View from the Tower of London

IVF and Every Other Possible Thing Wrong

2009-06-21T14:51:00.000-07:00

Dear Stan,

I saw your comment on the blunder at a British National Health Service fertility clinic which resulted in one couple's embryo being implanted into another woman. (See More IVF Problems.) Given the microscopic size of sperm and eggs it is amazing that it does not happen more often - or maybe it does and it is not publicised, or is not recognised. How would a couple be certain that a child was NOT their own - unless they went in for DNA testing of their newborn or a black baby was the offspring of white parents......

I am reminded of the excellent grammatical practice of parsing a sentence. The whole gruesome saga needs some moral parsing to draw out everything that was wrong with this story and modern Britain.

1) The couple who lost their baby were unmarried.
2) The instant solution to the problem was abortion.
3) The practice of in vitro fertilisation (IVF) is grossly immoral from so many viewpoints that it is incredible that any civilised society allows it, much less pays for it.
4) My taxes were used to fund the fertilisation, the abortion and (the undisclosed) truckload of compensation paid to the couple......

I am also reminded of a comment from a "Scotland on Sunday" journalist a few years ago. He was describing the Scottish social services' reaction to yet another horrible death of a little boy at the hands of his heroin-addicted parents. The official reaction would be to recruit the same sort of people to child protection teams, but supervise and train them better. "This is so obviously wrong that it will almost certainly be done".

I attach below the appropriately scathing comment from Melanie Phillips. We are supposed to be paying for a National Health Service, not a National Happiness Service. It is unbelievably expensive and is allegedly the biggest civilian employer in the world (if you leave out organisations like the Pentagon and the Chinese army). But it cannot afford to indulge every deluded whim of the population for cosmetic surgery or weight reduction or fertilisation treatment.

The most insane example which I have seen happened a few years ago when a very short but perfectly healthy teenage girl underwent leg lengthening surgery at our expense to make her tall enough to be an air hostess. Not surprisingly, her broken and stretched femurs proved rather fragile and she had at least one refracture (at our expense, of course).

Melanie writes as an agnostic Jew, so you would hardly expect her to be completely sympathetic to Catholic teaching. And as for her hope that the ludicrous Tory party will be any better once they replace the present Labour government, you can only adapt John McEnroe's immortal words: "You Cannot Be Serious, Woman!"

========================================

15th June 2009 "Daily Mail" of London
by Melanie Phillips

A ghastly blunder at an NHS fertility clinic has left two sets of prospective parents devastated.

A couple who had already produced one son through in vitro fertilisation decided four years later to have another child by using the last viable embryo of nine which had been created and which was stored at an NHS clinic in Wales.

To their horror, they were told that through a clerical error this embryo had been implanted in the wrong woman’s body — and aborted as soon as the mistake was discovered.

It is said that staff at this clinic had been struggling with an enormous workload. But this was by no means the only such debacle in NHS fertility clinics.

New figures due to be published this summer will show around 200 serious mistakes and ‘near misses’ in such clinics. Such blunders deepen doubts not merely about standards at the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, but about IVF itself.

There is no question but that it brings great happiness to otherwise childless people whom it enables to have a baby. But it has also raised a host of ethical issues that have multiplied and remain unresolved.

Many find it distasteful and troubling — to put it no more strongly — that because it is so difficult to implant an embryo successfully, more are necessarily created than will eventually become babies and so the majority are eventually destroyed.

Creating potential babies in this way only to dispose of them has undoubtedly helped erode respect for human life.

The procedure has also led us into the ethical quicksands of embryo research and ‘designer’ babies, not to mention in some cases breaking the biological link between parents and children and enabling other women to have children without a father being around at all.

More sharply still, for most people IVF simply doesn’t work. Almost three-quarters of those who put themselves through this trying procedure will not end up with a baby. By raising their hopes only most cruelly to dash them, IVF must surely deepen their anguish.
True, much IVF work is done privately. But given all these concerns, the question is whether it should be funded by the taxpayer at all.

That may sound harsh for those who do have IVF children on the NHS. But in a service with finite resources and where provision is always rationed in one way or another, choices inevitably have to be made about what the NHS should provide and what it should not.
After all, the NHS is a health service, not a happiness service. So where should the line be drawn? At what point does clinical need turn into ‘what I want’ instead?

Is it right, for example, that the NHS should pay for gender reassignment or gastric band operations for those who cannot — or will not — lose weight by conventional means?
Such questions are especially acute now. For despite the attempt by Gordon Brown to pretend that the Government will not make cuts in public services, it is clear that this is indeed the case.

As the respected Institute For Fiscal Studies has pointed out, the Government’s own spending plans envisage that from 2011 there will be cuts of around 7 per cent over three years.

Remarkably, Mr Brown is brazenly denying these statistics even though his own Government has produced them. He is doing so because he thinks that tarnishing the Tories with plans to cut public services such as health and education is one of the biggest weapons in his electoral armoury.

So he will challenge them to say whether they will cut teachers or nurses, or to spell out what NHS treatments they will stop funding.

But this tactic is not only cynical and dishonest: it is fatuous. Asking what public services either Labour or the Tories would cut is to pose the wrong question.

That’s because central government should not be making such decisions in the first place. It is wrong for a politician or some Whitehall bean-counter to say people can’t have IVF or the latest drug to combat Alzheimer’s.

Whether or not these things are efficacious or worth the money is a calculation central government should not be making. It should be no business of the state to tell us what treatments we can and can’t have.

But as long as the Government controls the purse-strings, it is entitled to make up the rules. What’s wrong is that it does control the purse-strings. It’s our money, and we should be entitled to decide how to spend it.

For we now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Government cannot be trusted to spend it properly. We know about the serial computer debacles.

We know about the huge profligacy and waste, with the idiotic non-jobs of ‘diversity outreach co- ordinator’ and such-like.

We know that in both health and education, gazillions have been poured straight into a black hole. We know that, while the extra money has undoubtedly brought about some improvements in the NHS, most of it has been wasted.

As for education standards, we can see them slipping as we hear ministers lying through their teeth that they are rising. And the most heavily funded state schools are often the very worst.

What the current crisis surely tells us is that this is now the time to stop prattling meaninglessly about ‘cutting waste’ and ‘increasing efficiency’ and address the root of the problem.

The era of paying central government to deliver public services such as health and education should be declared to be over.

We should start with a blank page on which should be written two fundamental principles: that the public should be put in the driving seat, able to choose what type of services to have and to take responsibility for those choices; and that the poor should be protected, so that all have access to a decent level of provision.

These principles would play out differently with different services. Personally, I favour some kind of European-style social insurance scheme for health and long-term care, and education vouchers to give all parents a proper choice of schools.

In countries where such schemes are in use, standards for all in both health and education are vastly higher than in Britain.

With our current system demonstrably bust, this is surely the moment to start a serious debate on these matters. But on all sides, politicians are unable or unwilling to tell the public the truth.

By denying what his own economic policy means, Gordon Brown is treating voters like imbeciles. But the Tories are scarcely any better. When Shadow Health spokesman Andrew Lansley let slip that, like the Government, the Tories would also be forced to cut public spending, his leader apparently rewarded him for his honesty by a roasting.

The Tories are still terrified that they will be painted all over again as the ‘nasty party’ if they acknowledge that the game is up for the NHS and other public services. So they are effectively colluding with the Government in the spending charade.

But times have changed. Everyone knows that whoever wins the election will have to make cuts. The new issue is that the public will no longer tolerate being lied to, about this or anything else. They are demanding honesty and transparency in political life.

And that means an end to the illusion that everyone can have identical access to everything — from IVF to ‘gender reassignment’ — at all times.

It means an end to this puerile politics of the playground. Now is a golden opportunity for the Tories to seize the agenda — along with their courage — and change the terms of the entire debate.

Planes, Malls, and Three French Corpses

2009-06-16T06:06:00.000-07:00

Farnborough lies twenty miles south of Reading. At one time it was distinctly separate from the neighboring town of Aldershot, “Home of the British Army”. Now the two boroughs have merged into one suburban sprawl, so the only way you can tell the difference is the boundary signs as you drive from one to the other.

Farnborough is the birthplace of British aviation. Every two years the airfield hosts a major air display. As you drive in from the north, you pass a full size replica of Britain’s first jet aircraft, the Whittle of 1941.It is proudly mounted in flying pose at the entrance to the airfield or “aerodrome” as some road signs quaintly describe it. See http://www.frankwhittle.co.uk/content.php?act=viewDoc&docId=9&level=top.

The town centre is an unremarkable assembly of malls and car parks, with clones of every major British bank, clothes shop, coffee bar, fast food provider and mobile phone retailer. The only thing to distinguish Costa Coffee here from the same outlet in hundreds of British malls and high streets is the replica World War 1 biplane suspended above your head as you consume your cappuccino.

But walk for a few minutes from the shopping malls and you enter a parallel universe. Take your life in your hands, cross the A325 road, pass through a pair of electric gates next to a unappealing apartment block and climb the hill beyond. In less than 200 yards you find yourself in front of a monastery with a very French domed church alongside it. All French features present and correct: 9 foot gargoyles, marble floors, extraordinary glass in the side windows, three members of the Bonaparte family resident in the crypt.

Yes, Emperor Napoleon 3rd, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte (the loser of the 1815 Battle of Waterloo), is buried here. Alongside Napoleon 3rd there is his wife the Empress Eugenie and their only child, Prince Louis who died tragically at the age of 23 in 1879. This marked the end of any realistic hopes of a Bonaparte restoration in France at a later date. Many Frenchmen had regarded the young Prince Louis as the Emperor in exile. For better or worse, their beloved France would henceforth be a secular democracy and their bodies would lie in permanent exile in a foreign land. “Buried” is not strictly the right word; entombed is more correct, as their corpses are housed above ground in three splendid sarcophagi made of Aberdeen granite. These tombs are allegedly similar to those used in the British Royal family’s private burial site at Frogmore. The Abbey website ( http://www.farnboroughabbey.org/) explains:

In 1880, the Empress Eugénie bought a house in Farnborough. Crushed by the loss of her husband Napoleon III in 1873 and the death in 1879 of her 23 year old son in the Zulu War, she built St Michael’s Abbey as a monastery and the Imperial Mausoleum.
Dom Cabrol, the prior of the French Abbey of Saint Pierre de Solesmes, had dreamed of a monastic foundation dedicated to liturgical studies, but no suitable property or funding had been found, though the vicissitudes of the anti-clerical France of the 1890s made the thought of a house abroad increasingly attractive. The Empress Eugénie invited these French Benedictines here in 1895 and thus the daily round of work, prayer and study began.

Monsignor Ronald Knox, who was received into the Catholic Church here, described the Abbey as ‘a little corner of England which is forever France, irreclaimably French.’ In 1947 a little band of monks came from Prinknash Abbey, near Gloucester, to anglicise the house and ensure the continuity of the monastic life here. The last French monk, Dom Zerr, died in 1956.

The community today draws on the richness of more than a hundred years of monastic prayer and witness in this place and more than 1500 years of Benedictine tradition. “

Farnborough Abbey is a Benedictine foundation, but these are a very distinct type of Benedictine. In contrast to the Benedictine monastery at Douai, twenty miles west of Reading, the Farnborough Benedictines are a contemplative community. Douai is open all the time; you can casually drop into the splendid church at any time of the day and join the monks at one of their regular Offices. Farnborough is open once a week at 300pm on a Saturday for a guided tour, but otherwise the monks preserve their privacy and seclusion two hundred yards from the bustle of 21st century England. At present there are 7 monks ranging in age from 23 to 96. The oldest member can recall the early, totally French days when any Englishman was a highly suspect intruder. There is typically a new novice every year, but there is a steady turnover; the majority do not persevere. Seven monks sounds very few, but it is enough to maintain a vibrant spiritual and working community. The monastery was never intended to be large, unlike some of the huge European houses which accommodate 200 or 300 monks. The most that could reasonably be housed at Farnborough is 14.

The electric gates beside the apartment block are mostly kept shut to preserve the sense of enclosure for the monks. If you want to get in, ring the bell, speak into the intercom, and give a good reason for intruding on their prayers and work. They aim to conserve St Benedict’s ideal life balance of prayer, manual work and study. They run a small farm with a mixture of cows, chickens and bees. But the work for which they are best known is book publishing and binding. Also the monastery now houses the National Catholic Library. I visited this library many years ago when it was housed near Westminster Cathedral in London. For years the Franciscans maintained this incredible resource, but had to give it up. It was threatened with dissolution and dispersal until the monks offered it a new home. So, between the NCL and their own library, they now have 125,000 books on site for 7 monks.

What a place to visit and how much politicking, sadness, humour and history is packed into these few acres. Napoleon 3rd died in exile 3 years after the catastrophic French defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71. When the war started, the cry in Paris was “A Berlin!”. Unfortunately the Prussians crushed the French Army and surrounded Paris. When Napoleon died in 1873, he was buried at St Mary’s Church, Chislehurst, south-east of London. There were various ideas for a suitably dignified memorial/mausoleum in that area, but none came to pass. The Catholic Church in Chislehurst was the property of the diocese. Land near the church belonged to a Prussian who had served in the 1870 war and was none too eager to sell any part of his land to accommodate the redundant Emperor.

Eventually his widow Eugenie had the opportunity to buy Farnborough Hill, a grand house built in a somewhat Continental style and sited in a huge estate. She hired an eminent French architect to extend it to accommodate her huge collection of Napoleonic memorabilia. It is now a Catholic girls’ school (see http://www.farnborough-hill.org.uk/ for a glimpse of this Grade 1 listed building). She arranged for the present monastery and church/Imperial Mausoleum to be built on a neighboring hill. Then she invited the monks. Part of the appeal for the monks was the fact that Farnborough had two railway stations. From one station you could reach Oxford and its Bodleian Library in a hour. From the other station you could reach London and its huge range of libraries in an hour. This was very attractive to the scholarly Benedictines.

When Napoleon’s coffin was finally moved from Chislehurst to Farnborough, history had one big joke to play. His remains were transported by rail…via the huge Waterloo station in south London. (See “The Bourne Ultimatum” for the memorable chase across this crowded terminus). Eugenie lived until 1920, though she said that she died in 1879 with her only child.

French politics is as heavily burdened by the past as that of any other nation. Napoleon Bonaparte is buried in great style in Paris. Having visited his tomb in 2006, I could only regard it as a monstrous waste of a glorious church. Yet his nephew remains in British exile, long after the cause for his staying abroad has faded away. Every so often there is a move to try to repatriate him, but so far the monks and the Bonapart family in France remain united in wishing him to stay in Farnborough.

His life continues to be celebrated quietly in unexpected ways. 2008 was the 200th anniversary of his birth and several diplomats from France and other countries turned up at Farnborough to pay homage. Most amazing of all was the Romanian ambassador. What on earth was he doing here? Well, Napoleon 3rd had helped to save Romania from being colonized by the Ottoman Empire and they were still grateful. The Swiss wanted him to be buried on Swiss soil, as the Bonapart family at one time spent a long exile in Switzerland. So a packet of Swiss soil is tucked underneath his sarcophagus.

I was reminded of my visit to Peterborough Cathedral a few years ago. Every year there is a service at the tomb of Katherine of Aragon, Henry 8th’s first and ever-faithful wife. As she was Spanish royalty, the Spanish Embassy in London always sends a representative.

The week before my visit was the 130th anniversary of Prince Louis’ death. His sarcophagus had at its base several wreaths with French inscriptions. Who will bother to remember any of our statesmen or celebrities in 130 or 200 years time? In most cases, we fervently wish that we could not remember them today.

Guilty Until Proven Guilty

2009-06-14T04:52:00.000-07:00

It is both reassuring and disappointing to notice that human nature does not change. Our most recent public sensation was hot enough to share the front pages with the latest disgraced Member of Parliament’s outrageous expense claims. As several perceptive commentators have noted, the age of the witch hunt is ever with us and this week’s witch is one Vanessa George, a nursery worker from the original Plymouth in south-west England.

Mrs George qualifies as Demoness of the Week due to allegations that she took pornographic photos of the little children in her care and sexually abused some of them. Apart from the inherent shock value of the alleged offences, the yellow press are plainly lining her up as Myra Hindley Mark 2. But legal quibbles such as “Innocent till proven guilty” can be safely ignored, both by the media and the enraged mob at her court appearance, who spat on her and attacked the van in which she was transported.

Theodore Dalrymple had ample exposure to evil in the course of his career as a prison doctor and described the same mentality among prisoners. Many prisoners considered themselves hard done by and claimed they had been set up or framed by the police or judicial system. But no such benefit of the doubt was extended to those suspected of sexual offences against children. They were instantly guilty if charged and could expect the most ferocious punishment from fellow inmates.

Before rushing to judgement, the press might have remembered the recent fiasco of two nursery workers in Newcastle, at the other end of England. This pair were found to be innocent after years of agony when they had been falsely accused of similar offences. But, hey, what's the problem about destroying the lives of Mrs George, her husband and two teenage daughters when there's so much money to be made?

The intelligent and exceptionally well informed journalist Dominic Lawson recently wrote that the British media have been in mourning since the death of the child killer Myra Hindley in prison in 2002. For the past 40 years, the images of two blond women have been guaranteed to sell newspapers, magazines and TV programs. One is Myra, the other is Princess Diana. Admittedly Diana’s hair colour was natural, while Myra’s came out of a bottle. But her 1960s iconic image of the hard-faced bitch with the blond beehive hairdo is ever enduring and endlessly reproduced. Later pictures of her in prison, with dark hair and a sweet smile, make her look like your favourite aunt and don’t fit the fairy story so well.

Unless you have lived in Britain for the last forty years, you cannot imagine the degree and quality of hatred focused on this woman. The only remotely comparable kind of loathing might be that directed at Adolf Hitler. But even Hitler’s public presentation lacks the peculiarly venomous edge which Hindley’s name instantly provokes. I was with friends on the evening in 2002 when her death was announced on TV and one friend’s vehement and heartfelt comment was “Good!” This friend is a really sweet natured and loving person; she was also born after Hindley’s trial and conviction.

Myra’s crimes were hideous, though not exceptionally horrible by the standards of British murders of both children and adults. I can think of numerous child killings over the last 40 years that were even worse and those perpetrators are almost completely forgotten. The barbaric killing of two French students in London in 2008 made Hindley’s crimes look mild in comparison. Yet I expect the names of their two vile killers to be largely forgotten a few weeks after they begin their 35+ year sentences. But she was caught in a perfect storm of circumstances partly outside her control.

Obviously the serial killing of children excites particular revulsion. And the fact that a woman participated made it doubly heinous, even though she was an accomplice who did not physically kill the children. True, she need not have associated with the depraved Ian Brady or gone along with his murders or assisted in the burial of the bodies. But there were two extra factors which have compounded and extended the infamy of the “Moors Murders” case, as it is known (The bodies were buried in the bleak high moors east of Manchester).

The first was the audio evidence. When she came to court in 1966, even hardened policemen were shaken to the core as tape recorded screams of their tortured 10 year old victim, Lesley Anne Downey, were played back. Reasonably priced tape recording equipment had only recently become available to the general public and Brady had put it to use to record his crimes. As far as I know, it is still the only murder in history where the crime was tape recorded. It helped to seal Brady and Hindley’s conviction and added another level to the public outrage at her crimes. Also the audio evidence had a visceral and immediate impact. No verbal testimony from any number of witnesses or academic pathologists could equal the searing agony of the little girl pleading for mercy and finding none: “Please let me go home to my mummy…..I swear on the Bible, I won’t tell anyone”.

No wonder that her crimes have achieved almost mythical status as examples of ultimate human evil. I say “her” crimes because Hindley is associated forever in most people’s minds as the more evil of the pair. No body wants to hang a woman. But in Hindley’s case nearly everyone would gladly have made an exception. Except that option was no longer legally possible.

Here we have the second complicating factor in her case. The last two people to be executed in England were hung in 1964. The use of the death penalty was suspended for a few years until formal abolition around 1970. As a sop to public sentiment, various officials and politicians promised that “life imprisonment for murder would mean life”. The lying bastards. “Life imprisonment” most usually means 10 years or so before release on licence. In the case of Hindley and Brady, it did turn out to be a life long sentence. She died in prison and he is still inside, probably having slid into insanity by now. So, for the thirty-six years of her imprisonment, much of the public could justly feel that an exceptionally evil killer had cheated the gallows.

The relatives of the victims publicly and repeatedly threatened to kill them if they were released. The politicians and officials responsible for parole thus had an extra nasty dimension to consider, apart from the usual established criteria for releasing a convicted killer back into the community. If Hindley was released (as she should have been freed under the normal rules in the 1990s), she would almost certainly have been killed by vigilantes. No new identity or “secret” address would have survived for 48 hours; a corrupt official would have sold it to the press before she was freed. And if she was killed and her murderers brought to justice, would a British jury convict? You might get another notorious case of a jury approving of murder, as happened in Australia where a vigilante policeman used his service revolver to kill a man he accused of molesting a relative. The victim was dead and couldn’t defend himself in court, but the policeman walked free despite there being no reasonable doubt as to his guilt.

But Hindley was not just a reviled serial killer. She was also a great long term investment from the media viewpoint. She was only in her early 20s when convicted and the reporters knew that they had a wonderful story for decades to come. For the rest of her life she was a guaranteed earner for the British press, who were and are happy to ignore any law or code of ethics in the pursuit of a great story. Any news of Hindley’s life in prison or any hint that she might be soon released were guaranteed front page coverage, along with the understandable but still unappealing chorus of hatred from a group of her victims’ relatives (who I understand were kept on a retainer by at least one tabloid).

Lord Longford, the Catholic campaigner for prison reform, quickly discovered this when he befriended Hindley. Whenever he visited her the press were waiting for him at the prison gate. He had arranged his visits confidentially in advance, so it was plainly a corrupt prison officer who was leaking the information to the newspapers. But despite his protests no one was ever detected or punished. No British politician would ever dare to offend the press barons.

So ever since her demise the newspapers have been looking for a replacement. Most of those who looked like possible candidates have proved to be fifth-rate villainesses and quickly forgotten. Even Vanessa George looks too insubstantial to be a convincing understudy for Hindley. But the search goes on.

The sad wasted life of Myra Hindley contained extra embarassments for Catholics in Britain. Lord Longford always had something of the Holy Fool about his public persona and his long association with Hindley did neither of them any favours. He was convinced that she was a good Catholic girl who had sincerely repented of her crimes and deserved to be released. I could feel only that if she truly understood the nature of her crimes, she would understand that she fully deserved a full life sentence and should accept that with resignation. As a prison visitor, I met another prison visitor who had visited Hindley and gained an utterly different impression of her character and disposition. She declared unequivocally that Hindley was “the most evil person she had ever met”. As this prison visitor was not nationally famous, merely a local volunteer, she had no political influence or powerful friends and was thus of no use to Hindley in lobbying for an early release.

In his article for “The Sunday Times” on 31st May ( http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/dominic_lawson/article6395923.ece ), Dominic Lawson considered the present chaotic shambles which poses as British policy for sentencing criminals of varying degrees of villainy. He quoted effectively from a great Christian thinker who Lord Longford might have been wise to consider before he endorsed Hindley's pleas for clemency:

“The advocates of our system maintain that it is more humane, since it allows for the prisoner who displays penitence to be released much earlier. Sixty years ago CS Lewis demolished this conceit in his essay The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment. He pointed out that a sentence based solely and inflexibly on the wickedness perpetrated – the concept of just desert, which was increasingly being denounced as “mere retribution” – was the only way of linking punishment and justice.

By contrast, said Lewis, if sentences served were based on a subjective assessment of the rehabilitative process, “grumpy unrepentant prisoners” could be consigned to perpetual incarceration while those cunning enough to “cheat with success” would be freed.

The dystopia foreseen by CS Lewis is now the English system of justice.”

2009-06-11T04:03:00.000-07:00

Dear Stan,

I have driven past the church of St Laurence in the historic town of Petersfield (40 miles south of Reading) many times. Its styling is eye catching and unusual for a small town Catholic parish church

http://www.petersfieldparish.org.uk/page/Home.aspx

In fact, Petersfield has an excellent collection of churches. The Methodist church across the road from St Laurence is very handsome, but the 800 year old St Peter in the ancient Market Place is a gem of a building. Of course, it was a Catholic church for over 300 years until Henry 8th came along. But the Anglicans have done a great job of preserving it and adapting it for modern needs, most recently in the year 2000. It is very visibly a vibrant parish church, as befits its position in the heart of this lovely town. The Farmers' Market was in full swing in the Market Place a few yards from its doors when I visited.

As I admired its refurbished interior, a couple came in. The man explained that it was a year since their marriage in that historic setting.

St Laurence's most famous parishioner was one Sir Alec Guinness, who, between "Star Wars" and " Passage to India", lived nearby. Pity that I could not get inside St Laurence. Like nearly all Catholic churches in England, its doors remain firmly locked between Masses. I am sure that its interior is good match for its very striking shell.

U.S. One of the Largest Muslim Countries?

2009-06-04T16:00:00.000-07:00

Dear Stan,

Here is a fascinating excerpt from Melanie Phillips' blog of 3rd June 2009. It is not often that you know that a politician is lying the moment he utters a sentence. Usually, you just don't have the background knowledge to instantly detect a blatant falsehood. And even if you suspect that you're being fed garbage, you don't have the time to research the facts. But the Leader of the Free World has spoken one piece of drivel which almost all his audience must have known immediately to be untrue.

Even if you lived in Detroit, with a very large concentration of Arab-Americans, you would have your doubts about the USA being "one of the largest Muslim countries in the world". Years ago I read that 80% of Arab-Americans were Christian and I suspect that has not changed too dramatically as more and more Arab Christians flee the Middle East.

=========================
Wednesday, 3rd June 2009
A statement -- or an aspiration?
9:57am
Having previously declared that America is ‘no longer a Christian nation’ – to be precise:
... At least not just. We are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, and a Buddhist nation, and a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers...
Obama has now announced, on the eve of his pilgrimage to make obeisance to the entire Islamic world, that the US can be seen as a Muslim country:

‘And one of the points I want to make is, is that if you actually took the number of Muslim Americans, we’d be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world,’

Mr. Obama said.
Uh? Here are some statistics of the number and percentage of Muslims in various countries:

Indonesia: 207,105,000 (88.2%);
Pakistan: 167,430,801 (95%);
India: 156,254,615 (13.4%);
Turkey: 70,800,000 (99%);
Egypt: 70,530,237 (90%);
Nigeria: 64,385,994 (45%);
Iran: 64,089,571 (98%);
Algeria: 32,999,883 (99%);
Morocco: 32,300,410 (99%);
Afghanistan: 31,571,023 (99%)
Saudi Arabia: 26,417,599 (100%)
USA: 4,558,068 (1.5%)
Just what planet is this US President on? Or is this not a statement but an aspiration?

=========================

Invisible Massacre

2009-06-03T10:52:00.000-07:00

Here is part of the ever thoughtful Archbishop Chaput's article in "First Things" on 2nd June 2009. He was reflecting on the uses of technology. He mentions the downside of the invention of cars. "traffic jams, oil dependency and pollution". Is he leaving something out.....like mass carnage? The fact that such an intelligent writer could omit the most obvious downside of widespread car use is testimony to how invisible death on the roads is.

Yesterday's Air France disaster over the Atlantic finally pushed the Members of Parliament expenses row off the top of the British news agenda for a day - this never ending scandal went down to the Number 2 slot for a day, so I expect it to be back at Number 1 tomorrow and for every day until a General Election is called or the "Daily Telegraph" runs out of politicians to destroy. 228 people have probably died in that crash. The death toll on the British roads, among the safest in the world, is 3,000 a year - more than 12 Air France disasters. The death toll on US roads is over 40,000 a year - an Air France disaster every two days.

The Chicago Tribune ran a series of articles some time ago about Illinois high school students killing themselves in a series of gruesome and easily avoided accidents (e.g. if they had been driving sober or at less than 100 mph). Perhaps older or younger citizens' lives were less valuable or less newsworthy, because I never saw any similar series on accidents involving other drivers. But most of the time road deaths never make the news unless it is an exceptionally high death toll.
============================
"The historian Edward Tenner once warned that every new technology brings with it a "revenge of unintended consequences." We invent cars, for example, to move us more quickly--and of course, they do. But we also end up with traffic jams, oil dependency and pollution. We're never as smart as we think we are. The modern scientific mind likes to imagine itself as Prometheus, the hero of Greek myth who's punished by Zeus for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humans. But we're really much more like the Sorcerer's Apprentice: smart enough to use the Master's magic, but not smart enough to know where it leads or how to control it.
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Because It's WRONG! (Part 5)

2009-06-01T06:09:00.000-07:00

Here is a great article from "The Independent" of 30th May 2009. Richard Ingrams is one of the surviving founders of "Private Eye" - a fondness for alcohol and general unhealthy living has carried off some of his friends and colleagues from the early 1960s. But Richard is still going strong. He often refers to commuting to London from Reading, so he obviously lives somewhere in this area. But as so-called "real life" is always crazier than the most heroic satirical efforts of "Private Eye", perhaps he realises that satire is redundant nowadays.

His article on the recent approval of a gay clergyman by the Church of Scotland is a prime example. Such an event would have been regarded as beyond the bounds of worst-taste satire when "Private Eye" started. But it is now hardly surprising - just the final end stage of the disintegration of Scottish Christianity, so evident on my holiday in Scotland in 2008 when I came across any number of closed churches converted to other purposes.

Remember the stern 1920s religion depicted in "Chariots of Fire", when the great Scottish missionary and athlete Eric Liddell refuses to run even an Olympic heat on the Sabbath? Some of Eric's spiritual descendants are definitely NOT taking the admission of gay clergy lying down, so we have yet another schism in full swing. The more vacuous talk there is of "Christian Unity", the more disunity there is in real life.

As Richard so truly says, "we are all very relaxed about the breaking of the marriage vows". In the last few weeks, yet another pair of my Catholic friends (with two children) have split up. Admittedly, I was not surprised from a Catholic viewpoint as their marriage had long struck me as a good business arrangement rather than a true Christian union, but it was still intensely depressing.

And if even the formerly rigorous Kirk in Scotland is indifferent to adultery and sodomy what is wrong? What is the purpose of such a "Church", except as a a vaguely spiritual welfare and social society?

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What was a vocation has turned into just another job

Being a priest, in the eyes of the secular media, is no different from any other job. It follows that we should no more think of objecting to a gay minister of religion than we would a gay dentist.

Hence the general rejoicing that the Church of Scotland has voted in favour of the appointment of its first ever gay minister, Mr Scott Rennie, 37, pictured.
Here is an organisation long associated with the harsh puritanism of John Knox now showing itself to be tolerant, forward-looking, modernising and all kinds of words that don't mean anything much.

The fact that Mr Rennie was married with a young child but has left them, is now divorced and living with a man is neither here nor there. In today's world we are all very relaxed about the breaking of the marriage vows. "Jesus loves me," says Mr Rennie, so it must be all right then.

The issue of openly gay clergy has already caused a major upheaval in the Church of England and now the same sort of crisis is threatening the Church of Scotland.
But the issue is not really to do with homosexuality. The only way the churches can survive is if priests and ministers are seen to be making personal sacrifices which the rest of us are not prepared to make. Then they will be respected.

As soon as they feel free to marry, get divorced, remarry, live with other men and so on then they are telling us that there's nothing so special about being a priest. It's just another job, like being a dentist. So no wonder the media are being so supportive.

Farmer Builds Model of Biblical Temple

2009-05-25T19:15:00.000-07:00

Here's link to incredible model and many pictures:
http://www.letterofrepentance.com/FarmerbuildsmodelofBiblicaltemple.html

Dear Stan,

Yes, I saw the report on this incredible project in a British newspaper. Norfolk is a county on the east coast of England, about 100 miles north-east of London. As it is very flat, it was the site of numerous RAF and USAAF bases in WW2. Its biggest Christian claim to fame is the major shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, frequented by both Catholic and Anglican pilgrims. Its major city, Norwich, has TWO cathedrals - one Catholic, one Anglican.

