Confessing Evangelical

Moving on to some of the more general points that came to mind reading Michael Newman's book on socialism (see previous posts 1 | 2), in one chapter Newman looks at the emergence of the "New Left" in the 1960s.

One earlier figure who Newman identifies as a significant influence on the New Left was the Italian communist leader Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), who was imprisoned by Mussolini for the last eleven years of his life. Newman writes of Gramsci:

In his writings, he dealt extensively with the extent to which capitalist domination (hegemony), particularly in Western Europe, rested on ideological factors, rather than overt aspects of power.

He stressed the need for socialists to be able to create a counter-hegemonic project - a new "common sense", based on alternative ideas and cultural constructs.

It strikes me that this is the problem that Christianity now faces in much of the west: the Christian worldview has ceased to be part of the "common sense" of our society. This isn't just about "Christian values", but the loss of the whole Christian narrative - creation and fall, death and resurrection, the direction of history - as the framework within which we view the world.

Increasingly, people are finding the Christian account of the origins, meaning, purpose and goal of life, and of the moral implications that flow from this, not merely incorrect, but incomprehensible. Christian teachings seem to fly completely in the face of "common sense", whether in relation to sexual ethics, euthanasia, the uniqueness of human beings as distinct from animals, and so on.

Reading Newman's summary of Gramsci's ideas, it is striking to see how - even as socialism as an overarching economic and political system has become increasingly marginalised - much of our society's "common sense" has been reconstructed along New Left lines. Some key examples of this include the transformation in attitudes towards women's rights, homosexuality and environmental issues.

This has not been a wholly negative process - in each of those areas there have been changes in law and social attitudes that I for one would not wish to see reversed - but overall the new "common sense" that has emerged is radically secular and hostile to Christianity, seeing it as an old, oppressive system that needs (at the very least) to be rigorously excluded from the public square.

As with the hegemony of capitalism, this secularist hegemony rests more on "ideological factors" rather than "overt aspects of power". It is very easy for us to absorb unconsciously the "common sense", the received wisdom, of our society, and to remain unaware of the constructedness of that "common sense". In particular, we can easily find ourselves reading the Bible through the lenses of "common sense", thus distorting its message.

And this also suggests that the way to respond to this change in circumstances is not to seek political power, or victory in a "culture war" (which, even if it were remotely possible, would simply be to turn Christianity into another ideology). Rather, we need to create (or rather, hold fast to) our own "counter-hegemonic project", our own "common sense", our own "alternative ideas and cultural constructs".

In other words, instead of seeking to justify Christian teachings according to the standards of the world's "common sense", or even worse, changing our teachings to accommodate that "common sense", we need to be clear about holding on to a Christian worldview, not simply in terms of moral values, but in terms of how we see the world - as a created, fallen, redeemed world whose destiny is resurrection. And to see that way of looking at things as simply being "common sense".

As I mentioned in the comments to my previous post, my recent musings on politics shouldn't be read as an advocacy of socialism, so much as exploring what Chris Atwood called "the bright lines where socialism and capitalism taken to the extreme become criminal and immoral".

However, given my background, this inevitably ends up as an exploration of socialist critiques of, and alternatives to, a free-market capitalism that I had been accepting increasingly uncritically in recent years. But this is still only exploration, not necessarily acceptance or advocacy.

Anyway, here are three statistics I've come across recently that brought me up short and made me wonder whether contemporary western capitalism, particularly in the US and UK, is already over that "bright line" at which it becomes "criminal and immoral", at least in some respects.

I'm not claiming that these are especially important issues in themselves (they're not concerned with issues of global inequality, for example), but then it is often the details, the small consequences, that challenge our assumptions about the big issues.

1. Directors' pay in the top 100 companies averaged £2.5m last year - an increase of 16.1% on the previous year. (Source)

Actually, the figure that originally caught my eye was the 2001 average for FTSE-100 executives - a mere £1.7m - as reported in Anthony Sampson's book Who Runs This Place?.

I've generally been unimpressed by horror stories about "corporate fat-cats". That was partly because I found the covetousness, envy and self-righteousness on display in many of these media reports distasteful, but mainly because I'd been assuming that the really vast pay awards were going to two kinds of director: those who really can be said to deserve it, having "added value" to their companies far in excess of the remuneration they are receiving; and a minority of greedy incompetents, a few "bad apples" who are enriching themselves at the expense of the companies that employ them.

What shocked me about that figure of £1.7m, and the inflation-busting year-on-year increases totalling 47% since then, was that this is the average across all FTSE-100 companies. This isn't a minority of stars and crooks - this is the going rate.

I don't blame the companies or the individual directors - after all, if getting a competent director now costs £2.5m, then top companies have little choice but to pay that; and it would be a truly heroic individual who decided to limit himself (and it is almost always himself) to the sort of figure that I would have plumped for if asked to guess the average level for executive pay: around £800,000, say. These sums are clearly what the market is demanding and supplying. But perhaps that suggests the market has broken down here.

2. Comparative rates of child poverty:

• Sweden: 2.5%


• France: 7.9%


• UK: 19.8%


• USA: 22.4%

Now, as Michael Newman makes clear in his Very Short Introduction to Socialism (from which those figures are taken: pp.63f.), the Swedish model of social democracy has hit a number of problems in the past 25 years, but that is still a very striking statistic.

And again, I was shocked to see how much higher the figures were for the dynamic, thrusting economies of the UK and US - one in five children.

3. The decline in social mobility in the UK

Research published by the Sutton Trust (PDF) earlier this year revealed that levels of "intergenerational mobility" (i.e. from father to son) were lower among men born in 1970 - that is, those whom one might term "Thatcher's children", heirs of the new, meritocratic, pro-enterprise Britain of the 1980s and 1990s - than among those born in 1958.

Those born in the bottom earnings quartile in 1970 were more likely to remain there into adulthood than those born in 1958 (from 31% among the 1958 cohort to 38% among the 1970 cohort), while the percentage reaching the top quartile declined between the two groups (from 17% to 16%).

On the other hand, those born in the top quartile in 1970 were more likely to remain there into adulthood than those born in 1958 (from 35% to 42%), while being far less likely to drop into the bottom quartile (from 16% to 11%):

At the same time, the gap between the highest and lowest earners has increased significantly in both relative and absolute terms. So as Britain has become less equal, the result has been less social mobility rather than more. In other words, where you are born has an even greater impact on where you end up than it did before 1979.

And this pattern is not just confined to the UK: as the Sunday Times pointed out at the weekend:

Not only has mobility declined in Britain as inequality has increased, but it is lower than in most other countries. America, usually thought of as a highly meritocratic society, also has low mobility.

Canada, the Scandinavian countries and Germany are "flatter" societies where income inequalities are smaller; they have significantly higher social mobility.

So the desire for a more equal society is not based on an envious, covetous desire to grab other people's wealth and property, but a recognition that inequality "locks in" privilege and denies people born at the bottom the same life chances as those born at the top. Thus "equality of opportunity" is meaningless unless it is combined with greater (not, please note, "absolute") equality of outcome.

Conclusion

Those statistics don't necessarily lead to support for socialist analyses or solutions, of course. The Daily Telegraph's City Editor has been a leading voice in opposing excessive boardroom pay, for example.

As for the decline in social mobility, conservative commentators were not slow to link this with the abolition of state grammar schools, which (they argued) provided a ladder out of poverty for bright children from deprived backgrounds. I have considerable sympathy for that argument (education is one area where I have always been fairly "right-wing", which is perhaps telling).

And some would argue that it is better to be at the bottom of the heap in a dynamic and expanding economy such as the UK or US, as opposed being a more socially-mobile citizen of one of continental Europe's stagnating economies. A rising tide lifts all boats, and all that. This argument would, however, be more convincing if those making it weren't almost invariably some way towards the top of the heap themselves.

So I'm still not quite ready to hoist the red flag to the top of my sidebar. But these are some of the factors that have jolted me into "re-rethinking" my position. No conclusions reached as yet, honest. :-)

The Guardian's political sketchwriter, Simon Hoggart, has made the very useful point on occasion that one way to tell whether a politician is saying anything meaningful is to ask yourself whether anyone could seriously advocate the opposite of what they're saying.

