This Christmas, we have a golden opportunity to re-invent our political culture and our economy

On the Sunday after the general election I attended a Christmas party near my parish in East Sussex and met a businessman who was very pleased with the result, principally for reasons of Brexit.

There ensued a robust debate on Brexit and immigration, which was one of his key concerns. I was a Remainer. The past tense is telling – as former Cabinet minister and arch-Remainer Michael Heseltine implied last week, we’re all Leavers now.

But my Christian faith makes me more interested in building bridges and gateways than walls and borders.

It made me think afterwards how much my new friend has in common with the surprise swing voters of formerly rock-solid Labour seats in the North that now have Conservative MPs, such as Workington, Sedgefield and Bishop Auckland. Those constituencies were populated by Leavers who just wanted to Get Brexit Done. But where they differ – my affluent Home Counties neighbours and the new working-class Tories in the North who dismantled Labour’s Red Wall – is in what they want and need from our economy.

During the summer, one of the first things Boris Johnson promised in his party’s leadership campaign was income tax cuts for our wealthiest earners – a pledge that was quietly dropped.

Contrast that with his victory speech in Tony Blair’s former seat of Sedgefield, when he promised £80billion of public investment in transport infrastructure in the North and renewed commitment to the Tories’ Northern Powerhouse initiative, which has at best been half-hearted.

Unlike my Sussex businessman, whom I imagine is true-blue to the marrow, new northern Tories will easily revert to the Labour Party, as and when it gets its act together, if Mr Johnson doesn’t make good on his promise to ‘repay their trust’.

So the One Nation Tory Mr Johnson has cast himself as has to deliver. That raises serious questions about the kind of economy over which we want this Government to preside. Many voters, I suspect, want a kinder economy in which there must be public spending for the poorest in society, the marginalised and the dispossessed.

If that is so we are also entitled to ask: Whom do our financial services serve? In the recent past, the answer has been principally bankers and financiers.

If Mr Johnson is to be true to his word and consolidate his northern vote, finance must serve those nearer the bottom of the pile to address our North-South inequality.

It’s apt that this sea-change election fell just before Christmas, the time in our Christian calendar when we trace the start of our narrative – that Nativity story about displacement, refugees, insufficient accommodation, the cruel and casual oppression by a ruling class and a baby born in a stable.

The child we celebrate at Christmas-time would grow up to tell some Pharisees who tried to trick him over Roman taxation policy to ‘render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s’.

Christians believe everything belongs to God. So some of the more rapacious models of capitalism we’ve suffered under, which brought about the financial crisis that cost the world so dearly, really won’t do today.

This Christmas we have a golden opportunity to re-invent our political culture and our economy. And those with a new worldly power have an economic opportunity to serve the highest power by holding out a helping hand to the lowest in our society. Merry Christmas to all.

George Pitcher is a visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and a parish priest in the Church of England