Category Archives: Current Affairs
The Bishops, The Poor And the TV Presenter
So the bishops in the House of Lords supported an amendment that defeated government plans that would have limited benefits in such a way as to penalise the children of poor families. Predictably, the government didn’t like this. It feels like 1985 again, with ministers briefing that the ‘Faith in the City‘ report is Marxist.
Into this debate weighs journalist, TV presenter and poker player Victoria Coren. In a passionate piece in today’s Observer called ‘Attacking the Church is a Cheap Shot‘ (subtitled ‘Has everyone forgotten these are men of God? It’s actually their job to stand up for the poor), she puts it like this:
It doesn’t matter whether I think they’re right or wrong; I think it’s their job to do what the Bible tells them to do, ie look out for the needy, like the innocent children on whose behalf they raised the amendment, who might otherwise get lost.
The right-wing press that is so angry with the bishops has been complaining for years that Christianity (for better or worse, our national religion) is too weak and small a voice, that its values are not fought for. Now it’s happening, they hate it.
And later:
Their hands are tied. The gospels say what they say. If their lordships wanted to support the idea that handing out bread and fish is bad for people because it demotivates them from doing their own baking and fishing, they’d really have to leave the pulpit and get a job on a tabloid.
And while the Stephen Hesters of this world, already paid 1.2 million loaves a year of arguably public bread, are being given fish factories as bonuses, the church can hardly join in with a move to reduce herring portions for the hungry. It would look ridiculous.
If this were X-Factor for journalists, Louis Walsh would be saying, “You nailed it.” The Bible calls us to be fair, but it calls us to a special concern for the poor. She therefore argues it’s unfair for the bishops to be criticised. They are only doing their job. Quite right, too.
However, it shouldn’t surprise us as Christians. Critique the powers that be and opposition will come. Jeremiah, John the Baptist, Jesus – all suffered. While being on the receiving end of criticism isn’t a guarantee of doing a good job, it may be a sign that the bishops scored a bullseye.
More worrying for me was the criticism by my former college principal, George (Lord) Carey. In an article in (of course) the Daily Mail, he seems to stereotype almost all people on benefits as being part of a dependency culture. Yes, some are, but overall – surely not! He knows all about growing up poor in the 1940s, but the pride of poor people he knew then in Dagenham still exists in many quarters, whatever else has changed. And yes, the national debt of £1 trillion is a scandal, but it was a scandal caused by the reckless folly of big business and a culture devoted to consumerism – a consumerism heavily promoted by the government that nominated him to the Queen first for Bath and Wells and then for Canterbury.
So well done the bishops, keep it up, whatever is thrown at you.
Turning Down An Honour From The Queen
(No, not me: not much chance of that.)
After much resistance, the Cabinet Office has published a list of those who declined awards in either the Birthday Honours or the New Year’s Honours Lists between 1951 and 1999, and who are now dead. It’s not necessarily the usual suspects. Alongside John Lennon‘s famous returning of his MBE and the author J G Ballard who called the honours system a ‘preposterous charade’ are people like Eleanor Farjeon, author of ‘Morning has broken’ and C S Lewis.
What are the pros and cons of an honours system? Politically, presumably any nation wants to celebrate those who have made a significant contribution to that society, but certain questions arise about its current practice. Who is worthy of an honour? Do entertainers and sporting stars rank more highly than someone who has given quiet and dedicated service in a village for decades? (You should meet our children’s lollipop lady.) And is it really fitting still to have honours that take their name from the British Empire? Then there is the royalty question, but while we still have a constitutional monarch as the head of state, that’s not surprising.
From a Christian perspective, there are also questions. Is it right to accept an honour and be associated with (tainted by?) the powers that be? On the other hand, is it an opportunity for witness, and if so, how do we ensure the glory goes to God, not the recipient of the honour? How does it fit eschatologically, when Jesus refers to those who will be rewarded in the age to come and those who have had their reward already?
What do you think?
Dishonesty On The Increase In The UK
Academic research has found that Britons are less honest than ten years ago. (Also reported in The Independent and the Daily Telegraph.) Here are some of the headline findings:
* Younger people are more likely to be dishonest than older people. Under 25s scored only 47 on an ‘integrity scale’, whereas over 65s averaged 54. The mean for all ages was 50.
* Ten years ago, 70% of people said having an affair was never justified. Now only 50% say that. The Faithfulness Matters campaign is timely, not only in highlighting the foul practices of a company like Global Personals in setting up sites that encourage affairs, but in standing against a worrying trend in our society (which doubtless Global Personals is exploiting).
* Women are slightly more honest than men. (Is this because women encourage a greater culture of openness?)