You know the sort of thing: "We remain committed to ensuring that all our children receive a decent education and are able to fulfil their potential!" Hmm, yes, sounds good, but could anyone seriously advocate the opposite? "We pledge that when we are in power, more and more children will have their life-chances blighted by poor education!"

Which brings me to a book I picked up over the weekend: Socialism: A Very Short Introduction, by Michael Newman, just published by OUP.

The main reason for mentioning this book is not so much its political content, so much as the fact that it suggested to me a couple of interesting parallels between socialism and Christianity that I hope to explore in a couple of further posts. But in the meantime, I wanted to canvass opinion on whether Newman's definition of "socialism" has any meaningful content to it.

Very briefly, Newman's thesis in this book is that socialism is a diverse phenomenon, and that while the two dominant expressions of socialism to date - Marxism and social democracy - may appear to have run out of steam, that doesn't mean that "socialism" as a political perspective is finished. He summarises the "socialist" perspective as being based on three main principles: equality, cooperation and solidarity.

This contrasts with political viewpoints that see inequality as desirable (or at least a necessary consequence of desirable policies), and that emphasise individual ambition and fulfilment above social solidarity, and competition over cooperation.

My question is this: does "equality, cooperation and social solidarity" sound like a meaningful definition, or is this really a set of principles that very many people could sign up without being in any real sense "socialists"? Anyone care to step up to the plate and defend inequality, individualism and dog-eat-dog competition?

I've been feeling fairly giddy and light-headed all evening - periodically drifting off into a rapt state, dreamy expression across my face. The cause? Simple: Australia 99 for 5, needing another 179 runs to avoid the follow on.

Yes, that's right: Australia 99 for 5, needing another 179 runs to avoid the follow on. No, I can't quite believe it's happening, either.

I'm sure the English players and the English weather have what it takes to snatch defeat (or at least a draw) from the jaws of victory, but that's not going to stop me enjoying it while it lasts.

It would probably be a little unkind to choose this moment to draw attention to Australian fast bowler Shaun Tait's thoughts on how dinosaurs became extinct, as vouchsafed to the Guardian's "Small Talk" feature:

It could have been the ice age, I suppose. But I'd have to say there was a giant earthquake and they all fell between the cracks and were frozen to death. That's why you can still dig them out nowadays.

Aw, bless. :-)

Update (Sunday): Aargh! No finger-nails left! But we did it! That last few overs must be some of the tensest minutes of my life.

Here's the fall of wickets from England's 2nd innings, as they chased a "mere" 129 to win: 32-1; 36-2 (feeling a little edgy now); 57-3; 57-4 (Bell skies it down to fine leg. Idiot!); 103-5; 111-6 (Flintoff's gone - getting a bit nervous again); 116-7 (Geraint Jones attempts to hit Shane Warne out of the ground, and fails miserably - way to go, Geraint).

At this point, full-blown panic set in chez nous - I could hardly bear to watch - but Hoggard and Giles proved to be men who had understanding of the times, to know what had to be done. What a match! What a series!

Note to American readers: now you know how I feel when you blog about baseball (or spelling bees). :-)

Pat Robertson. *sigh*

I had planned to use this post to comment on Robertson's original "take him out" tirade against Hugo Chavez, but really, is he worth it? One shouldn't mock the afflicted, after all.

Anyway, the text of Robertson's original comments, his first, hilarious (not to mention mendacious) non-retraction ("I didn’t say 'assassination.' I said our, uh, our special forces should, quote, 'take him out.' And 'take him out' can be a lot, a number of things, including kidnapping"), and his written statement "to clarify remarks made on the Monday, August 22nd edition of The 700 Club", can be found here.

How anybody could describe that statement as an "apology" is beyond me. OK, Robertson says he apologises for using the word "assassination", but then he goes on to say, "would it not be wiser to wage war against one person rather than finding ourselves down the road locked in a bitter struggle with a whole nation?" (Y'know, I'm sure I've heard a comment not entirely dissimilar to that somewhere before.)

Further down the statement, Robertson invokes the example of "the brilliant Protestant theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer", and his decision to "lend his support to those in Germany who had joined together in an attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler". So Pat Robertson thinks that he is Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Chavez is Adolf Hitler? Pathetic.

Bonhoeffer made the decisions he did at the end of a long process of peaceful resistance to Nazi rule, and he did so knowing he faced imprisonment, torture and death if caught. He would be appalled to find his example being used as implicit justification for a "doctrine of assassination" in any circumstances. But to use Bonhoeffer's example to support actions, not by desperate individuals living under tyranny, but by the most powerful nation in the world in order to uphold that nation's economic and strategic interests through the murder of a democratically elected leader? Just pathetic.

Anyway, let's move on to some interesting links concerning this fiasco. First off, Rick Ritchie suggests that Robertson's outbursts over the years support Neil Postman's argument that "anything important suffered when it was covered on television":

The three areas of life that were too important to leave to television were politics, news, and religion. Robertson has managed to mangle all three at the same time.

The British politics blog Blood & Treasure asks, "Who would Jesus kill?" (language warning). Opening with a nice Fast Show reference - "This week, the Rev. Pat Robertson mostly wants to kill Hugo Chavez" - Jamie Kenny goes on to look at some of Robertson's other proposed targets in the past: Osama bin Laden, people who've seen UFOs, "Ah, **** it. KILL THEM ALL!".

The Guardian gives some background to Chavez and his two fingers to America (see picture, left). Interesting read, though from a very pro-Chavez perspective. It argues that the main reason for US antipathy toward Chavez is his support for Cuba, which has been "the grateful recipient of cheap Venezuelan oil, replacing the subsidised oil it once used to receive from the Soviet Union". But that doesn't mean Chavez is a new Castro:

[A]lthough his rhetoric is revolutionary, his reforms have been moderate and social democratic. He criticises the policies of "savage neo-liberalism" that have done so much harm to the poorer peoples of Venezuela and Latin America in the past 20 years, yet the private sector is still alive and well. His land reform is aimed chiefly at unproductive land and provides for compensation.

His most obvious achievement, which should not have been controversial, has been to channel increased oil revenues into a fresh range of social projects that bring health and education into neglected shanty-towns.

As this article concludes, were Robertson's wish to become somebody's command, the results could be tragic for Venezuela:

Assassinations may be easy to plan, and not difficult to accomplish. But their legacy is incalculable. The radical leader of neighbouring Colombia, Jorge Gaitán, was assassinated more than 50 years ago, in 1948. In terms of civil war and violence, the Colombians have been paying the price ever since. No one would wish that fate on Venezuela.

Not even, one would hope, Pat Robertson.

This site (mentioned by Rick a couple of times recently) looks very interesting: Dissonant Bible.

I've not had chance to read it in any detail, but any theology-related blog that can open a post with the following Second World War ditty:

Hitler has only got one ball
Göring has two but very small
Himmler has something sim'lar
But poor old Goebbels has no balls at all

and can then show how it is relevant and appropriate to the passage under discussion, deserves a link any day of the week. :-)

Dang, now I'll have "Colonel Bogey" going round my head all evening...

Great essay by the Internet Monk, Michael Spencer: Is Your Boy A Real Man?: Focus On The Family's Gender Confusion Watch, in which the iMonk lays into an alarming - no, make that terrifying - article on a FotF website which provides a handy checklist in answer to the question, "Is your child becoming homosexual?".

Here is the checklist. Any parents reading this, do please try to resist the urge to cast anxious glances at your own children as you read this:

1. A strong feeling that they are "different" from other boys.
   


2. A tendency to cry easily, be less athletic, and dislike the roughhousing that other boys enjoy.
   


3. A persistent preference to play female roles in make-believe play.
   


4. A strong preference to spend time in the company of girls and participate in their games and other pastimes.
   


5. A susceptibility to be bullied by other boys, who may tease them unmercifully and call them "queer," "fag" and "gay."
   


6. A tendency to walk, talk, dress and even "think" effeminately.
   


7. A repeatedly stated desire to be — or insistence that he is — a girl.

Ho. Hum.

