Category Archives: politics

TBLA(extra): it’s not just about "choice"

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This is an ‘excursus’ to the TBLA sequence; it most naturally belongs at the end, but it’s on my mind. I wanted to say a bit more about the gay marriage debate going on at the moment. My views are still evolving, and I want to make explicit what my concern is about the particular nature of the present conversation. As it is a ‘work-in-progress’ it’s still quite clunky, especially in the reliance on barbarous acronyms – sorry.

Our society is deeply confused about sexuality, and this leads into so many other problems. I want to indicate a broad framework for how I see what is happening, and introduce two barbarous acronyms: ‘PEG’, standing for ‘personal enjoyment and growth’, and ‘PROC’, standing for ‘procreation and raising of children’. Much of the confusion about sexuality in our culture stems, I believe, from a lack of discrimination between those two types of relationship, and to try and apply the rules, regulations and expectations with regard to the one straight on to the other, without regard to the differences inherent between them.

Partly this is a fact of history. The raising of children is something in which we as human beings biologically, and any community seeking to sustain itself socially, have a very great and serious interest. It is because of this that sexuality has always been tightly regulated. If children are raised poorly then they do not flourish, they cause havoc, and society suffers. Similarly, on questions of sexual behaviour, something like adultery can cause extreme violence between the adults, causing the breach of the peace and everything up to and including a community breakdown or war – think of Helen of Troy. So the dominant form and understanding of sexuality has been the PROC form. This is what lies behind all the ‘traditional’ marriage values, which regulate the expression of sexuality, which are strict about legitimacy, and which emphasise that rightly-ordered sexuality is principally about procreation. This is the official Roman Catholic teaching for example – so any form of sexuality which is not open to procreation is inherently sinful.

Yet this is a reductive and, I would argue, non-Scriptural view of human sexuality. Human beings do not engage with each other sexually purely for the purposes of procreation, but also for the purposes of human bonding and deepening of relationships – see the Song of Songs for the clearest Biblical expression of this. This, I believe, has always been the case. For example, ponder the fact that, unlike other primates, the human female does not overtly signal when she is fertile, and she engages in sexual behaviour even when she is not fertile. Human sexuality is expressed in all sorts of contexts and for all sorts of reasons, and this, I believe, underlies the PEG form of sexuality. Our relationships enable us to grow as human beings, and, sometimes, this involves engaging with another person as profoundly as a sexual relationship makes possible.

The spiritual truth is, I believe, that the PROC relationships are called to include the PEG elements as well. This is how the Church of England understands marriage, and that is why the preamble for weddings is written in the way that it is. The trouble with our present society is that, in responding to things like the development of (generally!) reliable contraceptive technology, and embracing all the ideas around personal growth and so on – ‘the sixties’ as popularly understood – we have allowed such PEG relationships to eclipse our understanding of PROC relationships. This has had terrible consequences. Society has had a stake in PROC relationships for a very good reason; how children are raised is tremendously important, and a stable and loving home environment is an overwhelmingly strong indicator of psychological health in children, and their flourishing in later life. Sadly, because we have elevated PEG relationships into an idol, we have a culture that practices serial monogamy and easy divorce – perfectly understandable and acceptable from a PEG point of view, but anathema to the PROC.

This is why I’m not convinced that there can be such a thing as gay marriage – it is inherently non-procreative, and therefore will always be fundamentally a PEG, not a PROC – and it is PROC-including-PEG that is holy matrimony, as I understand it. (I’m ignoring, for now, the difficult questions around adoption etc, as ‘hard cases make bad law’.) Both PEG and PROC can, I believe, be vehicles of holiness, but in different ways. A PEG can work ‘under its own steam’, because the momentum of personal growth and discovery is so strong. With a PROC it is different – even if the PROC would normally start out as a PEG. I believe that a promise of commitment, such as the vows, open up a space wherein we can learn to become more truly human, one with another. When this is simply between two people, that can be wonderful and life-enhancing purely in its own terms (that is how I understand civil partnership). Where this happens in a procreative context, then God is doing something even more remarkable through it, and it is more essential that the couple preserve the union (and it is more God’s will).

