Article

Comment

Easter

Politics

6 March 2025

4 min read

Amid the power plays the Passion of Zelensky stands out

How to respond to the Trumps and Pilates of this world?

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

President Zelensky, wearing black, sits silently.

White House via Wikimedia Commons.

It started with prime minister Keir Starmer’s shameful toadying to President Donald Trump in the Oval Office at the White House, when he flourished a letter from his King inviting Trump for his second state visit to Britain.

My first thought was what Starmer was going to produce for Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky when he visited London shortly afterwards. A Fortnum & Mason voucher? My second thought was marginally more profound. Thirty pieces of silver came to mind. And I wondered why. Was it possible that Starmer was betraying Ukraine for the trinkets and baubles of our monarchy, just to stay in favour with the world’s most powerful man?

As we have just slid past Ash Wednesday into the season of Lent, these thoughts take on a fiercer focus as the ends of our stories look like they’re in our beginnings, as the cast of characters in Passiontide ahead of Easter seem to take their places in our world politics now.

Is US Vice President JD Vance a little like the Temple high priest of Jerusalem, Caiaphas, when he demands rhetorically: “It is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish”? Isn’t the price of bringing Zelensky down and appeasing Russia’s Vladimir Putin worth it for peace in Ukraine?

It might be customary in a column such as this to continue to ascribe characteristics of the cast of the Passion of the Christ to the leaders of today’s great powers. But that’s too easy and doesn’t really work. Starmer is no Judas. His courtly flattering of Trump preceded the attempted humiliation of Zelensky in Washington and since that event Starmer is widely applauded across the political spectrum for playing a blinder and not putting a foot wrong.

He is no betrayer of Zelensky, quite the reverse. And, anyway, casting him in that role risks the sacrilege of deifying Zelensky, who is definitely not the Messiah. Indeed, you don’t have to be a devoted Trumpian to invoke Monty Python’s Life of Brian and note that his performance before Trump and Vance was not messianic, but that of a very naughty boy.

Such comparisons are not going to get us very far. Maybe it’s better to turn them the other way around. Of greater value, perhaps, is to use the power plays that we’ve just witnessed on our global stage better to understand the one we’ll shortly be commemorating from a couple of millennia ago in Jerusalem.

In doing so, we may even begin to peek into some insights that demolish any case that the historical events of Passiontide are of no relevance today. And this isn’t just about politics, it’s about our human capacity for abusive power.

Like Trump, Pilate just wanted to make a deal to keep the peace. Like Trump, he told Jesus that he wasn’t being sufficiently appreciative of what he was trying to do for him.

Take that scene in the Oval Office when Zelensky was bullied by the two most powerful figures (Elon Musk excepted) in the new US regime. It’s a classic weapon in any domestic abusive relationship to blame the victim. So it was that Trump/Vance sought to blame Zelensky and by extension his nation for his and its oppression by Russia.

And so it was when the Nazarene stood before Pontius Pilate, the mouthpiece of the most powerful man on earth of his day, the Emperor of Rome, Tiberius. The similarities between the two situations are striking. And not just because one can reasonably doubt that Jesus of Nazareth wore a suit on that day either.

The latter, a battered artisan and preacher from the provincial hills and a man described as being “without sin”, was a classic subject of victim-blaming. Like Trump, Pilate just wanted to make a deal to keep the peace. Like Trump, he told Jesus that he wasn’t being sufficiently appreciative of what he was trying to do for him. Like Trump, he told him that he had absolute power over his fate. And, like Trump, he is certain that truth is anything he wishes it to be in the moment when he asks contemptuously: “What is truth?”

The intriguing question is how this tells us to respond to the Trumps and Pilates of this world. In the immediate circumstances of interrogation in both the Oval Office and the praetorium, the answer seems partly to be silence. The Christ chooses it; Zelensky has it forced upon him by the coercive control of his interlocutors.

Again, I make no claim for a Christ-like Zelensky. But silence as a human response invariably has its source in humility. In the most worldly of senses, that is now very apparent in the conciliatory words of the Ukrainian president towards his bully, calling his leadership “strong”, regretting how the meeting turned out and expressing willingness to return to the table.

Humility isn’t weakness. It brings the power of peace and enables the triumph of love. That’s the lesson from two thousand years ago. And the lesson is also that no good can come from a total lack of it, just as for Trump as it was for Pilate.

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Article

Assisted dying

Comment

Culture

Politics

3 December 2024

5 min read

The assisted dying debate revealed the real role of Parliament

MPs from areas where people are vulnerable and at risk were more sensitive to the dangers.

M. Ciftci

Mehmet Ciftci has a PhD in political theology from the University of Oxford. His research focuses on bioethics, faith and politics.

An MP stands and speaks in a parliamentary debate.

MP Diane Abbott speaks in the debate.

Parliament TV.

