"Brookmyre, Christopher - Boiling A Frog" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brookmyre Christopher)

Church or the Labour Party, you had to invest your faith
and your loyalty in what the greater whole could achieve,
and sometimes that meant swallowing things you didn't
personally like the taste of.
The crucial difference, however, was that in politics you
didn't actually have to believe in those things. You only had
to say you did, and this was where the problem lay. Elspeth
Doyle might be New Labour, but there was no such thing
as New Catholic.
There had always been divergences between Church
and Party, both being broad enough to accommodate as
wide a mix of types as they did a spectrum of opinion.
Plenty of Catholics (admittedly the more middle-class ones)
were strictly Tory-voting, as they regarded anything further left as the
thin end of an atheist-communist wedge.
Equally, there had always been those in the Party (again,
funnily enough, the more middle-class ones) who disapproved of religion in
general, considering it an instrument
of oppression.
She remembered her father's weary expression and visible discomfort when
his explanations to her could not
reconcile the views of both. It was from him that she
learned how the tolerance of policies you disapproved of
could be a necessary sacrifice for the cause of a greater good.
This didn't mean that you were abandoning or betraying
your beliefs. It just meant that even when you believed the
Party was wrong, you kept your dissent to yourself.
There were those who might, with gravely shaking heads,
condemn your silence as a breach of the Faith ('far worse
that a good man should do nothing...'), but what political
options did that leave them? Total abstention (aka copping
out) or starting that aforementioned one-member party and
voting for it. It was such narrow-mindedness that led to
the appearance of one-issue Holy Wullie outfits like the
Pro-Life Alliance. Sure, they had Elspeth's sympathies on
that subject, but what about everything else?
'So, you've covered abortion and euthanasia, and you've
touched a little on human embryo research. Now, on to the
economy.
'Er . . .Т
'Unemployment?'
'Er . . .Т
'Foreign policy?'
'Er . . .Т
Her father had regarded as unquestionable the tenet that
the Church was always right, and had taught her that politics, not
religion, was the place where compromise could be
accommodated. When Church and Party were at odds, you
agreed to disagree. It was a matter, he explained, of mutual
respect. You respected the Party's need for solidarity and,