Article
Character
Comment
Politics
6 min read

Why the Prime Minister should swear this new oath

A proposed new constitutional instrument is a hopeful recognition of the human condition.
Keir Starmer stands in the House of Commons and recites an oath from a card held up in front of him.
Starmer swears allegiance to King Charles III, September 2022.

Thank the Almighty, the General Election is over! We have a Prime Minister. We have another cadre of MPs, some old hands and many Young Turks, all ready for the excitement of Parliamentary procedural intrigue and (hopefully) hungry to exercise their power for the betterment of their constituents. As a nation, we can all breathe a sigh of relief. We have emerged, blinking, into the sunlight of what I can only hope is five years of a milder political climate. 

What happens next? 

Well, today, every MP, new or old, will swear the Oath of Allegiance to King Charles III. This is not optional. Anyone refusing to do so cannot exercise their rights as an MP and will not receive their salary. Ultimately, the refuseniks can have the reality of their election voided. The wording of the oath excels in comprehensive brevity:  

I swear by Almighty God that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty King Charles, his heirs and successors, according to law. So help me God.  

The Monarch is anointed as the protector of the realm, always seeking what is best for Great Britain, and so to swear an oath to be faithful to the Monarch is to swear to seek the best for their realm. It is all perfectly simple and logical. 

But is it enough? 

It would seem that swearing fealty to the Crown is no longer enough. Now the PM must specifically swear not to lie to the Sovereign and the nation. 

Some would argue not. Our political life has been marked by controversy for as long as I have been old enough to be politically aware. MPs expenses, the coalition Government, the Brexit referendum, parliamentary gridlock, Downing Street lockdown parties…Liz Truss! It’s all been like a circus, except all the animals are dead, the clowns just sit around screaming and crying, and the tent burns down. Trust in our political establishment could hardly be lower. Perhaps in light of this, a couple of constitutional scholars have mooted the idea of an extra oath - one for the Prime Minister. 

Professor Andrew Blick, of King’s College, London, and Baron Hennessy of Nympsfield have written an open letter, on behalf of The Constitution Society, inviting the new Prime Minister to swear an additional oath specifically for their office.

The oath is intended to act as a confidence booster - an extra promise that the most powerful MP in the land will abide by the conventions of our constitution: Cabinet Government, The Ministerial Code, Civil Service Impartiality, etc. In an effort to restrain the darker impulses of the PM, the oath would also mean swearing to uphold the seven Nolan Principles: Selflessness, Integrity, Objectivity, Accountability, Openness, Honesty, Leadership. It would seem that swearing fealty to the Crown is no longer enough. Now the PM must specifically swear not to lie to the Sovereign and the nation. 

In a moment of unattractive despair, I can’t help but let out a depressed sigh.

Yet, I also have hope. This new constitutional instrument would, on the surface, be a morose admission of defeat. We can no longer assume honesty in those who wield the most power and influence. Look deeper and you see a fascinating, and hopeful, recognition of the political (and human!) condition.

The very act of swearing an oath is itself a virtue. It is an act that puts one face to face with absolute truth, goodness, and beauty. 

Yet, I also have hope. This new constitutional instrument would, on the surface, be a morose admission of defeat. We can no longer assume honesty in those who wield the most power and influence. Look deeper and you see a fascinating, and hopeful, recognition of the political (and human!) condition. 

I find this new oath fascinating, and rather cheering, in spite of all my previous electoral gloom, because it clearly speaks to the human need for the transcendent and the eternal. So often our politics seems to be mired in the drudgery of the immediate: will the economy grow in the next quarter, will NHS waiting lists diminish by the end of the calendar year, will the crime stats be favourable any time soon. We rarely hear of any ‘vision’ for our country the looks to the horizon - not even the decade, let alone the voyage into the forever. Yet this oath does just that! 

It does so in two ways.  

