Politicians: How To Keep a Promise

You have 4 options

1. Make a promise, then make another promise to pass a law making it illegal for you to break the first promise, unless you bring forward another law to overturn the law you passed originally.

2. Make a promise, then carve it into a massive great rock and put it in your back garden, to remind you of the promise you made. 

3. Make a promise, then put it into a large document, and use red lines to mark out the promises you're really going to keep, as opposed to the ones that are neither here nor there. Note: get the right sort of red, infra-red is invisible. Mind you, you'll probably wish you'd used infra red after all. 

4. Make a promise. Keep it. 

Do the Conservatives know what the House of Commons is actually for?

This is ridiculous:

A Tory government will introduce a law guaranteeing no rise in income tax rates, VAT or national insurance before 2020, David Cameron is to announce.

The Conservative leader will pledge legislation within 100 days of assuming office to ensure rates do not rise in the next Parliament.

The law is not a plaything, what exactly is the point of this idea? Just make a promise and keep to it, how hard can that be? Oh yes, 'no top down reorganisation of the NHS', immigration, I see your point. I could just about see the point of the fixed term parliaments act, and we've bee spared 18 months of wittering about when the election is going to be. But simply passing a law which says that you will do what you've said you'll do is both a betrayal of the purposes of law, and a very revealing act in itself. It's an admission that, whatever politicians say, we can't trust them. 

Two questions

1. Will David Cameron be arrested and tried if the Conservatives do raise income tax, VAT or NI? And I'm assuming that not raising thresholds at least in line with inflation counts as a tax rise. 

2. How do we know they will keep this promise? The promise itself is only made because we know that politicians don't keep their promises, but it's subject to the same trust deficit. As far as I know, the LibDems are the only party in recent political history to have made a promise, broken it, and then admitted that they broke it and apologised. 

Could we pass a law making political gimmicks illegal? David Cameron seems to think that just about anything can be turned into a short-term electoral asset: the unity of the UK, the legislative system, fear. Stop for a minute and think, please.

In the meantime, if you want to pass a popular law, how about one forcing Conservatives to turn up to election debates ?

Scouts add Alternative Promise for Atheists

After a consultation with over 15,000 responses, the scouts have taken a different route to the Guides. Instead of replacing the existing promise, there's now a non-religious alternative:

Alternative versions of the Scout Promise have been available for nearly 50 years and have been used by Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and those who live in the UK but are not UK citizens. This is the first time that the Movement has introduced a Promise for members and potential members who are without a faith.

The core Scout Promise, which refers to a ‘Duty to God’, remains intact and Scouting remains fully committed as a Movement that explores faith and religion as a core element of its programme.

and here it is..

The existing Scout Promise
On my honour, I promise that I will do my best,
To do my duty to God and to the Queen,
To help other people
And to keep the Scout Law.

New alternative wording of the Promise
On my honour I promise that I will do my best
To uphold our Scout values, to do my duty to the Queen,
To help other people
And to keep the Scout Law.

For Cub Scout section:I promise that I will do my best
To uphold our Scout values, to do my duty to the Queen
To help other people
And to keep the Cub Scout Law.

For Beaver Scout sectionI promise to do my best
To be kind and helpful and to love our world.

'Belief' remains one of the 5 'core values of Scouting'. All the more important after the recent findings about the quality of RE teaching in schools. This is unpacked a bit more in the very comprehensive FAQs page:

Scouting is not about ‘teaching’ religion, however it does encourage and enable young people to explore faith, beliefs and attitudes. This is in Scouting’s five principles of spiritual reflection, which are:
1.    To develop an inner discipline and training
2.    To be involved in corporate activities
3.    To understand the natural world around them
4.    To help to create a more tolerant and caring society
5.    To discover the need for spiritual reflection

Just as with the Guides, here is a youth movement committed to exploring questions of faith, spirituality etc. That hasn't changed with the addition of the alternative promise, which seems a sensible way to go. The best way for churches to engage with this is simply to get involved with their local units. It would be great to see the CofE respond with some resources that could be appropriately used by local churches with their scout and guide groups, though I suspect the best route to that is finding good practice at local level and then spreading it around.  

'Explore my Beliefs' vs 'Do my duty to God'

The revision of the Guide promise last week has received a mixed reaction, including here. Yesterday I heard a couple of local guide leaders give their reactions to the change in the 'God' clause - on the one hand some concern at the dropping of a cherished promise, but also a sense of opportunity.

Which got me thinking. The guide promise to 'explore my beliefs' is more dynamic than the version it has replaced: 'love my God' (and the previous 'do my duty to God'). Guides will now make a promise to explore what they believe. Whether or not the church thinks that's a step backwards, we need to get over it (the Guides don't belong to us, they can do as they see fit so long as it's legal), and get with their programme. If thousands of girls across the country are promising to explore their beliefs, surely that's a great opportunity for local churches and Christians to say 'we'd be delighted to help you do that, if you'd like us to.'

The new promise also shifts the corporate focus from 'serve my country' to ''serve my community'. Again, this is right into home turf (I hope!) for most churches. If exploring faith is one possible point of connection, community action is another, and it shouldn't be beyond the wit of most churches to offer opportunities to local guide units for community service, whether it's the lunch club, food bank, old folks Christmas party or whatever.