* Yet whereas ten years ago 78% of people disapproved of benefit fraud, now 85% do.
The Daily Mail has a graph showing the differences for ten different indicators.
It’s interesting to see why the academics are concerned. Professor Paul Whiteley said:
“If social capital is low and people are suspicious and don’t work together, those communities have worse health, worse educational performance, they are less happy and they are less economically developed and entrepreneurial. It really does have a profound effect,” he said.
“If integrity continues to decline in the future, then it will be very difficult to mobilise volunteers to support the Big Society initiative,” he added.
He went on to say that a major reason behind dishonesty in younger generations was poor rôle models. Most of the examples he cites are those known from the media:
“If you think about it, you know, footballers that cheat on their wives; some journalists that hack into phones; behaviour in the City, where people are selling financial instruments they think are no good but do not say so. These kind of things,” he said.
So what do we make of this?
First of all, let’s leave aside whether we ideologically agree with the Big Society or not, the more important question Professor Whiteley brings out is about social capital. Effectively, individualism is destroying society. So I’ll pick up someone else’s money, I’ll have an affair, but woe betide people who cheat on social security, because that means I have to pay more tax and National Insurance. Margaret Thatcher said there was no such thing as society, and the rampant individualism of the 1980s when she was in power is now taking its vicious toll on society.
So given the fragmentation of society, it’s now everyone for themselves. There are honourable exceptions and good examples in places of people coming together for the common good, but the social forces (or should I perhaps say, anti-social forces) are against this. Instead of being with one another, we are more in competition with one another, and so – as some commenters on the BBC story noted – we will lie to gain a competitive advantage. If the only way to get a doctor’s appointment soon is to tell the receptionist it’s urgent when it isn’t, we’ll do that.
Second, one commenter asked where the church was in the debate. Several replied angrily that the church had lost all credibility in the honesty stakes due to child abuse cover-ups. While I think some people are likely to raise that case because they want the church excluded from public debate, it is clear that this issue is still substantially harming our witness in the civic arena.
How the church will recover credibility is a big question. We are as distrusted as other institutions. The child abuse scandal means that the postmodern suspicion of power has been applied to us. People think we are only ‘in it for ourselves’ – the same spirit that creates a lying culture.
It will take a long, sustained period to recover a public acceptance of our integrity. By the time it happens, many more churches will be gone. But I think it starts with a humble church, rather than a hectoring, lecturing church.
The Long, Slow Lingering Death Of Eastman Kodak
On a day when Eastman Kodak has filed for bankruptcy protection from its creditors, this seems like a poignant (if rather obvious) song:
Like Paul Simon, ‘I got a Nikon camera.’ But it doesn’t shoot Kodachrome. It’s digital.
I used to have a 35 mm Canon camera. Sometimes I shot Kodachrome, especially when I visited the Holy Land in 1989. I got through twenty-nine rolls of Kodachrome 25. The slow ISO was fine in the bright heat, and its pale to neutral colour bias was right for a dusty land. Back in the UK, I used to prefer the bold, green colours of Fuji Velvia, though.
But not any more. It’s SD cards and Adobe Photoshop Elements for me now.
Kodak was slow to adapt to the culture. It was there at the invention of digital photography, but they refused to bring out what would have been the first digital camera, for fear of damaging their income from roll film. Rather like the church not wanting to offend longstanding worshippers by finding new ways of reaching out to the unchurched, Kodak held back – and is now withering on the vine. The parallels are disturbing.
Today’s news reminds me of a story I read in the newsletter of the (ironically now defunct) organisation MARC in December 1990. On page 3 of that issue, Bryant Myers told this story:
There is a story of a company that manufactured drill bits for over forty years. It had been very successful, but the industry was maturing and profit margins were getting thin.
The son of the founder attended his first senior staff meeting after his father died.
“What business are we in?” he asked the older men, who had served alongside his father for many years.
“We make drill bits!” came the exasperated answer. “Our customers need drill bits.”
“No. Our customers need holes,” the young man quietly replied. Today the company is again successful. In addition to drill bits, it manufactures lasers that make very precise holes.
Kodak’s business was not film but images. We might not want to talk about the church’s business, because economic and consumerist metaphors can be dangerous for us. But we do need to ensure that we are concentrating on our core Gospel calling in a way that can speak to people today, and that almost certainly won’t be in the way it spoke to some of our senior remaining generations.
Why The American SOPA Controversy Affects Us All
Did you join in yesterday’s protests against SOPA? I didn’t, because I thought I couldn’t legitimately protest against proposals in American law, but the more I think about it, the more I consider I should in some way have joined the voices rising up against it. As this BBC article puts it, we are talking about something that would mean the USA deploying similar tactics to those used by China and Iran.
