Thanks, Bishop, but …
The Rt. Rev. James Jones, the former Bishop of Liverpool, has been given a knighthood. He chaired the Hillsborough Inquiry panel which finally got to the truth about the Hillsborough disaster. So we owe him and the panel a great debt of gratitude.
But a knighthood? He will go to Buckingham Palace to be hit on the shoulder by Her Majesty whose governments over – what was it? – 29 years resisted all calls for justice for the victims and their families, and whose police lied and covered up the truth all that time. None of that is unusual, of course – we all remember the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four, etc., etc.
Don’t accept this tatty award, change your mind, James. The only thanks you need are the thanks from the victims and their families. And you’ve got that beyond measure. And from the rest of us, who weep over the injustices built into our system. As an ex-bishop you presumably believe that “the powers that be are ordained by God … For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad” (Romans 13:1, 3). But when the powers that be go bad, you should resist them. You certainly shouldn’t accept their rewards. Change your mind – or, in more biblical language, repent.
In any case, what’s this Empire you want to become a knight of?
On oaths
The government may make new British citizens swear an oath of allegiance to “British values”. In my Christian youth we used to argue about whether it was right to swear an oath, even in court. Jesus had said that we shouldn’t and that anything more than just Yes or No “comes from evil”. I think it was because he rejected the assumption that everyone was a lying bastard unless they swore otherwise under some kind of threat from on high.
In later years, when I went to refugees’ citizenship ceremonies, I discovered that they were required to swear allegiance to “Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and all her successors”. I realised then that I could never have become a naturalised citizen if I’d had to even just declare such allegiance, never mind swear it. Tony Benn famously found a way round it. Faced with the necessity of swearing allegiance to said Queen and said descendants at the opening of each Parliament, he read out the form of words – but prefaced them with his own: “I, Tony Benn, under protest, and in order to serve my constituents, do swear … ”
But I don’t suppose the new oath makers will put up with any ploys of that kind when they’re registering oaths from today’s new citizens as they swear blind that they are totally committed not only to Her Majesty (even if her governments did try to bomb their home countries to buggery), but to cricket, or knitting, or Manchester United or anything else that they already subscribe to. I saw one list of British values that included “family values”. Unfortunately, our government’s own allegiance to the “right to family life” found in Article 8 of the Human Rights Act is more than doubtful. If you don’t believe that, you’ve never tried to assist already-naturalised citizens to negotiate the obstacles deliberately put in their way to thwart their attempts to reunite their families on good old British soil.
Oaths? I’ll give you oaths.
Bob Mouncer's blog 