http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9099511/Abortion-investigation-doctors-filmed-agreeing-illegal-abortions-no-questions-asked.html

Gender-based abortion claims probed by Department of Health
Health officials have been asked to carry out an investigation “as a matter of urgency”
Continue reading the main story
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The Department of Health has launched an inquiry into claims that doctors agreed to carry out abortions on the grounds of the sex of unborn babies.
The Daily Telegraph said it had secretly filmed doctors at a number of British abortion clinics.
The doctors are said to have agreed to terminate foetuses when women did not want their baby because of its gender.
Health Secretary Andrew Lansley said sex selection was “illegal and morally wrong” and he had ordered an inquiry.
“I’m extremely concerned to hear about these allegations. I’ve asked my officials to investigate this as a matter of urgency,” he said.
The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (Spuc) said sex-selective abortion was an “inevitable consequence” of easy access to abortion.
In its report, the Telegraph said doctors had admitted they were prepared to falsify paperwork so the illegal procedures could go ahead.
‘Too inconvenient’
The newspaper said undercover reporters had accompanied pregnant women to nine clinics in different parts of the country.
In three cases, the Telegraph reported, doctors were recorded offering to arrange terminations after being told the women did not want to continue with the pregnancy because of the gender of the unborn child.
Spuc’s communications manager Anthony Ozimic said: “This investigation confirms the reality of eugenics in modern British medicine, in which some innocent human beings are deemed too inconvenient to be allowed to live.
“Sex-selective abortion is an inevitable consequence of easy access to abortion, a situation to which the pro-abortion lobby has no convincing answer.
“The government needs to cut its ties to private abortion providers and to abortion rights organisations, as they are complicit in sex-selective abortion domestically and internationally.”
In England, Wales and Scotland abortions are allowed on certain grounds before 24 weeks of pregnancy including that:
• Continuing with the pregnancy would be a greater risk to the woman’s life, physical or mental health than ending the pregnancy
• Continuing would be more of a risk to the physical or mental health of any of the woman’s existing children
• There is a real risk the unborn child would have a serious physical or mental disability
Two doctors have to agree to the abortion, or one, in the case of an emergency.
Conditions are stricter for abortions carried out after 24 weeks. In Northern Ireland abortions are illegal usually, unless the mother’s life is at risk.
The Conservative MP Nadine Dorries has campaigned for the government to provide independent abortion counsellors for women considering terminations.
She said clinics needed to be regulated more effectively: “What we also need is the CQC — the Care Quality Commission — who are supposed to ensure that abortion clinics operate according to the law…what they need to do is get on top of this situation as soon as possible.”

————————————————————————————-
Abortion investigation: doctors filmed agreeing illegal abortions ‘no questions asked’ – Telegraph
Doctors at British clinics have been secretly filmed agreeing to terminate foetuses purely because they are either male or female. Clinicians admitted they were prepared to falsify paperwork to arrange the abortions even though it is illegal to conduct such “sex-selection” procedures.
Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, said: “I’m extremely concerned to hear about these allegations. Sex selection is illegal and is morally wrong. I’ve asked my officials to investigate this as a matter of urgency.”
The disclosures will add to growing concerns about the regulation of abortion clinics and the apparent ability of women to secure terminations “on demand”.
The Daily Telegraph carried out an investigation into sex-selection abortions after concerns were raised that the procedures were becoming increasingly common for cultural and social reasons.
Acting on specific information, undercover reporters accompanied pregnant women to nine clinics in different parts of the country. In three instances doctors were recorded offering to arrange terminations after being told the mother-to-be did not want to go ahead with the pregnancy because of the sex of the unborn child.
One consultant, Prabha Sivaraman, who works for both private clinics and NHS hospitals in Manchester, was filmed telling a pregnant woman who said she wanted to abort a female foetus: “I don’t ask questions. If you want a termination, you want a termination”.
She later telephoned a colleague to book the procedure, explaining that it was for “social reasons” and the woman “doesn’t want questions asked”.
She said to her colleague: “This [the termination] will be under private, she doesn’t want to go through NHS. OK, so — that’s right, because you’re part of our team and she doesn’t want questions asked”.
Miss Sivaraman, who works for Pall Mall Medical in Manchester and is an obstetrician and gynaecologist at North Manchester General Hospital, said the cost of the termination would be £200 or £300, on top of the £500 already paid to the clinic for the consultation.
After taking the woman’s contact details, Miss Sivaraman asked her if she had considered her options.
“Oh, absolutely … I can’t have it, this baby, because of the gender, so that’s just how it is …” replied the woman.
The doctor booked the pregnant woman in for a termination the following week despite the reason for the abortion being clearly explained.
Another consultant, Claudine Domoney, who works with 132 Healthwise clinic in Harley Street, central London, agreed to arrange for a woman to abort a boy after being told that she and her husband already had a son from his first marriage. The practice is known as “family balancing”.
In a consultation room in the Chelsea and Westminster hospital, the woman, who was about 18 weeks pregnant, explained her reasons for the termination “It’s a boy, and that’s the reason, we don’t want to have a second boy.”
“It’s obviously taken a little bit of time to decide this?” asked Miss Domoney, in reference to the fact that the woman was 18 weeks pregnant.
The consultant was still happy to proceed but explained that as she was going away she would be unable to perform the procedure, so she telephoned a colleague to see if he could fit the pregnant woman in for the following week. “He is OK for Tuesday”, said Miss Domoney when she returned.

“So the two of us are very experienced in this area. He [the other doctor] will organise for you to have a room on the private ward he’s OK to do it on Tuesday.”
Miss Domoney said she was “uncomfortable” with the situation, so decided to refer the case to a colleague.
Stephanie Byrom, the chief executive of Pall Mall Medical, denied that the clinic offered terminations on the grounds of gender determination and said that if one of its consultants had breached its rules it would take “immediate action”.
At both clinics offering the sex-selection abortions, the pregnant women were not offered in-depth counselling on their decision to request a termination — despite the questionable grounds.
The Daily Telegraph intends to publish more disclosures from the investigation tomorrow, in particular a recording of a doctor offering to falsify paperwork.
MPs have raised concerns over the growing commercialisation of abortion clinics and David Cameron and Mr Lansley are under pressure to accept proposals that women should receive independent counselling before a procedure takes place.
Last year, the Council of Europe recommended that member states, including Britain, stop telling parents the gender of their baby because of concerns that this was encouraging sex-selection abortions. Many hospitals have stopped giving parents this information.
However, blood tests that disclose the sex of a foetus are widely available on the internet or abroad. An undercover reporter telephoning an abortion advice line was also told private clinics would be able to offer a scan — for a fee.
Abortions for non-medical reasons are legal until 24 weeks, but terminations on grounds of sex of the foetus are illegal under the 1967 Abortion Act.
Doctors must agree that there is a compelling case for termination, but it is claimed that many abortions are agreed “on demand” and that the official paperwork does not fully reflect the discussions that have taken place.
In 2010 there were 189,574 terminations in England and Wales, an eight per cent increase in the past decade. There is some evidence that more female than male foetuses are aborted.
The women accompanying Telegraph reporters to consultations were from a variety of ethnic backgrounds.
At each appointment, the pregnant woman explained that she had taken a blood test abroad or had a scan to determine the sex of the foetus and wanted a termination because of the gender. Staff at several clinics agreed to arrange abortions for women who said they did not want to continue with their pregnancies because of the sex of their babies.
However, at other clinics, doctors made it clear that terminations because of gender were not legal and said they were unable to help. The disclosures will increase pressure on the Care Quality Commission, the NHS watchdog, which is already facing criticism over its failure to regulate care homes properly.

David Alton

On March 2^nd, 2011, aged 42, Clement Shahbaz Bhatti, Pakistan’s Federal Minister for Minorities, was brutally murdered. His assassination not only robbed Pakistan’s National Assembly of a dedicated, honest, and able politician but his death also threw into sharp relief the plight of Pakistan’s minorities, whose fearless champion he had become.  

Shahbaz Bhatti - Pakistan's outstanding Minister for Minorities murdered one year ago.Mohammed Ali Jinnah - Pakistan's enlightened founding father who insisted that minorities should be given respect and protection in the new country.

On this, the first anniversary of his killing – and after the detention, this week, in Dubai of a possible suspect involved in the murder – it is worth reflecting on the life of this singularly virtuous man while considering the continuing suffering of the people on whose behalf he sacrificed his life.  

One of five children, Bhatti was born in 1968 in Lahore to Catholic parents. They originated from a village near Faisalabad. His father, Jacob, after army service, became a teacher and then chairman of the board of the churches in Khushpur. The family were observant Catholics whose faith was central to their identity and lives.   

Unsurprisingly, as he was growing up, Bhatti   became acutely aware of what it was like to stand out as different.

In a population of over 172 million people, only about 1.5% (3 million) is Christians (half Catholic, half Protestant).

In part, the Catholic Church has its roots in the Irish presence within the British Army during colonial rule and the significant Goan community which the British established in Karachi.

There are other minorities: in 2011 the Pakistan Hindu Council put the number of Hindus at some 7 million people. Pakistan’s cruelly treated Ahmadiyya community is 4 million strong. There are also small numbers of Sikhs, Buddhists, Bahais and Zoroastrians – all of whom have faced relentless violence and profound discrimination.  Along with those Muslims caught up in the sectarian violence between Sunni and Shi’a, the minorities have suffered grievously Terrorism and instability have led to over 35,000 deaths since 2003 and 2,522 fatalities in one recent six month period alone.

In 1947, at the time of partition, Muhammad Ali Jinnah gave a speech to the New Delhi Press Club, setting out the basis on which the new State of Pakistan was to be founded. In it, he forcefully defended the right of minorities to be protected and to have their beliefs respected:

“Minorities, to whichever community they may belong, will be safeguarded. Their religion, faith or belief will be secure. There will be no interference of any kind with their freedom of worship. They will have their protection with regard to their religion, faith, their life and their culture. They will be, in all respects, the citizens of Pakistan without any distinction of caste and creed.”

These words became a forgotten aspiration when, in 1956, Pakistan became an Islamic Republic – although, even then, the Constitution guaranteed equal citizenship to all its citizens and guaranteed freedom of religion. Notable Christians, such as Mr. Justice A.R.Cornelius became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and others became celebrated members of the Pakistan Air Force and the professions.

But, as Bhatti was growing up a campaign of discrimination, intimidation and violence against the country’s Christian minorities had begun to disfigure the ideals of Muhammad Ali Jinnah and by the 1990s attacks had become routine. The world slowly began to wake up to the enormity of the suffering when, in 1998, Bishop John Joseph, the Catholic bishop of Faisalabad, shockingly, as a protest against the cruelty perpetrated against his flock, took his own life. 

Following Bishop Joseph’s suicide, Shahbaz Bhatti founded the All Pakistan Minorities Alliance and in 2002 was unanimously elected as APMA’s chairman. In the same year he became a member of Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party. Although the authorities placed him on their Exit Control List his name was removed and, in 2008, he was both made a Minister and, remarkably, given Cabinet rank – the only Christian in Pakistan’s Cabinet.

At the time of his appointment, Bhatti singled out the country’s Blasphemy Law as the principal instrument which had been used to vexatiously prosecute and harass minorities. He said it should be amended and he proposed a law to ban hate speech, changes to the school curriculum, representation for minorities in government and parliament, and eight months before his death, a National Interfaith Consultation out of which the country’s religious leaders issued a declaration against terrorism.

 In doing all this, he knew that his outspokenness and singularity would make him a primary target for Pakistan’s radical Islamists and sensed the almost inevitable consequence of his courageous words and actions.  However, he said that his stand would “send a message of hope to the people living a life of disappointment, disillusionment and despair” adding that his life was dedicated to “the oppressed, the down-trodden and the marginalised” and to “the struggle for human equality, social justice, religious freedom and the empowerment of religious minorities’ communities.”

 Perhaps the greatest tragedy of Bhatti’s murder is that his countrymen overwhelmingly share his ideals.

In a survey of Pakistan opinion, 90% cited religious extremism as the greatest threat to their country. Presumably the overwhelming majority of the UK’s 1.2 million British citizens of Pakistani descent must also contrast the tolerance of their adopted home, and the protection which minorities receive, with the truly shocking intolerance of their homeland.

That Bhatti’s life would be in danger became very clear in January 2011 when the Governor of the Punjab, Salman Taseer, was murdered for seeking clemency for a Christian woman sentenced to death under the Blasphemy Laws. One year later, in Pakistan’s climate of impunity, demonstrators gathered to shower rose petals on his assassin.

Two months after Taseer’s death Shahbaz Bhatti would follow him to the grave.