If anyone understands the effect of the Internet and social media on our society and the world, it’s Clay Shirky. Watch this video to hear why the proposed SOPA and PIPA legislation in the USA is dangerous for us all:
Here are the problems. There is a media industry that only wants us all to be passive consumers (how bad is that, anyway?). It does not want mere mortals to produce and to share content. This isn’t merely about copyright piracy, this is about enthusiastically saying to our friends, “Look what I’ve found” – something you would think they would be keen to promote. Already we are in a situation where bakeries cannot reproduce children’s drawings of cartoon characters onto cakes, because it’s illegal to copy an image of Mickey Mouse.
Thus, the industry wants to obliterate all established distinctions between legal and illegal sharing. It wants to make ordinary citizens criminals, alongside the pirates.
Furthermore, the proposed legislation reverses the historic burden of proof so that we are guilty until proved innocent, and if that’s not dangerous, I don’t know what is.
None of this is to condone piracy. As a Christian, I do not support theft of items for profit any more than I support burglars who raid a house and sell the items in the pub. But most of what ordinary people share on the Internet is not comparable to that. There is no financial motive.
In any case, there is ample legislation already on copyright piracy. The original Napster was brought to trial. So too was Limewire. What’s the problem? Shirky says the problem is effort. The media companies don’t want to bother with tedious matters like gathering evidence.
Neither am I completely against censorship. I am not a libertarian. As a parent, I have concerns about material my children could accidentally find on the Internet. But these bills are not about that.
And this affects us all, because the Internet by definition cannot be confined to one nation. If this legislation were to pass, the US Congress would be further codifying that terrifying concept of American exceptionalism, effectively allowing a digital American invasion anywhere and at any time.
I ask my American friends if they would lobby their elected representatives. For the rest of us, we need to find ways of legitimate and ethical protest, raising our voices in opposition to legislation that only has the interests of wealthy corporations at its heart.
You are welcome to try persuading me otherwise, but this sounds like laws bought by the millions of dollars of corporate lobbying, to favour its clients against ordinary people. Surely that’s wrong?
Over-35s And ‘The Green Thing’
A blog post entitled ‘Anyone over the age of 35 should read this, as I copied this from a friends status..‘ is trending on Facebook. (Ignore the grammatical error, it appears to be a Scandinavian writing in the foreign tongue of English.)
The gist is this: the author fails to bring some reusable shopping bags to the supermarket and is told off for this by the checkout cashier. The author apologises, not having had ‘the green thing’ when younger. The article then goes on to recount practices from past generations that are actually greener than today’s habits: bottles were recycled for the deposit, they walked up stairs rather than took escalators, they washed and reused cotton nappies, a house had but one small television, they used more public transport for journeys and homes had fewer electrical sockets. Ergo, why should younger generations have a go at older ones on environmental issues?
All the examples quoted are true, and yes, they are greener. The problem is this: things were that way due to lesser economic wealth and greater thrift. Once more prosperity came along, then it carried with it technologies that created more convenient and allegedly labour-saving approaches and devices. When these appeared, they were – ahem – hoovered up.
Economics and technology create these opportunities and more. One of the major issues about sin is opportunity and availability. Moving beyond green issues, are more people prone to slip into pornography because it is more readily available on the Internet and with web browsers that offer ‘private’ or ‘incognito’ browsing modes?
And perhaps another observation worth making about this post is that is true but simplistic. Isn’t that something that many of us have to watch? We want to keep things simple, which is laudable on one level, but we also don’t want to think too hard – or we don’t want others to make us think hard.
The National Health Service: My Daughter’s Keeper
It’s Monday, just gone, the day after New Year’s Day, and a Bank Holiday here in the UK. The Faulkner family is relaxing and preparing for the visit of friends from Sussex. All our other Christmas season get-togethers have failed to happen due to family illness, but this one will happen.
So Debbie is upstairs sorting out some household matters, Mark is in the conservatory playing, Rebekah is writing her thank-you letters for her Christmas presents in the dining room and I am in the study, catching up on news of friends via Facebook.
That’s when we hear the scream. A scream like nothing we have heard before. A scream so loud it reverberates around the house, such that I can’t tell where it’s coming from. I rush to the front door. I double back. There is Rebekah, on the laminate floor of the dining room, in terror and agony. She is screaming. Mark is with her, screaming too at what has happened. I scream, too.
Debbie rushes down the stairs like an Olympic steeplechase champion. She sees the scene, and she – the practical one – screams as well. Something awful has happened to Rebekah’s left elbow.
