EN recently interviewed Lord Alton regarding moral issues and matters currently before the houses of parliament, which are of concern to Christians...
EN: Firstly, how would you encourage Christians to have greater involvement in politics?
DA: There are many ways in which people can be involved. There is a duty on each of us to participate in the life of the community.
My generation was brought up with parents who had come back from the Second World War, some of whom had given their lives or seen their relatives or friends killed in the service of their nation, and they handed on a sense of patriotism - in the best sense of that word - as being engaged and involved through duty to your country. We have rather lost that - although it shouldn't take a wartime spirit to create a sense of duty. We have got to rekindle the idea of good citizenship and we need to do that in our schools, homes, churches and in the wider community. It should alarm Christians that in parts of the country - I represented Liverpool City at one level or another for 25 years - there was a local election recently in which only 6% of the people voted. This is a fertile breeding ground for extremism. And it underlines a deep-seated alienation and disaffection that should give us all cause for concern.
Christians in politics
EN: Would you share Sir Fred Catherwood's view that you can join a party if you agree with the majority of its policies?
DA: Yes, and when you cease to support the majority, you have no purpose being there. So not everyone will want to be in a political party.
There are groups like the Movement for Christian Democracy which is a broad-based movement and which eventually will produce people who will want to contest elections. I think that is almost an inevitability. In fact, some already have - Alan Storkey contested the last General Election against Michael Portillo in the Enfield seat as a candidate standing on Judeo-Christian values. We may well see more of that, especially under a proportional system of representation.
But for those who don't want to engage in contesting elections or joining political parties, there are the single issue organisations and the pressure groups and voluntary organisations - there is a whole wealth of these groups. If someone's heart, for instance, is to change laws that have allowed five million abortions in the last 30 years, 600 every single working day, then I would say to them: 'Join Care or Life or SPUC and work with them to change those laws.' Or if their heart is concerned with the sale of arms by this country to countries like Indonesia, well, there are organisations like the campaign against the arms trade, organisations like Christian Aid which people can join and work with.
EN: Do you have any optimism for progress on abortion or do you think that is a battle fought and lost?
DA: Whenever a life is saved, then the battle has been won. A woman came up to me two years ago at a conference that I was speaking at, and told me that she had heckled me at meetings up and down the land. As this was a meeting of Catholic charismatics, I wondered quite what she was doing there, but she told me that her daughter had come home a couple of years before that and said that she was going to have an abortion. She had remembered all the arguments from the meetings at which she had heckled, and expressed those arguments to her daughter. And she said: 'For what it is worth, I am here, my daughter is here, and my granddaughter is here.'
I think that the Jewish rabbi who said that the person who saves a single life saves the world was right. I think people will come to see the wholesomeness and the winsomeness of our position. Just being anti-abortion doesn't appeal to me in the slightest. Being positively pro-life does.
Euthanasia
EN: Do you think euthanasia is the next battleground immediately in politics?
DA: Over the next 12 months, there are huge battles which are likely to take place. Through the introduction of legally binding advance directives, there is an attempt by leading liberal lawyers to introduce euthanasia by the backdoor.
They will not call it euthanasia, but legally binding advance directives will require doctors to terminate the lives of their patients. In Holland, 3,000 people died in one recent year from euthanasia. And according to the Dutch Attorney General, over 1,000 of those were involuntary euthanasia.
So voluntary euthanasia then leads to involuntary euthanasia. It also leads, as Dame Cecily Saunders - that illustrious Englishwoman who founded the hospice movement in this country - pointed out, to the collapse of the hospice movement as it has done in Holland. If you can kill the terminally ill and the dying, you don't need hospices any more. They are the alternative to euthanasia, just as caring and support services are the alternative to abortion.
Cloning
The other big battle is the issue of human cloning, which will require the creation of yet more human embryos to enable cloning to proceed. A committee of four was established by the two authorities that govern these things. All four have publicly expressed views in favour of therapeutic cloning. Two of the four are directly associated with the pharmaceutical industry.
We have got to wake up, and wake up the country as well to what is happening to them. They should re-read C.S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength which actually prophetically forecasts the kind of experimentations that now routinely take place on our own species. It looks at the links between huge vested interests with academic conceit, the link between those two forces and what it can create and the destruction of ethics that follows in its wake. I think what Lewis wrote about 50 years ago is now coming about.
Also on the pro-life front, on the Abortion Act itself, there are moves to extend the Act to Northern Ireland. There is also an attempt to remove the 'two doctors' requirement from the green forms that are completed when an abortion takes place, and Frank Dobson, the Secretary of State for Heath, said that he would welcome such an attempt.
To my mind, there is the issue of free speech as well, which is linked to all these things. When you look at some of the people who have been paying a price, mainly Christians, they are being persecuted for their pro-life views, again with barely a murmur of protest being made by parliamentarians. The young journalist who lost his job because he wouldn't rewrite the copy to take out the word 'perish' when he described what happened in an abortion, or the young receptionist at a doctor's practice in Salford who was sacked because she wouldn't handle the processing of abortion application forms.
EN: Do you see the House of Lords reform removing one of the bulwarks in our society against moral decline?
DA: With the House of Lords reform, we are being invited to give the government a blank cheque by abolishing the hereditary element without knowing what we are going to put in its place. I believe that although there is a need to reform the Upper House (I don't think there is much disagreement about that), we should know in advance what it is that is going to replace the hereditary peerage. People can be enormously disparaging of the hereditary peers, many of whom have made an invaluable contribution to the national life of this country.
EN: If the House of Lords is reformed, do you consider this may have a negative impact on ethical issues such as homosexuality?
DA: The House of Lords has a very mixed record actually on ethical questions. It was the House of Lords, for instance, that introduced the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act which has led to the destruction of half a million human embryos. There is a huge, if I can call it 'scientific', lobby (there is nothing wrong with science as long as it is directed at the right objective) that almost worships at the feet of science and which on the 'right to life' questions can be extremely hostile, even more so than the Commons is. So I am not sure that there is that much to pick or choose between the two. We should be a lot more positive and affirmative of the family. Look, for instance, at the decision recently to reduce married people's allowance. In the same budget which is supportive of children, it is negative of marriage. I think that is an error, a huge mistake, that the government has made.
EN: What has been the most satisfying thing for you in politics?
DA: Having the opportunity to use a platform to air the issues that I care about, and speak up for those who would otherwise have no voice - specifically in that context, for the unborn child.
Next month, we will be looking at a pro-life unit trust that Lord Alton has been involved in establishing.
