Democratic deficits?

 

 

I remember discovering that the Duke of Wellington feared that passing the Reform Bill in the 1830s would reduce the country to ‘a mere democracy’.  For him, I suspect, ‘people-power’ sounded more like ‘mob-rule’ than ‘consensual-decisions’.  The Reform Act did not give any say to most of the people anyway. 

And, even with the universal adult suffrage which has developed since, we have a Government for which only 29% of registered voters turned out to support being able to pass legislation to require a Trade Union to act on a particular matter only if they can muster the support of more than 50% of its eligible voters.

There is the ‘West Lothian question’ about MPs from areas of the UK outside England with forms of devolved Government voting on matters which only apply within England where no devolved assembly exists.  There is the unnicknamed question of Scotland having decisions made about its non-devolved issues by a national Government which is represented by only six of its seventy-seven MPs.

It is in Northern Ireland where the term democratic deficit is in particular use at the moment.  It applies both to the present non-operation of devolved Government and to the extent to which our trading partners can apply their own law about such trade.  But there are other issues which are more overlooked.

From a Unionist point of view, a single Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) used to be the one public voice until some who feared it was compromising broke away to form the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) which grew to outstrip its support. 

Once the DUP was perceived by some to be compromised by its level of power sharing, a new Traditional Unionist Vote option began to appear on ballot papers.  In the 2017 Assembly elections the DUP had 28% of the votes and TUV 3%.  In 2022 the DUP had 21% and TUV 8%. 

The DUP’s rigorous position on the Windsor Framework can only be understood with this in mind.  If it is seem to compromise further it fears that it will simply lose power for doing so.  Few in England perceive this.

From a Nationalist point of view, there is a different perception of a democratic deficit.  Those who are elected to represent Sinn Fein (SF) in the Assembly are able to take their seats there by making a comprehensive declaration about operating democratically. 

Those elected to do so in the UK Parliament are not – they must instead declare personal loyalty to the Crown.  Few in England are aware that seven UK constituencies have an MP who has not taken up his or her seat in part for this reason.

Most English voters might well feel instinctively that the DUP is culpable in sabotaging the operation of devolved Government, and that it is SF’s look out if their constituents are not represented by a voting MP at Westminster.  But the dynamic needs to be understood.

Leaving Northern Ireland aside, I went to a meeting of those in this City who want dealing with the climate crisis to be a much higher priority for the Government.  It was sold as being a place at which we’d hear about new possibilities, but actually it was merely support for a major march on Parliament which was being solicited.

Before we had finished, discussion was running into the sand about unlikely possibilities sucha s proportional representation and people’s assemblies.  What I really heard was people, some of who had abandoned extreme Extinction Rebellion tactics, simply desperate at not feeling they had a way to have their voices effectively heard.

Afterwards I engaged in a thought experiment imagining I was, say, a nurse who wanted his or her serious loss of living standards to be taken seriously, and the peril in which it put patients. 

I could vote – although, not having money for a car and a foreign holiday, I’d allowed my Driving Licence and Passport to expire, so new legislation means I’d be turned away if I simply turned up with my poll card and NHS identity card.

I could protest publically – although if I did so in a way which might upset a couple of people I could now be in trouble with the law.

I could go on strike – although this may soon be made illegal for me.

I could get desperate and do something dramatic just like the Suffragettes who chaining themselves to fences – although I might soon find myself electronically tagged and restricted as a result.

And the biggest democratic deficit of all when any well meaning  rebalancing of any of this shifts things in unexpectedly more difficult ways?  It is probably that a large proportion of the ‘demos’ don’t try to engage with the ‘kratia’ at all.  If it was mob rule the Duke of Wellington feared, he can rest easy.

Meanwhile, the photo is from a walk with a friend at Moor Farm Nature reserve near Woodhall Spa.

Displaced clergy

 

The settled policy of this and other dioceses is that a newly retired priest should not be given ‘permission to officiate’ for six months.

The idea is, I’m sure, that facing the reality of a loss of role, status and utility should be fully experienced rather than softened or denied by a rapid accumulation of things like liturgical leadership and feeling useful.

Those of us who may have had even as much as forty years in which our only experience of Christian community has been one of influence and visibility (to put it no more strongly) could well be a liability suddenly disturbing the quiet power dynamics and/or collaborative structures of a new place.

‘I am not sure who I am,’ I’ve written to a few friends, ‘so it must be working’. 

I find I remain hungry for priesthood (which is a good discovery, I think) and deeply suspicious that I’ll simply revert to type when the six month sabbatical comes to an end rather than become freshly servantful (which is a troubling discovery, I realise).

