The Wycliffe Touchstone: Of, By, and For the People
If policies don’t pass this test, they should be questioned closely
A touchstone is the block used in gold markets to prove the genuine quality of a piece of gold. A mild scraping across the touchstone will leave a characteristic mark. If is doesn’t make that mark, it’s not gold.
It is an ancient and specifically English instinct that government should be of the people, by the people, and for the people. Right now, in this time of perverse and punitive policy offerings by both major parties, it re-emerges as a more useful political touchstone than any specific set of exhausted ideologies or impassioned ethical claims.
Of the people, by the people and for the the people. The Americans laid claim to the idea, after Abraham Lincoln deployed it in this Gettysburg Address in 1863. But like many politicians before and after him, he was plagiarising. Five hundred years before Gettysburg, John Wycliffe conjured it up in the introduction to his revolutionary translation of the Bible into English.
Who was John Wycliffe? Well, he was a 14th century Yorkshireman and a scholar. As well as his work in translating the Bible, he was a reformer and a professor at Oxford University teaching philosophy and theology. In other words, he was overseeing 14th century PPE. The phrase - let’s call it the Wycliffe Touchstone - comes from his justification for translating the Bible - that it would help in the better government of the people, by the people and for the people.
The power of this simple formulation was disruptive: it inspired a whole English political/religious tradition of Lollardism, which for hundreds of years after was a major and recurrent irritant to governance which, of course, had no intention of testing itself on Wycliffe’s Touchstone.
Why is such a simple phrase so powerful and, above all, so useful, still? Can this brief slogan from the 14th century PPE syllabus really be more useful than its 21st century curriculum?
Yes indeed. For me, I think there are two really powerful reasons. The first is that it identifies, indeed demands identification of, a single group: ‘the people’. This at a time when the full force of English identity, let alone coherent national government, was in its infancy. For Wycliffe, it was government for ‘the people’ of England. Not ‘some of the people’, not ‘the communities’, not ‘the lords and barons’, not, indeed, any sectional interest at all. Rather, government was to be for the people, the whole people.
And note, this is not exactly the same as ‘the nation’.
The second source of its power is this: if policies are not ‘for the people’, then they must be for some other power or interest. And that poses the questions: OK, who? And why?
When you use this touchstone to assess the quality, and indeed the validity, of current British policies, the degree to which our broad political establishment fails these fundamental tests is alarmingly clear.
Which current policies are made, or offered, exclusively in the interest ‘of the [British] people’?
It is far easier to spot policies which fail this test than those which pass it. ‘Devolution’ policies clearly doesn’t pass because they are concerned only to satisfy the political discontents of a section of the British people.
‘Net Zero’ policies don’t even claim to be in the interests of the people: they are there purportedly to ‘save the planet’. In that cause, radically punitive and impoverishing policies are imposed upon the people, whether it is covert taxation to subsidise ‘renewables’, demands, possibly enforceable by fines and imprisonment, for major personal spending on expensive and ineffective heat pumps, expensive electric cars. The cluster of policies designed to limit not only travel by cars, but more broadly travel per se are not even claimed to be for the good of the people, but for the good of the planet, supposedly (despite their unambiguous global failure).
Member-states of the European Union are regularly informed that they are accepting new policies in the name of ‘building Europe’, or ‘completing the single market’ etc. Again, such claims are prima facie dubious: such policies were never made ‘by the people’. They could not be ‘of the people’ if the object was to ‘build Europe’. And for each individual country, it was a legitimate debate as to whether they were ‘for the people’ at all. To be ‘for’ the European Union, is not, and cannot be, the same as being ‘for the people’.
Then there are the policies of privatisation. When key infrastructures (water, power, travel) are sold, particularly to foreign investors, there’s not even the pretense that these are run ‘by the people, and for the people’. They are specifically run for the benefit of shareholders, and very often those shareholders are sovereign wealth funds. Did no politician stop to ask whether these policies were of, by and for the people? No, they did not.
