The moral sugar high of the protest vote

We shouldn’t give politicians bloody noses over insurmountable single issues.

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is Vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead.

A winning candidate at an election address the audience from a lectern while the loosing candidates look on

The victorious candidate at the Rochdale by-election.

A cat was elected as a Member of Parliament. A cat. George Galloway - former Labour party MP and Rula Lenska’s former cat - has been elected as Member of Parliament for Rochdale. The unique circumstances of the by-election make this a less surprising result than one might think. The Labour Party disowned their candidate, the Tory Party hardly contested the seat, and the sheer number of inappropriate independents meant that a split-vote victory for Galloway was entirely foreseeable. One must also note Galloway’s many skills: as a campaigner, an orator, and a dirty-tactic by-election gadfly.

So…Rula Lenska’s cat did the unimaginable and won a seat in Parliament. How did the cat do this? He convinced people that they could vote for him to protest the current Parliamentary position on the Israel-Gaza War. In his victory speech, Galloway gave an ominous warning: “Keir Starmer…this is for Gaza.” He went on to intimate that his victory was due to the high proportion of Muslim voters in Rochdale; their disgust at the Labour Party’s response to the Israeli invasion of Gaza morphing into a wish to give Keir Starmer (‘one cheek of the same backside’ - Rishi Sunak being the other cheek) a bloody-nose. He warned that Starmer “…will pay a high price for…enabling, encouraging, and covering for the catastrophe presently going on in occupied Palestine, in the Gaza strip.”

My fellow voters are intelligent enough to recognise that the single addition of George Galloway to the green benches will do almost nothing to affect change. They have voted so, the general consensus goes, simply to register their fury at the plight of ‘fellow Muslims’. I simply want to respond with a question. Is this moral?

People vote for all sorts of reasons. If we believe political scientists and pollsters, voters might care about many things, but will end up voting on the basis of one thing. Normally the economy. One’s own economic interest is a perfectly rational reason to vote for one party’s promises than another. There is a potential immediate impact on our lives and those of our family and friends. But Gaza?

Sociologists have spilt a tremendous amount of ink describing how human communities tend towards ‘tribal’ affection. We tend to feel more connected to those who are like us - in terms of geographic location, in terms of obvious racial characteristics, in terms of language and culture, of course religion. The notion that the Gazan War is a war on Muslims would be a natural driver for the Muslim community of Rochdale to vote ‘for’ their fellow Muslims.

On the other hand, in the world of modern ethics there has been a move to recognise that such tribal allegiance is ultimately meaningless - a call to see all human beings as equally worthy of our care and attention, especially irrespective of geography. Peter Singer famously presented the thought experiment of a drowning child - if we are willing to get our shoes wet and muddy to save a drowning child we walk by a shallow pond, why aren’t we willing to give up some of our wealth to alleviate the war-stricken poverty of a Gazan child many miles away?

The people of Rochdale must vote as their conscience requires. I simply worry that their conscience has taken on an impossible burden of care that they will struggle to sustain.

The words of Jesus seem to support such an ethic, which is always global in its vision. We are not only to love our neighbour as ourselves, we are to go out into all the world, evangelising the nations. From its beginning the Christian faith has preached that loving our neighbour means loving everyone. Everyone is a beloved child of God. Everyone is our neighbour. Surely a vote for Galloway, a vote of rage against the occupation of Gaza, is fundamentally moral - either on grounds of tribe, or rejection of tribe. Surely its Christian!

I’m not so sure.

I’m not so sure we fallen humans actually have the capacity to ‘care’ about the horrors that go on many, many miles away. Jesus tells us to love our neighbour as ourselves, but we barely have the emotional energy to love ourselves. We live in a society of such activity and distraction - with a seemingly concomitant rise in the incidence of hopelessness and depression - that I don’t think we can really give our moral and emotional energy to an event as distant and overwhelming as the plight of Gazan civilians. We can barely give it to our families. We can barely give it to ourselves. C S Lewis once wrote that the best way of eradicating suffering was people working away quietly at limited objectives: “I think the art of life consists in tackling each immediate evil as well as we can.”

