Jonathan Aitken

His story is politically and historically important. The sheer longevity and variety of Nazarbayev’s career speaks for itself. I believe that Nazarbayev is the only politician in the world who was in office (as a young Consomol official) when John F Kennedy was in the White House and Nikita Khrushchev was in charge of the Kremlin. 47 years later Nazarbayev is still in office as President of his country with President Obama in the White House and President Medvedev in the Kremlin. Within that span, Nazarbayev has steered his country through many dramatic and difficult periods. The break-up of the Soviet Union was one crucial chapter. So was the nuclear disarmament of Kazakhstan. So has been the building of Kazakhstan as a successful and secure nation state.

I hope my book avoids some of the unthinking stereotypes which characterise too much media reporting on Kazakhstan. This reporting is often caught in a time warp and a Borat warp. For example, it is wrong to describe Kazakhstan’s government as “an old-fashioned Soviet style dictatorship”. The country is far from being a Jeffersonian democracy. Yet it has made significant progress on the road to greater freedoms and a more transparent political process which responds to public opinion. As for Borat, this joke is looking tired. The capital of Kazakhstan has more skyscrapers than Dubai; symphony concerts as good as those heard in the Albert Hall; and a rising generation of educated young people who will inherit one of the richest economies in the world. The country bears no resemblance to the backwardness and bigotry of Borat. It is time to move on in reporting of Kazakhstan, as I hope my book has done.

President Nazarbayev has made his mistakes, but he has also achieved remarkable results in building the most successful and stable nation state to emerge from the former republics of the Soviet Union. He is an attractive, charismatic and intriguing political leader. I certainly enjoyed writing about him, and I hope my readers will enjoy his life story which has never before been told in the West.

Sermon given by Jonathan Aitken at St Matthew’s Westminster for Pentecost, 31 May 2009

helen — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 09:20:44 +0000

Today we celebrate God’s gift of the Holy Spirit. Yet understanding the full meaning of this gift can be difficult.

From time to time I get invited to preach – or share as they call it – in Charismatic and Pentecostal churches.

When they are at full throttle – and they usually are at full throttle – their manifestations of the Holy Spirit often include:

beating on bongo drums

waving of flags

speaking in tongues

uttering prophetic words

sometimes leaping up and down on trampolines

and literally rolling in the aisles.

These activities are such a contrast from the home life of our own dear St Matthews that I sometimes find myself in charismatic settings feeling more than a little sympathetic to those bemused onlookers on the first day of Pentecost

When at 9 o’clock in the morning said of the suddenly multi-lingual disciples “What does this mean?…..These men must be filled with new wine.”

Today’s Gospel reminds us that there is more to the Holy Spirit than joyful exuberance.

Our two readings reflect two different teachings and traditions on the work of the Holy Spirit.

Acts, Chapter 2 presents the Spirit as the one who brings about new steps taken by the church in a new community of believers.

Steps which can sometimes be validated by ecstatic experiences.

But John’s teaching, more reflectively theological, places the Spirit in a Trinitarian perspective.

Just as by his Incarnation the Son reveals the Father by doing his work, so on the eve of his departure from the world Jesus is saying that he will send, from the Father, this new Spirit of Truth, who will continue and intensify the Father’s work by witnessing to Jesus as the truth and proving the world wrong about its sinfulness.

The complexities here can be challenging.

There’s an amusing story about a church in Northern Ireland whose congregation still regularly says the Athanasian Creed from the Book of Common Prayer.

On one occasion when the faithful were reciting the Athanasian Creed words:

I believe in the Father incomprehensible

the Son incomprehensible

the Holy Ghost incomprehensible

One irreverent Ulsterman was heard to mutter sotto voce:

“If you ask me the whole bally thing’s incomprehensible.”

Perhaps many of us have had one or two incomprehending moments about this aspect of Christian doctrine.

Some of you know that after I came out of prison, my next career move was to go to the only institution in Britain which served worse food than, and had worse plumbing than a prison.

This was an Anglican Theological College, Wycliffe Hall Oxford.

