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The biography of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, revealed shortly earlier than he led Labour to its large General Election victory on July 4, reveals the Christianity in his background.
The writer of Keir Starmer, The Biography is Tom Baldwin, a nationwide newspaper journalist and former communications director for the Labour Party. He recounts how Starmer’s late mom Jo, who died in 2015, was an everyday member of St John’s Hurst Green, a village close to Oxted in Surrey.
Jo Starmer, a nurse and mom of 4 youngsters, endured life-long well being issues with extraordinary braveness. She continued going to her native Church of England parish church after she had her leg amputated due to an accident within the Lake District in 2008.
Baldwin describes how Starmer’s late father, Rod, a professing atheist like his son, took her to church in her wheelchair: “Each Sunday Rod would wheel Jo into church, earlier than sitting exterior till the ‘spiritual mumbo-jumbo’ was over, then complain to a few of the different congregants about how they’d parked their automobiles on the pavement and made his job of getting the wheelchair in harder.”
The e book reveals that “one among Starmer’s regrets is that his youngsters by no means bought to know her or really feel the love she had given him”. Starmer is quoted describing his mom’s response after she fell over at a highway junction, with the household canine, whereas assembly him and his sister on their method house from main faculty. Unable to stand up as a result of influence of Still’s illness on her joints and ligaments, she needed to be helped onto her ft by a passing motorist.
“Mum was by no means one to make a fuss. When she was again on her ft, she joked about what had occurred, paid a lot of consideration to the canine, and took us house,” Starmer recalled.
Baldwin consists of an interview with Shaun Fenton, the headmaster of Reigate Grammar School, which Starmer attended within the Seventies. It is now a non-public faculty and is about to be severely hit by Labour’s plan to take away non-public colleges’ exemption from paying VAT on their charges.
Fenton is quoted as saying: “Keir will bear in mind having to sing our college track at assemblies, ‘To Be a Pilgrim’, which is all about happening a particular journey with a function. My recommendation to him is to go on and be a pilgrim and do good on the planet.”
The hymn, primarily based on phrases by John Bunyan, the 17th Century Puritan writer of the Christian traditional, The Pilgrim’s Progress, states in its opening verse: “He who would valiant be ‘gainst all catastrophe, let him in fidelity observe the Master. There’s no discouragement shall make him as soon as relent his first avowed intent to be a pilgrim.”
It concludes with a name to brave Christian discipleship: “Since, Lord, Thou dost defend us with Thy Spirit, we all know we on the finish shall life inherit. Then, fancies, flee away! I’ll concern not what males say, I’ll labour evening and day to be a pilgrim.”
In an article for The Spectator on July 6, Dan Hitchens, a former editor of The Catholic Herald, requested: “Does Keir Starmer’s atheism matter?”
Hitchens argued that what he termed “Starmer’s insensitivity to faith” may nicely matter: “Take his coverage of introducing VAT on faculty charges. Eton and Harrow can take it. But what concerning the Christian, Muslim and Jewish establishments with attendances under 300 and charges of, say, £6,000 a yr, which run on goodwill and prayer?”
Hitchens additionally cited Labour’s plan to ban conversion remedy “deserted by the Tories partly as a result of each method of framing it was an apparent menace to spiritual freedom”.
He quoted the Evangelical Alliance’s warning that an expansive ban “would place church leaders liable to prosecution once they preach on biblical texts regarding marriage and sexuality” and will “criminalise a member of a church who prays with one other member once they ask for prayer to withstand temptation”.
“Labour’s manifesto guarantees to institute a ban, with out explaining how they might keep away from placing conventional spiritual believers on the improper facet of the regulation,” Hitchens wrote.
So, there’s appreciable irony in the truth that Starmer used to sing Bunyan’s hymn commonly as a faculty boy. Unless Labour relents on its plan to impose arguably essentially the most draconian restriction on British spiritual liberty for the reason that 17th Century, orthodox Christians who maintain to the Church’s conventional sexual ethic are more likely to want simply the form of non secular and ethical braveness that To Be a Pilgrim requires.
Julian Mann is a former Church of England vicar, now an evangelical journalist primarily based in Lancashire.
