social order should promote; but it must leave the politician the devising of the precise means to those ends.'2 Today's engineers have forgotten where they left the construction plans. They have become obsessive about claimed rights and silent about duties and responsibilities. Much of this decline can be traced directly to Judaeo-Christian values within our parties and politics being pushed to the sidelines. The new Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sachs, put it well recently when he said we need a richer language than the language of rights; one which also acknowledges duties and responsibilities. We have moved a long way from the days when William Wilberforce was able to write about the interplay between faith and politics. He said:
It is the peculiar glory, and main purpose of Christianity, to bring all the faculties of our nature into their just subordination and dependence; that so the whole man, complete in all his functions, may be restored to the true ends of his being, and be devoted entire and harmonious, to the service and glory of God.3
Surveying a country whose churches were experiencing spiritual renewal and the regenerating influence of Wesley and Newman; and whose politics would be confronted by Gladstone's call to action and by Shaftesbury's and his own demands for social reform, Wilberforce also wrote: 'I boldly avow my firm persuasion, that to the decline of religion our national difficulties must be chiefly ascribed and that my only solid hopes for the well-being of my country depends on the persuasion that she still contains many who love and obey the Gospel of Christ.'4 As secularism has rebuilt its fortresses in Britain, we have lost our faith in Britain. Cardinal Basil Hume was right when he said in The Times in 1990 after Parliament had voted to allow abortion of the handicapped until birth, that Britain may no longer call itself a Christian country. Whether, as this alternative guide to the health of the nation has shown, we can call ourselves a good or happy country is also debatable. As our parties and the people who vote for them have lost their faith, Britain has undergone a corresponding decline. Perhaps that is why it is now right to seek the renewal of our British Christian and democratic traditions, and to reflect on the challenges and dilemmas which European change will pose for Britain.
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