I love models of anything. The best one I have seen recently is an incredibly detailed model of Worcester Cathedral (about 80 miles north-west of Reading) which was displayed in a side aisle of this magnificent building. On the upper levels of the Lutheran Cathedral in Berlin there are several excellent models, to varying scales, of the entire cathedral and parts of its structure.

To my stunned surprise, I discovered a major Catholic cathedral only twenty miles south of Reading today. I was briefly checking out the Army town of Aldershot on a day's random driving. There was a very large and handsome Victorian church in the heart of the military district. I wandered in, assuming that it was an Anglican church as it was so similar in general style to other Anglican parish churches in Southern England. But no, it was the Cathedral Church of the Armed Forces and the seat of the Catholic bishop to the Forces. I ended up enjoying coffee and biscuits (cookies) with the priest and congregation who had just finished Mass. Like other aspects of the Church in England, the chaplaincy to the Armed Forces exists in a parallel universe with hardly any overlap with the main diocesan structure. But this Cathedral's congregation is divided between military families, who are mostly short-stayers before transferring to another Army town, and civilians who are the long-term backbone of the parish.

This very splendid building, with lavish stained glass, mosaics and statues, was indeed an Anglican church up to 1973 when the Anglicans offered it to the Catholic chaplaincy. In the entrance porch a display case contains the trowel used by Queen Victoria to lay the foundation stone in 1892. Now there's a claim to fame; I suspect it is the only Catholic church in the world to have its foundation stone laid by Queen Victoria.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_Church_of_St._Michael_and_St._George

Here is the link to the Wikipaedia article on the Cathedral Church of Saints Michael and George in Aldershot. It was designed by two military engineers. Not many Catholic churches have such architects, I bet.....though there is the wonderful little Italian chapel in the Orkney Islands in Scotland, which I told you about last year. As that was converted from two prefabricated Nissen huts, you might argue that that was also a military building.

Because it's WRONG! (Part 4)

2009-05-25T19:09:00.000-07:00

The most recent overblown British media frenzy is still running as I write. It is even worse than the insane coverage given to the demise of Princess Diana in 1997. At least the media moved on to other trivia once she was buried. Now we have continuous coverage of the excessive expenses which Members of Parliament have been claiming. The problem is that there are over 600 MPs, while there was mercifully only one Princess D. Thus the unsavoury revelations about our elected representatives could run for the next year, with another juicy titbit being unveiled every day or two.

Nearly all the revelations centre on claims for MPs' "second homes". As most MPs represent constituencies outside commuting distance of London, they need a base both in their constituency and in London. The problem then becomes, which is their "main home" and which is their "second home"? The assumption is that they pay the costs for their main home out of their $100,000 a year salary (which is well over twice that of the ordinary working Joe in Britain). But the costs for the "second home" can be reimbursed out of public funds. And the permitted allowances for everything from redecoration to new kitchens to new widescreen TVs and home cinema systems are very generous.

So, all of a sudden, the enraged working Joes of Britain have been introduced to a new meaning of the word "flipping". It does not refer to practices such as tossing pancakes, but the way MPs have been able to switch their "main" and the "second" homes. You could call your London base your "main" home in 2007 and claim expenses for your "second" home in Yorkshire or wherever. Then in 2008 you could nominate the Yorkshire property as your "main" home and claim a second truckload of money for refurbishing, refurnishing and equipping your "second" home in London.

It was not just the blatant fraud involved which has provided ample fuel for public fury. The details of expenses claimed aroused further mirth and derision. My favourite was the Conservative MP who claimed $3,000 for cleaning out his moat. But of course....no English gentleman of taste and breeding would be seen dead with a dirty moat. The luckless Home Secretary revealed a mixture of greed and parsimony when she claimed for everything down to a $1.30 electric plug. (This very senior minister is on over $200,000 a year). She had an even worse day when it was revealed that her cable bill, which was also being charged to the public purse, included a couple of pornographic movies which her husband had watched.

Further merciless fun has been had at the expense of the MP who claimed mortgage costs for a property where the mortgage had already been repaid. As "The Daily Mash" explained, he is the first person in history not to realise that he had repaid his mortgage. And the guy who claimed $13,000 for a new TV.....I did not realise that it was possible to spend so much on any domestic TV. But apparently it is, if you buy it from the top-of-the- market Danish manufacturer Bang and Olufsen.

There have been so many revelations every day that by the time Saturday's crook is unveiled you have forgotten the crooks named on Tuesday and Wednesday.

But our pleasure at seeing one crook after another being publicly crucified should be tempered with several other considerations. For one thing, the information was obtained corruptly by the "Daily Telegraph" when they bought a CD full of this devastating information from an insider. Thus they have acted corruptly to expose corruption. It has been notorious for decades that British tabloids corrupt police and prison officers and civil servants for inside information. In more than one case such corruption probably compromised murder investigations. Now a so-called "quality" paper has indulged publicly in the same sordid practice; almost certainly every British paper, "quality" or downmarket, is in the corruption business if there's a great story on the market.

For another, the DT has a monopoly on this data and is thus able to drive the news agenda for every broadcaster and every other newspaper. These have been reduced to playing catch-up as every day the DT leaks another chunk of information and another politician's career goes down the toilet. Also it looks as if the DT is itself playing a political game to destroy the careers of politicians who the Conservative Party leadership want out of the way.

Also various commentators have been lashing out at the way every one of these crooks has claimed that their expenses were "within the rules". Of course they were. The rules in question were set by MPs. But these commentators have been going further, insisting that MPs should behave according to some stricter moral code than the letter of the law requires.

These condemnations look doubly laughable. For one thing, most journalists' best creative writing has traditionally been reserved for their expenses claims. My favourite was the journalist who reportedly claimed for a lawn mower when he lived in a fourth floor apartment. This story may be apocryphal, but lavish entertainment and fictitious travel costs are always good for tax-free boosts to journalists' salaries. And even without the creative expenses, many journalists, broadcasters and editors are on far higher salaries than MPs - up to $1.5 million a year, which makes their accusations of greed look all the more hollow.

The second flaw was the almost total lack of condemnation of the Telegraph's own corruption of a civil servant to get their hands on the data. Informed guesswork suggests that they paid around $130,000 for the CD - an absolute bargain, considering the publicity it has generated. But so many media people are personally corrupt; if they are paying bribes for stories or in receipt of fraudulent expenses and bloated salaries, they are hardly likely to condemn a fellow media worker.

The third flaw is the fact that the sums involved in MPs' expenses are microscopically small compared with the truckloads of taxpayers' money poured down the toilet on everything from the 2012 Olympics to useless weapons to useless computer systems. But these MPs made the mistake of embezzling imaginable sums of money. The $13,000 for a new TV generates outrage because people know how much a good ordinary TV costs and that the $13,000 would buy them a good secondhand car, a purchase they can imagine making. $20 billion squandered on the National Health Service computer system is just an unimaginably enormous sum and no individual is ever going to order such an object for himself. Yet such criminal incompetence and extravagance in spending public money attracts very little attention in comparison to $1.30 claimed for a new bathplug.

The fourth and most grievous flaw was the "Because it's wrong!" tone of all the writers, as if they were reading from tablets freshly delivered to Mount Sinai. Even the atheist philosopher A C Grayling was wheeled on to add his fuel to the bonfire of condemnation. He was loud in his insistence that politicians and the rest of us should have an inner voice telling us that something which was publicly shameful, albeit technically "legal", should not be done even in private when no one was likely to detect it. Of course the Church has always taught that our consciences should be formed according to an objective standard of morality. So which objective standard of morality are we using this week? A C Grayling? The editor of the Daily Mail? Or the Daily Telegraph? Or the BBC's political correspondent? Take your pick. That's the great thing about the consumer society; limitless choice.

After all, I should declare an interest here. In my Civil Service days, I felt no particular restraint in claiming any expenses going. The sums involved were small compared to the MPs' extravagance, but the principle was just the same. You are always far more careful with your money than other peoples' money, especially when the cash is coming from one gigantic impersonal trough labelled "taxation", rather than out of a small company's budget or your parents' pocket. Yet it was every small company and every parent in the country who I was screwing every time I put in a claim. And all my claims were of course entirely "within the rules" and approved by other civil servants.

Drawing All Faiths Together

2009-05-13T07:08:00.000-07:00

Dear Stan

DAFT is "Private Eye"'s name for Tony Blair's Faith Foundation. After his recent efforts to convert the Pope to Blairism, it was wonderful to see that The Great Charlatan has now been recognized as a monstrous fraud by the Vatican. Efforts by a new convert to change doctrine were obviously not well received, but the idea of Bush's sidekick acting as an honest broker in the Middle East was plainly beyond satire.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/may/13/tony-blair-faith-foundation

God in Strange Places

2009-05-10T06:46:00.000-07:00

I keep meeting God in some very strange places. As I noted in a recent post He was recently on the front cover of that very secular political weekly, the "New Statesman". And on a BBC documentary on the plight of the Church of England. And in the spectacular blockbuster "Knowing", which proved yet again that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. If it did not explicitly mention God, it shamelessly cribbed many of His famous special effects, such as the Ascension and Fire from Heaven.

Now He appeared on page 33 of "The Times" colour magazine on 9th May. A new religious order, The Community of Our Lady of Walsingham (www.walsinghamcommunity.org), provided material for a 5 page article with several photographs. The article started by describing the latest recruit who presently flies all over Europe as an air hostess and is due to enter the convent in September 2009. In fact the number of pages is more than this order's current number of members - who are Sister Camilla, the order's founder and webmistress, and Sister Gabriella.

Thus the air hostess will increase membership by 50% when she joins. Just about all parish prayer groups are larger than this miniature order. Why on earth would a major paper take any notice of it? Well, there is the rarity value of its plans to become a mixed-sex religious community - the first in England since the Reformation. There is certainly space for extra recruits. Several men are interested in the development of the Order and may make the plunge soon, once accommodation arrangements are sorted out.

It sounded like a rare piece of good news for religious life in Britain, where convents have been closing the length and breadth of the land. As I drive to work along Bath Road in Reading, I pass the Monastery. This is a very upmarket apartment development which was a Carmelite convent up to 1998. Then the aging and dwindling community dispersed to other Carmels and the site was sold for secular housing. Three miles to the north, the convent in Southview Avenue, which housed the nuns who taught me as a small child, was similarly sold a few years ago.

The new order is based in Brentwood, about 40 miles north-east of London. It was founded only in 2004. Looking at the reasons quoted for its foundation, I couldn't avoid the feeling that it owed as much to the consumer mentality as to traditional religious inspiration. Page 70 of the same magazine reviewed a new Japanese restaurant in central London. Of course, London has restaurants for just about every cuisine on earth. If you didn't like that restaurant, there are plenty of other Japanese eateries to feed you. And if you don't like Japanese food at all, you can choose from hundreds of other food styles from Portugal to the Phillipines. Pages 40 to 53 described several styles of the latest men's and women's clothing - the tiniest sample of what you can find in London's shops large and small.

Page 58 onwards contained the storyboards for the new commercial for Chanel No 5 perfume, the sequel to Chanel's 2004 commercial starring Nicole Kidman, which was reportedly the most expensive commercial ever made. This new commercial is being made by the director of "Amelie" (plus 250 technicians), stars Audrey Tautou, and will probably cost more than most European feature films. According to the article, the director "made the most of its (Chanel's) agreement not to be tightfisted about the production costs". You might think this is a seriously insane agreement to make with any creative filmmaker, but then someone once told me that perfume has a higher profit margin than any commodity except heroin.

This glossy and gloriously materialistic magazine seemed like a totally incongruous setting for an article on the religious life. But the founder explained that "I wanted the poverty of the Franciscans, the zeal of truth of the Dominicans and the liturgy of the Benedictines". I couldn't help feeling that this implicitly insulted all three existing orders on 2 out of 3 counts. I am most familiar with the Benedictines, because of my visits to Douai Abbey which is a Benedictine foundation. Certainly their liturgy is first-rate. But are they lacking in the Truth and Poverty departments??

It seemed faintly bizarre to fashion a religious order which fitted you exactly, much as I visited the tailor in Hong Kong to get a suit of the exact material, style and size to fit me precisely. Even the writer of the article wondered if it would be better to support an existing order than create yet another brand. And surely if you found an order precisely to your specification it must reduce the chances of finding like-minded members, just as my tailored suit would fit very few other people.

Sister Camilla also explained that she wanted a community which would be both "of the world" and yet rooted in time for silence and prayer. Er....don't numerous existing orders do just that, underpinning their work as teachers/nurses/whatever with a serious prayer life?

It is not the smallest religious order I have come across. On my trip to Medjugorge in 1996 I met a very well educated English "nun" who claimed to be the only one of her order, with a distinctive blue habit. Admittedly Medjugorge tends to attract people who are madder than a sackful of cut snakes, to quote a great Australian phrase. She wasn't the craziest person I met that week. There was the nurse from Glasgow who described the visions she saw when she stared at the sun. But this one-sister order ran the nurse a close second, especially when she described a stained glass window in the Medjugorge church which contained a nun with a habit exactly like hers. No, it definitely looked nothing like yours, Sister.

I can only wish the new foundation well and hope fervently that the mixed sex aspect does not result in a horrible car crash somewhere down the road, with the resulting publicity all over the pages of newspapers even less Godly than "The Times".

Great Daily Articles on Morality, Culture & Notre Dame

2009-05-09T04:57:00.000-07:00

Stan,

See great article on 1st May 2009 post in http://www.firstthings.com/. Once Lacy Dodd, a student at Notre Dame, found herself pregnant she quickly discovered what sort of guy her boyfriend, another ND student, was. He was all in favour of a quick abortion. As she says, "pro-choice" doesn't include the choice to keep your baby. Of course, like most articles, it leaves out far more than it includes. Like, does her daughter have any kind of relationship with her Dad? What sort of relationship could you have with a parent who wanted to abort you?

Bill

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Bill, do I have to subscribe? It looks as if I can't get to the articles other wise. Stan

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You don't need to subscribe to First Things to read most of the excellent material. There is a DAILY ARTICLE LINK on the top page and it is just a matter of going to the bottom of that article and clicking on the "Read More" link. [On the U.S. site, the articles for May are strung all together. Just scroll through them. -- SW]. This leads you to the previous daily articles in date order.....then you scroll down to the abortion article of 1st May.

The article for 8th May is particularly pertinent as it echoes the theme of one of my posts "Because it is wrong!" The author of the 8th May article reminds us of the centrality of moral principle in deciding the rightness or wrongness of an action. Thus it is expedient for the state to bug a confessional to obtain a murder conviction, or to torture someone to obtain anti-terrorist intelligence, or to conduct stem cell research to obtain a medical cure.....but all these actions violate a higher moral principle.

As well as the daily articles, you can click on the Archive tab at the top to get a mountain of back numbers of First Things. Enough to keep you reading for years. It is only the two most recent issues which are protected to encourage you to subscribe....

Latin Mass for One

2009-04-15T21:17:00.000-07:00

Is the Latin Mass less worthy of reverence than “Hamlet”?

Tuesday after Easter. I have a spare hour, so why not check out the daily Latin Mass at St William of York? It was at 1120am on that day only, which you might think was an odd time for any Mass. Not pre-work or post-work or lunchtime; it might attract only retired people or homemakers or the staff and students at the adjacent university who can make their own time. In fact, even these had other things to do and I found myself alone in the nave.

It was the first time I had ever been the sole member of the congregation at any Mass in any language. It certainly encourages concentration when you are the only one to make the responses AND in a foreign tongue. Fortunately most of the Mass is either silent or said by the priest, so my mispronunciations were not too plentiful, despite a sore throat. Unfortunately the long gaps of silent prayer made it extra hard to keep my location in the Mass booklet. With no clear visual or audible cues to guide me I was flicking back and forth in the booklet to see where my hoarse voice might next be needed. Suddenly the priest would proclaim: “Dominus vobiscum!” and my rusty childhood reflexes kicked in with “Et cum spiritu tuo.” Phew! Back on track at top of page 23.….

Even more unnerving is making sure I am kneeling, standing or seated at the right points. Normally you follow the herd movements up and down. Mercifully there are directions in the margins of the Mass booklet.

In some ways it was a wonderful nostalgia trip, with the glorious prayers ripped from the liturgy after Vatican 2 now coming up fresh as new paint. What could be more wonderfully new every day than the opening lines: “I will go up to the altar of God, the God who gives joy to my youth”? What bunch of destructive eejits thought that they would attract young people by editing out prayers like that? The Good Centurion, quoted for 2,000 years at every Mass just before Communion, was similarly evicted. “Lord, I am not worthy that thou should enter under my roof….” After all, in the 1960s atmosphere of universal peace and love as prescribed by Ho Chi Minh, a saintly imperialist military guy did not quite fit the picture. Now the God who gives joy to every one’s youth and the virtuous commander were back in daily prayers.

Come Communion, I advance to the altar rail. The altar rail has not been eliminated every where - I knelt at one in St Stephen’s Cathedral in Budapest in 2004. But at St William they have to improvise for Latin Mass - the strip of kneelers/bookrests normally used for the front row of seats is pushed forward to form a temporary altar barrier. You might think that a congregation of one would be difficult to miss, especially when he is my size, two rows from the front and the only voice responding, albeit croakily and shakily. Do I receive the host? Er, no, the priest carries on in silent prayer, back to me, apparently unaware of my bulky kneeling presence.

I retreat bemused to my seat, Mass concludes, followed by several post-Mass prayers which I had not heard in years, including the old favourite to St Michael the Archangel. Then, as the priest is finished and I am on the point of leaving, he asks apologetically if I wanted Communion. Well, yes… I quickly regret this as it involves a rewind to the pre-Communion prayers, distribution of the host (to me alone) and then a repeat of the post-Communion prayers.

Would I do it again? Definitely. Would I switch to it entirely as an alternative to the English rite? No. The sense of being an onlooker rather than a participant in the Mass was too palpable and you can see why even some Popes wrote about Catholic congregations being silent spectators. But the current marginalization of the Latin liturgy is both a monstrous injustice and a serious deprivation for much of the Catholic population in all countries. Only a minority of Catholics in England can easily get to a Latin Mass and savour a rich slice of Catholic history and prayer and I am sure that is the case in most parts of the world. We are incredibly lucky in Reading to have such easy access.

Yet you can get Latin Mass at any concert hall in the world, but as an artistic exercise, not a profound act of worship. No one dares to insist that a mass by Beethoven or Bruckner must be translated into fourth rate English before it is inflicted on the ignorant concert goers. Given the price of concert tickets in most countries, the hall managers would probably have an instant riot on their hands. Similarly for all the shorter prayers and devotional pieces set to incomparable music such as Mozart’s “Ave verum corpus”. Latin is plenty good enough for such masterpieces. Most Shakespeare producers and directors are happy with the English of 1600 without going in for a simplifying translation into the English of 2009. Is the Latin Mass less worthy of reverence than “Hamlet”?

Thoughts After Easter

2009-04-14T18:00:00.000-07:00

Guildford, 30 miles south-east of Reading, is a town I have driven past on numerous occasions, but never visited. I finally got round to it on Easter Monday. What has it got to offer? Well, there is an enormous cathedral, started in 1936 and finished in 1961 after countless interruptions due to WW2 and shortage of funds. By the time it was finished it was only 2 years to go to the "Honest to God" debacle and the on-going crisis of Anglicanism which continues to this day. So maybe it is the one of the last Anglican cathedrals to be built in England, or anywhere else. Like the John Keble church in North London, which I mentioned in a recent post, it has a very distinctive (or unfortunate) 1930s architecture which some have applauded and some have compared to a power station.

The Christian heritage of Guildford overflows in every corner. There is the huge "Friary" shopping mall. In the middle ages there was a friary on the site, which was destroyed under that thieving, murdering, adulterous scoundrel Henry VIII. (Though for the Day: Was he even worse than Tony B Liar? Probably not as Tony is responsible for far more deaths in Iraq and even Henry, whatever his countless shortcomings, was not keen on sodomy or abortion. And both had the brass neck to set themselves up as heads of religious foundations.). Then there was a large house called The Friary. Then, in the 19th century, there was the Friary Brewery. Now commercial change has brought a mall whose interior can hardly be distinguished from a hundred others the length and breadth of Britain.

Further up the picturesque High Street, past the coffee shops and mobile phone retailers, there are the almhouses, founded by a local man who went on to be Archbishop of Canterbury. They are still used 400 years later to house the elderly and still are called a "hospital", in the archaic sense of a place of refuge for the elderly rather than a medical centre. A short distance away there is a very prominent statue of this Archbishop.

Across the road from the almhouses there is Holy Trinity church. The signs outside advertised the multitude of Holy Week activities, including a dramatic reenactment of the Passion around the streets of Guildford on Good Friday. It was performed by a local theatrical group, founded by Peter Hutley, a fervent Catholic convert. They also produce a colossal outdoor play of the Life of Christ in beautiful countryside at nearby Wintershall. It is the nearest we have to the Oberammergau Passion Play. But Oberrammergau is performed only every ten years, while Wintershall happens every summer. See
Recreating the Life of Christ.

Back in Reading it had been a similarly crowded schedule at the much smaller church of St William of York. But it was not the long-time worshippers who were doing all the work. The Latin Mass Society used the church nearly every day for the two weeks before Easter. On some days they were there all day for multiple acts of worship or activities, such as a family picnic on the day before Palm Sunday. Services such "Tenebrae" which I had seen only on obscure websites suddenly appeared on the parish noticeboard for Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. Suddenly we mainstream Catholics using the English rite were starting to feel marginalised in our own church.

We ought to feel grateful. For years St William has not had a priest of its own and has been served by the parish priest at St James. But the poor man is horribly over-stretched with multiple duties such as the prison chaplaincy and the diocesan marriage tribunal. If the diocese was going to close any churches, we knew that St William had to be the first for the chop in the Reading area. Its special selling point was its closeness to the University campus, but there is another, larger church, Our Lady of Peace, barely 100 yards from the north-east gate of the campus. St Williams, with only two Masses per week, was grossly underused and was barely more than a dispensable "chapel of ease", despite its devoted congregation.

Now there is at least one Latin Mass every day and at least three Masses on Sunday, plus any number of other services and social activities. There is a fourth Sunday Mass if the Hungarian priest is in town. And the LMS are buying a property for their priest in the area so they are settling in seriously for the long term. And they are advertising for a confessional structure to fit into the "crying room" at the rear of the church. How much longer before they re-convert the sanctuary to the pre-Vatican 2 style, purely for Mass with the priest facing the altar, his back to the congregation? If they are visibly the most active users of the premises, it would be hard to refuse them.

We pray for re-birth and renewal of the Church, but sometimes our prayers are answered in very unexpected ways. The future belongs to the fervent and, to judge from the length of their Holy Week services, the LMS worshippers are fervent. One of our congregation who checked out their Good Friday service in 2008 left well before the end because of the heroic length. She should be grateful we have not adopted the Russian Orthodox style of standing throughout services. One English traveler to old Russia recorded the rigours of Holy Week in a pewless Moscow church: "May God grant us His special help to get through this week! As for the Muscovites, their feet must be made of iron".

Beneath the Waves

2009-04-14T17:33:00.000-07:00

Gosport, on the south coast of England, has been a Navy town for centuries. Driving into town I passed signs pointing to the "Institute of Naval Medicine". Not many towns have one of those. What is so special about "Naval Medicine" as opposed to ordinary doctoring? Well, you have all the problems associated with deep sea diving. And the risks of radiation contamination from the reactor in your nuclear submarine. See Institute of Naval Medicine.

Which brings us to the reason for my visit - the Submarine Museum. Not many towns have one of these either and what an enthralling place it is.

In fact Gosport is far more interesting than you might suspect. The main roads and most of the side roads look like the dreariest and most nondescript sections of Reading or any other small to medium sized English town.

But then I passed Holy Trinity Church. The exterior is eye catching enough, with its free standing column of a clock tower separate from the main church.

But the interior is wonderful, with a light filled nave and beautiful decoration.

In front there is a tree in full glorious blossom and to the right a most handsome Georgian house which used to be the vicarage. To judge from the expensive motors outside, this very desirable residence now has more affluent tenants. And immediately to the right of this house was a gate with the baffling name board: "Bastion No 1". Effectively it is a public park. Obviously it is not the only "military" park in the world - think of Battery Park in New York or Fort Canning Park in Singapore. But at least they put "Park" in the title, while the Gosport local council were content to leave this little patch of green with its stark military name, reminding the public of all the Bastions which protected Gosport.

A hundred yards behind the church are two huge slabs of apartments: ugly as mortal sin, erected by developers with the imagination of a mentally retarded flea. It made this little 1696 oasis all the more amazing and unexpected. You might expect it in a historic town in Germany or Italy, but not in functional, military Gosport. To add to the enjoyment, the parish website explains how the ministers of this Anglican church have been of the High Church persuasion for 150 years and spread "catholic" (with a small "c") teaching in the town. See http://www.holytrinitygosport.co.uk/welcome

This little gem is only a few minutes drive from the Submarine Museum. This institution is divided between an ultra-modern building, a very shabby entrance area in the course of reconstruction, various tacky wooden/semipermanent structures and an actual submarine "HMS Alliance".

This stands clear of the water on massive supports and the completely exposed expanse of its hull makes the rusty bits only too clear. But the interior lived up to my expectations of a traditional diesel-electric submarine: horrendously cramped, minimal comfort for the crew. There were levers, wires, piping, switches, dials, consoles and mysterious bits of machinery everywhere, low hanging objects to hurt the tall like me and irregular floors to trip up the unwary.

Our elderly guide had served on "Alliance" and was full of submariner stories. He ran soundtracks to demonstrate the overwhelming noise from the diesel engines and the bowel-loosening sound of a surface warship approaching and dropping depth charges. Obviously they couldn't reproduce the violent shaking of the submarine or the smell of terror as the crew braced for the attack and possibly the last seconds of their lives. Of course they couldn't reproduce all the other smells of submarine life: the cooking, diesel oil, toilets, body odours (no washing, laundry or shaving for weeks on end). He commented that when a submariner took the bus home after a tour of duty he was guaranteed a seat well to himself.......

Outside "HMS Alliance" on the quayside there is a memorial to all the Royal Navy submarines which have been lost. It is poignantly and appropriately headed "Resurgam" (I will rise again). This was also the name of an early submarine. One of the few I recognised was "HMS Thetis". It is a sign of how secret and uncelebrated much of our submarine warfare was. Thetis was not even lost in battle; she sank ignominiously in Liverpool Bay, close to shore, in 1939 before the outbreak of war. A guy opened the interior cap of a torpedo tube not realising that the other end was also open. 99 men died. George Orwell, writing during WW2, described how upset he had been at the highly publicised sinking of Thetis and the desperate attempts to save the crew. He had hardly been able to eat for days at the thought of all those young men suffocating in the cold and darkness of their steel tomb. Now he noted how every one rejoiced when a German U-boat was sunk and fifty fine young men died similarly.

Inside "HMS Alliance" there was a quotation from a WW2 British admiral - "In submarines there is no room for error. You are either alive or dead." Too true. There is limited buoyancy, limited space to evacuate a flooded or burning area, limited oxygen, limited battery power, limited space for spare parts or tools to fix any failures.......

Yet there was space for a most unexpected item. The new museum building had a miniature organ on display. In submarines access space is desperately tight. Every opening is a point of weakness in the pressure hull and so they are kept small. The 21" torpedos could just about slide down through the hatch into the tube area. Similarly this tiny organ could just about fit through the hatch. Until the 1980s such an instrument was standard issue in submarines for religious services. I don't know how often they were used, but the fact that they were permitted in such a cramped vessel speaks volumes about earlier generations' priorities.

Other aspects of British military culture were revealed in the interviews with crew members on a modern nuclear submarine. Obviously the meals are much better nowadays. The "Alliance" veteran described the green bread, tinned food and how they had two choices for dinner - "You ate it or you didn't eat it". With a nuclear reactor you have effectively limitless power to provide refrigeration, water and clean air, so the chefs can be more adventurous and stale food smells are dispersed by the air conditioning. Also an officer was asked about the privileges of rank beneath the waves. "Well, we have a steward to look after us...." Holy Cow. We are taking servants into battle? I as almost as stunned many years ago when a TV documentary showed a steward serving coffee to officers relaxing in the plush wardroom of "HMS Illustrious". But "Illustrious" is an aircraft carrier, almost as big as a liner.

Also there were several signs that even such a functional and serious museum is not immune to the charms of showbiz. The torpedo section obviously contained a long exhibition on Robert Whitehead, the British inventor of the torpedo. A Royal Navy Admiral H.J May commented in 1906: "But for Whitehead, the submarine would remain an interesting toy, and little more". Whitehead married an Austrian lady. One of their granddaughters, a very lovely girl, was invited to the launching of a new Austrian submarine in 1912. She caught the eye of its handsome and courageous commander, one Captain von Trapp. They married and had seven children, but she tragically died of scarlet fever, leaving the youngsters motherless. For the rest of the story, see the"Sound of Music". One display room celebrated the submarine in literature and movies. Obviously Jules Vernes' "20,000 leagues under the sea" and its 1954 movie version held pride of place, but Sean Connery's features adorned the poster for "Red October" and other undersea films showed our unending fascination with this alien and desperately dangerous environment.

Tony Preaches to the Pope

2009-04-14T17:29:00.000-07:00

Dear Stan,

Here is a story ("Daily Telegraph@, 8th April 2009) which practically redefines chutzpah. Our former Prime Minister thinks that the Pope should change the Church's teaching on sodomy. How did our Cardinal Cormac ever let this snake into the Church? Mercifully Cormac is retiring soon and being replaced by Vincent Nichols (of Birmingham archdiocese). I like the comment below Damian's article from an American reader who says that he reads the "Daily Telegraph" because the US papers are still besotted with Obama - not for much longer I suspect.....

Tony Blair wants the Pope to rethink his line on homosexuality.
What about Blair's line on abortion?

Prophets of Doom - Cagey Catholic Monarchs

2009-04-14T17:14:00.000-07:00

The recent blockbuster "Knowing" rang a distant bell in my memory. In an early scene the Nicholas Cage character's astronomical colleague is stunned. How can Nicholas believe the theory that a pageful of apparently random numbers, written in 1959, contains prophecies of a string of disasters from 1959 to 2009? The incredulous colleague correctly points out that such pattern-seeking theories are a dime a dozen.

The only occasion I met such a theorist in person was in 1978. I was working for the Department of Social Security in Reading and visited a guy who had paid no National Insurance (Social Security tax) for a few years. He lived in a little cottage in an idyllic corner of South Oxfordshire about ten miles north of Reading. He had given up his regular job and was devoting his whole life to deciphering a pattern of words in the Bible. I wish that I had kept detailed notes of his explanation, because I can't remember any significant points of his hypothesis or what great secret he was hoping to unveil to mankind. As I have heard nothing of him since, I assume that his labours were futile.

He was living off his savings - very frugally, as he had a wife and two children, who allegedly fully supported him. I wrote my report and the case was filed away as he was doing nothing illegal; if you do no paid work, you pay no National Insurance.

Plainly the Cage character has an equally sympathetic employer, as he seems to be able to absent himself from his official duties at M.I.T. whenever the spirit moves him. But maybe M.I.T is more spiritual than you might suspect from its sternly rationalist title. In this movie, the first view you enjoy of its campus is centred on a most imposing domed building that could well be a temple or basilica.

Admittedly the spiritual themes in "Knowing" are pursued with as much subtlety as an air raid. The dazzling ascension into the spaceship accompanied by angelic figures and a torrent of light, the apocalyptic destruction of mankind (in effect by fire from Heaven), the final images of two innocent humans in a glorious landscape dominated by a magnificent tree......haven't we been here before? In the End is the Beginning, to be sure. But the fact that the scriptwriters pressed the traditional spiritual buttons shows some marginal lip service to the core beliefs of most Americans. Of course they also pushed the filmmaker's favourite emotional button (Children in Peril) with the zeal of a lab rat hitting the Food switch.

All the above special effects were exceedingly bloody impressive on a $50 million budget, a pittance by Hollywood blockbuster standards. It also paid for a spectacular air disaster, a forest fire and the most insanely over-the-top train wreck I have seen since "Speed". (Gentlemen, subway trains, in New York, or anywhere else, just don't go fast enough to create such mayhem.) I couldn't complain about the bang for my bucks, even in a typically over-priced British multiplex. It certainly pays to shoot movies in Australia rather than in a Los Angeles studio. But were there any wider lessons we might draw?

