So Little At Stake

I love the old joke : "Why are local elections so vicious, bitter and hard fought? Because there is so little at stake".

This is superbly illustrated in that little gem "Election" where Reese Witherspoon's high school election involves enough skullduggery and plotting to fuel a national campaign. Similarly our recent little scandal involving the Tory Member of Parliament Derek Conway produced a prodigious amount of media vitriol all targeted on a truly tenth-division villain. Everybody, from the BBC and "The Times" to the Devil's Kitchen and fellow political bloggers queued up to spray him with industrial-strength excrement from high-pressure hoses.

Admittedly, the utterly venal Conway deserved every ounce of ordure heaped on him. He is in danger of giving shameless crooks a bad name. First, he had employed his wife as his secretary at the taxpayers' expense. Er...OK, this is permitted under British Parliamentary rules, though totally verboten in the US and German legislatures. Lots of MPs employ their spouses as assistants. Then he employed his elder son as a researcher.....er, um, yes, this is still permissible. Then he recruited his younger son, also at taxpayers's expense.....and his elder son's friend (or catamite, if you believe the less charitable scribblers). Sadly, he did not follow the example of the Roman emperor Caligula, who appointed his favourite horse to the Senate. At least the noble animal would have cost the taxpayers much less than the sons and would have been just as useful, seeing as neither son appears to have done a stroke of work during the time they were on the public payroll.

True, Conway had heavy expenses. His sons went to Harrow, one of the most expensive boys' private schools in the land (Around £24,000/$48,000 per year). His daughter went to St Mary's, the top Catholic girls school in Britain, which is at Ascot, 15 miles east of Reading. One of my fellow parishioners, a Cambridge graduate, is a teacher at St Mary's. (I have not yet had a chance to ask if she has met this unsavoury toad.) Like other private schools, it can afford higher salaries than State schools and thus attracts the best teachers. It charges a basic £25,000 ($50,000) per boarding pupil per year and God alone knows how much more if you throw in music lessons, horse riding, school trips, etc.

It makes our highly regarded girls schools in Reading look bargain basement. Abbey School and St Joseph's Convent charge only £8,000 to £11,000 per year, albeit for day pupils, not boarders. Such fees are within the reach of middle class business and professional people, even working class people prepared to make serious sacrifices. As I noted in an earlier post, some Reading state schools are so indescribably awful that one father was prepared to clean toilets at midnight to send his daughter to a private school. But St Mary's pupils mostly come from seriously rich families, both British high society and overseas tycoons and nobility.

As in the case of the CIA traitor Robert Hannsen, who spent some of his Russian gold on Catholic schools for his children, it was good to see even loathsome villains understanding the virtues of Catholic education. But I can't either Harrow or St Marys advertising him as one of their illustrious supporters.

Like Hannsen, Conway provides a superb example of the need to check public servants' lifestyles against their official incomes. His MP salary would have been around £60,000 at a time when he was spending up to £73,000 a year on school fees alone for Harrow and St Mary's. Plainly he could not afforded a cup of tea without a hefty bank loan or extra income. Yet none of his close friends in Parliament seem to have raised any awkward questions about his funding the school fees. Possibly his rich wife coughed up something for her offsprings' schooling, but I doubt that we'll ever see the full accounts.

Once caught, Conway continued to bluster than he had done nothing wrong, that MPs are underpaid and they should receive at least £100,000 a year for their services. No wonder that one blogger was recommending public execution for him and his fellow corrupt MPs, with their rotting corpses left on public display "pour encourager les autres". His punishment so far (10 days suspension from Parliament, plus repaying a few thousand) would not scare a ten year old. He will continue to serve as MP until the next election, drawing his £60K plus expenses plus wife's salary.....

Part of the media interest was inflated by his elder son's louche lifestyle, which makes Liberace look like Bruce Willis. It was a great way to do some genteel gay-bashing under the cover of investigating corruption. But the amount of media venom expended was completely out of proportion to Conway's offence. Admittedly the £100,000 wasted on paying his sons for invisible services is a lot of money for an ordinary British family - around four years' average salary, the size of a typical mortgage. But it is of sub-atomic dimensions compared with the £100 billion squandered on countless futile public projects every year. This somehow fails to excite comparable outrage. As George Orwell said of one monstrous waste of public money in the middle of WW2, once a scandal gets too big it becomes invisible. Conway's predations were imaginable and understandable.