Anyway, the iMonk points to the supposedly scientific basis of this article, namely the claim by a Dr Joseph Nicolosi that "In one study of 60 effeminate boys ages 4 to 11, 98 percent of them engaged in cross-dressing, and 83 percent said they wished they had been born a girl."

This left me reeling, for much the same reasons as the iMonk points out:

A study of 4 year old effeminate boys? The questions from that sentence could make up an essay of their own. What is effeminate, exactly? Is there a standard, researcher accepted definition of "effeminate?" Are there "effeminate" characteristics that can be objectively set alongside "masculine" characteristics? Is there any hope of objectivity in such a discussion?

I'll have to admit, it all seems a bit...bizarre. Especially when I read that this study was done with 4 through 11 year olds. Yes....that was FOUR year olds. What is an effeminate four year old like, and how do you find them for research? Do you advertise for them? Does someone find them at day cares?

We're off to a strange start.

As the iMonk goes on to argue, the whole article, and especially the checklist, relies on an equation of "effeminacy" with homosexuality, a fundamental error whose absurdity is compounded by definitions of "masculinity" versus "effeminacy" that would have been regarded as a bit narrow and backward in the 1950s ("real men don't cry, don't read books and don't back away from a fight, and they know that if you get bullied then it's your own fault for being such a goddamned queer").

For my own response to that FotF article, see my BHT post from yesterday. It's a bit of a rant, but then again the article made me pretty angry, and 24 hours further on my opinion hasn't altered.

A perceptive post from Sydney Anglican minister Gordon Cheng on early warning signs of "a spiritual power brownout".

How can you tell when you're "in need of a good cleansing zap of spiritual power"? Well, it's not the sort of external things by which we may sometimes be tempted to assess ourselves:

[I]t wasn’t because your ‘miracle a day’ had dropped to a ‘miracle a week’. And it wasn’t because your evangelistic conversations had stopped resulting in a flow of conversions, and started to turn to sniggers behind your back. It wasn’t even because your popularity rating amongst your fellow-believers had plunged below 35%, your lowest in a decade.

And it wasn't even because your blog hits had gone down, or your daily devotions had stagnated. No, it was something more subtle and spiritual:

[W]e knew there was a spiritual power brownout when you started to compare preachers. "That sermon was too long." "This sermon was the best I’ve ever heard." "This one was the funniest." "That one was the most inspiring."

And when you invited us to come to the convention to hear the "most brilliant speaker ever" (your minister), and be amazed by the political dignitaries who made an appearance, that was when we knew you’d really lost it.

As Cheng points out, this spirit of preacher-comparison and sermon-assessment (pretty endemic among conservative evangelicals, it has to be said) has a long pedigree in the church.

What makes this so perceptive is realising that it is situations of apparent strength and blessing that can often conceal the seeds of spiritual decline. It was the very fact that the Corinthians were so blessed with top-notch Christian leaders to follow - Paul, Peter, Apollos - that encouraged divisions among them.

In the same way, the more great preachers and other Christian teachers we have access to, the more easily we can forget that it is the gospel itself that is the power of God for salvation, and focus on the "gospel-givers" rather than the gospel they are giving.

Google comes up trumps with this search:



So it seems that people have been taking it upon themselves to suggest that Tony Blair is a liar and that Sir Ian Blair is also a liar. Well I never.

Anyway, it's another triumph for Google-bombing as an entertaining tool for political protest. All it takes is the widespread use (eg by bloggers) of a large number of unnecessary links to the online biographies for a liar or another liar. Simple as that.

HT (with a language warning) to Perfect.co.uk.

My recent political musings/ramblings (delete as applicable) on topics such as socialism and anarchism are at least partly motivated by the sense that at the General Election earlier this year I voted in haste and am now repenting at leisure. To be frank, I am increasingly aghast (and experiencing a certain degree of self-disgust) at the fact that I voted Conservative. What was I thinking?

This is partly because I've been re-rethinking some of my political attitudes, but the process has been greatly assisted by to the sheer, unadulterated uselessness of the Conservative Party following the election, something that is skewered very well by Roy Hattersley in today's Guardian, who writes:

Britain is in danger of becoming a one-party state - and the Conservative party is almost entirely to blame. Democracy requires at least a possibility of the government changing hands at the next general election. But that prospect diminishes day by day as ... the Conservatives behave in a way which suggests that they are hell-bent on a fourth defeat.

The Tories have spent the past six months following the election not in electing a new leader - that would have been bad enough - but in arguing over exactly how they should set about electing a leader once they get round to doing so. Unbelievable.

As Hattersley points out:

A party that in effect goes out of business for almost six months is no longer a serious force in politics.

The problem is partly the unimpressive personal qualities of the candidates. The frontrunner, David Davies - a man who appears to want to be leader of the Conservative Party for no other reason than that he wants to be leader of the Conservative Party - seems to have no discernible qualifications for the job other than "a broken nose, membership of the Territorial SAS and a birth certificate which confirms that he was born in a council house".

But the problem goes even deeper than that - a complete absence of political ideas, whether in terms of underlying philosophy or compelling policies:

The one qualification that none of the serious (that is to say electable) candidates possesses is ideas ... None of them attempts to describe what their party will stand for in five years' time.

They constantly list the qualities that Conservatives must exhibit if they are ever to win another election. Tories must be kinder, gentler, more compassionate and less associated with greed. But they never explain what hard policies those new attitudes will produce ... That is, I suspect, because none of the leadership candidates has the faintest idea about what Conservatism now stands for.

And as Hattersley points out, the contest scarcely matters anyway, since the last six months have ensured that whoever wins will never be Prime Minister:

[T]he Tories' clear unsuitability for government so undermines their political health that it will not be long before the electorate turns off the life support system.

As a democrat, I ought to mind. But as I contemplate the imminent demise of what once claimed to be the natural party of government, I think of Oscar Wilde on the death of Little Nell. Only a man with a heart of stone could prevent himself from laughing.

Certainly the Conservatives have done a great job of making sure I never repeat the mistake I made last year and this of voting for them, when in many respects - in terms of my age, family set-up, financial status and so on; what I referred to in my previous post, only half in jest, as my "class interests" - I should be the sort of person they are expecting to snare as a lifelong voter. Now, however, if there were an election tomorrow (to ask myself the classic opinion poll question) I suspect I'd return to voting Labour, albeit holding my nose.

Those of you who are reading this in the US may wonder whether all this matters to you over there. But as Hattersley points out, the New Labour one-party hegemony is a serious threat to the health and integrity of British democracy.

I'm currently working my way through Tony Benn's 1991-2001 diaries, Free at Last!, which I picked up on Monday. I greatly enjoyed Benn's 1980s diaries when I read them in the early nineties - back when my main objection to the Labour Party was that it was too right-wing - and the latest volume is equally well-written and stimulating.

Tony Benn certainly has his faults: like most politicians he is wildly egocentric at times, and his judgment can be pretty wayward: he describes Mao as the "greatest man of the twentieth century", and has this bizarre obsession with insisting on smoking in non-smoking compartments on trains, to the extent of carrying around a "Smoking" sticker to put over any "No Smoking" sign while he lights up his pipe!

But you've got to admire his commitment to democratic principles (his admiration for Mao notwithstanding), and there is something heartening about the continuing verve and energy of the man, even as he moved into his seventies. He retains an infectious, almost childlike enthusiasm - for example, when he is eagerly describing the new video camera he has bought ("instead of having a viewfinder, you watch it on a screen about three inches in diameter. It's very, very good") so that he can go round the Houses of Parliament making an unofficial "behind-the-scenes" film for schoolchildren - he the veteran MP, former cabinet minister and Privy Councillor, behaving like a young boy launching into a school project with his new gadget.

To be honest, that continuing mental liveliness alone is almost enough to persuade me to return to socialism. Otherwise I can just picture myself in fifteen years time, giving patronisingly tolerant but worldly-wise advice to my sons about how "It's all very well supporting Labour when you're young and don't have any responsibilities, but once you start paying your taxes you'll soon discover the world doesn't quite work like that", and quoting Margaret Thatcher's line at them about how "The facts of life are invariably Tory". And so on, as my sons roll their eyes and get angry with me as I used to get angry with my father for saying just the same things.