Evangelical in outlook it devoted much academic energy to teaching about the third person of God.

So several of my student essays were devoted to the Holy Spirit and to the doctrine of the Trinity.

Yet for all the scholarly tomes I read and lectures I attended at Oxford, nothing revealed the Holy Spirit in its rightful setting of the Trinity so clearly to me as did my human experiences of praying in a prison prayer group.

Usually we prisoners prayed aloud together, and it was noticeable that different members of the group addressed God in different ways.

Some of us prayed to God the Father, beginning in familiar ways such as Our Father, or Heavenly Father.

Sometimes those prayers seemed particularly poignant because so many of my fellow prisoners had never really had a father or even knew who their fathers were. So they prayed with deep longing to the God who would be for them a rock of paternal love and trust.

Others prayed to God the Son – perhaps because they longed for the things that Jesus stands for: – love mercy, healing, compassion and the forgiveness of sinners.

But sometimes the most powerful prayers were addressed to God the Holy Spirit – why? Because he was the Divine presence Jesus and the Father together sent here after the Ascension to be our Guide, Advocate, Comforter and Paracletos.

That word Paracletos perhaps best translates as the one who comes alongside us when we call. He is the one who empowers us to change our lives.

But how does the Holy Spirit do this? Our Gospel reading says that He will prove the world wrong about sin. Some versions of the Bible say that he will convict us of sin.

Of course its not only prisoners who know about convictions and being faced with the proof of their sins.

Up the road at HMP House of Commons, these days there are quite a few inmates who must be feeling convicted and judged.

But don’t let’s cast the first stone at them.

Because there are turning points in many people’s spiritual journeys towards Jesus when we feel convicted of our sins, and stirred towards a penitent longing for a deeper faith. This can be a painful process, but it is also a cleansing process, a necessary process, and ultimately a joyful process.

In his sermon last Sunday, Father Peter quoted Archbishop William Temple, of Blessed Memory.

In his commentary on today’s passage Temple refers to the ancient hymn of Pentecost known as Veni Creator and continues:

“When we pray

‘Come Holy Ghost our souls inspire

And lighten with celestial fire”

we had better know what we are about says Temple.

He will not carry us to easy triumphs and gratifying successes…..He may take us through loneliness, desertion by friends, apparent desertion even by God for that was the way Christ went to the Father. He may drive us into the Wilderness…. He may even lead us to the hill that is called the “Place of the Skull”.

Archbishop Temple’s warnings are certainly taking us a long way from bongo drums, waving flags and trampolines.

So there is a paradox here.

How can we reconcile this painful, purging, personally testing view of the work of the Holy Spirit with the joyful supernatural energy of wind, fire, and visions which Peter invoked to the crowd on the first day of Pentecost?

If we had been able to read on for a few more verses in Acts 2, we would have reached the climax of Peter’s speech when he says to the crowd, “Repent and be baptised every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that you sins may be forgiven and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit”.

Expressed in a different way this is the same work described by John who tells us in today’s Gospel that the Holy Spirit is coming to prove worldly people wrong about their sin.

This convicting work of the Holy Spirit is both cleansing and loving. It is designed to make men and women of the world recognise their need, guide them to the truth and bring them to Jesus. It is a profound and life changing process.

We need to be careful here of some superficial schools of thought which seems to believe that the Holy Spirit is a sort of instant spiritual elixir that can be produced in a convenient, worldly sort of way rather like James Bond ordering a dry martini with the request “Stirred but not shaken”. Not so. To rebut that easy believers’ concept may I go back to that prison prayer group for a final moment.

My witness to the work of the Holy Spirit when I was a prisoner and as someone who does prison ministry is that it is not just a stirring experience. It is a shaking experience and sometimes an utterly shattering experience.

Those who feel convicted of sin and then start to travel on the road of spiritual change from self centeredness to God centeredness are being divinely inspired and empowered.

The process inside their hearts and souls may not be as outwardly dramatic as mighty rushing winds and tongues of fire.