Also, I could not help feeling twinges of unease. After all, I profited pretty well at taxpayers' expense during my civil service career. I was perfectly happy to go on utterly useless courses in various attractive parts of the country, claim all the expenses and freebies going, take a hefty redundancy settlement after a year's total idleness or useless make-work on full pay... Adjusting for inflation, I made considerably more than the Conway clan. If you multiply my loot by that of all my colleagues in similar positions, we made the Conways look like public benefactors. And as the feral media, with their legendary corruption, expense manipulation and grotesquely inflated salaries, they are the least fit people on God's earth to criticise anyone for fiddling money. So much of people's behaviour depends on the surrounding culture of the organisation within which they work.

Also the whole business smears the reputations and the honest value of most ordinary MPs. Some champion extremely unpopular causes, such as the "Guildford Four" who were jailed in 1974 on false charges of IRA terrorist attacks. It took years of patient, dogged, courageous, intelligent and persistent investigating and campaigning by one ordinary London MP to finally win their release in 1989. This was after the MP, an utterly unassuming and gentle family man, had truckloads of vilification thrown at him as an "IRA sympathiser" by our indescribably evil tabloids. The old joke that "in America the accused is innocent until the papers come out the next morning" applies overwhelmingly in Britain.

Some MPs contribute to the national media and add to the merriment of the nation - notably our local Class A buffoon and philanderer Boris Johnson, MP for Henley-on Thames, eight miles east of Reading. Heck, some actually make intelligent comments on politics and other aspects of national life and have a real educational value (even Boris is usually worth reading).

But most MPs are unknown outside their local areas. Their long hours of unspectacular slog, their virtues, failings and minor triumphs seldom make it into the local media, much less the London stage. One of our local MPs has no material ambitions beyond the ability to go fishing on his days off. He runs an office in a small house on Oxford Road, one of the poorer areas of town, and is available to talk on all manner of problems. A parishioner rang him about her campaign to get a physiotherapy pool at the Royal Berkshire Hospital. He said: "Come down in half an hour and I'll have the kettle on." He spent time with her planning the campaign and the pool has been installed.

The local MP is still the one locally accessible person who is perceived as an effective ally of the little guy in battles with national or local bureaucracy. I remember my days in the Social Security office; when an aggrieved claimant threatened to complain to his/her MP, he/she got priority attention. If he/she actually complained to the MP, our manager received a letter on House of Commons headed notepaper from the MP demanding to know what we were doing to this voter. In some cases, the claimant had a genuine grievance. In others, they were unholy pains in the ass, professional complainers, mentally deranged..... It did not matter. Once this letter arrived from the MP, your life was not worth living until you had resolved the case and the manager could write a satisfactory reply to the MP. Of course, the people who did not complain simply slid lower down the pile of files. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

My favourite was the blind guy who was taught to touch-type at the Department's expense. He then proceeded to bombard the office (and sometimes the MP) with a series of immaculately touch-typed letters complaining about some error in calculating his Social Security. He knew far more about the benefits system than our little 17 year old clerks straight out of school, so it is not surprising that there were occasional errors. On one occasion, I had to go round to his house to grovel on behalf of the Department after some trifling error, the MP's letter inside the file in my briefcase. On one unforgettable day, a file arrived with a huge flag attached "PRIME MINISTER INTERESTED". An unhappy claimant had written direct to the Prime Minister's office, where some minor civil servant had raised the file and passed it via London DSS HQ to Reading. But it raised visions of Margaret Thatcher (it was the early days of her reign) bellowing down the phone at our hapless manager.

As the Devil's Kitchen aptly commented, once the latest European Treaty is passed by Parliament, our MPs will be overpaid regional councillors, less able to defend our interests than a dead dog in the street. It will be a real loss if these often reviled, often flawed, often overpaid, quite often oversexed, but more often devoted and undervalued individuals lose their public function. The media monsters might have to resort to exposing their own flaws, sexual perversions. lies, corruption and financial swindles and that would never do............

