News- Great Britain

Will the Moral Landscape Alter?

Despite the pleas of noted clerics and pro-life activists, moral arguments had little impact on the election results.

On the test of response to the prolife issue one cannot quarrel with the verdict of the Catholic Times: "Death culture wins the day."

The overall vote total for the Prolife Alliance was 19,176--hardly enough to have won a single seat even if all those votes had been been concentrated into one constituency.

It is idle to pretend that the strong voicing of moral issues in the campaign preceding the British election had any discernible impact on the returns. The main result was so clear and overwhelming that any theories about secondary influences, which might possibly have checked or accelerated the trend, is now irrelevant. The country had resolved, with a force it never quite confided to the pollsters, that it was going to sweep the Conservatives away.

The country voted Labor where this would hurt the Conservatives. It voted Liberal Democrat, too, where this would hurt the Conservatives--incidentally giving this third party its best representation in the House of Commons since 1929. The majority enjoyed by the new Labor government' under Prime Minister Tony Blair is now overwhelming. It is the sign of a bad war when the generals become very young; John Major is stepping down from the party leadership and as we go to press William Hague, only 36, is the leading contender to replace him.

On the test of response to the prolife issue one cannot quarrel with the verdict of the Catholic Times: "Death culture wins the day." The paper admitted that, quite contrary to what it and other pro-life advocates had predicted, abortion and similar issues had not mattered in the election. Bruno Quintavalle, the mild but impressive young leader of the newly formed Prolife Alliance Party told Catholic World Report that the new House of Commons was much worse on the pro-life issue than the old one; there were now only twenty staunchly pro-life members in the Parliament.

While Cardinal Winning rightly contended that the value of life itself must stand above every other value, and on that issue the results were disastrous, one can find some hopeful signs in the electoral aftermath. All of the Tory MPs whose integrity had come under question were defeated, rendering academic the publication of a report on in investigation into their conduct. For the first time there is a place in the cabinet for a minister responsible for aid to Third World countries: an earnest act of solidarity with the poorest people of the world. Labor is set to alleviate the plight of refugee applicants for asylum here. And, as Will Hutton, editor of the Observer. wrote, "... policy makers can both develop market capitalism and a modernized welfare state--where markets and social fairness are not at loggerheads. The tensions between market individualism and social democratic universalism dissolve."

In my own constituency of Chichester the local churches had arranged a pre-election meeting in the city's medieval cathedral, chaired by the Anglican Dean, as a forum in which voters could question the candidates. The huge nave was jam-packed and issues such as health and education were aired with great civility. But the life issue was not raised. So I wrote to each man and asked if they would vote in Parliament to support the unborn child's right to life.

The Labor Party is predominantly pro-choice, and their candidate did not answer my question directly; he explained that he wanted to see more and better birth-control advice being made available to the younger generation. The Liberal Democrat answered, "Not if that implies an end to all abortions." But he clarified, explaining that he would support some restraints on abortion. "I believe the 1967 Act--two doctors sign, the need for clear justification, etc.--was an acceptable position," he wrote, whereas "the present position is near to abortion on demand and this is unacceptable." The candidate for the Referendum Party--one of two new groups opposed to further European integration--considered the present law to be about right. Andrew Tyrie, the Conservative, who was elected, said that he was pro-life by instinct but believed it was impossible to end abortion entirely by legislative means. "The result would be to drive abortion underground and abroad with much consequent suffering," he argued. "Therefore I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that the present law should probably stay." Chichester was not one of the 50 seats that the Prolife Alliance contested.

The Prolife Alliance reveals that for the 55 seats they had contested, they attracted an average of only 350 votes. Their overall vote total was 19,176--hardly enough to have won a single seat even if all those votes had been been concentrated into one constituency. Tiny though the numbers were, they revealed one interesting fact: the pro-life ballots represented 0.8 percent of the vote in England and Wales, but twice that figure--1.6 percent--in Scotland. The Alliance attributed that difference primarily to the campaigning of the Scottish Cardinal Thomas Winning.