One obvious lesson is that all the dollars on the planet can't guarantee a half-decent screenplay. You might object that asking for any internal coherence or intelligent story development in a major movie is an inherently silly request. You would have a better chance of finding the truth in a British tabloid. But the very title "Knowing" and the early part of the film, where logical thought is needed to decipher the code, might raise some hope of a moderately thought provoking fable.

Sadly, "Knowing" is so appallingly written and realised that the numerous logical contradictions in the screenplay are simply evaded in a parade of stunning special effects, and any intelligent story development is crushed by a series of creepy or baffling incidents. Why the presumably super-intelligent extraterrestrials spent their time hanging around the hero's home like a bunch of dim witted kiddy fiddlers instead of evacuating more of the human race or working out a way to deflect the Sun's wrath and save us all......well, that's a mystery known only to God and (maybe) the scriptwriters. If you believe the prophecy written down by the little girl in 1959, these aliens had at least 50 years to evacuate or save us and they did precisely nothing. Or they might have made the message less cryptic in the first place and allowed us a chance to save ourselves.

Of course prophecy is an inherently contradictory business. If you accurately predict the future and someone believes you and tries to change it, the prophecy is falsified. The only satisfactory story of prophecy that I am aware of is, of course, Macbeth. The witches' prophecies are entirely "true"; they are sufficiently accurate to lure Macbeth into mortal sin. Yet they are also sufficiently misleading to deny him a moment's genuine benefit or peace of soul and eventually lead him to utter spiritual and physical destruction. And the story is structured so that the anti-hero progresses through his prophesied future with a predestined inevitability.

400 years after Shakespeare, it would be nice to think that highly paid filmmakers would be prepared to face the implicit contradictions of prophecy in an interesting way, but no such luck. Perhaps we should just be grateful for any sympathetic treatment of religious attitudes in a major movie. It was particular refreshing to see the hero's quietly decent pastor father portrayed in a positive light instead as a nutcase, bigot or charlatan.

I have speculated in the past that popular culture provides ways of preparing the public for radical changes in scientific perception. The most obvious recent example is "Sex and the City". The completely irresponsible behaviour of four promiscuous women in New York, the AIDS capital of the planet, was a pretty merciless mockery of the horseshit fed to the public for years by the AIDS industry. Similarly the role played by the Sun's fluctuations in the heating of the earth in "Knowing" looks like an equally savage mockery of the "CO2 = Global Warming" yarn we are still being sold in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary.

Is "Knowing" another straw in the wind, signalling abandonment of crassly rational explanations and looking instead for salvation from the Heavens? There have been a few signs recently, in the most unexpected places. On 3rd April, I saw the word "GOD" in enormous letters on a magazine cover in W H Smiths newsagents, not normally a hotbed of piety. No, it was not on the cover of "The Tablet" or "The Church Times". The "New Statesman", normally a left wing political mag appealing to a small number of people who still take left wing thought seriously, was running a special issue on religion.

Given the contributers, I took it about as seriously as you could take "Knowing" on cosmology or prophecy. Here were all the Usual (gruesome) Suspects. Christopher Hitchens (but not his religious brother Peter), Richard Dawkins, Polly Toynbee..... A few of the more reliably on-message theists, such as A. N. Wilson, were wheeled on. Since writing "The Death of God" (around 1999), Wilson claims to have found God alive again.

The Chief Rabbi, Dr Jonathan Sacks, was permitted a typically intelligent three column inches...about the same as our ever-asinine George Monbiot, the noisiest promoter of the religion of global warming. Good to see that Prophets of Doom are still given a hearing. But given the 3 pages devoted to Hitchens and Dawkins combined, you knew where the NS editor's sympathies lay. No danger of the good Rabbi or any competent Catholic theologian being given three pages. Yet the fact remains that religion is a prime factor in human affairs and cannot be ignored even by a handful of eminent atheists in major Western cities.

Religious problems just keep breaking out, like an itch the secularists cannot quite reach to scratch properly. The bruhaha over the recent idiotic Parliamentary Bill allowing the heir to the Throne to marry a Catholic is a prime example. I pointed out that such permission could mean that the Monarch after next might be a Catholic head of a Protestant Church of England. Not according to the fine print on the front of "The Daily Telegraph" (who usually get their religious facts straight). Any spouse of the heir would have to agree that their children be brought up as Protestants. So the heir could marry a Catholic as long as she was a bad Catholic. What if the spouse was a Jew (bearing in mind that Jewish identity is transmitted via the mother).....or a Muslim....or a devout Hindu?? Er, better to drop the whole dumb affair and keep on offending only Catholics.

The recent appointment of our new Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, attracted plenty of space in the secular press. The discussion on his merits was conducted in grossly secular terms, but the fact that they thought this item deserved the column inches is another sign that the Death of God has been greatly exaggerated.

And as I write, BBC Radio 4 is transmitting a documentary discussing the politics and legal status of the Church of England. Should it continue to be the recognised State Church, with the hereditary monarch as its anointed head and seats reserved for Anglican bishops in the House of Lords? How can the Church in England be boxed in by foreign Anglican Churches (who comprise the majority of Anglicans and inconveniently keep insisting on traditional Christian teachings) AND adapt to the sexual practices of 21st century Britain (including the practices of its monarch)? One of the contributers blamed Richard Dawkins for stirring the pot and raising the anomalies of the C of E's position. Perhaps we should be grateful to the troublesome professor for raising the public profile of religion.

Another contributer on the program pointed out another aspect of the "Catholic Monarch" debate. If the Monarch became Catholic, he would be anointed at his Coronation by an "Archbishop" whose priestly consecration was "null and void" according to the Pope's encyclical "Apostolicae Curae" (On the Nullity of Anglican Orders) of 1896. Holy Cow, we are getting the Latin title of an encyclical issued 113 years ago quoted over the secular BBC radio waves.

The future remains unknown, but it seems that the prophets of the death of religion still have a very long and futile wait ahead of them.

2009-04-13T05:18:00.000-07:00

Dear Stan,

Hope that all goes well with your work deadlines. A bit of light relief from the "Daily Mash" on the G20 meeting, which is probably more accurate than the acres of "serious" commentary on the subject:

G20 PRODUCES ONE TRILLION DOLLARS FROM BEHIND YOUR EAR

At least one commentator reckons that the trillion dollar figure is a smoke-and-mirrors illusion.

Also an exclusive revelation on what happened when the Obamas met the Royals - though the real life antics of the Royal family are much funnier. See Kitty Kelly's book on "The Royals". If you add up all the rumours, Prince Charles has at least one brother and sister who are not related to each other.

I TAKE MY COFFEE BLACK - LIKE MY WOMEN, SAYS QUEEN

Spirit of the Age - from John Keble to Hitler

2009-04-13T04:45:00.000-07:00

I always enjoy the motto:

He who marries the spirit of the age soon becomes a widower. As with great art, faith that lasts is faith that answers to higher standards than today’s trends.
—attributed to Dean Inge, St. Paul’s Cathedral, London.

This was visually demonstrated years ago when I took a wrong turn when driving in Mill Hill in north London. While passing the rows of ordinary houses in this very ordinary suburban road I saw a building which made me slam on the brakes and pull over immediately.

I had never seen a church, or indeed any other structure, quite like John Keble Church.

There can't be many churches named in honour of one of the leading lights in the 19th century Oxford Movement within Anglicanism which spawned Cardinal John Henry Newman. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Keble). But it was not its name which was so arresting; its design was eye-popping. It was a church which had been designed to be ultra modern for the 1930s. The London sprawl and the electric railway had just reached out to nearby Edgware and created the need for new Anglican parishes.

The architect had obviously chosen a style which he conceived as fitting for the 1930s, as much of its time as the new railway stations on the line up from Central London or the semi-detached houses with their state-of-the-art radios and electric light all around it. A few very affluent families in the area would have had a car and, who knows, one or two might even have had a TV. The BBC started the first regular high-definition (405 line) transmissions in 1936, the same year John Keble was completed, and Mill Hill was within range of the only hi-def transmitter in the world.

Plainly any old-fashioned notions of church design were as ridiculous in 1930s suburban London as a horse and buggy. I don't know to what extent the clergy aided and abetted the design, or if it was done over their dead bodies.

As a result John Keble Church is now almost grotesquely dated and somehow much more old-fashioned than the thousands of beautiful older churches throughout the land. These ancient buildings, whether Gothic, Victorian or Norman in style, have a timeless quality while John Keble merely looks very odd. Hardly any other English churches in the interwar period were built in this style, which makes it even more of a curiosity.

The only remotely comparable church I have seen anywhere is the Sacred Heart in Prague, built a few years earlier. That is also one of a kind, but the boldness of its conception and detailing, especially the enormous clock, works far better than its London contemporary and it has aged very well.

I first saw the Sacred Heart from the top of the nearby TV tower. This started construction as a Communist era prestige project but by the the time it was completed in 1992 the old regime had been swept away. The TV tower's restaurant was decorated in a strange mixture of darkish blue materials; this was probably some local designer's idea of what was ultra-chic in 1980s terms, but it now looked as passe as John Keble.

John Keble Church is a terrific metaphor for the religious and secular fashions which now look even more dated and bizarre. At the time, of course, the 1936 Olympics were in full swing and the great and the good were queuing up to praise the wondrous things Herr Hitler was doing in Germany: eliminating unemployment, building a nation wide freeway system 20 years before the USA got started, launching the first public TV broadcasts in the world (in Berlin in 1935), promoting technological advances of every kind. The first jet aircraft in the world would be German and take to the air three years later.

As a recent article pointed out, the 1936 Olympics were the first truely "modern" Olympics in many ways: the first to be televised, as well as the first to have mass commercial sponsorship and the hokey "torch marathon" from the original Olympic site (this latter spectacle was invented by Hitler's propaganda geniuses).

If Herr Hitler was not quite your cup of tea, there were astonishing reports of Comrade Stalin's successes in boosting Soviet GNP, building a whole new egalitarian society and abolishing poverty. The Western parliamentary democracies with their mass unemployment and social injustice were plainly on their way out.

By the 1960s both Stalin and Hitler were SO five minutes ago, almost as dated as John Keble's architecture, and their erstwhile advocates were widowers indeed. The surviving Hitlerites and Stalinists had mostly either reinvented themselves as devote democrats or retreated into embarrassed silence, though a few faithful followers still preached the discredited "gospels." All popular opinion (as interpreted by the noisier media pundits) was now allegedly on the side of a new revolution in church and secular life: for the Mass in the vernacular, sexual liberation, overthrow of traditional authority (in favour of liberating politicians such as Castro, Ho Chi Minh and Chairman Mao), the worship of youth and the denigration of traditional culture in favour of new music, art, etc.

All these trends have either been abandoned, savagely ridiculed or produced horribly sour grapes. So we have yet another generation of widows and widowers. As I noted in a recent posting, you can tell the 1968 party is over when even "Le Monde" is willing to see the dark side of Fidel Castro.

Of course a few aging rebels still preach the liberationist gospel, most hilariously our own Polly Toynbee who only recently was vigorously defending the Permissive Society of her long-ago youth in the 1960s. Even Members of Parliament in her beloved Labour Party are unhappy at the fruits of the Swinging Sixties, if only because they are so horribly expensive at a time when the country is nearly bankrupt. It was all very well squeezing responsible families to support the feckless in the good times, but now in 2009 one parent families are a luxury we can't afford and can't get rid of.

And the vernacular Mass, the most visible relic of the 1960s turmoil in the Church? It is still surviving, but the liturgical revolution has never produced the great results anticipated 40 years ago - certainly not in terms of church attendance, which has been going downhill like an Olympic ski run. The English translations varied from banal to crass, and like the one parent families, proved horribly expensive as the one approved translator had monopoly rights. No one adopted the dignified existing translations by scholars such as Ronald Knox; these had the serious disadvantage that there was no money to be screwed out of a faithful congregation.

For a while the religious revoltionaries assumed that the Latin Mass would fade away with the aging generation still devoted to it. But who is turning up at the Latin Mass in our own St William of York? Certainly a few of the pre-Vatican 2 parishioners, but an astonishing number of mini-vans full of young families, plus students from the adjacent University. The future of the Latin oddly looks more assured than the vernacular.

Limits to Unity & the Monarchy

2009-04-08T05:05:00.000-07:00

Dear Stan,

As a follow up to the pro-abortion "Catholic" politician row, here is a link to an article in the ever-excellent Touchstone magazine with reveals the chaotic and divided attitudes to abortion within US Christian churches. Yet again it highlights the vacuity of so much well meaning waffle on the importance of "Christian unity". If we cannot get agreement even on this issue, what on earth can "Christians" agree on?

http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=22-02-039-c

The old saying "Divide and conquer" springs to mind.

I am also reminded of an article in "Faith" magazine years ago. It looked back to a very different Britain in late 1949 when there had been a lengthy exchange of letters in "The Times" on the subject of Church reunion. In one letter a Catholic bishop had courteously but firmly explained why Catholics and Anglicans could not logically say the Lord's prayer together. They would attach different meanings even to phrases such as "Thy Kingdom come". In this phrase a Catholic would be praying for the world wide establishment of the Catholic church, while the Anglican standing beside him in Christian fellowship would be praying for...er, something else, probably vague in the best Anglican tradition. Such a straight forward and clear thinking recognition of the real problems is absent in the ecumenical droning from modern pulpits.

This basic confusion and reluctance to face bedrock principles is evident this week, with the debate in Parliament on a Private Members Bill to remove one of the few remaining legal pieces of "discrimination" against Catholics. The heir to the throne cannot marry a Catholic without losing the right to secede to the throne. (This became a very faint possibility in the 1970s when Prince Charles' name was paired with Princess Astrid of Luxemburg, who is Catholic. Nothing came of it and she married someone else). But the "discrimination" against Catholics was ignorantly denounced as if it was the equivalent of racial discrimination. After all, no law explicitly forbids the heir from marrying a Jew, a Muslim, a Hindu or an atheist on pain of disinheritance.

Yet a fundamental issue of principle still exists and cannot be wished away on the basis of modern whims about "injustice" or "discrimination". Hardly anyone admits that there can be just discrimination. Admittedly British Airways can still discriminate against blind pilots and our hospitals are not forced to accept the mentally disabled as brain surgeons - well, not yet. But only one or two people pointed out one blindingly obvious fact. What if the heir Prince William marries a Catholic and they bring up their children as Catholics, as the Church has always demanded? The monarch after next will be a Catholic head of an Anglican church.

Fortunately the Bill has failed. But the fact that it could even be introduced and waste Parliamentary time and media space speaks volumes about the shallowness of understanding in this country of basic principles of religion and morality.

It is another aspect of the problem I described in an earlier blog. Just about everyone denounces pedophiles as viler than the vilest of the vile, Beasts, Monsters, hanging's too good for them..... But hardly anyone has a coherent understanding of WHY it is wrong and why our enthusiasm for total sexual liberation for adults leads inevitably to the sexual abuse of children.

Randall Terry - Archbishop Burke Discussion

2009-04-08T05:01:00.000-07:00

Dear Stan

I am reminded of the time my Canadian friend declared in horrified disbelief: "You never heard of Wayne Gretsky?" Well, no. Hardly anyone in England has. Ice hockey just isn't a British sport despite efforts to introduce it. The only hockey played here on a large scale is on grass and mostly by girls and even that gets about as much national media coverage as the Chess championships. Most British people would be pushed to name a single grass hockey player, much less an ice hockey star. The British sports scene is utterly dominated by Soccer.

In the same spirit I feel singularly unqualified to jump in on the Randall Terry/Archbishop Burke discussion, seeing as I have never heard of either of these estimable figures before. But total ignorance of a subject plainly never discourages any British media pundits, so here goes. As the British newspaper motto goes: "Never let the facts get in the way of a good story."

Based on about 15 minutes Googling, it seems the bruhaha centres on the attempts to publicly discipline Catholic politicians who have no qualms about supporting abortion - with Randall Terry leading a delegation to Rome to lobby various high placed Vatican officials on the visible infidelity of some American Catholic bishops in their attitudes to abortion and other crucial aspects of doctrine. I loved the title of the brief they presented to these title "Oves sine pastores" (Sheep without a shepherd). It is reminder of the Latin titling of encyclicals. Except that here the correspondence is going the other way from the faithful to the pastors.

Terry interviewed Archbishop Burke on videotape to discuss the attitude of bishops in denying Communion to pro-abortion politicians. The Archbishops makes remarks that are clearly critical of those US bishops who do not deny Communion to such politicians. (That is assuming the substantial accuracy of the transcript I have read - see http://www.ahumbleplea.com/Docs/ArchbishopBurkeTranscript.pdf )

The Archbishop's statement (see http://blog.beliefnet.com/pontifications/ ) of 26th March is plainly laughable and indicates that like so many senior clergy (most notably our own ludicrous Archbishop of Canterbury) he just ain't bright enough for the job. Once you have put your views on videotape and the videomaker has left the room, you have no control over how it is going to be edited, distributed or projected. Even if replays of the tape had just been restricted to a small number of pro-life activists, did he imagine that his criticisms of his fellow bishops would remain confidential?

The Archbishop's comments have plainly hugely and deservedly embarrassed many of the US hierarchy. Other clergy around the world must have similarly burning ears; what about those English clergy who accepted Tony B Liar into the Church in the face of overwhelming evidence about his long anti-Catholic record while Prime Minister, as I noted in an earlier blog?

It is heartening to see such militancy in the face of the abortionists. How far they can pursue other aspects of the campaign, such as publicly stigmatising any ordinary Catholic who voted for Obama...well, that is going to make any divisions between Latin Mas enthusiasts and other Catholics pale into insignificance.

Death of the Newspaper?

2009-03-27T18:26:00.000-07:00

A politician is a guy who is generous with other people's money, courageous with other people's lives and eloquent with other people's words. A journalist is much the same, except that he/she usually has enough talent to scribble the words.

With the threatened demise of numerous British and American papers in the current recession, the politicised journalist (is there any other kind?) has become more repulsive than ever before, if that were possible. Two of my favourite hate figures Polly Toynbee of "The Guardian" and Johann Hari of "The Independent" have recently written equally ludicrous articles lamenting the downfall of the printed media as advertisers go elsewhere or stop advertising altogether. As you might expect from these two worthies, their remedies involve extorting yet more money from the ever-luckless taxpayer.

Obviously journalists want money spent on newspapers, just as admirals want more aircraft carriers and truck operators want cheaper gas. But even by the low standards of special pleading and pork barrel politics Toynbee and Hari's appeals were exceptionally crass.

Johann Hari's more laughable idea was that students should be compelled to subscribe to a newspaper as part of the condition for being on a college course. He imported this idea from some American philantropist who was concerned about the impending mass extinction of the major US newspapers and, like any politician, was prepared to be extra-generous with other people's money. This compulsory subscription would not only support endangered titles, but encourage the spread of general world knowledge among future graduates, who are woefully ignorant on many aspects of public life.

Obviously the only printable repost to such an idea, both from students and the rest of the population, would be something like "Go jump in a vat of acid". Why should anyone be forced to buy something which no one wants to buy voluntarily? Why should low-income students be singled out for this honour? And even if students were compelled to subscribe to a newspaper, how many would read it, or read anything beyond the sports and cartoon pages? And why should anyone be forced to buy something which everyone on the planet can read for free on the Internet?

Polly's slightly less laughable idea focused on supporting local newspapers and their allegedly essential role in facilitating local democracy. Numerous local councils spend small fortunes producing glossy magazines to tell the hapless local taxpayers how they are pouring their money down the toilet. The actual readership of these magazines is not known; unlike commercial papers, no one needs to measure readership to justify their existence or to put a reasonable price on advertising rates. But it is unlikely to be larger than three figures for each publication.

One of her ideas is that this visibly wasted expenditure should be re-directed into supporting local newspapers, perhaps via funding mechanisms such as charitable trusts. Again, my only charitable reaction is "Jump in an acid vat, Polly". Why should my hard-earned money be squandered either on a politicians' propaganda sheet or a dying local rag which can't support itself? Sadly, as this is a family blog, I can't quote all the riotously funny and indescribably obscene abuse heaped on Polly by various bloggers such as "The Devil's Kitchen".

And if having Polly in print and on the Internet is not appalling enough, there she was on BBC Radio 4 lunchtime news peddling exactly the same drivel at the licence payer's expense. Being a newspaper columnist is a great way of getting access to other media and thus even greater exposure for your fatuous opinions. It really is a case of "Unto him that hath much, much shall be given", though not in the Biblical sense.

To prove that lousy ideas know no language barriers, the Sarkozy regime in France are proposing to pay for a year's newspaper subscription for all 18 year olds. Given that France has much better broadband provision than Britain, with super-fast connections piping hi-def TV to your plasma TV/supersize computer display, this sounds like a super-fast non-starter. I can read "Le Monde", "Le Figaro", etc on line any time I want. In fact "Le Figaro" (see www.lefigaro.fr ) is happy to send a daily newsletter to anyone on earth, even to a "rostbif" like me. So I get "La lettre d'info du Figaro" in my inbox each day. If your high school French is up to it, sign on for free for a language refresher.

You can see what local papers are up against in sheer value for money terms. My mobile broadband connection costs £8.20 ($12.00) per month (I abandoned the AOL landline link months ago). For that I get every newspaper on the planet in every language, hundreds of superb magazines on every conceivable topic, (all hosting writers far better than Toynbee and Hari), free email, free multiple libraries (see www.refdesk.com to name only one) and only God knows how many awesome databases, such as the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com).On the lighter side there's instant shopping from Amazon and thousands of other providers, free music from www.Spotify.com (which is like having an Ipod the size of a suitcase - never buy a CD or MP3 again), video from countless sites, internet radio from 6,000 stations....the list goes on and on.

And I don't even have to get out of bed to obtain any of these goodies. With my netbook and mobile broadband dongle, surfing in bed is one of the little pleasures of modern life.

Our local "daily" rag, the "Evening Post", is published only on five days a week. In a month of 30 days, that is 22 issues at 40 pence per day....say £8.80. So-called "serious" national newspapers, filled with the sort of garbage peddled by Toynbee and Hari, cost twice as much per day. Comparing the "Evening Post", or any other "newspaper", to my internet link is like comparing a horse-and-buggy to a state of the art BMW. I'm afraid the old faithful nag is being retired to the knacker's yard. The difference is that some people actually want to use a horse and buggy on special occasions.

Unlike hundreds of local British papers, the "Post" is not going bust immediately, but it is being reduced to two issues a week from later in 2009. As the weekly "Reading Chronicle" is much fatter and more marketing-savvy (for example, it produces a Polish edition for the thousands of recent arrivals in town), how long a twice-weekly Post will survive is anyone's guess, especially once it loses its frequent publication edge over the "Chronicle".

It is obviously not just the technological gap between print and electronic media. It is displacement time; time spent sampling the internet is time not spent reading dead tree media. After a while you lose the habit and taste for reading traditional newspapers.

But all this is horribly selfish and inconsiderate, you cry. How can we ignore all the people who don't have Internet access and rely on the local paper for local news? Well, obviously the printed media themselves aren't much use to the 15 to 20 per cent of adult citizens who are wholly or partly illiterate. In fact sites like the brilliant www.spotify.com point one possible way to a post-literate future. At present Spotify is content merely to provide truckloads of free music in every conceivable genre from Janacek to Glenn Miller to children's nursery songs to U2. (Sorry, US readers, it is only available in certain European countries as yet). But it can obviously deliver every kind of audio material with equal ease; news broadcasts, documentaries, lectures, drama, "audio books" and much more.

The professed concern of Toynbee and Hari for local or national democracy if newspapers die is particularly laughable, given that their newspapers represent only a small minority of the British public. So-called serious papers like the "Guardian" and "Independent" are outsold 15 to 1 by the tit-and-bum titles like "The Sun". As Toynbee herself told me, when I emailed her in response to one exceptionally idiotic piece she had written: "We need a better quality public in this country". Obviously.....we need far more people who agree with La Toynbee. The true "De haut en bas" voice of the modern secular atheist.

Hari protested that traditional news-gathering journalism is very expensive and has been supported only by cross-subsidies of various kinds, e.g. from traditional advertisers. Seeing the vitality of on-line bloggers, some of whom make a good living from the Internet, and the fact that some bloggers have broken important stories which the traditional reporters have missed, I am not losing any sleep over the possible demise of the traditional hack.

Newspapers, like it or not, are only one small and disposable piece of the modern democratic jigsaw. Large numbers of people are going to lose out on local and national democratic access if they don't use the Internet, or can't read the local paper, or don't go to council meetings or never approach their local councillor or Member of Parliament.... Actual direct observation of council meetings and direct contact with local politicians costs nothing and is open to every one rich or poor, literate or illiterate.

Part of my joy at seeing the discomfort of Toynbee and Hari is that these two obviously sense that the days of influence of highly placed commentators like them are nearly over. The Internet gives unprecented open access to a worldwide audience to everyone with an opinion.

As I noted in an earlier blog, there are still horses around in present day Britain. But they play an utterly different role in the economy to that they enjoyed 100 years ago. One of the pleasures of studying the old Reading street directories in our local library is the sight of the long-extinct businesses who provided essential services in the early 20th century. Horse traders, blacksmths and suppliers of horse fodder and harnesses share the pages with the early car dealers who would soon replace them. The horse economy is important less than 40 miles west of Reading. In the Lambourn area, there is a major centre of race horse training and breeding. A major infrastructure, including a very specialised horse hospital, thrives in its support - though of course the horsie folk use Range Rovers and Volvo and Mercedes estate cars for everyday transport.

In the same way printed material will thrive in a different way in future. Our local newsagents shelves groan under the weight of traditional dead tree magazines covering hundreds of specialised interests. The "newspapers" stand is an isolated island which could be replaced in a few years by other merchandise with few people noticing or greatly caring. With the super-netbooks of the near future, who will bother to buy a newspaper even to read on the daily commute to London? Already the express coaches from Reading Station to Heathrow Airport boast free wi-fi. Those travellers are already more interested in continuos Web access. Most of the rest of us will soon follow them.

Conventional Wisdom - Pure Drivel

2009-03-22T09:52:00.000-07:00

Dear Stan,

At least one commentator (Peter Hitchens, as ever) was willing to back the Pope. And incidentally willing to point out that conventional wisdom (i.e. 90% of both politicians' words and media output) is pure drivel.

* Conventional wisdom says the Pope is stupid and wrong to say fidelity and abstinence are better than condoms at guarding Africans from AIDS.

Conventional wisdom, as usual, is talking out of its backside. What the Pope says matters only if anyone listens to him. If nobody does, his opposition to condoms won’t stop anyone using them and will make no difference. If lots of people listen to him, his support for marital fidelity will persuade many people to follow this path, and so save untold lives.

The experience of such countries as Uganda suggests very strongly that he is right when he says this, and that fidelity is a far better protection than a rubber sheath. The only real hope is a change in sexual habits.

I am not a Roman Catholic, but I am weary of the concerted smearing and misrepresentation which the Pontiff constantly faces.

The Other Side of the Revolutions

2009-03-20T09:54:00.000-07:00

After my recent visit to Basildon Park and seeing the exhibition for the "Pride and Prejudice" filmshoot, I reflected on my trip to Jane Austen's home in Chawton last year. Chawton is a picture postcard village and the Austen connection will doubtless ensure that it stays unaltered for a very long time to come.

But of course the outward shell of the buildings does not reflect the multiple social revolutions within the walls. As I toured the upper floor of the Austin house, I heard horses' hooves outside. Sure enough, there was a pair of well groomed animals, with their equally well groomed riders, walking at a relaxed pace down the one street of Chawton. No need to rush; after all, this was Sunday and these were animals kept as an expensive hobby.

In Jane's time, there would have been plenty of horses around, but as essential working beasts, supporting everything from farm work to deliveries of essential products to transporting people locally or nationally. The only horsepower used by most Chawton people today is the 200 bhp under the hoods of their BMWs as they set off for well paid jobs in the Thames Valley or up the M3 motorway to London.

As I came out of the Austin house, I heard the unmistakeable and very rare sound of a steam locomotive. The last steam locomotive ran on British Rail in 1968. Of course - it was the preserved railway which runs behind the row of trees near the house. Again, a form of transport which was the backbone of the Industrial Revolution for over a hundred years is now a tourist curiosity. The famous "Watercress Line" starts at Alton, less than two miles north-east of Chawton. Alton is a little gem of a historic English town, as much as Chawton is a little gem of a village. Appropriately, Alton station is both the terminus of the Watercress Line and the terminus of the real present day trains which carry commuters to London.

Jane Austen's life finished shortly before the railway revolution started in the 1820s in England. No wonder such a famous person traveled only short distances in her lifetime, as I noted in a previous blog entry. Before the railways, any long distance travel was laborious, expensive, time consuming, uncomfortable and often downright dangerous. Period films hardly convey the problems; the immaculately polished carriages and impeccably presented horses are covered by present day Health And Safety laws and legislation forbidding cruelty to animals.

The Railway Revolution was only one of multiple revolutions which separate us from Jane. The Industrial Revolution of which it was an integral part is obviously another. The social and sexual revolutions within Chawton are less visible than the flat screen TVs and the broadband internet links within the historic houses or the BMWs in the driveways. But they are longer lasting and more deeply felt than the ephemeral technologies around us.

Watching the glossy, but unsatisfying 2005 version of "Pride and Prejudice", some of the aspects of the social revolution are far more startling than the beautiful houses and costumes. The interesting, but inadequate "additional material" on the DVD outlined some of the aspects of social attitudes underpinning British high society of the time. Obviously the kind of potential husband with an income of five or ten thousand pounds a year was part of a very, very tiny minority of the British population. Yet a procession of such desirable beaus was paraded across the screen.

Most telling was the position of clergymen. It is almost unimaginable now, but in Jane's time a clergyman held one of the most lucrative and desirable professions in the land - comparable to a very high powered lawyer or City trader today. This is evident in the reference to one character getting eyewatering compensation for losing out on preferment for a parish. The power and wealth of the ordinary clergy was a direct reflection of the national power and wealth of the established Church.

Almost as revealing are the courtesies and behaviors between the sexes - with the young ladies bowing automatically before any gentleman and the care taken over the reputations of the ladies. It was not merely bad being "damaged goods", as Elizabeth's youngest sister threatens to become as she elopes to London. Being related to the damaged goods would be social disaster and spell the end to any hopes of a respectable marriage.

The discretion exercised between a potential "couple" rang a distinct bell. Of course - all that old Catholic teaching about "avoiding the occasions of sin". You should not just avoid sin, but any circumstances likely to lead you to sin. No doubt Jane Austen and all her characters would have been horrified at any insinuation of Popery, but here they were, taking traditional Christian precautions, ensuring that a young man and woman should not even have a private conversation by themselves and that they behaved with the utmost decorum.

Even the present day actors portraying these characters could see some of the advantages of such rules; people knew where they stood, how they should behave and how to interpret the almost invisible signals given by the opposite sex. Not much scope for the present day excuses of "I though she meant Yes, Your Honour".

So here we are after 200 years of English revolutions far more radical than either the French or Russian variety. As Dr Johnson so truly remarked, no sensible man would pay a guinea to live under one form of government rather than another. Jane could hardly have comprehended our present day technologies, beyond anything imagined by the most visionary science fiction writers of her time. But she might have written an even more devastating satire on present day sexual behavior - "Nonsense and Insensibility" perhaps?

Jane and Jesus

2009-03-18T18:41:00.000-07:00

It was the 30th anniversary of the opening of Basildon Park (picture to right) to the public under the auspices of the National Trust. So they dropped the entrance tickets to their 1979 price of 90 pence ($1.35) and I arrived early to grab this bargain offer.

