the first Covid lockdown.
This common decency has been shown in the many ways in which our society has hugely improved morally in my lifetime, as most obviously expressed in the 2010 Equality Act. We now recognise that it is wrong to discriminate against people on the basis of their sexuality, gender, religion or race, and any expression of racism or anti-Semitism is quickly picked up and condemned. The diverse make-up of the English football team is a wonderful tribute to this.
But are there ways in which our society has morally declined? Frank Field wrote a book shortly before he died in which he pointed out that in 1900 there were only 1,908 crimes of violence against the person in the country. Now there are more than that in each constituency. A century ago most people in prison were serving seven-day sentences for minor offences. But a significant amount of wrongdoing today is in so called white-collar crime, financial crime, fraud and so on, accounting for 40 per cent of crime committed in England and Wales. Then there is the normalisation of pornography; it is watched by around half of the adult population in the UK, the second-highest proportion of any country in the world. The four largest pornography sites received a combined 11 billion visits a month in 2020, which is more than the number of monthly visits to Amazon, LinkedIn, Netflix, Zoom and eBay combined. Particularly worrying is its impact on children. The children’s commissioner for England reported that children are being exposed to pornography from a young age and 50 per cent have seen it by the age of 13. It also found that young people are frequently exposed to violent pornography; 79 per cent had encountered violent pornography before the age of 18.
In Code of Conduct, Chris Bryant pointed out that 21 MPs had either been suspended by the House, resigned their seats, or left the chamber before being suspended for a day or more since 2019: “Statistically the worst record of any parliament in our history, by a long chalk.” Now the Labour Party in its manifesto has said that it will create a new independent ethics and integrity commission to bring probity to government. But it is difficult to see how we can bring probity to government unless it runs through society as a whole.
We do not want to go back to Victorian times, with its moral blindness in so many areas and sense of moral righteousness in others. We want to continue to understand the economic, social and psychological pressures that influence the way we behave. But it’s fundamental to what it means to be a human, whether we are an MP or an ordinary citizen, that we are responsible for our choices. We are frail, flawed and fallible, but still called to moral seriousness.
Richard Harries was bishop of Oxford from 1987 to 2006 and sits in the House of Lords as a cross-bench peer. He is the author of “The Re-enchantment of Morality” and “Faith in Politics?”
[See also: The unlikely refuge of British supermarkets]
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