A CENTURY ago, Mahatma Gandhi published a list of “Seven Social Sins” in his newspaper. The list originated months earlier with the “Seven Social Evils” of a socialist Canon of Westminster, Frederick Donaldson. Both writers were living through times of upheaval and violent political rhetoric, and felt that these seven trends were identifiable causes.
Donaldson’s first social evil was politics without principle. The preacher thought that much of modern politics was without moral rules and red lines. In 2025, politics, both domestic and global, is full of moral rules and red lines, but they are mostly broken and crossed, which leaves those of us who, like Donaldson, still subscribe to the old ideas of fair play and kindness rather baffled.
Moral rules that seemed set in stone now crumble before our eyes. In 2022, the Labour Party condemned the use of Jimmy Savile’s crimes and the failure of British society to prosecute him as a political weapon against Sir Keir Starmer. In 2025, Labour ministers repeatedly reused the same slur against Nigel Farage, without even a hint of regret. This was not just stooping to a level that they had condemned in 2022, but actively rejecting other more accurate and proportionate criticisms of Mr Farage.
We have an attention economy in politics in which actively rejecting principles to create outrage is the easiest route to prominence. What just three years ago was unacceptably immoral in politics is now a commonplace and basic doctrine of electoral politics.
A shift in the moral rules of a society over time is to be expected: the first buildings in Las Vegas were built by Mormons, who forbid gambling. Gradual moral deregulation is something that most level-headed Christians accept; the slow creep towards gay marriage in the C of E is a successful example that has made the Church and public life more inclusive.
WHAT Donaldson saw in the 1920s and many of us see in the 2020s, however, is an accelerating pace of moral deregulation in our politics which risks the absolute abolition of traditional political values, most of which, in this country, were long established by Christian influence.
The driving cause of this decline in principle was, in both Donaldson’s day and ours, a replacement of the intellectual driving force in political discussion with an economic one. High-thinking politics is gradually superseded by politics defined by what sells news and gains attention.
In the advertising world first, moral standards change because pushing boundaries gets people talking. In the 1920s, advertising was just discovering that sex sold, and “flapper culture” became the core of advertising beauty products. In recent years, brands have discovered that scandal sells — many wade deliberately into political debates to gain recognition and enter the public consciousness. In advertising, this is not a moral concern, but the mirror movement in electoral politics is of great moral concern.
For example, Donald Trump, a favourite global boogeyman, says deliberately outrageous things to provoke a response and to draw attention to himself. It is hard to imagine that, if he kept his policies to a set of consistent and sound principles, we would have heard of him as much as we do. His ideological chaos gets people talking, which is profitable, and so he remains important. The policies that he implements as a result get people killed: the United States is on track for its deadliest year in immigration detention yet, and that is undoubtedly due to Trump’s drastic crackdown. It is a crueler society created by a more chaotic and less principled politics.
IN THE 1920s, when Donaldson wrote, the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion had long been debunked, but they were still pushed because they sold papers and mobilised voters, and that led to brutal anti-Semitic attacks. In both the 1920s and the 2020s, politics became less principled and more damaging, driven by the information economy — emergent then; dominant now.
The million-pound question is why a modern Christian should care about this. We have already qualified that less principled politics can lead to violence and premature deaths, which it is the moral responsibility of all Christians to drag society away from.
More importantly however, a politics driven by what sells news and gets people talking has damaged the soul of our nation. Jesus taught that we should care for the needy, but, in the biggest debate in British politics — about asylum-seekers and refugees — the direction of travel is now towards cruelty as policy. This is not because refugees are Britain’s largest problem: it is because it sells news and it gets online attention.
An unprincipled politics that chases easy wins on refugees over genuine progress on great social issues has produced a society in which the principle of helping the needy, a pillar of Christian and Western civilisation for centuries, is neglected.
Douglas J. Parkinson is a freelance journalist.