I have been to this minor stately home, 10 miles north-west of Reading, once before. But there had been a few changes since my last visit. A whole room was devoted to the filming of "Pride and Prejudice". Part of the 2005 version, starring Keira Knightley, had been shot at Basildon Park, with a few even more magnificent houses around England providing other backdrops. See http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0414387/

Jane Austin was a relatively local girl, spending most of her life in the county of Hampshire, immediately south of Berkshire. I visited her home at Chawton, about 40 minutes drive from Reading, last year. She also spent a short time in Reading, attending the Abbey School about 200 yards from St James. This early 19th century establishment had absolutely nothing in common with the present-day Abbey School for the daughters of the affluent, but I suspect that the latter is very happy about any confusion on the part of the ignorant.

Her life is a reminder of how "local" was the life of nearly all people until very recent times. Such a famous (and fairly privileged) person never travelled outside a 70 mile radius of Reading in her whole life. In her later years, when she wrote her most famous novels, she spent most of her life within a small family circle in a very small radius of Chawton. But then Jesus travelled in an even smaller area and look at his impact...... (Chawton house at right.)

The film exhibition conveyed a highly positive image of the cooperation between the movie makers and the National Trust. This was in marked contrast to the impression of the James Bond film, "The Living Daylights", filmed at Stonor House (picture at right) on the other side of Reading. One of the staff at Stonor told me "Never again!!" Filming a huge budget Bond film was obviously a very different enterprise to "Pride and Prejudice". P and P's budget of $28 million was large by European standards, but modest in Hollywood terms.

Working in such a historic house posed endless problems for the crew. They obviously wanted to keep the National Trust on-side, otherwise they would compromise future cooperation in granting any filmmakers access to the hundreds of wonderful locations controlled by the NT. There were endless restrictions on the intensity of light and temperature; no equipment was to touch the historic walls. All the priceless and irreplaceable artifacts in certain rooms had to be catalogued, dismantled and carefully packed away.

As ever, the perversity of the creative team knew no limits. Having gone to all this trouble gaining access to a splendid house of the correct period, they decided that certain rooms were not splendid enough and needed some improving touches. 18 feet high pillars were constructed by a master plasterer (no fibreglass here) and shoehorned into a room. Once filming was over, they would just be dumped. No use storing all that expensive workmanship in the hope they might be reused in some future historic epic.

Basildon Park has known its up and downs; it is very lucky to survive to the present day without being demolished or destroyed as so many major houses have been. The 1930s depression and World War 2 obviously didn't help. During WW2, the legendary 101st Airbourne Division was billeted there, plus Italian prisoners of war. Between neglect, abuse and the ceiling of the library being scorched by brasiers during the grim 1940s winters, it was in a very sorry state by 1950.

Other parts of Basildon Park were equally enthralling. I couldn't recall them from my previous visit - I can't have paid proper attention. The Sutherland room was given over to a celebration of the largest tapestry in the world "Christ in Glory". This stunning work, 78 feet high by 39 feet wide, hangs in Coventry Cathedral. See http://www.know-britain.com/churches/coventry_cathedral_6.html

The original Cathedral was destroyed in the 1940 air raids on the city; Coventry was a major centre of the arms and vehicle manufacturing industries. At the time the destruction of this major city eclipsed even the London blitz; a new phrase, "to Coventrate", conjured up the new total warfare on civilian and military simultaneously. But was a civilian on a production line making a gun or a truck any less of a soldier than the man who used them on the battlefield? In 2005, when I visited Berlin, the German Historical Museum had relics from Coventry Cathedral on display.

The new Cathedral was consecrated in 1962, with the scorched shell of the old cathedral still standing beside it as a memorial. I have visited it only once in 1967. There was a still a huge empty area, used just for car parking, surrounding the new building. The rubble of 1940 had been cleared away, but no new buildings yet filled the vacancy. The enormous tapestry was emblematic of the new hopes for a new cathedral, a new city, a reborn Anglican Communion in England. The 1950s were a time of religious revival in Britain, with both the native clergy and exotic visitors like Billy Graham attracting churchgoers. In a few decades there was a catastrophic collapse into doctrinal chaos, moral confusion and organisational schism.

The Iliffe family, who bought and restored Basildon Park after WW2, made their money in provincial newspapers in the Midlands. They were friends of Graham Sutherland who designed the tapestry.

The Sutherland room contains numerous sketches and designs, both of the whole tapestry and detailed sections. Such a colossal project had to be subdivided to make it manageable. It also describes the manufacturing process at Freres Pinton in the little town of Felletin near Aubusson in France. To tackle this unprecedented task, this very specialised family firm had to bring out a huge loom last used 50 years earlier - talk about long term investment.

They were not even sure if this old tool could handle the sheer weight of the fabric, over a ton. But they did it and the whole enormous artwork was finally airlifted to Coventry. Someone suggested a 500 year warranty for the tapestry. No problem, monsieur. Tapestries made in the 15th century in that area still hang in cathedrals 500 years later.

See http://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/france_159/label-france_2554/label-france-issues_2555/label-france-no.-46_3691/feature-creative-arts-very-much-alive_3692/tapestry-tradition-of-excellence_4947.html

Royal Bank of Madoff

2009-03-13T05:33:00.000-07:00

Some much needed light relief; "The Daily Mash" is in prime form with a comment on Bernie Madoff's fundamental mistake.

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/business/madoff-pleads-guilty-to-not-being-a-bank-200903131639/

The picture of the "Royal Bank of Madoff" is a quick adaptation of the "Royal Bank of Scotland". RBS's recently departed Chief Sir Fred Goodwin has pocketed a pension of well over $1 million a year after flying the bank into the ground - and thus into the pocket of the taxpayer.

Despite all the ludicrous huffing and puffing by the media and various politicians, there is no legal way of relieving him of the money. And he is only 50 and in excellent health, so we may be paying him the $1 million a year for the next 40 years.

Still, informal vengeance is often the best. Some one daubed "Scumbag Millionaire" in large letters opposite Sir Fred's home in Edinburgh - in the same neighbourhood where J K Rowling of "Harry Potter" fame lives. As you might guess, it is a rather different neighbourhood from that inhabited by Danny Boyle's Edinburgh druggies in "Trainspotting".

Because It's WRONG! (Part 3)

2009-03-13T05:28:00.000-07:00

A further postscript on the ever-depressing subject of child protection from the news this morning (Friday 13th March - how appropriate). The eminent Lord Laming complained that his recommendations for improvements in Social Service child protection had not been implemented. These recommendations were made years ago after the horrible death of a little girl, Victoria Climbie, in London. The occasion for his protest was a further investigation after the more recent and equally horrible death of a little boy, Baby P, in London.

With all respect to the good Lord, one of his well-meant recommendations was that sufficient resources should be devoted to child protection. Given the scale of the problem, do you think the entire Gross Domestic Product might make up for the failures of parents? The inefficiencies involved are mind-bending.....not to mention budget bending.

One social worker described the follow up to a family visit. If she spent a hour with a problem family, on return to the office she might spend anything from 30 minutes to 3 hours on electronic paperwork and other actions. There has to be a full accounting for all actions; even telephone calls to other agencies (e.g. police, schools, National Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children, etc) have to be recorded. And that is excluding other "downtime" such as travelling to and from families, team meetings, training, sick leave, holidays, etc.

A classic theme in past inquests into the horrible deaths of battered children has been "failures of communication" between the numerous responsible agencies. Teachers' worries about a neglected child did not get passed to Social Services, Social Services' communications to the police got buried in police files, the hospital staff hesitated to breach medical confidentiality, etc, etc. So the remedy for bureaucracy is super-bureaucracy.

And of course while the social worker is covering his/her backside in the case of one family, he/she cannot give attention to the other problem families in the desk. A totally perverse set of incentives encourages the social worker to spend more time protecting himself than protecting little children.

But given the way in which Social Service departments, from the most senior to the most junior front-line worker, have been mercilessly vilified in the media every time another disaster happens, such self defence is inevitable. And the witch hunting media are not going to indulge in any self-criticism about the way in which they have promoted the sexual liberation agenda and hence the mass abuse of children.

One of the few thoughtful articles I have ever seen on the subject is in the ever-superb "Touchstone" magazine:

http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=15-03-031-f

Carson Holloway's article "Dare We get real about sex" argues forcefully that you cannot promote the sexual liberation of adults without promoting the sexual abuse of children.

Which is why well meaning but unreflective politicians like Tom Harris are caught on the horns of a dilemma. He is rightly horrified at mass bastard breeding by vulnerable girls who are hardly more than children themselves. But to coherently argue for reform means far more than condemning such behaviour, however cautiously and diplomatically. You have to reject extramarital sex among consenting adults....and the gay agenda....and contraception...Er, hold on, Holy Cow, I want a few voters behind me come the next General Election. And the next General Election in Britain is barely a year way. All the New Labour chickens, from years of schmoozing bankers to PR spin to illegal wars to lying about education, are coming home to roost in quick succession.

Because it's WRONG! (Part 2)

2009-03-13T05:24:00.000-07:00

(Stan writes:)
Bill,

In the previous post on Right and Wrong, are you indulging in sarcasm or are we to take you literally? There are several places in this post where I had that question. I'm not saying you need to make it clear, as such ambiguity fosters thinking.

Stan

(Bill's response follows)

Dear Stan,

I meant it literally; the problem with Tom Harris's article, like many "conservative" commentators' writings on "morality", is that he makes moral declarations without any bedrock of seriously considered principle to give them credibility.

Consider his sentence:

Teenage girls shouldn’t choose to have babies as an alternative to getting an education and a career. Why? Because it’s wrong.

This statement by itself is obviously silly beyond belief; it condemns a large percentage of our mothers, grandmothers, etc. It is wonderful that modern teenage girls have far more opportunities than their ancestors. But what about those who have no aptitude for or interest in formal education, especially given the abysmal quality of secondary school qualifications in Britain? There is nothing "wrong" in the serious moral sense, about choosing to have children at an early age. It might be a misguided, ill-advised or short-sighted decision.....but that's part of the risk of being alive. For some girls it might actually turn out to be a very worthwhile choice.

Of course, if there were radical reforms in education to make it more relevant to deprived young girls' lives you might get some of them going for careers rather than diapers. God knows, Labour has poured more than enough money into state education to make some difference even in the worst areas. But Tony B Liar's mantra of "Education, education, education" doesn't seem to have reached the grass roots, at least in Tom Harris's constituency. What about a voucher system to promote new schools and draw educational innovators into providing for families who have never known the dignity of choosing their own private schools? Well, Tom's fellow Labour education bureaucrats and the teachers' unions would never stand for it, so I think we can forget that one.

And if he is condemning young girls only for having children out of wedlock at the ever-luckless taxpayer's expense? Well, that IS doubly wrong in a serious moral sense, both as an abuse of sexuality and recklessly making yourself dependent on the public purse. But Tom will have to do some serious arguing about the correct use of sexuality within the context of marriage and he's going to sound like the Pope, despite his unconvincing protestations that he is not promoting Christian morality. Or we are all going to suspect that he is picking a soft target for cutting public expenditure.

You can make a very convincing and purely rationalist case for encouraging people to have children within stable marriages by pointing out the terrible statistical outcomes for children born to single mothers. But these arguments always seem to lack practical effectiveness in the face of the libertines' ideology and their assertions that people are free to indulge their sexual preferences in any way they want.

In fact Tom almost endorses the libertines' position:

Don't interpret this as any kind of "back to basics" crusade; I'm not remotely interested in what adults do in the privacy of their own homes, and I'm not sounding the rallying cry for Christian or religious morality. But when the actions of others has such a debilitating effect on the rest of society, it's time to stop being polite. It's time to stop worrying about how people's feelings might be hurt if we question the choices they've made.

If he is not interested in what adults do in private, why does he regard it as wrong for young girls to be sexually active - unless he is hiding some religious agenda?

Tom gives a superb exhibition of delicate figure skating on very thin ice where he describes the grandfather whose immature daughter had just given birth. He did not want to condemn the father or daughter; after all, he is a politician and does not want to offend too many potential voters or seem to be religiously judgemental. But how are we going to reduce the incidence of illegitimacy unless it is again regarded as a target of serious social disapproval? The complacent acceptance of illegitimacy is plainly an important support for a girl's decision to get pregnant.

In short British politicians, even the sincerely well meaning like Tom Harris, are too compromised in too many ways to act as credible contributers to any serious debate. Merely lamenting the eyewatering expense of single mothers looks ludicrous when the Government and Opposition are united in continuing public expenditure at its present crippling level and in refusing to abandon anything: useless defence projects, useless computer systems, hordes of parasite consultants and Public Relations liars, expensive schools with appalling exam results, the 2012 Olympics, countless building programs which run way over budget.....and that is barely scratching the surface.

As for objecting to the killing of little children....well, some of us have problems taking any British politician seriously, given the scale of abortion in Britain and the near-impossibility of even reducing the number of weeks at which a baby can be aborted.

[More on the next post.]

Because It's WRONG!

2009-03-11T06:42:00.000-07:00

It was a strange and unnatural sight. Here was the word "wrong" being used in an article in the "Guardian". It was seemingly being used in the sense of "morally wrong", not in the sense of getting the answer to a maths question "wrong". Indeed, the article was headed: "The return of morality". How could such an article be published in the temple of secularism and liberalism, "The Guardian"? And, to stretch the eyes wider, it was written by a Labour Member of Parliament, Tom Harris [picture at right].

He was rightly horrified by the spectacle of young women, barely out of childhood, giving birth to children out of wedlock and preparing for a lifetime on Social Security benefits. In short, a member of the Labour party was prepared to see the downside of the Welfare State which his party had promoted for over 60 years. And Tom Harris is a Scottish Member of Parliament; they don't come more hard-core traditional Labour than the Scottish variety.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/05/welfare-children

The very conservative writer Peter Hitchens [picture at right] went into understandable outpourings of joy over this apparent repentance by one member of the party of sinners. He declared:

I'd like to say a word in praise of the Labour MP Tom Harris, who this week very courageously spoke up for millions of respectable working-class people, long deprived of a voice by New Labour trendies who know nothing of real life.
He said: ‘Teenage girls shouldn’t be having underage sex. Why? Because it’s wrong. Teenage girls shouldn’t choose to have babies as an alternative to getting an education and a career. Why? Because it’s wrong. Parents shouldn’t teach their children that a lifetime on benefits is attractive or even acceptable. Why? Because it’s wrong.’

As he rightly says: ‘The most vociferous critics of the dependency culture and of deliberate worklessness have always been those who live in the same communities, those who resent paying their taxes to help other people waste their lives.’

Welcome, Mr Harris, to the ranks of the wild-eyed extremists. And good luck.

Peter's enthusiasm ran away with his normally sober brain, as I explain below. But it was forgivable; the sight of any British politician showing the smallest glimmer of sanity or courage is so rare that you tend to overreact in delight.

"Scotland on Sunday" on 8th March described one end result of multiple strands of the permissive society, aided and abetted by the Welfare State. The short and wretched life of Brandon Muir in the small city of Dundee came to a disgusting end just before his second birthday. With a junkie prostitute single mother who had just shacked up with a child-abusing paramour, his long term prospects were never promising. But to die in hours of lingering agony after a savage assault.....

It was a sobering reminder of the drugs underside of modern British life. Scotland's beautiful and prosperous capital, Edinburgh is famous for the biggest arts festival in the world. And its historic castle and other ancient buildings. And its Scottish Parliament. And its art galleries and film theatre. And the biggest theatre in Great Britain. (I saw "Les Miserables" there in the early 1990s). And the highest concentration of HIV sufferers in Britain, thanks to intravenous drug use.

You probably won't find any links to the Brandon Muir article on the Scottish Tourist Board's website (http://www.visitscotland.com).

http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/opinion/The-Forgotten-Children-How-society.5049981.jp

A few weeks ago Danny Boyle won the Best Director Oscar for "Slumdog Millionaire". I thought it was a grotesquely overpraised movie, especially in comparison with his earlier brilliant "Trainspotting", which depicted the lives of junkies in Edinburgh. Trainspotting's most unforgettable scenes appropriately featured a dead baby. [Picture at right: EWEN BREMNER the perpetually unfortunate druggie Spud in Danny Boyle's cult classic Trainspotting (1996)]

Now we had a real life dead baby coming out of the drugs underworld of central Scotland. Not the first and certainly not the last. One estimate puts the number of children living in the Edinburgh area with at least one junkie relative as 6,000. There are 143 social workers looking after families in the Edinburgh area. Doing simple maths, each vulnerable child might have as much as 20 minutes attention per week from a social worker, once each worker has spent hours on his/her laptop doing the electronic paperwork to cover his/her backside against the next Dead Child inquest. These children might as well rely on a paper napkin to protect them from armour piercing bullets. As one commentator noted after the death of yet another abused child in London, there was a perfect audit trail showing how the social workers had failed to protect the deceased.

All this ought to be good ammunition for any ardent social reformer seeking to arose public determination to reverse disastrous trends. Yet the limitations of Tom Harris' position become horribly obvious once you think about them for ten seconds. What particular moral authority has he? About as much as you or me or the resident bore propping up the bar who declares it is all "wrong" that these Poles are allowed to come over here and take British jobs.

Take his proclamation:

Teenage girls shouldn’t choose to have babies as an alternative to getting an education and a career. Why? Because it’s wrong.

Of course it's not wrong. This is a perfectly laudable and worthwhile ambition, as long as the teenager has a good husband to support her and the children. What is the glorious value of spending thousands of hours of your young life getting the transparently bogus British educational "qualifications", followed by years as a wage slave in some supermarket or call centre?

But, you protest, Mr Harris is merely objecting to such young women breeding at the taxpayers' expense. So what? Which paragon of moral authority decides that such actions are "wrong"? The British state pours about $150 billion per year down the toilet on wasted public expenditure of all kinds from useless defence equipment to useless computer projects to the 2012 Olympics. Who cares about a few billion spent on single parent families? As for ordinary people objecting to professional welfare claimants - who gives a **** about the opinions of our moronic tabloid reading masses?

And why is it "wrong" for underage girls to have sex, especially if they avoid pregnancy or seek an early abortion? The current age of consent (16) in Britain was imposed in the 19th century as part of the fight against child prostitution - and against the ferocious opposition of some senior politicians who wanted to continue breaking their sons in on child prostitutes. A girl's 16th birthday is a legal borderline as arbitrary as a tax percentage or a speed limit, with zero reference to objective morality. In other parts of the world, including Catholic areas, a girl can be married at 14. Tom Harris declares elsewhere in the article that he is not seeking to reimpose religious morality. So what basis of morality is he leaning on? The guy's a politician, after all. You can't help feeling that part of his Damascene conversion is down to the catastrophic recession - we just can't afford to fund a never ending stream of bastards out of the public purse. So is it just expedient to trumpet those fragments of "traditional" morality which assist public expenditure?

But surely some actions are visibly, indisputably wrong all the time, regardless of political ideology? Battering a little child like Brandon Muir to death is just plain "wrong". Well, at the moment, most people would agree. (What about the thousands of innocent Iraqi children killed horribly in an illegal war waged by a, er, Labour government? Er, well, er, that's different). But if Brandon had been two years younger many people would have reluctantly supported his termination right up to birth. What hope had he as a child of a junkie mother? Much better to eliminate him quickly and mercifully and avoid all the later pain and expense.

Tom Harris is notably silent on any other aspect of morality except the
is expensive moral failure of the underclass. But his confused and incoherent contribution is one hopeful sign that genuine moralists may have more public space and more sympathetic hearers for genuinely intelligent discussion than for decades past.

POST SCRIPT:

It was the Brandon Muir tragedy which sparked off Tom's article. On his website, Tom expressed his frustration that the Dundee child protection authorities hesitated about taking Brandon into care, even though his mother was a drug addicted prostitute with learning difficulties. But if he was taken into care, where would you stop? There are so many little children at varying degrees of risk from druggie parents; there aren't enough specialist social workers to supervise them or foster parents to care for them all. And there probably isn't enough capacity in the courts or legal profession to accommodate thousands of legal cases taking children into care and the resulting appeals....

[See following post for continuation of Bill's posts on this issue, and perhaps clarification of the problem facing all society.]

Free TV

2009-02-27T05:45:00.000-08:00

Dear Stan,

I have recently seen reports that most of the major US newspapers are in terminal crisis or near-terminal crisis. The "Rocky Mountain News" in Denver is closing, the venerable (1865) "San Francisco Chronicle" is slashing jobs in what looks like its death spasms, the "New York Times" is losing tens of millions a year, the corporation which runs the "LA Times" and the "Chicago Tribune" has filed for bankruptcy....and can these titles survive much longer in their own right?

Part of the problem has been falling circulation caused by, er, giving the stuff away for free on their Web sites. Why should anyone in their home cities pay for these papers when anyone on the planet with an Internet connection can read them for nothing?

Is the BBC committing similar slow motion suicide? Apart from enraging people like me, who ought to be its core supporters, with garbage programs, abortion propaganda and eyewatering salaries for people of questionable ability, it has been giving its material away for months on the iplayer service - check it out on www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer. You can watch very recent BBC programs shortly after they are broadcast live to UK audiences, plus truckloads of other material such as David Attenborough's natural history documentaries.

I noted in earlier blogs that the BBC extorts $200 from every TV-watching household in the country, regardless of whether they watch BBC or not. I say "extort" because there is a consensus across all the political parties that the BBC licence fee should remain untouched, so there is no constitutional way of resisting it. Turkeys don't vote for Christmas and politicians aren't going to offend a major media player.

But you need a TV licence only for "live broadcast" material. As the iplayer content is not transmitted in "real time", you don't need a TV licence to view it. Well, seeing that everyone on the planet with a broadband connection can view it for free anyway, it would be doubly iniquitous to force a fee on British iplayer viewers.

So far the only way you could avoid the TV licence was by being over 75 or by living on those dodgy housing estates in Northern Ireland where the local Catholic or Protestant ganglords would break the legs of any TV licence enforcer. The obvious downside was that they would also break your legs if you offended them. Now that you can use iplayer to watch BBC for nothing, how much longer can it survive?

Reading Catholic Segmentation

2009-02-21T05:18:00.000-08:00

Dear Stan,

Many thanks for the blog update! Yes, the photo shows the sanctuary of St William of York - amazing. The composition does not extend to floor level, so you can't see the temporary wooden platform erected over the main sanctuary floor.

HERE'S A LINK to our two churches on which you'll find the latest bulletin with Mass schedules.

You will see that St William has a 3:00pm Hungarian Mass, on top of the 900am English, 1100am Latin and 600pm University. St James is hosting the Ukrainian Mass. For many years St James also hosted the regular Polish Masses, until 1981 when the Poles acquired their own church, few hundred yards to the south.

This "new" Sacred Heart was the former Anglican church of St John. It is a fine Victorian structure, sited in what is now designated as a historical conservation area. But the Anglican authorities were determined to demolish it and sell the site for development. The Poles and the Reading Victorian Society joined forces to fight this act of vandalism. The Anglican authorities actually obtained legal permission to demolish St John....until some wily legal eagle pointed out that they had only obtained permission to demolish the church, not the surrounding wall. And, until the wall was demolished, they could hardly get the heavy equipment in to demolish the church. At which point, rather than go through more legal exercises, the authorities surrendered and sold St John to the Poles at a very low price.

With the mass invasion of Poles in the last 5 years, Sacred Heart is packed to the doors for 4 Masses every weekend. But,even though it lies well within St James' parish boundary, it might hardly exist as far as the "English" parish is concerned. You can see that it is not mentioned on the website or newsletter. And, despite the usual bureaucratic obsession with Mass attendance statistics, which you can see in the Blackfen parish articles you sent me, the very healthy Mass attendance at Sacred Heart does not appear in the Portsmouth diocesan statistics.

Despite the never ending propaganda about Christian Unity we have had for the last 45 years, these examples from churches within a two mile radius of Reading town centre give you a taste of the practical fragmentation of Catholics into multiple sub-congregations divided by language and liturgical preference. As I said in an earlier post, the logical end result would be the Protestant situation of every person being his/her own Pope and congregation.

St. William of York Latin Mass

2009-02-20T15:49:00.000-08:00

I sent Bill links to posts about the Latin Rite controversy at Our Lady of the Rosary in Blackfen, England, asking if he knew about it. The links were rebuttals by two priests, Fr. Tim at Blackfen... HERE... and Fr. Z in the US... HERE.

Below is Bill's response, and a picture of the first Latin Mass at his Church St. William of York. (The web's amazing that these pictures exist.)

Dear Stan,

Many thanks for the link to this story. I am not familiar with Blackfen being as it is on the far side of London. But Fr Tim is locally famous in England. The Latin Mass is exactly what we have at St William of York every Sunday.
The St William Sunday timetable goes:

900am Start of English Missa Normativa.
1000am: Mass finishes, coffee starts in annex.
1015am: We, the choir, finally get started on rehearsal for next week
1030am: Choir practice finishes as the Tridentine Rite congregation start to arrive, a wooden platform is laid over the Vatican 2 -style sanctuary and the huge folding partition to the right of the altar is rolled out to seal off the annex area, which is normally an extension of the main nave. Perhaps they feel that the annex area with its serving hatch from the kitchen is too secular....
1100am: Latin Mass starts.

Between the 900am English Mass with organ hymns, the 1100am Latin rite and the 600pm University Chaplaincy Mass with guitar/keyboard/etc, it is like 3 churches in one building; a new metaphor for the Holy Trinity?? And of course we have the occasional Hungarian and Sri Lankan Masses at St William for those minorities.

So far the Latin Mass Society have not caused any noticeable acrimony in our parish, because they are so largely separate from the most of the St William parishioners, though a few St William parishioners do go to the Latin Mass. The Latin Mass parishioners converge from miles around; as far as I know, it is the only regular Latin Mass venue between west London and Oxford, which is quite a gap. The Latin Mass priests are entirely separate from Fr Dominic, who serves St William and also St James in the town centre; this is obviously not the case at Fr Tim's parish. (St James parishioners have even less reason to notice the Latin Mass presence in the little church up in the University area). And the Latin Mass people do help considerably e.g. by taking turns to clean the church. But I can see the potential for friction elsewhere, especially among those people who will sing the praises of every kind of diversity - except that which they don't like.

Money To Burn

2009-02-18T14:42:00.000-08:00

There is one part of the economy guaranteed bombproof against any financial catastrophe or recession. It is of course the public sector. We had yet another demonstration of this in Reading on 17th February.

More (Video) Here

Last May I described how St Mary's Butts in the town centre was closed by the police while they searched this historic thoroughfare for evidence after the murder of a 17 year old youth. Most people would accept the necessity for such measures, despite the chaos and inconvenience it caused. For one thing nearly all the bus routes in town go through the Butts at one point in their journey, so bus services were heavily disrupted.

But now on 17th February we had a repeat performance. The Butts was sealed off by the police. It was not just the traditional strips of blue and white tape; substantial wooden barriers appeared at both ends. Last May there were hardly any police vehicles present - just the forensic team in their white cover-all suits. Now there were police vehicles galore with blue lights flashing, even when parked. Apparently the jury in the murder trial were enjoying a field trip to familiarise themselves with the crime scene.

Er....couldn't they just walk to the scene with a couple of guides and inspect it while the rest of us went about our lawful business? It is barely ten minutes walk from the Crown Court where the trial is in progress. Welll, no. The problem is that the defendants are allegedly entitled to see what the jury sees, so they enjoyed a field trip to the Butts in their prison van. Hence the police presence suitable for a Presidential visit. And of course the TV crews and other media trooped along in force, so the event appeared on the evening BBC local news.

As one wag put it years ago, such exercises are all tied up with the Liberty of the Subject. While the police are occupied with such futile tasks the Subjects elsewhere can take Liberties. I can't imagine how much it cost, but I suspect the police will not be highlighting the bill in the PR puffs they issue to show how effective they are. The business of taking juries along to crime scenes is a recent innovation; the idea that you have to take the defendants as well can only be another monstrous imposition by the tribe of Human Rights lawyers. All people who are doing mighty well at the expense of the rest of us.

Death in Care

2009-02-16T18:53:00.000-08:00

I visit an elderly parishioner who lives in a care home on the Oxford Road, three miles west of Reading town centre. Tony used to be a vicar at St Giles, about half a mile south of the town centre. St Giles is famous locally for its ultra-High Anglican style of worship. Arguably Holy Trinity on Oxford Road, Brian Brindley's old parish, was even higher in its heyday in the 1980s. Brian staged liturgies fit for a Papal coronation, with enough bells, smells and lavish vestments to give any Evangelical instant heart failure. But St Giles comes a very honourable second, with faithful celebrations of any number of Saints' feastdays.

After his retirement, Tony lost no time in converting to Rome. But in his bedroom there are still mementos of his Anglican glory days, notably a framed photograph of him with the Archbishop of Canterbury, circa 1962 I guess. Archbishop Michael Ramsey was world-famous as "leader" of the world-wide Anglican community of the time and there is Tony, prominent among his clerical entourage. It is a poignant reminder of the time when, as another convert ex-Anglican clergyman said to me, he had an "absolutely brilliant mind", before a series of large and small strokes and advanced age reduced him to a stage of child-like helplessness.

He was briefly in a much less attractive care home on the Bath Road before his move to Riverview. It is thus named because, when the trees have shed their leaves, you can just about see the River Thames on the far side of the Oxford Road and the London-South Wales main railway line. In some ways this is a plus point for a care home. Those residents with some remaining mental faculties have visual stimulation from the incessant traffic and the frequent trains linking London to Cornwall, South Wales and Birmingham. The interior is well furnished and maintained - not that you would expect anything less, with fees up to 800 pounds ($1,200) per week......

The staff are like the United Nations, with white Britons being a tiny minority - i.e. one care assistant and one receptionist, from my numerous visits to date. Not that it diminishes the care in most ways. The residents look clean and relatively well groomed and dressed and there is none of the pervasive urine odour that you find in other care homes. This is no small matter, given their extreme helplessness and considerable mental confusion. It is an inevitably depressing sight in the dayroom, with formerly active citizens sitting in an apathetic circle of silence or intermittent verbal outbursts.

The staff are always welcoming, with Krys, one of the numerous East Europeans, knowing how to serve my tea just as I like it (milk, no sugar). But you can't help suspecting the chance of communication problems, between the constant changes of 24 hour care staff on shifts and the numbers whose first language is not English.

I was thus greatly surprised to see reports in our local papers about the death of a 97 year old resident at Riverview. She had reportedly died from hypothermia after admission to the Royal Berkshire Hospital. I always found the home well heated - too much so on some days, when I felt compelled to open Tony's window for a breath of fresh air. But frail elderly people need that extra warmth. So how did this very vulnerable lady get hypothermia? We await the formal inquest and coroner's report. But the PR bullshitters, as ever, were very much on the ball. A few days after the news of her death broke, I visited Tony and the receptionist handed me a circular letter in an envelope as I signed in at her desk. It reassured visitors about the misleading media reports - though it did not say how or why they were misleading - explained that the home was working with Reading Social Services to bring the matter "to a close".

Ho hum....call me a rancid old cynic, but I shall be scrutinising media reports and any coroner's verdict very closely for the next few months........

Benefit of the Doubt

2009-02-14T19:00:00.000-08:00

Having recently seen and appreciated "Doubt", I could not help reflecting on how suspect much of the pedophile witch hunt in Britain has proved. Years ago an old joke ran: "In England you are innocent until proven guilty. In France you are guilty until proven innocent. In America you are innocent until the papers come out the next morning. In Russia you are guilty until proven guilty and then you are guilty all over again."

Some recent British cases combine these American and Soviet styles of jurisprudence. The most monstrous single case concerned two children's nurses in Newcastle, in the far north-east of England, who had their lives utterly ruined by baseless accusations of child abuse. They were forced to flee their homes, because any suspected pedophile can expect a lynch mob on his/her doorstep. And "suspected" means "proven beyond all possible doubt" as far as our moronic mobs are concerned. A resulting expensive enquiry, manned by "experts" in social work and childcare, was commissioned by Newcastle City Council. It demonstrated conclusively that the spirit of Lewis Carroll is alive and well in the land.

Among numerous bizarre matters, it considered an accusation that one of the nurses had been taking pornographic pictures of the little children in her care and selling them on the pedophile websites which abound on the internet. Why on earth would a reputable nurse be tempted into such iniquity? The chairman of the enquiry ( a professor of social work at one of our joke universities) surmised that she was short of money. "But a police investigation found no evidence that she was short of money." Well, explained the chairman, that's because she was selling child pornography......Lady, face it, you're definitely in a lose-lose-lose situation here.