On leaving his Islamabad home he was gunned down by self described Taliban assassins.  He had accurately predicted his own death – knowing that the cause he had embraced – Jinnah’s cause – would ultimately cost him his life. His murderers scattered pamphlets describing him as a “Christian infidel”. The leaflets were signed “Taliban al-Qaida Punjab.”

The Prime Minister, David Cameron, called the murder “absolutely brutal and unacceptable” but Cardinal Keith O’Brien sharply contrasted the rhetoric with the reality: “To increase aid to the Pakistan government when religious freedom is not upheld and those who speak up for religious freedom are gunned down is tantamount to an anti-Christian foreign policy.“

At the beginning of this year, Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, Chairman of the Conservative Party, visited Pakistan and in the Lords told me that “ the assassinations of Salman Taseer and Shahbaz Bhatti were tragic for both Pakistan and the rest of the world. They were a personal tragedy for me because of my personal relationship with Shahbaz Bhatti.” She made a point of visiting the Catholic Archbishop of Karachi and said that the local Christian community “is doing well, despite its challenges”. She defended British aid to Pakistan – which can end up in the hands of radicals and rarely reaches the minorities.

Christians who are not “doing well” continue to face prosecution, discrimination, forced conversions to Islam, rape, and forced marriage. This denial of civil rights and the failure to protect minorities are all directly attributable to the rise of the Taliban and the failure of the civil and security forces.

Shahbaz Bhatti was a brave advocate of reform of the country’s Blasphemy Law. But he was more than this.

His was a sacrificial and exemplary life and his life was given for the common good.

 By definition, a martyr is a witness and an example to the Christian community of how to behave – and Bhatti was certainly a witness for truth and for justice. He stands in a long tradition – from Beckett to More, Kolbe to Romero – of men willing to sacrifice their lives as the price for upholding their beliefs.

After his death, in Bhatti’s diocese of Faisalabad, local Catholics fasted, prayed and processed, venerating his legacy. His bishop, Archbishop Saldanha of Lahore subsequently announced that the Pakistan Bishops Conference have written to Pope Benedict asking that Bhatti’s name be recognised as a name to be listed among the martyrs of the faith.

On the anniversary of Bhatti’s death recall the words of Pope Benedict last year: “I ask the Lord Jesus that the moving sacrifice of the life of the Pakistani minister Shahbaz Bhatti may arouse in people’s consciences the courage and commitment to defend the religious freedom of all men and, in this way, to promote their equal dignity.” 

Who better, then, to now raise to the altars and, in these disturbed and dangerous times, to entrust with the cause of religious freedom – for which there is no patron saint – than Shahbaz Bhatti? 

This article appeared in The Catholic Herald, February 24th 2012.

http://davidalton.net/2012/01/27/the-real-test-for-the-arab-spring-how-minorities-are-treated/

Mahatma Gandhi - be the change you wish to see

Liverpool Hope University Bringing About Political Change 4 – Powerpoint Presentation

Hope University: Tuesday February 21^st 2012.

“Bringing about Political Change”

Arun Gandhi attributed the following remark to his grandfather, Mahatma: “You must be the change you want to see in the world” (quoted by Michael Potts in India-West (San Leandro, California) Vol. XXVII, No. 13 (1 February 2002) p. A34;

What Gandhi was signifying was the centrality of personal transformation.

Without such change, political life can be a game of charades where its participants are seduced by the allure of power; where they trade the principles which they once espoused, and the ideals which they once embraced, in a Faustian Pact of self advancement.   

The sophistry is offered that, if only they can climb a little higher up what Disraeli described as “the greasy pole” of politics (“I have climbed to the top of the greasy pole”), then they will change things.   But, usually, the only thing which has changed is they themselves, and not in the manner which Ghandi had in mind.    

Enoch Powell, with whom I served in the House of Commons, and who died in 1998, remarked in his biography of  Joseph Chamberlain (Thames and Hudson, 1977, p. 151) that

“All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.” 

I have a more optimistic view of politics and of human nature than Enoch Powell.  There are many who have entered political life, performed great service, or advanced some great cause, or put right some injustice, and who left the field believing that they had done some good on the way.

In 350 BC the father of modern democracy, Aristotle, in his great work “Politics” saw our participation in “the polis” for the high calling which it is. He said that “we are not solitary pieces in a game of chequers” but all players in a common life. He went further, admonishing those who are contemptuous of the political life of the community and warning that “aidos” – shame – would attach to the person who refuses to play their part. But to be true participants in the common life we need to remember our roots and enter into the world in which the people whom politicians are meant to serve actually live.

 It’s been said that “To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves” (Gandhi). It’s certainly true that when politicians forget to walk the streets, to knock on people’s doors, to be available and to live in the communities and regions they represent it compounds alienation and the dislocation of politics and people.     

I was brought up by parents who believed in the importance of both community and duty. My mother was an immigrant whose first language was Irish and who, following the early death of her parents, leaving eight children behind them, came from the grinding poverty of a gaeltacht area of Mayo.  In the East End of London she met my father, a Desert Rat who had just been demobbed.  From the smog of the East End we were rehoused to a Council flat which gave us a bathroom for the first time. My father worked for the Ford motor company all of his life.

A beneficiary of the 1944 education Act – which is why I so strongly oppose and voted against the increase in tuition fees – believing that education is the single most important instrument for bringing transformational change in our world – I became the first from either side of my family to enter higher education.

 I wanted to teach, came here, and studied history and theology (in the aftermath of the publication of Fr.Alexander Jones’ brilliant translation of the Jerusalem Bible) – getting student experience, teaching in Toxteth and, for two summers, working as a volunteer, teaching immigrant children English.

The crucial importance of education in personal and collective development – was brought home to me again last year when I travelled to Turkana and Southern Ethiopia with my second son, Philip. At Omorate I talked to 13-year-old Joseph Amukoo who was shot with an AK47 – Africa’s weapons of mass destruction – while asleep. He was left for dead.

A friend of mine, an African priest, Fr. Stephen Ochieng, saved the boy’s life, ferrying him to a hospital. With the wisdom of a child Joseph told me that the raiders “needed education” if ever they were going to learn to live differently. Joseph’s story also recalls the truth of the rabbi’s observation – important for politicians who too often measure their success in too grand a way – that “the man who saves a single life saves the world.”

During my Sixth Form, at my grammar school, founded by Jesuits, I came to the early realisation that small individual actions matter and that politics shapes priorities – spending on education being one of them. I joined the National League of Young Liberals and would later become its national President.

I joined, not because I wanted a career in politics but because of what was happening in the world around me – in Czechoslovakia, in Vietnam, in Northern Ireland, in South Africa, in Biafra and in the USA – where Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King had both been assassinated. And, here at home, I began to follow what I believed to be unjust legislation, ranging from a Bill rushed through all its Parliamentary stages by the Labour Government to take away citizenship from Kenyan Asians, to the 1967 Abortion Act – which would lead to seven million abortions in the UK.

From the beginning I have believed that no life is so futile or worthless that it does not command the right to be defended with determination and vigour.  Regardless of gestational age or political status, colour or creed, orientation or gender, class or origin, all men and women at every stage of their lives deserve the protection of those who hold political office, make laws, and determine events.

As a teenager I felt especially challenged by the killing at Memphis on April 4^th 1968 of Dr. Martin Luther King, then aged 39, who five years earlier had given his landmark speech – “I Have a Dream” – in which he described the American Constitution and Declaration of Independence as a promissory note:

“A promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the “inalienable Rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of colour are concerned.”

Fundamental change in the USA, Europe, and in South Africa’s apartheid regime – how we view colour and race – was ushered in by King’s sacrificial entry into political life. But he understood the price that would be paid to bring change:

“Change,” he said, “does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can’t ride you unless your back is bent.”

Those who believe that politics is about grandstanding, sound-bites, personal aggrandisement, the pursuit of power, or a charmed life will rarely develop King’s bent back but nor will they have the satisfaction of bringing an idea or a great cause to birth.

Two months after Dr.King’s assassination Robert Kennedy also paid the ultimate price in championing civil rights and opposing racial segregation. Kennedy’s Catholic faith led him to a profound belief in the importance of individual actions, that each of us is made in God’s image (Imago Dei), is, therefore, of inestimable worth, and that we should neither be discouraged by seemingly impossible odds or by the intractable nature of the challenges we face:       

“Let no one be discouraged by the belief there is nothing one person can do against the enormous array of the world’s ills, misery, ignorance, and violence. Few will have the greatness to bend history, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. And in the total of all those acts will be written the history of a generation.” (Robert Kennedy).

Looking at the world today – 800 million people wracked by starvation or despair, living below any definition of human decency; at egregious violations of human rights,  from Iran to North Korea – where I have travelled several times with your Chancellor, Baroness (Caroline) Cox; famine in Somalia and the Sahel; unspeakable violence in Syria and Nigeria, Congo and the Sudan; and at the domestic challenges at home, which I recently outlined in a lecture entitled “The Condition of England Question”, and which have left 1 million young people not in education, employment , or training,  and over 2.6 million without work – a 17 year high in a flat-lining economy;  or the 3.9 million children living in poverty in the UK or the 4,000 who call Childline each day; or the 1 million elderly living in toxic loneliness who don’t see a friend or a neighbour during the course of a typical week;  or the devil take the hindmost policies in an increasingly sharp-elbowed Britain and which threaten some of our most vulnerable people – families with disabled children reliant on benefits, others dependent on the National Health Service,  or access to justice through legal aid – we can very easily overawed – like the boy in Louis Stephenson’s rhyme who is dejected by the one-damn-thing-after-anotherness of life and despairs that “the world is so big and I am so small I do not like it at all at all”.   

 It would be easy to echo his desperation and ask the question can I really do anything about it?  Will anything I do make a difference? 

And, when you look at the parlous state of our institutions – from Parliament, to the police, to the media – you either say, change is an impossibility, or you commit yourself to change. It’s as simple as that.  If you don’t like something turn your hand to the wheel and try and change it.

In deciding to get involved in politics it’s as well to recognise your own limitations but not to be incapacitated by them. While I was a student here for two years I lived in Newman Hall – named for Cardinal John Henry Newman – who is now Blessed but whose hall is now demolished.

Encouragingly he reminds us that “A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault” and that “We are not born for ourselves, but for our kind, for our neighbours, for our country: it is but selfishness, indolence, a perverse fastidiousness, an unmanliness, and no virtue or praise, to bury our talent in a napkin”

I often remark that we are not great boulders but small stones – and that it is small stones that must first move for a landslide to happen.  To take up this challenge, as Ghandi had it,  we must become the change that we desire to see; and be encouraged by Winston Churchill’s observation that  “to improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.”

As we approach what the Italians call the “tempi forti”, Lent, one of the “strong seasons” it’s the time when we should go to war with ourselves and to seek to change ourselves. The Leonine Sacramentary, from the seventh century, contains the Ash Wednesday Collect which says “Grant O Lord, that we may begin with holy fasting, this campaign of Christian service.”

For Christians – and I would suggest others of different ort no belief – politics should be a campaign of service. Politics should always be about service not self-seeking; virtue not vanity; speaking up for the powerless, not narrow partisanship; respectful of opponents, not the silencing of dissent; tolerant of difference, not the crushing conscience. Politicians should consider the merits of arguments and not blindly accept the dog whistle of party whips – and I say that as a former Chief Whip.

An elected representative is not a swingometer, simply reading the runes of popularity ratings before daring to speak,  feverishly putting his finger into the wind to find which way it is blowing before he dares open his mouth.  A Member of Parliament should put their conscience, their constituents, their country and their principles before party or popularity.    

I have held these views since I left Christ College forty years ago to take up my first teaching post in Kirkby but also having been elected, as a student, to Liverpool City Council.  

My first significant speech was made here to the Student Union, which adopted my Motion opposing apartheid and committing the Union to demonstrate against the 1970 South African rugby tour with its racially selected team.

But it was community politics – and getting close to disadvantaged communities – which was increasingly preoccupying me. What I experienced was challenging and changing me.

I had chosen to stand in the Low Hill Ward of the city – part of the old Exchange Division of Liverpool, once represented by Bessie Braddock MP. Much of Low Hill had been designated a slum clearance area; half the houses had no inside sanitation or running hot water or bathrooms, and there were still streets lit by gas.   

It was a seat which I had been assured that I had no chance of winning – it hadn’t even been contested by a Liberal for 50 years – and remember, I had joined a party of just 12 MPs and 8% of the vote, led by Jo Grimond, – hardly a good move if my aim was a political career.  But I was brought up on the straightforward maxim that “there is no such word as can’t.” I was well aware, however, that the odds were stacked against me.