OK, yes, I'm having one of those early-thirties aargh-I'm-turning-into-my-father moments, but I do find my heart stirred when I read things like Benn's summary of a short speech at the Labour Party conference in 1994:

I spoke for exactly three minutes: a very short speech saying that the Labour Party represented the use of the ballot box to redress imbalance, and we should liberate labour and make capital democratically accountable, have more democracy and raise hope.

Certainly that line about the need to "make capital democratically accountable" makes me think. OK, yes, I know what that often ends up as in the end. But it's a reminder that capital has enormous power over how we live, and it's a power over which we have very little real democratic control. Perhaps, in the end, capitalism is (to paraphrase Churchill) the worst way to run an economy apart from all the others, but it would still be a shame to lose even the very aspiration of greater democracy in the economy and the workplace.

On the other hand, perhaps I should just vote Conservative on the grounds that I am being a good Marxist and voting on the basis of my class interest. ;-)

Finally, it has to be said that one comment made by one of Benn's friends some time in 1991 has proven rather more prophetic than Benn would have wished: the friendly warning that he risked becoming seen as an "eccentric old socialist gentleman". My wife's parents went to a "literary luncheon" in Aldeburgh earlier this year at which Tony Benn was the guest of honour, and they suspected they were probably the only people in the entire audience who were (i) under 60 and (ii) Labour voters. The man whose very name struck fear into the hearts of the middle classes for a quarter of a century has become a National Treasure. "Those whom the gods would destroy they first make loveable."

Some interesting news from the astronomers: a new infrared survey of our galaxy, the Milky Way, appears to confirm that it is a barred spiral galaxy, rather than just a regular spiral galaxy like all the Patrick Moore books I devoured as a child told me it was.

Still looks very pretty, whatever it is; especially if you click the thumbnail for the stunning full-size image of what the galaxy could look like from the outside.

Brother Roger, 90-year old founder of the Taizé community, was stabbed to death last night at a prayer service.

Remember Juan Charles de Menezes? He's the Brazilian electrician who was shot seven times in the head by the Metropolitan Police, after he ran from anti-terrorist officers who suspected him of being a suicide bomber, and who chased him after he had vaulted over a ticket barrier at Stockwell underground station.

Well, it now turns out that the whole thing was a pack of lies: apart, sadly, from the bit about him being shot seven times in the mouth from point-blank range. Leaked documents from the police investigation show that:

• Mr Menezes did not realise he was being followed.
  


• He didn't run.
  


• He didn't vault over the ticket barrier - he bought a ticket, picked up a free newspaper and boarded the train calmly.
  


• He wasn't wearing a "padded jacket": his denim jacket can clearly be seen in the above photograph, if you can bear to look that closely.
  


• He was already being held by one officer when he was shot while seated in the carriage: "I grabbed the male in the denim jacket by wrapping both my arms around his torso, pinning his arms to his side. I then pushed him back on to the seat where he had been previously sitting ... I then heard a gun shot very close to my left ear and was dragged away on to the floor of the carriage" (police officer's statement to the investigation).

It is also alleged that no video footage was taken of Mr de Menezes leaving his flat, because the police officer on surveillance was relieving himself at the time. Well, I'm sorry, but in the light of everything else, I simply don't believe that. I suspect that's another shoddy attempt to maintain a last fig-leaf of "innocent human error" to justify the police actions (the most charitable description of which would now appear to be criminal gross negligence, if not outright murder).

What really angers me is the propaganda that was pumped out by the authorities in order to "manage" the public response to this outrage. "He was running from the police", "he jumped over the ticket barrier", "he was an illegal immigrant", all lies or irrelevant smears intended to defuse public anger by producing a response that could be summed up as, "Well, ghastly business, but I guess the police had no choice".

And I'm angry with myself for falling for this sort of propaganda every time. I fell for it in 1991, I fell for it in 2003, and I fell for it this time.

But to return to the point, you might be wondering if it would be too much to expect the Home Secretary and the Metropolitan Police Commissioner to resign over this. Well, yes, I expect it would.

Update: The BBC has a side-by-side comparison of the initial reports versus the new evidence.

So the reputation of British Airways is once again down the toilet (along with an estimated £40m of BA's profits), 100,000 have their travel plans wrecked, and the British tourist industry (already jittery following the London bombings) takes another hit, and it turns out that by a strange coincidence the company at the centre of all this, Gate Gourmet, had prepared a secret plan that bears an uncanny resemblance to what has taken place:

Recruit, train and security check drivers. Announce intention to trade union, provoking unofficial industrial action from staff. Dismiss current workforce. Replace with new staff.

The only rational conclusion I can draw is that the management of Gate Gourmet are a communist sleeper cell dating from the Cold War, who have never abandoned their mission to undermine and discredit capitalism from the inside. Except that, from what I've seen and heard of their management, I think that would be crediting them with too much competence.

HT: Harry's Place.

Doonesbury (which I get sent by email each day, ever since I stopped reading the Guardian regularly) has been very preachy and dull recently, so it was good to come across one that made me laugh for once:

In response to a comment by Chris Atwood, I've added trackback to the site. I'd previously omitted this feature because I couldn't make head nor tail of it. Still can't, but if you can - and Haloscan have provided a guide to its use, here - then be my guest.

A real eye-opener of an article in the Observer this week on food poverty. Various sidebars to the main article gave details of some typical meals for children in various third-world countries (including Nigeria, Zambia, India and Haiti), set out as food-magazine recipes.

For example, here's what eight year-old Asquo Edem of Lagos eats as his only meal of the day, on a good day (on a bad day, he has no food at all and cries himself to sleep):

Plantain, pepper and bones
Serves 1 child
Cost: 15p

half a thin slice of plantain and fried pepper
leftover bones and fat (free from butcher)
palm nut oil

Slice the plantain and pepper as thin as possible. Heat oil, fry the plantain and pepper, bones and any fat. Serve hot with weak tea and powdered milk.

The Zambian child's supper consisted basically of cereal and ash.

The article itself gives broader background information about the problem of food poverty:

You need protein and fats to survive. But in most sub-Saharan countries and much of poorer America and Asia the protein and oils part of the diet is around 20 per cent - not the 40 or 50 per cent it ought to be. Even in the most meat-heavy supper in our survey - eaten by a street family in Port-au-Prince, Haiti - 14 people shared just 330 grams of goat. And so tonight 800 million people will go to bed chronically under-fed: 200 million of them are children.

Even in comparatively rich countries like India and Nigeria, almost fifty per cent of under-fives are "so malnourished that their growth is stunted", and "200 million children across the world are suffering from chronic or acute malnutrition".

The article then goes on to look at the underlying causes of this widespread malnutrition across the world:

All the problems of the settled malnourished - as opposed to those displaced by war or disaster - can be traced back, quite simply, to poverty. But the causes of that are complex, and often quite new.

Here are some of these causes, as outlined by the article:

1. Trade liberalisation

I've generally been in favour of free trade, but it did make me pause when I read this:

...the liberalised trade rules forced on Cambodia as part of the deal to let it join the WTO has meant opening its borders to rice imports. These have poured in from Vietnam, where cooperative farming produces much cheaper rice. The price of rice in Cambodia collapsed.

And hence the Cambodian family to whom this journalist spoke is broken up (as the father goes of to Phnom Penh to try to earn some money in the building trade) and their eight-year old son given nothing to eat for his supper other than a lump of rice the size of his (under-sized) fist. The writer argues that this is typical of small farmers around the world who now find "their fragile worlds upset by economic forces far beyond their control".

2. Western agricultural subsidies

This is the bit that made me angry. The more I think about it, the more I believe that the Common Agricultural Policy and the equivalent subsidies to farmers in North America are just plain evil.

I mean, where to begin? With the "€2-a-day cow", with European cows each receiving more in government handouts than over a billion people have to live on each day? As the article continues:

Adding to the injury, that cow's excess milk is then dumped abroad - an operation the EU also subsidises. As a result, small dairy farmers in countries as far apart as Jamaica and India have been put out of business.

