麻豆社

Good morning. Yesterday on this programme Michael Howard said that the first task of a new Prime Minister would be to unite the country. Well, there are some key decisions to be made before then, not least in the Commons today- but it would be good to think about the issue even now. And what better place to begin than a text from the Hebrew Scriptures that would I believe unite most of us-Love your neighbour as yourself. Jesus selected this together with another one, Love God with all that you are, as the foundation of all religion and ethics, that on which the health of a society depends. (1)

It involves, first, a sympathetic imagination. The capacity that a great novelist like George Eliot possessed, to think our way into another person鈥檚 mind and outlook. What, for example, if one is a remainer, is the real appeal, the strongest, not the weakest, part of the argument, of a leaver. What, if one is a leaver, is the genuine appeal, the strongest part of the argument, of a remainer. It involves so trying to enter into their outlook that one begins to understand them, so see what the issue looks like from their point of view.

In Italy, at a time of great turmoil and war, one prince said to another. 鈥淲e understand one another perfectly. We both want Italy.鈥� So understanding by itself is not enough. We have to want a shared goal, not just power. This week in the House of Lords there was an appreciated speech by the modern historian Peter Hennessy, who said that his generation, for all its divisions, had been united by some great historic achievements. It had enjoyed the collective experience of the 1942 Beveridge Report on welfare, the 1944 Education Act, the full employment white paper of 1944, the formation of the NHS in 1948, the creation of NATO in 1949. What, he wondered, were the aspirations that might unite us over the next decades? After all, both leaving the European Union and remaining in it are means to an end, the flourishing of society, and everyone in it, with our country playing its proper role in the world as a whole. The task is to work out how that shared goal can best be achieved. All political power needs to be seen as a means to that end, that shared goal, not an end in itself.

So, to love ones neighbour as oneself means first trying to understand others and then asking what one wants for them. What would I want for that person if I was in their situation? We would I think want them to flourish in every aspect of their lives; would want to do away with all that diminishes them as human beings. So when we leave this strange Brexitland it is around that goal and how it might best be achieved that we will somehow need to unite.

(1) Leviticus 19,18, Deuteronomy 6,5, Matthew 22, 37.

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