In Liverpool there had been no Liberal Member of Parliament since 1924 when Hugh Rathbone had represented Wavertree for a year and in the Edge Hill Constituency, in which the Low Hill Ward was incorporated in 1973, there had been never been a Liberal member of Parliament since its creation during the First World War, in 1918; and its sitting Labour MP, Sir Arthur Irvine QC, had held the seat since a by-election in 1947.  

Edge Hill had four Wards and 12 councillors, no Liberal Association and no party members. Within a year of my election as a City Councillor in 1972 we had captured every council seat and took control of the City Council. As the Council’s Housing Chairman and Deputy Leader I was subsequently able to see through the biggest housing renewal programme in the country and end the policy of ripping the heart out of the city.

In 1979, with the party at 7% in the polls, and its former leader, Jeremy Thorpe, on conspiracy to murder charges, a by-election occurred in Edge Hill. I secured a 36% swing and 64% of the vote, becoming the youngest member of the Commons and also its shortest lived. The night before my election the Callaghan Government lost a vote of no confidence and a General Election was called, leading to Margaret Thatcher’s first administration. Happily I was returned at the General Election and subsequently in the new constituency of Mossley Hill for 18 years until I stood down, leaving my party on a matter of conscience.  

Then, like a prisoner caught escaping the penitentiary, I was given a life sentence for bad behaviour and, since 1997, have sat as an independent Crossbench Peer.

Have a care, then, if you are among those who delight in deriding Parliament and parliamentarians, pronouncing that they are “all as bad as one another.” Politics remains a high calling even if some of its players have dragged it down.

Stand for a moment in Westminster Hall where, in 1265, the first meeting of Parliament took place and remember that, four hundred years later, here, too, a king of England was sentenced to death precipitating an eight year bloody civil war.  Before you write off the privilege of living in a free, democratic country recall the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Chartists, the Abolitionists, the Suffragettes, and the brave men and women who died fighting Nazism to preserve our hard won freedoms and cherished liberties.

 Invoke here, too, St.Thomas More – Lord Chancellor of England and Speaker of the House of Commons – sentenced to death in these same precincts for refusing to break the unity of religious life or to compromise his conscience. And wonder aloud whether religious freedom and the gains made, in 1829 with the emancipation of Catholics and Jews, remain safe in a country whose courts say that a 400 year-old tradition of saying prayers before a council meeting in the Devon town of Bideford is no longer legal and that a young woman working for British Airways may no longer wear a small cross around her neck lest it causes offence. How right is Shami Chakrabati, Director of Liberty, who says of Britain: “Here the struggle for religious freedom has been strongly connected with the struggle for democracy itself”(The Times, January 19, 2010).

It would be a great loss to this nation if the foolish notion gained a foothold that faith has no place in the public square. This city made its wealth from the slave trade. According to Ramsay Muir, in his wonderful “History of Liverpool” (1907) in 1807 alone Liverpool’s men of commerce generated more than £17 million from the trade in African men and women.  Those who led the campaign for abolition of the trade were men and women of deep religious conviction, notably the Quakers, William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, Granville Sharpe, Olaudah Equiano, Josiah Wedgewood – who created the medallion “Am I Not a Man and Brother”, John Newton, the Liverpool ship’s captain and slave trader who changed his mind and last composed “Amazing Grace” – and the Liverpool MP William Roscoe.

Estimates of the numbers of Africans sold into slavery vary but over nearly four centuries about 12 million people were forcibly transported into bondage.

Between 1701 and 1810 around 5.7 million people were taken into slavery, 2 million coming from the Slave Coast, where Benin is situated.  Around 39% went to the Caribbean, 38% to Brazil, 17% to South America and 6% to North America.

Many of the slaves shipped out of Africa from the Bight of Benin were taken to the port of Ouidah, which is situated near Cotonou, the present capital and which I visited .Not since I visited the holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem in Israel had I experienced such harrowing emotions.

In the total Atlantic trade, British ships are estimated to have made 12,000 voyages and to have carried 2.6 million slaves. The trade before 1730 was dominated by London but was overtaken by Bristol in the 1730s, only to be eclipsed by Liverpool in the 1750s. In 1797, 1 in 4 ships leaving Liverpool was a slaver. Liverpool merchants handled five eighths of the English slave trade and three sevenths of the slave trade in Europe.

In his Journal of a Slave-trader, John Newton wrote:  “I have no sufficient data to warrant calculation but I suppose not less than one hundred thousand slaves are exported annually from all parts of Africa, and that more than one half of these are exported in English ships.”

The last letter written by the great John Wesley – whose “heart was strangely warmed” on his conversion on May 24^th 1738 was to Wilberforce and asked “what villainy is this?” which allowed the enslavement of Africans. Wesley told Wilberforce to put his trust in God and to work for an end to such evil – “a scandal of England of religion and of human nature.” He told him to be a force for change and an “Athanasius contra mundum” – literally to be like the 4^th century Christian Bishop, Athanasius, “Athanasius against the world.”

Two hundred years after Wesley, John Paul II put it differently urging young people to become involved in political life, challenging injustice, and to be “signs of contradiction.”   

Among those who have stood against the world, and have been signs of contradiction, are Wilberforce, Shaftesbury, Gladstone, Kier Hardy and many other notable figures  -  challenged and changed by their faith. In turn, they have channelled their belief in the sanctity of human life, human dignity, the upholding of the common good and their belief in mercy, justice, love, and compassion into their political lives.

In 1876 Gladstone recalled the proverb “Vox populi, vox Dei” –“The people’s voice, God’s voice”. Religion, for Gladstone, was central to his personal life and to that of the nation: “As to its politics, this country has much less, I think, to fear than to hope; unless through a corruption of its religion – against which, as Conservative or Liberal, I can perhaps say I have striven all my life long.”

These views won him the respect and support of the pioneering Christian leaders of the Labour movement, Keir Hardie, Arthur Henderson and George Lansbury along with Nonconformists, High Anglicans, and Irish Catholics.

 Today, a bust of Mr.Gladstone dominates my study, along with something which he once said:  “We look forward to the time when the power of love will replace the love of power, and then will our world know the blessings of peace.” Good advice for today’s rising generation of politicians.

 Gadstone’s last great speech – defending the Armenians against the atrocities of the Ottoman Turks – was delivered in Liverpool, in 1896, to 7,000 people at Hengler’s Circus, Low Hill, where, as a student, I would one day become the local councillor and later an MP.

 During my own time in Parliament I have been fortunate to meet some extraordinary people and to see some extraordinary changes in the world.

As a young MP, in 1980 I first travelled to China. Today, I chair the All Party Parliamentary Committee on North Korea.

Forty years ago China was like North Korea – a country where 2 million died in the famine in the 1990s and where, according to the United Nations, 300,000 people are detained in prison camps because of political or religious dissent or social crimes. Next month, Shin Dong Hyok, who has given testimony before my committee was born in one of the camps, will publish his “Escape from Camp 14” (Penguin, 2012).  He and Barbara Demick, in her magnificent book “Nothing to Envy” (Granta Books, 2010); graphically capture the nature of this servile state.

And yet, as I detail on my web site (www.davidalton.net) , the actions of one extraordinary man, Dr. James Kim – who was imprisoned and sentenced to death by the regime – have led to the creation of a university in Pyongyang, of which I am a trustee: public-private and international in a country which hitherto has embraced neither of those things. Like China, North Korea is changing and that change cannot come fast enough for many of its beleaguered people.  

I first encountered totalitarian communism in the 1980s, when I helped Danny Smith establish the Jubilee Campaign, and championed the plight of Christian and Jewish dissidents in the former USSR and the Soviet bloc. In 1989 through the inspiration of John Paul II, the  heroism of Lech Walesa and Solidarity, Vaclav Havel and the Velvet Revolution, men like Ivan Hel in the Ukraine and Lazlo Tokes in Romania, and the movements for change which swept across eastern and central Europe, the  Berlin Wall finally came tumbling down. They each answered the question “if not me who?” and “if not now, when?” with their own courageous and definitive actions  – signs of contradiction, standing against the world.

And other walls have fallen.

In South Africa, Nelson Mandela, brought down the walls of apartheid, while the troubles in Northern Ireland, which led to 3,000 deaths – were replaced by the Good Friday Agreement, a peace process and political settlement.

 Who in their most wide eyed moment  - and certainly not I as a former Front Bench spokesman on Northern Ireland – would have anticipated what happened last month when the DUP First Minister and the Sinn Fein Deputy First Minister, Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness,  publically called for prayers for the ailing Unionist leader, the Reverend Ian Paisley.

Change has occurred, too, in Burma, where I have travelled illegally in the Karen State, to see first-hand and report on the atrocities committed by the Burmese military regime. The indomitable presence of the iconic Aung San Suu Kyi – through years of house arrest – has been the inspiration which kept hope alive and has inspired the changes now underway.

So don’t tell me that democratic political change cannot occur. But it usually starts with the transformation of hearts and minds, with men and women learning to be the change which they desire to see.

But let me end by reflecting that elsewhere, change is either far off, or deeply problematic.

Take the Arab Spring, for instance,    

One year after the Arab Spring many people are asking what difference the revolutions have made to the position of the region’s people.

The game of grandmother’s footsteps which has seen the toppling of dictators, and some tentative reform in countries like Morocco, is still being played out in Syria and Yemen and although it’s too soon to say how it will end, so far, the omens are not good.

Look at Egypt. I am President of the British Coptic Association.

One Coptic Orthodox bishop says that although 10-15% of Egyptians are Copts, because of the first past the post system of elections, none were elected to the lower chamber of Parliament

To provide a fig leaf, five Copts were subsequently appointed to the People’s Assembly.
After they swore their oaths, and took their seats, a Coptic woman MP asked to be put on a parliamentary committee.

However, another member stood up and objected that she couldn’t be appointed because firstly, she was a Copt and, secondly, she was a woman. This refutation went unchallenged. Nor did anyone challenge ad hoc oaths which were made on the spot by new MPs swearing to observe the constitution insofar as it is compliant with Sharia Law.

Many see this disturbing trend as an attempt to establish a pan North African Islamic caliphate – with all the consequences which this would involve for minorities such as Christian Copts and secular or non radical Muslims.

Many Christians are not even aware that there is an indigenous Christian community in the Middle East.

Most believe the Arab world is Muslim and that Israel is Jewish – and maybe that there was once a vibrant Christian community in Bethlehem. Depressingly, that’s about it. A Palestinian Christian tells the story of how he was asked when his family had converted and become Christians – “About 2,000 years ago was the reply.”

Although, among Arabs, Sunni Muslims form an overwhelming majority, several of the region’s countries have significant religious minorities. In addition to ancient Christian churches – which, of course, pre date Islam -these include small sects such as Alawi, Druze, and Yazidi. There has been an unbroken Christian presence in Egypt since St. Mark first preached the Gospel there in the first century.

How minorities like the Copts are treated in the Arab world will be the ultimate test of the Arab Spring.

As revolutionary energy and zeal continues to sweep across the region – facilitated by contemporary social networking – the door has been opened to groups who have sectarian agendas which brook no differences and reject toleration. In Sudan these same forces were responsible for two million deaths – situations I saw first hand during the civil war and in Darfur; and today they are attempting to turn Nigeria into a new Sudan.

If these radical forces go unchecked it will  also dramatically affect non-orthodox or secular Muslims, as it has already done with such dire and violent consequences in the Mullah’s fiefdom of Iran and in Pakistan.

Next month it will be the first anniversary of the brutal murder of Clement Shahbaz Bhatti, Pakistan’s Federal Minister for Minorities. His assassination not only robbed Pakistan’s National Assembly of a dedicated, honest, and able politician but his death also threw into sharp relief the plight of Pakistan’s minorities, whose fearless champion he had become

In taking a stand- being an Athanasius contra mundum –  in working for change, he knew that his outspokenness and singularity would make him a primary target for Pakistan’s radical Islamists and he sensed the almost inevitable consequence of his courageous words and actions.

However, he said that his stand would “send a message of hope to the people living a life of disappointment, disillusionment and despair” adding that his life was dedicated to “the oppressed, the down-trodden and the marginalised” and to “the struggle for human equality, social justice, religious freedom and the empowerment of religious minorities’ communities.”

By definition, a martyr is a witness and an example to the Christian community of how to behave – and Bhatti was certainly a witness for truth and for justice. He stands in a long tradition – from Beckett to More, Kolbe to Romero – of men willing to sacrifice their lives as the price for upholding their beliefs.

As Kolbe expressed it so well: “No one in the world can change Truth. What we can do and should do is to seek truth and to serve it when we have found it. The real conflict is the inner conflict. Beyond armies of occupation and the hecatombs of extermination camps, there are two irreconcilable enemies in the depth of every soul: good and evil, sin and love. And what use are the victories on the battlefield if we ourselves are defeated in our innermost personal selves?”
 

