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Change

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S&U interviews

30 April 2024

7 min read

Stephen Timms: still on mission

The MP on five decades trying to prove a Christian Tory wrong.

Robert Wright

Robert is a journalist at the Financial Times.

A man in a suit turns to look at the camera and behind him is a gallery of large painting

Stephen TImms MP.

The day before the February 1974 election, the first in which he was old enough to vote, Stephen Timms says an elder at the Brethren assembly that he then attended – near his home in Fleet, in Hampshire – took him aside. The Brethren are a non-denominational, non-conformist evangelical Christian movement.

“You will be voting Conservative, won’t you?” Timms recalls the man asking.

The assumption surprised Timms, who had thought there was an “obvious connection” between the social justice elements of Christ’s teaching and parties that sought greater equality. He told the elder – Mr Gilmour – that he would be voting Labour.

The incident was an early sign of how Timms, now 68, would spend a life that has brought together an evangelical Christian faith with attachment to the Labour party.

His career has taken him as high as the Cabinet – where he was Chief Secretary to the Treasury for a year in 2006 and 2007. He became Sir Stephen in 2022. He also has a reputation as one of the MPs most dogged in pursuing case work for constituents. That commitment nearly cost him his life in 2010 when a constituent, angry at his support for the Iraq War, stabbed him twice at a constituency surgery. Timms is standing again at the coming general election for East Ham, the constituency which, with some boundary changes, he has represented in various forms since 1994.

“I suppose I’ve spent 50 years trying to prove Mr Gilmour wrong,” Timms says. “[He was] a delightful man but I never agreed with him about that.”

There is a “very clear trend” of economic justice in the biblical message, which the Labour party represents and seeks to realise, Timms goes on, over coffee at an arts centre in his constituency.

“The Christian roots of Labour are absolutely clear,” he says, pointing out that Keir Hardie, the party’s first leader, was an evangelical Christian and many of its other founders were Methodists. “I’ve always seen Labour values and Labour aims as wanting to realise that commitment to economic justice which is such a clear thrust of the Bible.”

He sees no attempt in the Conservative party to realise that vision, he says.

“It’s just not a subject of interest, I don’t think,” Timms says of Conservative supporters. “For people in the Conservative party, there are concerns about maintaining order and respectability and all those things and I can understand how you might find those in the Bible. But I don’t think that’s what the Bible is about.”

“His argument to me was, ‘You believe in God; we believe in God; we think you should go for this’.”

Timms’ attachment to his small area of East London is almost as strong a thread in his story as his Christian and Labour party commitments. He first came to the area while a maths student at Cambridge, in the summer of 1976, as part of a two-week mission by the Christian Union of Emmanuel College to Forest Gate. It was a formative experience.

“It was the first time I could see how what I believed could shape my life,” Timms recalls.

He returned to the area in 1978 when, after leaving university, he was recruited by Logica, then an information technology and management consultancy, working in the west end of London. He joined the church that the 1976 mission had planted – now called Plaistow Christian Fellowship. He continues to attend the church with his wife, Hui-Leng, originally from Singapore, who was also part of the 1976 mission.

His joined the local Labour party.

“Very quickly, I was asked to be the secretary of my local branch Labour party, which was Little Ilford branch, and then very quickly after that I was asked to be the secretary of the constituency Labour party,” Timms recalls.

Timms was chosen as an office bearer, he believes, because of his neutrality in a bitter feud. Left-wing activists had tried to oust Reg Prentice, Labour MP for the constituency, then called Newham North-East. They claimed he was fundamentally a Conservative. Long-standing local activists had successfully defended him. Both sides had been left dismayed when Prentice subsequently defected to the Conservative party.

“It was a terrible mess,” Timms recalls.

His first elected office was as a councillor on Newham Council, fighting in an unusually high-profile council byelection in 1984. The party had, surprisingly, lost the three Little Ilford wards to representatives of the then Liberal-SDP Alliance. But it emerged that two of the Alliance councillors had given false addresses and there was a byelection.

“Ken Livingstone came down; Neil Kinnock came down,” Timms recalls, referring, respectively, to the then Labour leader of the Greater London council and the Labour party nationally. “We threw everything at it.”

Timms was leader of Newham council when, in 1994, the previous MP, Ron Leighton, died of a heart attack. After being chosen as the Labour candidate, Timms won the subsequent byelection, in June 1994.

His connection with his church has remained critical, he says. A group in the church offered to pray with him every month when he became a councillor. They increased the frequency to weekly once he became leader of the council.

“We still do that and that has been a very important source of support for me through all the ups and downs of the intervening 34 years,” Timms says.

Yet it was not a foregone conclusion that an evangelical Christian would form such a strong bond with, first, Newham North-East and then East Ham, as the constituency has been known since 1997. The seat has, according to the 2021 census, the eighth-highest proportion of people – 41.2 per cent – identifying as Muslim.

Timms insists the tension is less than it might appear. The first person to urge him to stand as an MP following Ron Leighton’s death was the chair of the Alliance of Newham Muslim Associations, he says.

“His argument to me was, ‘You believe in God; we believe in God; we think you should go for this’,” Timms recalls.

