蜜芽传媒

Good Morning.

Whether you're selling sausage rolls or building up a bank, the top advertising tip from the start of 2019 is to provoke. Get the nation arguing and you get the nation talking. Some respond in anger, but others may warm to your stance, and bring you their custom. So, this week, at the very point when vegan baked goods had become a stale topic, a financial institution has declared Britain not to be an island, and sparked a fresh and tasty debate.

John Donne, the seventeenth century writer and Dean of St Paul's Cathedral got there long ago. "No man is an island", he began his most famous poem, albeit in language a little too gender specific for today. The demise of any human being diminishes all, he argues, before concluding, "Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee". Religious leaders, including me, often cite his sentiment to infer separation is always bad and joining always good. Yet I wonder whether we have missed a vital point.

One of my favourite places is Holy Island, on the Northeast Coast of England. Settled by the early Christian monks, twice a day the rising waters cut it off from the mainland. When the tide is in, it feels a very different place. It's as though a deeper, unspoken bond unites those of us who remain on its soil after the last car has set off, hastily, across the causeway. I sense something similar when I get back to Salford after a busy day, close the door behind me, and settle down in the island of my home.

Being an islander does not imply a desire to stay cut off from the world outside, it's about finding the safety and security that allow us to cross our causeways with confidence. Indeed, the best islands are not found on any map. They are built from the shared values, beliefs and relationships that ground and sustain us, not least our faith traditions. When I say the Lord's Prayer, or sing a hymn in church, I gain strength to travel further from my comfort zone.

Yesterday, in response to the verbal abuse of one of their number outside Parliament, over 50 MPs wrote to complain to the Metropolitan Police Commissioner. Even more than a provocative bank advert, these unpleasant scenes in Westminster remind us that Britain's national identity remains bound up in that short stretch of water which separates us from the European mainland. Questions about our nationhood, and our place in the world, face us acutely; and are unlikely to be resolved within the present debates and decisions about Brexit. A greater and abiding challenge presses on us; to regain our sense of our identity, to find our true island.

Show less