In Pakistan and throughout the Arab world this is a moment for Christians and Muslims to draw inspiration from Kolbe’s words and from Shabaz Bhatti life:  to reject modern crusaderism as vehemently as they reject the forcible imposition of Sharia Law; and to argue for common civic principles which should form the basis of new constitutions and reform. It is not a western notion or western model to seek government based on honesty; the upholding of law; justice; mercy; and respect.

We must assert these common good principles together.

Failure to do this will consign the hoped for change represented by the Arab Spring to history as a failure. And there will be untold human suffering on the way.

Those who risked so much, and believed so passionately in reform, will be cheated of the fundamental change which they hoped to see. In Pakistan and the Arab world how minorities are treated will remain the greatest test.

 The story of Shabaz Bhatti is a good place to conclude. He was called to a political life and in the end he laid down his life for his friends: standing against a world which he knew to be unjust and which needs to change.

Shabaz Bhatti life and death reminds us that change comes at a price. John Henry Newman captured this though when he reflected that:

 “Good is never accomplished except at the cost of those who do it, truth never breaks through except through the sacrifice of those who spread it.” 

  Like Dr.King and Robert Kennedy Shahbaz Bhatti sacrificed himself for his beliefs and in the service of others.  Like Gandhi, his own life represented the change he wanted to see.  Most of us will never be called upon to make the supreme sacrifice but let us never forget Aristotle’s warning that shame will attach to those who refuse to play their part.  

Pictures of the event may be viewed at:

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Further details at:

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Washington DC

Extracts from an Address by Lord Alton of Liverpool

There is a story about an argument that ensues between three men who all believe that theirs is the oldest profession. There is a doctor, a lawyer and a politician.
The doctor insists that his is the oldest profession: “because a doctor took a rib out of Adam in order to make Eve.”
“No,” says the lawyer, mine is the oldest profession because a lawyer created order out of the chaos that existed in the firmament before time began.”
“No”, insisted the politician, “mine is the oldest profession, because we created the chaos.”
In reality, both the politicians and the lawyers can take some of the credit, and the blame, for many examples of order and of chaos. The link between the making of law and its administration hardly needs stating – and perhaps that’s why, down the generations, so many lawyers have been attracted into politics. It’s a particular pleasure for me, therefore, to trespass both across the pond and into an American Lawyers conference. Before I begin I had better make a pre-emptive strike and apologise for any linguistic nuances. They have a point when they say that the English and Americans are divided by a common language.

You have asked me to address the question of Human Rights and Religious Freedom.

I should like to begin with a references to the Book of Genesis.

It reminds us that we are each “Imago Dei” – made in

the image of God Himself.

If we truly believe this: that every man and woman –

regardless of their abilities, their race, their creed,

their origins or their individual idiosyncrasies and

characteristics – is made in the image of our Maker –

then it places upon us a non-negotiable duty to

uphold the sanctity and the dignity of that person’s

life: at every stage, from the womb to the tomb.

The two other texts to which I wish to refer link the

Old and the New Testaments. The first is taken from

the Prophet Isaiah and the second is Jesus’ first

public proclamation in the synagogue in Nazareth –

where he draws down on Isaiah’s words.

Isaiah’s text challenges us to act collectively and

radically in working for the common good of God’s

people. It is not a text for quietism or personal

religiosity but a wake-up call. It roots practical civic

and political action in religious belief. It reminds us of

the Jewish belief in both justice and mercy. It doesn’t

call for theocratic forms of government but is a text

that urges us to transform the world around us: a

thought that Jesus returns to when he tells us to be

salt –preventing the body politic from rotting – and to

be light: shining His light into the darker places.

The Semitic tradition was to declare a time of jubilee

when past debts would be wiped away, when fields

would be left fallow so that they might regain their

goodness, and when prisoners might be freed. It is a

text that demands an opportunity for human flourishing and fulfilment: a text driven by our Maker’s injunction to see His image in the men and women we treat with.

In the third text, in the gospel of Luke, Jesus picks up the scroll and finds Isaiah’s text. He invokes it and tells us that He has come to declare the year of the Lord’s favour. He wants this time of Jubilee to be a time of personal change. The challenge is to change ourselves and then to change the world around us. It’s worth noting for anyone who intends to do as Jesus bid that His audience is so outraged that they then tried to throw Him over the edge of a cliff.

What does all this say to us?

It tells us that defending the man made in the image of God is not one of a series of options: it is an imperative; a solemn and profound duty placed upon each of us. It surely tells us that we must be on the side of the weak, the vulnerable, those without power and those who have no-one else to speak for them.

It is also telling us that however reasonable such a proclamation of the rights of the man made in the image of God may seem, there will be powerful interests that will oppose you.

At the minimum this may result in misunderstanding, rejection, and a hostile confrontation. Ultimately, taking a stand may even cost you your life.

What then is the implication of these texts for us today?

I think they represent a call to each of us to proclaim a contemporary year of the Lord’s favour – a time of jubilee for those who are enslaved and even imprisoned by ideologies based on tyranny, enslavement, brutality and fear.

The words of Jesus are a call to us to combat exploitation and subjugation. These texts are a command to see the image of God in every person: to insist on the sanctity of every life and the upholding of their human dignity. These texts represent a call for us to engage with an oppressive culture, a culture that too often takes the side of death against a culture that should celebrate God’s gift of life. And they are a repudiation that religious belief is a private matter that makes no call upon us to understand or engage in political life.

A consistent pro-life ethic – that sees the face of God in the face of every man, and demands respect for the sanctity of his life and dignity in the way he lives it – would recognise that every life is sacred: from the womb to the tomb.

A society that surrenders a belief in the sanctity of human life rapidly becomes wholly utilitarian.

In 1990 The United Kingdom was seduced by the beguiling argument that if only Parliament would allow a little destructive experimentation on human embryos every illness known to man – from Alzheimer’s to Parkinson’s – would be cured. Since then more than two million human embryos have been destroyed or experimented upon; and subsequently the same specious argument was used to justify the use of embryonic stem cells for therapeutic cloning. In any event, where are the cures? – and ironically the most encouraging advances have been coming from the ethical use of adult stem cells – but even if such illicit procedures were efficacious, what kind of society permits the creation of an embryo which, if left to develop may graduate through every other stage of human development, only then to disembowel it, destroy it and then discard it?

In contemporary society over the first few days and weeks of its life the unborn child may well face an attack on its very right to life. More than 40 million in the US and more than 7 million in the UK have lost their lives before or during birth because we enshrined the belief that ending a life is just a matter of choice. There are about 45 million abortions worldwide each year.

Analyse the rhetoric for a moment: my right to choose. It puts me and my interests first – not you; it demands a right but disavows responsibility or duty; and it elevates choice to a principle which supplants life itself.

Every choice carries a consequence; and if the unborn are not made in God’s image, in whose image are they made? Freedom for the pike is death for the minnow; freedom for the hunter is death for the hunted. We have to decide on whose side we stand. It’s a stand that may well cost you something.

Let me give other examples of where a “womb to the tomb” insistence on the sanctity of human life and the cherishing of human dignity might lead.

What happens to the 800 million people in the world who are wracked by starvation or despair, living below any rational definition of human decency, if we simply insist on our right to choose to consume all the good things with which God has endowed our earth?

Two weeks ago I was in Africa – in Congo, Rwanda and Darfur.

I visited the general hospital in Congo’s capital city, Kinshasa. In the premature baby unity just two out of nine incubators were working. Yet there were babies in each of them. In this broke incubator there were two babies – tragically, both subsequently died. For 30 years Congo had corrupt government and it has been followed by 10 years of violence. In the past decade more than 3 million have been killed – deaths have been running at about 2,000 a day. Choices have been made by local war lords, by armaments manufactures, by corporations who have stripped the country’s assets and by the international community – and none of those choices have been on the side of life.

Earlier this year I was in Brazil’s favelas. Some of you will have seen the movie, “City of God”, which is set in Rio de Janeiro. It accurately paints a picture of a society in which between 4 and 5 children and adolescents are murdered every day. Children as young as four of five tote guns and are sucked into drugs-driven mafia gangs. This is a photograph that I took on the street outside the church of Candelaria. It is the memorial to eight children who were gunned down by the police. When a brave journalist, Tim Lopez, who worked for Global Television Network, tried to shine a light into this darkness, he was tortured and shot dead.

Life is cheap in Brazil. If you look closely enough at this picture of some rubbish tipped onto a Brazilian beach you will see the feet of a small child. The chance of a child dying in Brazil is eight to nine times greater than a child dying in the Middle East.

As I think of the things we permit – in our own nations and in others – I am reminded of the choice given to Moses. He is challenged with the ultimate choice, the one that we must each make: “I have laid before you a blessing and a curse, life and death” and he is admonished and encouraged to “choose life.” The prince of paradox, GK Chesterton, well understood the definitive nature of the choice between life and death, good and evil, when he wrote that “to admire mere choice is to refuse to choose” (Orthodoxy, 1906).

Our culture of death – and our failure to uphold the sanctity of human life – is evidenced in the killing of our unborn children, in indifference to the plight of children caught up in conflict, poverty, or abandonment. It is to be seen in the pursuit of eugenics – the weeding out of those not judged to be socially useful – and now, in countries such as Holland and Belgium, through the killing of the sick and disabled people and the terminally ill by the act of euthanasia.

Only a consistently driven pro-life ethic, championing the man made in the image of God, can act as an antidote. As Alasdair Macintyre says in “After Virtue”: “…a morality of virtues requires as its counterpart a conception of moral law. Its requirements too have to be met by practices.”

This is the antithesis of the depressing nihilism – that is, the rejection of all values and beliefs – and the defeatism that argues for disinterest and disengagement. The father of the modern age was the late nineteenth century German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche who maintained that the one great freedom was the freedom from God. For him everything that heightened mankind’s feeling of power was good; and every feeling of weakness was bad. Nietzsche wanted his disciples to raze to the ground every inherited structure of moral belief – based on the natural law of Aquinas and the virtues of Aristotle – and his effectiveness in achieving that objective hardly needs comment.

The lethal combination of indifferent individualism and nihilism has left a landscape littered with human casualties. When you delete God from the picture it’s far harder to see the man made in his image.

The modern liberal frequently draws a line between law and morality. This is in sharp contrast with the polis of Aristotle or the impulses of European Christendom. In both, men in company are expected to pursue the human good and not simply to provide an arena in which every individual seeks his or her own private good. A Christian has to carry their communal role with them as part of their defining characteristics.

Aristotle, the father of democracy, wrote in his great work “Politics” that we “are not solitary pieces in a game of chequers” and he said that aidos – shame - would attach to the man who refused to play his part. Cicero -in his work “On Duty” – said that we each become more virtuous, simply by accepting the duty to be engaged in civic and public affairs. These are sentiments summed up well by Nelson Mandela’s belief in umbuntu – brotherhood: “a person is a person because of other people.” The Irish, fleeing the British Isles during the great starvation when 1 million died, never lost sight of a similar belief that “it is in the shelter of each other’s lives that the people live.”

Sometimes when we move from our private “hobbit holes” and engage with the culture of death it will lead to a clash with the secular powers or, in a modern democracy, to pitting yourself against the consensus. In 12th century England it led, for instance, to Archbishop Thomas a Becket having to distinguish between the obedience he owed to the secular power of Henry II and the obedience he owed to a higher order. Four hundred years later Henry VIII and the Lord Chancellor of England, Sir Thomas More, had to resolve the same issue, with the lawyer, More, famously declaring “I am the King’s good servant, but God’s first.”

Two hundred years after this, another Christian, William Wilberforce, pitted himself against a consensus that held that it was merely a matter of private choice to own another man as a slave. For 40 years Wilberforce campaigned to end slavery. He took seriously St.Augustine’s maxim: to “pray as if the entire outcome depends upon God and work as if the entire outcome depends upon you.”

Estimates of the numbers of Africans sold into slavery vary but over nearly four centuries about 12 million people were forcibly transported into bondage. Between 1701 and 1810 around 5.7 million people were taken into slavery, 2 million coming from the Slave Coast, where Benin is situated. Around 39% went to the Caribbean, 38% to Brazil, 17% to South America and 6% to North America.

Many of the slaves shipped out of Africa from the Bight of Benin were taken to the port of Ouidah, which is situated near Cotonou, the present capital and which I visited with Congressman Frank Wolf. Not since I visited the holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem in Israel had I experienced such harrowing emotions.

