IT IS interesting, in the light of Tony Blair's "attack" on the Conservative Party's Christian credentials, that the distinction between the Tories and New Labour should begin to manifest itself in religious terms.
"My view of Christian values," Mr Blair said, "led me to oppose what I perceived to be a narrow view of self-interest that conservatism - particularly its modern, more right-wing form - represents."
Traditional ideological paradigms have not been useful in defining the emerging struggle in British politics, perhaps because traditional ideologues have a vested interest in muddying the waters.
Most left-wingers, both in Britain and in Ireland, seem content to dismiss Blair as a crypto-Tory who seeks to tiptoe to power on a false floor of fudge. There are aspects of Blair's pragmatism that I find unsettling, but I believe that he is a good and able leader who represents the best chance of rooting out the diseased thinking which infects both of these societies after nearly two decades of Thatcherism.
The religious viewfinder may prove the most effective aid to perception.
There was an interesting article recently in the Catholic Herald, written by the principal of Plater College, Oxford, Michael Blades, which argued that Tony Blair's vision of the "stakeholder society" had much in common with Catholic social teaching.
It has occurred to me before now that the closest I have seen to Mr Blair's outlook is in the work of the Conference of Religious of Ireland (CORI) on poverty, participation and solidarity.
Mr Blades referred to a speech Mr Blair made in Singapore earlier this year, in which the Labour leader attempted to sketch the territory into which he hoped his party could grow - between the twin failures of Thatcherism and traditional socialism.
The "stakeholder economy" would involve everybody "not a privileged few, or even a better off 30 or 40 or 50 per cent", said Mr Blair. "If we fail in that, we waste talent, squander potential wealth-creating abilities and deny the basis of trust upon which a cohesive society, one nation, is built. If people feel they have no stake in society, they feel little responsibility towards it and little inclination to work for its success". In this, Michael Blades observed, there is little with which anyone could reasonably disagree.
He did not, however, employ the axiomatic broad strokes of the Blair vision in order to dismiss it, but went on to praise also the emerging policy dimensions - the commitments to reform of the education and social welfare systems, and to the development of a greater spirit of community and partnership in British workplaces and neighbourhoods.
Left and right are obsessed with either/orism. State intervention is either an unmitigated good or a total bad. Politics had become so fixated on the struggle between these two opposing ideas, one trying to defeat the other, that the best we could hope was that sanity might escape from the dialectic between them.
Instead we delivered ourselves into societies which have become mirror images of the madness of this polarised form of thinking. On the one hand, the society of the fundamentally sound, built on the belief that greed is the only effective way of motivating human activity. (And the market-venerating ideologies which validate this belief.) On the other, the growing reservations of the excluded, who look on that which calls itself society with envy and contempt.
The best that exists to serve this sector is a kind of patronising leftism, which makes louder and louder demands, supposedly on behalf of the excluded, for more and more entitlements and less and less responsibilities.
BRITISH leftism, on which Irish leftism is largely modelled, had become both absurd and dangerous, having ceased to be capable of admitting its own mistakes.
The reality of both our societies is that while the welfare state has provided a safety-net in basic material terms, it has not succeeded in providing contentment based on cohesion and participation. Instead, we have two societies which look increasingly askance at one another, one believing that everything it has is the result of individual effort, the other that the means to live should be readily available on demand without any reciprocal responsibility or effort.
Industrialisation and urbanisation created a form of dependency on capitalism which obsolescence transferred to the welfare state. This in turn gave birth to generations of people, removed from their roots, who could not understand the most basic truths about the human being's relationship to the earth and its resources, for whom the notion that survival might require concomitant effort was but a folk memory.
Out of the best of intentions, welfare delivered us a state of being which was unsustainable and unnatural. All but the most myopic now recognise that there is an urgent need to restore to society some fundamental impulses which governed and regulated humanity's relationship with the earth since our species first walked on the planet.
THE problem is that it has not been possible to make this kind of simple observation without tripping over an ideology.
When the right said it, the left could justifiably - say that this was yet another attack on the basic provisions of the welfare state. When someone on the left whispered it he was dubbed a reactionary.
The ideological collision had divided us in such a way that neither left nor right promised any hope of redemption.
The left were good at saying that the market didn't work, the right at saying the welfare state didn't work. There was nobody to say that, actually, neither of them worked terribly well. And of course, neither existing right nor left had any interest in fundamental change, because the way things were provided both with their ideological bread and butter.
Between the cracks of this paradigm, our societies slipped rapidly into chaos.
Tony Blair has been engaged in dismantling this culture from both directions, using basic Christian principles as his touchstone. Unlike the Tory version of Christianity, Blair's is not exhibitionist, moralistic or gospel-greedy. He simply takes it for granted that God is more or less on the side of goodness.
He offers what we urgently need: a balance between extremes of thought, recognising that there are certain things best done by government, certain things best done by individuals, and a range of functions which should be done by human beings acting within the communities to which we all belong.
Tony Blair offers a chance to salvage truth from the wreckage of ideology. What is important is that what he offers is sensible and good, rather than that it is Christian. But then again, have we departed so far from the true meaning of Christianity as to be surprised by this "coincidence"?