Firstly, by seeking to enshrine the Nolan principles, it recognises the distinction between ‘values’ and ‘virtues’. Values have the veneer of the absolute but are far too easily jettisoned when necessity dictates. Commitment to a value is good, but is in constant competition with other values: openness battles the need for state-secrecy, honesty’s sword is often broken in the face of obfuscation’s onslaught, etc. The holding of values is a static thing, which can wilt and die in the burning heat of reality. A virtue, on the other hand, is something which must be constantly practiced and nurtured. A virtue always looks to its ideal form - a universal perfection of honesty or selflessness. Swearing an oath to uphold the Nolan Principles means committing to operating by them every day, and so allowing them to grow in the individual, becoming easier and easier to live by until the practitioner of virtue struggles NOT to operate in their eternal light.  

Secondly, the very act of swearing an oath is itself a virtue. It is an act that puts one face to face with absolute truth, goodness, and beauty. The act of making an oath recognises that our lives and deeds are not simply contingent moments in the pitiless march of time, but that they resound in the halls of eternity.  

I think this is why Jesus warns people against swearing oaths in the fifth chapter of the Gospel according to Matthew. When reading this warning in the light of the serious, radical, and even hyperbolic speech that comes before, it is clear that Jesus doesn’t want us to avoid making promises, but that he realises just how bad we are at keeping them. Swearing an oath (invoking eternity, the absolute, the divine!) means that when we break our oaths we diminish ourselves in the face of God.  

“Let your word be ‘Yes, Yes’ or ‘No, No’; anything more than this comes from the evil one.”  

This is not a command to avoid promises and promise keeping, but a radical call to live one’s life always in the light of eternity, so that even the simple ‘yes’ is the truest oath one can make. 

We need leaders - political and otherwise - who can offer the human soul something more than simply an uninspiring roadmap for five years of moderate economic improvement. We need leaders who can inspire the nation with a vision of eternity. We need leaders who point us to that horizon of the absolute where we do not see individual good acts warring against the forces of apathy and indifference, but see the Good itself illuminating our every moment with hope and joy.  

Perhaps an oath - an admission that there is meaning beyond our momentary finitude - is the best way to inject a bit more universality and meaning into a political system that has left this author feeling quite so cold so far. 

I shall pray for our new Prime Minister, and for all our new MPs. I shall hold them before the face of God who is beyond all immediate concerns and pray that they may have the vision of our eternal destiny ever in their minds and in their hearts. I shall earnestly intercede that they recognise that their oaths are not simply a formula of words, but a positive spur to lead us into a future that never ceases to grown brighter and brighter with the light of our eternal destiny. 

Article
Character
Comment
Education
Fun & play
1 min read

Is your child school ready?

What really matters as a child develops
A teacher looks on as a young child concentrates on writing.
Department for Education.

In the coming weeks, those little critters will start to emerge, easily identified by their autumn plumage of coloured sweatshirts and oversized backpacks. Anxious parents and caregivers can be spotted, shepherding their young along paths and pavements, casting worried glances left and right at the pelican crossings. Listen carefully and you may hear the squeak of uncomfortable new shoes and juveniles complaining about the wearing of a coat, as adults of the species re-establish social bonds with cries of, “Back to school already, I can’t believe how fast it’s gone!”   

As they congregate upon the tarmac staging ground, some will be taking part in this ritual for the very first time. Neophytes who have maintained social bonds throughout the pre-school years might be seen to greet their fellows cordially, “Did you have a good summer? Can Flo make it to Izzy’s party?” Others will stand alone, scanning the playground for a half-remembered face from the bygone days of antenatal classes. That was only five years ago, but it feels like a millennium. The faces are changed; everyone looks more…tired. 