Offers have already come for me to have Canon Emeritus status, to join the Trustees of a local educational charity, potentially to assist in some diocesan training, and to begin to develop a provisional agreement about a minimum level of ministry in the Parish Church I now attend – and I am still only four and a half months in.

With some time on my hands I have found that exploring and writing up things that interest me has come to the fore.  Just some of this (parts of my relating to the neighbouring art gallery and museum, exploring local countryside, and making use of my Ancestry subscription) have made it into this Blog.

And now I’m spending time with stories of other displaced clergy – those given small pensions as they were ejected from dissolved monasteries in the Sixteenth Century.  It is research about one in particular which started me off, but it is others who are the focus of my attention now.

A 1554 Exchequer survey of all those being paid these pensions is the rich seam.

Canons of Thornton Abbey / College (which interested me so much when I lived nearby) pop up as the incumbents of neighbouring parishes at Barrow, South Ferriby and Wooton, and only a little further away at Louth, Welton and Withcall. 

The displaced Dean of Thornton himself had a pension of £50 p.a., and was bringing in another £37 p.a. as the Rector of both Haxey and Laceby, where he was paying former Thornton colleagues just £6 (a sort of minimum liveable wage) and £1 6s 8d (one and a third pounds, or one pound and half a mark) to act as working curates on the ground.

But it is the smaller stories which are most touching.

Two north Lincolnshire pensioners were married to each other.  Anne Castleforth was the former Prioress of tiny Gokewell Priory near Broughton (the Priory site is on the edge of the Scunthorpe Steelworks), and has £4 p.a.  Robert Stayton had been the priest of a chantry at Althorpe eight miles away, and has £2 9s 6d.  He was now serving as the Curate of Broughton itself for £6. 

William East had been priest of a guild in Louth now with a pension of just £1 p.a.  He was ‘celebrating from time to time’ (covering services in local churches) for fees of about £4 p.a., and working as a weaver. 

John Brampton had been a monk at Bardney Abbey now with a pension of £1 6s 8d.  He was married and ‘said not to be in holy orders and working as a tanner’. 

Meanwhile, having mentioned the Amarna Letters in an earlier post, the picture is of one of them in the British Museum which I searched out when in London overnight a few weeks ago.

Seeking identity

 

A long and personal story, but I’m wanting to write it, and this seems the only place to put it.

For what feels like most of my life, I have been seeking to identify a man who I have gradually come to realise was a serial sexual predator in and around Ross-on-Wye in the 1920s.  He would have been my grandfather.

On my father’s side, I’ve always known an unusually comprehensive amount about my family history.  My father valued and shared what he knew.  As a boy with him, and later on my own, I’ve read, recorded, researched, and transcribed in archives, attics, churchyards, record offices, and a whole trunk of material my father preserved.

But on my mother’s side, there was a blank.  She would speak of her grandparents bringing her up in  Ross.  Nothing else was said, and the strange absence included that of any photograph or relative.  Somehow my brothers and I simply knew not to ask.

In my early twenties, being driven back to University along the M40, without being prompted, my father did quietly tell me that my mother did not know who her father was, and did not want to know.  I guess he realised that it was inevitable that I would find this out at some point.

In those pre-internet days research had to be done in person at Somerset House in London.  I did find my mother’s birth record.  There was blank where her father’s name could have been written.  Assuming my mother must have been orphaned, I looked for, but failed to find, a record of her mother’s death in the late 1920s or early 1930s.  I didn’t do any more.

In my early forties, having left things at that for so long, I was finally travelled near Hereford and went into the archives there.  Here searching of the parish registers was done on microfiche.  I found my mother’s baptism record, also with a blank where her father’s name could have been written.  Again I failed to find a record of her mother’s burial in the years in which I expected to find it. 

Then I was stunned to scroll on and find her marriage, and thus also the name of a step-father who my mother had never mentioned.  I sat in silence for quite a while.  It was to turn out that he died quite quickly, that my grandmother remarried much late in her life, and that she did not die herself until I was a teenager.

By now the internet and a large amount of luck helped me find this all out.  I also managed to identified what turned out to be the only child of that marriage, an elderly half-sister of my mother’s, and her address.  I made tentative contact.  With some trepidation, I went to meet her at her home in the Forest of Dean.  A house full of her curious relatives was there.

The story which came out was not an uncommon one.  Someone brought up as the youngest child in a large family learning (in my mother’s case, at the age of seventeen when she needed next-of-kin consent to join up under age during the War) that what she assumed was a much older sister was really her mother.

