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07/27/2008: "Response to madness"

Here is a letter I sent to the Sunday Herald, in reply to a rather bonkers article by Patrick Reilly last week. Don’t know if they have published it – the letters appear not to be on the online version.

‘As well as projecting an entertainingly histrionic tone – who, in British politics, is really ‘trying to eradicate religion itself’? - Patrick Reilly’s analysis of the shifting relations between Scottish Labour and the Catholic Church (Sunday Herald, 20 July 2008) lacks much by way of historical context. Far from necessitating a ‘seismic’ shift, disagreements between social progressives and religious conservatives have been a periodic feature of the Labour Party almost since its inception. The Party may have famously been thought to ‘owe more to Methodism than to Marxism’, but liberal and radical views on contraception, abortion, gay rights and the role of women were always to be found in disproportionate numbers among its ranks.

As early as 1927, the Party Conference saw a schism over the prospect of state-funded contraception, and witnessed the now familiar sight of dire forecasts of Catholics defecting from the Party. Similar scuffles between progress and reaction have been a regular feature in the relations between Church and Party ever since. One of the more recent involved an attempt in 1996 by the late Cardinal Thomas Winning to make Tony Blair’s personal views on abortion an election issue. Throughout all of this, Scotland’s Catholic voters remained resolutely Labour, unswayed by the thinly disguised campaigning from the pulpit.

If a new schism has opened between the Party and the Church in recent times, it has opened on other ground. The traditional shared concern with poverty and equality has been strained to breaking point by New Labour’s apparent indifference or impotence in the face of the widening gap between the chronically poor and obscenely rich. But the Church leadership’s on-going obsession with sexual and reproductive morality, over all other moral concerns, has added to the strain. ( I might add that an organisation that would deny contraception to even the most overburdened and hard-pressed of families has always had, at best, a mixed record on helping the poor.)

Labour lost Glasgow East almost certainly because Labour was seen as having no answers to the problems of chronic poor health and a desperate life expectancy, of rising utility bills and rents, and about personal safety. It did not lose a referendum on Gordon Brown’s views about cytoplasmic hybrids or same-sex civil partnerships, however much it may suit the agenda of conservative religious leaders and their supporters to portray things this way.’