It was not just the unfortunate nurses who were losers. When the court case which demonstrated their innocence finally came to an end, there were legal and other bills of 8 million pounds ($12 million) to be picked up by the luckless local taxpayers of Newcastle. But of course some people will never be convinced of their innocence and the smell will follow them around forever.

Once our indescribably evil tabloids get on the case, any hope of mercy or balanced judgment flies out the window. In 2000, the worst of them "The News of the World" (better known as the "News of the Screws") ran a witch hunt against pedophiles in the wake of the murder of 7 year old Sarah Payne. "Name and Shame" was the title of their campaign to name every convicted pedophile in Britain. The whole insane business was abandoned after a couple of weeks when it was obvious that it was causing serious public disorder in the underclass areas, most notoriously on the Paulsgrove estate on the north side of Portsmouth, our major naval base city. The local mob terrorized twenty suspected pedophiles out of their homes and it was near-miraculous that no one was killed. Even worse, we have had a never-ending campaign, headed by the Screws, since then to introduce "Sarah's Law", a British version of Megan's Law. The fact that Sarah's bereaved mother has been the public face of the campaign makes it no less deluded and dangerous.

The ever excellent Theodore Dalrymple suggested forcefully that much of the anti-pedophile rage in such underclass areas could be convincingly explained by guilty consciences. The appalling neglect of children on such estates provides wonderful opportunities for sexual predators - especially among women who invite a paramour into a home with young children.

A recent case in Jersey, one of the British Channel Islands off the west coast of Normandy, was equally baseless. For months newspapers ran sensational stories about fragments of bones being discovered in an abandoned children's home on the island. The smell of implicit pedophilia was guaranteed to attract every journalist in a 500 mile radius. But sadly it turned out to be another case of a wonderful story killed by ugly facts. The evidence had as much substance as the ghosts in the Nicole Kidman film "The Others", also set in Jersey. When it turned out that the bone fragments were either hundreds of years old or, er, bits of wood, an awful lot of senior policemen and journalists found themselves with egg on their faces. See the excellent www.richardwebster.net site for an enthralling set of documents on this and numerous other witch hunts in Britain and other countries.

With this level of intelligence displayed by the great and the good, perhaps we should not blame the cretinous tabloid-reading mob too much. "Doubt" displayed such a contrasting intelligence and ambiguity in its approach. I think that Father Flynn was plainly guilty, but that is based partly based on the past 40 years of 20/20 hindsight and accumulated evidence as to the ways in which corrupt and depraved priests have behaved around children. For example, dosing the victims with alcohol and/or drugs is one well-practised technique of the predator. The fact that Father Flynn was such a good and popular communicator with the parish children immediately raised suspicions in my mind. In so many cases, after the police and media have descended on a parish, the stunned parishioners have protested "Father Smith was such a great priest, so good with the children....". Having a genuine wholesome interest in children's welfare and a more sinister intent may well overlap in complex ways and in far more cases than we like to admit.

From the perspective of 1964, where "Doubt" is set, the issues would have been far more confused than they seem to a 2009 audience. The film is one of the extreme rarities in mainstream cinema which is willing to entertain uncertainty from beginning to end and make everyone's motives mixed and suspect. How much easier it would be if the dodgy priests all looked like extra-Satanic versions of Jack Nicholson and the accusing nuns looked like Doris Day...........

No Special Relationship - US & UK

2009-02-12T05:24:00.000-08:00

Dear Stan,

A fascinating piece on US-UK relations by Peter Hitchens. He knows his history - including the bits of history that politicians prefer to forget when they are inconvenient.

I was glad to see him supporting my blog piece about "punching above your weight" when he again describes the blindingly obvious - how the Irish influence outweighed the British in Northern Ireland matters. Part of the "Good Friday" so-called "peace settlement" (heavily sponsored by uber-liar Bill Clinton of course) in effect abandoned central British control over parts of the province to the various para-military thugs and drug dealers.

To take one telling example, on the housing estates controlled by the IRA, no one pays the BBC TV licence which everyone else under 75 in Britain is forced to pay. The license enforcers know they will be dealt with if they dare to enforce the law in these areas. I think it is outrageous that we are forced to pay $200 per year for the sort of garbage the BBC churns out. But it is hardly a fair exchange - free TV in return for having your life ruled by gangsters and drug dealers.

William Murphy, 18 Kingsway, Caversham Park Village, Reading, RG4 6RA, United Kingdom. Tel: 011 - 44 - 118 - 9543087 Mobile: 07899017301

10 February 2009 10:19 AM
Down with the Special Relationship
Peter Hitchens

When I lived in Washington DC I tried for many months to find the famous 'Special Relationship' which I had heard so much about back home. It was not there. I could find nobody, including our then Ambassador, who admitted its existence.

What was more, I noticed that my country was pretty unloved in the American capital, despite the increasingly shabby and embarrassing Winston Churchill and/or Margaret Thatcher cults common among a certain type of American.
In fact I was later able to witness, at very close quarters, the complete diplomatic defeat of Britain in Washington by the tiny Irish Embassy. Bear in mind here that the British Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue is a relic of Imperial grandeur, both magnificent and huge. The Ambassador's residence, a fine piece of Lutyens in a sort of semi-country-house style, is a rather melancholy reminder that we were once great. The nearby Embassy buildings, though architecturally frightful, are large and suggest (correctly) that Britain maintains a very large staff here, much of it devoted to military and intelligence cooperation, or attempts at cooperation.

Yet, during 1994 and 1995, this whole apparatus knew less about the White House and its intentions than the Irish, and was quite unable to win a diplomatic battle over what amounted to American recognition of the Provisional IRA as a negotiating partner.

I was once phoned up by a White House official who had become aware that I was writing uncomplimentary articles about this. She wanted to brief me into softening my views. But she wrecked the whole thing by comparing Bill Clinton's intervention on the side of Gerry Adams with his involvement in Yugoslavia.

'So', I said to her 'You regard Britain, your wartime ally, a sovereign democracy with a thousand years of history, the origin of your own constitution, as the equivalent of Serbia?' She went very quiet. Because in fact that is exactly how the White House then regarded Britain, and I should think is pretty much as the White House regards us now.

This was nothing new. There's a very good scene in Ian Curteis's excellent Falklands Play (still yet to be broadcast on BBC1 or BBC2) , during which Margaret Thatcher goes intercontinental when Al Haig suggests that the US ought to be even-handed between Britain and Argentina.
And it's been clear for ages that, in its desire to have a 'single phone number' when dealing with what some Americans refer to as 'Yerp', the US State Department has been anxious to cram Britain into a European Superstate. In fact it's often been suggested that the CIA has been involved in various backstairs pro-EU campaigns in the past. I've never been quite sure how the various neo-conservative admirers of the USA, Eurosceptics to a man, cope with Washington's strong pro-Brussels policies. I expect they just ignore them.

Now, I love the USA as much as many and more than most. I'm glad it's there. If we can't be top nation any more (and we can't), I'm glad it's the USA that has taken over the position. But I won't get sentimental about it. They don't. The American national anthem is an anti-British song about the Royal Navy's bombardment of Baltimore, in which the presence of British soldiers on American soil is referred to as 'their foul footsteps' pollution'. At the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia (to whose foyer I was once admitted) stands a statue of Nathan Hale, America's first spy, hanged by...us, the British. American schoolbook history is full of dubious stuff about British oppression of the Colonists, and many Americans believe the sort of tripe encapsulated in Mel Gibson's appalling film 'The Patriot", in which British officers are portrayed as being more or less like the Nazis. Meanwhile the cruel and intolerant treatment of the very large numbers of pro-British loyalists left in the USA after the revolutionary war is forgotten. Canada, where they mostly fled, is their memorial.

More recently, it was our ally the USA which ended British naval supremacy (and in effect put a stop to our Asian Empire) with the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty. This was in truth the moment at which the British Empire was finished, though we had to go through several defeats before we believed it. And of course there was the desperate indebtedness of Britain to the USA after the Second World War, which enabled Washington to demand the dismantling of the Empire in return for aid.

Not to mention Suez, where the US Sixth Fleet actively harassed British warships on their way to Egypt, and President Eisenhower threatened us with bankruptcy if we didn't withdraw.
Well, that's all right. Why should it be otherwise? America's accession to the topmost rank could only have come at our expense. America's interests are different from ours. Nations don't have eternal friendships, as Palmerston long ago pointed out.

But in that case isn't it time we stopped the pretence, which survives only in London, that we are somehow specially close to the Americans? Mightn't we actually get more out of them, and have a more healthy relationship, if we rather more frequently told them we were not doing as they wished?
France, through stroppiness and refusal to cooperate with the USA, has probably received just as much military help and support from Washington as we have, if not more, and its nuclear forces are more independent than ours.

Now here's an opportunity to declare independence, as we might put it. The miserable behaviour of the British government, in ordering the suppression of a British court judgement on the allegations that Binyam Mohamed, is deeply embarrassing to anyone who believes either in truth or in national sovereignty. Our judges cannot say what they wish, apparently, because of a fear that we will then be denied US intelligence cooperation.
Then let it be so. I am sure that no American judge would be silenced by British government threats of this kind, even if they had any substance to them. The case of Mr Mohamed isn't even the point. The point is, do we run our affairs or not? And if the answer is that we cannot run them without annoying the Americans, then let us annoy the Americans. What good has our slavish following of US policy in Iraq or Afghanistan actually done us, let alone Iraq or Afghanistan? I am told that relations between the two militaries are now poorer than they were before, which isn't much of an achievement. If this is what being special involves, I would rather not be special any more.

Road Into Eden, Cornwall, & Lands End

2009-02-09T07:44:00.000-08:00

Eden is one of those powerfully evocative words which people love to use in the most bizarre contexts. The professional atheist Richard Dawkins uses it in a book title - "River out of Eden". Now I have been through the Eden Project in Cornwall, 280 miles south-west of London. Go a bit further and you reach Land's End - the last bit of the British mainland.

The Eden Project is the biggest tourist attraction in the South-West of England. Basically, it is an enormous botanical showcase, centred on two vast hothouses. The larger of the two, the Tropical zone, is the largest hothouse in the world. I much preferred the environment in the smaller Mediterranean zone, far less hot and humid. Both are wonders of architecture and engineering. In the Tropical zone, a waterfall cascades over 100 feet vertically through the various levels of lush vegetation. Along with smaller buildings they are sited in a disused china clay pit, an abandoned relic of Cornwall's industrial past.

It is not just the thousands of plants in this artificial environment. You know you have arrived in Cornwall when you see palm trees fluttering in the brisk Atlantic winds. Actually palm trees can be found on the west coast of Scotland, hundreds of miles north, thanks to the Gulf Stream. But it is still a lovely reminder of the contrasts to be found in such a small island. On the north coast of Scotland you have a bleak treeless landscape populated with sub-artic flora. Here you can imagine yourself in the Mediterranean.

I was dimly aware that Truro had a cathedral. I was completely unprepared for its size and beauty. Like the cathedral in Kirkwall in the Orkney Islands, it is way out of proportion to its surrounding town. It is a reminder of the time when Cornwall was very rich as a result of the tin mining industry.

A truly bizarre relic of the Cornish past is the occasional use of the Cornish language on official signs. This is even more pointless than the bilingual signs in Wales and Ireland, where at least a small percentage of the population still speak their Celtic tongue. The last person to have Cornish as his language of choice died in 1770. It "survives", if you can call it survival, just as an academic revival by a handful of enthusiasts.

Land's End itself is a disappointment as much as its Scottish equivalent, John O'Groats, on the very north-east tip of the British mainland. John O'Groats had little more than a souvenir shop and a cafe, but at least the cafe was open when I visited last June. At Land's End there is a larger cluster of buildings that you might call a theme park, if you were feeling generous. But nearly everything was shut in January, apart from a souvenir shop. As I bought my postcards, the shop assistant regretfully told me that there was nothing open even for a cup of coffee.

But the Lizard Point made up for it all. The weather in January on the most southerly tip of mainland Britain was better than that in June on Dunmore Head, the most northerly part of the mainland. In January the Lizard was bathed in sunshine, the sea was blue and it was a fantastic day to be alive in such wonderful scenery, with subtropical plants tossing in the wind.

Don't Mention Abortion! - Revolutionary Road

2009-02-09T07:39:00.000-08:00

Having just seen the widely praised "Revolutionary Road", I am still trying to work out all the reasons why I detest it so much. Some of them are the same reasons why I hated "American Beauty", by the same director, so much.

Does no fashionable Hollywood director or writer have a kind word to say about traditional marriage? But on top of this there is a deafening silence on the part of the critics. Only one reviewer, on the US Catholic Bishop's website, mentions the abortion which kills Kate Winslett's character. This is like writing a history of WW2 without mentioning Herr Hitler.

I am not sure if the film condones her choice - much of the script displays a preposterously trivial and adolescent attitude to serious moral questions, with the tiresome characters' yearnings for some undefined meaningful life being the most important factor in human existence. You might say that the young mother's demise is an implicit plea for safe abortion on demand, rather than a bodged Do-It-Yourself procedure at home. But I doubt that the author is even that consistent and serious.

On a more trivial note, it is plain that the producers were oblivious to the impact on audiences anywhere outside North America. The young couple's lovely house would be beyond the dreams of any young couple on Europe today - never mind in the 1950s. Was it really possible for a young single-wage family to live in such style in the New York commuter area in 1955? The house used in the film is like those on the upmarket Caversham Heights area of Reading - and in upmarket areas around other British and European towns and cities. The difference is that the British and mainland European houses would have less land than the "Revolutionary Road" home and could be afforded only by middle-aged professionals. I suspect that most audiences elsewhere on the planet will laugh at the attempt to evoke sympathy for two dumb Yanks who don't know how lucky they are......and evidently know even less about the cost of living in Paris.

Abortion Propaganda

2009-02-09T07:32:00.000-08:00

How to get free propaganda for your cause? Get the ear of someone at the BBC. It has long been notorious that you can get a 30-minute free prime time commercial for your luxury holidays or expensive consumer toys by getting the BBC to produce a suitable programme. One of the few justifications for the iniquitous 139.50 TV license fee was the claim that we have no paid commercials on BBC - unlike those horrible American channels. As the old quip goes:

You cannot hope to bribe or twist
Thank God! The British journalist.
But seeing what the man will do unbribed
There is no reason to.

Now we have primetime abortion propaganda, as Peter Hitchens so well describes in this column on 25th Jan 2009.

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This Isn’t the Truth, it’s Lying BBC Slurry

The BBC’s bias in favour of wild radical causes is not just to be found in its news and current affairs output. A number of people rang me to urge me to watch an astonishing programme on BBC1 last Monday.

This was a police thriller called Hunter, staring Hugh Bonneville and Janet McTeer. A lot of money had clearly been spent on sets, costumes, cars and actors. Almost everyone in it was young and attractive. It tore along at a compelling pace and was on at prime time.
And what was the plot? A group of abortion opponents had kidnapped two young boys, and were threatening to murder them unless BBC news showed a film of an abortion. The kidnappers were outwardly respectable people – a doctor, a nurse and a charity worker with an MBE. During the police hunt for the culprits, a righteous (and alluring) young woman detective aggressively interrogated an (entirely innocent) medic.

‘So,’ she hissed, ‘you’re an anti-abortionist?,’ using the words much as she might have said: ‘So, you’re a Nazi war criminal.’

Since the anti-abortion movement in this country is composed of kindly, non-violent people who seek to stop the slaughter of unborn babies, it is hard to see how they could resort to the murder of young children in pursuit of their cause.

Why is this lying slurry chosen for screening on our main channel? Well, perhaps it’s summed up in the line given to Janet McTeer at the end of the programme.

‘Thank God for abortion,’ she says.

Which I reckon is the BBC’s official view.

Behold the Loaf!

2009-02-09T07:28:00.000-08:00

Dear Stan,

While listening to "Something Understood" on the BBC's Godslot on Radio 4 on 25th January, I heard this wickedly funny little rhyme. It is obviously not a recent composition, but still comes up smelling fresh as dawn in the face of all the various "scientific" maniacs claiming to have brilliant insights into the meaning of life.

Miniature, by Eden Phillpotts (1862-1960)

The grey beards wag, the bald heads nod
And gather thick as bees,
To talk electrons, gases, God,
Old nebulae, new fleas.
Each specialist, each dry-as-dust
And professorial oaf,
Holds up his little crumb of crust
and cries, 'Behold, the loaf!'

British Education - Better Results PLEASE!

2009-02-09T07:09:00.000-08:00

Our local superstar Kate Winslett has just scored a double whammy at the 2009 Golden Globes. Way to go, Kate... I hope this inspires our local council to come up with a better tribute than the "Winslett Place" they named in her honour a few years ago. This is a dreary development of apartments on the Oxford Road, two miles west of the town centre. I loved a recent interview which probably won't win her many local fans. She mentioned that she has no trace of a Reading accent, despite being born and brought up in the town. She attributed that to coming from a theatrical family, who tended to speak better.....ouch!

I recently saw her in one of the award-winning roles, "The Reader". So strange to see a superb, largely German, cast all speaking English. So rare to see a film with illiteracy as an important theme. That point seems to have been buried in most comments on the movie, who concentrate on 1) she plays a former concentration camp guard and 2) she takes her kit off (yet again) for some highly suspect sex scenes with an underage boy.

The Nazis have moved into the dustbin of history, but illiteracy lingers on, despite the truckloads of money poured into public education. It is a plague afflicting many people's lives, even if it doesn't push them into confessing to war crimes, as Kate's character does in one of the most baffling scenes in cinema history. The effect on most people is a life of blighted opportunity, restricted careers and, in a surprising number of cases, a descent into crime. It is so taken for granted by the prison authorities in Britain that one of the first things a prisoner undergoes on entering prison is a basic literacy test.

It is not just basic literacy where the British education system continues to fall down, although that is obviously the key to just about everything else in education. A 2008 story in our local "Evening Post" described how 10 and 11 year old pupils at a highly regarded primary (elementary) school had passed the GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) examination intended for 16 year old pupils throughout the country. No great surprise there. The sample questions printed were plainly of a mathematics standard which I was taught at 9 or 10 or even earlier. E.g. "Write the number two thousand and seven". Excuse me....after 11 years of compulsory education, this is the level expected at age 16???

To compound the confusion, this was the GCSE paper at "Foundation" level. There are three levels offered - Foundation, Intermediate and Advanced. On checking the specimen papers, it was obvious that "Advanced" is a completely different examination with questions more appropriate to a 16 year old. But "Foundation" sounds more credible than "Childish" or "Joke". But the grades offered for these wholly different examinations overlap. The highest you can get at "Foundation" is a Grade C (allegedly by answering 67% of the joke questions correctly), where the "Advanced" paper allows you to achieve up to A* level. The fact that there has to be an A* grade higher than the traditional A speaks volumes about grade dilution.

Friends who are involved in local education as voluntary school governors explained this joke examination away as the consequence of the schools' anxiety to keep pupils "engaged" with mathematics for as long as possible. They need to give even less able or motivated pupils something to aim for. This smells of utter desperation on the part of the teaching profession. The compulsory school leaving age goes up to 18 by the year 2016 - i.e. pupils starting high school in September 2009 will have to serve a seven year sentence, without hope of remission. So how are the luckless teachers going to keep the unmotivated motivated until 18?

Part of the problem is that teachers, pupils, parents, politicians, educational bureaucrats, the huge educational ancillary industry (such as textbook publishers and examination boards) and much of the commentariat have a strong interest in pretending that such worthless qualifications mean something. £75 billion pounds ($140 billion US dollars) is spent on public education in Britain each year. If money talks, £75 billion pounds gives an overpowering scream, drowning out most of the alternative voices. But they're not fooling anyone else, least of all the universities and employers who accept the products of 13 years of state education.

The "Evening Post" story had a wickedly funny twist. The local councilor who highlighted this educational fiasco was quoted as saying (in more than one place) that he did not think these 10 and 11 year old pupils were "proteges". I assume that he meant "prodigies", but no one noticed the obvious mistake - certainly not the journalist or editor who are supposed to be professional users of the English language. If the adults are semi-literate, what hope is there for the children? (Remember "Billy Bathgate", where Dustin Hoffman's dimwitted gangster made exactly the same mistake? But he was supposed to be an exemplar of pig ignorance.)

And we are talking about competence in English and Mathematics, the only subjects of practical relevance for the majority of the population. Only a small minority will find a practical application for their years of studying science and languages, much less history or geography. And even this more academic minority will be utterly dependent on the accurate use of English and Maths.

Some of the consequences can be seen at University level, with universities forced to provide remedial classes for new students to teach them what they should have learnt years earlier. I could hardly believe my eyes when I read the flyer for mathematics workshops at Reading University. It was displayed on a large notice board and invited students who were having problems with statistics, calculus, percentages and basic arithmetic. Admittedly Reading is not the top university in the land. But it is a serious institute of higher education and research. How on earth do you bluff your way in here if you can't do basic arithmetic or percentages?

Statistics might be a different matter. I can imagine someone applying for a Psychology degree course on the grounds that it looked like a soft option and then finding to his horror that it involved some statistical analysis. (Sociology was an even more mercilessly derided subject. In the bathrooms at the University, a graffito above the toilet roll holder explained: "Pull here for Sociology degree".)

In fact the situation is even more dire than the above "Evening Post" example might suggest. Only 58% of the high school population achieve a "C" pass in both GCSE English and Mathematics. And the "C" grade is probably of a standard which would constitute a bad failure in any other high school examination system in the world. So 42% of pupils cannot even achieve a bad failure in a joke examination in the two most basic subjects, including the only language they have ever spoken - or ever will speak.

One high school in Bristol found that 40% of its 13 and 14 year old pupils were functionally illiterate and drew the blindingly obvious conclusion: it was pointless teaching these pupils French or biology or any other highly desirable subjects. What limited resources the school had needed to be focused on getting the students fit to survive in the most menial work situations.

The failure of education is not just a disaster for the world of commerce and industry. Some years ago the driving test was changed so that it involved a substantial theory component tested by a simple written exam. This was plainly a catastrophe for the subliterate and illiterate. The driving test used to involve only enough literacy to read a number plate (as a crude eyesight test, not a literacy test) and answer a few questions about road signs. Now even a simple written test became a Mount Everest of impossibility for a substantial minority. The theory test can be taken in numerous languages, but there is no "illiterate" version. Not surprisingly, the number of people taking the driving test plummeted from 750,000 a year to 600,000 - a decline suspiciously close to the rate of illiteracy (20%). Are there fewer drivers on our roads than in 1998? The roads are more congested than ever and the number of cars continues to increase. Plainly more and more people are driving without licenses and getting away with it.

Yet the number of road deaths is at an all time low, which suggests that the "tougher" driving test with its written exam was just another bureaucratic waste of time and money. Basic human instincts such as self-preservation are probably a better safeguard of public safety. Also, the police are forced to admit that, with 20 million vehicles on the road and an overstretched police force, the chances of anyone being caught driving without a license are very small. The only way such miscreants are likely to be caught is if they are pulled over for speeding or are involved in an accident. So, perversely, having no license is arguably an extra incentive to drive safely and avoid drawing unwelcome attention to yourself.

The police were forced into this admission of impotence when a young man drove his decrepit car into a lake about 50 miles north of London. Three little children, all under 5, in the back seat drowned. But the driver and his girlfriend (the children's mother, who had produced the children with the help of two other guys) both survived. To a rancid old cynic like me, this looked like a very convenient way to get rid of three inconvenient children and I am sure that the same unworthy thought occurred to the police. But they couldn't pin anything worse than "causing death by dangerous driving" on him. Of course, he had no driving license, any more than than he had a marriage license. Similarly he had no insurance, no roadworthiness certificate for the car (bought cheaply as an insurance write-off after an accident) and no road tax certificate for the car. In response to the media hubbub over the fact that this driver had been on the public roads undetected for years, the police could only state truthfully that they had very little chance of catching such unlicensed drivers.

But illiteracy imposes yet another handicap on the poorly educated. Driving a van or a taxi was one way of earning a living if you had no educational qualifications. Nowadays, if your employer insists on seeing a valid license before he lets you drive one of his vehicles, you are immediately denied the job.

A dedicated teacher explained part of the problem: If children have a chaotic and unhappy home life, they will never learn anything at school, no matter how well the lessons are prepared and how enthusiastic and competent the teachers might be. As ever, there are some teachers who should plainly not be working in the profession and blight the learning of hundreds of pupils. But parents are the first educators of their children, as Catholic educators have always emphasized. This is not just a matter of dogma; it is plainest common sense. The fact that 40% of the pupils at that Bristol high school were illiterate comes uncomfortably close to the figure for marital breakdown and the number of children living in one-parent homes. Bristol has some of the best schools in the country and some of the most desirable living areas on the planet. But, as a port city, it also has its share of grim inner city neighbourhoods with high rates of family breakdown.

Obviously there is huge variation within such "average" figures. Some schools in Reading, as I pointed out in an earlier post, achieve a Stalinist 95 to 100% of passes at GCSE level. But then schools such as the Abbey School and St Joseph's Convent are fee paying. If you are a child of divorced parents, your mother and father have been financially badly damaged already and all the less likely to afford the fees. Also both these schools are religious foundations which at least pay lip service to the ideals of Christian marriage. If you are paying $21,000+ per year to educate your child, you are seriously motivated about education (or at least certification) and will take a serious interest in his/her progress. It is a case of multiple good influences all blowing the same way, unlike the underclass where all the multiple bad influences blow the same way.

I could not help feel both elated and depressed in 1996 when I saw my Canadian friend Helen reading a simple story book with her two year old daughter. The little girl was being raised in Athens, so she was going to be naturally bilingual in English and Greek, and her mother and grandmother were working to make her trilingual in English, French and Greek. Obviously any child of the English underclass (such as the drowned trio above) was already at a hopeless disadvantage compared to Helen's daughter. And that is long before they even started school. What hope have you when your parents have no interest in education and you have no stable family support, with your mother bedding a string of transient boyfriends (who might also take the opportunity to bed you)?

From time to time you find an asinine article in one publication or another arguing for the abolition of private schools in the UK, always in the interests of "equality" and "fairness". Apart from the fact that such a ban would be in direct contradiction to European human rights legislation, the articulate middle classes would always find one way or another around it, not least by redoubling their efforts at informal education.

The most powerful education is of course personal example. Some years ago a local Indian woman became Local Hero for the day when she fought off a robber at her convenience store, despite being five feet nothing tall. She was not going to work 16 hours a day to have her money taken by some moronic thug. In passing, the article mentioned her four children. One was going to be a lawyer, another an accountant, another a doctor..... You can hardly accuse the British of discrimination in favour of the Indian minority. Their very visible success, like that of Jewish and Chinese minorities in Britain and elsewhere, is down to familial attitudes to education and hard work. Years ago I spoke to a teacher who described a Chinese immigrant visiting the school to check on his child's progress. In his halting English, he asked anxiously about his child's behaviour and his respect for his teachers. The teachers were astonished at this line of questioning, as the lad's behaviour and politeness were always impeccable. When reassured on these points, the father said: "That is good. Now we will talk about his work...."

In comparison, there is no place in the future for a substantial part of the British population. The only place for the English underclass in the legal European economy of 2030 would be washing Helen's daughter's Mercedes (no sane person would let them service its brakes or engine) or hoovering her apartment. But the Albanian underclass in Greece would be doing those jobs anyway. And that is assuming that a more motivated class of menial workers had not invaded Europe from Asia or Africa. No wonder so many will be forced into drug dealing, prostitution, pornography, burglary or any other illegal way of survival.

Part of the solution is already blindingly obvious. So much money is poured into public education that it would make more sense to give every child a voucher, redeemable at any school of the parent's choice. One educational writer claimed that educational expenditure per child is already over £9,000 ($16,000) a year, EXCLUDING the monstrous bureaucratic overheads of local educational authorities and the Department of Education. Paradoxically, at such levels of public expenditure there is no longer any justification for public schools. Every school should be private, cutting multiple knots simultaneously. Parents would be free to apply to any school they deemed suitable for their child: large or small, single sex or coed, religious or non-religious, with particular emphasis on maths, sports, music, languages, etc ( I wonder how many would opt for an explicitly atheist school???). No need to go cap in hand to a local education authority and fill out an impertinent application form, hoping that your child does not get forced into one of the substandard schools.

Plainly, as I noted in an earlier post, most of the vested interests above would oppose such a reform. But experience elsewhere, in Sweden, Holland and parts of the US, show its practical superiority in terms of parental commitment and academic achievement.

Yet this could only be a first step in achieving "better results", the tiresome obsession of much of the British middle class and media professionals. What are "better results" worth if it is just a higher percentage of pupils achieving higher scores in exams of doubtful credibility? The only worthwhile results are the eternal ones.

Far more important than the obvious academic deficit in the British underclass is the moral difference of wholesome example in family living and moral development. Helen's children would be raised in a stable loving home with two parents plus a network of grandparents, uncles, aunts and family friends who were not into drug dealing or other criminality. Most importantly of all, they would be raised in the knowledge of God, go to a private Catholic school in Athens and be surrounded by an overwhelmingly Christian culture.

A voucher chance of a proliferation of Christian schools, including innovative and imaginative styles of teaching free from central restraint, might be one huge step in recreating a civilised culture in Britain. It would certainly not be a sufficient step by itself. The cultural influences outside school walls are just too powerful at present. But it would be a significant ray of hope for many children whose present chance of a good career in any field is as remote as their chance of winning two Golden Globes....

Punching Above Your Weight

2009-02-09T07:01:00.000-08:00

Who influences whom? How big does a minority be to have a public voice? Plainly some groups acquire visibility and power out of all proportion to their numbers. Obvious examples include the Irish and Jewish communities. Who gives a fig about the huge German slice of the USA population - never mind the Serbs, Armenians, etc? Even the gruesome collection of Irish gangsters and terrorists who seem to have no problems accessing the White House for photocalls with the President have only a tiny organisation behind them - albeit they are backed by plenty of money derived from drug dealing and other racketeering.

I was fascinated to see the figures quoted for the main British atheist organisations - the British Humanist Association, the Rationalist Press Association and the National Secular Society have a few thousand members each out of a population of 60 million plus. Even the poor old Church of England, in its present diminished and fragmented state, boasts anywhere from 900,000 to 1,700,000 "regular" worshipers - depending on which figure you believe and how you define "regular". Catholic and Muslim communities similarly outnumber the atheists. Even the smaller Baptist, Methodist, Jewish, Sikh, Hindu and Buddhist communities dwarf the card-carrying atheists. Yet, the militant atheists are granted regular access to Parliamentary committees formulating public policy and future legislation.

From one viewpoint it is bizarre that such atheist organisations even exist. If you are a tennis player or a stamp collecting enthusiast you may join a club of like minded people. If you have no interest in such pursuits, you don't join a society of non-tennis players or one devoted to denouncing the evils of stamp collecting. As organisations inspired mainly by opposition to something else, atheist groups inevitably have problems attracting people for positive reasons.

Purely rationalist ethical and philosophical theories about how to lead a Good Life are utterly abstract and bloodless constructions with zero popular appeal. There is no such thing as a "non-practising" atheist. Admittedly in the late 19th century there were "Ethical Societies" which held quasi-religious meetings in London for non-believers in an age of widespread church attendance. These were forerunners of the present-day atheist movements. But most run of the mill modern British atheists seem content to wander through life in a state of non-belief without seeking formal attachment to any atheist club.

It is hardly surprising that the professional atheists end up adopting some ludicrous positions in opposition to Christian organisations, even those with the most marginal Christian influence. My favorite recent example was the campaign about the Scouts' oath mentioning God. The ever wickedly funny Bryan Appleyard (I recommend his demolition job on Princess Diana) had huge fun putting the boot in. See Oh Grow Up!

After all, if the atheists want a world wide atheist youth movement, there's nothing to stop them putting their money where their mouth is and doing just that, rather than bullying an organisation which had Christian foundations. Admittedly the history of non-Christian youth groups is not encouraging: the Hitler Youth, the Communist Pioneers, the Red Guards...all crumbled to dust like a vampire at dawn.