There was a sad element.  Soon after the War, my mother moved away to train as a nurse.  She never made contact with her family again.  The opening page of my mother’s oldest photo album is indeed of the camaraderie of that training cohort in Birmingham – clearly a new Year Zero in her life.

There was also a sinister element.  My mother’s half-sister told me that she had asked her mother from time to time about my mother’s father.  She became obliquely aware that my mother had not been conceived consensually.  She knew that he was one of the people they saw very occasionally on the street when she was a small girl, and that he was ‘a nasty man’.  She did not know his name.

Soon Ancestry and related DNA testing became a possibility and then a bit of an obsession.  It identified for me about twenty people with whom I share enough DNA for it to be likely that each is a third cousins or something like that. 

My comprehensive knowledge of my father’s family meant I could rule out about half of them as being related to me that way.  My use of Ancestry meant I would trace and rule out those to whom I am related via my mother’s mother.  Just two remained, and the site showed that they were related to each other.

I thought it would be simple to take their family trees back five generations and find the ancestors they had in common, and from whom I must be descended via my unknown grandfather.

A’s family tree was most comprehensive, and I quickly focussed on the Prosser family in Ross itself.  The oldest brothers in the family had moved away at the beginning of the century to work in mines thirty-five miles away in south Wales.  The surviving younger brothers remained local and were of the right sort of age.

B’s family tree was comprehensive on her mother’s side, but none of her ancestors shared a surname with any of A’s, so I was sure I had to look on her father’s side.  Here her information was much sparser.  Worse, it led back to a network of Davies, Evans and Jones across the same south Wales valleys which proved an impossibly challenging thicket to investigate.  I laid it all aside.

Now, in my early sixties, three things shifted.  Ancestry began to show through which of our parents one of us has a DNA connection.  Unexpectedly I turn out to be related to B via her mother’s side, so the south Wales thicket was irrelevant, the information I had ought to be enough.  And newly retired, I had time and distance to pick it all up again. 

But let me mention the third thing first.  An additional  DNA match to A, B and I showed up.  And he shared much more DNA with me than I do with A and B.  If I could read off his four great-grandfathers then one would be the man I was looking for, probably with a surname which overlapped with either A or B’s known ancestors.

The first three great-grandfather’s names didn’t match at all.  I looked eagerly for the fourth.  I was stunned for a second time in this journey to find he was unknown.  Not just unresearched, but absent from his daughter’s birth certificate.  She was born the year after my mother and not far from Ross.  I was no nearer knowing who my grandfather was, but I did now know that he had done it (at least) twice.

Meanwhile, B had shared a query about one of her ancestors with me, so I buckled down to address both this and the lack of common surnames between A and B’s ancestors five generations back.  I quickly clarified the answer to A’s query about her ancestors James and Mary Jones in the village of Garway on the Welsh border (about ten miles west of Ross) in the 1861 census returns.  I also put my notes about her ancestors generally in some order.

The following day, I thought I might as well put my notes about A’s ancestors in some order too, and, in the process, spotted that years ago I had written the place name Garway.  I looked for the person concerned in the 1861 census and was astonished to find myself on the same page I’d been looking at the previous day.  James and Mary Jones (ancestors of B) lived next door to John and Ann Prosser (ancestors of A).

A few more clicks and I found someone had listed James Jones and Ann Prosser as brother and sister, although I can’t see her evidence for doing so.  This would make their parents Thomas Jones and Penelope Jones (nee Arthur) the common ancestor of A and B (and of C and I), one generation further back than we’d been able to look before. 

In theory, my unknown grandfather could be any of Thomas and Penelope Jones’ great-grandsons.  There are a few, but not that many, and most had not ended up near Ross.  But here on the page of the 1861 census in front of me was John and Ann Prosser’s son George, aged 5.  He would become father of the brothers in Ross who had seemed to be strong suspects all that time ago.  I needed to work my way over all that was known about the three of them.

On Sunday, I was stunned for a third and final time.  I had cross-checked my notes with each piece of information Ancestry had on each of them.  In the process I eventually clicked on the ‘hint’ button by each of their names on the website just to double check there was nothing there I’d failed to find when entering search terms for each of them over the years and that day.  For one there was a record which I am sure I had not seen indexed before.  It was a court record.

Ernley William Prosser (33), a brewer, was tried at Hereford in 1921 on two counts of the ‘carnal knowledge’ of a named fifteen year old in Ross at the beginning of the year.  He was acquitted. 