But I know that when you listen to the prayers of young prisoners asking for the Holy Spirit to come in and change their sinful lives and then you watch and pray them over the weeks and months, and you see them stopping swearing, throwing away porn magazines, breaking with their drug habits and turning to God in prayer and penitence and growing into new changed lives

Then you know that the power of the Holy Spirit can still today be as inspiring and strong as it was on that first day of Pentecost.

Let me end with two last thoughts.

The transforming power of the Holy Spirit is a gift from God the Father and God the Son. It comes mysteriously. As Jesus said when explaining the Holy City to Nicodemus in John III “The wind blows when it chooses and you hear the sound of it but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes”.

Here today in Westminster, we do know that winds of change blowing through individual lives and through the institutional lives of our Parliament and government.

So let us pray on this day of Pentecost that this may be the transforming power of the Holy Spirit at work in our nation.

Amen

Rehabilitation of Offenders Act

helen — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 10:50:34 +0000

Article published in The Guardian June 8 2009 on the need to reform the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974.

Today, (Monday June 8th) I become an officially rehabilitated ex-prisoner. Ten years ago this morning I was standing in the dock of the Old Bailey pleading guilty to charges of perjury for which I received an 18 month sentence. Many Guardian readers will remember the case but few will know that in the words of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act I am now entitled “to be treated for all purposes in law as a person who has not been convicted or sentenced”. But what does this mean in practical terms to any ex-offender? And why has the ROA fallen into abeyance as one of the most disregarded laws on our statute book?

Rehabilitating offenders needs a legislative framework. 35 years ago the minority Labour government led by Harold Wilson accepted this principle. With the support of liberal and conservative MPs (including yours truly) the present ROA was enacted in the summer of 1974. It broke new ground at the time but looks antiquated now. The classes of offender who can ever have their convictions “spent” are too limited and the periods after which rehabilitation can be earned are too long. The present government recognised that an overhaul of the law was needed. It attempted to strike a new balance between offender resettlement and public protection by publishing a consultation paper Breaking the Circle in 2002. Chaired by Lord Falconer, this report made sound proposals for reforming the ROA. They would have substantially increased employment opportunities for ex-offenders without increasing risks in areas such as national security, child protection, and special positions of trust, all of which can be covered by exceptions. Unfortunately these reforms have never been implemented. Breaking the Circle has now been gathering dust in Jack Straw’s in-tray for seven years.

The failure to reform the ROA has contributed to our stubbornly high national rates of reoffending. I know from my work with ex-prisoners that many of them feel intensely frustrated by their frequent failure even to be interviewed for job vacancies. My closest friend in prison, the late Mickey Aguda, encountered many examples of this familiar obstacle to offender employment. When he completed his four year sentence for embezzlement he was desperately keen to find work. He applied for over seventy vacancies for which his local Jobcentre thought he was qualified. But only two of the potential employers concerned gave him the opportunity to be interviewed.

Mickey believed, as most ex-cons do, that he never stood a chance once he disclosed that he had a criminal record. This is required by law for all job applications until a conviction is spent under the ROA’s ten year rehabilitation period. But the Catch 22 in Mickey’s case was that his conviction never could be spent. That is because the ROA applies only to those who have received a sentence of less than two and a half years. Such an arbitrary cut off period is irrational in today’s world of ever lengthening sentences. It permanently excludes many tens of thousands of non-reoffending ex-prisoners from legal rehabilitation. How much fairer it would have been to implement Lord Falconer’s recommendations that all convictions could ultimately be spent and that the qualification timetable would be the length of the original sentence plus a variable buffer period.

I cannot pretend that my life will be massively changed by being officially rehabilitated. As a self-employed writer I have not had to run the gauntlet of Jobcentre applications. Even so there may be some advantages. Some years ago I was surprised to receive an order from the Charity Commission to resign from the boards of a prison charity, an international human rights charity, and my local Parochial Church Council. Perhaps I will be reinstated to these voluntary positions if the Commission can be persuaded by the ROA that charity should begin in their own offices.