The world has been turned upside down in those past five years. It’s been said so often that it is almost trite, but nonetheless true: nothing prepares you for becoming a parent. In the UK, new parents increasingly raise their children without the immediate support of extended family, coupled with the tyrannous expectation that one will retain one’s employment rank and contribution to the labour market alongside this new and 24/7 full time job of looking after baby. The Key Performance Indicators of parenting are ambitious. Deliverables for the first five years include toilet training, instilling speech and language skills, establishing basic recognition of 26 alphabetical characters (including the child’s ability to recognise the alphabetical sequence that spells their own name) and ensuring the recognition of and (ideally) ability to correctly sequence numbers 1 to 20.  If your child can do all of this by the age of 5, whilst also learning not to punch, kick or bite other children, not to eat food off the ground, and not to stick rocks up their nose, then congratulations! Your child is school ready

It may comfort some readers to know that very few 5-year-olds manage to hit absolutely all of these milestones. As the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, commented recently – parenting is too hard. She is working to establish a new iteration of Labour’s ‘Sure Start’ programme (rebranded as ‘Family Hubs’) to offer parents more support in the community. As part of her rationale she states, “When one in four children are leaving primary school without having reached a good level of reading, then something’s gone seriously wrong in those early years that has to go beyond the school gate.”  

Whilst I’m keen to see more support for new families – I’m intrigued by this particular rationale for it. Ability to read well by a certain age seems an unlikely metric by which to measure whether a child has had a positive experience of childhood; it appears indicative of what autism-researcher Anne McGuire calls “The normative time of childhood,” in which the success is measured against an imagined future of economically productive years. By this metric, if a child learns to read at a prodigiously young age this is taken as an indicator that they will enter the workforce with greater velocity than their peers, essentially that they will have “more future-yet-to-be-realized” than those around them. McGuire writes, “In a neoliberal regime where ‘time is money’, the child is figured as ‘time-rich’ and so represents a good investment opportunity indeed.”  

McGuire’s analysis is piercingly accurate of how we often talk about our children, despite knowing all too well that it represents a fallacy. There are multitudinous stories of adults who have gone on to make staggering contributions to human flourishing, despite being placed (literally or figuratively) under the dunce’s cap at school. But even without focusing on those who go on to excel, those who attract fame, fortune, or both, we don’t have to look far to find cause to re-evaluate what it means for a child to be school ready.  

My son’s year group recently finished their own primary school journey, and a quick glance through some of the leavers’ books reveals that children are very good at valuing each other for what is here in the present, without recourse to an imagined economic future. As children wrote goodbye messages for each other they said things like,

“Thank you for always having such good ideas for games to play.”

“You helped me on my first day when I got lost.”

“You’re a great house captain and you always help the teacher.”

No one was particularly keen to predict fame and fortune for the future of their friends, and there was an understandable indifference towards academic milestones. As a literary corpus, the leavers’ books were testament to the old adage that people will not remember you for what you say or do but will remember you for how you make them feel.  

One the subject of childhood, Jesus once said something that defies easy explanation. He was out, teaching in the open air, surrounded by crowds of adults including important religious leaders and wealthy individuals who wanted to ask complex and deep theological questions, but in the midst of it all there were parents bringing their children, elbowing their way to the front of the crowd to ask Jesus to pray for their little ones. When some of Jesus’ followers tried to usher the children away, Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” The precise meaning of this utterance has eluded thinkers and theologians for centuries – what exactly is it about childhood that Jesus was alluding to?  

I wonder if it is something about the capacity of children to live in the immediate, and therefore to value what really matters – justice, kindness and friendship. In primary school, yes it helps in some ways for children to arrive aged 5 with a certain command of the alphabet and the ability to finish the day wearing the same set of underwear that they arrived in. But perhaps what matters more is children arriving ready to enter the fray of friendships – being kind, being helpers, having the self-confidence to know that they have something to give to the learning community that they are joining, whatever their learning speed might be. Such things are gloriously untethered to economic potential or a future-yet-to-be-realized, but they are closely tethered to a child’s understanding of themselves as a valuable and important person. If Labour’s intention to offer new parents more help in the community goes some way towards communicating to our pre-school children that they have that have – and will always have – value, regardless of what they will or won’t attain to academically or economically, then it will help many more children reach the milestone of being school ready.  

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