God's Country

Part Thirty-Three

'The Bible will keep you from sin or sin will keep you from the Bible.'

Dwight L. Moody

Colin Hughes sat right at the back of the room, his CNN accreditation on his lapel, good enough to get him right into the press conference. No one was checking very hard because the CDP wanted everyone to cover their story. He slipped out at the end and went back to his hotel to scan the document, email it to his clients and read it himself as the PDF was not going to reach him via his fake email address. He was not a political strategist or specialist but he was a voter. Taken as a whole, he could see that the manifesto was an appeal to a certain sort of conservative, regardless of whether their views were left or right, in that the ideas proposed were quite fundamental to daily life. Overall, the message was that Britain was breaking down as a society. The governments of the past few decades were not looking at the big picture. Buckingham was suggesting that to fix things going forwards the people of Great Britain first had to accept the need for change. Full employment was never going to happen again, so prioritising certain sections of the workforce made sense. It was no secret that the existing benefit system needed reform, but neither of the old parties, purveyors of old politics, something the CDP apparently abhorred, were prepared to provide the cure, because it might hurt them at the polls.

Much to his surprise, Hughes found himself agreeing with some of the arguments. If you could not provide a job for everyone, it was sort of logical to choose who you wanted to work and who you wanted to be unemployed. The country had to pick up the tab for the shortfall so it ought to be organised for the good of everyone. Hughes did not particularly feel that the argument justified discriminating against women per se, but if you had to choose who should get a precious job it would obviously be a man with a family to support. Lying on his bed he went back to the beginning and started reading again. He had to admit that if the Reformists were fanatics, they were clever fanatics. There was definitely something there.

To anyone like him, Christian values made perfect sense. It was a resonant backdrop to everything the Reformists said, and as they pointed out it was more flexible and familiar than socialism or capitalism. Reading through their words, he found it all quite familiar, and the steps in thinking he was being asked to take did at least seem logical. It was like a throwback to his childhood in many ways, to things his own children had no real comprehension of. He could remember being a cub scout and learning the Lord's Prayer by rote. He could also quite clearly remember a sense of shame around things like homosexuality and divorce, the sense that those things were somehow wrong. Buckingham was not openly decrying things like homosexuality because that was more or less impossible in the modern world, but he was saying that things had gone too far the other way. Hughes found that hard to argue with.

Buckingham was also cleverly admitting that he could not win. It was crushingly obvious that he could not, with just twenty five candidates, but the assertion that the objective was to set the political agenda was a strong one. People were sick of the old lame excuses, they were tired of hearing the same things, they were tired of the blame game. Empty promise after empty promise had failed to end the worldwide financial slump, because politicians all thought more of votes in the next election than they did about putting things right. The whole situation was crying out for someone who had a longer view than the next election to set out their stall for the future.

'We have to take the biblical truth and start applying it in the statehouse, the schoolhouse and the marketplace.'

Rod Parsley

"Sorry you had to hang around so long Gavin...I am in some demand, for once." Charles Buckingham shook Gavin Williams' hand and motioned to him to a seat in the small room they were using for one to one interviews. It was a little bleak but it was private and there was a pot of coffee.