What would be the effect of allowing assisted suicide for those ‘people who lack agency, the people who know what it is to be excluded from power and to have decisions made for them’, asked Danny Kruger MP, as he wrapped up his speech? ‘What are the safeguards for them? Let me tell the House: we are the safeguard—this place; this Parliament; you and me. We are the people who protect the most vulnerable in society from harm, yet we stand on the brink of abandoning that role.’

His words capture an important aspect of Friday’s debate: what is the point of Parliament? Do MPs meet to turn public opinion polls into policies? If the majority are in favour of something, do MPs have nothing left to do but to follow the public and sort out the fine details? We might instinctively say ‘Yes!’ It seems right and democratic to treat those whom we elect as people we select and send to do our bidding. And the polls do seem to show the majority of people supporting assisted suicide, at least in principle – although there are good reasons to be sceptical about those figures and about the conclusions drawn from them.

But there are numerous times when the majority are known to be in favour of something but politicians refuse to endorse it. Polls repeatedly show that a majority are in favour of reintroducing the death penalty. Why might it be right for MPs sometimes to ignore what the purported majority thinks and to use their own judgement?

Because Parliament is not just a debating chamber.

An older way of referring to it was to call it the ‘High Court of Parliament’ because ‘parliament, classically, was where individuals could seek the redress of grievances through their representatives,’ as law lecturer Dr Robert Craig writes. It performed its function admirably in response to the Horizon scandal: a legitimate grievance was brought to its attention, and it responded to redress the wrongs done to the sub-postmasters by passing a law to ‘overturn a series of judgments that could only have been obtained, and were only obtained, by a toxic, captured and wilfully blind corporate culture’.

Friday’s debate featured many MPs who understood what they were there to do. They acknowledged the ‘terrible plight of the people who are begging us for this new law’ as Danny Kruger said. But they also spoke up for those who were in danger of being harmed and wronged by the bill: the disabled and the dying, and all the vulnerable who were not there to speak on their own behalf.

Many echoed the concerns expressed by Diane Abbott about coercion: ‘Robust safeguards for the sick and dying are vital to protect them from predatory relatives, to protect them from the state and, above all, to protect them from themselves. There will be those who say to themselves that they do not want to be a burden. … Others will worry about assets they had hoped to leave for their grandchildren being eroded by the cost of care. There will even be a handful who will think they should not be taking up a hospital bed.’ And evidence of coercion is hard to find and trace: ‘Coercion in the family context can be about not what you say but what you do not say—the long, meaningful pause.’

An analysis shared on X by law lecturer Philip Murray found an association between the level of deprivation in a constituency and how likely a Labour MP was to vote against the bill. He also shared figures showing that 2/3 of MPs from ethnic minorities voted against it. In other words, MPs from areas where people are vulnerable and at risk were more sensitive to the dangers of helping people to kill themselves.

The second reading of the bill on Friday was a crucial moment for them to decide whether the bill would fix an injustice or whether it would itself cause harm.

But it seems that many MPs did not appreciate what the debate was about or what they had gathered to do. Layla Moran MP said: ‘The media are asking all of us, “Are you for or against the Bill?”, but I urge hon. Members to think about the question differently. The question I will be answering today is, “Do I want to keep talking about the issues in the Bill?”’ But James Cleverly MP intervened: “she is misrepresenting what we are doing at this point. We are speaking about the specifics of this Bill: this is not a general debate or a theoretical discussion, but about the specifics of the Bill.” He was right to be impatient. Unlike the Oxford Union, the vote has consequences. Parliamentarians are not there merely to debate. As the term ‘High Court of Parliament’ suggests, when MPs (either on their own initiative or as a government) propose bills, what they are often doing is conveying a plea to redress some grievance, and their debates are to decide whether to respond by making laws to grant justice to the wronged.

The second reading of the bill on Friday was a crucial moment for them to decide whether the bill would fix an injustice or whether it would itself cause harm, because the scrutiny that the bill will undergo in the following stages is not likely to be as rigorous as with government bills. As a Private Member’s Bill, the assisted dying proposal is free to be scrutinised by a committee selected by the MP who has proposed the bill, i.e. Kim Leadbeater. When the bill reaches the stage for a final vote in the Commons at the third reading, no further amendments can be made and the time for debate is likely to be short.

It is rare but bills are sometimes defeated at the third reading. With eighteen abstentions on Friday and at least thirty-six MPs claiming they might change their minds later, there is still hope.

Each sitting of the Commons begins every day with a prayer by the Speaker’s Chaplain, who prays that MPs ‘may they never lead the nation wrongly through love of power, desire to please, or unworthy ideals but laying aside all private interests and prejudices, keep in mind their responsibility to seek to improve the condition of all mankind.’

We can only hope and pray that at their next opportunity, MP will consider this bill in light of their responsibilities as the country’s High Court, charged with protecting the most vulnerable in society from harm.