In the total Atlantic trade, British ships are estimated to have made 12,000 voyages and to have carried 2.6 million slaves. The trade before 1730 was dominated by London but was overtaken by Bristol in the 1730s, only to be eclipsed by Liverpool in the 1750s. In 1797, 1 in 4 ships leaving Liverpool was a slaver. Liverpool merchants handled five eighths of the English slave trade and three sevenths of the slave trade in Europe. In his Journal of a Slave-trader, John Newton – who would later become a Christian and composed the great hymn, Amazing Grace, wrote: “I have no sufficient data to warrant calculation but I suppose not less than one hundred thousand slaves are exported annually from all parts of Africa, and that more than one half of these are exported in English ships.”

In 1792, on introducing his first Bill for Abolition, Wilberforce began his speech with this cry from the heart: “Africa, Africa, your sufferings have been the theme that has arrested and engages my heart, your sufferings no tongue can express, no language impart.”

Thank God that one just man could be found who challenged this evil, unjust law. Thank God for one man who saw the image of His maker in the face of his African brother.

On the occasion of Wilberforce’s first major legislative victory, in 1807, his friend and supporter, Josiah Wedgwood had struck a piece of Wedgwood pottery depicting an African breaking his chains and bearing the words “Am I not a man and a brother?” In our generation should we not also dare to call all men our brothers – and act accordingly? But not everyone cared for Wilberforce and he was regularly vilified by his opponents and had to overcome powerful vested interests.

The reality is that when faced with such forces we often collaborate or retreat. One of the men I most admire is Maximillian Kolbe. A Polish Christian, he was given the chance by the Nazis to continue publishing his religious magazine so long as he made no social comment. He immediately responded with this editorial:

“No one in the world can change Truth. What we can and should do is to seek Truth and serve it when we have found it. The real conflict is within. Beyond armies of occupation and the hecatombs of the extermination camps, two irreconcilable enemies lie in the depths of every soul. And of what use are the victories on the battlefield if we are defeated in our innermost personal selves.”

The Gestapo immediately arrested Fr Kolbe. He was herded into a cattle truck and transported, along with 300 others, to Auschwitz. Father Kolbe was branded with the number 16670. At the beginning of August 1941 a group of three prisoners escaped. The Nazis killed ten men for every one who escaped. Death was by long and slow starvation. The condemned men were simply buried alive in an airless underground concrete bunker. The Deputy Camp Commandant, Karl Fritzsch, accompanied by the Gestapo chief, Gerhardt Palitzsch, passed down the lines of prisoners. Fritzsch selected his victims. As the ninth man was chosen he cried out: “My wife, my children, I shall never see them again”.

It was at this moment that the unexpected and the unprecedented happened. A man stepped forward and stood before Fritzsch and calmly asked, in correct German, if he might take the place of the condemned man. The reprieved man, Franciszek Gajowniczek, was ordered to return to his place in the line. The condemned men were then sent to be stripped of their rags and to be buried alive. Kolbe died at Auschwitz because he was prepared to pay the ultimate price. Generally speaking a lot less heroism is thankfully required of each of us.

But we should not be deterred by the notion that a price may have to be paid…that we might be figuratively if not literally thrown over the cliff. This applies as much to great nations as it does to individuals.

When we decide to engage in an interventionist rather than an isolationist foreign policy it inevitably carries significant implications. Take, for instance, the genocide currently taking place in Darfur.

Ten years ago genocide in another African country, Rwanda, claimed 800,000 lives. At the time, the US and UK declined to call events in Rwanda genocide because the 1949 Geneva Convention Against Genocide, and Article 51 of the UN Charter, requires coherent a practical response. There is a legal duty to “prevent and protect” and subsequently to prosecute and bring to justice those responsible for crimes against humanity.

The Clinton Administration had recently beaten a hasty retreat from their imbroglio in Somalia and decided that Rwanda could be safely ignored. The consequence? Three quarters of a million deaths.

I visited the Murambi genocide site near the Rwanda city of Butari. It’s about 30 miles from the border with Burundi.

It was the location of a technical college. 58,000 Tutsis took refuge there, believing that the French soldiers who had been flown in would protect them. Their mandate did not require their intervention. Those who took me to Murambi told me that the soldiers subsequently played volleyball on the levelled ground covering the mass graves.

At Murambi I saw some of the hundreds of bodies that have been disinterred. I saw pregnant women with their babies in their wombs; I saw women still clutching their rosary beads. I saw the remains of countless children; of men whose heads had been smashed by mallets or broken by machetes. I saw women whose violated bodies were still in the rape position.

A decade later President Clinton admitted that the failure to act in Rwanda was the worst foreign policy mistake he had made. It is also a timely reminder – especially as the mass graves are uncovered in Iraq – of how easily a country can be “damned if it does, and damned if it doesn’t.”

Difficulties in Iraq should give us cause to ask some hard questions about how we go about things – for instance the failure to act on any of the State Department’s 135 suggestions for post war reconstruction in Iraq, and also some hard thinking about the nature of the enemy – but it would be a disaster if a tough situation in Iraq led to a universal loss of nerve.

Our championing of human rights must be universal. Global civil society is under threat. Above all else, whatever happens next week, the world needs America and it needs America to be sharply focused, not to lose its nerve, and people in places like Darfur can’t afford “attention disorder” in the US.

If you tire or get bored, the tragedy of Rwanda will be repeated in places like Darfur and elsewhere. And, be clear, that this will not only costs millions their lives it will also be a defeat for the values on which this country and other western democracies have been founded, and for which millions paid with their own lives in two World Wars.

Let me return for a moment to Darfur. You have to put what is happening there into the context of what has happened elsewhere in Sudan. Two years ago I went into Southern Sudan with the SPLA – into an area where 2 million have died over two decades as attempts have been made to forcibly impose Sharia law; and daily aerial bombardment has been used to try and intimidate and subjugate a whole people. Among those I met was bishop, Akio Johnson, who has had nine attempts on his life. The Sudanese dropped 73 bombs on his compound and the neighbouring primary school. His story is recorded in Jubilee Campaign’s book “Passion and Pain – the story of the Persecuted Church”. Our failure to act over these past two decades has lulled the Sudanese regime into believing that it can do whatever it wants with impunity.

Certainly that has been the case in Darfur.

Last month, in a sombre report to the UN Security Council Kofi Annan, said that the government of Sudan had reneged on its promise to disarm the Janjaweed militias who have now killed 70,000 people and displaced 1.7 million others. What is the point in passing Chapter VII resolutions – mandatory on the governments to which they refer – if they are not enforced. The UN told Sudan to disband the Janjaweed by the end of August – and they have failed to do so. Instead, they have continued to arm them.

This further entrenches the belief that your actions carry no consequences.

Last July the UN described the horrific situation in Darfur as “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis” and nothing much has changed.

Two weeks ago I was in Geneina in West Darfur at the Ardamata refugee camp where 30,000 terrified people are sheltering. My full report is on the Jubilee Campaign web site.

While I was there it was reported that Government helicopters had been seen that day flying in arms for the Janjaweed. We collected evidence from tribal leaders who testified to a systematic campaign of killings, rape, burnings and looting.

It is hard to overstate the scale of the continuing suffering of the Black African women and girls in Darfur. At Ardamata Camp, outside Geneina, where 30,000 people live, we talked to families who had fled from Abhasla, a village eight days’ walk to the west.

In February 2004 heavily armed Janjaweed on horseback swept into the village and killed every man and boy they could find. Their cattle were looted and their homes were burned down.

Thirty five year old Hawry told us that the men “harassed and beat” the women and girls before they rode off. It soon emerged that these are euphemisms for rape, but in their traditional society it is an unmentionable subject, bringing shame and humiliation on the victim and her family.

We were told that the “Arabs” carried razor blades and sharp knives with them to cut open the atrophied vaginas of old women before they raped them. They also raped girls as young as 10. When the Janjaweed had gone, Hawry told us, the women abandoned the village. “My family once had 88 head of cattle, but I put one baby around my neck and another child on my back, and I started walking.” Her other three children had to walk for the next eight days, hiding in empty houses when they could.

Be clear, this is a campaign with the sole objective of eradicating the African tribe’s people and installing the Arab militias in their place. I agree with Colin Powell, this is genocide. If it isn’t genocide it is difficult to imagine what is.

No doubt, an American intervention in 1994 in Rwanda or a 2004 intervention in Darfur would have been denounced by some as American imperialism and interventionism. But if the international community had had the will to act then many people who died in Rwanda would be alive today.

In the introduction to the 2002 U.S. National Security Strategy, it states: “Freedom is the non-negotiable demand of human dignity; the birthright of every person – in every civilisation.” It goes on to say that “the United States will use this moment of opportunity to extend the benefits of freedom across the globe. We will actively work to bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets, and free trade to every corner of the world.” In that objective, all countries that cherish those same values should assist in that task.

Niall Ferguson has recently written about the difference between trying to create a territorial empire and the objective of spread values in which you yourself believe. And although I disagree with Ferguson’s unhelpful description of such an approach as “the Americanizing” of the world, I believe America should be commended and supported when it sets out to help others to achieve the universal law of freedom for themselves.

The fundamental clash today is between tyranny and oppression – often fuelled by nationalism and terrorism – against the goal of spreading democracy, the rule of law and fundamental freedoms of religious and political belief.

A Liverpool lawyer, Hartley Shawcross, was British Attorney General and at the end of World War Two he was Chief Prosecutor for the War Crimes Trials at Nuremburg.

In his closing speech at Nuremburg Shawcross remarked, “In all our countries, when perhaps in the heat of passion or for other motives which impair restraint, some individual is killed, the murder becomes a sensation. Our compassion is roused, nor do we rest until the criminal is punished and the rule of law vindicated. Shall we do less when not one but 12 million men and women and children are done to death, not in battle, not in passion, but in a cold calculated deliberate attempt to destroy nations and races.”

Shawcross reminded his generation that such tyranny and brutality could only be resisted in the future not simply be “military alliances but firmly on the rules of law.”

This passionate belief in the upholding of law and in the administration of justice is central to the upholding of civilised values; to the maintenance of human rights and hard won liberties. The rule of law determines the way in which we govern ourselves. It is the bedrock of the parliamentary system and the corner stone of our democratic institutions. Without it we all descend into chaos.

And are we going to settle for less in other nations?

Last year I visited North Korea, China, and the refuges camps on the Burma border. In North Korea, they enjoy few political or religious liberties. I heard of a group of believers whose church was destroyed by the communists 55 years ago but who have continued to meet in the rubble ever since. The Hawk Report – authored by David Hawk – documents the suffering of countless detainees held in North Korean gulags. There have been arbitrary arrests, detentions and murders. I went there because 18 months ago I met a Korean refugee who had seen his wife and child shot dead and then saw his other child die as he made the perilous journey out of the country. As Chairman of the British North Korean Parliamentary Group I have been able to encourage our Government to build bridges with Pyongyang but to ensure that along with vital security issues we have opened a serious dialogue with the North Koreans about their abuse of human rights.

With Pennsylvania’s Congressman, Joseph Pitts I went to the Burma border – where, again, there has been genocide in the strict meaning of that word. A campaign of attrition has been carried out against the Karen people by the Burmese military junta. About 40% of the Karen are Christians, evangelised by American Baptist missionaries.

On the border I met a child whose parents had both been shot by the military junta; he had been sold over the border to a Thai family and then run away to the camp at Mela, where I me him. All this before the age of 8. Around 130,000 people live in those camps and in the Karen state there are literally hundreds of thousands of displaced people. Their story is detailed in “Passion and Pain”

On hearing these accounts, from Rwanda and Darfur, from the Congo, North Korea and Burma, you could be forgiven for feeling pretty inadequate.

When I was at the genocide site in Rwanda I picked up a small stone. Let me use it to remind you that this is what we are too – small stones who, when we start to move can cause a landslide. We needn’t be daunted by the odds and, in any event, we need no guarantees of success in this life time. Our reward will be a different one. Mother Teresa of Calcutta once told me and I believe her, that “you are not called upon to be successful; you are called upon to be faithful.”

Through engagement and political action – working with groups like the DC based Jubilee Campaign – we can use advocacy, practical action, and dialogue to be agents for change. At let me end with just two last thoughts.

The first is the evidence given by Pastor Martin Niemoller when he appeared before a congressional committee in the early 1950s. He was asked how, in a country where there were nominally so many Protestant and Catholic Christians it had been possible for Nazism to become so firmly established. He famously responded by stating that “first they came for the Jews and because I was not a Jew I did nothing…and then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.” Failure to take a stand for our belief that all men are our brothers and that each is made in the image of God may buy us some time in the short term but what will it cost the next generation?

And, to end, twenty years ago, with some friends I helped found the Jubilee Campaign in the British Parliament.

