Cancelling the Church for opposing the Rwanda policy is deeply un-Conservative

Jun 16, 2022 by Jill

by Marcus Walker, New Statesman:

Rebuking the bishops for speaking up for refugees feels achingly wet. Preserving the institutions of the constitution has been core to every Conservative vision since the development of the party system.

What does it mean to be a Conservative? Every political party, especially those in a first past the post system, is a coalition of interests. Therefore, any definition is either going to be crude or so caveated that only a political theorist would be bothered to wade through to find one.

Yet there has always been a pretty consistent core in Britain, as defined by Disraeli in his Crystal Palace speech of 1872: “The first object of the Tory party [is] to maintain the institutions of the country.” For this, he was reaching back to the founder of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke, and anticipates the conservatism of all the 20th-century leaders of the party. And what was the first institution he turns to? “No institution of England, since the advent of liberalism, has been so systematically, so continuously assailed, as the established Church.” Preserving the institutions of the constitution: the Crown and the established Church, have been central to every Conservative vision since the development of the party system.

Until now, it seems. In a temper because the entire bench of bishops in the House of Lords wrote a letter to the Times opposing the government’s removal of migrants to Rwanda, the administration that currently trades under the name “Conservative” is considering revenge. “Retribution, it appears, is coming for the 26 bishops who said the Rwanda policy ‘shames Britain’,” tweeted the journalist Tom Newton Dunn. “Cabinet ministers [are] openly talking about expelling them from the Lords now. ‘Only Iran also has clerics that sit in their legislature,’ one tells me. ‘They’ll go.’”

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Read also: Will bishops stop the Rwanda plan? by Giles Fraser, UnHerd

Should the Church of England be disestablished? by Jonathan Chaplin, Law & Religion UK