State Church Backs Occupy Protesters

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State Church Backs Occupy Protesters
Opposes People’s Rights, Defends Privileges

The Church of England has told a parliamentary committee that draft legislation to reform the House of Lords by allowing the people to elect most if not all of the legislators in that chamber is “highly questionable”.

The state church says that to allow the people to choose their legislators would deprive the legislature of expertise and be too expensive. Its submission to the committee argues that the earlier reform that reduced the number of hereditary legislators and replaced them with legislators appointed by the state “has largely addressed the issue” of democratic legitimacy.

Depending on how the second chamber is reformed,  the feudal Church would lose the right to appoint some or all of the 26 clerical legislators it now places in the legislature. The key to its statement may be found in its warnings against “far-reaching changes which sweep away all the familiar landmarks”, and against following an “abstract theory of supposed universal norms” about democracy. One of the UK’s  “familiar landmarks” is a Church that has minority support from the people but receives extraordinary privileges from the state.

Rowan Williams, who heads the Church, has recently expressed support for the “Occupy London” protesters who are currently camped outside his St. Paul’s Cathedral.  In its submission to the committee the Church referred to the present as “a time of considerable public concern over our national political life”. The protesters may may wonder why his Church has not recognised its own anti-democratic privileges as contributing to that “public concern”.

 


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