Then there are the swathes of policies and establishment rules of thumb which specifically seek to divide ‘the people’ in order to ingratiate themselves to particular interest groups. Take your pick.
This begins to read like a list of ‘modern liberal’ policies that can’t leave a respectable mark on the Wycliffe Touchstone. Alas, it is so. ‘Liberals’ must ask themselves what mark their agendas do leave there.
Here’s the key point: if policies are not ‘for the people’, they are still ‘for’ someone or something. No charge of ‘conspiracy-mongering’ should be levelled at those pointing it out. If not ‘for the people’, then it is entirely legitimate, and indeed urgent, to enquire who it is ‘for’, and why it has been pursued.
It‘s at this point that we must consider the difference between ‘the people’ and ‘the nation’. Politicians very often will claim to be acting for the good of the nation, even when this seemingly offers nothing good for the people.
For it is all too obvious that often ‘nationalism’ justifies policies which are either irrelevant to, or actually harmful to ‘the people’. To me, a useful starting point to consider the difference is something said by William Penn in the 17th century: ‘Gross impropriety it is that a nation’s pride should be maintained in the face of its poor.’
Bear this distinction in mind when you consider, say, the justification for the Iraq War, or the current policy of inserting British warships into the China/Taiwan face-off. Consider it also when we are warned of the loss of face, the loss of influence, of, say, scaling back the impositions on finances and liberties of Net Zero policies. Or the loss of face involved in leaving the European Human Rights Convention in order to address mass illegal migration.
Whenever politicians praise themselves for taking a global lead, or warn that that global leadership is in jeopardy, you should get suspicious.
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Get suspicious and reach for the Touchstone: ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’? If the demands of ‘global leadership’ are not clearly overlapping with ‘of, by and for’, then once again, the crucial question is ‘why are we doing this?’ Who is it ‘by’ and who is it ‘for’?
In my lifetime, I think there has never been a more urgent and comprehensive call for policies to be tested on the Wycliffe Touchstone. For my money, all the major political parties right now fail it, and fail it obviously, continuously and across almost the entire policy spectrum. Alas.
You ask:
"if policies are not 'for the people', they are still 'for' someone or something. No charge of ‘conspiracy-mongering’ should be levelled at those pointing it out. If not ‘for the people’, then it is entirely legitimate, and indeed urgent, to enquire who it is 'for', and why it has been pursued."
The essence of our national problems is that the toxic and corrupt British Ruling Elite are virtually all bought by the Money Men to pursue the latter's international Plan of global domination, and for British Ruling Elite the Wycliffe Touchstone (Of, By, and For the People) is a joke. They may speak about it at election time but they don't ever mean it.
I do not care a toss for "global lead" or accusations of "conspiracy-mongering"or indeed any of their morality.
Because the British Ruling Elite and their uniparty have a total and unmoveable monopoly over British politics by virtue of the Political Party system, there is no chance whatsoever of ANY reform to prevent the complete termination and destruction of our society which is happening in front of our very noses.
There is plenty of complaint from many people but there are never any solutions suggested.
Well, I have a suggestion for anyone who seriously wishes to make our politicians comply with the Wycliffe Touchstone, and that is the total abolition of the Political Party system. Every MP should be independent and CONTRACTUALLY bound to their constituents to fulfil their electoral promises. If they break their contract they can be removed by their constituents directly and there would be a by-election.
I will not trouble you here with the details of my suggestion but suffice it to say these are set out in detail as follows:
https://TheCounterRevolution.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/TCR/Counter-Revolution.pdf (Pages 927 to 939 in Edition 9).
I am well aware that such a reform can only be brought about by mass civil disobedience (Gandhi and MLK jr) - otherwise reform is quite impossible. But that is the size of our problem.
If we don't want to lose our entire civilisation we had better start thinking in these terms.