Life in the political twilight zone -Aug 23, 2006

While Britain has the longest average working hours in Western Europe, its national parliamentarians still theoretically enjoy the most generous breaks.

The summer recess now stretches from late July to mid-October. Then there’s half-term week, Easter, and what is still quaintly called Whitsun (Pentecost). A big chunk of holidays sandwiching a smaller block of what are, in theory, ‘holy days’.

For many, the summer break comes as a huge relief. MPs, Westminster aides, journalists and sketch writers enjoy a respite from their customary jousting, while the TV-watching public are spared regular instalments of set-piece barracking across the dispatch box. Buckets and spades briefly replace unarmed trench warfare.

But in an increasingly complex 24/7 world, nothing is ever simple. For some, the summer ‘break’ means a drop in contract earnings, not a holiday in Tuscany. Cleaners still have the halls of power to sanitise, albeit littered with fewer discarded order papers.

In terms of work-life balance concerns, it’s a mixed bag too. A recess is really a lull between ever-engulfing parliamentary storms, with bureaucrats secretly trying to catch up on unfeasible workloads and families needing to repair the damage of the ‘usual’ 24/7 lifestyle.

From the perspective of global entanglement in places like the Middle East, the summer recess faces another kind of pressure. In recent years government has used ‘down time’ to get policy underneath the radar – especially over international conflicts.

Indeed MPs are smarting at the moment because their power to ‘recall’ the House seems to have been fatally undermined by an overbearing government keen to avoid too much serious political scrutiny over responses to the recent alleged UK terror plots.

Politically and humanly, none of this adds up to a healthy situation. Frenetic activity followed by enforced quietude doesn’t seem to work either as a system of engagement or of restoration.

Yet like mice-on-the-wheel, our parliamentarians seem trapped in an ever-faster process of change where running quicker gets you nowhere and back-peddling puts you in a different kind of spin.

The answer, perhaps, is to consider re-thinking the idea of ‘recess’ in terms of ‘recreation’.

A recess is essentially a hole. And we all know what happens to them. They get filled in, either with useful stuff which doesn’t fit anywhere else, or with odd bits of rubbish.

Recreation, on the other hand, is about, yes, ‘re-creation’ – having our deepest sources of creativity as thinking, acting and (above all) relating beings renewed. It is what lies behind the bold concept of Sabbath in Jewish and Christian tradition.

Sadly, Sabbath as a set of distinctive, restorative practices for a community consciously feeding on God as its endless source of creativity has got totally lost – precisely because the Christendom church tries to impose it on the wider society, against its will and with a diminishing sense of what it really means.

What Sabbath came to mean for many, certainly in my youth, was essentially ‘not doing stuff’, because God said so. That was especially the case if the ‘stuff’ was fun or called into question the overall system.

In earlier years the church rigorously opposed Sabbath bear-baiting, for example. It didn’t do this out of care for bears, but because it worried about losing its capacity to dragoon the reluctant into the pews.

So Sabbath became, for believers and non-believers alike, little more than a political recess. It lost its genuine recreational potential, and with that its genuine attractiveness and viability. Which brings us back to parliamentary holidays.

Sooner or later, no doubt, someone will decide that the short breaks named after Christian festivals are inappropriate in a plural society and will quietly try to rename them.

Some Christians will then get very upset about this and will pour vast energy into pointlessly trying to retain another final vestige of symbolic control over the political system.

A better idea would be for churches to concentrate on being a bit more Christian themselves, rather than trying to get others to do it for them. That way they might have something worthwhile to offer back to the parliamentary rat race.

For example, we might explore Sabbath practices as imaginative downtime for repairing relationships, for reconsidering what really matters in life, and for reflecting on truly radical alternatives.

Then, rather than just ‘going on recess’ we would be going on retreat – entering that revolutionary zone where the unthinkable is suddenly thought.

Just imagine it. A whole week where political and faith leaders joined civic forums unbounded by the standard rules of political confrontation. Time deliberately set aside to focus on people issues rather than issues people.
A periodic political Sabbath would be, above all, an opportunity to face those re-creational (but overlooked) ‘what if?’ questions. Like, ‘what if bombing doesn’t make people good, and democracy can’t stop people endorsing the bad? What would political realism mean then?’

This is an expanded version of an article which appears in the September 2006 issue of Third Way magazine.

Simon Barrow (www.simonbarrow.net) is co-director of Ekklesia. His background is in journalism, adult education, politics and theology, and his weblog is: http://faithinsociety.blogspot.com