Translation into English...please.

It takes years of effort to gain reasonable competence in a foreign language. Often I feel it takes even more work to be able to translate from one form of English to another. Political language is an obviously subtle dialect which is best translated via humour, as in these examples of British politicians' words (and what they really mean):

"Just because I'm Conservative, it doesn't mean I back all Mrs Thatcher's ideas". (All Hail to Thee, Blessed Margaret, Earth Goddess and Mistress of my soul.)

"Just because I'm Labour, it doesn't mean I'm a raging socialist". (We'll keep the Red Flag flying....)

"Just because I'm Liberal Democrat, it doesn't mean I support lunatic policies". (When we're elected, we'll not only legalise paedophilia, we'll make it compulsory.)

Often the information omitted from a politician's speech is far more relevant than that included. You have to translate what the lying SOB should have said. If you think I have a low opinion of the Reverend Blair and his colleagues, you should see the wickedly funny and incredibly foulmouthed political blog Devil's Kitchen (devilskitchen.me.uk). Another blogger recommended him thus:

The Devil's Kitchen is one of the foremost blogs in the UK. He makes "Those Bastards", much loved by Dr Crippen, seem like a Quaker Meeting. The DK is bawdy, foul-mouthed, tasteless, vulgar, offensive and frequently goes beyond all boundaries of taste and decency. So why on earth does Dr Crippen read the DK? Because he reduces me to a state of quivering, helpless laughter.

The DK author recently described our Foreign Secretary David Milliband as "a mendacious sack of shit". This is probably the only nice thing he has ever said about Milliband, or indeed any British politician. It was a refreshing reminder of the savage abuse Jonathan Swift heaped on the high and mighty 300 years ago. This particular vilification was inspired by Milliband's reference to several top British charities supporting the latest European Union treaty, which is about to be press ganged through Parliament. How could any decent person disagree with the opinions of the biggest and most respected NGOs in the country? Well, on closer scrutiny of their accounts, the Devil discovered that all these "charities" are in receipt of truckloads of British Government and/or EU money. No wonder they were all singing from the Milliband hymn sheet.

It was an extra depressing revelation for me personally, as I actively supported one of them (the NSPCC, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children) for 20 years and raised thousands of pounds for them. (As many cynics have pointed out, in Britain we have the Royal Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Animals.) The NSPCC was founded by the Reverend Benjamin Waugh in 1889. He was sickened, as many people were, by the thousands of abused, neglected and hungry children in London, the biggest and richest city in the world at that time. (In the first place it was the London SPCC.) Unlike the others, he had the drive and determination to do something about it. His portrait shows a man with the flowing beard and piercing eyes of an Old Testament prophet. It took someone with ferocious "fire in the belly" to save these children and he had it by the furnaceful.

For over a century the NSPCC did a prodigious amount of child protection work on a shoestring income. But, of course, charity bosses have become more and more ambitious, expansionist, "professional" and "commercial". How could you possibly argue with "professionalism" and "efficiency"? The more money raised, the more you can help abused children, famine victims, multiple sclerosis sufferers, or whoever the charity serves. I went to a NSPCC meeting around 1992 where the national fundraising director explained their latest moneymaking ideas. He obviously lived on a different planet to the street collectors like me. Of course, he still wanted the money from the little guys, like the local, tireless and utterly faithful fundraising committees, but his everyday life involved big business sponsorship (e.g. get a supermarket chain to adopt you as their "Charity of the Year") , seeking major media visibility, launching expensive commercials and PR campaigns, promoting initiatives such affinity credit cards......

Judging from the plum senior charity jobs advertised in national newspapers, he was typical of a new breed of charity careerists. Sooner or later, that sort of "charity" executive is drawn inevitably to the bottomless trough of taxpayers' money controlled by the odious likes of Blair and Milliband. But once a charity takes any substantial sum of government money, even for supplying specific expert "services", it is a lost soul. You know that a person needs only 5 or 10% of shares in a business to have a controlling stake. You don't need 51% of the stock.

