The problems Keir Starmer faces are not just political - they are spiritual

His greatest battle may be the fight for our trust.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

The beginning of a new government is a bit like the beginning of a new football season. Nothing yet has gone wrong. The future seems full of promise. The grim memory of last season is in the past. Hope is in the air.

Keir Starmer, in his early speeches as Prime Minister, sound some familiar notes. He speaks of “a weariness in the heart of a nation, a draining away of the hope, the spirit, the belief in a better future that we need to move forward together.” While not quite Margaret Thatcher’s invoking the spirit of St Francis in 1979, Sir Keir was reaching for something deeper than the practicalities of politics, for bigger themes, more resonant ideas. Yet there was one note that caught my eye, not just in these speeches but also before that in the election campaign – a theme that cropped up often – the need for trust.

On the day after the election, when the confirmation came through that Labour had won, in an early morning speech to supporters delivered at the Tate Modern, he said this: “Make no mistake, this is the greatest test for politics in this era – the fight for trust is the battle that defines our age.”

Keir Starmer has put his finger on something. As Martin Kettle in the Guardian put it, “Whether you approve of Keir Starmer’s election strategy or not, it is a matter of observable fact that he has centred it upon the regaining of trust.” The Labour manifesto claimed that “over the last 14 years, trust in politics has been shattered.” It went on: “sleaze and scandal have eroded trust. Just as corrosive has been the inability of politicians to keep promises made to the British people.” Among the main reasons the Conservatives were roundly rejected were the actions of Boris Johnson’s inner circle, who partied in Downing Street while families were avoiding each other and staying away from their parents’ funerals (I know – I was one of them). I'm not sure that he and his party realised how corrosive and damaging that was to public trust in government and the Conservatives in particular. Perhaps now they know.

Trust is built when politicians keep their promises and deliver what they say they will over the months and years. It wilts in the presence of political in-fighting, bets placed by election candidates, or unfulfilled boasts to save the NHS.

Hope and trust are vital things for human life. We cannot live without them. And it’s not just in politics. The Church of England has had its own troubles with trust in recent times. A report, debated at General Synod, lamented the lack of trust in the Church, setting it in the context of a general lack of trust in institutions in our society.

Starmer understands that trust has to be earned. “This lack of trust,” he said outside No 10 Downing Street, “can only be healed by actions not words.” And trust takes time. Trust is built when politicians keep their promises and deliver what they say they will over the months and years. It wilts in the presence of political in-fighting, bets placed by election candidates, or unfulfilled boasts to save the NHS.

However, to be fair to politicians, trust has not only to be earned, it also has to be given. And we have become less trusting as a nation. The IPSOS Trust Index reveals that politicians, the media, bankers and advertising executives are our least trusted institutions. An ONS survey in 2023 revealed that trust in political parties, the media, local government, and international organisations was at its lowest level for years. A survey of over 36,000 interviews across 28 countries revealed “a world ensnared in a vicious cycle of distrust, fuelled by a growing lack of faith in media and government. Through disinformation and division, these two institutions are feeding the cycle and exploiting it for commercial and political gain.”

To break what it called the ‘cycle of distrust’, it recommended demonstrating tangible progress, focussing on long-term thinking and providing credible information. Yet I wonder if the problem lies deeper than that.

Trust is a habit. It is like a muscle. The more you exercise it, the more it tends to grow. Yet the paradox of trust is that without trustworthy objects in our lives, it becomes hard to exercise that muscle. A child growing up with parents who regularly deceive and lie to him, promising but not showing up to sports events, hinting at presents that never actually turn up, quickly learns that trust doesn't work. The disappointment is too great to bear. Cynicism works better. He learns to take everything with a pinch of salt, to be wary of promises, and that a guarded attitude where the default position is not to believe is a safer option.

In a broken and fallen world, trust is a fragile thing. Some people and institutions will be more trustworthy than others, but even the best will get things wrong...

