An archbishop and a minister on speed
The law defines who we are as a people, writes George Pitcher
I was on a Speed Awareness Course some years ago. Early on, the leader asked us a technical question, probably about braking distances or something.
I raised my hand and gave the correct answer. He seemed impressed and asked where I’d learned that. “On my last Speed Awareness Course,” I replied, truthfully.
Yes, I was a serial speed offender, invariably after I was leaving a cathedral late at night after one of the fundraising concerts we arrange at Christmas time for the legendary folk/rock band Jethro Tull. Maybe it’s that rock ‘n’ roll excitement, man, at getting out on the highway to the next gig.
It never got critical and I’m better now. I drive more slowly – and I drive slower cars. But it’s easily done and so I sympathise with both archbishop Justine Welby and home secretary Suella Braverman, who have both recently been nicked for speeding.
Welby paid his fine (eventually – there were allegedly “admin errors”). Braverman has been in rather more trouble. Not with the police, but with political enemies who claimed that she leant on civil servants to get her a private Speed Awareness Course all of her own, online.
If this is so, she caused herself more damage than the harm she sought to avoid. We’re told that she thought it wouldn’t look good to be pictured, as she surely would have been, sitting with the naughty boys and girls in a pub conference room somewhere, pencilling answers to questions such as “What damage is caused by speeding?”
Special treatment
As it is, her high-handed demand for special treatment is of a piece with those who have recently seemed to think that laws are for little people. It’s not so much that government ministers believe they’re above the law, from Matt Hancock during covid to almost everything that Boris Johnson said and did as prime minister, but that they enjoy a privileged position with regard to it. It’s “Do as I say, not what I do” on steroids.
I wonder whether it matters. To err is human and to forgive is divine, so they say. Against that, we respond that people in authority have a duty to set an example. Though I’m not sure who would regard either Welby or Braverman as a role model.
We have a choice. We can be po-faced about our laws. I have heard Christians claim that because scripture tells us that Jesus Christ said that he’d “come not to destroy the law, but to fulfil it” he would have been in favour of 20mph speed limits, banging up hippies for smoking weed and the summary arrest of anti-monarchist demonstrators.
Hebrew Law
But he didn’t mean law in that sense, he meant the ancient Hebrew Law of the kings and prophets. These were the books of the Jewish Torah that indeed contained rules for living, but which were really about what it meant to be a people of God. It defined a culture. The word for Jewish Law, Halakha, can be translated as “a way of walking”.
It’s in this context, I think, that we’re called both to frame and interpret our laws, in a state in which the Church of England is established in law. It’s about our laws defining who we are as a people. And it doesn’t mean that Welby is a hypocrite for picking up a speeding fine, so long as he adheres to that principle in his practice.
Assisted suicide
Let me give an example of how that works. Campaigners for a change in the law to allow assisted suicide or euthanasia in the UK can often be heard to justify their desires by claiming: “It’s my life and I should be allowed to do with it what I wish.”
Now compare that claim with, say, the law on speeding that Braverman and Welby (and I) have breached. It’s beyond risible to imagine that a reasonable defence to doing 40 in a 30mph limit might be: “It’s my car and I should be allowed to do what I want with it.”
Law is there to protect the majority of people, most of the time. Good law is, anyway. That’s why we have speed limits, to protect pedestrians and other motorists, most of the time. And it’s why very many of us believe that the law against assisted suicide and euthanasia is there to protect most people and especially the disabled, the vulnerable, the depressed and the terminally ill.
Values
These are laws that define our values and who we are as a people. In the Christian faith, it’s why our law is fulfilled rather than destroyed by our sense of what is morally right.
And it’s why an archbishop should both pay his speeding fine and condemn as immoral the proposed Illegal Immigration Bill in the House of Lords, because we can’t recognise the gospel in it. We’re all in favour of him putting his foot down – just not in order to get there on time.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest
A version of this column appeared on PremierChristianity