Or perhaps we could consider European sugar, where subsidies and market restrictions benefiting producers of EU sugar - declared illegal by the WTO in April, but with no action yet in response from the EU - are estimated to have caused damage to (for example) Mozambiquan sugar producers amounting to one-third of the value of the aid that the EU annually contributes to that country.

The G8 meeting this year promised an additional $48 billion in aid to Africa by 2010, but this is dwarfed by the effect that an end to agricultural export subsidies and Western import duties on third world goods would have: earning Africa alone $269 billion per year.

Attempts to improve this situation are being held up by wrangles between the EU and the US, "neither of whom will budge on subsidy reform unless the other does".

3. Western aid

As we've seen, the G8 meeting promised Africa additional aid, but did little or nothing to improve the trading position of poor nations. But quite apart from fostering a dependency culture and making it impossible for people to earn money by selling produce to rich nations, aid can be counter-productive for poor nations:

The arrival of sacks of foreign grain and rice in a famine-hit country has many effects beyond feeding the starving. For a start it can result in a drop in the market price of the same products - good news initially for the hungry, but potentially catastrophic over a few months.

After the 1997 financial crash in East Asia, Japan and America shipped huge amounts of their own farmers' subsided rice into Indonesia, where the collapse of a government food subsidy scheme was causing shortages in rural areas. But this glut of foreign rice destroyed the market for local producers, and put tens of thousands of farmers and distributors out of business. Indonesia, once a rice exporter, is now a rice importer - to the benefit of US and Japanese farmers.

So what's to be done? Well, as the article points out, there have been some positive changes in recent years. China saw a 49 per cent drop in underweight infants during the 1990s, and Mexico a 46 per cent reduction in the same period. The reasons for this are disputed, but the opening of these countries to global markets seems to have been part of the process.

It does seem that the situation at the moment is the worst of all worlds: poor nations are forced to open up their markets to Western imports (often of subsidised produce being dumped at a loss), while tariffs continue to hamper attempts for poor nations to export produce and other goods back into rich nations (US tariffs on imports from Bangladesh average out at 14%).

So perhaps there is something to be said for what the likes of Oxfam call "pro-poor trade": deliberately tilting the balance of trade rules back in the direction of poor nations, rather than insisting on a supposedly "level" playing field.

The article concludes that there is no simple answer to this problem. Even though there is enough food in the world to feed everybody, the idea that this is simply a problem of supply is "impossibly idealistic". Nor is vegetarianism a solution, despite the suggestion that too much food is currently fed to livestock. One analyst quoted in the article argues that "Vegetarianism may be OK for kids in the very best conditions, but I can't see that it's a good thing for the poorest". And population growth and climate change could make matters significantly worse over the next few years.

However, one Oxfam worker pointed out that there are still things we can do to alleviate hunger:

"It's as simple as a mother in Bangladesh selling the bananas from the trees behind her home. Her children need to eat them, because they badly need the potassium and the vitamin B6. But she has to pay the money-lender back for the cash she borrowed when her son was in hospital. Don't tell me that sorting out Bangladesh's macro problems - the debt, the trade issues, the bad aid and the corruption - won't help that family."

This special feature on food poverty was followed by an article on British eating habits, illustrated by photographs of the popular beat combo Girls Aloud! having a badly-staged food fight.

My friend Nick - whose unsolicited testimonial to this site ("Love the blog; not sure about the message, in fact I actively disagree with about 90% of everything you post, 'opposition is true friendship'") I am tempted to put on the sidebar, Pontifications style :-) - left a comment that linked to a CND site about the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System at USAF "RAF" Fylingdales in North Yorkshire.

The old "golf balls" (LHS of above photo), now demolished, were a very familiar sight from my childhood: we used to go on holiday regularly to Whitby, and the road to Whitby runs right past the Fylingdales base. I haven't been up that way since the golf balls were replaced by the new pyramid-style structure that can be seen at the right-hand side of the above photograph (conspiracy theorists will note the resemblance to the pyramid depicted on the US dollar bill...)

Anyway, while I confess to having not read the linked site too attentively, I was interested to see a link to an aerial photograph of Fylingdales here. It's quite instructive to look at that aerial photograph (or this close-up; sadly Google Maps doesn't pick this area up at any decent resolution) and then compare it with the Ordnance Survey map of the same area (if you hover over the aerial photograph, the site should superimpose the map over that part of the photo, which is rather clever). Notice anything missing from the map, somewhere around Loose Howe Rigg?

This sort of knee-jerk British secrecy has always baffled me. I once had an argument about this with a friend of mine who worked for the Defence Research Agency, over the issue of why the establishment at which she worked does not appear on any maps (aerial shot; map - note the buildings at the top-centre of the photo). She thought this was perfectly justifiable; I said I could see why some buildings that were, like, actually secret should be kept off the map, but buildings that everyone knew were there - especially buildings that are a world-famous landmark situated 200 yards from the A169 - could conceivably be included.

Anyway, you have to remember that this is the country that still refuses to admit that MI6 exists, let alone that this nondescript and anonymous London office (as seen in a recent James Bond film!) is its headquarters. (The MI6 building does at least appear on OS maps, even if only as "Govt Office", and can be see in all its Google Maps glory - along with a monster traffic jam on Vauxhall Bridge - here.)

My understanding is that this is very different from how other countries, particularly the US, go about this. Any thoughts on that?

Wonderful poem, from Gordon Brown's eulogy for Robin Cook, yesterday:

Praise of a Man

The beneficent lights dim
but don't vanish.
The razory edges
dull, but still cut.
He's gone:
but you can see
his tracks still, in the snow of the world.

                                              - Norman McCaig

Been having a fiddle with my blogroll again. Everything is now in alphabetical order, though with British blogs (in a fervour of national pride) listed first. One or two MIAs removed.

One very interesting-looking new blog is Three Hierarchies, a new site started in the last few hours (how up to date am I?) by Chris Atwood. Given the high standard of Chris's posts on HWS over the past few months, this promises to be well worth visiting regularly (or subscribing to its site feed, of course).

Another new addition is A Beggar at the Table, in which Revd Alex Klages is providing an "anti-breviary" of heretics down the ages. Entries so far include Montanus, Marcion and Paul of Samosata, and each entry includes a special verse in commemoration of that day's heretic (though my suggestion that these should all be clerihews appears to have fallen on deaf ears, alas). A very original idea, and an entertaining and edifying read.

Better a meal of vegetables where there is love
     than a fattened calf with hatred. (Proverbs 15:17)

Somehow I'd failed to read this properly back in June - though that didn't stop me commenting on it at the time (*blushes*) - but Chris Atwood had an excellent post over at HWS on early Christian vegetarianism.

Vegetarianism among Christians had its roots (no pun intended) in a number of factors: the example of Daniel and his companions, concerns about meat sacrificed to idols, as well as a general emphasis on a frugal and abstemious lifestyle which also featured teetotalism and abstention from sexual relations.

I particularly enjoyed the quote from the fourth century Spanish Christian poet Prudentius, who describes all the foods given by God ("birds ensnared in cunning traps, fish caught in nets and on rods, the rich crop in grains, the vine, the olive, milk, honey, and the fruits of the orchard") before going on to say:

All this abundance is in the service of Christ’s followers and supplies their every need. Far from us be the appetite that would chose to slay cattle and hack their flesh to make a bloody feast. Let tribes uncivilized have their savage meals from the slaughter of four-footed beasts: as for us, the leaves of greens, the pod that swells with beans of diverse sorts, will feed us with an innocent banquet.

While I personally have some sympathy with the bumper sticker described by Dave H which said, "If God didn't intend for us to eat animals then why did he make them out of meat?" :-), my wife is a vegetarian, and I won't hear a word said against vegetarianism. (Nor have I any patience with those who claim to be vegetarian, but then happily eat fish, chicken, bacon, sausages, steak, etc.)

My wife is also a superb cook, who proves that Prudentius is right on the money with his assertion that "the leaves of greens, the pod that swells with beans of diverse sorts, will feed us with an innocent banquet", though frankly it sounds like Prudentius could have done with a slightly more imaginative range of vegetarian recipes if that's all he was getting to eat. Perhaps I'll be able to get my wife to cook for him in the new heavens and the new earth.