The trouble is that much of this discussion is about semantics – what is meant by a particular word. We’re in an environment where previously-held assumptions have broken down, and we’re still working out what to do with our present situation. What most troubles me about Cameron’s agenda is that he is elevating ‘choice’ to be the key criterion in working out whether gay marriage is the right way forward or not. To my mind that misses some of the most important elements of what has made marriage be what it is in our society – that is, it is an institution which subordinates individual choice to a wider social and human good. That’s what I fear is being recklessly cast aside in his haste to appear acceptable to progressive opinion. We must not make ‘choice’ into an idol – if we do then we are simply joining in with our culture’s worship of Mammon and treating everything in our human and social life as if it is a product in our supermarket for our discriminating delectation. Marriage is more important than this.

Why I joined UKIP this summer

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Latest Courier article

We learn to be ashamed before we walk

On the principle that I may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, I’d like to use this article to explain why I joined UKIP this last summer. One of the key elements of the English religious settlement after the Civil War was that religion was given a particular place – one that forbade any political involvement. This is why there remains something of a taboo about religious figures getting involved in political affairs in this country, although that taboo is, thankfully, beginning to break down, alongside all the other elements of our national life that are breaking down.

Religion and politics have always gone together. If we consider some key figures from history – look at Desmond Tutu, or Martin Luther King, or Gandhi – then the idea that religion and politics can be easily separated is seen as a nonsense; or, if not a nonsense, then as a particularly local English eccentricity, and whilst I am very much in favour of particularly local English eccentricities, this is not one that I can respect any more. When priests are ordained we are charged to ‘let the good shepherd be the pattern of our calling’ – in other words, we are to try to walk the walk that Jesus walked. As he was someone who was executed by the state for being politically inconvenient, I have some idea of how he would react to being put into a corner and told not to startle the establishment.

So why UKIP? Well, it won’t come as a surprise to many that I have always seen myself as being conservative – with a small ‘c’. In other words, I look to things like the development of character and virtue as the key way to move towards a better life, for an individual and for a community, and I see such things as being best cultivated by the ‘small platoons’ of local institutions, church and family life. The other side of that positive vision is that I share a profound distrust of the over-mighty state (actually, of any over-mighty institution or corporation, there’s not much difference between a mindless bureaucracy and a mindless supermarket chain for example). In the context of the economic devastation that has been working its havoc on our lives for several years now – with no prospect of improvement for at least a decade, if ever – what will enable us to get through the hard times is the quality of our social interactions, the strengthening of our community fabric, our capacity for good neighbourliness and looking after each other. I see the rise of the state through the twentieth century as a systematic dismantling of that social fabric, an intrusion of bureaucracy into areas that are best left to personal or local resolution, and consequently we are suffering much more from the economic consequences of political incompetence than we need to have been.

There were two key issues that made me change my mind about actually joining in with a political party – something that I haven’t done since my student days, when I used to campaign for the Green party. The first is becoming aware that the existing Conservative party would never hold an honourable referendum on leaving the European Union – they would do to the anti-EU cause exactly what they did to the Liberal Democrats on the referendum for electoral reform. The established leadership will mouth sufficient platitudes to keep enough euro-sceptics on board to preserve their access to power, but they will not entertain the radical step of withdrawing from the EU with any honesty. Clearly, that is only an issue in so much as withdrawal from the EU is an issue – and a large part of my changing mind on this is because I have come to see that particular issue as having such significance. Perhaps I can spell out why in another article; for now, let me say simply that the centralisation of power and authority in an unaccountable bureaucracy remote from the people that it claims to serve is the apotheosis of all the things which I instinctively distrust – and I am more and more convinced that it is the political equivalent of the dinosaurs after the asteroid had struck the Yucatan peninsula 65 million years ago. The world is changing very rapidly, and the future belongs to the local and the flexible – all the things which the EU most definitely is not.