Politically Incorrect - Cuba Solidarity and Gay Liberation

2009-02-09T06:54:00.000-08:00

2009 is a year of multiple anniversaries - 70th anniversary of the start of WW2, 40th anniversary of the first Moon landing, 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall....oh, and the 50th anniversary of Castro's seizing power in Cuba. One of the many enjoyable and heartwarming sights recently has been numerous writers pouring excrement over the great man and all his works - notably Theodore Dalrymple at his best:

Cuba a Cemetery of Hopes

It is a measure of how far French political writers have come since the enchanted summer of '68; who could have imagined that "Le Monde" would one day be so critical of left wing Paradises?

It also reminded me of one of the most hilarious events in my life - better than any movie or stage comedian I have paid to see. It was the 1993 conference of my union in Bournemouth, on the South Coast. A motion was proposed that our union affiliate to the Cuba Solidarity Campaign. Normally, with all the gruesome old Stalinists on the Executive Committee, such a motion would have been instantly passed nem con (without dissent). Unfortunately, a Gay Liberation speaker jumped up to protest at Castro's treatment of his brethren in Havana. For a few terrible minutes two forms of Political Correctness faced a head-on crash. You could feel the Castro supporters tying themselves in knots trying not to offend the gays while upholding Fidel and all his marvelous works. Finally, the Cuba motion was passed, but it was a close-run thing......

Stranger Than Satire - Porn and Crucifixes

2009-02-09T06:45:00.000-08:00

It's getting harder and harder distinguishing between spoof news reports and so-called "real life". I was browsing the ever-funny "Daily Mash" website and then switched over to the allegedly serious "Daily Telegraph" for the "real news". What do I see? An item explaining that US porn barons are applying to Congress for a $5 billion bailout for the adult entertainment industry. Seems reasonable - the porn merchants probably have more satisfied customers than the Big Three of Detroit who are getting so much taxpayers' money.

But in the "Holy Smoke" blog on the "Telegraph" website its Religious Affairs correspondent Damian Thompson describes an even more surreal story from the little town of Horsham in the beautiful county of Sussex, south of London. The vicar at the Church of England parish has taken down the crucifix outside the church as it is a too-graphic depiction of pain and suffering. As Damian explains patiently, the Crucifixion involved nailing a man to a piece of wood......

Crucifix depicts pain and suffering, says vicar. So he takes it down.

The vicar of St John's Church, Horsham, has taken down a crucifix from the front of his church because its depiction of pain and suffering was too vivid. The Rev Ewen Souter was worried that the sculpture (which had been on the building for 45 years) might detract from the parish's "welcoming"...

Click on link for blog post. Image on this blog is NOT the crucifix at St. John's.

Serious Disrespect

2008-12-29T18:32:00.000-08:00

Two of my favourite commentators' paths converged recently. Peter Hitchens in England and Steve Chapman in the "Chicago Tribune" both noted the impact of security mania on free speech and insulating politicians from legitimate protests. The occasion of Peter's reflections on 22 December 2008 (http:/www.hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk) was the Iraqi guy who threw his shoes at George Bush - this is apparently a seriously offensive gesture in the Middle East. Peter ponders the most appropriate footwear - ordinary slip-ons are legitimate protest, while heavy boots might count as a weapon.

As Peter notes, more robust politicians used to accept heckling and rotten eggs as part of the democratic process. Before the days of the mass media, politicians had to go out and make loads of speeches in numerous places, without benefit of present day security. They inevitably faced the direct wrath of the electorate. It kept them in touch with ordinary people. Examples abound, but my favourite was the Victorian politician who was denounced by a voter at a rally:

"I wouldn't vote for you if you were the Archangel Gabriel".

"If I was the Archangel Gabriel, sir, you wouldn't be in my constituency...."

Steve Chapman on 24 December (http:/www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-oped1224chapmandec24,0,32491.column) notes the example of two peaceful protesters at a Bush rally, which was allegedly open to the general public - not just the Party faithful. They simply displayed two T-shirts with mild anti-Bush slogans and were immediately evicted by the police. Evidently a "balanced" Bush audience is divided between those who like him and those who love him.

Peter notes a similar example from the 2005 Labour Party conference, where debate used to be vigorous and uninhibited, to put it mildly. A 82 year old delegate, Walter Wolfgang, had been a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. He shouted "Nonsense" at some particularly ludicrous speech and was promptly seized by two of Blair's goons and evicted from the hall. Most of us felt that his intervention was excessively polite, given the indescribable garbage spouted at such events. Fortunately the whole affair was captured on camera and even Tony B Liar was forced to apologize.

What on earth would the security thugs do with Catalan protesters? I was introduced to this aspect of Catalonian culture at Midnight Mass at Douai. A know-all friend and I were admiring the simple Manger scene erected at the side of the high altar. He told me about the "caganer" or crapper who is a key character in Catalan manger sets. Along with Jesus, Mary and Joseph, the animals, shepherds and the Three Wise Men, there is a guy taking a dump in a corner of the stable. He has been a disreputable hanger on at the Nativity in Northern Spain since the 16th century. Often he is portrayed as some public hate figure. So guess who this year's favourite caganer is? Squat forward, GWB...... see this wonderful article by a New Zealand writer living in Barcelona http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0512/S00250.htm .

Thank You For Those Emails

2008-12-23T19:40:00.000-08:00

Dear family member and Friends  

As we move closer to the end of another year I wanted to thank you for all the e-mails you have forwarded to me over the past year.  

I must send a big thank you to whoever sent me the one about rat shit in the glue on envelopes, because I now have to use a wet sponge with every envelope that needs sealing.  

Also, I now have to wipe the top of every can I open for the same reason.  

I no longer have any savings because I gave it all to a sick girl who is about to die in the hospital for the 1,387,258th time. But that will change once I receive the $15,000 that Bill Gates and Microsoft are sending me for participating in their special email programs. Or from the senior bank clerk in Nigeria who wants to split seven million dollars with me for pretending to be a long lost relative of a customer who died inestate.  

And I need no longer worry about my soul because I have 363,214 angels looking out for me.  

I have learned that my prayers only get answered if I forward emails to seven friends and make a wish within five minutes.  

I no longer drink Coca-Cola because it can remove toilet stains.  

I no longer can buy petrol without taking a friend along to watch the car so a serial killer won't crawl in my back seat when I'm filling up.

  I no longer go to shopping centres because someone will drug me with a food sample and rob me.  I no longer answer the phone because someone will ask me to dial a number and then I'll get a phone bill with calls to Jamaica, Uganda, Singapore and Uzbekistan.  

I can't use anyone's toilet but mine because a big brown African spider is lurking under the seat to cause me instant death when it bites my bum.  

I can't even pick up the five pounds I found dropped in the car park because it was probably put there by a crazed axe murderer waiting under my car to grab my leg.  

If you don't send this email to at least 144,000 people in the next 10 minutes, a large pelican with an acute case of diarrhoea will sit on your head and fleas from 12 camels will infest your back, causing you to grow a most unsightly hairy hump.   I know this because it actually happened to a friend of my next door neighbour's ex-mother-in-law's second husband's cousin's plumber - and it was on the Today Show.  

By the way.... did you know that a South American scientist has, after a lengthy study, discovered that people with low IQs who don't have enough sex, always read their emails while holding the mouse. Don't bother taking it off now, it's too late.  

Regards,  
Your good friend in the UK

Christmas Greetings to the USA form the UK

2008-12-23T19:29:00.000-08:00

Sunday 21 December. A short drive west of Reading to Douai Abbey on the shortest night of the year for the Advent service of music, scripture readings and reflections by the monks. The exquisite music was conducted as usual by Dr John Rowntree, who has been running the music at Douai since the year dot. Driving home through the dark Berkshire countryside I was trying out a recently bought Johny Cash CD. Track 9 is introduced by merrily strumming guitar chords:

"My name it is Sam Hall, Sam Hall,
My name it is Sam Hall, it's Sam Hall,
My name it is Sam Hall,
And I hate you, one and all....."

It's always good to have an alternative voice at this time of compulsory love and peace to all mankind. I bought this album some weeks ago, and had put off listening to it until now, for the same reason - Track 2, "Hurt". I was introduced to this searing confessional piece by Madeleine Bunting, a presenter on "Something Understood", part of BBC Radio 4's early Sunday morning Godslot. Her subject for that week was pain and suffering and "Hurt" was one of the songs she played. The Man In Black, as usual, tells it like it is. There can't be many songs about injecting yourself for diabetes - I don't know of any others. Some have called it Cash's epitaph; it describes like few other songs the torments of physical disintegration and loneliness as your contemporaries die off.

Speaking of pain, I was doing some last minute shopping in Waterstones (the British equivalent of Barnes and Noble) on Tuesday 23rd when I spotted a whole new section within the wall of tomes in "Biography". I am not making this up - this ceiling-to-floor bookcase was headed "Painful lives". And who was featured within this bookcase? The greatest shelf footage was given over to biographies of Princess Diana, one of the most over-privileged humans in history. Is it too late to persuade Tom Lehrer to come out of retirement to write a suitably brutal piss-take of a song?

This is the time of year when God makes a temporary break out of the Godslot and appears in some unlikely corners of the British media. Monday 22nd saw a discussion of Christmas traditions on "Beyond Belief", a 25 minute general religious discussion program at 430pm on Radio 4 which runs for only part of the year. On 15th December "Beyond Belief" covered religious attitudes to eithanasia. At other times of the year this slot is occupied by an even more unlikely subject. "More or less" enlightens you on the subject of mathematics and statistics. Such programs must be even rarer than songs about diabetes and "More or less" is always straightforward, informative and thought provoking - as is "Beyond Belief".

The trouble is that 25 minutes is hardly long enough to do justice to any serious topic, secular or sacred. On top of which, you can't help feeling that the time of day reflects the importance which BBC bigwigs attach to essential subjects of which they know nothing and care less. 430pm is almost another graveyard slot, like the 600am-9am place for the Godslot. 430pm is too late to include such material in schools programming. It is too early for the drive time listeners coming home from work. And even full time homemakers will be preoccupied with children fresh home from school. Yet maths and religion are at the heart of the modern world and modern science. Statistical information and disinformation is essential to all policy development in every area of public life and propaganda, from economics to climate change to social security decisions.

The local papers do huge spreads of photographs of Nativity plays from most of the local primary (elementary) schools, both religious and secular, a happy reminder that there is no separation of Church and State in Britain. Children dressed up as shepherds, the Wise Men plus Jesus and Mary, get almost as much coverage as the local sports teams for a day or two. Local clergy may get quoted on the meaning of Christmas, though, as ever, our asinine Archbishop of Canterbury is guaranteed a bigger quote as he opens his mouth on the possibility of disestablishing the Church of England. If even the guardians won't guard the national church, what hope has it got? It seems strange that it takes a practising Jew to make the case for retaining the Church of England's current privileged status in British society: see www.melaniephillips.com/articles-new/?p=631

Even that temple of secularity, "The Guardian" gives a few column inches to God - even if it is only the appalling Polly Toynbee, their star columnist, heading her Christmas message: "God probably does not exist". Well, at least she declares her vested interest - as "President of the British Humanist Association and honorary associate of the National Secular Society". One of the most heartwarming sights of nearly every week is the ferocious savaging which Polly receives in the reader comments posted after every column she writes. Any other columnist on any other paper would have been politely requested to retire years ago before she became a total embarassment to the editor and owner; I can assume only that she has a bomb proof contract for life.

This year we have not one but two Midnight Masses in the parish. St James, in the town centre, is having Mass in English, while St William of York, in the University area, is having a full-blown Tridentine Latin celebration, probably with excellent choral support. Apparently they had Latin Midnight Mass at St William in 2007, but it was not publicised widely. I shall be paying a return visit to Douai on Wednesday evening for the 900pm Mass. You have a magnificent sung celebration, Benedictine hospitality afterwards with mulled wine and mince pies, plus you get to bed at a reasonable hour.

With fondest greetings to all in the USA.

Websense

2008-12-18T17:44:00.000-08:00

As you might have guessed from earlier posts, I have a very soft spot for the politically and religiously deranged of all persuasions. I recently tried checking out one of my favourite nutcase websites which I had not visited for some time. I tried accessing the pompously named Institute for Historical Review at our local library and a reproving message from "Websense" covered the screen: "The websense category "Racism and Hatred" is filtered. Your Websense policy blocks this page at all times". Er, excuse me? MY Websense policy? I have no such policy banning entry to any website. I had to access www.ihr.org from home.

Plainly some opinions are more vile and abominable than others. The Institute for Historical Review is so far beyond the pale of decency that grown adults are not allowed to access it from a public library and make up their own minds as to whether it has any merit or not. The most unacceptable stance of the IHR is, almost certainly, its reputation for Holocaust denial, though its website contains a mass of material on other subjects.

Does Websense maintain similar vigilance with regard to other unacceptable opinions? It seems highly variable, to put it politely. I had no trouble using the library's PCs to view the "Monthly Review" website, which has peddled Marxist theory and apologias for Communist tyrants for years. I never have any difficulty getting onto the "Guardian" website, which regularly runs articles attacking the family. In fact, like every British public library, Reading stocks the hard copy of the Guardian so that local people who won't use computers can read its ludicrous drivel in print form. The peerless Theodore Dalrymple pointed out a particularly priceless example http://www.city-journal.org/2008/eon1204td.html. Dalrymple's typically superb article covered the cases of "Baby P", a little boy murdered by his "parents" and Shannon Matthews, the little Yorkshire girl who was the victim of a ludicrous "kidnapping" staged by her depraved mother. The tragic fate of these children was obviously the result of the breakdown of any "traditional" family structure. But what does the "Guardian" do? Run an article headed: "Marriage is a form of prostitution".

Where have I heard that before? Of course, it is yet another offspring of Marxist theory on the economic analysis of society's class and power structures. Given that such theories are as utterly discredited as Holocaust denial, you might have thought that society's moral guardians would have shielded us from such dangerous opinions. But some opinions are obviously more equal than others, to adopt George Orwell's dictum.

Incidentally, who was "Baby P"? His real name was Peter Connolly, a fact that you could discover from a few seconds on Google. But evidently the British courts and media feel that we should not know that fact either. Not a single newspaper or TV station has mentioned his re

Obama and premature death

2008-12-16T18:15:00.000-08:00

Peter Hitchens in suitably acid tongued form. Maybe I've missed something, but I haven't noticed any of the British commentariat who hailed Obama's election as The Second Coming rushing to comment on the stench of corruption coming from his home base. Even by Tony B Liar standards of shameless corruption, the Illinois story is a cracker.
________________________________________________________________

Obama worshippers preparing for a Multiple Obasm when The Wonderful One is inaugurated next month must be shocked - deeply shocked - to find that their idol’s political base, Illinois, is a swamp of corruption where the Governor is (allegedly) trying to sell Obama’s Senate seat to the highest bidder.
Is it at all possible that Mr Obama (who recently endorsed that same Governor) could have spent years as a full-time politician in Illinois without noticing this? Oh, come on.
________________________________________________________________

What a strange society we are, squeamish about hanging guilty murderers, increasingly enthusiastic about dispatching the old and innocent.
Supporters of ‘assisted suicide’, especially if they own their own houses, should watch out lest one day they find their own suicide being enthusiastically assisted by people who don’t fancy seeing the family savings squandered on care-home fees.

Mercy Killing

2008-12-12T05:24:00.000-08:00

As ever, Melanie Phillips provides a cogent commentary on the strange legal attitude of the British authorities to euthanasia. As Mr Bumble protested "The law is an ass" on so many matters. It was particularly good to see Melanie reiterating the blindingly obvious - that "assisted suicide" is simply killing by the medical profession.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/3078041/in-the-public-interest.thtml

Every Child a Wanted Child ?

2008-12-05T05:24:00.000-08:00

One of the woes of getting older is that your memory isn't what is used to be. But didn't I recall an old slogan from my youth: "Every child a wanted child"? This was the war cry of the proponents of birth control and, by extension, abortion. The only children born after a few years (or decades) of free contraception and abortion would be genuinely loved and cared for by parents who had deliberately chosen to have them. Well, unfortunately, there seem to have been a few hiccups along the way. One of the most recent and extreme examples concerned a particularly unlucky 9 year old girl from Yorkshire. Shannon Matthews was one of 7 children who her "mother" had conceived by 5 men. So far, so normal British underclass. What made this unusual was that her "mother" cooked up a particularly ludicrous plot to have her daughter kidnapped and then "discovered" in return for a large reward. She and her dim witted accomplice now face long prison sentences. Somehow the message of only having children you really want fails to penetrate all parts of British and American society......

You can read more about it HERE.

UnReality TV

2008-11-21T05:14:00.001-08:00

Dear Stan,

Another brilliant piece by Peter Hitchens. It underlines the sinister effect of TV on so many people - if you see it "with your own eyes" it must be real and true. The most unreal of all are of course "reality TV" shows like Big Brother or, the mother of them all, "The Family" which depicted the "real life" of a Reading family in 1974 and which I described in an earlier post. As proof that you cannot keep a bad idea down, a 2008 version of "The Family" has just been aired, showing the dreary life of a family in Canterbury, 40 miles south-east of London. Needless to say, that city's peerless cathedral and Christian heritage were not much in evidence.

I particularly loved Peter's observation on men wearing makeup. A few years ago Reading Crown Court was under media siege because of the trial of a woman accused of murdering three of her children. As I walked past the court building and the satellite trucks, a young man was powdering his face and studying the results in a small mirror. It was a particulary creepy and unsettling moment; I assume he was a reporter for one of the numerous channels I do not watch, as I did not recognise him. Even a purely "factual" report evidently could not be delivered straight without the reporter adjusting his own image.

The young mother was acquitted of all three counts and all the channels displayed her joy at being "proved" innocent. But, in the best whodunnit tradition, it was revealed afterwards that she had been investigated separately for the attempted murder of a fourth child.....

Peter's comments on our two biggest icons, Tony B. Liar and Princess Diana, are particularly revealing. Both were plainly utterly unworthy of the status and public influence they were given; Tony's catastrophic appointments to Government positions alone show how completely unfit he was for public office. But somehow on TV they were highly convincing performers. Princess Diana must have been the most "recognisable" person in history; yet Peter did not recognise her at first meeting.

===================================================================================

........the perniciousness of TV would be just as bad even if it were used to promote causes I like. I can say this quite safely since I know that it won't do so, but it also happens to be true. TV influences the human mind in ways which defy and avoid reason and ignore facts. It is also seduced by appearances, and extraordinarily bad at picking up the subtle negative signs that humans give off when you meet them personally. I have often pointed out that TV is good at making bad people look good, and also at making good people look bad.

Two striking examples of this are Princess Diana and Anthony Blair ( and of course now Barack Obama). I am not suggesting that any of these were or are personally wicked. But I am suggesting that their effects on our society have generally been bad, and that without TV they could not have achieved those things. Diana's televisual glamour was astonishing, and made people ignore her many episodes of bad behaviour, most notably her erratic private life (surely unwise in the mother of young boys) and her incredibly destructive BBC interview with Martin Bashir. Compare the response to Prince Charles's equally destructive TV interview with Jonathan Dimbleby, which rightly rebounded hard on him and has done him damage ever since.

In the case of Mr Blair and Mr Obama, I have never seen Mr Obama in the flesh so I can only comment on his record, but he seems to me to be a rather ordinary and undistinguished politician who once made one good speech but generally contents himself with imitations of Martin Luther King. Those who have the 'I have a dream' speech imprinted on their brains, as many of my generation do, must have noticed how similar Mr Obama's voice, cadences and inflections are to those of Dr King. As I scurried through various US airports during the election campaign, Mr Obama's speeches were often relayed on TVs in the concourses, and more than once I thought I was actually hearing Dr King. But how can this be? Dr King's voice and vocabulary were the product of a specifically Southern and deeply Christian upbringing and background, especially an intimate knowledge of the Authorised (King James) version of the Bible.

Mr Obama has never lived anywhere in the American South, he did not have a Christian upbringing and his acquaintance with the Bible only began when he signed up to Trinity Church. If he sounds like Dr King ( and he does) it must be because he - consciously or unconsciously - seeks to do so. You think this unlikely? You're welcome to do so. But politicians are very concerned about how they sound. We learned on Sunday from my colleague Simon Walters that the teenage Tory Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, has used a voice coach, apparently in a (not wholly successful) effort to make himself sound less posh.

In the flesh I expect Mr Obama is a fairly ordinary person, who I suspect smells quite strongly and unglamorously of cigarettes if you can get close enough to him. Princess Diana, likewise, was so beloved by the camera that the reality was deeply disappointing. The first time I saw her in person, from about ten feet away, it took me 30 seconds to realise that this was the face that launched a thousand headlines. This angular, awkward figure was the monarch of glamour? Surely not. Yet it was so.

As for Mr Blair, my own experience and that of many others who have dealt with him directly has been that he is a person who knows very little about the world, rarely reads, and is of rather limited intelligence. Yet TV has managed to make him look like a world statesman.

That is one of TV's faults, its creation of wholly false images. But because it enters the mind unmediated, a word whose significance Mr Lewis seems to have missed, it bypasses all kinds of important filters. A child dealing with an adult, be it a parent and teacher, gets its impression of that adult not just from a screen persona which may or may not be true, but from a complete experience. the child will see that person when in a hurry, on the mornings when that person has overslept or missed the bus or had a puncture, or left a label standing up at the back of a shirt. The child will have seen that person in good and bad moods, tired, irritable, distracted. In short, it will be much better able to judge what that person says. TV persons are too good. They never make mistakes or have spots. They are always on their best behaviour, always combed and properly dressed, always carefully lit to their advantage, always anxious to show their good sides and conceal their bad ones. Even the men wear make-up, and (I speak as a person who has appeared a few times on TV) the relaxation of tension when the cameras finally turn away and the microphones are off is considerable, as is the difference between the behaviour and language of TV people off and on screen. People on TV are consciously not being fully themselves.

Then there is the difference between books and TV. A child who reads books forms his own pictures of the characters, sometimes aided by verbal description but undoubtedly his own. He imagines their voices and mannerisms. So does the author. But each experience is individual. This is why, for those of us who were brought up before TV was the overwhelming master of our culture, the filming of beloved classic books is always a disappointment. We know the characters did not speak or look like that . Similarly, once TV or movies have taken over a classic, there is only one image. Sherlock Holmes will now always look more or less like Basil Rathbone (actors who play him until the end of time have to pass this test) Inspector Morse, who didn't look in the least like John Thaw in Colin Dexter's early books, came in the later books to be identical to Mr Thaw, and acquired a red Jaguar too. Even 'Brideshead Revisited' was so taken over by the Jeremy Irons version that the miserable movie remake often copies the TV series in visual imaging (the casting of the minor character Hooper is particularly striking. The film actor is obviously based on the TV actor). As for 'Pride and Prejudice' , this is now rapidly ceasing to be the property of Jane Austen. In the end, Andrew Davies will have remodelled most of English literature.

St. Barack Worship

2008-11-18T09:06:00.000-08:00

Stan,

Thought you might enjoy Peter Hitchen's comments on the Obama media mania.

=======

St Barack’s Expensive Schools and Sneaky Cigarettes.

Still the Obama-worship continues. Scores of Americans denounced me for suggesting last week that Mr. Obama was not divine. How do these people cope with the fact that the President-elect, following a fine old Left-wing tradition on both sides of the Atlantic, is seeking to send his daughters to terrifyingly expensive private schools in Washington DC?

Surely, in between curing cancer and mending the hole in the ozone layer, Mr. Obama can fix the US capital’s atrocious state schools?

And have any of you ever seen a picture of Mr Obama, a heavy smoker, with a cigarette in his mouth? No, nor have I. Why is that?

Remembance Sunday

2008-11-12T02:52:00.000-08:00

Sunday 9th November was Remembrance Sunday and our parish newsletter had the following poem on the front, which I am sure you would like to share:
--------------------------------------------------------

If I should never see the moon again
Rising red gold across the harvest field,
Or feel the stinging of soft April rain,
As the brown earth her hidden treasures yield.

If I should never taste the salt sea spray
As the ship beats her course against the breeze,
Or smell the dog-rose and the new mown hay,
Or moss and primroses beneath the tree.

If I should never hear the thrushes wake
Long before sunrise in the glimmering dawn,
Or watch the huge Atlantic rollers break
Against the rugged cliffs in baffling scorn.

If I have said goodbye to stream and wood,
To the wide ocean and the green clad hill,
I know that He who made this world so good
Has somewhere made a heaven better still.

This I bear witness with my latest breath
Knowing the love of God, I fear not death.

(Lines found in the Bible of Major Malcom Boyle,
killed in action after the landing on D-Day, June 1944)

The night we waved goodbye to America... our last best hope on Earth

2008-11-12T02:43:00.000-08:00

Dear Stan,

Here is Peter Hitchen's ever razor sharp dissection of the Obama hysteria. He is perhaps unfair in comparing it to the frenzy on the demise of Princess Diana. Having had the misfortune to be in England in 1997 for that tsunami of garbage, hypocrisy and falsification, I don't think even the torrent of drivel written so far on Obama by the British media quite approaches their week long abandonment of sanity that September. It was particularly good to see Peter reminding the British public of the inglorious cesspit of corruption and cronyism behind the Democratic machine in Chicago.

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

The night we waved goodbye to America... our last best hope on Earth

Anyone would think we had just elected a hip, skinny and youthful replacement for God, with a plan to modernise Heaven and Hell – or that at the very least John Lennon had come back from the dead.

The swooning frenzy over the choice of Barack Obama as President of the United States must be one of the most absurd waves of self-deception and swirling fantasy ever to sweep through an advanced civilisation. At least Mandela-worship – its nearest equivalent – is focused on a man who actually did something.
I really don’t see how the Obama devotees can ever in future mock the Moonies, the Scientologists or people who claim to have been abducted in flying saucers. This is a cult like the one which grew up around Princess Diana, bereft of reason and hostile to facts.

It already has all the signs of such a thing. The newspapers which recorded Obama’s victory have become valuable relics. You may buy Obama picture books and Obama calendars and if there isn’t yet a children’s picture version of his story, there soon will be.

Proper books, recording his sordid associates, his cowardly voting record, his astonishingly militant commitment to unrestricted abortion and his blundering trip to Africa, are little-read and hard to find.

If you can believe that this undistinguished and conventionally Left-wing machine politician is a sort of secular saviour, then you can believe anything. He plainly doesn’t believe it himself. His cliche-stuffed, PC clunker of an acceptance speech suffered badly from nerves. It was what you would expect from someone who knew he’d promised too much and that from now on the easy bit was over.

He needn’t worry too much. From now on, the rough boys and girls of America’s Democratic Party apparatus, many recycled from Bill Clinton’s stained and crumpled entourage, will crowd round him, to collect the rich spoils of his victory and also tell him what to do, which is what he is used to.

Just look at his sermon by the shores of Lake Michigan. He really did talk about a ‘new dawn’, and a ‘timeless creed’ (which was ‘yes, we can’). He proclaimed that ‘change has come’. He revealed that, despite having edited the Harvard Law Review, he doesn’t know what ‘enormity’ means. He reached depths of oratorical drivel never even plumbed by our own Mr. Blair, burbling about putting our hands on the arc of history (or was it the ark of history?) and bending it once more toward the hope of a better day (Don’t try this at home).

I am not making this up. No wonder that awful old hack Jesse Jackson sobbed as he watched. How he must wish he, too, could get away with this sort of stuff.

And it was interesting how the President-elect failed to lift his admiring audience by repeated – but rather hesitant – invocations of the brainless slogan he was forced by his minders to adopt against his will – ‘Yes, we can’. They were supposed to thunder ‘Yes, we can!’ back at him, but they just wouldn’t join in. No wonder. Yes we can what exactly? Go home and keep a close eye on the tax rate, is my advice. He’d have been better off bursting into ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony’ which contains roughly the same message and might have attracted some valuable commercial sponsorship.

Perhaps, being a Chicago crowd, they knew some of the things that 52.5 per cent of America prefers not to know. They know Obama is the obedient servant of one of the most squalid and unshakeable political machines in America. They know that one of his alarmingly close associates, a state-subsidised slum landlord called Tony Rezko, has been convicted on fraud and corruption charges.

They also know the US is just as segregated as it was before Martin Luther King – in schools, streets, neighbourhoods, holidays, even in its TV-watching habits and its choice of fast-food joint. The difference is that it is now done by unspoken agreement rather than by law.

If Mr Obama’s election had threatened any of that, his feel-good white supporters would have scuttled off and voted for John McCain, or practically anyone. But it doesn’t. Mr Obama, thanks mainly to the now-departed grandmother he alternately praised as a saint and denounced as a racial bigot, has the huge advantages of an expensive private education. He did not have to grow up in the badlands of useless schools, shattered families and gangs which are the lot of so many young black men of his generation.

If the nonsensical claims made for this election were true, then every positive discrimination programme aimed at helping black people into jobs they otherwise wouldn’t get should be abandoned forthwith. Nothing of the kind will happen. On the contrary, there will probably be more of them.

And if those who voted for Obama were all proving their anti-racist nobility, that presumably means that those many millions who didn’t vote for him were proving themselves to be hopeless bigots. This is obviously untrue.

I was in Washington DC the night of the election. America’s beautiful capital has a sad secret. It is perhaps the most racially divided city in the world, with 15th Street – which runs due north from the White House – the unofficial frontier between black and white. But, like so much of America, it also now has a new division, and one which is in many ways much more important. I had attended an election-night party in a smart and liberal white area, but was staying the night less than a mile away on the edge of a suburb where Spanish is spoken as much as English, plus a smattering of tongues from such places as Ethiopia, Somalia and Afghanistan.

As I walked, I crossed another of Washington’s secret frontiers. There had been a few white people blowing car horns and shouting, as the result became clear. But among the Mexicans, Salvadorans and the other Third World nationalities, there was something like ecstasy.

They grasped the real significance of this moment. They knew it meant that America had finally switched sides in a global cultural war. Forget the Cold War, or even the Iraq War. The United States, having for the most part a deeply conservative people, had until now just about stood out against many of the mistakes which have ruined so much of the rest of the world.

Suspicious of welfare addiction, feeble justice and high taxes, totally committed to preserving its own national sovereignty, unabashedly Christian in a world part secular and part Muslim, suspicious of the Great Global Warming panic, it was unique.

These strengths had been fading for some time, mainly due to poorly controlled mass immigration and to the march of political correctness. They had also been weakened by the failure of America’s conservative party – the Republicans – to fight on the cultural and moral fronts.

They preferred to posture on the world stage. Scared of confronting Left-wing teachers and sexual revolutionaries at home, they could order soldiers to be brave on their behalf in far-off deserts. And now the US, like Britain before it, has begun the long slow descent into the Third World. How sad. Where now is our last best hope on Earth?

AMERICA BUYS ALL THAT CHANGE BULLSHIT

2008-11-05T02:21:00.001-08:00

Dear Stan,   Excerpt from the ever-acidic "Daily Mash" on the election result, which came through at about 5am London time (I was listening with one ear to the bedside radio). I should explain that "Lord Dimbleby" is David Dimbleby, one of the BBC's long time presenters. The fact that he and his younger brother Jonathan are always on our screens has, of course, nothing to do with the fact that their late father Richard was for decades the British equivalent of Walter Kronkite. Keep the family business in the family, I say.     AMERICA BUYS ALL THAT CHANGE BULLSHIT

"Change... yeah... of course"

BARAK Obama swept to victory last night as millions of Americans lapped up all that bullshit about change.

The Illinois senator made history as the first black American to become President and the 44th man to win the office with a lot of vague platitudes and an army of creepy spin doctors.

He told a crowd of 250,000 supporters in his home city of Chicago: "Remember, change is something that happens in the middle of the night when we're all fast asleep and very often the next morning no-one can tell that anything has actually changed.

"I promised you change you can believe in, I did not promise you change you can actually see."
He added: "You believe in Jesus don't you? Right, but have you ever seen Jesus? Exactly. Just making sure we're all on the same page."

