Column

Comment

General Election 24

Politics

7 June 2024

4 min read

Who’s right when hurling charges of hypocrisy?

Accusations highlight the risk of self-deception.

George Pitcher

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.

Review

Culture

Music

Politics

25 July 2025

6 min read

As the congregation gathers Bruce Springsteen leans hard into hope

Chords of confrontation and communion

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Bruce Springsteen crouches down and holds a hand out to a sea of outstretched hands

Springsteen plays Manchester.

Brucespringsteen.net.

I finally got to experience a Bruce Springsteen concert recently. Which is to say, for three hours, I touched a land of hope and dreams.

We walked along a canal to get to the arena – my husband, my father-in-law, and me –Manchester shimmered with the arrival of summer, and light bounced off red brick and still water. We neared the arena and the air felt dense with anticipation. T Between us we carried heartbreaks, elections, hopes, failures, and a collective return to music that had accompanied and clarified it all. We were drawn by loyalty and nostalgia and joy, but also I sensed by a hope that Bruce would meet the moment — the frayed, furious, anxious now — with something that mattered.

We found our seats and gripped our drinks as the lights dimmed. Thousands of people stopped individual conversations, and hushed, and then joined voices into a deep and reverent chant. “Bruuuuuuuce”. To my right, the glow of a screen, the woman holding it sending a text – “yes babe, 1pm, lovely” – and it seemed incongruent and true. In the tension before the release, in the dark before the light, we hold our breath even as the ordinary carries on. The ordinary carries on even as the world fractures and glows. The ordinary is what Bruce often sings of, it is one reason why fans feel heard and seen by him. That night though, all the ordinaries he sang of formed something extraordinary.

Then there was light, and Bruce walked slowly from the side to the front of the stage, his guitar suspended across his body, his face a relaxed, broad smile, his bandmates and companions beside and behind him. Then there was music. No videos, no pyrotechnics; just old songs that felt as if they existed for the now. My City of Ruins, Death to My Hometown, Land of Hope and Dreams, The Promised Land. The song Long Walk Home was introduced as a “prayer to my country”. It is a country that he embodies, despairs of, and loves. He sings of his home with fury, sorrow, tenderness, and love.

Riffs and rhythms that were decades old were being made urgent again. Springsteen’s music holds both grit and glory, and hard-won joys leave space for sorrow. I write this and lines by Mary Oliver come to mind: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief / what a time they have these two / housed as they are in the same body.” What a time they had, joy and grief, that night with Bruce.

The evening unfolded not as spectacle but as liturgy; all of us involved in something like devotion – in part to Bruce, but also to moral clarity, to the power of poetry, to the promise of who we could be. At times the crowd seemed silent, ushered into something deeper – not entertainment or escapism, but something like confrontation and communion. We were being offered the joy of music and memory, but also an opportunity to reckon with who we are.

Between songs, Bruce spoke. He apparently rarely does so in his gigs. His voice slowed and deepened – not chit chat, not to entertain, but to bear witness and stand defiant and call us to the best versions of ourselves. “I’ve spent my life singing about where we’ve succeeded and come up short in pursuit of our civic values,” he said. “I just felt that was my job.” He proceeded to describe how those values are being torn apart, and why they matter. The crowd roared. He was making civic values shine, speaking about them with urgency. He acknowledged both the dream and the failure, but still he believes in the promised land and he asks us to as well. Before he belted out Rainmaker, he said, “when conditions in a country are right for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up.” He spoke of America, and really of the world – what it is, what it is becoming. His honesty and poetic rage situated us, then became a map for how to keep going.

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts.

I found myself wondering: why is it that Bruce can sing and speak about justice, warped politics, and who we are becoming, and be met with cheers, while so many churches avoid doing so, preferring instead to whisper in neutral tones while the world burns? That night, I stood in a crowd of thousands and I heard a kind of moral clarity that orientates the soul and made me cry. It wasn’t partisan, it was human. Why can it feel riskier to speak specifically and prophetically in a sermon than in a stadium? I wonder if it’s because Springsteen has always rooted his politics in people’s real lives – in work, family, grief, memory. He doesn’t gesture toward abstract ideologies for fear of alienating people, or in the hope of retaining fans: he tells stories and gives names to problems and injustices, singing about crooked institutions, boarded-up factories, buses that never come, lovers who don’t come back.

The evening felt, for me, like the kind of church I long for and sometimes touch: no tidy answers, no insincere lyrics, no vague calls for justice, but rather honesty and specificity and the chance to stand alongside strangers and feel something challenging, beautiful, true.

I scribbled a question as the music soared: can a chord be mystical? Because that’s how it felt. As if there are progressions – minor then major, dissonance into harmony – that can reach past language and speak directly to the part of us that longs for love more than cynicism, to the part of us that still dares to hope even when there is very little obvious reason to do so, to the part of us wondering how to be truly alive.

Near the end, Bruce quoted the American writer James Baldwin:

“In this world, there isn’t enough humanity as one would hope. But there’s enough.”

There’s enough. It was a small phrase but it hung in the air like incense. For Bruce, there is enough humanity to keep singing for, and about. Now, he seemed to ask the crowd, what will you do with that enoughness, with that humanity?

In the final stretch, Bruce leaned hard into hope with songs like The Rising and Born to Run. The energy in the room felt like resistance – not against something, but for something. He didn’t pretend everything’s fine, but he sang anyway. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts. Gladness is being asked to stand its ground now, and to do something with our improbable aliveness. For the final song, Bruce played Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It is a song about lightning and exiles and freedom, about the trembling of the soul and about a sky that “cracked its poems in naked wonder.” He sang it slowly, tenderly, like a prayer – which can also be a trembling of the soul, a song of naked wonder. Perhaps he prayed to God, perhaps to some other sacred thing: our better angels, or the fragile hope of who we might yet become.

In a BBC documentary about Bruce Springsteen’s history with the UK, someone says “there’s something in Bruce fans, you know you can implicitly trust them.” As we filed out of the arena, it felt like 25,000 of us briefly knew each other, trusted each other, could take on the world together. Perhaps we just had.

Soon it was just me, my husband, my father-in-law, and the silent dark canal as we walked back into the night. We were tired, we were awake. I thought of Bruce’s belief in the promised land, and of Baldwin’s line: there’s not enough humanity, but there’s enough. These are beliefs that can feel risky. So can belief in God. But enough is plenty. Enough can turn up the volume and let the spirit be our guide. With 25,000 other people, I’d turned that volume up and I could hear the spirit defiant, unifying, guiding. It is – has always been – time to go and sing of it, despite everything.