There is a second issue that triggered my change of thinking, however, and this is more directly related to religious questions – the debate about gay marriage. This is not so much an issue about the ultimate substance – it is at least possible that I could be persuaded that there might be such a thing as ‘gay marriage’; I do, after all, have no problem with the idea of a religious blessing for gay civil partnerships. No, the key issue for me is the way in which this very significant change is being pushed through in such a fool-hardy fashion. For those of a conservative disposition issues around family and social formation are absolutely central, and any changes to the existing framework have to be considered extremely carefully. It is quite obvious that the existing political leadership have not thought through their understanding on this question, and that they are being driven by a particularly metropolitan form of political correctness. All the right people are in favour, therefore it must be a good thing. As a result, a huge change in our society is being pushed through at a fast pace and, quite simply, this is not a conservative way of doing things. It is not surprising that so many conservatives are deserting the Conservative party over this question – what is the point of something which doesn’t do what it says on the tin?

At the heart of my understanding, however, is a sense that I am fed up with a political culture that has an instinctive repudiation of all that is most noble and elevated in our own political heritage and national story. In the words of one of my favourite songs “we learn to be ashamed before we walk, of the way we look and the way we talk; without our stories and our songs, how will we know where we’ve come from? I’ve lost St George in the Union Jack, it’s my flag too and I want it back…” I am proud of my country – not blindly, not without an awareness of all that is terrible in our history from Amritsar to Dresden – but fully consciously, accepting that no country will ever be perfect and without sin, but still proud of the contribution that our society has made to things like the abolition of slavery and the establishment of human rights. The remarkable thing from my point of view is that so many of the things that are valued by the politically correct – a culture of humane tolerance for difference, of care for minorities, the weak and vulnerable – these all depend upon the prior existence of a healthy society which positively inculcates such virtues, and actively teaches the young not just that these are good things (we’re still paying lip service in that direction) but that the achievement of such good things is hard work and requires motivation and discipline, character and virtue. That is where we’ve gone wrong. We have forgotten the practical implications of living in a sinful world.

Ultimately, I want to ask – who are we as a nation? Are we really so weak and pitiful that we are dependent upon outside help and assistance in order to be the best that we can be? Do we need to depend on outside authorities to do good, and what is the cost of accepting such outside help – costs borne by our fishermen and farmers, our market traders and so on? Of course, I don’t agree with everything that UKIP stands for (seeking a party that perfectly conforms to our own ideas is one of the more self-indulgent of vanities) but it’s a question of priorities. I see the EU as having an entirely baleful influence upon our national life and economy, and I don’t think that we are going to be able to see any serious progress in addressing the mire of our political culture until there is a complete break with the EU. Hence – I am now a member of UKIP, out and proud!

A good election to lose

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Courier article

I write this article on the morning after the US elections, as Barack Obama celebrates his re-election as president of the United States. I can’t escape the feeling that, rather like the Conservatives in 1992, this might have been a good election to lose. In 1992, a little surprisingly, John Major led the Conservatives to a small victory, and the following September the pound was ejected from the Exchange Rate Mechanism. Whilst this was clearly a good thing for the British economy, it was just as clearly a very bad thing politically for the Conservative party, whose reputation for economic competence took such a hit that it has arguably not yet recovered, some twenty years later. I think that a similar sort of ‘black swan’ type event – in fact, several – lie in wait for the President of the United States, and I want to briefly indicate the sorts of things that might be lurking.

