It is often said that we get the government we deserve. We castigate government and politicians for all sorts of reasons, lack of integrity, lying, bullying, sexual impropriety, but perhaps the behaviour of government simply reflects the behaviour of society at large.

Here are some interesting quotes:

The Bible, Proverbs 16 v 32: ‘He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he that rules his own spirit than he that takes a city.’

‘Men, in a word, must necessarily be controlled, either by a power within them, or by a power without them; either by the word of God, or by the strong arm of man, either by the Bible, or by the bayonet.’ Robert C Winthrop, Addresses and Speeches on various occasions, 1852.

“When a people shall have become incapable of governing themselves, and fit for a master, it is of little consequence from what quarter he comes.” George Washington.

“If we will not be governed by God, we must be governed by tyrants.” William Penn.

The implication here is that some form of self government is the best for society, springing from great self control or individuals being answerable to some higher power. If people cannot control themselves the government will step in to protect us from one another’s harmful behaviour. The greater the number of potentially uncivilised behaviours, the greater the number of restrictions on our lives. And often, we all suffer.

The papers are full of stories every week that reflect peoples’ inability to control their own behaviour. In many cases everybody suffers to minimise the dangers from a tiny number of potential offenders. More laws are called for, or more restrictions are put on peoples’ freedom to protect society from potential criminals.

Because of the dangers of paedophiles and child molesters all teachers and those working with children have had to be CRB checked regardless of whether or not those people have any criminal record. In the news recently was a report that in Magaluf on the Mediterranean island of Mallorca the authorities have decided to crack down on pub crawls because of the level of disorder from English youngsters. This is after an incident when a teenage girl was seen performing sex acts on more than 20 men in public. No surprises there that a crackdown came. Also recently there were calls for more laws to protect people from abuse and bullying in cyberspace. The list could go on and on of calls for more laws to restrict bad behaviour.

Writing in the Guardian recently (July 12^th 2014) Hari Kunzru touches on this and actually relates it back to faith implicated in my earlier quotes when he says: ‘In general ‘faith’ makes people much easier to govern – after all they’re already being governed by God, who has panoptical security cameras and already knows what’s in everyone’s browser history. No wonder politicians line up to praise it. If only everyone possessed this salutary quality!’

Some politicians indeed understand these things, even in their own lives they are aware of guiding principles ruling their behaviour. Gordon Brown, son of the manse, when becoming Prime Minister spoke of his moral compass. John Major used his ‘back to basics’ campaign in an effort to return to ‘certain values.’ Here are his words in a speech he made on the 8^th October 1993.

‘The old values – neighbourliness, decency, courtesy – they’re still alive, they’re still the best of Britain. They haven’t changed, and yet somehow people feel embarrassed by them. Madam President, we shouldn’t be. It is time to return to those old core values, time to get back to basics, to self-discipline and respect for the law, to consideration for others, to accepting a responsibility for yourself and your family and not shuffling off on other people and the state.’

This all backfired somewhat after a series of scandals hit the Conservative party, and Mr Major himself was later found to have been having an extra marital affair which must have left much of the population agog with astonishment.

However we have touched on an important principle for good government in any nation at any time in any place. Good government is directly related to the discipline and self control of its people. It guarantees that you have a much more healthy balance between those who are governed and the governors themselves, who should after all be the servants of the governed. Nobody would dispute that any country needs good government. Whether we actually have good government is another matter. But if we want good government in any nation it first starts with you as an individual, yes each one of us in our own lives.

Good government starts with you. If you can control yourself you don’t need an outside authority to control you. The more an internal ‘law’ keeps you in order, the less an outside law needs to keep you in order. You are no threat to those around you because you know how to control yourself in day to day discourse.

The less self discipline and self control a population has, the more a government has to step in with coercive measures. New Labour were known for making a huge number of laws. To what extent they were trying to control peoples’ bad behaviour and to what extent they were just passing too many laws to impose an ideology upon the nation is an interesting question.

Here is a quote by Philip Johnson in the Telegraph in March 2010. He writes that in his ten years as Prime Minister Tony Blair presided over more than 3000 new laws, more than 1000 of which carried jail terms. Their incessant law making was disturbing to say the least. I’d say that was sign of a corrupt government. Or maybe they thought the people of this nation couldn’t control themselves as well as they used to. Maybe it’s in their DNA and that’s why a socialist government should never ideally be allowed to govern this nation. It’s been said in general that socialists use the law to make people ‘good,’ conservatives use the law to punish bad people. The socialist interpretation is a misunderstanding of the nature and limits of government. The inner compass cannot be imposed by law. That has to come from other sources, the settled mores of an established culture, family and the teaching of right from wrong which comes from institutions such as school and church, but primarily should come from family. When a government takes these responsibilities, you know a culture is on its death bed.