Similarly, once the state is contributing more than, say, 5% of income, it has the charity by the balls. The charity bosses can't live (or think they can't live) without the state's money and thus cannot help but support any government policy. In effect they are a branch of the state, but a special type of branch where the luckless public are voluntarily paying most of the tax. The "charity" street collectors like me, rattling our boxes in our spare time, become unpaid taxmen. It is a win-win-win situation for the state. They co-opt charity resources and thus effectively increase taxation without Parliamentary approval. They silence a previously independent organisation, held in great public esteem because of its enormous good work, which might have opinions unpalatable to the Government.

These opinions carry considerable weight if the charity is perceived as honest, competent and independent in its specialist area. An obvious example in the case of the NSPCC was some years ago when it pointed out the blindingly obvious - that children are safest from physical and sexual abuse in a traditional intact family. Plainly this is not welcome advice in numerous "progressive" circles. Also, as I pointed out in an earlier post, existing Government policy undermines family stability by facilitating adultery and single parenthood and thus probably increases the sum of childhood misery. But charities can go on being perceived as "independent" for a long time after they have been captured by the State. How many people ever examine their accounts, think of who is paying the piper and apply a suitable interpretation (Non Government Organisation means Government Organisation) to their PR utterances? I never looked at the NSPCC accounts in the 20+ years I collected for them.

The implications of the state (and, even worse, the EU) controlling "NGO"s are endlessly sinister. The whole point of a charity is that it is supported by voluntary contributions. This has the disadvantage of restricted income and involves continuous competitive effort to fundraise. But it encourages creation of a widespread support base where the loss of an individual donor is less important. It ensures continuous contact with the general public and their opinions. It offers the dignity of independence where the charity is free to provide services where it thinks the most urgent need or appropriate recipients exist.

Also it is visibly distinct from local or national government. This was very significant in the case of the NSPCC. Parents knew that the local NSPCC "cruelty" officer was not a policeman or civil servant or social worker. In many cases parents at the end of their tether approached the NSPCC to seek help when they had hurt their children, or felt about to hurt them. They trusted the long established reputation of the charity - that they would be sympathetically helped and the family kept together, with the risk of the children being taken into care much reduced. Concerned family members or neighbours who suspected child abuse would approach the NSPCC in preference to the police or social services.

All the opposite factors apply as the charity subtly slides into state control. Why should citizens give their hard earned (and hard taxed) money to an organisation which is also receiving piles of the tax money extorted from them? The whole motivation to give and the nobility and generosity of charitable giving is undermined. The energy of the charity gets diverted in ways alien to their original objectives. The fact that the NSPCC had any opinion on the European Union is bizarre: what special knowledge or interest have they in international relations? The charity has to pay attention to an area if its paymasters hint that resources are needed there, regardless of their own expert opinions. Why should the public trust the employees of a charity which is merely a disguised branch of the state and is thus obliged to observe every highly suspect regulation and guideline?

The public confidence in the NSPCC has also been severely damaged by a series of disasters, notably the horrible death of Victoria Climbie. This little girl was failed by every agency which might have helped her, including the NSPCC, the London Social Services and a hospital doctor in the National Health Service. About the only person with the intelligence and compassion to help her was a cab driver, who saw her catastrophic condition shortly before she died and drove her straight to hospital. The ever increasing income did little to improve the competence or basic common sense of NSPCC staff. This is hardly surprising as over half the grossly expanded NSPCC income is now going into publicity campaigns rather than child protection services.

Every organisation makes mistakes, but the way they respond and admit fault is crucial. The PR speak of the current NSPCC director defending the charity after Victoria's death was in unbelievable contrast to the attitude of the NSPCC National Director in the late 1980s after a comparable disaster. He was a doctor, who, like the retired doctor in my earlier post, sadly lacked all training in bullshit, evasion, garbage, Political Correctness, Public Relations and Communications Strategy. Heidi Koseda, a 5 year old girl, was locked in a room and left to starve to death. Before she died, she was reduced to eating strips of wallpaper torn from the wall. A NSPCC officer came to her home, but failed to see her and put the file away after falsely reporting he had seen her. The Director at that time could speak only in plain honest English which needed no translation and his grief and distress at the failure of the charity was palpable.

