A graven image of a consummate ‘progressive’ communicator who won three general elections in a row.
In October’s Prospect magazine, the editor David Goodhart produces a startlingly perceptive and disturbing insight into the soul of post-Christian Britain in his review of Tony Blair’s memoir A Journey:
Blair did shift Britain to the left, but perhaps only as far as the centre-right – and the country’s various power elites in the City, the media, the law and so on – would allow. His easy liberalism on matters of sexuality, race and gender (although not on crime) combined with his suspicion of the state and trust in markets makes him a prime minister for our times. Both for good and ill, when we look at Tony Blair we look at ourselves.
Mr Goodhart is right. It is important to remember that though Mr Blair has become unpopular, his third election victory came after the invasion of Iraq. The great persuader retired unbeaten and the fact that he personifies the soul of post-modern Britain has if anything been reinforced by the defeat of the Brownite Labour Party.
Sadly, the institutional church has bowed the knee before this graven image. It has colluded in one of Mr Blair’s most poisonous spiritual legacies – the institution of civil partnerships, into which the House of Bishops has allowed clergy to enter.
Personally, Mr Blair would appear to be a humane and sincere man who has been unjustly demonised, albeit he is profoundly wrong on some key spiritual and moral issues. But no orthodox Christian should look into the mirror of the soul of our country and come away without a profound sense of penitence and a heart-felt prayer that the true and almighty God would, as the Book of Common Prayer puts it,
grant us true repentance and his Holy Spirit, that those things may please him which we do at this present, and that the rest of our life hereafter would be pure and holy; so that at the last we may come to his eternal joy; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
- You don't refer to Blair's part in the promotion of the abortion industry, which has destroyed far more human life than all the wars and disasters; now he calls himself a Roman Catholic - yet repents of nothing. The "spiritual soul" of modern Britain, then, is a kind of gross hypocrisy, masking as "religious".
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