Firstly, the economic issues, which I have touched on in this column several times before. The Western economic system is bankrupt, and at the moment is persisting purely via a sequence of confidence tricks – that is, lots of measures, principally printing money, designed to keep confidence in the financial system going. If at any point that confidence is damaged, then people will start to seek a safer place to park their financial assets. In other words, debts will start to be called in, and instead of the value of any debt being an abstract item on a putative balance sheet, that debt will become a very real obligation. As there is not enough wealth in the world to balance out the existing debts, there will be defaults – that will make people more nervous, causing them to call in more debts, which will make more people go bankrupt, making people more nervous… Rinse and repeat until enough of the bad debt has been properly accounted for and a solvent economy – at a much smaller size than the present economy – emerges from the wreckage. Human nature being what it is, this is likely to take the form of some very visible event, like a stock market crash or a spectacular bank failure – and the person in power, whether innocent or not, will have to take responsibility.

Another aspect of the economic situation is the US government’s own financial position. As a result of the huge level of deficits built up over many years – but massively accelerated over the last four – the US government is practically bankrupt. It has been able to fend off the implications of this situation for the simple reason that the US dollar remains, for now, the ‘reserve currency’ for the world financial system. In other words, for a great deal of international trade, especially oil, the transactions take place in dollars. The US government can therefore keep printing dollars because people need them, and there is a lot of ‘wealth’ in other government accounts that people do not wish to see collapse in value. However, that is not a situation that can or will last forever. Indeed, this aspect may come to a head very soon, as unless the US government agrees a new budget in the next few months, it will drive off a ‘fiscal cliff’ – there are some $600 billion worth of tax increases about to take effect, and if that is allowed to happen then it will have a severe impact on the US economy. There will be lots of coverage on this topic over the next few weeks.

Thirdly, an under-reported but major factor in our ongoing economic problems is the developing impact of Peak Oil. Ignoring the ‘blip’ in 2008 (when oil hit $150 per barrel) the price of oil has been significantly increasing year on year for nearly ten years now. The reason for this is simple – there is less oil available than there is demand for it, and that is because there has been no significant increase in the oil supply since 2005. Indeed, if you break the numbers down, the amount of oil available for export (in other words, the amount of oil not being used by the nations that produce the oil) has been declining by about 0.7% a year since 2005. This problem is not going to go away, it is only going to get worse, and for an indication for how it might affect the United States, just look at the coverage of ‘superstorm’ Sandy, and what happened there when the fuel supply was interrupted.

Of course, economic issues aren’t the only ones that can cause problems to a President, although I suspect that they will be the major ones. The field of foreign affairs is also looking scarier as time goes on. Principally that relates to the Middle East. I tried to explain to a friend the other day why the situation is so bad, and simply tried to list the different actors and their motivations. I stopped when I had reached eight! The situation is obviously very complex, but it seems equally obvious that things like the accession to power in Egypt of the Muslim Brotherhood, and their shift from a pro-US stance to one that is, at the very least, independent and welcoming to Iran, will have significant long-term consequences. More broadly, the increasing level of hostility between China and its neighbours in the Far East is worrisome, and if the Chinese leadership elects a more ‘hawkish’ new President, that would be a dark omen.

As MacMillan once put it, ‘events, dear boy, events!’ are what govern political careers. It is quite possible that there will be one particular event that triggers a cascade of consequences bringing all of these issues to a head. Imagine, for example, that Israel launches an attack on Iran, triggering a wider war involving Saudi Arabia; that the oil supply through the Straits of Hormuz is interrupted, even if only briefly; that the resulting spike in the oil price causes many of our fragile financial institutions to pass over into bankruptcy; and that the US dollar – as a result of political hostility to the United States – loses its role as a reserve currency. I don’t want to say that these problems will be impossible to solve only that, as I said at the beginning, if you’re going to lose an election, this isn’t a bad one to lose. Barack Obama’s in-tray is unlikely to have much good news in it for many years to come.

I’ll finish by sticking my neck out and making a bold prediction (containing just a smidgen of wish-fulfilment) – either at the head of a purged Republican party, or at the head of an independent ‘Tea Party’ ticket, the US will elect Sarah Palin as president in 2016. You read it here first…

On wishing they might both lose

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A few brief thoughts about the US election.