Jesus was the ultimate localist - God became incarnate as a unique individual, of a particular tribe, of a particular nation, in a particular time and place. Jesus taught an ethic of universal love and dignity and respect, but lived out in specific acts of service. He didn’t wash the feet of all Jerusalem - just his disciples. He didn’t heal all disease everywhere and forever - but he did restore sight to the few blind people he met. St Paul wrote individual letters to individual communities. Yes, he asked them to pray for him and each other, but otherwise told them to focus on their immediate needs and charity and holiness. The popularity of Jordan Peterson is largely based on the achievability of his slightly nebulous self-help worldview: make YOUR bed, keep YOUR back straight, look after YOUR family. Improve yourself first if you want to even begin improving the world. You’ll probably never manage to improve more than your village…maybe only your own household. That might be enough.

I don’t judge those who voted for Galloway as a Gaza-conflict protest. A new campaign, ‘The Muslim Vote’, has emerged to persuade Muslim voters to lend their support to candidates who commit to ‘Peace in Palestine’ – ceasefire, sanction Israel, and a state for the Palestinians. It is becoming clear that what appears to have happened in Rochdale may well happen in constituencies up and down the country. The idea of the ‘Muslim vote’, which Galloway was able to turn into electoral victory, is being given form and force. It is emotive and persuasive, and may well convince people who have no link to Gaza other than their Muslim faith. It is entirely possible that some of the voters have family and friends trapped in the siege. I empathise with their vote and weep for their sorrow.

I don’t judge those who voted for Galloway as a Gaza-conflict protest. I do, however, worry that many have taken upon themselves a fundamentally unwieldy ethic. Galloway is not a one-man parliamentary wrecking ball - whatever he says. The position of the Government will not be changed by his election. The resolve of the Israeli military is unlikely to be dinted by the UK Government, no matter what resolutions the House of Commons passes. The people of Rochdale must vote as their conscience requires. I simply worry that their conscience has taken on an impossible burden of care that they will struggle to sustain. Perhaps they would be more fulfilled and more effective if they cast their vote on the basis of what could be achieved for them in their community, in the immediate future.

We must pray for the people of Gaza, and we must not cease praying; but I would suggest that we must vote in the interests of the people of our own place, our own constituency. Giving the Labour Party a bloody nose over Gaza might be an immediate moral-sugar-high. Electing an MP who will actually work for the needs of the community in their particularity will certainly be less instantaneously thrilling - but maybe it is more moral.

Article

Character

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Education

Fun & play

1 September 2025

5 min read

Is your child school ready?

What really matters as a child develops

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

A teacher looks on as a young child concentrates on writing.

Department for Education.

In the coming weeks, those little critters will start to emerge, easily identified by their autumn plumage of coloured sweatshirts and oversized backpacks. Anxious parents and caregivers can be spotted, shepherding their young along paths and pavements, casting worried glances left and right at the pelican crossings. Listen carefully and you may hear the squeak of uncomfortable new shoes and juveniles complaining about the wearing of a coat, as adults of the species re-establish social bonds with cries of, “Back to school already, I can’t believe how fast it’s gone!”

As they congregate upon the tarmac staging ground, some will be taking part in this ritual for the very first time. Neophytes who have maintained social bonds throughout the pre-school years might be seen to greet their fellows cordially, “Did you have a good summer? Can Flo make it to Izzy’s party?” Others will stand alone, scanning the playground for a half-remembered face from the bygone days of antenatal classes. That was only five years ago, but it feels like a millennium. The faces are changed; everyone looks more…tired.