Anyway, when you combine this with my recent series of posts about Christian anarchy (1 | 2 | 3 | 4), it's interesting to be reminded of this important strain in early Christianity that is often airbrushed out of church history: one characterised by vegetarianism, anarchism and pacifism. (Plus all the men wore sandals and had beards - aargh! They were Guardian readers! It brings a whole new meaning to the phrase, "liberal Christian"...)

Even if we decide that those early Christians were mistaken to think that the faith required them to take these positions, it still does us good to have our conceptions of the early church widened in this way. And it's a useful counterbalance against those Christians who try to argue that vegetarianism is some kind of New Age/neopagan innovation that is forbidden to us as Christians (such as the former Conservative minister John Gummer, who, when he wasn't force-feeding burgers to his daughter in a doomed attempt to allay fears about BSE, argued that vegetarianism was "wholly unnatural").

Via Rick's latest post, a fascinating article from Logia on "The Most Beautiful Hymns in the World", in which Jon Vieker looks at how the 19th century Lutheran church in America adopted English-language hymns from other Christian traditions for its first English hymnals.

The "small but gifted" English Synod was mainly responsible for this process. The editors of the first English-language Lutheran hymnal, the Evangelical Lutheran Hymn Book (ELHB, first edition published in 1889), started their task by translating "their beloved German hymn corpus" into English, but then found themselves looking further afield to "what for them must have been a brave, new world of English-language hymnody".

They were clearly impressed by much of what they saw in this new world. As one English Synod writer put it:

God's praise is worthy of man's most perfect literary expression; and when Isaac Watts and Martin Luther and Wesley wrote the most beautiful hymns in the world they brought to the task all their literary skill and ability, their sentiment is lofty and inspiring, the music noble and uplifting.

For a Lutheran to mention Watts and Wesley in the same breath as Luther tells its own story.

The article continues by looking at the main eras of hymn-writing that were reflected in the ELHB, providing a very useful history of English hymnody up to 1900 in the process:

1. "From Watts to Wesley"

This looks at the eighteenth century, when Isaac Watts "open[ed] the window and let in the sunshine" into a church music scene that had become dominated by "a monochromatic [metrical] psalmody", and was followed by such evangelical hymn-writers as Charles Wesley and Edward Perronet ("All hail the power of Jesus' name").

2. The Legacy of the English Evangelicals

In particular looking at John Newton ("Glorious things of thee are spoken"), John Cowper ("There is a fountain filled with blood") and Augustus Montague Toplady ("Rock of ages"). I was particularly interested by the description of how Newton's hymn "Glorious things of thee are spoken" follows his three-part "sermon hymn pattern" of text, application and prayer, and to read the fourth stanza which is now invariably omitted from hymn books:

Bless'd inhabitants of Zion,
Wash'd in the Redeemer's blood!
Jesus, whom their souls rely on,
Makes them kings and priests to God.
'Tis his love his people raises
Over self to reign as kings,
And as priests, his solemn praises
Each for a thank-off'ring brings.

Another common change to this hymn is the practice of starting the final stanza "Saviour, since of Zion's city/I through grace a member am...", instead of Newton's more Calvinistic "Saviour, if of Zion's city..."

It's good to see the twentieth-century successors of Newton, Cowper and Toplady, particularly Timothy Dudley-Smith ("Tell out my soul"), making their presence felt in more recent LCMS hymnals, particularly the forthcoming Lutheran Service Book.

This section also describes the legal wrangles that accompanied the introduction of hymns into the Church of England. Hymns had been prohibited in the Church of England (since the Book of Common Prayer makes no provision for them), and an evangelical clergyman in Sheffield, Thomas Cotterill, was forced by the Archbishop of York in 1820 to withdraw a hymn book he'd produced for his congregation ten years earlier.

However, the Archbishop was by no means hostile to the practice of singing hymns, as evidenced by the fact he went on to authorise - and have printed at his own expense - an alternative collection of 146 hymns that became known as "The Archbishop's Selection", and were used throughout the north of England.

3. The Oxford Movement and Hymns Ancient and Modern

Hymns Ancient & Modern (Revised) is still my definitive notion of what constitutes a "hymn book", having been used at both my school and the church where I was a choirboy. It reflected the priorities of the Anglo-Catholic revival that began in the 1830s with the Oxford Movement, particularly John Mason Neale's translations of pre-Reformation Latin and Greek hymns and liturgy ("Let all mortal flesh keep silence", for example).

The first edition of Hymns Ancient & Modern was intended to provide the first truly "national" hymnal for the Church of England, in place of the locally-assembled collections found in many parishes, described by one observer as follows:

Every Clergyman now-a-days seems to pride himself on having "his own" selection of hymns, compiled probably by his wife and eldest daughter ... No doubt it is well to let gentlemen have a vent for their genius, and perhaps a hymnbook is after all more harmless ... than a volume of bad sermons printed "at the request" of personal admirers!

4. The Flowering of English Hymnody

The second half of the nineteenth century saw probably the greatest flowering of English hymnody. Victorian hymns were more "doctrinal and didactic" than those of the eighteenth century, with key themes including the centrality of death, and the Christian life as a "pilgrimage to heaven". These themes are exemplified in Henry Lyte's hymn "Abide with me", and again it is fascinating to read some of the stanzas that are normally omitted from hymn books today.

Another feature of nineteenth century hymnody is the emergence of more women hymn writers, such as Frances Havergal ("Take My Life and Let It Be") and Charlotte Elliot ("Just as I am"). Vieker quotes the hymnologist Ian Bradley as saying:

It is tempting to categorize Victorian women hymn-writers into two distinct types - the sickly spinster who pours her frustration into highly-charged verse of an intensely emotional and evangelical hue, and the robust and active wife and mother who writes with more objectivity and control.

5. The American Contribution

The ELHB contained relatively few US hymns, mainly because these were so heavily influenced by the Arminianism and revivalism that swept the American church during the nineteenth century ("What a friend we have in Jesus" seems to have slipped through because initially no-one knew who had written it!). Lutheran hymn writers of this period include Matthias Loy and Henry Eyster Jacobs.

Conclusion

As Vieker concludes, the great preponderance of British hymns in the ELHB is scarcely surprising:

[O]ne must ask the obvious question: why would a confessional Lutheran at the end of the nineteenth century consider for more than a minute including the contemporary gospel songs of Sankey and Moody when he had at his disposal all of the doctrinal richness of Hymns Ancient and Modern and, indeed, much, much more from which to choose?

The explosion of Victorian hymnody that had burst forth from the marriage of Evangelical and Tractarian purposes in the Church of England, found itself echoing loudly, even in such faraway places as the little English Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Missouri and Other States.

The application to the contemporary Lutheran church is left to the reader as an exercise, but it is striking (and heartening) to see how many British hymns are being included in the Lutheran Service Book, including some (as included in "Hymns to Learn before 2006" (PDF)) that it is almost impossible to imagine could qualify as "new" hymns anywhere in the English-speaking world: "Praise, my soul, the King of heaven", "Lo, he comes with clouds descending", "Christ is made the sure foundation", "See amid the winter's snow", "The King of love my shepherd is", "Once in royal David's city" and "The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended".

But good to see the tradition of Lutheran adoption of classic English hymnody, in preference to more "contemporary" American songs, continuing even today.

I liked this. From Blood & Treasure (full post is well worth reading) via the Guardian's Backbencher email:

An Afro-Caribbean Englishman, a Sino-Irishman and a Scots Muslim of Pakistani descent walk into a pub.

"That Hazel Blears," says the Afro-Caribbean Englishman, who is Welsh on his mother's side. "Just what planet is she from?"

Wondering what on earth this is about? Click here.

Well, enough moping around already. After all, it's not like I've just spent three weeks in prison for sitting at the bottom of a fire escape, is it?

That was the fate that befell Andrew White, a 43-year old homeless man in Bradford, West Yorkshire, as reported by the Guardian today:

Andrew White, a 43-year-old homeless man, breached his antisocial behaviour order (Asbo) by sitting on the bottom steps of a fire escape, behind a derelict building. For that breach, he spent three weeks in prison.