Mr Obama said he would bring about change by working closely with the vast and terrifying multi-national corporations that had funded his campaign and pledged to end the war in Iraq in order to create a much bigger war in Afghanistan.

"But instead of some middle-aged white guy doing it, it'll be me and I'm half-Kenyan. What's that about?"

Bill McKay, a college student from Denver, said: "I can't believe I now live in a country where an African American can be elected to the presidency after spending just $600 million on advertising."

He added: "Give me a hug!"

Meanwhile, in the UK, thousands of people talked about staying up all night to watch the drama unfold, but then didn't.

Martin Bishop, from Oxford, said: "I was going to follow the coverage and have the significance of every result explained to me by Lord Dimbleby but then, at the last minute, I decided to go to bed because I don't care."

Denys Hatton, from Guildford, added: "If your life is such that you're placing all your hopes in one politician, then may I humbly suggest you get yourself a crate of superlager and a cardboard box and stop wasting everyone's time."

How the Stock Market Works

2008-10-24T05:59:00.000-07:00

Great parable for investors in stock market.....or for people following any short-term panic. (Sent by friend at church)

It was autumn, and the Red Indians asked their New Chief if the winter
was going to be cold or mild. Since he was a Red Indian chief in a
modern society, he couldn't tell what the weather was going to be.

Nevertheless, to be on the safe side, he replied to his Tribe that the
winter was indeed going to be cold and that the members of the village
should collect wood to be prepared.

But also being a practical leader, after several days he got an idea.
He went to the phone booth, called the National Weather Service and
asked 'Is the coming winter going to be cold?'

'It looks like this winter is going to be quite cold indeed,' the
weather man Responded.

So the Chief went back to his people and told them to collect even
more wood. A week later, he called the National Weather Service again.
'Is it going to be a very cold winter?'

'Yes,' the man at National Weather Service again replied, 'It's
definitely going to be a very cold winter.'

The Chief again went back to his people and ordered them to collect
every scrap of wood they could find. Two weeks later, he called the
National Weather Service again. 'Are you absolutely sure that the
winter is going to be very cold?'

'Absolutely,' The Man replied. 'It's going to be one of the coldest
winters ever.'

'How can you be so sure?' the Chief asked.

The weatherman replied, 'The Red Indians are collecting wood like
crazy.'

This is how Stock Markets work.

Speaking in Tongues

2008-10-23T18:09:00.000-07:00

One of the fascinating aspects of my visit to Scotland last June was the reminder that English is not the only British language. The extraordinary little resort of "Tongue" on the far north coast was originally the Gaelic Tonga. The language is still spoken by over 60,000 people on the Scottish mainland and islands, where geographical isolation has helped to ward off the all-conquering English dominance. This was the depressing statistic cited in a recent "Scotland on Sunday" article, where specialists fretted that this "60,000" was the figure below which its long-time survival was unlikely. "Scotland on Sunday" pays lip service by having about a quarter of a page each week devoted to an article in Scots Gaelic. But it is otherwise as marginal a presence in the Scottish media as it is in the population.

The occasion for this gloom was the very expensive launch of a BBC channel dedicated to the Scottish Gaelic language (not to be confused with the Irish Gaelic, which Irish friends assure me is as different from its Scottish relation as German is from English). I wondered if this pessimism was justified. Minority languages hang on in the most unlikely and surprising corners of the world.

The example which surprised me most was the various dialects of Sorbian, a Slavic language spoken by small communities in Eastern Germany. Despite being immersed in the German speaking majority for centuries and persecuted or ignored under Nazi and Communist regimes, they have preserved their language and culture. Estimates of the number of Sorbian speakers vary from 45,000 to 60,000, close to that of Scottish Gaelic speakers. This seems to be a magic survival number, at least for the rational computerised models which predict the number of speakers, and the extinction of the Sorbian language at some point in the 21st century has been similarly forecast . But I would not bet on it.

If you drive in the west of England and scan the radio waves, you may find an unusual text appearing on the radio display: "BBC CYMRU". Yes, you have hit the BBC Welsh channel, which caters for a much larger number of speakers than its Scottish counterpart. Cross the Severn Bridge into Wales and bilingual signs appear by the roadside. Go deep into Wales and you actually hear people speaking Welsh in the street.

You are very unlikely to hear it in the capital city of Cardiff, where Welshness is flaunted mainly by sticking a dragon on everything from the sides of buses to the postage stamps. But go to the wild and beautiful north and you hear young men out on their lunch break in small town centres in animated discussion in their native tongue (most likely of Rugby results). With 600,000 speakers, its survival looks mor assured than that of Scottish Gaelic.

I stopped at a farmhouse in North Wales for the night during a brief holiday in 1991 and my charming hostess served me tea and biscuits (cookies). The phone rang and she immediately switched to high speed Welsh talking to a friend. She took me upstairs to the bedroom, which was obviously the children's bedroom on other occasions. The brightly coloured spelling chart on the wall did not show "A for Apple" and "B for Bird". The Roman alphabet was taught using Welsh words.

In the 1970s I worked with a colleague whose second language was English. He had spoken only Welsh up to the age of seven. But then he was of an older generation, immediately before the all-conquering power of video and TVs in every child's bedroom showing multiple TV channels. The seductive attraction of this beautiful language was vividly illustrated in the recent film "The Edge of Love" about two of the women in the crowded love life of the poet Dylan Thomas. In one very telling scene Thomas and Vera, one of his old flames, sing a song in Welsh in front of her English husband. The bond of a common childhood language is something which the husband cannot share.

Many Welsh schools provide education in Welsh as well as English and universities still offer first and higher degrees. A friend has recently achieved first class honours in Welsh studies at Aberyswyth University.

Also there is official endorsement for Civil Service puposes. If you write to a Government department in Welsh, your letter should be answered in Welsh. After all, it is a much more ancient language than English. For a few years in the late 1980s and early 1990s I maintained the Department of Social Security's collection of standard letters - about 2,500 WordPerfect files covering all the major benefits - sickness, incapacity, widows pension, etc. One initiative which was proposed was to duplicate all these letters in Welsh. Two major problems were immediately obvious. One was finding enough skilled translators to turn all these documents into legally accurate Welsh. The second was how to shoehorn these extra 2,500 files onto the ancient PCs in local offices around the country. Even with the help of data compression software, their tiny hard drives were already bursting at the seams. Fortunately I moved on to other tasks and dumped my paperwork with my successor before we reached that impasse.

The Welsh, Scottish, Irish and Sorbian languages are all recipients of substantial amounts of public funds to assist their survival. There is good reason to doubt the effectiveness of public subsidy in the face of the overwhelming English linguistic imperialism. When even major European languages such as German and French are challenged on their home ground, it would be amazing if marginalised language groups could hold their own. One scathing Irish commentator described the results in the "Gaeltacht", the Gaelic-speaking western fringe of the Irish Republic, "We are spending millions to subsidise a Gaeltacht of rural slums where the everyday language is English, employment is unobtainable and a once proudly independent people have been corrupted into relying on public handouts". That was written well before the "Celtic tiger" revolution in the Irish economy transformed the prospects of people in the poverty-stricken west. But this financial transformation has had other utterly unpredicted results; the minority language you are most likely to hear in the west of Ireland these days is Polish. The regional centre of Limerick was grimly portrayed in "Angela's Ashes" as a place that dynamic young people of the 1940s and 50s were desperate to escape at any price - to England, Australia, America, wherever. Now it is invaded by dynamic young Poles to the extent that Polish shops, restaurants, banks and a medical centre have sprung up.

We are prepared to spend huge sums to conserve ancient buildings and works of art. A language embodies the essence of a living culture. Imagine if English disappeared as a living language and all the works of English literature could be appreciated only in translations and by a few eccentric academics studying dusty texts. It seems equally necessary to keep languages alive as to keep threatened species of animals in being; to have a living population of speakers rather than a mass of neglected textbooks and forgotten classics in the corner of a library.

At least one neglected language needs no public subsidy to keep it alive. At St William of York I go to the 900am Mass on Sunday. We cannot linger too long afterwards for coffee and conversation. The cups have to be washed and stored away because the Latin Mass Society (LMS) have arrived for their Mass at 1100am. A whole new wooden platform is quickly assembled in the sanctuary, so that the post-Vatican altar for Mass facing the people can be used for Mass where the celebrant has his back to the congregation. A sizable congregation turns up, some from as far as 20 miles away. Minivans carrying large families crowd the car park; even the parents are clearly too young to remember the Latin Mass as it was said up to the 1960s. You can hear the traditional Latin Mass in many parts of the country, but the next nearest venues would most likely be in Oxford 30 miles to the north or London 40 miles to the east.

I say "hear" the Mass because for most of the service the congregation is silent and the priest alone recites the prayers. I have been to a couple of these Latin Masses and they are a striking reminder of what a recent innovation the dialogue Mass is. It is a 1950s innovation. For 19 centuries Mass was recited as the LMS arrange it today.

It is also a reminder of how recently the Church was so powerfully united by one language. Wherever you went in the world, it was as if the curse of Babel had been temporarily suspended, for at least one sacred hour. We could all share the same words without a translator. Like the first Pentecost, people from all over the known world could hear about the marvels of God, simultaneously, albeit not in their native languages.

Go to Lourdes or some other major international religious site nowadays and you get a taste of linguistic bedlam. As if the major services at Lourdes were not long enough, you get some sections recited 4 or 5 times in French, English, Italian, Spanish and German - plus extra repeats if the Poles or Flemish-speaking Belgians (as opposed to French-speaking Belgians) are in town..... 50 years ago it was one united service which everyone could share spontaneously. It is a reminder of the tensions between the advantages of linguistic unity and preserving precious jewels from the margins of human genius.

Human Perfection and Imperfection

2008-10-17T04:28:00.000-07:00

[This post by Stan. Bill sent me the article below, and here are my comments on it.]

Click HERE for the full article by Amy Becker about her reflections on her Down syndrome child Penny, pictured at the right with her husband Peter. The title link will take you to FIRST THINGS' website. (More links to her stuff below.)

The article begins below, but I encourage you to read it to the end and try to fully understand Amy's take on what it means to be perfect and imperfect, especially as we automatically apply the concepts to babies, but also to ourselves.

"What shall it gain a man if he should gain the whole world but loose his soul?" (Jesus' words from somewhere in the Gospels.)

At first glance this article looks like it might be an argument against abortion when the child has Down syndrome, and indeed it is that. (cf. Sarah Palin and the fear people have of her because she sees perfection in babies at a different level than most. Her insight into this is supernatural and transcendent...a valuable asset for a world leader.)

But the article is more significant than just an argument against abortion. As Becker explains there is an extra chromosome that gave Penny the disease (something extra that apparently "distorts" physical perfection). Becker inmplies, but never says it, that there is a more serious affect of adding extra "chromosones" -- to our lives and culture. Such "extras" have a more serious impact on our spiritual perfection before God. Penny's chromosome "problem" is small compared to what we do otherwise to our "spiritual" chromosomes.

But her point is actually better than that.

She writes, "humanity includes limitations and dependence on one another." But what she is really saying is that humanity is not defined by culture's view of physical "perfection" but by God's view which NECESARILY includes limitations and dependence. That is "humanity is DEFINED as something that includes 'limitations' and 'dependence.'" To be truly human is to be dependent on others and God. If we believe we are independent we buy into Satan's lie that we can be like God. Humanity IN ITS PERFECTION requires, demands, begs, screams for limitations and dependence. IN THOSE THINGS we are made PERFECT (James 1).

She writes, "when we conceive of healing simply as miraculous cures for abnormal states of being—blindness, deafness, cognitive delays—we miss the point." Indeed! Some years back I began to look at all the aged and mentally dependent senior citiziens I was meeting in several churches that ministed to such folk. It occured to me that one of their purposes in life was to teach us abled body, and mentally "capable" people to CARE for them. By their "disabilities" they were teaching us to love, to be charitable, to give of our time and resoruces, to be like Christ. Just as we can never pay back Christ for all he's done for us, so these aged and mentally dependent people I was meeting could never pay back their caregivers. But that was the point. When society sees them as "disabled" or "not living fully" or as "unnecessary" we should be seehing them as just the opposite, if we have any interest in seeing heaven and God. Humanity was designed as a DEPENDENT DISABLED specese for a reason... so we could accept God's love, and share it with others.

Indeed, Penny, in the ways that matter most (eternal values) is more perfect with her Downs than many others. Pray for us Penny. (More pictures of Penny at link below.)

BABIES PERFECT AND IMPERFECT
by Amy Julia Becker

Copyright (c) 2008 First Things (November 2008).

Our daughter was born at 5:22 p.m. on December 30, 2005. Two hours later, a nurse called my husband out of the room. When he returned, he took my hand and said, “They think Penny has Down syndrome.” As this news began to make its way into my consciousness, we heard shouts from the room next door. Another child had been born. “She’s perfect!” someone exclaimed about that other baby. “She’s perfect!”

Amy's website, with more pictures and her other writing is HERE. She's working on a Masters in Divinity at Princeton, and has a book coming out. Her blog is THIN PLACES. Thanks to my bogging-pal Bill Murphy for sending this. This is also posted on my blog at CROSSING NINEVEH.

British View of U.S. Events

2008-10-14T02:51:00.000-07:00

Dear Stan,

Here is Melanie Phillips' typically cogent view of the US election fray: (I'm going to post this on my own site, Bill. Her summary is very cogent and to the point.) See HERE.

http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles-new/?p=618

Further to the financial meltdown: the headlines in one paper yesterday described our boss Sir Fred Goodwin, chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland, as falling on his sword. Falling on several sackfulls of money, more like. He has quit his job after RBS was forced to accept a £20 billion ($35 billion) bailout from the Government (i.e. the ever-luckless taxpayer), but will be consoled by a £580,000 ($1 million) a year pension. Also it's nice to see that someone's doing well out of the Lehmann Brothers debacle....the lawyers of course. It will cost $350 million in legal fees to sort out the mess. At $950 an hour, some lawyers are going to have a very Merry Christmas.

I loved the explanation of one American legal firm whose hourly rates were at the top of the table for US lawyers. Their rates were inflated because they had two partners in London who were billing at British rates. With the currency conversion rates at the time, they outstripped the most expensive US lawyers. Of course Shakespeare said it all in Henry VI: "The first thing we do is kill all the lawyers..."

The Finaical Crisis in the UK

2008-10-11T07:44:00.000-07:00

Dear Stan,

Thanks for the news. The financial disasters are heavily dramatised in the media, as you might expect, though the wise have been warning about the unsustainability of our housing-price boom for years. The bail-out proposed for the big 4 British banks, including the royal Bank of Scotland where I work, is £500 billion ($850 billion). This is more than the fortune proposed for the US economy with 5 times the population, but the figures are so insanely huge it is like talking about the distance to the "nearest" galaxy - still beyond human understanding.

Most unbelievable of all is the heavy British involvement in Icelandic banks - around $7 billion invested in the Icelandic banks by all sorts of British institutions, due to the favourable interest rates offered. Major charities, hospital trusts, local councils.... I didn't know the SOBs had so much of our cash to invest. I bet some of them have an extra hard time fund raising once the dust has settled. One cautious council which did not take the Icelandic bait said that they thought the offers were "too good to be true". Spot on. I sometimes think that our more rabid political bloggers are far too vicious, cruel and foul-mouthed about our politicians. Then something like this happens and you realise that they are too kind and tolerant about them.

The "Daily Mash" had merciless fun at some of the investors in Icelandic banks, quoting one appalled "financial expert": "I thought Iceland was a huge economy next door to Belgium. Now, after checking the internet, I realise it is a stinking volcano in the Arctic inhabited by 3 weirdo singers and six fishermen....no one warned me." Slight exaggeration, but its total population is about that of Reading. Given the amount they owe British investors, we probably own the whole country lock stock and barrel.

The weird thing about being at the centre of this storm is how little everyday life is affected. At the bank, there has been frantic business as customers spread their funds between multiple banks - the Government is guaranteeing up to £50K per person per bank. But even that has not been as manic as you might expect. Given that the Government has taken huge numbers of preferential shares in all 4 big banks to prop them up, we have had no clear guidance as to whether our status has changed - are we all going to be civil servants now?

Thanks for the news about your changing parishes (our liberal priest got to me - sw.) Part of the problem with Reading is that we are part of an extremely liberal diocese (Portsmouth), so the rot afflicts all parishes to a certain extent. I have not done the obvious thing and crossed to a parish on the north bank of the river - the Thames marks the boundary with Birmingham diocese.

Abortion and Families

2008-10-10T18:12:00.000-07:00

Dear Stan,

As a follow up to earlier posts:

Here is a typically superb article from Theodore Dalrymple in "City Journal", looking at the state of childcare in Britain. Part of it heavily overlaps with one of my earlier posts. Of course, his experiences as a prison doctor and a doctor in a grim inner city area of Birmingham colours his outlook, but you cannot accuse him of dishonesty. The state of physical neglect, emotional abuse and spiritual vacuity inflicted on helpless children by grossly inadequate or depraved parents beggars belief. The ultimate consequences can be seen in prisons where the dedicated workers find themselves helping prisoners who have no concept of family life and have never sat at a table for a meal.

Of course, many children suffer in a way which is not quite bad enough to force decisive action by social services and/or the police, whereby they are taken into care or subject to supervision orders. One of my friends works as a teaching assistant in a school on the west side of Reading. This school is by no means the lowest of the circles of Hell in British education, but in a "remedial class" she tries to teach 12 and 13 year old students who do not know left from right or simple concepts such as North and South. One of the pupils is visibly filthy with ingrained dirt in his skin. As children are notoriously merciless to any child who is slightly odd or different, you can imagine what his school life is like. Another teacher friend recalled how she used to wash a little girl as part of the weekly swimming lessons at school. Each week she took a fresh sponge because, after a thorough scrubbing down in the shower, the sponge was black. The poor child confessed how lovely it was to feel clean.

Of course, there have always been inadequate parents. And in the past children from otherwise good homes suffered terrible deprivation due to desperate economic conditions. But now that we have standards of living beyond the dreams of people 100 years ago, we still have large numbers of deprived and neglected children. A significant part of the problem, as Dalrymple clearly describes, is the attitudes of people in positions of authority. Plainly the lunatics have taken over the asylum when esteemed commentators regard grossly disordered families as a valid lifestyle choice. No one should criticise such choices and everyone, including the cruelly "judgemental", should be forced to subsidise them.

http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_3_otbie-british_children.html

Of course, such "commentators" in the pages of the Guardian or Observer would regard incompetent parents as blameworthy only insofar as they had failed to use contraception or abortion to prevent the birth of children who they couldn't look after. Further to my recent posts on medical experiments, I remember the autobiography of A J Cronin, another of the distinguished company of doctor/authors, along with Dalrymple and Chekhov. Cronin wrote the "The Citadel", which was made into the 1938 classic starring Robert Donat. Robert Donat's dedicated doctor loses his way and by implication his soul when he moves to the big city and starts making truckloads of money treating the wealthy. Cronin was also the author of "Doctor Finlay", a huge favourite of my 1960s childhood when it was a long running BBC serial. It portrayed the lives of two Scottish doctors in a small Scottish town in the 1920s. Cronin recalled as a matter of undisputed fact how any doctor performing abortions was an utter outcast and pariah, a lost soul. Cronin was Catholic, but he was clearly describing the matter-of-fact professional assumption of his generation of doctors. How things have changed. Now movies get made about experimenters who conducted sexual abuse of little children (like Alfred Kinsey).

The Humane Concentration Camp

2008-09-30T05:57:00.000-07:00

Dear Stan,

Many thanks for the latest posting. I forgot to mention that Lord Moran was Winston Churchill's personal doctor for many years. Talk about having friends in high places. Obviously you don't get such a job and hold it for decades unless you are more of a politician than a physician. So the chances of him or any of his medical pals facing embarassing questions about British and American medical experiments were less than zero.

Lord Moran of course kept a diary of his time with Churchill and made a further truckload of money by publishing it. He clearly heeded the wise advise of Mae West: "Keep a diary, honey, and one day it will keep you". Obviously the old fashioned notions about patient confidentiality don't apply at that level.

And if you have no qualms about medical experimentation on the helpless or coerced, are you going to have any greater qualms about abortion or euthanasia? The wholesale corruption of the medical profession was not something which suddenly fell from the sky onto a few nasty German doctors in the 1930s. Plainly the ethical rot started decades before throughout the Western world.

Here is the link to a highly revealing review of H M Pappworth's groundbreaking book "Human Guinea Pigs."

Pappworth had the courage to make himself very unpopular with his medical peers, who obviously resented public exposure of their practices. Scariest of all in this review was the description of experiments at a New York hospital, with patients being threatened with having their legs plunged into freezing water. This was powerfully reminiscent of the unforgettable scene in "Downfall" where an SS doctor kills himself and his whole family as the Russians close in on Berlin in 1945. Not surprising; the doctor in question was responsible for freezing Russian prisoners of war to death in tanks of icy water, so his chances of survival in Russian captivity were just about nil.

My acid tongued friend at church (who thinks Moran and Co should have been in the dock and on the gallows at Nuremburg) tells me that "Human Guinea Pigs" may be about to be republished by an American medical charity. It is available on Amazon.com and Ebay through second hand book sellers. The really interesting read would, of course, be a fully updated edition, as Pappworth's book is 40 years out of date.

The most recent scandal I am aware of was the 2006 fiasco in London were 6 healthy young men were nearly killed by trials of a new drug TGN1412. They survived (just) by grace of some incredibly skilled treatment by doctors who were plainly making it up as they went along - no one anywhere in the world had ever treated such bizarre effects before (at least, none which have been widely publicized). But the last I heard was that their health is permanently compromised and they may well be prone to early development of cancer and other horrors. See link: Human medical experiments go terribly wrong in "nightmare" TGN1412 drug trial

The Humane concentration camp

2008-09-27T16:26:00.000-07:00

Professor Leo Alexander explains the results of German medicalexperimentation on a Polish student, Jadwiga Dzido, carriedout at Ravensbruck concentration camp.

Dear Stan,

Further to my recent post on the dodgy ethics of the medical profession, HERE is an enthralling extract from the archives of the revered BMJ (British Medical Journal). Plainly there was little difference between the ethical attitudes of British, American and German doctors in the 1940s. It is the first time I have ever seen Dachau described as a "reasonably humane" concentration camp. And this phrase was not used by some Nazi lunatic. Among its other horrors, Dachau was the imprisonment site for 2,000 Catholic priests who had upset the Nazis in some way.

I particularly loved Lord Moran whining about his expenses, showing yet again how Mammon is the main motive for some doctors. "50 guineas a day" was £52.50 a day or roughly $240 a day in the 1940s exchange rates. In other words, one day's pay for Lord Moran was more than a month's pay for a working joe in Britain or the USA at that time......

Plainly the most senior people in the British medical establishment did not like the prosecution of Nazi doctors or even free reporting of the "experiments", obviously suspecting that they might find themselves on the gallows if the general public knew too much about their practices.

Click link for article: NUREMBERG DOCTORS' TRIAL: Human guinea pigs and the ethics of experimentation [BMJ 1996;313:1467-1470 (7 December)]

Death of the Inconvenient

2008-09-23T13:31:00.000-07:00

What was the point of fighting the Nazis?

The thought had occurs to me many times, especially on the countless occasions I have heard WW2 described as the "Last good War". You had the Nuremberg Trials, where all those nasty people like Herman Goering were called to account for their sins against humanity. Obviously there were problems about what you were going to charge them with. The British, Belgians and Dutch could accuse them of wanting to build a huge empire, the Americans could accuse them of blatant racism, the French could accuse them of Antisemitism (and building a huge empire), the Russians could accuse them of running torture chambers and concentration camps.

It was not just the big fish like senior politicians and generals who were dragged into the dock. Little people like doctors who practiced euthanasia found themselves in court, even though they could truly protest that they were not "obeying orders"... they were acting voluntarily to relieve suffering. And people like the medical experimenters in concentration camps were held up to public condemnation as obviously the vilest of the vile.

Unfortunately the message did not get through to numerous British and American doctors. Vulnerable people have always been at the mercy of the medical profession. George Orwell, writing in the 1930s, referred to "a sinister minority of doctors whose motives are suspect". In a grim Paris hospital around 1929, he had seen two doctors almost kill a poor patient in a mischievous experiment which they probably would not have dared to try on a wealthy client with influential friends. After the Nuremberg trials, you might have thought that even the doctors would have learnt their lesson.

But, only a few years after Nuremberg, British doctors were experimenting on military personnel. In the 1950s, they tested poison gas on soldiers at the Porton Down research laboratories. This is one of the most sinister places in England. Set in lovely countryside, only a short drive from the magnificent Salisbury Cathedral, it is the centre for research into chemical and biological weapons. Of course, the experiments went too far, as they always do, and they killed at least one soldier and maimed several others. One writer found at least 300 experiments on humans in the 1950s and 1960s by trawling through the British and American scientific literature. And these were obviously only the results which were published, albeit in the specialist pages of the medical reviews which few non-medical people ever read. The ones where they killed or maimed too many of their victims would be suppressed or circulated only in discreet home-produced documents. Obvious experimental subjects were people in asylums, old people's homes or orphanages, with no concerned relatives outside to defend them. Prisoners and military personnel under strict discipline were also good material.

The Nazis are slowly sliding into forgotten history, despite the best efforts of the movie makers and British tabloids. One widely traveled German friend commented to me that she had never visited any country which had such an obsession with WW2 as Britain....not even France, which was occupied for four years.

But it is obviously the wrong lessons which are being remembered. How else do you explain any person in public life daring to suggest killing the most helpless members of society? And this was not a Nazi nutcase. It was Lady Warnock (pictured with Geoffrey), one of our most influential ethical pundits and a long time participant in any number of public enquiries and commissions into medical issues. In a recent article she stated:

"If you're demented, you're wasting people's lives – your family's lives – and you're wasting the resources of the National Health Service".

This must be the first time I have heard a yearly budget of £75 billion ($140 billion) described as "very limited", though I suppose it is by Government standards. When there are more urgent needs, like pissing $35 billion down the toilet on a useless computer system for the NHS and paying doctors enough to buy new Audis (see the ludicrous Michael Moore's "Sicko"), I suppose elderly people count for very little.

Lady Warnock's Article (A Duty to Die?) was at least a useful corrective to Moore's typically fatuous documentary, which seemed to imply that the British NHS treated any sick person immediately for free. Of course, this has never been the case. Any number of people have been denied treatment that would prolong or improve their lives because it was not available on the NHS. I have lost count of the number of appeals for various people who need £x thousand pounds to go abroad (usually to the reviled and overpaid US doctors) for treatment which is unavailable in Britain. With the opening up of the East European economies, medical care is available in Budapest and other cities for a fraction of the price British private doctors charge. And even when "free" care is available on the NHS, it is seriously deficient compared with the best available. So even though artificial limbs are provided on the NHS, some patients go to private companies which provide more comfortable or more functional alternatives, even for thousands of pounds a time. Talk about costing an arm and a leg......

But enough of my rantings... Read Melanie Phillips' hatchet job below.

September 22, 2008

The Dehumanised Landscape of Planet Warnock

Daily Mail, 21 September 2008

Has there ever been anyone who has displayed more inhumanity towards her fellow human beings, and yet had more influence over British society, than the noble Baroness Warnock?

In an article for a church magazine, Lady Warnock has declared that elderly people with dementia are ‘wasting’ the lives of those who care for them, and have a duty to die in order to stop being a burden to others.

On pitiless Planet Warnock, people are valued in proportion to their ability to lead an independent life. If they can’t do so, they are to be written off as valueless — and even more nauseating, they are being told they actually have a duty to end their lives.

The elderly and chronically sick - — indeed, anyone who constantly depends on others for care — often dread being a burden on their nearest and dearest. To be told that they must end this burden by finishing themselves off can only increase their guilt, despair and suffering.

On Planet Warnock, it seems that ties of family and kinship, acts of selfless love, the deep satisfaction from bringing comfort to those who are helpless or who are so poignantly leaving us — essential aspects of our common humanity — mean nothing at all.

To be sure, those who are forced to watch a spouse or close relative descend into dementia often suffer immeasurably from this tragic process. All the more reason, therefore, for protecting those who have lost their minds from any pressure from relatives to end their lives, and not — as Lady Warnock is doing — adding to that pressure still further.

Sufferers and relatives should be helped through the provision of better treatments and improvements in care. To say that the demented should instead end their lives shows a quite chilling absence of elementary human sympathy.

And just how does she propose such people should bring this about? She is, after all, talking about people who have lost their minds. How can people who are mentally incapable possibly be expected to take such a decision?

Does she mean they should take it their minds have disintegrated — in which case, their quality of life will still be good and the pressure on relatives will be relatively light? Should their ‘duty’ to die perhaps kick in the very moment they receive the diagnosis of dementia?

Or does she mean that all of us should sign living wills instructing doctors to end our lives if we should ever suffer from dementia in the future — without knowing whether we would be a burden on anyone at all, or indeed whether, if such a disease did strike us down, we would still rather like to continue to live, thanks very much?

One gets the feeling that such practicalities don’t matter much to Lady Warnock. What drives her is simply the belief that lives which she considers to be worthless should be ended. Down this particular road, of course, lie the historic spectres of eugenics, the concentration camp and the gulag.

Tempting though it may be, it would be a mistake to treat this elderly philosopher as an eccentric who can be safely ignored. Lady Warnock is a key figure in the development of medical ethics in this country, from research on embryos to the debates over euthanasia.

Although the days when governments called upon her to serve on such committees of the great and the good may be over, her thinking provides graphic evidence of the slippery slope down which we are sliding at terrifying speed.

What she originally presented as the ‘right to die’, for example, soon mutated into the ‘duty to die’. The claim that euthanasia would benefit sick people by ending their pain is thus revealed as a fraud. The real point is to benefit the sick person’s relatives, in whose interests the patient must be expected to forfeit life itself.

For the ‘right to die’, therefore, read instead ‘no right to live’.

The impulse to end lives considered to be worthless is sliding from cases involving people in an irreversible coma to people who still have their senses, but have lost the power of rational thought.

The watershed was the Law Lords’ judgment in 1993 that allowed doctors to withdraw feeding and hydration from Anthony Bland, the Hillsborough victim who had been left in a persistent vegetative state.

Subsequently, the Mental Capacity Act, which came into force last year in the face of huge disquiet and after a fudged to die’ is a ‘wholly bogus distinction’.

It is a view she carried into practice when she watched her incurably ill husband, Geoffrey, accept the help of a family doctor to take lethal doses of morphine in order to end his life.

This is because Lady Warnock’s thinking follows the ‘consequentialist’ doctrine which looks at the result of an action, regardless of its motive. Hence, she sees no distinction between a drug administered to alleviate a dying patient’s suffering that ends up hastening that person’s death, and a drug deliberately given to bring about death.

But intention is the essence of morality. It means the difference between murder and manslaughter; between an attack and an accident; between killing and allowing someone to die.

Consequentialists similarly think there is no intrinsic value in a human life; the only value lies in the quality of the life that is being lived. That’s why Lady Warnock thinks that if people have lost their faculties, they should forfeit their existence to benefit others whose lives are — in her eyes — worth more.

This is indeed the path to barbarism. But Lady Warnock is by no means alone in holding these views. They are mainstream among our secular, anti-religious elites - and alarmingly, nowhere more so than in the medical profession.

The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, for example, said two years ago that ‘active euthanasia’ should be considered to spare parents the emotional and financial burden of bringing up seriously disabled newborn babies. These doctors were advocating killing newborn infants for the presumed benefit of others.

A terrifying, amoral landscape is opening up before us, brought into being by the philosophy embodied by Lady Warnock — the garlanded intellectual, whose epitaph will be a dehumanised society where the weakest are being steadily sacrificed for the benefit of the strong. This is the way civilization dies.

Church on the Cheap

2008-09-12T13:20:00.000-07:00

I was walking past the Comfort Inn, an unremarkable hotel on Christchurch Road, when I saw a banner attached to the railings: "Potter House Christian Fellowship". The banner told me that they meet in the hotel at 11:00 am and 6:30 pm on Sundays and 730pm on Wednesdays. After 150 years we have a second place of worship in Christchurch Road. The fine Victorian structure of Christchurch itself is 50 yards away on the other side of the road.