The public response to this tragedy, just before the charity's 100th anniversary in 1989, was remarkable. People were putting extra money in collecting boxes, saying that the NSPCC had received a pile of appalling publicity, but they knew it was an isolated lapse in a huge history of public service. The NSPCC was still serving abused children who would suffer all the more if the public lost faith and stopped giving money.

The language of money looks something like English, but the quantities described in the media usually lack any connection with everyday reality. What does £12.4 billion ($25 billion) really mean in plain English? Put one way, it is one of the estimates for the National Health Service computer project I mentioned in a recent posting. Admittedly this figure is probably as fictional and flexible as the shoe production figures in George Orwell's "1984". But you have to start somewhere, even if the figure won't end at 12.4 billion.

Spoken quickly, it sounds like a larger version of your weekly grocery bill. Translated into physical reality, it is more than half of the houses in Reading, a town of 250,000 people. Put another way it is three large family cars for every single man, woman and child in Reading. There is physically not enough space in town to park these cars. In plain English, these 800,000 cars parked nose to tail would stretch from Detroit to Los Angeles. It is an insane, unreal, eye watering, mind bending, obscene and unbelievable sum of money for a service ancilliary to the alleged core functions of the NHS (i.e. caring for the sick, injured and disabled).

There is no reasonable confidence that this monstrous Information Technology (IT) scheme will ever work remotely satisfactorily or deliver any benefits commensurate with the investment. Yet once launched, there seems to be no political will to cancel it or settle for a more modest system and spend the loot on some real NHS disaster areas. There is no shortage of the latter, despite what you hear from the ludicrous Michael Moore in "Sicko". Care of the elderly, cleaning/infection control and decent prostheses for amputees all spring to mind as needing radical improvement. These are all problems where fancy IT support is irrelevant. But, as numerous cynics pointed out, organisations exist for their own benefit, not for the good of the luckless clients. The one thing in "Sicko" which was right on target was the depiction of the NHS doctor's lifestyle, with his new Audi and luxury home. Doctors have done best out of the recent massive increases in NHS spending.

The lack of basic numeracy among much of the population is a stumbling block in translating any Government expenditure into plain English and getting people sufficiently outraged. This £12.4 billion is a fraction of the money squandered by the British Government alone (£100 billion per year according to one estimate). But the ten or twelve figure sums poured down the toilet lack any clear physical meaning. And don't even get me started on the EU corruption and waste...... If more journalists expressed some government folly by saying, for example, that this NHS project alone will cost new Ford Mondeos stretching from London to Moscow, would it make any difference?

Does any of this have relevance to a Christian? Well, so many UK and US charities are of Christian origins and continue to draw massive Christian support. The "professional" fundraisers really know this when they are targeting possible sources of help, whether cash donations or volunteers. Churches are always near the top of their hit list. The choice of Christmas cards offered by secular charities for fundraising purposes is revealing; they always include a good choice of beautiful religious cards along with those depicting only snow, robins and holly. It is sickening to see Christian goodwill being hijacked by an alien state or superstate and pressed into anti-Christian service. But at least there are still independent charities to which you can switch your money.

Politics is far worse because there is no alternative Parliament or credible existing alternative parties. The few which exist in Britain are tiny, powerless and stuffed with nutcases and sociopaths. Setting up a new Christian party would be horribly expensive. Yet some alternative is desperately needed; the shameless mendacity and venality of politicians in the main parties invites only the worst and most cynical interpretations. Tony Blair proclaimed 10 years ago that he was a "pretty straight guy" and has now moved to a 4 million dollar sinecure with JP Morgan. The only sane conclusion you can draw is that every senior British politician is automatically corrupt. The 4 million dollars is obviously intended as up front corruption of every top British (and other senior Western) politician for the rest of eternity; keep your nose clean, don't offend us and your semi-eternal reward will be great on earth... Like the corruption of charities above, it is an all-time bargain. Great control for very little money.