It was supported by Catholics and Protestants together, and given political endorsement by all our political leaders, including the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. Since then it has tirelessly campaigned for religious liberties all over the world, but it has also spawned Jubilee Action, a charity that works for exploited children a foundation that champions conflict resolution, dialogue and engagement. Jubilee’s founding impulse and continuing mandate is a profound belief in the dignity of every person and in the sanctity of every life: that each of usn is made in God’s image; and that in every generation we must resolve again to declare a year of jubilee.

Ends.

Lord Alton is an Independent Crossbench Peer who served for 18 years in the House of Commons. Author of 11 books, he is one of the founders of Jubilee Campaign and is professor of citizenship at Liverpool John Moores University. www.davidalton.net

Gladstone – son of Liverpool, scourge of tyrants.

Let me begin by saying why this Roscoe Lecture is being held now, why here and why the university is sponsoring it.
Why now? This year is the bicentenary of Gladstone’s birth in 1809, at 62 Rodney Street, and a series of events have been organised to mark the occasion. This lecture is among them.
Why Here? St.George’s Hall is a particularly appropriate venue for the lecture because as a young 32 year-old MP Gladstone would have seen the foundation stone laid in 1841 and have celebrated its completion and opening in 1841. For Gladstone this Hall was the scene of both political triumph and disaster and it will be here on December 29th, the day of his birth in 1809 that a wreath will be laid at his statue in the adjacent St.John’s Gardens.
The university’s interest revolves around its connection with William Roscoe, after whom these lectures and its Foundation for Citizenship are named. Gladstone’s childhood overlapped with Roscoe’s last years. He was 22 at the time of Roscoe’s death in 1831 – and his father, John, was initially one of Roscoe’s supporters.
Both men were quintessential good citizens – par excellence. The recipients of our Good Citizenship awards follow in their footsteps.
This series of Roscoe Lectures has primarily been looking at the nature of tyranny. The trajectory of my remarks tonight will begin with a summary of Gladstone’s connections with Liverpool; then an overview of his achievements, and, finally, some remarks about his role in opposing injustice and tyranny. In preparing for tonight I consulted the Liverpool Record Office and the House of Lords Library and thanks them for their help. I am also grateful to David Llewellyn, whose interventions will enliven the lecture – and my son Philip for his help this evening with the slides.
My own interest in Gladstone began as a teenager. My first newspaper interview appeared in 1968 under the headline: “If Only Gladstone Was Here.”
Four years later, now a student in Liverpool, I would be elected to represent the City Council’s Low Hill Ward, where, at Hengler’s Circus in 1896 – two years before his death – that Gladstone gave his last great speech.
In Parliament, I was privileged to represent part of the city of his birth and part of the constituency, where for three years, he served as Member of Parliament.

So, who was William Ewart Gladstone, this son of Liverpool, and what did this city mean to him?

Born in the south east quarter of Liverpool, Gladstone came in to the world in the same year as Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin, Felix Mendelssohn and Edgar Allen Poe.

In 1809 the Napoleonic Wars continued as Bonaparte defeated the Austrians, seized the Papal States, arrested Pope Pius VII, and took him to Liguria. In the Peninsular War the British defeated the French at the Battle of La Coruna.

George III, who was descending into madness, was King. Two months before Gladstone’s birth, he appointed Spencer Perceval as Tory Prime Minister in place of the Whig Duke of Portland.

In 1812 Perceval was assassinated in the lobby of the House of Commons He was replaced by the Earl of Liverpool – serving as Prime Minister until 1827, when one of Gladstone’s political heroes, and one-time Liverpool MP, George Canning – whom Gladstone had known since childhood – came to office.

1809, the year of Gladstone’s birth, was two years after William Roscoe had voted with William Wilberforce in the House of Commons to end the trans-Atlantic slave trade; and 24 years before the final Abolition Act would be passed by Parliament.

All of Gladstone’s childhood and early life was shaped by the debates about the morality of the slave trade and by what Wilberforce called “the laws of God.” As the battle lines became shaped around religious arguments the Gladstone family would find themselves torn between their adherence to evangelical Christianity and to their family’s principal source of income.

It was wealth from the trade that had enabled Gladstone’s father, John, to purchase the handsome property in Rodney Street, in the city’s elegant south east quarter, where William, the fifth of six children was born.

Although he never traded in slaves much of John Gladstone’s wealth was derived from the West Indian sugar plantations in Demerara, worked by slave labour.

The trade was the engine that was fuelling Liverpool’s exponential growth. In the year of Gladstone’s birth the city’s population was 94,000 – up from 60,000 in 1792, and it would continue to grow rapidly.

Although John Wesley described it as ‘One of the neatest, best built towns I have ever seen in England’ the burgeoning city became chracterised by an avaricious provincial barbarism based on the naked accumulation of wealth. The last letter penned by the dying founder of Methodism was an exhortation to the young William Wilberforce to make the elimination of the trade his life’s work. Wilberforce said he would happily be remembered as a “fanatic” for his opposition to the trade.

In his childhood reminiscences Gladstone recalled the picturesque nature of the white winged vessels waiting to catch the winds out of Liverpool but these great sailing ships represented something much darker; and as the young Gladstone grew up he would have encountered the anti-slavery movement – and its leading figures, Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson and the lawyer Granville Sharp. He would have known of the conversion of the Liverpool sea captain – and composer of Amazing Grace, John Newton, who died two year before Gladstone’s’ birth and he would have heard the stories of Olaudah Equiano (Gustavas Vassa) – the escaped slave who had died in 1797, having published an autobiographical account of life as a slave, and who had risked his life by speaking at public gatherings in cities like Liverpool.

The indefatigable Clarkson had abandoned his Divinity studies at Cambridge and would devote sixty years of his life combating slavery – organising meetings and disseminating across Britain pamphlets and Wedgwood brooches depicting a chained slave and bearing the words “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” Mass petitions were submitted to Parliament and boycotts organised of sugar from plantations such as those owned by the Gladstone family. Posters were made to depict life on the slave ships – vessels like the notorious Zong from which 132 slaves were thrown to their deaths in 1783.

In Liverpool Clarkson acquired the implements used to chain and torture slaves taking them to huge rallies and public meetings where he sought to rouse the conscience of the nation. This first human rights campaign would set the tone for the mass movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It involved everything from boycotts to lobbying.

From 1783 until 1793, 878 round trips were made by Liverpool slaving ships, carrying over 300,000 slaves from Africa to the West Indies. They were sold for a profit of £15,186,850.

In the triangle of trade between Europe, Africa and America, vast numbers of people were uprooted and displaced into bondage. In the 18th century 6 million people were transported from Africa; by the 1850s, as Gladstone reached middle age, the figure was put at 12 million – some historians put the figure as high as 40 million men, women and children.

John Newton, captain of Liverpool slave ships, wrote in his Journal of a Slave Trader:
“I have no sufficient data to warrant calculation but I suppose not less than 100,000 slaves are annually exported from all parts of Africa and that more than one half of these are exported in English ships.”

William Roscoe in a 35 page poem published in 1787, The Wrongs of Africa, wrote

“Blush ye not to boast your equal laws, your just restraints, your rights defined, your liberties secured,
Whilst with an iron hand ye crush to earth the helpless African; and bid him drink
That cup of sorrow, which yourselves have dashed, Indignant, from oppression’s fainting grasp.”

At the time of the vote on February 23rd, 1807, Hansard records that:

“I have, said the hon. gentleman, Mr.Roscoe, long resided in the town of Liverpool; for 30 years I have never ceased to condemn this inhuman traffic; and I consider it the greatest happiness of my existence to lift up my voice on this occasion against it, with the friends of justice and humanity.”

Roscoe returned to Liverpool on May 2nd 1807, the day after the abolition of the trade became law. His public entry was disastrous. A combination of enraged slave traders and religious zealots – who reviled Roscoe because he had championed Catholic relief – assailed Roscoe as he stepped from his coach and horses in the city’s Castle Street.

Although he would never be returned to Parliament again, Lord Holland not only spoke for his Cabinet colleagues, but for many sympathisers of the Whig cause, when he wrote to Roscoe to say that his “rejection at Liverpool is considered by us all as one of the greatest disgraces to the country, as well as misfortunes to the party, that could have happened.”

John Gladstone, a principal opponent of Roscoe, certainly did not see it that way.

John was himself one of seventeen children, born in 1764, and of Scottish Presbyterian descent. He migrated to Liverpool in 1787. A childless widower, in 1800 he married another Scot, Anne Robertson, at St.Peter’s Church, Liverpool. As his family grew, he built a formidable trading empire and embraced his wife’s evangelical Anglicanism – which created a tension with Wilberforce’s anti-slavery movement. He built three churches – “the Scotch Church” in Oldham Street, St.Andrew’s in Rodney Street, and a third church, St.Thomas’, at Seaforth, where, in 1815, on the border of Crosby and Bootle, the family took up residence in the palatial Seaforth House. By 1820 John was worth a staggering three quarters of a million pounds.

But it was at Rodney Street that the young Gladstone had his first political encounters.

In 1812, John Gladstone was one of the merchant princes who invited George Canning to accept the Tory nomination for the Liverpool constituency. There were four candidates for two seats but, in reality, it became a duel between
Canning and the Whig candidate, Henry Brougham.

They were the two greatest orators of their age and were two of the brightest stars in the political galaxy. John Gladstone, now alienated by Roscoe’s intellectualism and opposition to the slave trade, deserted the Whigs to support Canning.

One year before the election William Roscoe wrote and published a 32 page letter to his friend Brougham. It encouraged Brougham to support full blooded parliamentary reform and it became the basis of the arguments that raged in the election of the following year.

Roscoe insisted that Parliamentary reform was “essential to the safety and preservation of the country.” He said:

“The connection between a corrupt Parliament and bad measures is as certain as cause and effect in any other instance; feel the truth of that unalterable maxim that an evil tree cannot produce good fruit.”

He insisted that:
“…Men of good and independent character should be returned and these men should not have before them a continual temptation to desert their duty…they must be free from partiality and corruption”

To the House of Commons he wanted to see – in words that have a contemporary resonance – “restored that degree of independence and integrity which is indispensably necessary to enable it to perform its functions and to maintain its proper dignity and influence in the State.”

Each day in the 1812 election the candidates poured forth their verbal assaults on each other at the Liverpool hustings and either pressed for uncompromising reform or warned of the dangers to the constitution should reform be sanctioned.

Every evening the crowds gathered to hear them declaim from the windows of their houses – Brougham staying in Clayton Square and Canning staying with the Gladstone’s in Rodney Street. William Gladstone’s earliest memory was as a three year old being dressed up in a red frock and asked to utter the words “ladies and gentleman” as the diverting and beguiling warm-up prior to the appearance of the great orator Canning. Canning went on to win the 1812 election and was duly elected and served as a Liverpool MP until 1823.

Gladstone was finishing his school days at Eton when in 1827 |Canning died in post as Prime Minister. He purchased a bust and portrait of Canning, composed a memorial verse, and before returning to Seaforth visited the Statesman’s grave at Westminster Abbey.

After Eton he enjoyed a meteoric rise at Christ Church, Oxford, where he walked away with the finest academic prizes, Gladstone increasingly emulated Canning and, after some glittering performances at the Oxford Union, was elected as its President.

One of his detractors later remarked that he was “Oxford on top, and Liverpool below” – which might, when properly considered, well account for Gladstone’s phenomenal political success. Always something of an outsider, one potential spouse reputedly told her mother: “I cannot marry a man who carries a bag like that” while Emily Eden complained: there is “something in the tone of his voice and his way of coming into a room that is not aristocratic.

However, Gladstone’s workmanlike approach to his public life did win some admirers from those same circles. His trenchant opposition to the 1832 Reform Bill brought him to the attention of the Duke of Newcastle – who offered him his patronage and the rotten borough seat of Newark.

At the age of 23, Gladstone, with 887 votes, entered the House of Commons – with his brother, Tom, as Members of the Opposition. His maiden speech was in the 1833 debate on the Bill abolishing slavery in British dominions, and it was a defence of plantation owners in the West Indies. Among those accused of cruelty in his treatment of his slave workers was the young MP’s father, John Gladstone. Lord Howick described the manager of the Gladstone plantations as “a murderer of slaves.”

A few days after the Abolition Bill was passed, Gladstone’s friend, Henry Wilberforce, took him to the deathbed of his father, William. Gladstone prayed with William Wilberforce and ten days later he attended his funeral at Westminster Abbey. Gladstone said: “It brought me solemn thoughts, particularly about the slaves. This is a burdensome question.” Just as he later embraced the cause of wider electoral representation, Gladstone renounced his support of slavery and admitted that Wilberforce had profoundly affected him: “I can see plainly enough the sad defects, the real illiberalism of my opinions on that subject.”

