Political logic appears to be on the side of Conservative MP Sir Gavin Williamson in his bid to deprive 26 Church of England bishops of their seats within the House of Lords. But the Labour government is more likely to resist his amendment since the “Lords Spiritual” have proved to be so reliably left-wing.
The former Education Secretary within the Conservative government led by Boris Johnson has tabled an amendment to Labour’s House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill: “No-one shall be a member of the House of Lords by virtue of being a bishop or Archbishop of the Church of England.”
In an article on October 29, the PoliticsHome website reported: “In the largest Lords reform shake-up in almost 25 years, the Labour government has decided to abolish the remaining 92 hereditary peers, as promised in its manifesto. But 26 Lords Spiritual also possess an automatic right to sit down and vote within the Lords and have done so because the 14th century. They constitute one other block now thought by some to be outdated and undemocratic, not representing Britain today.”
PoliticsHome explained the political background to Sir Gavin’s amendment: “Tensions between the bishops and the Conservatives reached boiling point in the course of the last parliament, with relations described as ‘toxic’ and ‘unfixable’. The bishops were criticised for being too political by taking strong views on government laws, particularly its flagship immigration policy. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, was considered one of the foremost critics of the Rwanda Bill on the time, labelling it ‘immoral and cruel’.”
The article quoted Sir Gavin explaining the logic behind his amendment: “The Government has made the choice to remove one outlier that has develop into outdated, they must also recognise the proven fact that there may be one other great outlier. What can justify the Church of England having the appropriate to such legislative power? This is totally out of sync with any modern democracy. It’s frankly fallacious, and it’s actually quite insulting.”
Significantly, Martin Sewell, a distinguished lay member of the C of E’s General Synod, agrees that the bishops should lose their seats within the Lords. He wrote to The Church Times on November 1: “The Bishops’ privileged status has been founded upon a premiss of ethical integrity, which was presumed to be sure that they ‘spoke truth to power’. That justification has evaporated with their collective failures to urgently address the multiple disasters in safeguarding…
“The Church that they lead obstructs every try to hold episcopal delinquency to account. Under its processes, any criticism is refined and diluted at each stage until it is set that it’s doesn’t ‘quite’ reach the requisite standard and is dismissed.”
He concluded: “The sooner the Established Church is held to the identical standards as every other institution the higher; the withdrawal of its privileged position in Parliament is the worth now we have to pay. We only have ourselves in charge.”
Fortunately for the Lords Spiritual Labour’s recent Second Church Estates Commissioner, Marsha de Cordova MP, appointed by the federal government to field questions within the House of Commons on behalf of the established Church, has revealed the Westminster elite’s determination to reward the leftist loyalty of the bishops.
She defended the bishops with none apparent irony for being non-partisan. She told PoliticsHome:Â “They scrutinise government laws, which is what the Upper Chamber is there to do, and considered one of the positive things is that they usually are not partisan…To me that’s something we must always be applauding.
“I all the time consider there shall be a spot within the Lords for our bishops. I can not see any space where that would not be the case.”
So, the bishops will almost definitely keep their red seats within the Upper House showing that loyalty to neo-Marxist dogma relatively than political logic is the dominant think about the federal government’s purge of the hereditary peers from the Lords.
But under the Labour government’s House of Lords shake-up would the C of E’s bishops be keeping their hereditary places within the UK legislature in the event that they had consistently stood up for traditional, orthodox Christianity in all its counter-cultural glory?
Julian Mann is a former Church of England vicar, now an evangelical journalist based in Lancashire.