“She’s fractured it!” shouts Debbie. “Ring for an ambulance!”
“It might be a dislocation,” I observe, as I press 9, followed by 9, then another 9, and the green ‘call’ button.
While I’m on the phone to the emergency services, Debbie changes her mind. Her practical mind is kicking in. “It’ll be quicker to drive her to the hospital,” she says, so I say we don’t want the ambulance at all and we scramble as quickly and as delicately as we can into my small car. O that Debbie’s people carrier wasn’t off the road with an indicator fault.
I drive as fast and as safely as I can the seven miles to the nearest A and E unit. I don’t speed and I don’t take chances, but I am frustrated by the two cars ahead of me doing only 40 in a 60 limit for three of those miles.
At the hospital, I drop Debbie and Rebekah off outside A and E, while Mark stays with me as I find a car parking space. By the time we walk back to A and E, the girls are nowhere to be seen inside.
“Are you looking for Rebekah?” asks a woman sitting with her crutches, just inside the door. She points to double doors underneath a sign that reads, ‘Paediatric A and E’. “She’s in there.”
It turns out that the clerk had entered Rebekah’s details on the computer, instantly forwarded them to Paediatric A and E, where they would be waiting for her immediately.
A nurse administers diamorphine nasally. We are near the nurses’ station and we can hear them ringing Radiography to get Rebekah’s X-rays prioritised. We don’t wait long. In X-Ray, a senior radiographer dons a lead jacket and helps hold Becky in position for a difficult second picture.
I was behind the screen, and saw the first picture come up on the monitor. I am no medic, but my untutored eyes saw two detached bones, neither apparently broken.
Back at A and E, the nurses are now phoning the orthopaedic surgeon to get him down quickly. He soon tells us that yes, it is a dislocation, not a fracture. Whatever we had seen of sportsmen having dislocations put in quickly and painfully, a child would have the bones relocated under general anaesthetic. We would have to wait until Becky’s breakfast was sufficiently out of her system for her to receive an anaesthetic safely, but that would be the course of action.
The nurses keep the phones hot. Now they are nagging the anaesthetist to come sooner than expected, so that a little girl not be kept waiting any longer than necessary. He confirms the surgeon’s proposed course of action. It was only a case of the waiting time to anaesthetise.
By 3 pm Becky is being wheeled into theatre for the relocation and a plaster cast. The accident had happened around 11:15 am.
Half an hour later, I help collect her from the recovery room. All has gone well, no fracture occurred when the bones were relocated, and she can consider starting the new term at school. She will wear the cast for a fortnight until it is reviewed at the Fracture Clinic.
We take Becky to a children’s ward where she is monitored regularly by a staff nurse for the after-effects of the anaesthetic. Although we are told around 5 pm that it will be another four to six hours before she can be discharged, at 7 pm the nurse pronounces herself satisfied that she is ready to go home.
And the nurse tells Rebekah, “You have made my day.” We think that was a reference to the teenage girl in another bed on the same bay, whose every adjective begins with ‘F’ and whose family is equally delightful.
Does anybody wonder why I love the National Health Service? It is an institutional way of putting into practice the mandate to be my brother’s keeper (or my daughter’s keeper, in this case). Quote the horror stories if you must, but the fundamental principle is sound and important. Think of those who work in it under great stress and who only hear feedback when something has gone wrong. I for one am glad we have it, and I cannot understand those Christians in certain other countries who seem to think the State should not provide these services.
FOOTNOTE: Please note the top picture above is not our Rebekah, nor is the second photo her x-ray. These have been used for illustrative purposes only.
The Modesty Wraps Campaign – Forthcoming Government Action?
If our Coalition Government delivers as suggested in this report in the Daily Telegraph, then it will be good news.
HT: Gemma Wilson in the Make Modesty Wraps Law group on Facebook.
Employment Rights And Ministers
The Methodist Church has lost an appeal against a minister who claims she was unfairly constructively dismissed. To be more precise, Haley Preston is pursuing a case along these lines against the church, and in past times the church could claim that it was not her employer, but that ministers are employed by God. Now the Appeal Court has upheld the ruling of an Employment Appeal Tribunal that Mrs Preston was in fact employed by the church, a position which gives her access to redress under employment legislation. Before now, ministers who were dismissed have had no such redress in law. The full judgment is here. The official Methodist response reads as follows:
Revd Dr Martyn Atkins, General Secretary of the Methodist Church in Britain said: “The Methodist Church is seeking leave to appeal to the Supreme Court against the judgement that Haley Preston’s (formerly Moore) case is a matter for an employment tribunal. We are treating this matter with great seriousness as something which would affect all of our ministers and the culture of our Church. “The church values all of its ministers, and it is clear to us that relationship cannot easily be reduced to a simple contract of employment. The call to Methodist ministry cannot be treated as just another job – it is based on a lifetime calling, expressed through a covenant relationship with the Church. “We want to ensure that we treat everyone fairly and properly and all of our ministers have rights of redress under existing Church procedures. We are committed to caring for all who serve the Church, whether lay or ordained, paid or volunteer.”
