Last week I wrote Towards a Christian view on the Alternative Vote not least because I had not seen any other argument on this matter from a Christian perspective. But perhaps that is because I hadn’t been looking far enough. I have now discovered that the Christian think-tank Ekklesia is committed to the cause of electoral reform, to the extent that their co-director Jonathan Bartley has been seconded to be one of the main leaders of the Yes! To Fairer Votes campaign.

Bartley’s co-director Simon Barrow has outlined Ekklesia’s position, and Bartley’s role, in an article Supporting the case for Fairer Votes. This article goes into theological issues only where it quotes a more detailed paper by Barrow from 2009, The state of independents: alternative politics. Most of this paper is not directly relevant to the Alternative Vote referendum this May. But it does offer some significant insights, such as:

Ekklesia is a Christian-based think-tank and believes strongly that the challenge for Christians is to find a new way of engaging with people and with power which will change the rules of the game – from self-interest to concern for our neighbours; from organised hatred to enemy-loving; from punitive to restorative action; from trying to ‘be in control’ of others to seeking the invitation of persuasive example, and so on. …A healthy democratic system – one that is open to change, criticism, renewal and a wide base of participation and decision-making – is positive for all of us. Of course, it will not resolve our differences nor will it alone produce the change of hearts, minds and lives which Christians (and others) argue is what real transformation in the public and inter-personal realm requires. Something more is needed for that. But it does give us a framework in which to ‘do business’.

Christian hope and commitment points towards the creation of public places where political competition is displaced by neighbourly affection, based on the voluntary but deeply-rooted commitments of ‘communities of principle’ (ekklesia).

The paper is not specifically referring to the Alternative Vote, but it could have been, when it concludes:

Here is a chance to do things differently, to challenge what St Paul once condemned as ‘party spirit’ and listed as a destructive impulse alongside ‘selfish ambition’. He was thinking of factionalism within the church. But this is a shared human failing. What we need instead is a shared human opportunity to take our politics, our participation and ourselves in a fresh direction.

Indeed! This material from Ekklesia is still not really a theological defence of the Yes! to Fairer Votes campaign. But it does provide a strong basis on which such a defence could be based.

I would expect to find more relevant material in Jonathan Bartley’s books The Subversive Manifesto: Lifting the Lid on God’s Political Agenda (2003) and Faith and Politics After Christendom: The Church as a Movement for Anarchy (2006). But I have not read these books. (At the Ekklesia site the link to the former is uninformative and the link to the latter gives a message “You are not authorized to access this page”, so I have linked instead to their pages at amazon.co.uk.) Sadly Jonathan seems to have been too busy with the Yes! campaign to write anything more recent from an explicitly Christian perspective. But his role within the campaign should ensure that this Christian viewpoint is not ignored or lost.

UPDATE less than an hour after posting: Jonathan Bartley replied quickly to my e-mail linking to this post. He included a reminder that ten Church of England bishops have come out in support of the Alternative Vote, as reported by The Guardian. Among the bishops quoted is the blogger Alan Wilson. While Bartley is quoted as saying that the bishops were backing change on moral and ethical grounds, sadly there is nothing more in the article that goes beyond the standard politicians’ arguments. The next day Bishop Alan blogged on Are voting systems moral?, which he concluded with:

So by all means let’s have a discussion about voting systems. I wonder what general moral principles we will be using as we take our positions. The answer “None, because this is about politics” strikes me as distinctly weedy, nasty people would suggest “sub-Christian.”

Indeed. But it would have been nice to see Bishop Alan starting that discussion by properly explaining his own position.

More than three years ago I expressed some concern here that a US arms manufacturer was about to be selected to run the 2011 UK census. Despite the campaign I reported on, Lockheed Martin was indeed selected for the contract.

I should clarify that the Lockheed Martin contract was never for the whole census, but only for data processing and storage. Assurances have been given that this foreign company will not have access to personal data. The British company Capita has been contracted to recruit and train the 35,000 staff who are collecting the data.

Census day is now nearly upon us (Sunday 27th March, in case anyone has forgotten), and the census forms have been distributed – and there is a convenient option to fill in the census forms online. And I had almost forgotten this controversy until I saw a report at the BBC website that a Coventry “peace worker” has burnt her census form

in protest at a weapons firm helping to run the Office for National Statistics’s (ONS) census. … She faces a fine for failing to return her census form and said she was prepared to go to prison for the sake of her conscience.

So how widespread is this boycott campaign? Wikipedia reports that the Christian thinktank Ekklesia has called for a boycott, but there is nothing at their website to suggest this – only an article reporting that the Green Party has decided against a boycott. Wikipedia also names Stop the War Coalition as calling for a boycott, but the article on their website this month, while urging rather too late that Lockheed Martin’s contract be cancelled, falls short of a call for a boycott. Time to edit the Wikipedia article, I think.

So it seems that there are no organised groups calling for a boycott of the census. It rather looks as if Ms Walker of Coventry will be one of a small band of individuals who refuse to fill in their forms because of the Lockheed Martin connection – probably far fewer than refuse simply to be difficult.

And that is for the best. Although I do not support Lockheed Martin’s arms trade activities, I agree with the Green Party’s position as quoted by Ekklesia, that “the census is extremely important and needs to be accurate”. So, whatever our reservations, let’s all do our duty to our country by filling in our forms, accurately and on time.