Column
Comment
General Election 24
Politics
4 min read

Who’s right when hurling charges of hypocrisy?

Accusations highlight the risk of self-deception.

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

A newspaper headline, text and an image of the subject of the article.
Ashcroft's charge against Raynor.
David Yelland, X.

Lord Ashcroft launched an extraordinary new attack on Labour’s deputy leader, Angela Rayner, in the Mail on Sunday at the start of this week, claiming that his investigation into where she lived, allegedly for tax purposes, was never about money. 

“Hypocrisy was always the charge against Angela Rayner,” he intoned, “not tax avoidance… And the stain will dog her for years to come.” 

Leaving aside whether stains dog people or the other way around, this is extraordinary not because Ashcroft attacks a senior Labour figure – day follows night, etc – but because it’s the sort of volte face that journalists call a reverse ferret. 

Had Rayner been found by investigating police officers to have committed a tax-fraud or electoral offence (and, to be clear, they didn’t), we need to ask ourselves whether Ashcroft would have run with the same line.  

Imagine: “Angela Rayner has committed a crime, but this is really about hypocrisy.” Do you think he’d have gone with that? Neither do I. 

Usually, charges of hypocrisy are levelled at politicians who use social privileges to which they’re opposed in principle. 

Hypocrisy is invariably the charge when there’s nothing else to go with. And that must raise questions about what hypocrisy really is. 

It’s clearly not just about telling lies. In the first televised debate this week between Rishi Sunak and his rival for premiership, Keir Starmer, the former repeatedly (12 times) claimed that Treasury officials had independently calculated that the latter’s spending plans would add £2,000 to the tax bill of every family in the UK. A published letter subsequently showed that the Treasury had specifically told the Government that this figure was bogus and not to be used. 

Was this hypocritical? No, it was just plain wrong – in the sense of both inaccurate and immoral. The opportunity for hypocrisy came when both leaders were asked whether they would use private healthcare for a family member in need. Sunak said he would; Starmer said he wouldn’t. If Starmer now ever uses private health facilities, Mr Hypocrisy will be ringing his door bell. 

From this, we deduce that hypocrisy is pretending to be what you’re not. So Donald Trump poses as a great statesman, the saviour of his nation, but goes down for all 34 felony charges of falsifying accounts to hide his pay-off of former porn actor Stormy Daniels, in order to protect his electoral prospects. That’s hypocrisy, precisely because he’s pretending to be someone he isn’t. 

That hypocrisy is exacerbated when Trump holds up a Bible to support his authority – or, indeed, publishes his own. Likewise, when a rich TV evangelist is convicted of sexual abuse (there are, tragically, too many examples to choose from).  

By contrast, is Rayner pretending to be something she isn’t because her family has used two properties? Very probably not. Similarly, we might like to ask whether SNP deputy leader Kate Forbes is a hypocritical politician because she’s a Christian, or a hypocritical Christian because she’s a politician. Very probably neither. Being both is who she is. 

Usually, charges of hypocrisy are levelled at politicians who use social privileges to which they’re opposed in principle. Like when Labour MP Diane Abbott sent her son to a fee-paying school. Private education, like private healthcare, is only meant to be available to those who support it ideologically, rather than just financially. Otherwise, it’s hypocrisy. 

The problem here is the presumption that the private sector is only available to those who endorse it. So it’s hypocritical for socialists to use it. But that presumption moves very close to the view that working people should know their place (a social order, incidentally, that the Christian gospel defies). 

There is no inconsistency – and consequently there can be no hypocrisy – in wanting the best for our own children, while concurrently wanting the best for all children. One might even call such a policy something like levelling-up, should such a thing exist. 

We may not know what Angela Rayner’s shortcomings are, but simply having them doesn’t make her a hypocrite.

A biblical definition of hypocrisy might be the hiding of interior wickedness under an appearance of virtue. In Matthew’s gospel, it’s the charge levelled at Pharisees whose good deeds are entirely self-serving. 

In this manner, moral theology would point to hypocrisy being the fruit of pride. But simply to hide one’s own shortcomings isn’t necessarily to be construed as hypocrisy, because there’s no moral obligation to make them public.  

In that context, we may not know what Angela Rayner’s shortcomings are, but simply having them doesn’t make her a hypocrite. Otherwise, we’re all hypocrites (and there may be some truth in that). 

It reduces to resisting the temptation to point to the mote of hypocrisy in our neighbour’s eye, while failing to attend to the beam in our own. That would also be to avoid self-deception. The kind of deception that pretends that one’s actions are in the public interest, when clearly they are only serving your own. Which, neatly enough, brings us back to Lord Ashcroft. 