That morning he had come out of the local night shelter with another homeless man. The weather was fine and they had an hour or so to wait before the day centre for homeless people opened. So they crossed the road to a derelict office building and sat in the sunshine. His companion started to inject himself with heroin. Whether White knew or cared about this is uncertain, but when the police came by the other homeless man was told to move on, and White was arrested.

Mr White had breached two provisions of his Asbo: one forbidding him from entering any privately-owned land or building in West Yorkshire "without rightful authority of the owner" - such as sitting on the bottom step of a fire-escape without the landowner's permission - and the second prohibiting him from being present whenever any illegal drug is "traded, sold, supplied or otherwise distributed in a public place" (I can only conclude that Mr White's companion was deemed to have been "distributing" the heroin into his bloodstream).

As the article goes on to point out, while Mr White is "no angel" - a record as long as your arm, frankly - there are a number of worrying features of this Asbo:

1. Mr White was illiterate, and no-one had ever even read the terms of his Asbo to him.
   


2. The Asbo was - and as a lawyer I can freely concur with this assessment - appallingly drafted, including badly-worded provisions and illegible handwritten amendments. "All in all, it looked as if the court had not treated the Asbo as a serious document, since it is hard to believe that any court clerk checking it could have left this mess."
   


3. The Asbo covered a number of acts that were criminal offences anyway (such as shoplifting), rather than the more vaguely "antisocial" behaviour that Asbos are intended to cover. As the writer points out, this suggests the true purpose of the Asbo was "to ensure that this homeless and illiterate man would receive a longer than commensurate sentence for any criminal act".

And then there is the question of whether the offence for which Mr White was actually jailed - sitting in the sun - could be said to constitute "antisocial behaviour" in any meaningful sense.

Further analysis of this case, and of Asbos generally, can be found here. DS Ketelby has posted on the subject of Asbos here and here, and (just to show this is not merely a concern to bleeding-heart liberals - just kidding, DS) there was a good article in the Spectator a few months ago on this Asbo Madness (but it'll cost ya - paid subscription required).

"Antisocial behaviour orders" were introduced by the Labour government to deal with behaviour that was antisocial but not specifically criminal - such as "disruptive gangs of young people that terrorise estates". However, this case reinforces concerns that Asbos have turned into a Dickensian nightmare in which individually-tailored criminal offences are created (at the whim of a magistrate) for the poor, the mentally-ill, the vulnerable and the eccentric.

These include such notorious Asbos as the order preventing a woman from being naked in her own home if there was a chance someone might see her, and another case in which a 15-year old boy with Asperger's Syndrome was prohibited from staring over his neighbours' garden fence. One Scotsman was jailed for four months for breaching an Asbo that banned him from howling like a werewolf and dancing round his flat with a Christmas tree.

The Asbo approach seems to be very popular with this government: one of the proposed new anti-terrorist measures is the introduction of "extended control orders" for British subjects who cannot be deported, with any breach of the order resulting in a jail sentence.

No doubt there are circumstances in which both Asbos and "extended control orders" are a just, reasonable and effective way of dealing with behaviour that is antisocial or that poses a potential terrorist threat, but falls short of outright criminality. As government ministers are always quick to point out, it's very easy for people in nice middle-class areas to get very precious about the theory of Asbos, while people in working-class areas live in terror of a few hooligans.

But the track record for Asbos shows there is a very real risk of injustice where this type of order is poorly drafted or used in inappropriate circumstances.

Just having the weekend off. Online discourse completely sucks. Involves 10% of our personalities trampling over 100% of the personalities of the other participants. We were made by God to be face to face with one another, to see and hear one another as real people.

Will be back just as soon as I've forgotten that again.

Update (Monday):

"...heavy words are so lightly thrown..."

Self-pity levels stabilising... martyr-complex returning to normal operating parameters... Smiths CDs returned to breakable-glass cabinet... normal service will be resumed as soon as I have anything worth saying...

Update (2): I now realise what I said in my post on Friday could be misinterpreted. To clarify: it was my 10% doing the trampling, not my 100% getting trampled. I wasn't complaining about anybody else's behaviour, but bewailing my own.

Returning to the very un-British subject of Britishness, as I mentioned in my earlier post on this subject this topic has been exercising the Guardian just as much as the Telegraph since 12th July (the date on which it was announced that the London bombers were British).

The Guardian asked various people the question, "What does it mean to be British?". Given that the Guardian is the polar opposite of the Telegraph in many ways, it's interesting to see how many of the same themes emerge here as in the Telegraph: tolerance, pluralism, freedom, history, a certain national character and way of looking at things.

Thomas Kielinger, London-based correspondent for Die Welt of Germany:

The greatest virtue of Britain is tolerance, towards itself and others. The flip side of that is negligence and slovenliness and a sense you don't care too much about defining yourself, but now you need to because you are under threat...

You've lost the knack for calling a spade a spade and admiring your own historical greatness. It's not called "Great" Britain for nothing. There's no need for this country to become so open to other societies that it's oblivious to its own culture and historical centre.

Jeremy Paxman, journalist and author:

You have a perfect right in this country to do what you want without anyone asking what you are doing or why you are doing it. People may say we are cold, but what is wrong with being less demonstrative?

...I would not want to work anywhere but Britain. Elsewhere the media take themselves so seriously and are pompous and dull. The premium here on being interesting and engaging is something I like.

Kwame Kwei-Armah, playwright and actor:

We are miles ahead of everyone else when it comes to cultural relations. On the question of naked integration we are streaks ahead of even North America...

What I do associate with Britishness is our intellectual vigour, our sense of irony and our liberal sensibilities - not some idea that once we ruled the world or some sort of stiff upper lip.

Boris Johnson, Conservative MP and editor of The Spectator, currently writing a book about Britishness:

We gave the world industrialisation, democracy and football. In other words, we gave the world its economic system, its political system and its main leisure activity, and we continue to be a hugely beneficial civilising force across the planet. There is a distinctive British culture, cast of mind and set of values. It's not just tolerance, though tolerance is part of it...

I also think it's quite unBritish to keep bashing on about Britishness. One of the things we are most valued for abroad is our understatement and our refusal to keep asserting, the way the Americans do, that "we are the greatest nation on earth". We might secretly believe it, but we don't see any particular advantage in saying it. But you could mount a very good case.

Sir Iqbal Sacranie, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain:

The values of Britain are the very values I am proud to be part of as a British Muslim, as part of my faith. Tolerance, respect, understanding, care for your neighbour are very important concepts that should be inherent in any Muslim...

Michael Boyd, artistic director of the RSC:

The thing I like most about Britishness is its messiness and incompleteness ... I like the unfinishedness of the idea of Britishness and I think that's what is shaping about it...

There is a British anti-intellectualism and a fear of pretension which is quite difficult for people in the arts, but this same impulse means the British are able to resist the sweep of big ideas and things like xenophobia and the BNP. I hope we will always be a messy, pluralistic place.

"A waitress is no longer allowed to wander round a beer garden with a plunging neckline. I would not want to enter a beer garden under these conditions."

To find out what is causing such dismay to Christian Ude, mayor of Munich, see my new post over at Purpose Driven Drinking.

I was plugging this on another site earlier today, but it's worth a mention here: the excellent book "What some of you were: stories about Christians and homosexuality", edited by Christopher Keane. It won the Australian Christian Book of the Year award in 2002, and the judges described it as follows:

It combines open, honest & at times moving personal stories of those who grapple with homosexuality (their own or that of people close to them). Personal testimonies are supplemented with appendices providing impressive medical, social and theological perspectives on the issue.

They added that it is "a compassionate treatment of an issue which - the book itself admits - has been handled poorly at times by Christians".

The introduction by Edward Vaughan, Senior Minister of Darling Street Anglican Church in Sydney, sets the scene for the book. Vaughan describes hearing a radio phone-in following a report on Sydney's Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras:

I listened as a spokesman for the Mardi Gras said, "It's a celebration of love, creativity and human sexuality. Being gay is just another way to be human, to be a family, to be together". He spoke with the voice of commonsense, the voice of reason.

