We talk easily about faith and public service: education, medicine, law and order. Few Catholics would <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/letters-a-morally-tough-choice-in-us-election-biden-v-trump-does-not-absolve-catholics-from-the-need-to-vote/"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">abstain from voting</mark></a>. And yet we have a reticence when it comes to talking about faith and public office.
Electoral politics is tough and messy. It has an adversarial nature, like our judicial system or broadcast media. It is a tough job that relies on teamwork and compromise. And it is hugely important because decisions get made by those who are round the table: decisions like the guidance in the pandemic to close places of worship alongside cinemas.
We find it easy to talk about Catholic prison officers, teachers and nurses, but we talk much less about the pathways into Whitehall, Westminster and regional government where the policy decisions are made that affect prisoners, children and the sick.
In 2014, I stumbled into politics after putting in a speculative application to work on the frontline during the 2015 General Election. Politics moves quickly and two weeks later, just two months after my 21st birthday, I was standing in an empty office in a marginal constituency, leading my first Parliamentary campaign. Over the next several years, I worked professionally and voluntarily on political recruitment, encouraging talented people to stand as councillors and MPs and undertaking an academic study on pathways into politics.
What I found surprised me. Despite significant airtime given to discussing politics, there is very limited awareness of elected office as a career path, and even less awareness of other areas of influence like public appointments. Having a vocation to public service is not enough on its own, and when you speak with the people who came to politics from non-political backgrounds, circumstantial factors were key triggers making their calling a reality: meeting a politician, an election, a knock on the door from a political party.
In 2019 a group of us founded <a href="https://catholictori.es/#:~:text=Catholics%20in%20the%20Conservative%20Party&text=We%20are%20a%20group%20of,or%20religion%20in%20the%20country."><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">Catholics in the Conservative Party</mark></a> to increase support, recruitment and mentoring for Catholics in public life. Stakeholders within the faith community told us that we’d find it difficult, that Catholics were under-represented in politics. But what we found surprised us. With minimal publicity, the group swelled from 5 to over 200 within a year and kept growing.
We were also told we would have difficulty finding an MP to back us; within a few months we’d secured twelve. Sending out a recruitment email to our mailing list, I received dozens of responses from names I knew professionally. Attending Mass at Party Conference for the first time, I sat next to a colleague I’d worked closely with for a year.
Faith can be a broker to cross party relations across the political divide, as we found working with our colleagues in <mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color"><a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/mps-launch-catholics-for-labour-group/">Catholics for Labour</a></mark>, and can help breech the frictions of an environment where many feel distanced from politics partly because of divisiveness.
Catholics are out there – and doing good work in public office. Though quantifying the numbers is difficult. An estimate taken of the 2019 intake of Conservative MPs shows that roughly 8 per cent of the 365 cohort at the time were Catholic. That dataset is incomplete and the likelihood is the true number is higher.
The 8-13 per cent of the UK population that are Catholic contains a high proportion of recent immigrants, so in theory we should expect the proportion of Catholics active in the establishment to be slightly lower than the population average. Counter to what is often thought, though, in public office we may have an over-representation of people of faith.
Yet people of faith in public office will say they feel isolated. If we have conflated “not talked about” with “not there”, it’s easy to see how this has happened. <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/going-to-the-polls/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">Politics can struggle to understand the nature of faith</mark></a>: the term “Catholic issues” has become shorthand for particular social issues.
Catholic politicians who live their faith by supporting investment in small to medium-sized enterprises (SME), by expanding skills bootcamps into deprived areas or by maintaining the overseas aid commitment face a difficult choice: if they choose to talk about their faith publicly, they risk decades of every question being about gay marriage and abortion.
Candidates wishing to enter politics need to be aware of how to communicate in a way that is understandable to those not from a faith background. For some, it becomes simpler not to talk about it at all.
At the same time, the faith community can struggle to treat politics with nuance. Preaching “support for society’s poorest” from the pulpit is easy because everyone agrees with the intention. But politicians and civil servants have to roll up their sleeves and turn intention into implementation, and that becomes complicated.
It’s far easier holding a foodbank founder up as a role model than highlighting the work of a civil servant dealing with income support policy, even though it’s the latter that has a better chance of tackling the root causes of poverty.
Countering that trend is difficult because if any sector needs better publicity, recruitment and mentoring, it is public office.
As people of faith we have a call to charity, to view our neighbour as ourselves and to view everyone as our neighbour. Those are the qualities vital in public service, whether serving the community as a councillor, as a civil servant, or as a public appointee.<br><br>Over 100 MPs are standing down at this election and at least 11 per cent of them are estimated to be Catholics.
Catholics are predisposed to public office, we are good at it – and we should do much more to encourage people of faith onto that pathway. <br><em><br>Photo: Britain's Prime Minister and Conservative Party leader Rishi Sunak visits a Morrisons supermarket on the campaign trail in the build-up to the July 4 general election, Carterto, England, 2 July 2024. (Photo by PHIL NOBLE/POOL/AFP via Getty Images.)</em>
<em>Frances Lasok is the Conservative Parliamentary</em> <em>candidate for Newcastle Central & West during the 4 July UK General Election. </em> <br><br><strong><strong>This article was written before the election was called; it appears in the Summer Special July/August 2024 issue of the <em>Catholic Herald</em>. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent and high-calibre counter-cultural Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/subscribe/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">HERE</mark></a></strong></strong>.
