The politics of Fiji?

The referendum on the type of voting system we should adopt in General Elections in the UK takes place on May 5.

I began to worry immediately I saw a leaflet about it come through our letterbox festooned with the photos of celebrities. ‘Because Stephen Fry and Joanna Lumley think a certain way you should too’, seemed to be the message. ‘Oh dear’, I thought.

The choice is between retaining the old ‘first past the post’ system and the arrangement known as the Alternative Vote (AV), in which voters rate candidates in order of preference on their ballot paper. The appeal of AV seems to be that minority parties have more chance of getting a say. But is that always a good thing? If we think that Christian parties might at last find a platform under AV, it might also mean that extreme Islamists and the BNP will do so too. And remember that AV is not the same as proportional representation. Its results do not even have that degree of ‘fairness’ about them. Some say it is also likely to lead to mediocre candidates in power, with second and third choice names on the ballot paper coming out on top. I understand that the only countries which presently use the AV system are Australia, Papua New Guinea and Fiji and that the latter is now seeking to ditch it.

Social mobility

During March one of the hot political topics was social mobility. It has been the aspiration of governments of all shades since at least the days of John Major that Britain should be a place in which diligent people from poorer backgrounds have the opportunity to ‘make something of themselves’. The debate particularly took off around the question of how much access less privileged individuals have to our top universities.

Upward social mobility is hard to engineer for secularism. It is dependent on fluctuating economic circumstances, not least with many universities intending to charge the maximum rate of £9,000 for tuition fees. And, in a global recession, if the jobs are simply not there how can hard work guarantee getting on in life? In fact, many things in contemporary Britain militate against encouraging hard work — the huge salaries paid to ‘celebrities’ and pampered TV presenters for one.

Gospel transformation

In fact, the most certain way of promoting social mobility is the gospel. Wasn’t it R.H. Tawney, in his Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, who, following Max Weber, showed this to be true? Looking back to the social influence of the Reformation, he said that to be diligent at work, providing for your family and being productive in life was looked upon as being part of the mark of true conversion and hence wealth was produced. Becoming a Christian makes that kind of change. We have a friend who from a life of car theft was converted in prison and ended up in management. We see youngsters in our own congregation from dysfunctional families already getting on in education. I’m sure many readers know of similar stories. And wasn’t it always said that the reason the churches declined in the inner cities in the 20th century was because, as people came to Christ, they changed their attitudes, got on in life and moved to the suburbs? That wasn’t such a good thing, but the fact of it is yet more evidence for what I am saying.

If governments want to increase social mobility they should encourage the transformation of society through the gospel. But will they have the wisdom to do that? What do you think?