The world has been turned upside down in those past five years. It’s been said so often that it is almost trite, but nonetheless true: nothing prepares you for becoming a parent. In the UK, new parents increasingly raise their children without the immediate support of extended family, coupled with the tyrannous expectation that one will retain one’s employment rank and contribution to the labour market alongside this new and 24/7 full time job of looking after baby. The Key Performance Indicators of parenting are ambitious. Deliverables for the first five years include toilet training, instilling speech and language skills, establishing basic recognition of 26 alphabetical characters (including the child’s ability to recognise the alphabetical sequence that spells their own name) and ensuring the recognition of and (ideally) ability to correctly sequence numbers 1 to 20. If your child can do all of this by the age of 5, whilst also learning not to punch, kick or bite other children, not to eat food off the ground, and not to stick rocks up their nose, then congratulations! Your child is school ready!

It may comfort some readers to know that very few 5-year-olds manage to hit absolutely all of these milestones. As the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, commented recently – parenting is too hard. She is working to establish a new iteration of Labour’s ‘Sure Start’ programme (rebranded as ‘Family Hubs’) to offer parents more support in the community. As part of her rationale she states, “When one in four children are leaving primary school without having reached a good level of reading, then something’s gone seriously wrong in those early years that has to go beyond the school gate.”

Whilst I’m keen to see more support for new families – I’m intrigued by this particular rationale for it. Ability to read well by a certain age seems an unlikely metric by which to measure whether a child has had a positive experience of childhood; it appears indicative of what autism-researcher Anne McGuire calls “The normative time of childhood,” in which the success is measured against an imagined future of economically productive years. By this metric, if a child learns to read at a prodigiously young age this is taken as an indicator that they will enter the workforce with greater velocity than their peers, essentially that they will have “more future-yet-to-be-realized” than those around them. McGuire writes, “In a neoliberal regime where ‘time is money’, the child is figured as ‘time-rich’ and so represents a good investment opportunity indeed.”

McGuire’s analysis is piercingly accurate of how we often talk about our children, despite knowing all too well that it represents a fallacy. There are multitudinous stories of adults who have gone on to make staggering contributions to human flourishing, despite being placed (literally or figuratively) under the dunce’s cap at school. But even without focusing on those who go on to excel, those who attract fame, fortune, or both, we don’t have to look far to find cause to re-evaluate what it means for a child to be school ready.

My son’s year group recently finished their own primary school journey, and a quick glance through some of the leavers’ books reveals that children are very good at valuing each other for what is here in the present, without recourse to an imagined economic future. As children wrote goodbye messages for each other they said things like,

“Thank you for always having such good ideas for games to play.”

“You helped me on my first day when I got lost.”

“You’re a great house captain and you always help the teacher.”

No one was particularly keen to predict fame and fortune for the future of their friends, and there was an understandable indifference towards academic milestones. As a literary corpus, the leavers’ books were testament to the old adage that people will not remember you for what you say or do but will remember you for how you make them feel.

One the subject of childhood, Jesus once said something that defies easy explanation. He was out, teaching in the open air, surrounded by crowds of adults including important religious leaders and wealthy individuals who wanted to ask complex and deep theological questions, but in the midst of it all there were parents bringing their children, elbowing their way to the front of the crowd to ask Jesus to pray for their little ones. When some of Jesus’ followers tried to usher the children away, Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” The precise meaning of this utterance has eluded thinkers and theologians for centuries – what exactly is it about childhood that Jesus was alluding to?

I wonder if it is something about the capacity of children to live in the immediate, and therefore to value what really matters – justice, kindness and friendship. In primary school, yes it helps in some ways for children to arrive aged 5 with a certain command of the alphabet and the ability to finish the day wearing the same set of underwear that they arrived in. But perhaps what matters more is children arriving ready to enter the fray of friendships – being kind, being helpers, having the self-confidence to know that they have something to give to the learning community that they are joining, whatever their learning speed might be. Such things are gloriously untethered to economic potential or a future-yet-to-be-realized, but they are closely tethered to a child’s understanding of themselves as a valuable and important person. If Labour’s intention to offer new parents more help in the community goes some way towards communicating to our pre-school children that they have that have – and will always have – value, regardless of what they will or won’t attain to academically or economically, then it will help many more children reach the milestone of being school ready.

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