As bad money drives out good, so any remotely intelligent and honorable Christian will shun political life. Even if you are heroically idealistic and austere, you cannot help but suspect that your colleagues are eyeing a massive future payoff. And they will be far more ruthless and less principled than you in any fighting for senior positions. Genuine Christian politicians of the past, such as Konrad Adenauer, will seem as unreal and unimaginable as a Hobbit. It is already impossible to imagine any Western politician behaving as courageously and honourably as he did, in resisting the flying of Nazi flags over his home city of Cologne.

Statistics: Getting Your Sums Wrong

As one jester said, 85% of statistics are made up on the spot. That was certainly the case for the numerous crimes against the taxpayer in which I was a minor accomplice. The second Department of Social Security project I worked on in 1982-1986 was allegedly the second biggest IT project in history, second only to the computer projects which supported the Apollo moon shots. The original estimate was £700 million (over a billion dollars even then). Needless to say, it climbed and climbed to over £2 billion by the early 1990s, so God alone knows what it finally cost.

One particularly telling episode was the frenzied week when the decision was taken to reduce the number of mainframe computer centres from seven to three in a desperate effort to make the cost/benefit figures add up. I was frantically multiplying the original estimates by 3/7 or 7/3 in one of the crudest recalculations you can imagine. But any questions of value for taxpayers' money and justifying the investment evaporated as time went on. When one of the senior bullshitters was summoned before a Parliamentary committee on public expenditure, he unblushingly explained the original £700 million estimate as "an academic exercise". The original "seven centres" network design was influenced by the 7 regional controllers in DSS who wanted an IT centre in each region; any region without a centre was perceived as second-class. It is a measure of the almost limitless contempt in which the public administrators of this country hold the taxpayer that they are able to indulge in such expensive power games.

Another (mercifully minor) project was justified on the basis on a 10% saving of existing clerical costs. This was a figure I had plucked from thin air, with not a shred of solid evidence to support it. It looked modest enough to be credible and large enough to make the discounted cash flow calculations deliver a worthwhile return after 7 years. The whole project never reached the 7 year mark, being abandoned after a trial at one site. Plainly no one in government has learnt anything from these fiascos as hundreds of millions continues to be poured down the toilet on aborted or inadequate civil service IT projects year after year. The most monstrous outrage at the moment is the National Health Service computer strategy which will cost anything from $20 billion to $60 billion, depending on which estimate you believe - or more likely don't believe.

The old jibe about the truthfulness of statistics (Lies, damned lies and statistics) has an extra edge in counting Christians. The recent revelation that Catholics had overtaken Anglicans in British church attendance loses some of its lustre when you think about the quoted figures. Both were less than 900,000. Out of an alleged 4 million Catholics and 40 million Anglicans, the figures ranged from bad to abysmal. Far from any cause for Catholic celebration, they underlined the long term decline in both Churches' influence. As I said in my previous post, the fact that Catholic church attendance is relatively healthy is largely due to the East European invasion we have enjoyed since 2004.

The Polish invasion has revealed some of the glorious confusion in head counting any large group. According to one figure I have seen, there are nearly one million new Polish arrivals in the UK out of a total population of 60 million, i.e. less than 2%. Yet if you take the figures town by town, it looks rather different, nearer 5 to 6%. The moderate sized town of Crewe in north-west England had a population of 45,000 until 3,000 Poles arrived. Most of them were recruited by a local employment agency whose owner confessed that he could not believe what he had done to his home town. The ocean port of Southampton, with 300,000 people, has allegedly 15,000 to 20,000 Poles. Reading, with around 250,000 people, has 8,000 to 14,000 Poles. These figures look a trifle imprecise, especially when you realise that both estimates appeared on the same page of the "Reading Chronicle" and were offered by two people with allegedly intimate knowledge of the local Polish community. All you know for certain is that three Polish shops have popped up in a half mile stretch of the Oxford Road.

From the Polish viewpoint one advantage of Reading is the long-established Polish church of the Sacred Heart and the Dom Polski social club. They are not ideally placed for the new arrivals, being in the east/centre part of Reading while the immigrants are clustered heavily along Oxford Road is on the west side. Up to 2004 Sacred Heart had two masses each weekend and a declining congregation as the post-WW2 migrant generation who did not return to a Communist Poland slowly died out. Now it has 4 masses each weekend, all packed to the doors. Yet curiously its church attendance is not included in the diocesan directory figures which contribute to the calculations of the national total of Catholics which were quoted above. If you add in the numerous Polish churches, and other national minority Catholics around the country which are similarly excluded, the true figure is probably considerably higher than 900,000.