Can market differentiation go much further in Christian worship? In Reading we already have Catholic, Methodist, Baptist, Quakers, United Reform, plus multiple flavours of Anglicanism. These are the most subtle and confusing. Christchurch itself is mainstream Anglican (judge by the reference to "Sunday Eucharist" on the noticeboard outside. St Giles, ten minutes walk away is more Papal than the Pope. There was talk of St Giles defecting en masse (if you'll pardon the expression) to Rome after the uproar over the ordination of women in the 1990s. St Marys, five minutes from St Giles, would have a fit at the suggestion of anything Romish and is sternly devoted to the Book of Common Prayer. Greyfriars, less than 5 minutes walk beyond St Marys, is the exemplar of happy-clappy evangelicalism.

Yet all these long established congregations, in solid purpose built (and often historic and beautiful) premises, do not satisfy all the spiritual requirements of the local population. there is constant multiplication of small "churches" that do not fit any established pattern, beyond an apparent devotion to the Bible. In an earlier post I mentioned the fellowship which has established itself in a large house on Wokingham Road, plus the mysterious "Brethren" who have large modern premises on Redlands Road and are moving to much bigger accommodation ten minutes drive away. A longer established "Mount Zion" church is tucked away in a little road off the Wokingham Road.

All these involved serious money to build and maintain. Something like "Potter House" involves only paying rent for a hotel lounge as and when required. The pastor needs only a cheap family computer for email and printing off newsletters and service sheets (if it is a style of worship which requires written guidance). The congregation would bring their own Bibles, if needed. If the pastor has a full time job and officiates only on Sunday and Wednesday, costs are minimal. Given the meeting times, the hotel might well provide the lounge for free as long as the congregation paid for a buffet lunch/supper. It is another regular income stream which hotels never thought about 20 years ago. It is not the first example in town; the Christian Science group meets in the Ship Hotel in Duke street.

The "Potter House" banner displayed a quotation from Jeremiah. How it actually interprets Jeremiah or any other part of Scripture might be open to interpretation. The more talk there is of "Christian unity" in theory, the more visible disunity there is in practice. As the official efforts on "Ecumenism" accelerated in the 20th century, doctrinal and morality splits between churches and within churches multiplied like a metastatic cancer. Contraception, divorce and remarriage, ordination of women, the nature of God, the Resurrection, the Incarnation, the role of Mary, the Eucharist..... As heroic efforts were made to achieve union between Rome and Canterbury, internal divisions and disputes made the exercise ever more fatuous. The expansion of "House Churches" and mini-churches seems to have no limit - except the ultimate limit where very family and eventually every person is his/her own church, Pope and congregation.

Calling for Help

2008-09-10T10:29:00.000-07:00

It was a Saturday evening in mid summer on Caversham Road. I was walking back to the car park when I came across a man collapsed on the sidewalk with a man and a woman standing over him. He was sitting up, but could not rise to his feet. He was perhaps in his late twenties and plainly in a confused state. It was difficulty to tell if this was some mental problem or a result of drink/drug abuse, but he was visibly in no condition to help himself for the next hour or so. The man and woman had no previous connection with him; they had found him a minute or two earlier and were plainly as clueless as me as to how to effectively help him.

I called the ambulance service using my cellphone. This was only the second time in my life that I had called 999 (the UK equivalent of 911) and the first time I had ever called for an ambulance. Now the young woman on the other end was giving me a hard time...."Did he ask for an ambulance...does he want an ambulance?" This was tricky when I was standing close to the guy and did not know how much he understood of what he NEEDED, as opposed to what he wanted. Also it was difficult to convey the urgency of what I thought might be needed without possibly seriously offending him. He seemed to have twisted his ankle as he collapsed, but of course none of us knew if it might be broken or how much pain he was feeling (or would be feeling if he was not in such a fuddled condition). He was not in immediate danger (unless he staggered into the busy road eight feet away) and was hardly likely to die of exposure even if he stayed on the sidewalk all night. But I did not want to leave him without getting some assurance of professional help.

Finally she agreed to send an ambulance. I was getting seriously uptight by this time, seeing that I was struggling to explain a delicate situation with the background roar of traffic on one of the busiest roads in town. The fact that the ambulance depot is barely 300 yards away off Caversham Road did not improve my temper.

As we waited two policemen on bicycles approached and I flagged them down. It felt like a Good Samaritan situation, but circumstances have changed since AD30. You can imagine the reaction if I had taken this man to a hotel, given them my credit card details and asked them to look after him. I could have given him a ride to my own house and put him in the spare bedroom. Or given him a ride to his own place...but we were having problems getting any coherent information out of him, much less a name and address. And we plainly had no authority to go through his pockets for ID. I could have taken him to the Salvation Army hostel less than 600 yards away, but I doubt if they would have accepted someone under the influence of unknown chemicals. I should add that none of these "Good Samaritan" actions occurred to me at the time. It was much easier to wash my hands, leave him in the care of the two young constables and head on to the car park.

Incidentally these police looked hardly old enough to shave. It used to be said that you were getting old when the policemen started looking young. I passed that some time ago. You have to get really worried when the new mayor of Reading looks young. But these kids....are they protecting us from Bin Laden????

As I approached my car, the two young constables reappeared on their bicycles. They had not chased after me; it was just another part of their patrol route. They said that the ambulance had come and the man just had a sprained ankle. And I have not seen him since or seen any reports of unidentified bodies discovered. On reflection many weeks later, it struck me that the guy might have suffered a stroke, which might have resulted in slurred speech and paralysis, but it plainly did not occur to me or the ambulance lady at the time.

It is surprising that you see so few people in such straits. The mass drinking and drugs abuse culture has been in full swing for well over 10 years now. Many of the carefree young revellers so noisily visible around town in the early 1990s have doubtless progressed to alcoholism, the acute liver disease specialists and even the graveyard. But I have not noticed as much of the grim results as you might expect.

Perhaps I should get out more, as the old jibe says. But then I don't want to "get out" in town at the times when so much of the drunken revelry is in full swing. We have already had several scary public order incidents around town, the worst being in March 2002 when the police lost control of part of the town centre for a few hours after a riot outside a night club in London Street.

So who do the police call when they need help? In that case, it was more police from neighbouring forces who finally arrived in sufficient numbers to regain control of the town centre. Presumably all the senior police were fervently praying that there wouldn't be an incident in one of the towns from which they had taken officers to support Reading......or that there would not be a bad accident on the M4 motorway which would similarly require officers which they did not have. On that occasion they got away with one bad incident on one Saturday night.

I suppose I should be grateful that my incapable guy in Caversham Road was merely passive and helpless. One of the inmates at a local charity house was 6 foot two, built like a gorilla and had a weakness for vodka, LSD, cocaine, heroin and amphetamines in various combinations. Thus he could be a seriously scary guy once he was out of control. Mercifully I have never met him in Caversham Road or any where else. We would have been calling for more than one ambulance.

Cementing Their Partnership

2008-09-09T14:49:00.000-07:00

Saturday 30th August. A beautiful wedding day in a traditional English church at Burghfield, south-west of Reading. St Mary the Virgin has a traditional lych-gate, a traditional graveyard, a traditional pair of stone effigies inside the main door and a traditional peal of bells. To my delight, I later discover that you can see the bell ringers at work in their chamber, outlined by a window. It is the perfect setting for a traditional English wedding, with the bride in white gown and veil. The St James music group turned up to sing at the wedding because the bride had been nanny for the children of one of the families. It rather reversed the "traditional" pattern of an Irish girl looking after the children of an affluent English family. Here an English girl had looked after the children of two YIPLIEs (Young Irish Professional Living In England).

This wasn't the only old tradition overturned; the vicar is a lady....as permitted by the Anglican communion since 1994. And the bride and groom have, of course, enjoyed horizontal relations and produced two children long before the posting of the banns. Nothing said by the vicar suggests that this is anything unusual or incompatible with "traditional" Christian teaching, such as her church advocated up to c. 1970. After all, with congregations falling through the floor, savage internal dissension and complete doctrinal disintegration, you can't afford to alienate the customers and lose what little market share you have left.

Sunday 31st August. I am listening to the "Morning Service" on Radio 4 while driving to St William of York for 9:00 pm Mass. Unusually, this broadcast service includes a wedding rite. The happy couple, Stephen and Zoe, are "cementing their partnership", as the celebrant explains. So I think we can assume that the traditional "wedding night" will be no surprise to the bride. And this example of Christian witness is being broadcast to the nation. Holy Cow. With Christians like this, we don't need the professional atheists like Professor Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens.

As one editor of "Faith" magazine commented many years ago, we English, with our upper-middle class, "public"-school educated ways, do know how to do things.....even blatant fudges of basic Christian morality are done much more elegantly and smoothly in the Anglican tradition than in English Catholic services, where the ominous shadow of Roman authority is somewhere in the background, even if it is ignored much of the time.

From a rationalist perspective, it is amazing how many people still feel the need of religious endorsement at the crucial stages of life. The old jibe about "Hatch, Match and Dispatch" (Baptism, Wedding and Funeral) being the only times most British people enter a church is still applicable. There are now numerous alternatives to a church for a wedding service apart from the grim public Registry Offices. (think Secretary of State premises, only without people queuing to renew driving permits). Recent changes in British marriage law have allowed numerous hotels and stately homes to enter the marriage market and make more money out of their beautiful premises and gardens. They have not yet entered the christening and funeral markets, though of course they are happy to entertain guests after a baptism or funeral elsewhere.

Yet people know in their bones that there is something extraordinary about these "boundary" moments of human life - arrival in and departure from earthly existence and the promise of new life with the union of two existing lives. All these events demand some exceptional ceremonies, even if God is sidelined for much of people's lives. One of the saddest aspects of life in the old Soviet Union was the disposal of the deceased at prefunctory crematorium ceremonies. It must have been an unwitting recruiting agent for the Orthodox Church, just to allow your loved one some sense of dignity and Divine splendor at the very end, even if they had lived their lives ina two room apartment.

I remember the service for a local councillor who had been active in civic life in Reading for many years and whose pasing was marked by a humanist commemoration in the old Town Hall some years ago. The Town hall is a stunning example of Victorian architecture and it does have an organ, but I could not help feeling a hollow chill as I read about this service. What did his widow and daughter feel? When you're a humanist, this is As Good As It Gets, to quote the film title.

A few months ago, a young man who had been a pupil at Blessed Hugh Faringdon School, our local "Catholic" high school, died in a road accident. Blessed Hugh Faringdon used to be Abbot of Reading Abbey in the 16th century....until he was beheaded under Henry 8th. Now the young man had his farewell service at Reading Crematorium chapel, attended by numerous ex-BHF students. It was a humanist ceremony. How many more ex-BHF students will be laid to rest/committed to the furnace attended by a humanist facilitator rather than a Catholic priest? Mind you, how many more BHF students will there be if this is the widespread result of a "Catholic" education? How can we argue for separate "Catholic" schools or justify their massive cost?

The austere crematorium chapels around Britain are among the few places where you can hold a humanist funeral, but I suspect that demand for different styles of humanist send-offs will require a wider variety of funeral venues, just as the non-religious wedding market has expanded. I have yet to see a humanist "welcoming" ceremony for babies, but the obvious market vacuum invites innovative businesspeople. You can see why churches still have a powerful, if completely incoherent, appeal to the great Unchurched.

Yet how long can the powerful emotional appeal of Church services survive the total demolition of the spiritual foundation? Having abandoned belief in the Resurrection, the soul, Revelation, Hell, Sin, the Incarnation, the reality of a Church founded by and sustained by God, with no clear idea of the nature of God, no sense of the power of the coherent arguments for premarital chastity and an orderly Christian family life....

Probably more consciousness of the morass into which we are moving will awaken some people. I heard of one young black man, also an ex-Blessed Hugh Faringdon student, who was stunned, as a 13 year old, to discover that the girl sitting next to him in class was his cousin. Imagine his turmoil when he discovered that another girl in the same class was his half-sister, of whose existence he had hitherto been utterly ignorant. Not surprisingly, it really messed him up to the extent that he would not date black girls and has a white partner.

In a perverse sense, he is fortunate because, as a member of a racial minority, he had a foolproof DNA test without asking any prospective white girlfriend to undergo a formal DNA test. The white majority lack that assurance with any partner they casually associate with. The old saying "It is a wise child that knows its own father" now obviously translates as "It is a wise child that knows its own sibling".

Not that you need a string of genetic disasters to waken the wise. You might have thought that the very visible misery caused to so many children by widespread infidelity and marriage breakdown would be more than enough. The utter relational confusion experienced by this sensitive 13 year old is just the tip of the iceberg of human misery resulting from the permissive society. Of course the Permissive Society was all about Freedom, wasn't it? Except it takes decades to work out the consequences in reality. The Pakistani community in Britain has been the subject of scrutiny because of the practice of first-cousin marriages, leading to a spate of rare and horrible genetic defects in their children. (Every cloud has a silver lining; as a result some British doctors are among the top experts in the world on these conditions). Serious proposals to forbid such marriages have already been aired. Apart from the misery and pain, the UK Government has a financial interest in paying for the care of such offspring. The next step logically would be compulsory genetic testing for all UK couples, to see if they are unwitting blood relatives. You can hardly discrimnate only against Pakistanis, can you? As a Dostoyevski character says: "Starting with unlimited freedom, I end with unlimited tyranny"......

Satisfactory Results

2008-09-06T16:25:00.000-07:00

At last the 2008 Olympics is over. The end was marked by "celebrations" in hundreds of locations around Britain to rejoice in Britain inheriting the Olympic banner. This will doubtless be only one of countless wastes of money in the 4 year run-up to 2012. One of these pointless ceremonies was held in our local Palmer Park, which houses the stadium for amateur sports events. Bizarrely, there is going to be an associated Arts festival costing at least £40 million ($75 million) as part of the Olympic festivities. Plainly the arts functionaries, as much as the construction companies and hordes of "consultants", can recognise a sucker when they see one. The sucker in question is of course the British taxpayer.

Ben Rice, one of the loudmouth columnists in our local rag, was overjoyed about the surprising British medal success in Beijing and urged the skeptics to shut up - no amount of money was too much to spend on 2012, especially when we waste so much on defense and other areas of public expenditure. Don't pour money down the defense/education/health/agriculture toilet, pour it down my favorite toilet....

He is certainly half-right on that. I recently visited Portsmouth, Britain's main naval base. It is partly a working modern base, partly a historic tourist site. Among the numerous attractions there is a boat ride round the harbour. The advertisement for this ride is done on a chalkboard, to allow for easy amendment according to what ships are in harbour. Not surprisingly, both the Royal Navy carriers were in port. There is nothing for them to do at the moment and I have no idea what these aging warships might be pressed into doing in the near future, apart from sitting in harbour clocking up costs like a taxi meter gone crazy.

These carriers were visible from land as I walked around the historic docks; incongruously they were moored only 300 yards from "HMS Victory", Admiral Nelson's magnificent flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 and the ultimate in state-of-the-art naval engineering at the time. Will "HMS Ark Royal" be on public display in 2208, proudly showing off her unimaginably obsolete 20th century technology? She and her sister ship are overdue for replacement and £7 billion ($12.6 billion) has been earmarked for two "super-carriers" to be delivered c 2015.

Whether they will be delivered before they are obsolete is anyone's guess. How much they will really cost is a bigger guess. For one thing, there will have to be extensive dredging of the approaches to Portsmouth harbour as the water is too shallow to let these 65,000 ton monsters enter; they will be by far the biggest British warships ever built. What useful military role they might play is an even bigger and hazier guess. They will be as much use as a chocolate furnace in the guerrilla-type operations which seem to figure large in much of the future and in a real naval war would probably be useful only to the Russians/Chinese/whoever as target practice for their advanced missiles. In the British tradition of getting the worst of all possible worlds, they will be almost as big and expensive as the US super-carriers such as "USS Ronald Reagan", but far less capable as they will be able to operate only one type of fixed wing aircraft, a Harrier-style jump-jet. And with only two large ships available and the extremely lethal weapons they will have to face, senior naval commanders will probably be too scared to death to risk even one of them in combat. As they are to be named "Queen Elizabeth" and "Prince of Wales", I wonder if we will see a rerun of the WW2 comedy where Hitler ordered the pocket battleship "Deutschland" to be renamed as he rightly feared losing such a ship.

You can tell the state of British military desperation when there is talk of France building a replacement carrier and that the three new British and French carriers might be shared on some ill-defined cooperation basis. I am not sure if the French have yet forgiven the Royal Navy for sinking their Mediterranean fleet, with appalling casualties, in 1940 - to prevent it being handed to the Germans after the French surrender.

And these carriers cost only a fraction of the money being planned for other dubious military initiatives. But pouring money down one toilet is no sane reason to justify pouring it down a second which is championed by some zealot.

The eye watering extravagance of modern Olympics was brought into focus as I viewed "Chariots of Fire" recently. The recreation of the stadium used in the 1924 Paris Olympics looked like a local amateur track. The director, Hugh Hudson, said on the commentary track that not even many Parisians bothered to turn up for the Olympic events. Every participant was a genuine amateur. Of course it was as ferociously politicized as the 1936 Hitler Olympics, the 1980 Moscow affair or the 2008 Beijing events. For one thing, Germany was banned from participation as ongoing punishment for WW1. And the seeds of the future rot were evident in the Harold Abrahams character employing a professional coach and the Eric Liddell character's obsessive devotion to running and training, sacrificing all else.

The one scene in "Chariots" which unites most critics is the meeting between Abrahams and the two very senior Cambridge professors who deplore his "professional" attitude to his running. "We believe that the way of the amateur is the only one to provide satisfactory results", the Sir John Gielgud codger declares. Just about everyone seems to treat these professors as obviously ridiculous old fossils. Hugh Hudson's commentary heaped more vitriol on these venerable characters, regarding them as preposterous, outdated, repulsive and racist. (A deleted scene, significantly, showed them in a far more sympathetic light as they grieved for their students slaughtered in WW1. But it was emotionally easier to portray them as wholly unappealing). Most of "Chariots" is fictionalized, but it is surprising that Hugh Hudson, commenting in 2004, failed to see how right the old codgers have been proved by events. In passing he noted that security at the 2004 Athens games was costing $1 billion, while the Paris security costs were practically zero. God alone how much security will cost in 2012, especially after one or two more atrocities in London - which are almost certain before 2012.

The overall cost of the 2012 games has soared from a 2003 "estimate" of £2.3 billion to a probable £15 billion (c. $29 billion). At a rough estimate, this would buy over 1.3 million family cars which would stretch end-to-end from New York to Anchorage, Alaska.

Curious word, "Satisfactory". Nowadays it implies something which is generally OK, but not particularly outstanding. No athlete would be satisfied with "Satisfactory". Nothing less than Gold would be regarded as remotely satisfactory. I don't know how much weight Colin Welland meant to put on this word in his Oscar-winning screenplay. But if the old Cambridge codgers implied "satisfactory" to mean the best balance of physical, mental, social and spiritual outcomes they had a very powerful case. Just about everything about the modern Olympics is grossly unsatisfactory. The waste of public money, the security, the politics, the drugs abuse, not to mention the abuse of their populations by totalitarian governments (such as demolishing the homes of 30,000 Chinese to make way for the festivities, intimidating Tibet demonstrators, even daring to send their goons to escort the Olympic torch around Western cities).

The abuse to which modern athletes subject themselves could hardly be recognized as "satisfactory" by any sane, let alone Christian, person. Apart from the death toll of athletes expiring at suspiciously early ages, you get grotesque spectacles such as our Paula Radcliffe trying for the 2008 marathon despite having a stress fracture of her femur....eh?? Wasn't it only stress fractures of the shin bone a few years ago? Now athletes are cracking the biggest and strongest bones in their bodies?? Yet this is the obvious end result of the process exalted in "Chariots", where Eric Liddell was prepared to abandon his missionary work to "run for God"

The only remotely "satisfactory" way forward for the Olympics I have seen suggested is to keep Athens as the permanent venue. The modern facilities are there (largely unused), the historic association is there, and it would eliminate a large portion of the future waste and politicking. But modern high-level athletics itself has plainly passed the point of no return. The money involved even outside the Olympics is just too tempting to permit any satisfactory results; the low-key amateur participants are the only ones likely to achieve them.

Big Brother

2008-08-26T20:41:00.000-07:00

George Orwell's "1984" described numerous horrors in the future totalitarian Britain or "Airstrip One". Secret police everywhere, people denouncing their loved ones, torture chambers, perpetual war, hate propaganda, beer served in litres..... All of these actually existed in under various tyrants various parts of the world.

But the really creepy horror was the perpetual observation by TV. The worst bit was the interactive TV with a hectoring harridan urging the reluctant comrades onto greater efforts in their early morning gymnastics. It must have seemed particularly unsettling in the 1940s when TV was an exotic novelty which few people had seen and even fewer could afford. Not even Hitler and Stalin had the technical resources to spy upon their people so comprehensively and intrusively. Even at a much later date, the East German Stasi depended on pretty old fashioned methods of spying on the population. When practically all the people were potential Enemies of the People, they went in for tens of thousands of snoops.

This premise in "1984" was that all this intrusion was compelled by an all-powerful state. Surely no one would "voluntarily" submit to perpetual public observation unless in the grip of some particularly pitiable mental disorder? Well, the good people of Reading were only too willing to show the way to the rest of the planet.

This reminiscence was prompted by the recent death of Margaret Sainsbury (formerly Margaret Wilkins), the pioneer of "Reality" TV. Back in the early 1970s, new lightweight video cameras made documentary filmmaking far easier that it had been with the earlier massive TV cameras or even the compact 16mm and 35 mm movie cameras. Documentary makers seized the new technology and boldly went where no sane man had ever gone before. Reading was the venue for two of the most notorious programs.

I suspect that this was at least partly due to financial restrictions - once TV crews went further out from London, a higher rate of salary and/or allowances was payable under the union-negotiated conditions. So I have seen an episode of "Inspector Morse" (set unforgettably in Oxford) being filmed at some suitably imposing building in Reading which might double as an Oxford college or library.

Reading Police let one of these newly equipped crews into their interrogation of a rape victim and changed British police procedures forever. The way they treated the traumatized woman created a national uproar and the police had to drastically revise their guidelines for such questioning.

But the Wilkins clan paved the way for any number of media creations, from "The Truman Show" to "Big Brother" and arguably any number of grisly confessional daytime TV shows all over the world. Mr Wilkins was a bus driver, Margaret was his wife and the family matriarch, and their unconventional family lived about a mile south of Reading town centre. Their crowded apartment in Whitley Street was barely half a mile from the green campus of Reading University, but it might as well have been on another planet. For a few weeks it was obviously even more crowded with a TV crew squeezed in.

The resulting program called simply "The Family". Its purported aim was simply to observe the everyday life of a British family. At this distance I cannot remember if the producers were so brazen as to claim it was a "typical" British family. An obvious problem with such a program was finding a family which was sufficiently stupid and/or venal to take part, especially with the paltry sums which were on offer. A second problem was to stop it being boring beyond belief, when the raw material was the trivia of everyday life. Even with the most selective shooting and ruthless editing, it threatened to lose much of the audience after the first or second episode, once the sheer novelty wore off.

Plainly the uneducated Wilkins were not the sharpest knives in the drawer. But I doubt that it would have been more exciting if a family of professors from the prosperous University area half a mile to the east had volunteered. Everyday life is pretty mundane in any home. Although, of course, a University household might have exercised more forethought about the impact on their family dynamics of displaying all their dirty laundry on nationwide TV and would have been less tempted by the money.

At the time I cynically assumed that the producers had picked the Wilkins simply because their unconventional (i.e. immoral) lifestyle might add a little spice to a desperately dull pie. Mrs Wilkins' youngest child was sired by another guy during an extra marital fling and the older daughter was cohabiting with her boyfriend under the family roof. It is difficult now to imagine how disturbing this was to ordinary British families who still struggled to maintain Christian family values, if not religious practice. It was that period when the lifestyle of the swinging sixties was spreading out from a tiny minority to a wider population, but before it had become complacently accepted - or, if not accepted, resignedly tolerated as being as unavoidable as a tsunami.

Looking back on it now, I see "The Family" as a blatantly political exercise to further the destruction of Christian values. It showed yet again that there is no such thing as "impartial" observation in social matters (vide Margaret Mead and any number of "scientific" anthropologists). The "observer" was a promoter of the values displayed by the Wilkins, merely by showing them as "normal". Even the luckless Mr Wilkins was praised as being forgiving to the wife who made him a cuckold. Though possibly not that forgiving....they divorced a year after the program, which is why Margaret Wikins died as Margaret Sainsbury.

And where the Wilkins went, any number of British families have gone since so that cohabitation and illegitimacy are an "accepted" part of the social scenery.

Also the program broke any number of taboos on basic decency and kindness, which have been gleefully exploited mercilessly by even less scrupulous program makers since. Most unsettling of all was the treatment of the youngest child, the 9 year old son. The adults could hardly have known what they were letting themselves in for when they "volunteered" as guinea pigs. It was a wholly unprecedented experiment. But at least they were consenting adults, even if ignorantly consenting. The 9 year old obviously was a helpless victim of their decision. Apart from having his illegitimacy exposed for world wide entertainment, he was filmed in floods of tears as his parents gave him a hard time about a poor school report. Imagine going into school the day after that episode........ I suspect that today child abuse teams would be on the job and am amazed that little fuss was made about it at the time.

The wonderful "Truman Show" skipped the less appetizing aspects of the hero's 24 hours-a-day TV exposure - such as his trips to the bathroom and his horizontal relations with his "wife". But then Peter Weir is an artist of taste and subtlety, unlike the majority of TV producers around the world.

I can't help wondering if the Stasi missed a trick; what if, instead of paying a fortune for an army of professional agents and informers, they had simply offered loads of cheap TV deals to East German families???? Get all your citizens to expose their intimate secrets voluntarily - and get a profit on world wide syndication rights.....

Rubish Galore

2008-08-22T09:46:00.000-07:00

I spend a few minutes each Sunday morning before Mass starts picking up garbage from the grounds of St. William of York. I have gathered plastic and glass bottles, fast food boxes, drink cartons, candy wrappings, a woman's purse, beer and coke cans, plastic toys, leaflets, newspapers, various small garments, shoes, plastic bags, bicycle parts, a television, fencing panels, condoms, a child's scooter, hub caps, traffic cones, cigarette packets, cigarette butts and countless fragments of broken glass. Even down on your knees with dustpan and brush, it is near impossible to remove the latter completely and you can see lots more glinting like diamonds when the sun is at the appropriate angle.

The scariest item was a needle exchange kit (unused, as far as I could tell) and the biggest and heaviest was a stack of scaffolding poles dumped by a dodgy roof repairer. I took the exchange kit back to the local drugstore for safe disposal - it was still in their plastic bag. But the scaffolding poles took some serious effort to remove them to the local refuse dump.

You obviously can't leave such objects lying around for both cosmetic and health and safety reasons, especially in premises open to children. It is a depressing revelation about the complete lack of respect for public spaces, even consecrated public areas. But garbage always provides a fascinating insight into society, if only to illustrate how wealthy a country must be to casually dump so much raw material.

At the beginning of April I saw a huge queue snaking out of the Oracle shopping mall. The queue was people who had waited for hours to get tickets for the Reading Rock Festival. Even though the Festival is not held until late August, all the tickets had allegedly gone already - unless you go on Ebay and pay an arm and a leg (See below for further rip-off details). Where the queue had been there was the most appalling mess of discarded bags, drinks containers and food wrappings dumped by the fans during their long vigil. Just after I saw the mess, a team of council workers arrived with brushes, bags, a large road sweeping vehicle and a small sidewalk sweeping vehicle and cleared it with admirable speed and efficiency.

It was a microcosm of the debris left by the real Festival. The only time I have ever been to the Festival was in 1989, when I helped man the Christian outreach tent. After the Festival, which runs only from Friday evening to Sunday evening, the garbage beggared belief. Plastic bags, ground sheets, huge water containers, paper galore; the shambles stretched in all directions as far as the eye could see across the huge site. I thought it would take most of the months until the 1990 festival to pick it up. But there is a huge well organised operation to clear it away in a week or so.

A new store has just opened on Caversham Road, on the direct route from the railway station to the festival site. It is one of the rapidly-growing Aldi chain of budget food stores. Like their budget rivals, Lidl, they are also German and very well positioned to take advantage of the economic downturn, when people hunt for bargains. (The third big German supermarket chain, Kaiser, has not yet arrived in the UK - their name carries unhappy WW1 connotations..... But they are huge at home - there are 155 branches in the Berlin area alone.)

Aldi's introductory offers include a complete "Festival pack": a tent, two sleeping bags and two ground covers for a total of £9.99. At that price, it is not worth taking the pack home after the festival and no doubt there will be even more non-degradable garbage abandoned afterward.

Now that the festival has actually started, you can see the indescribable mess already accumulating. I drove behind two large vans, each towing a large caravan, en route to the site three days before the start of the music. One was the Chinese take-away caravan, the other a burger-and-kebabs caravan. So that's two more heaps of fast-food wrapping.

The festival site is beside the river on the north side of Reading and the nearest supermarkets are over the river in the suburb of Caversham. So you see a procession of youngsters coming back over Caversham Bridge loaded with plastic bags from the supermarkets. If there are 70,000 festival goers and each gets only only one plastic bag and half leave that bag as litter......Holy Cow, that's 35,000 plastic bags for starters.

It is not just the lightweight litter. One of the supermarkets, Waitrose, had a guy stationed in the middle of Caversham Bridge to grab back all the shopping carts which the festival goers were using to transport the mountains of drinks and groceries. So there were two large groups of shopping carts either side of the bridge waiting to be wheeled back to the store. We have two lovely rivers in Reading, the Thames and the Kebnnet, plus any number of picturesque smaller tributaries. These all act as rubbish magnets, with abandoned shopping carts being a prominent ingredient. As they are well made and coated with rust resistant material they can stay in a waterway indefinitely until the next periodic clear out. You can bet that many of Waitrose's expensive carts would have ended up in the Thames unless swiftly recovered. And the path along the south bank of the Thames leading to the Festival site is already strewn with drinks cans and fast food debris, to be cleared up at public expense.

Once the Festival starts, the graffiti artists are out in force as well, adding to the £120,000 a year the local council already spends in scrubbing down walls and other vertical surfaces. That's not to mention the noise pollution created by the multi-megawatt amplifiers. The main recipients are the people in the million pound plus riverside homes on the north bank, but it easily spreads to my humble home two miles away on a hilltop; sound bounces in unpredictable ways all over town. And then there's the glorious pollution and traffic congestion as traffic converges from all over the country.

Obviously somebody's making truckloads of money off this. With tickets at £145 ($280) a go just for admission, there's obviously still money to burn in this country despite the impending recession. And that's excluding food, camping gear, souvenirs and travel to the site. Some people were ripped off £145 by bogus internet sites and STILL descended on the on-site ticket office, queing for hours from early morning to pay another £145 to the legitimate sellers for the remaining 3,000 tickets. No wonder they could afford to pay £1 million just for a temporary bridge spanning the Thames, linking to a campsite on the north bank. We have been waiting 80 years for a third Thames bridge in town and a temporary one springs up in days. I am remained of General Patton's Rhine crossing in 1945. The US Army engineers in Patton's sector alone put 5 bridges across the Rhine in 24 hours, under threat of enemy attack. If the US Army had been run by Reading Council, WW2 would still be in full swing. This temporary bridge is a rare example of recycling - it was allegedly made from structures used for the stage on Madonna's last world tour....

Any Christian presence in this pagan celebration? Well, the warmth and hospitality of local people has been evident in some places. The Baptist Church in the centre of Caversham, across the road from Waitrose supermarket, was holding open house, with festival goers welcomed in for coffee, sandwiches, toilets and a chance to recharge their mobile phones. Another church on the south bank was offering coffee sessions in the morning. But, given the sheer size of the affair, the Christian input is very marginal.

Given the size of Great Britain and the 60+ million people squeezed into it, it is a wonder that there is any land left unoccupied by rubbish tips and landfill sites. There's even less spare space this weekend.....