Dan Hitchens is a senior editor at First Things.
For British Catholics like me, it should be a moment of rejoicing. One of the last restrictions on our faith, a holdover from the centuries of prejudice and persecution, is being lifted. And the reform is being carried out by the United Kingdom’s first lifelong Catholic prime minister. So why does it not exactly feel like a new dawn?
Since becoming prime minister, Andy Burnham has made some big promises: to abolish homelessness, to end “40 years of neoliberalism,” to sort out Britain’s crisis-ridden care system, to introduce a new electoral model and perhaps to seek a closer relationship with the European Union. Yet his government’s first piece of legislation is on a seemingly minor technical point. The Church Appointments (Repeal of Discriminatory Provision) Bill would allow Burnham, a Catholic and therefore not a member of the Church of England, to advise the king on the appointment of Church of England bishops.
In practice, it isn’t really the king or the prime minister who chooses the bishops of the national church; it’s an independent commission. But to Burnham, the current law — which forbids Catholics as well as Jews from having even a rubber-stamping role — is simply outdated. So, though it is still the case that no Catholic can become king or queen, there will soon be one fewer law against us.
Burnham’s somewhat vague Catholicism (he rarely goes to Mass) underpins his somewhat vague politics. He credits his devout mother, Eileen, with instilling his ethic of “care.” He comes from Liverpool in the northwest — the most Irish-Catholic city in the most culturally Catholic part of England — and inherited its politics. “What I used to have to read in the catechism,” Burnham once said, “the enfranchisement of it on Earth was the Labour Party.” The commonalities, he has argued, are “the underdog, a sense of solidarity and values.”
Solidarity is the one that stands out. At the party conference last week, Burnham came onstage to the 1990 hit “All Together Now” — a song about the Christmas Truce of 1914 during World War I — and in his speech spoke repeatedly of the need for national unity. “Today we draw a line on a decade of division,” Burnham declared.
Yet this technical change to the legislation on Catholic prime ministers reminds us of one reason that unity has proved so elusive. British identity was forged in the century after the union between England and Scotland in 1707. And it was founded, above all, on the rejection of Catholicism. The kingdom, according to the popular national story, had been narrowly saved again and again from Catholic invasion, Catholic tyrants, Catholic plots. Britain’s prosperity and freedom were the blessings of Protestantism, visibly contrasting with the poverty and absolutism supposedly found in Catholic Europe. Even the British national character — law-abiding, sober-minded, understated — was thought superior to Latin hotheadedness.
This national mythology justified some ferocious anti-Catholic laws. In the century and a half following Henry VIII’s break from Rome in 1534, hundreds of Catholics were put to death for their religion. Until 1791, Catholic churches and schools were banned; until 1829, no Catholic could sit in parliament. The ban on the monarch marrying a Catholic was lifted only in 2013. Of course bigotry is part of this long story, but so is the British belief that Catholicism threatened a precious national achievement.
Since Britain went into debt in World War II, lost its empire and suffered a series of recent political crises, its sense of pride has imploded. Even the minimal patriotism amid which I grew up is no longer being transmitted. Only 41 percent of younger Britons say they are proud to be British — about half the number 20 years ago. The number who believe the country is “united” has fallen even more dramatically; half would not fight for Britain “under any circumstances.” It may seem a stretch to connect these glum statistics with the Church Appointments (Repeal of Discriminatory Provision) Bill, but there is a link. Britain once at least knew what it was. Today the national identity, though debated endlessly and anxiously, is an enigma.
Meanwhile, Britain’s leaders cycle through a narrow selection of policies. Burnham, just like his unpopular predecessor, Keir Starmer, wants to revitalize the public realm without abandoning the fiscal constraints imposed by the official regulator. Like Starmer, he wants to limit immigration without doing anything that would strike the liberal conscience as cruel. And he wants to be an idealist about foreign policy and climate change without alienating the United States or looking like a softheaded eco-warrior. It’s just that whereas Starmer carried out these sad triangulations gloomily — lamenting, for instance, that Britain had become an “island of strangers” — Burnham delivers them with a reassuring chuckle.
When he came onstage at the party conference, Burnham carefully managed the backing track. We heard the intro to “All Together Now,” but not the lyrics. “Same old story again,” it goes. “All together now in no man’s land.”
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