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Marx, Methodism and Mayhem

It is said that that the Labour Party owes as much to Methodism as to Marx, but few ever suggested that the two strands were happily synthesized. No doubt modernizers like Blair, Brown or Mandelson would claim that New Labour left all that stuff behind. But the unreconciled legacies of Karl and the Wesleys still characterize the present government’s incoherence about basic political matters like communities and the ordering of society. It seems to take about a decade in power before philosophical contradictions in a political programme become disabling. The Thatcher/ Major administrations ran out of steam when the tensions between economic liberalism and social authoritarianism became inescapable. The “events, dear boy, events” theory of politics (to misquote Macmillan) is only half the story. Governments can navigate their way through the turbulent seas of “events” if they have a reasonably reliable moral and theoretical compass. But when the loadstones of ideology swing the compass needle hither and yon, the Ship of State can founder on the smallest reef. Perhaps Blair’s greatest sin of omission was his wilful refusal to think in terms of moral or ideological compasses at all. Today, Not-So-New-Labour is caught by its contradictions. The catalyst is, perhaps surprisingly, religion, and crisis looms because Labour has never worked out where it stands between its Methodist and Marxist inheritances. The “narratives” about religion, endorsed by government, and occasioned mainly by post 9/11 panics about Islam, show this administration’s cluelessness about faith and communities which embody faithfulness. Take the Department of Communities and Local Government’s Single Discrimination Bill. Here, religion is just one more variety of difference—an analogue of gender or ethnicity—which the State must