I may even receive some relief from the tabloids. Under Section 8 of the ROA it is defamatory to report a spent conviction. I shall not be rushing to instruct Messrs Sue Grabbit and Runne for breaches of this law in my case, not least because I so often speak and write from the perspective of an ex-offender. Yet I hope that fair editors will think about their obligations under the ROA towards all ex-offenders before regurgitating, often out of any reasonable context, pejorative labels such as “disgraced ex-jailbird”.

Personal instances aside, there are innumerable examples of how the ROA has become an Act more honoured in the breach than the observance by employers, institutions and even by the government itself. Yet the widespread neglect of the ROA does create an immense opportunity for any government willing to give offender rehabilitation the priority it deserves in our criminal justice system.

If as a society we are seriously interested in offering offenders, particularly young offenders, a fresh start and real employment opportunities in their local communities, then we need to go further than the cautious modifications of ROA recommended by Breaking the Circle. To see what might be achieved, we should look at what has been accomplished on the other side of the Atlantic. Instead of the “one size fits all” mentality of our Ministry of Justice and its unhappy offspring NOMS, two years ago Congress produced the innovative and community focused Second Chance Act 2007. Introduced by an all party group headed by the then Senator Joe Biden, the stated purposes of this law are “to break the cycle of recidivism … to assist offenders re-entering the community to establish a self-sustaining and law abiding life … and to provide job placement services to facilitate re-entry into the community”.

The Second Chance Act’s successful emphasis on the importance of bespoke rehabilitation schemes tailored to fit local communities has been echoed by recent specialist reports in this country, such as the Howard League’s paper on Localism (2008); The Conservative Party’s Prisons With a Purpose (2008); and the Centre for Social Justice’s Locked Up Potential (2009). The findings of the House of Commons Justice Select Committee, expected shortly, are likely to go in the same direction. But all this activity is movement without action until a government produces its own legislation to reform and build on the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974. A much wider audience than ex-offenders will be watching this space.

“Truth and Politics”

helen — Thu, 28 May 2009 10:42:57 +0000

Truth and Politics
A Continuum Author Dialogue with Peter Hitchens
by
Jonathan Aitken
Tuesday 26 May 2009

As some of you know I have the unhappy distinction of being the only British cabinet minister ever to have been sent to prison.

These days, quite a few people seem to be surprised that I am the only one.

But despite the obvious ironies of being invited to open our discussion today, perhaps I can bring to it both a worm’s eye view and a bird’s eye view of the subject.

The worm’s eye view, which I acquired involuntarily by spending 7 months in Her Majesty’s prisons for perjury, does concentrate the mind wonderfully on why some politicians fail tests of character to do with the truth. In my own case it was largely to do with pride, a theme which may recur in other cases.

But on the principle that poachers sometimes make good gamekeepers I also want to offer you a bird’s eye view of why our present Parliamentary system has been failing.

Coupled with some concluding thoughts about how the best practices and highest ideals of Parliamentary democracy could be made to work far better than they are working today.

In short, using the title of Peter Hitchens stimulating book The Broken Compass, I want to ask 2 questions in the spirit of seeking after truth.
1. Why is our national political compass broken?
2. How could we fix it?

In the present mood of public anger about Parliamentary expenses there may be some confusion as to whether we are talking about individual, institutional or constitutional failures.

Individual failures of character in politics are not new.

Jack Profumo was a close friend and Parliamentary colleague of my father’s. I vividly remember as a teenager in the summer of 1962 when the utterly broken Jack Profumo secretly came to stay with us in our home in Suffolk to escape from media hounding.

And while he was staying with us Time Magazine published a cover story on the Profumo Crisis. The American reporters writing the article took the line that the whole drama was over-hyped British establishment hypocrisy. All the errant minister had done was to sleep with a girl and deny it in the House of Commons. So Time Magazine signed off their piece with a jokey quatrain:

“To lie in the nude is not at all rude
But to lie in the House is obscene.”

Yet for all the lampooning by Time, the fact of the matter was that the institutional standards of Parliament in regards to truth were not in any danger of failing in 1962.