Bruno Quintavalle, the founder of the Prolife Alliance, revealed that of the 21 members of the new Labor Cabinet who had been sitting in the House of Commons, every one had voted to allow legal abortion up to the moment of birth under certain circumstances. (On the other hand William Hague, front-runner to become Tory leader, has compiled a pro-life voting record.) The leaders of the Alliance hope to keep their young party alive, to be able to field candidates in all 87 UK constituencies for the European elections in two years' time. But those ambitions will be dependent on their ability to attract adequate funding.

John Smeaton, national director of the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child (SPUC), echoed Quintavalle's dismay regarding the composition of the new House of Commons. SPUC had distributed over 3 million leaflets up and down the country, only to see 78 pro-life MPs unseated while only 20 new pro-lifers were elected. Smeaton warned readers of the Catholic Times that the Labor government's plans to "clarify" the law, permitting abortion in Northern Ireland and making the practice simpler elsewhere by allowing abortions to procede on the strength of just one doctor's signatures during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. "Their justification for this is that they want to bring down late abortions," Smeaton wrote, but "they will soon make the discovery that you don't overcome evil by making it easier to practice."

Quintavalle recalled Tony Blair's statement last October that he would do everything in his power to prevent abortion from becoming an issue in the election. What did become an issue, paradoxically, was the censorship of the Alliance's political program by the nation's television companies. By virtue of having fielded over 50 candidates, the Alliance had been entitled to one television broadcast. Quintavalle himself scripted the film, which showed harrowing footage of actual abortions. The impact of the film on journalists who attended a preview was devastating; many were left silent and aghast. But broadcasting authorities banned the broadcast on the grounds that it breached guidelines on taste and decency. The original program was in fact shown intact on one small station, Channel 4--after midnight and using blurred images.

The broadcasters' decision was scarcely believable in the light of much of the material that is shown routinely on television: the metaphor that rose to many Christian minds, and found expression in letters to the editor, involved straining at gnats and swallowing camels. But the BBC has said that it will not show the film at any time, or under any circumstances; spokesman Ann Sloman said the corporation did not want to offend any woman who had had an abortion.

Election broadcasts are often a highly sensitive element in British politics, and the Prolife Alliance film was not the only one to cause controversy this year. Channel 4, which alone showed the Alliance film, refused to show a film provided by the British National Party ,which wants to "repatriate" non-whites; the larger BBC and ITV companies cheerfully screened that program. The BBC in Northern Ireland also cut part of a broadcast by Sinn Fein.

In spite of the impact on the pro-life issue, a reporter would be guilty of inaccuracy if he failed to fail to convey that a profound sense of a good deed done--a moral act that had been carried out--was in the air following the election. Writing in the Independent after the election, Cardinal Hume remarked that there was a palpable sense of hope and optimism as the winds of political change blew through Whitehall.

The nation sees the new Prime Minister as a professed Christian, who attends Mass with his family in a Catholic Church every Sunday. In one of his most significant speeches before the election, Blair developed his party's core beliefs in family and community, contrasting them with the Tories' ideological obsession with self-interest. A Labor government, he promised, would make Britain one nation again; he promised to restore the social and moral dimension in British government and ensure that in all debates the question "is it right?" would be asked.

In the long run the moral idea which may be said to have gained ground in the 1997 British election is the notion of a common good, a phrase injected into the discussion by the Catholic bishops last autumn in their document on the moral and social, issues which electors should be weigh as they approached the ballot box. But there is no sign that the pro-life argument is winning ground in today's Britain; rather the reverse. Cardinal Hume has already repeated Cardinal Winning's pledge to continue the fight on that issue, while pro-life organizations are buckling on their armor for whatever lies ahead.

Kevin Grant is editorial coordinator for Catholic World Report in Great Britain and Ireland.