Bishops vote on taking a political stand

Church of England bishops are discussing whether or not to tell people how to vote in the general election.

The 43 bishops, who are in a four-day meeting at a Liverpool hotel, are trying to agree a common stance after individual interventions earlier this month from the bishops of Oxford, Birmingham, Coventry and Liverpool all seemed to urge Christians to vote for the Labour Party.

"They are wondering whether to issue a collective statement about the political responsibilities of Christians," a source close to the meeting said.

The agenda of the bishops' meeting is kept a tight secret. Much of this week's discussions will be taken up with internal issues. But it is known that several senior bishops would like the church to play an active role in illuminating the issues of the general election campaign.

Others, however, chief among them the Archbishop of York, Dr David Hope, are very worried that any such intervention would be seen as a boost to the Labour Party. Dr Hope last week gave a newspaper interview in which he stressed the prosperity and success of much of Britain; most of his colleagues prefer to stress the miseries of the deprived parts of the nation.

The official position of the Church of England is that it welcomes the Catholic bishops' document "The Common Good," which was widely seen as urging Catholics to vote Labour when it appeared last autumn.

Several Bishops have privately remarked that they wished the Church of England could have produced as impressive an analysis on its own account. But the Catholic document led to renewed strains within the Catholic Church. Anti-abortion activists denounced it as insufficiently focused on their favourite issue, while Conservatives denounced its general approach.

The next difficulty faced by the Church of England is the appearance of an ecumenical report on unemployment, which a senior adviser to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr George Carey, tried rather clumsily to squash when it appeared that it would draw the church into political controversy. A compromise has now been reached, whereby the report will be published on 7 April. It is expected to stress the primacy of jobs over profit.

Few observers believe the bishops will be able to unite around an unambiguous political statement, partly because they are themselves politically divided. But what they are trying to do, said one source close to the meeting, is to ensure that the political agenda is seen in a theological light: Christianity teaches that human beings have certain fundamental needs and rights implanted by God, and these are what political programmes should try to satisfy.

The trouble for the church is that the causes where Christian leaders believe the teachings of the Bible are clearest are those which are least popular. The treatment of the powerless, whether they are beggars, asylum seekers or refugees, is high on the Christian agenda but low on that of any politician who wants to get elected. Several bishops, such as Rt Rev Mark Santer, the Bishop of Birmingham, have attacked New Labour from the left, in political terms.

The final dilemma the bishops meeting in Liverpool must confront is that although they want the deliberations of politicians to be judged by their theological content, they find themselves in a world where the deliberations of bishops are judged for their political content.