Then the lines were opened to those who wished to comment. The callers fell into two categories. One group agreed with the spokesman, and also spoke with the same voice of reason. As for the other group - it was rabid, bigoted, angry, aggressive, simply embarrassing, often misinformed. And often claiming to be Christian.

I reached over and turned off the radio with a deep sense of despair. I seemed to have only two options - to affirm homosexuality as a lifestyle choice, as acceptable as any other, or to be narrow-minded and hateful. It doesn't seem like much of a choice to me.

Vaughan goes on to look at the lessons of the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector for this issue, before describing a suburban church of which he had once been a member:

In that church, I think it would have been impossible for an adolescent in our fellowship to come out and say "I think I'm gay". We didn't create a safe place for people to be honest about their struggles. We allowed a culture of fear, where being honest would have meant almost certain rejection and ridicule.

In that church, I think we were guilty of sin. The Bible is not homophobic. God is not a persecutor of homosexuals, and his people know only too well the depths of their failure before him. It's very hard to be violent to someone when you are looking them in the eyes with your hand around their shoulder saying, "I have sinned too".

And as Vaughan points out, one of the strongest and clearest condemnations of homosexuality in the Bible, in 1 Corinthians 6:9-11, not only brackets it with other expressions of human sin that may be closer to home for some of us - drunkenness and greed, for example; and "revilers" - but is also followed by some of the most moving words in the whole Bible, certain words that have a great deal of meaning for me personally. As Vaughan puts it:

[T]he part I love is verse 11 - "That is what some of you were...". From the very beginning the church of Christ has been made up of people who were substance abusers, adulterers, liars, compulsive spenders - and homosexuals. The church is made up of people who have found mercy in Christ. No matter who I am or what I have done, I am a candidate for regeneration in Christ. Praise God that he should have mercy on a sinner like me.

This book is absolutely essential reading on this topic, mainly because it is one of the few books that lets us hear the voices of Christians who have struggled with this issue at first hand: six gay and lesbian people, a mother, daughter, wife, and a married couple.

One of these individual testimonies, from a man named Christopher, can be found in this sample chapter (PDF). Christopher describes in vivid detail both the appeal, and ultimately the emptiness, of the homosexual lifestyle for him personally.

The book itself is available from Matthias Media and the Good Book Company on their respective Australian, US and UK websites.

Reading the lists of Great British Characteristics in my previous post calls to mind John Betjeman's poem In Westminster Abbey, in which a lady praying in Westminster Abbey during the war ("Gracious Lord, oh bomb the Germans...") petitions the Almighty thus:

Think of what our Nation stands for,
Books from Boots' and country lanes,
Free speech, free passes, class distinction,
Democracy and proper drains.

One effect of the terrorist attacks on London last month has been to provoke a great deal of debate and discussion about British identity. What's interesting - given the mixture of hostility and embarrassment that many on the Left seem to feel about the very idea of "Britishness" - is that this is not confined to the Right: both the Daily Telegraph (from which the neat little graphic at the top of this post is taken) and the Guardian are running series of articles on this issue.

First of all, the Telegraph's perspective. A recent leader column proposed ten core values of the British identity, as follows:

1. The rule of law ("No one is above the law - not even the government").
   


2. The sovereignty of the Crown in Parliament.
   


3. The pluralist state ("all parties, sects, faiths and ideologies must tolerate the existence of their rivals").
   


4. Personal freedom ("We should tolerate eccentricity in others, almost to the point of lunacy, provided no one else is harmed").
   


5. Private property ("Britain was quicker than most countries to recognise this and became, in consequence, one of the happiest and most prosperous nations on Earth").
   


6. Institutions ("British freedom and British character are immanent in British institutions").
   


7. The family ("the essential ingredient of a stable society").
   


8. History ("...a political culture, a set of specific legal rights and obligations, and a stupendous series of national achievements").
   


9. The English-speaking world ("the atrocities of September 11, 2001, were ... an attack on the anglosphere - on all of us who believe in freedom, justice and the rule of law").
   


10. The British character ("stubborn, stoical, indignant at injustice").

Interesting to compare this with a poll from the same issue, in which people were asked to state how important various phrases or words are in defining Britain and what it is to be British:

1. British people's right to say what they think.
   


2. Britain's defiance of Nazi Germany in 1940.
   


3. British people's sense of fairness and fair play.
   


4. The landscape of Britain.
   


5. The achievements of Britain's scientists and engineers.
   


6. British justice.
   


7. Our parliamentary democracy.
   


8. People's politeness and consideration towards one another.
   


9. The Royal Navy.
   


10. Having a strong economy.

Narrowly missing the cut: tolerance, not being invaded since 1066 (apart from all the times we have been, obviously), stoicism and the Monarchy. The Church of England came fourth from bottom, just behind red telephone boxes, but comfortably ahead of the motorway network.

The same poll found that the contemporary Briton whom most people said they took pride in was Kelly Holmes, the Olympic double gold medallist, who beat the Queen in a photo finish (51% to 50%).

Worth reading the analysis of the poll by Prof Anthony King, who is something of a beloved national institution himself these days (a status that can be precisely dated to Election Night in 1997, when he described what was happening in the immortal words, "This isn't a landslide: it's an asteroid hitting the planet and destroying practically all life on earth").

Ordinary Americans give their views on the London bomb attacks, as reported by The Onion. I particularly enjoyed the Irish-American's comment:

"What? Did these madmen not hear the
world denounce these acts just weeks ago?"

"Well, it certainly led to a lot of poorly Photoshopped
crying lions and unicorns in my e-mail."

"The sad thing is, London may now develop
anti-Pakistani racism for the first time in its history."

"Whatever dangers London may face, I am confident
that the strong leadership of Her Majesty
the Queen can handle any challenge."

"Are the Brits flying into a blind rage and invading
an oil-producing country for no reason? Well, why not?"

"As an Irishman, I think whoever's behind
this should be found and punished if it isn't us."

Following on from Jacques Ellul's reflections on how all political power is suspect, even when wielded by Christians, some interesting thoughts from Dietrich Bonhoeffer on an example of how one law passed according to "Christian principles" proved disastrously counterproductive.

This is taken from Charles Ringma's splendid little book Seize the Day (with Dietrich Bonhoeffer), which consists of 365 devotions in which a short extract from Bonhoeffer's writings is followed by reflections from Ringma. This is the entry for March 19th (the first paragraph is Bonhoeffer, the rest is Ringma):

"In carrying through the prohibition law in the 18th Amendment... American Christianity... has had to recognise that the transference of Christian principles to state life has led to a catastrophic breakdown. The prohibition law gave an unprecedented impulse to crime in the larger cities. - from No Rusty Swords

Sometimes Christians assume that if only they were in power the world would be a better place. But the personal values that Christians hold aren't so easily translated into social values and laws. And more particularly, good social initiatives can have unintended consequences.

The complexity of all this, however, should not reduce us to social inactivism. Christians also have a responsibility to work for a better world. What should characterise us is a willingness to experiment, do our homework, work for gradual change, recognise that there aren't any easy answers and display a humility marked by wisdom.

Thought: Is it better for us to be salt than to have power?

Certainly when I saw the film Once Upon a Time in America recently, I was struck by the long-term power and wealth that Prohibition gave to organised crime (a theme of numerous other films, not least the Godfather movies). And I don't think Bonhoeffer's point is affected at all by the question of whether Prohibition was even right in principle (which it wasn't).

As for the general point, this is also made rather well in a similar book by Ringma, Resist the Powers (with Jacques Ellul). In the entry for July 11th, Ringma quotes Ellul as follows:

"God's order has more to do with the practice of love, justice and mercy than it has to do with the creation of systems and institutions."

Ringma then observes that, while God has in fact given us institutions such as the church, the family and political authority (not sure Ellul would agree with Ringma here!), when we focus on these in themselves we can miss the point:

The emphasis to us then becomes: Get the structures right and we will express God's rule on earth. But this can get us way off the mark. For the emphasis should fall not so much on the structures themselves, but on the quality of life these structures are meant to reflect.

"Get the structures right" - and, we might add, get the right people (i.e. Christians) in charge of those structures - "and we will express God's rule on earth": a fitting epitaph for much "Christian" political endeavour.