Of course, I cannot prove that he then went on to father children on (at least) two other women in Ross later in the 1920s, neither of whom wanted to record his name on their daughters’ birth certificates.  But the cumulative evidence is that he did, my search is at an end, and he was my grandfather.  A descends from one of his brothers.

He had married in 1915 while on leave from the Army Service Corps having served very briefly in France, and then later served in Salonika where he contracted malaria.  He had two sons (so half-brothers of my mother) born the year before and the year after his trial, who seem to have children themselves (half-cousins of mine – they will be older than me and may not still be alive - just perhaps one of them is and will take a DNA Ancestry test one day).  He had been widowed and married again before he died, still in Ross, in 1949.  Anyone with any adult memory of him would need to be in their mid-90s by now.

Meanwhile, the plant on my window sill has flowered this morning.

How fast is change possible?

 

The English societal cultural shift towards the acceptance of homosexual sexual activity and then of same-sex marriage has been historically rapid.  Homosexual sexual activity was still a criminal offence in my lifetime (not decriminalised until 1967) and fresh Government restrictions preventing schools and local authorities promoting a homosexual lifestyle were being introduced after I was ordained (1988).  It is striking that progress culminating in legalising same-sex marriage was then achieved by 2013 – the same political party which legislated against promotion of a ‘pretended family relationship’ in 1988 legislated to establish a real family relationship just twenty-five years later.

Now, ten years later, those members of the Church of England’s ‘House of Bishops’ who want to follow this through are in a trap.

First, our doctrinal limits are hard to pin down.  These often have to be deduced from what authorised liturgy (especially the 1662 Book of Common Prayer) and our Canons (a rule book much more limited in size than, say, the very substantial code of the Catholic Church) say.  But it is clear that marriage is explicitly referred to in both as being between a man and a woman.

Secondly, our ability to express fresh developments is circumscribed.  Changes to authorised liturgy or to Canons can only be made by consensual agreement in the General Synod.  The working definition of such consensus is that a majority is needed of two thirds in each of the Synod’s three ‘Houses’ (bishops, clergy and lay people voting separately).  This is the reason, for example, agreement to ordain women as priests and then as bishops came much later in England than in, for example, the Episcopal Church in the United States.

So even if a majority of the members of the House of Bishops have come to believe that homosexual sexual relations are not inherently sinful, that same-sex marriages are a welcome development, and it is politically expedient to progress in speaking and acting on these beliefs (which are, incidentally, three quite different things), they could not begin to act on these convictions by attempting new authorised liturgy or changing the Canons whilst they know the level of consensus does not (yet) exist in all three Houses.

Some voices urge strongly a move towards equal marriage celebrated in church – what the state has been doing for the last decade and some other Christian denominations churches are also now doing.  Some voices urge strongly an explicit recommitment to the position that any sexual activity outside heterosexual marriage is sinful – the teaching of the church for most of its history.  The House of Bishops latest move is seen by some to be an attempt to split the difference between these two irreconcilable positions – proposing new liturgy to ask a blessing on those who have entered into same sex civil marriage but not proposing any move towards having such marriages take place in church. 

Actually the trapped House of Bishops may simply be moving as far as it can.  There is provision in the Canons which allows bishops to commend liturgy for situations in which no authorised liturgy exists - but such commended liturgy cannot be ‘contrary to, nor indicative of any departure from, the doctrine of the Church of England in any essential matter’.  This is what they are doing - although it remains an open question as to how many Christian men or women who have entered into legal civil same-sex marriage will want to seek such a blessing  which, when you look through them, studiously avoid mentioning that such a marriage exists or is possible.

They cannot, as far as I can see, do any more.  This dismays those who wish they would - it flummoxes both Christians in faithful same-sex unions and those in wider more accepting English society.  It delights those who wish they wouldn’t – many believing that the General Synod’s approach to over whelming consensus is an important safeguard against fashion or liberalism.  It is simply what it is - a church which, when it does change, for good or ill, does so slowly.

I mentioned the ordination of women.  I might have it in mind because the official cycle of daily Bible readings brought me to read 1 Corinthians 11 at Morning Prayer today – Paul spelling out that it is self evident to him (in his reading of scripture, reason and tradition) that it is inappropriate for women to pray with their hair uncovered.   Anyway, I’ve just looked things up.  Anglican women were being ordained priest in Canada, Hong Kong, New Zealand and the United States in the 1970s, but, nearly forty years later, 36% of the members of the House of Laity of the General Synod were voting successfully in 2012 to prevent their ordination as bishops.

Meanwhile, I was given a bulb and some instructions by one of Deborah’s friends when I moved house at the end of September.  There has been a lot of change in the four months since and something spectacular is about to happen.