Politicians lacking Christian conviction and moral values have cause voters to lose trust in politics, according to a leading UK Labour .jpg)
politician.
David Lammy (pictured), former minister for higher education, compared many current politicians to King Herod and accused the political system of being dominated by “yes-men, placemen and posers,” the Daily Telegraph reports.
Mr Lammy, who has expressed an interesting in running for the office of Mayor of London, has previously stated that fatherlessness in urban areas was one of the reasons behind the London riots of 2011.
Delivering an Advent sermon on Christianity in public life at St Michael’s Church in Westminster, he said that the lack of principle among politicians has eroded trust in the political system.
He said public disillusionment with politics was partly down to the cynical behaviour of politicians and their aides.
Drawing images from the Nativity story, he suggested that politics was now dominated by people largely driven by self interest and self promotion, not moral values.
“There are still plenty of people with a Herod-like view of power as a goal which trumps all others. And more and more over the last 20 to 30 years there have developed ‘wise’ men and women only too happy to bluff and spin and beguile in support of these people,” he said.
He added: “It used to be fashionable to say that Britain was broken. But is it not the case that it is really Westminster that is fractured? It has lost touch with ordinary people and with ordinary values of decency and truthfulness.”
In 2011, in the wake of the London riots, Mr Lammy, MP for the Tottenham area where the riots started said that the lack of male role models in young men’s lives was one of the long term reasons behind the trouble.
Mr Lammy MP warned that in areas like his there are “none of the basic starting presumptions of two adults who want to start a family, raise children together, love them, nourish them and lead them to full independence”.
He continued: “The parents are not married and the child has come, frankly, out of casual sex; the father isn’t present, and isn’t expected to be.”
In a book about the riots, Out of the Ashes, Mr Lammy criticised both conservatives and liberals for their attitudes towards single mothers. He criticises conservatives for being too ready to condemn single mothers while liberals are criticised for too ready to think father don’t matter a whit.
He wrote: “For traditionalists, single parents were totemic. They chose to ignore the fact that most were abandoned by their partners rather than victims of their own “promiscuity”. As commentators and politicians lambasted the assumed moral failings of single mothers, I came to appreciate the voices who wanted to stand up for people such as my mother – smart, dedicated and deserted by her husband.
“They came overwhelmingly from liberals in the Labour party and beyond, who realised that these women were performing heroics and needed help, not insults.
“The danger is that those same liberals who fought so hard for single mothers now give the impression that fatherlessness does not matter at all. They insist that it is the quality of parenting that matters, that the loss of a father matters only if it means a loss of income.”