Williams voices doubts over May, Trump and the majority vote

Lord (Rowan) Williams has expressed concern about “the blurring of boundaries between democratic decision and populist mandate”, writes Margaret Hebblethwaite.

The former Archbishop of Canterbury, who was giving the Las Casas Lecture on Political Liberty and Religious Liberty at St John’s College, Oxford, on 20 January, the day of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, said that blurring these boundaries undermined the legitimacy of a minority view. He said that the lecture led him to reflect on “a rather timely and pressing set of concerns”, more than he had anticipated when he was offered the title. Key among them was “the confusion about democracy and the resurgence of the unsettling language of the people’s will”, as was seen in the extraordinary global growth of populism.

He explained that “when you have extremely close popular votes, when – as in both the American election and the British referendum last year – you have votes hovering around the 50 per cent mark, what you are going to do with the dissident minority of 49 per cent is rather a serious question. You need to have a good political perspective of why it is important that the minority should be attended to.”

“Winston Churchill was surely right in saying democracy is the worst form of government apart from all the others,” said Lord Williams, “and given that this is what we inherited, we have to make sense of it.” Lord Williams is currently master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and told The Tablet he is preparing “a longish book on Christology”. When he retires from Cambridge in three years’ time it will be “back to Wales”, where he was born.