– I’ve never been a fan of Obama, all other things being equal I would be rooting for him to lose on Tuesday night. All other things are not equal, however; – one of the principal things that I don’t like about Obama is that I see him as a machine politician without any particularly strong guiding principles of his own; I suspect that he is personally corrupt; and most especially I see his policies as being driven by established vested interests in the various spheres. Crucially, Goldman Sachs alumni seem to have been in charge of the economic policy, and I’m not in favour of anything that favours the vampire squid;
– but what is the alternative? Romney is hardly someone to shake up the system and take on the vested corruption is he? To again refer to a Matt Taibbi article – yes I’m a fan – Romney is absolutely a product of the capitalist system, and a member of the financial elite. If we’re looking for a radical change of path, Romney is not the one to deliver it. If he wins the presidency, I don’t see any change of course on the horizon;
– hence, my preference would be for both to lose! Which won’t happen. The thing is, I suspect that – just as with the UK elections of 1992, the winner of the election will be inheriting a poisoned chalice, and that the 2012 election is a ‘good one to lose’. The magnitude and extent of the bad news falling on to the US is only going to increase – a superstorm Sandy in several spheres. Which is why I’m kinda-sorta rooting for Obama to just edge it, ideally in a contested election, that he wins through the electoral college and not via the popular vote;
– who would I rather see leading the US? Someone with a track record of opposing corrupt entrenched interests, ethical and pragmatic, and a committed belief to the highest values that the US represents; ideally someone who was also prepared to accommodate a decline in the US empire and recognise the Limits to Growth. Nobody qualifies on all those scores – but there is someone who does come close.

Left behind by lemmings

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My latest Courier article.

I take a break from talking about the bad news on the energy resources front to return to talking about the bad news on the financial crisis front – most especially the delightful effect of David Cameron’s ‘No’ at the European summit. Is British politics about to become interesting again?

What I mean by that is that for the last few decades more and more of the significant decisions that affect our lives have been taken at a level above that of the British parliamentary system. Yes, we are ‘represented at the table’, but I’m sure I’m not the only one to believe that the influence flowing from that position is over-rated (and to find some of the recent fretting a touch comical. It’s not ‘Where’s Wally?’ it’s ‘Where’s Clegg?’). Yet with this ‘No’ it would seem possible – and I mean simply ‘possible’, not ‘likely’ or ‘probable’ – that some measure of autonomy might return to our national life.

What is the crucial thing to understand about this recent crisis? Well, I thought this picture summed it up rather well:

The language being used is of establishing a ‘fiscal union’ – that is, that there is some form of common governmental budget-setting, to be enforced by some central authority yet to be precisely defined – in order to establish the financial bona fides of each government, thereby allowing them to continue to borrow at rates that will not cripple their economies, with the hope, thereby, that the financial crisis can be eased. Now there are so many elements wrong with this vision that it is difficult to know where to start, but let us focus on Germany, for the German political system has made very clear that there can be no joint-liability for government debt. According to the German constitutional court “No permanent treaty mechanisms shall be established that leads to liability for the decisions of other states, especially if they entail incalculable consequences…” In other words, whatever it is that Merkel and Sarkozy have been trying to put together, Germany will not be accountable for the debts of Greece.

This is where the problem lies. In order for Greece, say, to be able to function economically, it has to be able to cover the cost of its debt – and this cost is seen in the interest rate of Greek government bonds. When that rate is low – say around 2% – then the sums add up. When that rate starts to get higher – and the danger rate is thought to be around 6% or so – then the sums do not add up. Now one way out of that problem, for a government like Greece, would be for there to be genuine ‘Eurobonds’, backed by a common European government and drawing on the credibility of the Eurozone as a whole. This, however, is what the German courts have forbidden. Instead, what has to happen is that the local government has to either raise taxes, or cut spending, or both. This is just about possible when the relevant government is enabled to make that decision itself, although even then it is politically extremely difficult. What is being proposed, however, is that the local governments will no longer have autonomy over these decisions, and instead some Eurocratic institution is going to enforce these judgements. So instead of a Greek government choosing to balance its books – and perhaps, gaining the authority to pursue that path through a referendum – the Greek government is simply going to be an administrative arm of the European government, which is where the decisions will be made – and who, rather pointedly, have forbidden such a referendum from taking place.