Article
Assisted dying
Death & life
Ethics
Politics
4 min read

What will stop the culture of death that libertarian Britain has embraced?

Now we’re allowed to end life with impunity

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

Diane Abbott speaks in the assisted dying debate.
Dianne Abbott MP speaks in the assisted dying debate.

Just a few days apart, two debates recently took place in the House of Commons concerning life and death. In the first, MPs voted to decriminalise late-term abortions. In the second, they voted for assisted dying. Both times, the reach of death grew a little longer.

Imagine a mother about to have a baby who is suddenly having grave doubts about whether she can manage a new child as the moment draws near. It’s not hard to sympathise with many in this situation, but rather than recommend she goes through with the birth, and perhaps putting the baby up for adoption for childless parents desperate to adopt, we now have passed legislation that allows us to terminate the baby’s life instead. Proponents argued this was to relieve a small number of women who had been prosecuted for late-term abortions. The reality is, however, that it will probably become more common. In the debate, Jim Shannon MP pointed out that in New Zealand, in the first year after their parliament voted the same way, late-term abortions increased by 43 per cent.

A baby a week before and a week after birth are virtually identical. Yet as a result of this bill, it will not be a criminal act to end the life of the first, but it will be to do the same to the second. What’s the betting that the logic of this will stretch before long to allowing parents to terminate the lives of newborn babies with a new limit – say up to one month after birth? The arguments will be exactly the same – sympathy for distressed parents who suddenly realise they cannot cope with a new life on their hands, especially if the baby is discovered to be flawed in some way. When emotional sympathy, personal choice and the rights of the mother over the baby become the only moral arguments, the logic is inevitable.

Despite the argument shifting rapidly against the Terminally Ill Adults Bill – the vote passed by 314 votes to 291, with 32 MPs apparently having changed their minds - it now looks likely that this second bill will pass into law in a few years’ time, despite scrutiny in the Lords.

Here on Seen & Unseen, we have scrutinised the arguments put forward for assisted dying over past months. We have argued about the unintended consequences for the many of permitting assisted dying for the few. In The Times a while ago, I argued that if ‘dignity’ means autonomy — my ability to choose the place, the time and the manner in which I die — there is no logical reason why we should refuse that right to someone who, for whatever reason feels their life is no longer worth living, however trivial we may feel their problems to be. With this understanding of dignity as unlimited choice, the slippery slope is not just likely, it is philosophically inevitable.

In both cases the logic of the arguments used means the march of our ability to bring about death will not stop with these measures, despite their proponents’ assurances that safeguards are in place.

These two votes reminded me of something Pope John Paul II once wrote. In an encyclical, Evangelium Vitae – the Gospel of Life - he warned that “we are facing an enormous and dramatic clash between what he called a “culture of death” and a “culture of life”.

He warned that this “culture of death” would be “actively fostered by powerful cultural, economic and political currents which encourage an idea of society excessively concerned with efficiency.” It is, in effect, he argued, “a war of the powerful against the weak: a life which would require greater acceptance, love and care is considered useless, or held to be an intolerable burden, and is therefore rejected in one way or another. A person who, because of illness, handicap or, more simply, just by existing, compromises the well-being or lifestyle of those who are more favoured tends to be looked upon as an enemy to be resisted or eliminated. In this way a kind of ‘conspiracy against life’ is unleashed.”

They were strong words, and in the UK at least, back in 1995, might have seemed alarmist. Yet I couldn't help thinking of them as these two bills passed through the UK’s national parliament. In both cases, the bills were introduced very rapidly with little time for serious moral deliberation. Both depended on emotional appeals to a small number of admittedly distressing cases without serious consideration for the wider cultural and philosophical ramifications of these seismic moves. Both encouraged the steady encroachment of death on demand.

What concerns me is what these bills say about the kind of culture we are becoming. MND sufferer Michael Wenham makes the point powerfully that this is all about autonomy and independence, a spurious kind of compassion, and the fact that palliative care is more expensive than subtly encouraging the dying to take their own life. Looking behind the arguments for compassion, it's not hard to spot the iron law of libertarian ideas of freedom, where individuals have absolute rights over their own lives and bodies that trump everything else. This is the kind of libertarian freedom that prizes personal autonomy above everything else and therefore sees our neighbours not so much as gifts to be valued and cherished, but limitations, or even threats to our precious personal freedoms.

Pope John Paul was right. It does seem that we are opting for a culture of death. And my fear is that it won’t stop here.

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