For an MP to lie in a personal statement to the House – traditionally heard in silence and without questioning – was regarded to be as massively serious a breach of Parliamentary rules as to lie on oath in a court room is regarded as a breach of the law.

So both Profumo and I were rightly punished – although for individual rather than institutional failings.

Today’s broken compass is different because its exposed failings suggest that an entire political class has lost its bearings.

Of course we all know that on the expenses scandal large numbers of decent MPs have not, to paraphrase the words of the Anglican general confession, “followed too much the devices and desires of their own hearts” – or pockets. There are still plenty of good and honourable members.

Yet the Parliamentary compass is evidently broken and I think that is so for far deeper reasons than claims for flipped mortgages, moats, beams, bathplugs and duckhouses.

My view which I think is shared to some extent by Peter Hitchens, is that Parliament has been falling into low public esteem for some years. This is due to some if not all of the following factors:

1. The failure to scrutinise huge swathes of legislation with anything like the same level of debating time and due diligence that almost all Parliaments in the first nine decades of the 20th century applied as a fundamental duty of MPs.

2. The handing over of Parliamentary authority to an ever increasing number of unelected bodies ranging from politically correct quangos to the EU commission. Power has drained away from Parliament as a result and marginalising MPs.

3. The increase and almost automatic use of the Parliamentary guillotine to cut off debates on Bills. The first Blair government even invented a corrupt device by which parts of Bills are “deemed” to have been debated by Parliamentary committees when they have not actually been debated. So much for truth in politics there!

4. The failure of Parliament to protect the erosion of traditional British liberties in the cause, occasionally justified but too often unjustified, of strengthening the criminal justice system, particularly in regard to terrorism.

5. The rise in power of the party whips’ offices and their centralised control over independent minded back benchers – who have become an almost extinct species as a result. The whips now suppress dissent and control all committee chairmanships and memberships – which is wrong.

6. The undermining not only of Parliamentary independence but also Civil Service independence. This has been achieved by the appointment of large numbers of “special advisors” on the government’s payroll who act as Prime Ministerial spin doctors and acolytes, again marginalising MPs in the process.

7. The undermining of what used to be called the adversarial system of long and sometimes fierce Parliamentary debates over all important legislative proposals.

Peter Hitchens writes powerfully about this in the final chapter of his book. He argues, and I agree with him, that the historic traditions of adversarial argument in Parliament have almost completely ceased. Instead we have the creation of a cosy Parliamentary consensus in which too many important issues get short changed or even ignored by the political class. As Peter Hitchens puts it: “Political parties have become devices for representing the views of the establishment to the people rather than the other way round”.

8. The cumulative effect of these changes has been to turn the peoples Parliament into a politicians Parliament.

This introverted approach has increased the power of government and outside bodies at Westminster’s expense. Toomnay MPs have been reduced to impotent time-servers. They have long forgotten the wise dictum of Mr Gladstone: “Parliament is not the government. It is the check upon the government”.

Today’s subservience of Members of Parliament to government is much more worrying an institutional trend than individual venality over expenses.

Yet it is the scandals over these expenses that has triggered today’s crisis and which now offers a major and healthy opportunity for Parliamentary reform.

So finally how might we fix the broken compass?

At the heart of the individual and institutional failings of Parliament lies this uncomfortable truth.

For far too many people in politics compliance has replaced conscience as the arbiter of what is right and what is wrong.

Perhaps it is spiritually relevant to this debate to remember the question Pontias Pilate asked before disregarding his own conscience and complying with the pressures from the crowd: “What is truth?” – unfortunately he did not stay for an answer.

I suggest we will only get the right answer to questions such as “what is truth?” or “what is right?” until we have gone through the painful but necessary cleansing process of electoral and Parliamentary upheaval which has only just begun.

All the wrongs that I have just listed, plus a root and branch clean up of the Parliamentary expenses rules can be put right by the votes of the electorate and by a new reforming Parliament. It has happened before in our history, notably at the time of the Great Reform Bill of 1832.