This is not a long-term solution to the crisis; in fact, it is a recipe for increasing short-term disaster. Imposing technocratic governments upon the allegedly “insolvent” nations of Italy and Greece is simply increasing the perceived illegitimacy of each government. It won’t be long before there is bloody revolution – and a large part of the problem is that this will be seen as a German desire for control, built upon a basis of German hypocrisy. Ponder the fact that the German economy has been benefiting hugely from an undervalued currency – possibly as much as 30% less than where an independent Deutschmark would be – and that this undervaluation is what has enabled the German economy to perform as well as it has, and for German government bonds to be obtained as cheaply as they have. In other words, it is not simply that the German approach is ‘virtuous’ it is that – to put it starkly – the southern European countries have effectively been subsidising the northern. The honourable course – and the one with the only prospect of preserving a functioning Eurozone – would be to go all out for a comprehensive fiscal union for the countries that use the Euro, and to establish a common taxation and budgeting system; in effect, a single government. This is what enables the United States to function with a single currency. Yet this is exactly what is impossible for Europe.

So the proposed solutions will not work – and I haven’t even touched on the fact that the sums of money being discussed are trivial compared to the size of the debts, nor the way in which the government debt problems interact with the wider banking debt problems, nor the fact that, frankly, it is all too little, too late. What we are witnessing is the spectacle of a generation of politicians committed to a particular path whose only response to a crisis is to say ‘further and faster’. Sadly, reality has changed, and the further and faster simply means going further and faster over the cliff, with all the destruction and devastation that follows. If Britain is being left behind then we are being left behind by lemmings, and that is not a bad place to be.

David Cameron’s Christianity, or: why conservatives can support the Occupy movement

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Much twittering about David Cameron’s speech, accusing him of hypocrisy – after all, how on earth can a Conservative be a Christian? Isn’t that a contradiction in terms? Well, no. It’s perfectly possible to be a Conservative and be committed to, inter alia, social justice; ‘conservative’ does not equate to ‘apologist for an abusive status quo’ – although, obviously, in some cases that is accurate.

To bring out what I am describing, ponder the Occupy movement. Some ‘conservatives’ might criticise it for being a petulant protest, an army seeking to destroy the goose which lays the golden egg of prosperity. That’s just shallow. On the other side, of course, there are elements in the protest which are indeed, childish and irresponsible (and gross). Yet it seems to me that the core of the protest is an assertion of moral values, most especially a rebellion against the idolatry of greed and an idea that justice must be done, that criminals should be punished, and that subsidising the wicked is no way to run an economy. Which seems exactly what a conservative would support – so long as the conservatism was thought through, and not simply tribal. I suspect that tribal criticisms from the left are not the best way to bring conservatives to such a realisation though…

Anders Breivik’s "Christianity"

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In his own words:

If you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and God then you are a religious Christian. Myself and many more like me do not necessarily have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and God. We do however believe in Christianity as a cultural, social, identity and moral platform. This makes us Christian.

European Christendom isn’t just about having a personal relationship with Jesus or God. It is so much more. Christendom is identity, moral, laws and codexes which has produced the greatest civilisation the world has ever witnessed.

I’m not going to pretend I’m a very religious person as that would be a lie. I’ve always been very pragmatic and influenced by my secular surroundings and environment.

As a cultural Christian, I believe Christendom is essential for cultural reasons. After all, Christianity is the ONLY cultural platform that can unite all Europeans, which will be needed in the coming period during the third expulsion of the Muslims.

