It was, I believe, Conor Cruise O'Brien who said that, in his biography of Edmund Burke, thinking of the British Crown's treatment of the people of Ireland in the eighteenth century.
I thought of his point when I heard that Clive Lewis was being made to take his oath of allegiance to the king again because be omitted some words the first time.
It ought to be possible for MPs to be republicans, just is at possible for them to be atheists. MPs are given the option of affirming rather than swearing on a holy book, and everyone thinks that's right and proper.
Yet it took a long battle by Charles Bradlaugh, a Liberal MP from Northampton, to win the right to affirm.
Would those who have accused Lewis of "student politics" say the same of Bradlaugh?
What the authorities should do is devise a tweak to the oath, producing either one that every MP can take or a subtly different version that republicans can take.
There would be a row at first, but soon we would be congratulating ourselves on a typically British piece if pragmatism. And not long after that, we would imagine that it has always been like that.
Photo by Rwendland.
Hmmmm..... but it's not quite the same though, is it? The MP is required to make a promise of some sort or another - call it an oath if you like - and some MPs will follow an ancient tradition of invoking a particular deity to support the power of the promise they are making. Mr Bradlaugh didn't want to do that - he wanted his own promise to be accepted on its own merits, a position which is, incidentally, identical to many individual Christians, Quakers and even Tim Farron, who affirmed rather than swear an oath precisely because he is a Christian in the evangelical tradition.
ReplyDeleteThe Big Question here is *to whom* is the promise being made? It's being made to the Monarch as the Head of State, and the personification of the nation. It's not being made to a particular individual, but to the monarch and his legitimate successors. It's not possible for an MP to make a promise to "the people" - the people are too diverse, and with too many conflicting interests, to represent themselves - see the election result for further details. Making a promise to an individual doesn't negate Republican sentiments or sensitivities - it's just that, as currently constituted, the monarch is best placed as the recipient of the promise.
A better suggestion, of course, might be to get rid of any promise whatsoever. It would get rid of a lot of grandstanding all round.....
When, years ago, I was sworn in as a judge (actually affirmed in, because, like Tim Farron, I have read Matthew 5:34, even though I can’t abide Tim’s particular flavour of Christianity), before taking the judge’s oath I had to take the oath of allegiance.
ReplyDeleteAnd my reasoning was exactly that of Anonymous – the current Head of State is Mr Saxe-Coburg with the initials of the Child Poverty Action Group, but when we finally succeed in growing up as a nation, the titular Head of State will be Charles’ “successor according to law”. The oath actually says nothing about who or what those successors should be.
Anonymous is of course right that we ought to look hard at the oath, because it’s a requirement that disenfranchises anyone who quite legitimately votes for Sinn Fein – you cannot expect someone who seeks Irish reunification to pledge allegiance to the English Head of State, whether a King or a President.
But we do need something, even if a requirement to “faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and... preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” didn’t work too well with Mr Drumpf. And you are right that we ought to be able to come up with something better than what we’ve got at the moment. The Victorians got an awful lot wrong, but the oath they drafted for judges to swear is, I think, a thing of beauty: “do right to all manner of people after the laws and usages of this realm, without fear or favour, affection or ill will”.