Indeed a new government and Parliament might usefully consider whether Britain needs a Great Parliamentary Reform Bill of 2010 or 2011 to give us a differently motivated political class and a new political compass.

At least the great debate is now starting. Thank you for putting on this early instalment of it in St Mary le Bow today.

March 2009

helen — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 10:50:07 +0000

JONATHAN AITKEN’S BLOG FOR MARCH 2009

March was one of the most demanding yet most fulfilling months I can remember. In travel, I made gruelling trips to the US (twice), Moscow and Kazakhstan. The Centre for Social Justice’s Prison Reform Report: Locked Up Potential: A Strategy for Reforming Prisons and Rehabilitating Prisoners was completed and launched, the culmination of 18 months of hard work. I finished my biography of the President of Kazakhstan and delivered it to my publisher, Continuum on time.

1. Other highlights in March included giving four major talks or lectures; receiving a generous prize from Sanford University for my biography John Newton: From Disgrace to Amazing Grace and being awarded a munificent grant from the John Templeton Foundation for the future work of Trinity Forum Europe. Quite a month!

2. Locked Up Potential the 273 page report which I chaired at the request of Iain Duncan Smith, the Chairman of CSJ had a positive reception from the media and from interested members of the political community and general public. To obtain an electronic copy of the report click here. To obtain a hard copy please contact Christian Guy:

Email:christian.guy@centreforsocialjustice.org.uk
Tel:020 7340 9653
Address:Centre for Social Justice
9 Westminster Palace Gardens,
Artillery Row,
London, SW1P 1RL

3. Media coverage of Locked Up Potential was good. I was interviewed about the report on the Andrew Marr show (BBC 1 March 23^rd) and on numerous radio programmes including Radio 4’s Analysis programme which will be broadcast next month. Several newspapers, both national and provincial, covered the story well. The most favourable (and most surprising!) editorial comment on Locked Up Potential came in a Guardian leader on March 24^th In Praise of Jonathan Aitken and in a cover story in the Guardian’s Society section by Erwin James.My belief in miracles has been strengthened by the Guardian’s reports and comment on Locked Up Potential!

4. The next challenge for Locked Up Potential is to get some or all its principal recommendations for reform debated and implemented. Invitations to speak on the reports are flowing in from all sorts of interesting audiences. More on this in future blogs.

5. My next book Nursultan Nazarbayev and The Making of Kazakhstan will be published in June by Continuum. More in later blogs. Enough to say that I found writing this biography equivalent to unearthing a rich treasure trove of new historical and political material. The real story makes Borat boring!

6. In the US I spoke in Naples, Florida and Birmingham Alabama. The latter event was a lecture to receive the John Pollock award for biography from the Beeson School of Divinity at Sanford University for my John Newton: From Disgrace to Amazing Grace.

7. The March issue of American Spectator carried my usual monthly column. The subject was Syria

8. The Trinity Forum Europe (TFE) of which I have been Executive Director since 2006 has been given a new impetus by a generous grant for 2009-10 from the John Templeton Foundation.
We will expand our existing educational programs at Oxford and Edinburgh Universities and launch a new Westminster Forum. More in future blogs and on our future TFE website.

9. Other speaking engagements in March included a dinner at Westminster organised by Christian Solidarity Worldwide; a men’s fellowship breakfast at Esher Rugby Club; and a Lent lecture at St George, The Martyr, Holborn.

I have rushed across continents and broadcasting studios far too much in the last four weeks but home life, family life and prayer life have remained strong. Next month and Easter will provide a much needed break for rest and reflection on the challengers of the year ahead.

Jonathan Aitken

FUTURE PUBLIC ENGAGEMENTS – APRIL 2009

Monday, April 6 – Speak at first night of Holy Week lectures in St Georges, Tron Glasgow
Wednesday, April 22 – Speak at Alpha Course launch, British Transport Police, Camden
Thursday, April 23 – Speak Oak Hill College

Welcome to Jonathan’s blog!

helen — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 14:40:52 +0000