As this is a cultural war, our definition of being a Christian does not necessarily constitute that you are required to have a personal relationship with God or Jesus. Being a Christian can mean many things: – That you believe in and want to protect Europe’s Christian cultural heritage. The European cultural heritage, our norms (moral codes and social structures included), our traditions and our modern political systems are based on Christianity – Protestantism, Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity and the legacy of the European enlightenment (reason is the primary source and legitimacy for authority). It is not required that you have a personal relationship with God or Jesus in order to fight for our Christian cultural heritage and the European way. In many ways, our modern societies and European secularism is a result of European Christendom and the enlightenment. It is therefore essential to understand the difference between a “Christian fundamentalist theocracy” (everything we do not want) and a secular European society based on our Christian cultural heritage (what we do want). So no, you don’t need to have a personal relationship with God or Jesus to fight for our Christian cultural heritage. It is enough that you are a Christian-agnostic or a Christian atheist (an atheist who wants to preserve at least the basics of the European Christian cultural legacy (Christian holidays, Christmas and Easter)). The PCCTS, Knights Templar is therefore not a religious organisation but rather a Christian “culturalist” military order.

There’s lots more in the same vein.

I’m about to go away on holiday. I might have more to say about all this when I return, but it will be on my other more political blog – Gandalf’s Hope.

Motive

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If it turns out that he’s “a right-wing Christian fundamentalist” and those doctrines provided a motive for his behaviour then such doctrines need to be denounced and combatted. In just the same way that the doctrines that give rise to terrorists shouting ‘Allahu Ackbar’ also need to be denounced and combatted. Of course, that would expose a contradiction at the heart of our society – or, perhaps more accurately, a self-hatred. Muslims etc are victims of the oppressive West, therefore they are on the side of the angels. This Norwegian nutter is an expression of the oppressive West, therefore he is on the side of the devils.

Perhaps there are all sorts of mitigating circumstances and doubtless we will come up with all sorts of explanations but in the end evil is as evil does and he is responsible to the Almighty for what he has done.

Why, O LORD, do you stand far off?
Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?
In his arrogance the wicked man hunts down the weak,
who are caught in the schemes he devises.
He boasts of the cravings of his heart;
he blesses the greedy and reviles the LORD.
In his pride the wicked does not seek him;
in all his thoughts there is no room for God.
His ways are always prosperous;
he is haughty and your laws are far from him;
he sneers at all his enemies.
He says to himself, Nothing will shake me;
I’ll always be happy and never have trouble.
His mouth is full of curses and lies and threats;
trouble and evil are under his tongue.
He lies in wait near the villages;
from ambush he murders the innocent, watching in secret for his victims.
He lies in wait like a lion in cover;
he lies in wait to catch the helpless;
he catches the helpless and drags them off in his net.
His victims are crushed, they collapse;
they fall under his strength.
He says to himself, God has forgotten;
he covers his face and never sees.
Arise, LORD! Lift up your hand, O God.
Do not forget the helpless.
Why does the wicked man revile God?
Why does he say to himself, He won’t call me to account?
But you, O God, do see trouble and grief; you consider it to take it in hand.
The victim commits himself to you; you are the helper of the fatherless.
Break the arm of the wicked and evil man;
call him to account for his wickedness that would not be found out.
The LORD is King for ever and ever; the nations will perish from his land.
You hear, O LORD, the desire of the afflicted;
you encourage them, and you listen to their cry,
defending the fatherless and the oppressed,
in order that man, who is of the earth, may terrify no more.

Psalm 10, NIV

(NB for a flavour of what I’m guessing is part of his motivation, do some research on Fjordman and read his writings. They are very interesting and have been very influential.)

George Monbiot’s nuclear conversion

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See here.

Once upon a time I worked for the government on assessing the safety of nuclear power stations, and I was involved at the highest level when a significant decision was made about the future of Sellafield (the THORP plant) – I even received a congratulatory message from John Major about the quality of my briefing for his PM Questions (boast!). One of the take-away facts from then is that most people are incredibly superstitious about radiation. The truth is that we are exposed to radiation all the time and, without it, there would be much less evolution over time. If memory serves, the UK regulatory system was much tougher on the nuclear industry than it was on, eg, the coal and fertiliser industries which also generated significant quantities of radiation – indeed, I remember being told that more radioactivity in the Irish Sea came from a fertiliser plant in Cumbria than actually came from Sellafield!