Many changes were now occurring in Gladstone’s life – personally and politically.

In 1839, the young Gladstone married Catherine Glynne, of Hawarden Castle. Between 1839 and 1854 Catherine had nine pregnancies, including one miscarriage. There’s was a happy and enduring marriage.

Politically, his support for Sir Robert Peel during the battles over the Corn Laws led the Duke of Newcastle – an ardent protectionist – to withdraw his patronage and Gladstone lost his Newark seat – now becoming MP for the university seat of Oxford.

As Gladstone became preoccupied with great theological questions England was also undergoing radical change.

Since his childhood Liverpool and the surrounding region had altered beyond recognition. In particular, the consequences of the potato blight of 1848 had been catastrophic.

During “the great starvation” of the Irish Famine the population of Ireland had halved. One million people had died and three million emigrated – many getting little further than Liverpool “the gateway to America.”

In 1847, the Irish Nationalist leader, Daniel O’Connell had begged the House of Commons to save the starving and he described a country that had become a land of corpses and walking skeletons.

In February 1847, in his last speech to the Commons, a tottering O’Connell told Parliament:
“Ireland is in your hands….She is in your power….If you do not save her she cannot save herself. And I solemnly call on you to recollect that I predict with the sincerest conviction that one quarter of her population will perish unless you come to her relief.”

Parliament did not come to her relief and in the year of that prophetic speech, the year of O’Connell’s death, 17,280 mainly Irish people were recorded as dying in the town of Gladstone’s birth. There were also 20,000 street children. Dr.Duncan, the city’s outstanding public health officer estimated that 100,000 people were living in abject conditions. 3,000 had been tightly packed into the Workhouse – which stood on the site of today’s Metropolitan Cathedral, and there was room for no more. As typhus raged, fever sheds were erected to isolate the afflicted and two ships were moored in the River Mersey as lazarettos.

In 1846, two days before Christmas, in 1846, Sarah Burns, an Irishwoman and mother of seven, died after complaining of pains in her head and chest. At the inquest it was revealed that in three days she had eaten only a scrap of bread. The Coroner said of her Liverpool home:

“The floor was composed of mud; in that hovel there were seventeen human beings crowded together without even so much as a bit of straw to lie down on.”

In April 1847, during one week, in the St.Mary’s parish, just up the hill from this Hall, and close to this university’s Learning Resource Centre, there were 166 burials; 105 were children. Typhus was compounded by hunger.

In May 1847, 8-year-old Luke Brothers died. His post mortem revealed that there “was not the least particle of food in his stomach.” The typhus was followed by cholera.

It would not be until November 24th 1998 that the first memorial to the thousands of Liverpool victims of the Irish famine was unveiled in Liverpool – in the grounds of St.Luke’s Church in Bold Street. The memorial was unveiled by President Mary McAleese, who later the same day gave the eighth Roscoe Lecture here in St.George’s Hall.

Although, even by standards of Victorian squalor, the situation in Liverpool was appalling, all over Britain the scars of industrialisation and poverty were to be seen in the lives of vast numbers of people. In their novels, Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell shone a light into the twilight worlds of the Victorian poor.

Mrs. Gaskell’s Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life was published in 1848. Mary Barton with its cast of working-class characters and its interest in Chartism, the emerging trades union movement and social issues, including the consequences of industrialisation and poverty, shocked Victorian society and provoked political debate. Mrs. Gaskell had men like Gladstone in her sights when she wrote, in Mary Barton,
“What thoughtful heart can look into this gulf
That darkly yawns ‘twixt rich and poor,
And not find food for saddest meditation!”

The situation did produce thought both for meditation and for action.

In Liverpool, Dr.Duncan, Major Lester and Canon James Nugent – two of whom are commemorated here in St.John’s Gardens – became the heroes of the hour – and the relief of poverty, public laundries, district nurses and social provision all became manifest.

The Victorian virtues are often caricatured as hypocrisy to cover Victorian vices – but taken as an era the Victorian age produced some extraordinary generosity of spirit – philanthropists like Rowntree, Peabody and Cadbury.

Gladstone once said that “No man ever became great or good except through many and great mistakes” and he along with other eminent Victorians had all the same human failings as our own generation. We criticise Victorians for trying to hide their vices from public view – and Gladstone pre-eminently represented this approach to life – but this was driven by a belief in the principles of private and public morality – a belief held by the unskilled classes as much as it was held by the middle classes. Family and home were repositories of personal and civic virtues. Gladstone became the most eminent representative of these beliefs which is why he achieved such an extraordinary empathy with the masses, but he was no cheap populist and he passionately believed it when he proclaimed: “Nothing that is morally wrong can be politically right.”

When Gladstone extolled the Arthur of the Victorian Poet Laureate, Alfred (Lord) Tennyson, who, in Idylls of the King, described his Arthur as “a selfless man and stainless gentleman…the great pillar of the moral order”, he had in mind the proto-type for the perfect Victorian. He dispensed the advice that we should “Be happy with what you have and are, be generous with both, and you won’t have to hunt for happiness.

Gladstone’s parliamentary constituencies of Newark and Oxford University had, for different reasons, constrained him and restricted his ability to take his values to the masses. That was about to change.

In 1865 he lost his Oxford constituency as a result of the opposition of clerical graduates following his attack on the continued establishment of the Church of Ireland.

One month later he was then returned for the seat of South Lancashire – a vast constituency which included the hundreds of West Derby and Salford.

He launched his Lancashire campaign at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall with the words: “At last, my friends, I am come among you ‘unmuzzled.’”

The industrialised urban electorate would now become the power base, for “the People’s William.”

His ability to reach the masses, and to give voice to their aspirations, changed the nature of political campaigning, created a more representative form of government, and arguably averted revolution by facilitating reform.

Gladstone was now on his way to forming his first Government – but it wasn’t plain sailing.

Two years after winning South Lancashire, in a boundary re-organisation, the vast seat was divided into two.

When the 1868 General Election was called Gladstone opted for the new South West Lancashire seat which included the Liverpool suburbs of Wavertree, West Derby, Old Swan and the towns of St.Helens, Bootle, Leigh and Widnes – a total electorate of 350,000

Here, on the Plateau of Liverpool’s St. Georges’ Hall, the first recognisably modern election campaign got underway.

Crowds gathered on what The Times described on November 23rd as “a raw and cold morning with some rain” to see the candidates nominated. The report continued: “By the time Mr. Gladstone had to speak the crowd had reached 10,000 to 12,000 extending in a compact mass right across Lime Street…a number of fellows on the Conservative side, some of whom if dress is any guide, should have had a little more decency, conceived it to be their duty to put down the speakers on the other side by sheer noise. Blowing horns, singing songs etc were resorted to. No personal violence of any kind was attempted, and placards and lampoons were rare, but witty.”

Gladstone addressed the crowds at length, detailing his record in government, setting forth his beliefs, and making a rousing plea for support:

“And gentlemen, when with all possible respect to my opponents, I ask you to vote for me, I am not asking you merely to give your approval to my personal claims, which are nothing, or to give authority to my opinions, which are of no account – I am asking you to confirm by your suffrages the recoded verdict of the nation.

“….Some persons have said that you need not return me for South Lancashire because I may sit somewhere else. They say that I had better go away from the place where I was born, from the place where I was bred, from the place where my family have been for 90 years, and where they still pursue the honourable commerce of this country. You may just as well say, “I will turn a man out of his proper house because someone else will have the charity to take him in as a beggar or a vagrant.” I don’t, gentlemen, desire to be a parliamentary vagrant

“…grant the request that I may have not merely a seat in Parliament, but that I may be permitted and enabled to speak the words of truth and justice in the House of Commons, in the name and with the authority of the men of South-West Lancashire (Loud cheering).”

Gladstone never lacked in rhetoric – nor, in South West Lancashire, was he without powerful allies. He had the active support of John Pemberton Hayward, the Liverpool banker, Thomas Weld Blundell, and William Rathbone (VI) – who in 1882 would help to found University College Liverpool, the progenitor of Liverpool University.

Notwithstanding his formidable coalition of supporters Gladstone had to contend with a well organised and ferocious campaign against him. Fuelled by sectarianism – and deep antagonism to his support for Irish Catholics – Gladstone had to contend with a formidable campaign organised by the Orange Lodges.

On November 27th 1868 The Times reported that “Political rivalry had been attended in his case with far more than usual personal animosity, and the Lancashire Tories have fought rather against an enemy than an opponent….Ever since the day Mr.Gladstone made the Irish Church an imminent political question it has been known that his seat was far from safe.”

The Liverpool Daily Post announced that when the High Sheriff declared the result, votes cast were: Mr.Cross, 7,729; Mr.Turner, 7,676; Mr.Gladstone, 7,415; and Mr.Grenfell, 6,939. In thanking his supporters the newspaper reported that the vanquished Mr.Gladstone said “It is to me a matter of lively satisfaction, which I can never lose, that I received a large majority of votes within the district of Liverpool.”

Despite a massive swing throughout the country which had swept his Party to power Gladstone had suffered defeat. Fortunately, in those times, a candidate could stand in two parliamentary divisions simultaneously – and, without seeking Gladstone’s approval, the Greenwich constituency association had listed him as their second candidate in their two member seat.

Defeated in Lancashire his success in Greenwich enabled him to become Prime Minister and to form his first Administration. He remained in the office until 1874.

He would frequently visit Liverpool and the region in the years which followed but never again as a local MP. But, as I will remark at the end of this lecture, it was to Liverpool that he would return to make the last great speech of his life.

So much for Gladstone’s connections with Liverpool and how events in the city of his birth shaped his life. Let me briefly try to summarise his central achievements.

At the conclusion of the 1868 election Gladstone retreated from Liverpool to Hawarden Castle before returning to London. He received a telegram from Queen Victoria saying that her secretary would shortly arrive with a commission to form a government. He read the telegram and he continued to fell trees. It was recorded that a few minutes later he “looked up and said with great earnestness in his voice and great intensity in his face, exclaiming: “My mission is to pacify Ireland.” He then resumed his task, and never said another word until the tree was down.”

On his return to the capital, he formed the first of four administrations in which he served as Prime Minister – becoming Prime Minister at 58 years of age.

His life long legacy includes a remarkable record as Chancellor of the Exchequer- presenting eleven budgets to Parliament; consistent support for free trade and the shaping of structured fiscal policies; the “mission to pacify Ireland” – which one hundred years later found its ultimate fulfillment in Northern Ireland’s Good Friday Agreement; the promotion of Home Rule and devolution; his confrontation with the unelected House of Lords; meritocratic reform – including public exams throughout almost all of the civil service; the abolition of university religious tests; an appreciation of self reliance and the role of faith in a secular society; the creation of a recognisably modern and democratic political movement; his willingness to confront and split his political party on an issue of principle; his heroic legislation – on everything from free elementary education to the secret ballot; and his ability to rouse the conscience of the nation, embracing causes that challenged tyranny or injustice and promoting national crusades, such as the Midlothian Campaign.

Many volumes have been written about Gladstone’s life. In 1995 the late Roy Jenkins wrote his highly readable biography of Gladstone. He approached his subject in much the same way as John Morley, who published “The Life of William Gladstone” in 1903.

Most recently, in 2007, Richard Shannon added his brilliant “Gladstone, God and Politics”- which re-examines Gladstone’s life from a different vantage point and explains the Statesman’s political life against the backdrop of his religious faith. Morley and Jenkins rightly argue that Gladstone was a great leader of his party but Shannon argues that “Gladstone’s Liberalism was a great problem for the Liberal Party” and says that without understanding Gladstone as a religious leader, viewed simply from a purely partisan or secular point of view, the story becomes distorted and makes no real sense – a proposition with which I agree.

Gladstonianism diverged from the interventionist direction in which his party had been moving: He was highly critical of the new Liberal “pet idea – what they call construction,—that is to say, taking into the hands of the state the business of the individual man”. He wrote that Tory Democracy and this new Liberalism had done “much to estrange me, and has done for many, many years.”

In 1876 Gladstone recalled the proverb “Vox populi, vox Dei” –“The people’s voice, God’s voice”. Religion, for Gladstone, was central to his personal life and to that of the nation: “As to its politics, this country has much less, I think, to fear than to hope; unless through a corruption of its religion – against which, as Conservative or Liberal, I can perhaps say I have striven all my life long.”

These views won him the respect and support of the pioneering Christian leaders of the Labour movement, Keir Hardie, Arthur Henderson and George Lansbury along with Nonconformists, High Anglicans, and Irish Catholics.

In 1998 – the centenary year of Gladstone’s death, I invited Lord Jenkins to give the seventh Roscoe Lecture, entitled “Gladstone: A Consummate Victorian Citizen”.