The problem politicians face is that politics, as they say, is the art of the possible, and along the way, whether due to financial constraints, or the need to do deals with allies, political opponents, or (more likely for Starmer, given the size of his majority) within your own party, compromises have to be made, promises ‘re-aligned’ if not actually broken, which is where distrust starts to creep in. Nick Clegg famously made a promise that his party would never increase student fees, yet in the cut and thrust of actually having to govern, he had to break that promise, and his version of the Liberal Democrat party never recovered.

A little while ago, I interviewed Esau McCaulley, an African-American theologian and New York Times columnist with a fascinating backstory. His childhood in the backstreets of Alabama was complicated by an intermittently absent and unreliable father, whose promises were broken again and again. Esau learnt to approach the world with wariness, burned by broken promises. Yet somehow, through the determination of a good mother and the steady influence of a local church, he learnt to trust again. As he put it: “others must own their scepticism, and I my trust, both of which arise out of deeply held convictions about the nature of reality.”

Like Starmer, McCaulley has put his finger on something. The question of whether or not we believe ultimate reality can be trusted lies beneath our cultural tendencies towards trust or mistrust. Ultimately, trust needs a transcendent object. In a broken and fallen world, trust is a fragile thing. Some people and institutions will be more trustworthy than others, but even the best will get things wrong and when those people and institutions that we have trusted implicitly let us down, it is the hardest fall of all.

Judaism and Christianity, in particular the latter, have made a big deal about faith and trust. The Bible is not a list of pithy, timeless aphorisms, but consists of a story across time – and as we saw, trust takes time. One of the central characteristics of the God of the Christian Bible is faithfulness across time. It tells the story of a God who makes a world with a regularity that can be trusted, where the sun rises and sets, light follows darkness, where the fluctuations of a dynamic planet are contained - hence the symbol of the rainbow as a sign that God will not ultimately destroy his creation. When the creation is disrupted by a primeval act of rebellion by the very species that was intended to care for the creation, God promises to send a rescuer from out of that very species to redeem it, a promise fulfilled in Jesus Christ. It then promises the as-yet-unfulfilled hope that the world will one day be healed and brought to its fullness. We do not yet see that, but on the basis of promises previously kept, we are invited to trust. The narrative arc of the Bible is a story that is designed to inculcate trust.

Contemporary spirituality does not have such a focus on faithfulness in time. An appeal to ‘find our spiritual centre’, to ‘accept the present moment’ may bring a temporary sense of peace and serenity. It doesn’t rebuild trust. Because trust, as Keir Starmer has recognised, is built slowly over time by trusting in someone who proves themselves trustworthy.

Having such a transcendent horizon of faith tends to build the muscle of trust. It turns the dial from the default of distrust to that of trust. It becomes just a little easier to handle the disappointments of broken promises in this world because ultimate reality can be trusted.

All this tells us that the deepest problems we face as the new government begins its work are not just political - they are spiritual. I for one hope and pray that Keir Starmer's government will be as trustworthy as he hopes it will be. It would be wonderful if they can rebuild a sense of trust in politics. But there are limits to what politics and politicians can do. They cannot ultimately heal our hearts from the damage done to our ability to trust. Only a faithful God can do that.

Starmer is, well known as an atheist. In seeking to build trust, he has hit the right note. In identifying trust as the key issue of the day, he is perhaps unknowingly reaching out for the God he doesn’t believe in, but who builds trust in those who do.

Review

Books

Culture

Ethics

Film & TV

8 November 2024

4 min read

Small Things Like These: putting the spotlight on backstage goodness

What it means for a film to be good.

Kevin Hargaden

Kevin is a social theologian studying ethics and economics.

The gaunt face of a dishevelled man stares into the distance

A ‘stellar’ Cillian Murphy plays Bill Furlong.

Lionsgate.

Small Things Like These is a novella by the Irish writer Claire Keegan. Published in 2021, it compresses a remarkable story into 128 pages. Acclaimed widely by critics and readers, it follows Bill Furlong, a fuel merchant living in the small County Wexford town of New Ross in 1986, as Christmas approaches. While delivering coal to the local convent, Bill makes an alarming discovery. Memories of his childhood begin to press in on him and he finds himself in an existential crisis.

