Will the left get it?

I am the first to admit there is an enormous difference between UK and US religious politics. But there are lessons we need to learn - before we find ourselves allowing the religious right in the UK to do what they did to the Democrats in the US throughout the Republican years.

After the 2004 defeat the Democrats took stock and decided to listen to Jim Wallis and others. The Democrats had to take a hard look at how they had been re-defined by the Religious Right and therefore why so many Christians were identifying their morals and votes with the Republicans. In his book Don’t think of an Elephant! George Lakoff demonstrated all too clearly how the right had managed to get a stranglehold on the political dialogue in the United States. The book is a guide on how to articulate the progressive moral vision and reframe and reclaim the political discourse.

Over the last three or four years I have come to believe that we need a similar level of engagement in the UK before the Right start to define the Labour Party and Progressive Christians in the same way. It is not done by the partisan political parties or even by the usual suspects in the media, but by pressure groups and think tanks which all bemoan the declining moral standards of the nation and capture the language of morals that should be ours. In the US they invested 40 years in framing the moral and political debate. It is not a 12 month programme but a steady drip of effective domination of the public square. We need to step back into the public square and reclaim the lost ground in the UK before it is too late. CSM can be an integral part of that.

We all know and understand our deep and historic link between Christians on the left and the Labour Party. For me the two were intertwined from an early age. After a surge of renewed interest in CSM as the new Labour project took hold in the 1990s it has once again become less fashionable to be a Christian and Party member. It is certainly true that many of us join the Labour Party and CSM because we are against “the world” and because we envisage a Kingdom of God which we can work towards by delivering social policy. We are instinctively against authority and the way things are done. We are rebels with a cause. This is probably why the last decade has been tough for Labour and CSM members at times. Being in government is suddenly about making and taking tough real choices – not just producing sound bites and press releases in opposition.

The hardest for so many of us was the war in Iraq. No other such avoidable war has caused so much pain and hurt for the Party and so many Christians. I could not put the party above my moral judgement that this was not a Just War and resigned as a PPS to allow me to speak out. Many others drifted or left the Party. We seem to have made other mistakes too which have managed to alienate different parts of our own religious base – relaxing drink laws, increasing opportunities to gamble and extending stem cell research and using admix human embryos for research. Of course this is ironic because in Tony Blair we had one of the most committed Christian Prime Ministers in living memory. But of course under Alistair Campbell the “we don’t do God” became the mantra. So we need to redefine so much of what we are doing to strengthen relationship and to join up some of that thinking.

We have done so much to reduce family poverty and to increase social and employment rights for mother and fathers. Yet we are not seen as the party of the family. It is territory where we should feel comfortable. Gordon Brown recognises the need for a core moral purpose to his premiership and the delivery of his government. For those of us who have worked with him on international poverty and injustice for example the experience of working with somebody so driven to make poverty history is electric. On these issues he is a man with a mission and a clear moral purpose. We need that same sense of purpose and energy on other issues too. But as we have seen in the US elections this year political interaction is changing. The internet is slowly changing the way we are connected. The dialogue between politics and citizen has never had such positive potential. The contact is now immediate.

We are the facebook generation and we must do our politics and therefore our Christian politics out there in web 2.0. Look at the people who turned out for Obama for the first time from the internet generation. They were inspired to register and vote and that was done by Obama and his web presence. We face imperfect choices in life. No organisation probably ever fits our understanding of the moral choices that face us. Being in a denomination or a political party means compromising when we sign up! The Kingdom of God is not on the ballot paper at any election but we should certainly be working and striving for reaching as near as possible. We need to be encouraging and mentoring a generation of young Christians to get involved in politics and the Labour Party. By encouraging and assisting we should be developing the next generation of MPs. In the current global financial crisis we have an opportunity to be at the heart of the discussions in the public square about where our values – or lack of them – will take us for the remainder of the 21st century. We need to be relevant and to offer hope.

Both the Party and CSM need a coherent answer to the problems we face. Our response should not be a mild interpretation of what has gone before in the first decade of New Labour but a radical programme that responds to the crisis. We need to base our response in good theology but it needs to speak about sustainability, simple living, right relationships and a sense of Shalom. The Labour Party seems to be reassessing what it is about and what it really stands for. The global economic collapse has given new labour an opportunity to break away from the doctrine that the market will always prevail. The public are now ahead of us in their understanding of this. They are looking for different answers to different questions. If we respond properly we can row back the excesses of capitalism and steer the progressive agenda onto the front foot. If the US can nationalise its banks anything is possible! It is not too late to reinvigorate the relationship between the Labour Party and the Christian left. Yes it will be hard in an increasingly secular public square but it is not a battle we should shy away from. Indeed we should relish the prospect of showing that the Bible has so much to say about poverty and justice. We can rescue the Labour Party by concentrating on these core issues. At the same time we can reinvigorate the Church to think much more about the 2000 verses in the Bible that relates to poverty and social justice rather than being seen as only being interested in what happens in the bedrooms of the UK.

The old order is collapsing. Hopefully a greedy debt driven period in our history is over. Gordon Brown has appointed Stephen Timms as a Vice Chair of the Party responsible for Faith. Labour and CSM have a consultation under way, led by Malcolm Duncan. There is a golden opportunity to shape the future if only we are positive enough to seize it. The next generation of exciting young Christian leaders are responding to the challenges of the 21st century outside of our traditional political boundaries. The social networking on the web has and will transform even further the break down and dominance of the political parties. We can seize this as an opportunity and channel the enthusiasm and dynamism of a new generation to our progressive ideals or we can be so afraid of losing control that we miss the opportunity.

I firmly believe we can win the hearts if we are prepared to be bold enough. This is a chance to seize our opportunity to win the 21st century for progressive politics of hope against fear.