Which is not to say that nuclear power is the answer to all our problems. The principal case against it is economic, both in the medium term (it needs to be subsidised during operations) and especially in the longer term (what to do with nuclear waste). It also locks us into a centralised structure of power generation, which is much less resilient than a dispersed and localised pattern of power generation which I suspect is our future. I think there are interesting possibilities for some measure of nuclear power – eg the Thorium cycle and pebble-bed reactors – but it is probably too late now, not least because after Fukushima – in many ways an incredible testimony to the SAFETY of nuclear power! – the bar of public opinion is set so much higher.

Monbiot seems to have finally grasped two things – that radiation is nowhere near as dangerous as it is often made out to be (see this excellent graphic by xkcd), and also that much of the advocacy in the green movement is driven by emotion and superstition. I look forward to him seeing the light on SOME aspects of agw…

Seeking a Christian England

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So – we live in a secular society, not a Christian one. Nice to have it laid out so clearly by the judiciary. It grates that these judgements are so philosophically ill-grounded – but I’ve discussed that in more detail before.

“…if such a thing should be, the crimes of that nation will probably begin in infringement on Apostolical Rights ; she will end in persecuting the true Church ; and in the several stages of her melancholy career, she will continually be led on from bad to worse by vain endeavours at accommodation and compromise with evil.”

Should Christians be worried about this? Given that the church was (arguably) at its healthiest when working within the avowedly pagan Roman Empire, one would suspect not. Yet surely it is understandable for a Christian to want not to suffer so much? In a way, it will make Christian witness rather clearer. This isn’t a point about homosexuality so much as a broader point about how a distinctive Christian life is possible in a secular society. For example, take issues at the beginning and end of life. At what point will a Christian doctor be disbarred, or restricted from practicing in certain areas, if they, eg, refuse to terminate a baby’s life, or refuse to administer euthanasia? Will Christians be allowed to teach differently to the secular world-view? Will parents be forbidden from teaching Christian doctrine in those areas where it clashes with secular assumptions? “That’ll never happen!” Right.

“How may a man best reconcile his allegiance to God and his Church with his duty to his country, that country, which now, by the supposition, is fast becoming hostile to the Church, and cannot therefore long be the friend of God?”

I think what’s really running around my mind is whether it is legitimate to seek to make England a Christian nation (I leave off the possible ‘once again’ as it begs too many questions). There are, of course, all sorts of potential idolatries here – I have read my Hauerwas – but there is also an idolatry in quietism. If we, as Christians, are inevitably committed to questions of social justice then we are also inevitably political creatures – which, logically, and under God with all due humility, must mean seeking to so order our political arrangements in such a way that abundant life can flourish – and that “abundant life” is irreducibly Christian in character, not secular. We are therefore in necessary tension with any secular state.

There are several threads that I want to knit together:

– the internal collapse of the Church of England, culturally and theologically (symbolised by the abandonment of the BCP, however sensible that step was);
– the death of England more broadly;
– the on going threat of Islamisation, and the sometimes unhealthy political reaction to it;
– the way in which the Anglican Communion will split, and how TEC may be a better vehicle for the Anglican theological spirit than a Covenantised CofE; and finally
– the unhealthy nature of Anglo-Catholicism within the CofE (reactionaries contending with liberals), compared to the initial flowering of Anglo-Catholicism sparked by a political controversy.

I just wonder if there is a ‘sweet spot’ lurking here that would mean the project of seeking a Christian England would be blessed. Watch this space.

“What are the symptoms, by which one may judge most fairly, whether or no a nation, as such, is becoming alienated from God and Christ?
And what are the particular duties of sincere Christians, whose lot is cast by Divine Providence in a time of such dire calamity?”