There are points of connection between different faith groups in the area, he adds. He has a particularly strong connection with Bonny Downs Baptists Church, in Beckton, which has an active food bank and many other social ministries.

“If you look at the people who around this community are really doing things to help here, it’s the faith groups,” Timms says. “It’s Bonny Downs Baptist Church; it’s some of the Muslim groups.”

“I certainly see what I’ve been doing in politics as a calling, as part of what I came here first of all to do, which is to take part in a mission,”

Timms’s sense of affinity with his Muslim constituents, however, did not prevent the most distressing incident of his career – when Roshonara Choudhry tried to kill him at a constituency surgery in Beckton in May 2010.

Medical staff described the two stab wounds, to his stomach, as “life-threatening” and Choudhry is serving a life term for attempted murder. She had been radicalised by online Islamist extremist sermons and acted because of Timms’ vote in favour of the 2003 Iraq war.

“It was a very, very unpleasant episode,” Timms says, with characteristic understatement.

In March this year, he says, he received a reply from Choudhry, part of a correspondence that began after she wrote to him expressing remorse for her actions.

Even the stabbing, however, underlined the community’s goodwill, Timms insists.

“I was absolutely inundated after that episode with people sending cards and good wishes – including Christians saying, ‘We’re praying for you’, and quite a lot of similar things from Muslims saying, ‘We’re praying for you for a speedy recovery’,” he says. “I hadn’t had that experience before of Muslims telling me, ‘We’re praying for you’. So it left me with a stronger sense, I think, of being supported by my Christian and Muslim constituents, which I appreciated very much.”

Timms nevertheless remains an unapologetically partisan politician. He wants a Labour government under Keir Starmer, he says, to resolve problems he says have built up over 14 years of coalition and then Conservative government since 2010.

“I think the country is in a sorry mess,” he says. “I think we very urgently need a change of direction. I think that the prescription that Keir Starmer has set out offers a hopeful way forward.”

Timms, who is currently chair of the Commons work and pensions committee, says he would be “delighted” to return to a ministerial role in a Starmer government. He is standing as an MP again in the hope of being able to support a new Labour government.

“It would seem a shame to leave just when we might be on the brink of a Labour government again,” he says.

Nevertheless, the way he links his work as an MP with his Christian faith sets him apart.

“I experienced a calling to be in this area,” Timms says.

As far back as when he came to East London, his thinking about faith, what to do with his life and politics were all “intertwined”, he adds.

“I certainly see what I’ve been doing in politics as a calling, as part of what I came here first of all to do, which is to take part in a mission,” Timms says.

Article

Climate

Comment

Politics

27 November 2024

7 min read

Neighbours, nimbys, and politician power plays

Is there a politics that takes both love of the land and climate concerns seriously?

Joel Pierce

Joel Pierce is the administrator of Christ's College, University of Aberdeen. He has recently published his first book.

A sign protesting a proposed wind farm stands on flat moorland.

A Scottish wind farm protest sign.

Richard Webb, Wikimedia Commons.

It was easy to forget the fury of the past few winters in the gentle light of the golden autumn which enveloped our corner of rural Aberdeenshire over the past month. The scars Storm Arwen tore through the landscape three years ago, toppling whole hillsides of trees, and the flood-soaked fields of last winter were hard to conjure when faced with the thousand colours that painted the landscape. The smoky green of pine forests in twilight, the shocking scarlet of apples my daughters picked from our neighbour’s tree, the little violet fireworks of elderberry clusters hanging above the path to our house, these chased away worries about the future and the past and demanding attention to the present. Amid this array, it was easy to see why Queen Victoria chose our corner of Scotland for her rural retreat over a century and a half ago. The changing of the season has something of the eternal, sacred, and inviolable in it. “Let the field be joyful and all that is therein; then shall all the trees of the wood rejoice,” sang the ancient Psalmist. Surely, if ever a land was obedient to this command, it was our valley’s, this October. Surely too, it is our duty to preserve it so that it can sing out for a thousand more such autumns?

This drive to preserve is evident in the signs that appear regularly on fences as you drive through our valley. “STOP MONSTER PYLONS” and “NO WINDFARM ON HILL OF FARE” they say in capital letters large enough to communicate their creators’ anger. Our valley, which connects the Highlands to the sea, is prime real estate for the sorts of development necessary to transform the UK economy, which still gets 77 per cent of its energy from burning fossil fuels, into one built on renewable energy. Our hills are ideal for turbines and our land must be crossed if transmission lines are to carry electricity from wind farms in the north to population centres like Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, and London. To many of my neighbours this sort of construction amounts to an industrialisation of the countryside, an irreversible scarring of pristine land in service of interests far away which care little for them. This view is common enough that almost all of the local village councils have expressed opposition to the developments. When my neighbours are characterised by senior government ministers as “the blockers, the delayers, the obstructionists”, I suspect it only hardens their resolve.

It is not hard to imagine Adam the gardener or Abel the shepherd attending to their land and animals with similar care to that of my neighbours.

