In Kafka’s The Castle, officials from the ‘castle’ go to extraordinary lengths to conceal their presence in the village, where those who rely on their administration live.
In Kafka’s The Castle, officials from the ‘castle’ go to extraordinary lengths to conceal their presence in the village, where those who rely on their administration live. Meetings with petitioners are held in the middle of the night, and so sensitive are the officials to the possibility of being confronted by a villager that they hide in their rooms at the village’s inn until the right moment to dash out to their carriage and depart.
A symptom of this (or perhaps the cause, we are not told) is the complete and unquestioning deference and submission of the villagers to the reputation of the officials. It is only the novel’s protagonist, the outsider ‘K’, who unconcernedly flaunts this rigid custom and for his behaviour is greeted with despair by the shocked locals.
The reputation, deserved or otherwise, of MPs among the public-at-large is that those we elect to Westminster are only less elusive than Kafka’s officials by a factor of comic surreality. There are those like Simon Hughes and Stephen Timms, for example, who have carried out a great deal of surgeries and constituency meetings, but many others make less effort to be less opaque. In cases where the work of MPs is laid bare, it is the misbehavings that are remembered by the public, such as those revealed earlier this year by the ‘sting’ which showed two senior MPs, one Labour and one Conservative, listening to lucrative offers for their consultancy services.
Trust and transparency are needed to restore the public’s confidence in our system. I do not envisage a set of regulations by which MPs must abide, or any procedure requiring our politicians to declare all parliamentary and other work before official censorship. Rather, politicians should see it as part of their duty to those they serve. By opening the mysteries of their profession to others, trust can be restored and votes won. Those who think they exist outside an incomprehensible Westminster bubble will perhaps for the first time feel that they are stakeholders in our politics.
In this regard Mhairi Black, at 20 the youngest MP since the English civil war, is blazing a trail: very simply, she wrote a diary of her first week at Westminster. To those MPs who feel their position necessitates certain experiences and successes in one’s professional life (those who, frankly, risk being seen as politically moth-eaten), Black’s incredible story suggests the way of the future. With more following her example, we could see a decisive shift towards a generally positive reputation for our elected servants.
The theologian David N Field has written: ‘If our theology is to be an authentic reflection on and witness to God who is revealed in Jesus Christ as the God of the excluded, then we need to embark on the often painful journey to meet with Jesus the Christ outside the camp, among the excluded. Such a journey will leave us uncomfortable and displaced…’ We must present this challenge plainly and strongly, for our politicians to come out of the camp and experience common society with those they claim to represent.
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© Jake Cunliffe is an Ekklesia associate. He has a master’s degree in World Christianity.