Mr Robert C Winthrop’s quote above says you either rule people through the Bible or the Sword. My, that would get all the cappuccino sucking liberals choking on their coffee. Highly controversial nowadays as so many people have jettisoned Christianity. But what do you put in the place of Christianity as a restraining influence on peoples’ bad behaviour? Take your pick! You either have a people who know how to behave through the internal restraints of conscience or you have men and women who cannot control their natural appetites who need an increasingly ruthless external authority to keep them in order.

Self control springs from character and integrity, two qualities that are in short supply today. The measure of any man or woman is their character and integrity. That is the way you measure success in life or otherwise. Not by what they do or how much they earn, but by their character and how they deal with those around them. The west is performance orientated, people are valued or measured according to the power of their personality, their looks, their earning power of status in society. Yet these things should play second fiddle to character. But we tend to look on the outward appearance or talents rather than what’s inside. How many of us are excited by a person with self control rather than a person with charisma, good looks and high intelligence? Who would you rather spend a night in a pub with, a man about town with a hint of danger in their eye or a man who has been faithful to his wife for 30 years but seriously lacks charisma. People are overawed or overwhelmed by attractive natural ability and underwhelmed by steady faithful unexciting character.

What do we mean by a person of character and integrity? We could produce a long list of attributes, but one of those attributes is definitely self control, and that means dominion over your temper, your tongue and your appetites. A man or woman who can control their own temper is to be esteemed. That means you rule the spirit that is within you, it does not rule you. You are not easily roused to intemperate behaviour.

They know how to control their tongue, a rare thing again for most of us! Life and death is in the power of the tongue, we speak life with encouragement, praise and a ‘looking on the bright side’ attitude or we can speak death by continually running people down, moaning, complaining and gossiping. That’s a difficult one!

They can control their appetites. Whether it is longing for food, alcohol, sexual impropriety, money or a whole host of other things, allowing a particular appetite to control you can bring untold misery to others.

Self government is manifestly not everyone doing what is right in their own eyes. In such a society what is right to you may not be right to me, and I will still do what I want. There has to be a common set of mores, a standard of right and wrong that people more or less agree with. If you do not have that the nation begins to fall apart for what is the glue that holds it together anymore? So it’s not enough to control yourself. You also have to have general agreement in society as to the proper way to behave.

But we now live in a society where increasingly people do what is right in their own eyes regardless of traditional morality. The church has a diminished role in being the nation’s moral compass. In addition the drive towards a multicultural society magnifies the importance of all cultures and worldviews. We now have communities in the UK whose mind-set and ways of thinking are totally incompatible with the mind-set of the traditional Brit. This makes governing the nation much more difficult, especially when the authorities have encouraged immigrants to import their own culture without buying into what it means to be British.

So there you have it. The more internal constraints individuals have on their behaviour the less external constraints they will need. The more internal motivation to practice good behaviour, the less need there is for governmental authority to force people to conform to ‘expectations.’ A nation is the sum of its parts, and what is more valuable than a nation’s human resources? The strength of a nation is in the character of its people. That makes a nation great. Self control and self discipline are essential prerequisites of such a culture.

There are immeasurable benefits to a society whose people know how to govern themselves properly. For starters there is the effect on the nation’s finances. The UK has a vast fiscal deficit. I wonder how much it would be reduced if the courts, policing, security and prison services had less to do because the system was not under such strain from people who don’t know how to behave? More could be said on this but that would be the scope of another article.

George Washington said that the American constitution was only ever made for a spiritual and moral people. If that begins to break down, we move towards totalitarianism. Frighteningly the signs are that under Obama Barak particularly, the US is losing its freedom. I remember speaking to a Headmaster who said he thought the French were more ungovernable than the English, what with their farm protests and so on. Secularists and atheists may not like it, but a significant proportion of the older generation in this country went to Sunday School where they received a Bible education which taught them clearly what was right and wrong. Did that give them the internal compass which helped make the English a relatively law abiding nation certainly in the past? Even now, are we living on the moral and spiritual capital that has been built up in previous generations?

Whatever you say, I believe unless politicians have a fundamental understanding of the importance of self government for a nation’s health and welfare, and are prepared to debate how we can rediscover such a quality, we will continue to slide down the darkening trajectory we have set ourselves.

Just a thought!