Sometimes I wonder if what politicians have in mind when they think of my neighbours are the sorts of toffs featured in Rivals for whom the countryside is a playground of upper-class indulgence. I am not rich. Neither are most of my immediate neighbours, many of whom rely on waiting tables at the local farm shop or cleaning holiday lets to make ends meet. My understanding is that most of the local farmers consider themselves lucky if they turn any profit at all from their long and exhausting hours. Every year we wonder if there will be enough pupils to keep our local primary school open. Every winter we prepare for the inevitable interruptions caused by power cuts, school closures, and unplowed roads.

If I had to guess at what keeps my neighbours here it is the land itself, watching and admiring it, caring for it, aligning the rhythms of their life to it. Autumn can be wonderful, but so too is spring. I drive to work past newborn lambs trying out their stilt-like legs, anticipate the sudden return of house martins to their nests under our eves, and enjoy weekend walks up the hillsides amid the sun-yellow mazes of coconut-scented gorse bushes. Each season land presents itself to us, demands our attention, calls for our admiration.

In the two creation stories of Genesis, what it is to be human is to be made in the image of God and to be given the task of tilling and keeping the land, respectively. A way of reading these together is that humans are to be priests to creation, recognising and praising its beauty and caring for it in a way which reflects God’s love for it. In my last article for Seen & Unseen, I discussed philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s concept of practices and how the human activities he identifies as practices can order and give meaning to our lives and communities. Another way of thinking about these practices is that they are all, in some way, an expression of this original edenic imperative, to see, to respond to, and to care for God’s creation. If this is true of any practice, it is perhaps most transparent in rural ones. It is not hard to imagine Adam the gardener or Abel the shepherd attending to their land and animals with similar care to that of my neighbours.

The practices we engage in have a way of becoming enmeshed with our identity in such a manner that it can be hard to imagine ourselves without them. That is why, I believe, opposition to wind farms and pylons runs so deep here, and why, as geographer Patrick Devine-Wright has demonstrated, attempts to offset the financial downsides of developments through local grant programmes and other compensation do very little to swing public opinion in favour of development. As he demonstrates, at the root of such opposition is an affective attachment to the land, one that money cannot buy away and which resists even the most well-reasoned arguments which attempt to ignore it.

And yet, I know, my neighbours know, that all is not well with the land. Although we draw sizable crowds on Easter and Christmas, the most packed I’ve ever seen our parish church was when a locally born climate scientist came to present his research on Antarctica. He walked us through what it is like to live there, how scientists survive the winters, and what they eat, but all anyone was interested in the Q&A that followed is what can be done about climate change. It is hard to ignore it. It is there in the good and the bad: in the pleasant, nearly tropical breeze that ushered my children from house to house on Halloween; in a mild winter making ticks and Lyme’s disease a regular visitor; and in the onslaught of storms felling fifty year old forests in a single night and cutting road and railway connections to the rest of Britain for days on end. If we are to keep these changes from becoming more extreme, if we are going to bequeath to our grandchildren a countryside with the beauties admired by Queen Victoria and countless others, we need to slow this change. We need to move away from fossil fuels and to renewably generated electricity and given that, as I said above, 77 per cent of our energy is still made by burning carbon, we need to produce not just a little more electricity, but a lot. The answer to the oft repeated question, “Wouldn’t these be better, if they were built somewhere else?” is that, yes, they will need to be built somewhere else and here, and in many other places, if we are going to get anywhere close to a carbon-free future.

The land will be changed either way. Our choice is some scarring now, or a terminal decline later.

What might a politics look like that both took my neighbours’ attachment to the land and these realities seriously? What it shouldn’t be is one that castigates my neighbours for that attachment. That only feeds suspicions that what is really at play is an exploitation of the countryside to feed the excesses of the cities. Such exploitation runs deep in the folk memory of Scotland. The Clearances only lightly touched our valley, but a little travel here or there takes one by abandoned villages. Those who resisted then, clinging tightly to their land, also might have been called blockers, delayers, and obstructionists by modernising absentee landlords the sitting rooms of their Edinburgh townhouses, intent on replacing them with more profitable sheep.

However, the possibility exists for drawing my neighbours’ attachment to the land into the conversation about why these developments are needed. The land, the planet, is sick, and sometimes the scars of a necessary surgery are a price worth paying for survival. The alternative to roads rising up our hills to turbines and to transmission lines cutting through now fertile fields is a future of longer droughts, hotter heat waves, and more extreme storms, bringing with them infertile fields, forest fires, and landslides. The land will be changed either way. Our choice is some scarring now, or a terminal decline later.

But for such a rhetoric to work, politicians need to be serious about everyone bearing someone of the burden of climate solutions, both here in the UK and across the world. It can be tempting to give up hope in this regard. More than one article about our area has cited farmers complaining about how what we do won’t really matter anyway since China and India will burn away any positive effects of renewables here. But there are problems closer to home too. When UK governments and traders gush about the possibilities of new, power-hungry technologies like AI and cryptocurrency it can give any discussion of net-zero an air of unreality. Turbines and transmission lines can be part of caring for the land and can be shown to be in continuity with those other practices of care, but if other changes aren’t made, they will be as useful as a keyhole surgery on a patient who is bleeding out.