The point of the ‘covenant’ language is that there is a mutual covenant between church and minister. Ministers give up a home to go where the church stations them; in response, the church provides a stipend (a living allowance – not a salary) and a manse. In court the Methodist Church tried to invoke Human Rights law to the effect that religious conscience should have prior claim over employment law. The Appeal Court called this ‘moral poverty’. It appears that the church has added things to the covenant from the world of secular employment, such as appraisal, supervision and holidays, and these are now regarded as evidence by the courts in support of ministers being in a contractual situation, in addition to or instead of a covenantal one.
The covenant is good when it works. However, it can go wrong on either side. A minister can be treated badly by a congregation, circuit or other body; equally, a minister can mistreat a church or individuals. I do not know what happened in Mrs Preston’s case, and even if I did it would be wrong to comment, especially when the legal process has still not finished. Clearly, though, she feels aggrieved. However, it is a tragedy when Christians have to invoke the law in order to deal with each other, something Paul told the Corinthians in his First Epistle to their shame.
At this point I simply want to tease out the pros and cons if ministers do end up being treated as employees. In favour is the fact that it would open us up to clear protection in employment law. It might also make things clearer in cases of incompetent or abusive ministers. Against is the notion that some people would want to tell ministers explicitly what they should be doing, in ways that go against the historic notion that the stipend frees ministers to pray and seek God’s direction for their work. The introduction of the ‘Letter of Understanding’ that circuits give to ministers when an invitation to serve in a new circuit is accepted has pushed in this direction: some circuits start to get quite precise about their expectations of the minister. While accountability is important, it will be hard to be a leader if those we are trying to lead think they can tell us what we should be doing.
Furthermore, should the position be confirmed that we are employees of the church, we shall need to resolve exactly who or which body in the church is our employer. The fears described in the last paragraph could be very real if the employing body was very local. If, on the other hand, it was the Methodist Conference itself, there might be more opportunity for proper safeguards and procedures. It is not that all local lay leaders are dangerous – far from it! – but lack of knowledge, experience and skills could be dangerous.
There is a fascinating (but increasingly complex) discussion of this issue going on at the UK Methodists page on Facebook.
In the wider context, the trade union Unite (which represents such ‘faith workers’ as join it) has been campaigning for a few years now for ministers to be given the same rights as employees. That may not necessarily involve us becoming employees, but being entitled to the same protection. There is a paper explaining their position here.
This is going to run and run, in some form or another. Whatever the final conclusion, it will massively change the relationship between ministers and their congregations. My gut feeling is that it will end with ministers becoming employees in some form or another, because – as has been said on the UK Methodists Facebook page – the courts are increasingly taking the line that ‘if it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck then it is a duck.’ It is hard to know what fundamental doctrinal reason we could have for resisting employment status, but if we go that route we shall have to be careful and we shall need to be proactive in developing what that relationship could and should be in line with our convictions.
The Modesty Wraps Campaign – Update
Following my post on Sunday I went into our local Co-Op this morning after the school run to buy some rolls for lunch. Seeing the manager stacking goods on the shelves, I approached him. Bearing in mind my concerns yesterday about aggressive political engagement I spoke diplomatically to him.
I explained that I had a concern as the father of young children about his store. It was all too easy for my children to see the copies of Nuts and Zoo. Before I could go any further he told me they had ordered modesty wraps (or modesty bags, I think he called them) and duly explained what they were.
I told him how grateful I was for this, and that I also understood the difficult position retailers were in, given that wholesalers demand they take a particular range of magazines without exception (and demand that they are displayed). He nodded, seemingly in appreciation that I understood their dilemma.
I shall watch with interest to see when the modesty wraps appear.
But it also poses a further question, about the attitude of the wholesalers and of the magazine industry. Clearly retailers feel financially threatened by the terms of the contracts the wholesalers expect them to sign. Should we not also be talking with them and with the magazine industry? The advertising industry learned that many people disliked unsolicited direct marketing. As a result, the Mailing Preference Service and the Telephone Preference Service came into being. There is even legal backing for these services. So why should there not be something similar for retailers who don’t want to take vulgar or pornographic magazines?
