This is one of a series of articles in which representatives of the main parties make their pitch for the Catholic vote.
The encyclical Rerum Novarum, issued by Pope Leo XIII, sets out the rights and duties of every Catholic towards the conditions of the working classes. The document can be more or less summed up in a simple yet potent quotation from it: “there underlies a dictate of natural justice … that wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner”.
I believe that Ukip is now the only party that is willing and able to fulfil these obligations. Our manifesto commits us to lowering the tax burden on lower earners and the self-employed. We’re committed to increasing the standard of living for workers, and we’re the only party with a realistic and radical approach to the housing crisis, using prefab modular homes and brownfield sites.
We’ve also been consistent in this concern for workers in terms of immigration, and are the only party committed to ending free movement – something cynically lobbied for by big employers to compress wages and saturate the jobs market.
It can be very easy for Catholics to fall into the intellectually flabby and simplistic trap of “welcome the newcomer”. Of course, on an individual level, we are obliged to do so by the words of Our Saviour. However, on the governmental level, immigration poses other questions with implications that require more sophisticated moral discernment. Ukip has been the only party which has made real ethical points about the effect of continued mass immigration on the working conditions of the poor in this country, as well as the issues faced by the countries that skilled immigrants leave behind.
In matters social and cultural, Ukip is the only party which has consistently argued for the need to protect our Judaeo-Christian heritage, as well as the liberty of conscience for Christians. Indeed, it was for that reason we refused to back same-sex marriage; we foresaw (rightly, if the Ashers Bakery case is anything to go by) the problems that would be faced by religious people in acting according to their beliefs. We are also the only party with leading figures who have expressed concern about the teaching of sex education, including LGBT sex education, to primary school pupils.
Finally, we are the only party that has consistently backed Brexit, a position which is completely conducive to the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, despite the flowery language regarding the European Union from Cardinal Nichols and other churchmen.
Those are the nitty-gritty policy points, with some Catholic dogma thrown in. But Catholics ought also to take a broader view of what Ukip stands for. We’re essentially against the new globalism. That isn’t to say we’re against a global world. Of course, we cannot turn the clock back to an age before cheap flights and the internet. Nor would we want to. Our survival as a nation depends upon being confident in that world, and rebuilding relationships with nations we’ve long ignored.
However, that world is one with a geopolitics far different to that of St John Paul II. His geopolitics of the Christian faith, one that helped bring down an evil empire, has long gone. His current successor seems more content with working with an altogether different and prevailing geopolitics rather than attempting to carve out his own.
That prevailing geopolitics emerged sometime in the 1990s as a sort of merger between the two existing positions of the 1980s. It took the statist and cultural aspects from Marxism while maintaining the market-driven, consumerist position of Western capitalism. It doesn’t care much for countries, national identities or local cultures. Nor does it care much for individual liberties and consciences, although it does promote self-seeking and instant gratification.
Transnational companies have completely bought into it as it serves so many of their interests, jettisoning many traditional aspects of society for the sake of profit and expansion. It certainly doesn’t care much for faith or traditional Catholicism. The Church is welcome to engage with it, but only if it agrees to be a meek NGO which doesn’t cause too much trouble. This geopolitics is godless, and it’s only muscular opponent is Islamism.
But in 2016 we saw the potential for a rise in a new geopolitics with Brexit and Trump, one that does respect individual conscience and extends this respect towards national interests, culture and identity; one that is broadly conservative and dismisses the cant of the liberal elite as mere decadence. It understands the threat of Islamism. It also understands that happiness isn’t measured by GDP figures, and isn’t willing to sacrifice people and what they hold dear on the altar of materialism. As Nigel Farage said when debating with Nick Clegg: “It isn’t just about money.”
Ukip, although still finding its feet post-Brexit, does still broadly represent this movement in the UK. Indeed, it is the only party to do so.
Catholics in this election should therefore look at the bigger picture and ask themselves what type of world they want to live in, what type of world is safer for them as practising Catholics and what type of world is going to return their influence in public life.
Jamie Ross McKenzie is chairman of Ukip’s youth wing, Young Independence
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