After a long postponement, the UK Parliament has resumed its debate leading up to the “meaningful vote” on Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit deal. As of this writing, the unpopular compromise is predicted to fail by an historically large margin – and some clerics consider this not just unfortunate but immoral. Rev. Richard Turnbull analyses that argument, and the status of Brexit, in a new essay written the Acton Institute’s Religion & Liberty Transatlantic website.
Rev. Turnbull writes:
In the upper chamber, the House of Lords, the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby said on January 9 that a “no deal” Brexit would be a “moral failure,” and a second referendum might be required. Demands for a “second referendum” to reverse the initial Brexit vote inspired me to share some observations with readers of Religion & Liberty Transatlantic about the nature of sovereignty and self-determination, where the Brexit debate stands, and the morality of economic freedom.
Rev. Turnbull – who is both ordained in the Church of England and the director of the Centre for Enterprise, Markets, and Ethics in Oxford – brings the full powers of insight to bear on the economic, political, and moral dimensions of the debate. And he echoes concerns shared by liberty-minded Christians across the Atlantic as he writes:
If only we had a prime minister like a Margaret Thatcher, with the vision to chart a bold course toward independence, to lower corporate tax rates in order to attract investment, to reduce to the minimum tariffs on trade, to set people free economically as well as politically, to find new and renewed trading partners. If only church leaders saw economic freedom as a means of generating prosperity and allowing people to provide for their families.
If only….
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