Like her previous (very short) work, Foster, Small Things Like These is an understated book with a searing moral clarity. And just as Foster was adapted for the screen – in the astonishing Irish-language film The Quiet Girl – a movie version of Small Things Like These is now likely showing at a cinema near you.

The movie is built around a stellar performance from Cillian Murphy. It would be criminal if his name is not featured among the shortlists when awards season comes round. Many of the film’s most arresting scenes feature close-ups of his face as Bill wrestles with the implications of his discovery and the phantoms of his past. The effect is that the film serves as an almost literal portrait of what it means to be a decent person.

The story begins with Bill making a delivery to the convent. He sees a mother drop off her screaming daughter to the back door, where she is met and manhandled inside by a nun. The teenager protests passionately, but to no avail. The viewer understands that this girl has “fallen pregnant”, to use the Hiberno-English idiom that was so common in the twentieth century. She has been dispatched by her family to this institution to serve out the months of pregnancy and to remove any shame or taint from their reputation. Bill watches as the girl shouts out for her father, who is entirely absent.

And, after a tense interaction with an aggressive nun, he goes home to his five girls and his wife, clearly shaken.

A few days later, unable to sleep, haunted by memories of his own childhood being raised by a single mother, with an absent father, relying on the kindness of a wealthy local landowner, he begins his deliveries before dawn. As he deposits peat briquettes in the coal shed of the convent, he discovers a teenaged girl abandoned in the corner of the tiny, filthy room. She is in deep distress and Bill responds instinctively, wrapping his coat around her shoulders and bringing her inside to the convent.

While the existence of Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes were not a secret in twentieth century Ireland, the exact details of their operations were not widely understood. With these two encounters, so close together, and his own personal biography as the son of a woman who was subject to exactly the same marginalising dynamics, Bill can no longer be satisfied to turn a blind eye to the oppression and alienation endured by those sent for reformation.

It evokes the ways in which all such systems of oppression are socially constructed and maintained. Otherwise, good people learn to look the other way.

The film gathers momentum as Bill is forced to confront the way his mother had been treated for “falling pregnant” and the reality experienced by girls the same age as his daughters who were in a similar situation. In the midst of his existential angst, he finds little solace in the no-nonsense pragmatism of his wife who reminds him “there are things you have to ignore” to get on in life. He is taken aside by his local publican, a woman who has similarly scrabbled up from humble origins to establish a thriving business and cautioned to not make trouble for the nuns since “their fingers are in every pie in the town”.

I will refrain from fully revealing every detail of the film’s plot. But this element of the screenplay – where Claire Keegan along with Enda Walsh – draw out the sense in which the oppressive ecclesial institutions were enabled and even sanctioned by the wider population is exceptionally well done. The film does not pull any punches on the evils that were committed in the name of churches in Ireland. Indeed, if anything, the presentation of the nuns veers too far towards caricatures of pure malevolence. But with surgical precision, it evokes the ways in which all such systems of oppression are socially constructed and maintained. Otherwise, good people learn to look the other way.

And that is the lasting significance of this film. Toni Morrison has spoken about how it can seem harder to write about goodness than evil. “Evil has a blockbuster audience; goodness lurks backstage.” In Small Things Like This, Claire Keegan introduces us to a hardworking small business owner who treats his staff well, a loving father who seeks to care for his wife, a man who lives down a back street of a provincial town in an overlooked part of a small island on the periphery of Europe. And in this very definitively backstage context, he is presented as heroic in his pursuit of the Good.

We all fancy ourselves to be the one person who would stand up and oppose systems of oppression if we ever found ourselves enmeshed in them. Cillian Murphy’s depiction of Bill Furlong whispers to us that we likely are enmeshed in just that way and are choosing not to notice. Small Things Like These is a heavy film that somehow liberates. It reminds us that there is, within each of us, this appetite for seeing the Good and bring brave enough to do it. It is worth your time far more than any competing blockbuster.