I asked him where he placed Gladstone in the pecking order of great Prime Ministers:
“When I began writing about him I thought he was a terrible prig. By the time I finished, I thought he was the greatest of our prime Ministers.”

After publishing his masterly 2001 biography of Churchill, Lord Jenkins told me that he had revised his opinion adding that Gladstone, unlike Churchill, had not been tested in war.

Notwithstanding this caveat – and, in fact, as Chancellor Gladstone had considerable experience of the Crimean War – Roy Jenkins added that “Gladstone was, without question, the most remarkable specimen of humanity ever to be in No10 Downing Street.”

Gladstone had plenty of faults – and his wife of sixty years, Catherine Glynne, shrewdly remarked: “Oh, William dear, if you were not such a very great man, what a bore you would be!” What made him great rather than a bore, were his legendry energy, his formidable intellect, and passionate oratory.

At 76 he climbed the highest peak in the Cairngorms; at 86 he personally wheeled 30,000 of his books up the hill from Hawarden Castle to his new St.Deiniol’s Library, and in his eighties he still pursued his hobby of felling great oaks with one of the axes which visitors frequently presented to him.

His intellectual energy made him a voracious bibliophile, personally annotating the books he read, and, sitting with his wife, as he translated the Odes of Horace or the works of Homer, or reading his Bible – in the Greek – as he did each day.

His oratory brought thousands to hear him – and shouters would pass the words back through the crowds. Queen Victoria hated his oratory, famously complaining that when he spoke to her: “He always addresses me as if I were a public meeting.” She remarked to her daughter: “What an incomprehensible old man he is! Old Lord Palmerston was not wrong when he said to me, “he is a very dangerous man.”

Punch contrasted Gladstone’s earnestness with Disraeli’s ability to flatter and charm.

Queen Victoria was certainly not amused by Gladstone’s rumbustuous appeals to the nation as he sought to rouse the popular conscience. Gladstone asserted that “All the world over, I will back the masses against the classes”. Little wonder Lord Palmerston regarded him as a dangerous rabble rouser, stirring sedition with his calls for the enlargement of the franchise and electoral reform. Disraeli loathed him – and while the public nicknamed Gladstone “the People’s William” and the G.O.M: the “Grand Old Man” Disraeli preferred to render this acronym as “God’s Only Mistake”

In a letter to Lord Derby, at Knowsley Hall, Disraeli venomously referred to Gladstone as “…that unprincipled maniac Gladstone – extraordinary mixture of envy, vindictiveness, hypocrisy and superstition.” He once accused Gladstone of conduct that was worse than those who had committed the Bulgarian atrocities.

Gladstone was little more admiring of his leading political adversary: “the Tory Party had principles by which it would and did stand for, bad and for good. All this Dizzy destroyed.”

When Disraeli died, Gladstone proposed a State Funeral, but Disraeli’s will asked for burial alongside his wife, to which Gladstone replied, “As Disraeli lived, so he died — all display, without reality or genuineness.”

Gladstone and Disraeli were the towering figures of Victorian politics. They were political opponents whose dissonant outlook and attitudes, social and cultural backgrounds, led to bitter rivalry and disagreement.

Gladstone’s decision to leave the Conservative Party and to become a Liberal no doubt contributed to this animosity – although as late as 1870 in Dod’s Parliamentary Companion Gladstone described himself as “liberal conservative” – a label later used by Churchill and even David Cameron.

Leaders from all sides of the political divide, including Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, have laid claim to Gladstone’s mantle.

I have talked about his Liverpool upbringing, and his central achievements. The last part of my remarks turns to his abhorrence of tyranny and his belief in the liberties of free peoples to determine their own destiny.

After his defeat in 1874 – having sought to raise revenue from Spirits and Death Duties – and “borne down in a torrent of gin and beer”, as he put it – and as head of a Government which Disraeli famously described as “a range of exhausted volcanoes”, Gladstone resigned as Leader of the Liberal Party. Disraeli formed a new Government.
A short period of quiet followed but Gladstone soon began publishing mildly inflammatory pamphlets and embarking on a scathing critique of Disraeli’s imperialism, warning of the dangers of a bloated empire.
Most memorably, in 1876 he published his “Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East” In a tirade against the tyranny of the Ottoman Turks in the Balkans Gladstone used all his powers of rhetoric. Let me give you a sample:
“Let the Turks now carry away their abuses, in the only possible manner, namely, by carrying off themselves. Their Zaptiehs and their Mudirs, their Bimbashis and Yuzbashis, their Kaimakams and their Pashas, one and all, bag and baggage, shall, I hope, clear out from the province that they have desolated and profaned. This thorough riddance, this most blessed deliverance, is the only reparation we can make to those heaps and heaps of dead, the violated purity alike of matron and of maiden and of child; to the civilization which has been affronted and shamed; to the laws of God, or, if you like, of Allah to the moral sense of mankind at large. …..That such things should be done once is a damning disgrace to the portion of our race which did them; that the door should be left open to their ever so barely possible repetition would spread that shame over the world!”

By 1879 he had decided to turn his moral indignation into a nationwide clarion call.
He would contest the next election at Midlothian and from this began what would become known as the Midlothian Campaigns (of 1879, 1880 and 1884).
In 1879 he gave 30 substantial speeches heard by an estimated 87,000 people; another 18 speeches followed in 1880 – and each was reported extensively in the national newspapers. They were speeches for and from his constituency.
Throughout the Campaigns he argued that nations should reconcile their differences through the Concert system, not secret alliances, that Britain should assert a doctrine of “equal rights of all nations” and, in particular, he condemned the brutality of the Ottoman Empire against its Christian subject nations.
In the 1880 General Election Gladstone’s victory saw him back in office for four years Now he had to deal with the “bloated empire” – not least in the debacle in Sudan with Charles Gordon’s death at Khartoum when the acronym G.O.M. (Grand Old Man) was turned on him by the Conservatives who now called him M.O.G. (Murderer of Gordon).
The following year, 1886, Gladstone returned to office for a third time. Now allied to the Irish Nationalists he sought to promote Irish Home Rule. This policy split the Liberal Party and led to the Unionist breakaway. Within months his Home Rule Bill had been defeated. Once again he was out of Downing Street. He knew that the failure to provide an equitable settlement for Ireland would have disastrous consequences: “We are bound to lose Ireland in consequence of years of cruelty, stupidity and misgovernment and I would rather lose her as a friend than as a foe.”
In 1892, at the next election, Gladstone returned for the fourth and final time. Now aged 82 he became the oldest man to occupy the Prime Minister’s office. He held the post for two years until resigning in 1894. His resignation followed the defeat of his second Irish Home Rule Bill. It had passed all its stages in the Commons achieving a Second Reading majority of 43 but the House of Lords defeated it 419 votes to 41 – and ended both Gladstone’s parliamentary career and any prospects of a peaceful settlement of the Irish Question.
His mission to pacify Ireland would be put on hold for the best part of one hundred years and a civil war; partition; Stormont’s abuses and discrimination; civil rights marches; British troops; Bloody Sunday; direct rule; internment; hunger strikes; and decades of bombings and paramilitary terror would be the consequence.
His last speech to the Commons came on March 1st 1894 when he urged the House to overturn the veto of the Lords. That day he also chaired the last of his 556 cabinets. Because of the tears of his colleagues it became known as the “blubbering cabinet”. Gladstone remained still and composed.
The following year, in 1895, he left the House.
But let me end where I began – in his home town of Liverpool.
On December 3rd, 1892, Gladstone returned to this St.George’s Hall and he was given the freedom of the city. The presentation of a casket was made on behalf of the Corporation by Robert Durning Holt, the Lord Mayor – which his great grandson, Sir William Gladstone, has brought with him for us to see today.
And, in a perfect act of symmetry, four years later, on September 24th, 1896, now aged 86, at Hengler’s Circus, in Low Hill, Gladstone gave his last public speech. In another two years he died of cancer.

The Hengler’s Circus speech came after a minor uprising in 1894, in Sasun, in Turkish Armenia. Throughout 1895 a series of pogroms were carried out throughout Turkey’s Armenian provinces – and even in the capital, Istanbul.
Gladstone took first hand accounts of the killings from Armenians who travelled to Hawarden Castle, his home in North Wales. He said “the powers of language hardly suffice to describe what has been and is being done, and exaggeration, if we were ever so much disposed to it, is in such a case really beyond our power.”

Gladstone reflected that only the enormity of the “sickening horrors” perpetrated against the Armenians, and “a strong sense of duty” could have induced “a man of my age” to abandon what he called “the repose and quietude” of his retirement to embark on what would be his last great mission.

He declared that “We are not dealing with a common and ordinary question of abuses of government. We are dealing with something that goes far deeper…..four awful words – plunder, murder, rape, and torture.”

By the time he came to speak in Liverpool, a year later – and where an immense crowd of 6,000 people gathered to hear him – Gladstone knew that it was his duty to rouse the conscience of the nation. The Times reported that many more people thronged outside while The Liverpool Daily Post recorded that the entire city turned out for him and had greeted him with “a tornado of applause.” Such passion for great political questions is so often absent today.

In describing the “horribly accumulated outrages” he demanded a non-sectarian and non-partisan approach; and he also emphasised that “this is no crusade against Mohammedanism”; that, whatever faith had been held by the Armenians, “it would have been incumbent upon us with the same force and the same sacredness” to speak out on their behalf.

With precision, Gladstone identifies and names the Ottoman Turkish Sultan, Sultan Abdul Hamid II – “the assassin” – as responsible for the order to massacre the Armenians; and he roundly condemns the European powers for giving the Sultan “the assurance of impunity.” While believing that ideally Europe should act together he bitterly criticised their failure to do so: “Collectively, the powers have under-gone miserable disgrace…
“Translate the acts of the Sultan into words and they become these, ‘I have tried your patience in distant places; I will try it under your own eyes. I have desolated my provinces; I will now desolate my capital. I have found that your sensitiveness has not been effectually provoked by all that I have heretofore done; I will come nearer to you and see whether … I shall or shall not wake the wrath which has slept so long.’”

When Europe failed to act, Gladstone said Britain had the right to act alone and not “make herself a slave to be dragged at the chariot wheel of other powers of Europe.”

Many of these same arguments have relevance and application in our own times but so does the challenge which comes at the culmination of his Hengler’s Circus address: he demands no ambiguity, no neutrality but condemnation of crimes against humanity “which have already come to such a magnitude and to such a depth of atrocity that they constitute the most terrible, most monstrous series of proceedings that have ever been recorded in the dismal and deplorable history of human crime.”

Gladstone was right to prophesy that indifference would lead to catastrophic consequences.
Seventeen years after his death, the Armenian genocide of 1915-16 would become the first genocide of the twentieth century. Over one million men, women and children were killed as the Ottoman Turks sought to erase entirely the Armenian identity from eastern Turkey.
The belief that no-one really cares is what always encourages the tyrant.
Hitler believed he could invade Poland and do so with impunity: “who after all,” he asked, “speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” The same rationale – a culture of impunity – led to the industrialised murders of the concentration camps.
The folly of forgetting – collective amnesia about what has gone before – led to Hitler’s ideology of a purified Master-Race. It was directly inspired by the biological vision of a purified pan-Turkism, based on racial origins and racial superiority; even his corruption of medicine and science drew inspiration from the deliberate infecting of Armenians with typhus in a sequence of medical experiments.

If, in 1896 or 1915, the world had saved the Armenians – or after World War One held those responsible to account – would Hitler have believed that he could act against the Jews with impunity? And might a holocaust have been averted?

Perhaps, as we ponder the contemporary failure to end the continuing massacre of people the world over – from Congo, to Burma, to Darfur – we should lament the absence of statesman like Gladstone today.
After his death, on Ascension Day, 19th May, 1898, he was given a state funeral and was buried in the statesman’s corner of Westminster Abbey. Two years later Catherine was laid to rest at his side.
Gladstone was mourned throughout Britain and hardly a town or city is without a road or street named in his honour.
In this bicentenary year of his birth, as we revisit the life of this scourge of tyrants and great son of this city, it may be pointless to say “If only Gladstone Was Here” – as I did when I was 17 – but it is far from pointless to hope that through the study of his life and times we can inculcate a new generation with his sense of political purpose, his high calling, and his passionate belief that we must confront tyranny in all its forms.
Gladstone knew that the best we can sometimes do is to put down markers for the future, memorably asserting that “We look forward to the time when the power to love will replace the love of power. Then will our world know the blessings of peace.” Perhaps we can share his optimistic belief in the final outcome recalling his words that whatever the short-term defeats “you cannot fight against the future. Time is on our side.”

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