Finally, back to the faith bit - I do actually wonder whether 'explore my beliefs' might actually be closer to the grain of Christian living than 'do my duty to God'. Whichever way you go with this, the facts on the ground are that the entire guide movement is thinking about God, faith, belief etc., and asking a lot of questions about it. Isn't that a good conversation to be part of?

God still Guides, but Guides don't God

(update: some second thoughts on this here)

The UK Girl Guides have dropped 'do my duty to God' from their promise, in an effort to be more inclusive to girls who don't believe in God. The new promise reads:

I promise that I will do my best, 
To be true to myself and develop my beliefs
To serve the Queen and my community
To help other people
and To keep the Guide (Brownie) law

Its easy to see the logic. After all, my own Church of England baptises children into the church on the basis of the faith of their parents and godparents, recognising that children aren't old enough to answer for themeselves about their faith until later in life. If we don't baptise 8 year olds based on their own stated faith, then we can hardly criticise the Guides for dropping the God clause. It's a good organisation, and they want to be more appealing. It's worth noting, however, that the Scout movement is growing steadily, so promising to God clearly isn't putting that many people off. 

Having said that, it's sad to see it go, another survival of a more overtly Christian era which has been hollowed out by secularism. To be honest, I'd be surprised to find many guiding or scouting groups which really took 'do my duty to God' seriously. My own experience of 30 years ago was church parade (during which we played innumerable games of hangman and noughts and crosses to while away the time in the pews) and the Lords prayer at every meeting, though the lifestyle and language of the scout leaders the rest of the time wasn't exactly what you'd call a good Christian example. God was a duty, but little more.

This is from the Guides own website:

Girlguiding is not and never has been a Christian organisation. Girlguiding is open to all girls and adults, whether they follow a specific religion or not. Spiritual development is part of the Girlguiding programme, but this is not limited to one or any specific religion, or indeed any religion.

It's interesting to look at some of the reasoning behind the change: the Guides FAQ page makes reference to the strong faith of many guides, and a desire to take 'spiritual development' seriously:

Spirituality is open and accessible to everyone. It is concerned with the inner life and its meaning and purpose, and with making sense of the world around us. Spiritual development is an independent journey that continues throughout our lives.

Within the guiding programme we define spiritual development as making your own spiritual choices, respecting the spiritual choices of others and achieving inner peace.

Sounds nice, but the focus has turned from outward ('do my duty to God') to inward ('making your own spiritual choices...inner peace'). On the one hand there's an integrity about this which is good, but I don't actually believe 'spirituality' exists as a free-floating entity. We are spiritual beings made for relationship with God; what makes sense of our 'spirituality' is having God as an external reference point. We find inner peace when we 'find our rest in Thee', in the words of Augustine. What this attempts to find in 'spirituality' is already there in God, and if we are made by God for relationship with God, then the goal of spiritual development is a mature and committed relationship with God. If there's no God, and we have no spirit, and the only authentic 'spiritual choice' is atheism, then the British Humanist Association should be just as twitchy about this as the sentiment it replaces. The worry is that this creates a spiritual no-girls-land, with brownies and guides being led around the spiritual shadowlands on a 'journey' with no destination. 

I just wonder if the promise above is a bit of a compromise, a bit like an ecumenical act of worship, trying to find language that nobody can reject, which turns out to be language with very little content. 
 

So what of the new promise? What does 'be true to myself' actually mean? It's the kind of statement you expect to hear from a contestant on a reality TV show, but good luck to the person who has to develop a robust syllabus to back it up. I'm sure there must be something a bit more robust, a bit chewier, that could be put here, but then with 40,000 responses to the consultation perhaps this was the common mind of the respondents.

The other aspect to note is how much more self-absorbed this promise is than the one it will replace: "I will do my best to love my God, to serve my Queen and my country, to help other people and to keep the Guide law."

The entire focus of the current (until September) promise is away from self, towards others - God, Queen, country, others, Guide law. The new promise is headed by a vague narcissism, the focus is me, myself, I. And already it builds in a tension. What if a Guide develops republican views, can she be true to herself and serve the Queen? Or what is someone is innately and naturally selfish? Can she be true to herself and help others? 

By introducing two locuses (locii?) of value, one within and one without, I think the new promise could create as much confusion as the one it replaces. Because it starts with the Brownies/Guides making a promise to themselves, with no objective content, it immediately creates a conflict between objective duty and subjective feeling. 

Maybe it's all part of a cunning evangelistic strategy. By the end of their time in the Guiding movement, teenage girls will be crying out for a way of matching personal integrity and fulfilment with moral duty and higher purpose. Enter Jesus, promising life in all its fullness (personal) and calling people to lay down their lives for others (moral). Maybe the promise will create so much cognitive dissonance that in a few years times the Guides will be crying out for God again.

(apologies for the formatting issues!)
Update: thoughts from elsewhere -
Richard Hall (connexions)  - a similar concern to mine, that by turning the focus from others onto self the new promise loses something important.
Heresy Corner excellent piece, teasing out some of the inconsistencies and implicit values in the new promise
God and Politics wonders why Guides no longer have to promise to serve their country, but still pledge to serve the Queen.
And here's the perspective of a Christian Guider, who welcomes the change, and notes that it's lack of adult leaders, rather than the wording of promises, which is the main thing holding the movement back.