Dom Polski tends to cater for the older generation of Poles (plus any number of English/Irish customers), so the newcomers have launched "Ecce Homo" (Pontius Pilate's words on presenting Christ to the crowd) as a social/educational society to attract young Poles, educate Poles about England and the English about Poles.

Oxford Road has seen wave after wave of immigrants; Jewish, Irish, West Indian, Pakistani, Indian and now East European. Some linger in the crowded, but cheap side streets off Oxford Road, most move on to more prosperous suburbs. A multi cultural collection of buildings bears testimony to this complex mix; the Irish Centre is 200 yards north of Oxford Road, the synagogue is 100 yards off Oxford Road and the first purpose-built mosque in town is being built right on Oxford Road. The steel skeleton of its minaret dominates the nearby Methodist church and the restaurants of several nationalities which line the road.

The church attendance figures, flawed as they are, provide the main basis for decisions on diocesan administration. Some of the truly bizarre proposals in the plans for reorganising our Portsmouth diocese seem to have arisen from "management by spreadsheet" where distant bureaucrats carved up and regrouped parishes based purely on their attendance figures. Sacred Heart, bursting at the seams, was not even mentioned in these plans. But it is not only church attendance figures that entice Catholic leaders into highly suspect initiatives. A current fad backed by allegedly startling figures is a pretty good bet for launching clerical careers.

Nearly 20 years ago I attended a talk by a priest who was advertised as the diocesan expert on AIDS, which was the main threat to the human race at that time. His main qualification for the job seemed to be a willingness to swallow and regurgitate every terrifying statistic promoted by the AIDS industry. Among his prophesies was the assertion that in 5 to 10 years we would see people with Karposi's sarcoma on their faces on the buses and in the shops on a daily basis. Needless to say, I have never seen a single person anywhere with Karposi's sarcoma - except in Hollywood gay propaganda such as "Long Term Companion" or "Philadelphia". I have also never seen a single diocesan expert on amoebic dysentery or malaria or TB, all much bigger health problems than AIDS......but then I have never seen a Hollywood star wearing a shit coloured ribbon to advertise his burning compassion for amoebic dysentery sufferers. These people have the unforgivable bad taste to have an unchic fatal disease which doesn't afflict celebrities. And I would not be surprised to find that our diocesan AIDS expert has now moved on to global warming activism armed with a fresh set of terrifying statistics. AIDS is so five minutes ago, especially as barely 0.1% of the UK population suffer from it, despite widespread chaotic promiscuity.

That talk on AIDS, incidentally, was unforgettable for a ferocious intervention by the retired doctor sitting in the row in front of me. He was probably irritated by a non-medical guy lecturing on his turf, but his venom was fuelled mainly by the utterly secular and rationalist attitude to the disease displayed by the priest.

"What the church should be teaching, Father, is that sodomy is mortally sinful. That fornication is mortally sinful. That if a virgin man marries a virgin woman, they will not get AIDS...."

The priest was visibly startled by the force of this call to morality and was belatedly and unconvincingly forced to concede the importance of the Church's teaching on sexual behaviour. It was plain that for him the only real mortal sin was being judgemental i.e. truthful. It is difficult to decide what was most shocking about the old doctor's comments: his total lack of respect for the clergy, his complete lack of knowledge of the precepts of Political Correctness (unforgivable in a man of his education) or his use of clear unambiguous English.

Education is a major area of contentious figures. The "league tables" of secondary schools provide statistics by the sackful on the exam results of every school in the country. Like the church attendance figures above, they are mostly a herald of dismal underperformance, especially given the ever increasing sums poured into state schooling. The exams for 16 year olds (GCSE or General Certificate of Secondary Education) must be among the most derided qualifications ever promoted by any major education system. The basic "satisfactory" standard is that a pupil gets a grade C in 5 subjects, including English and Maths. But according to some credible reports, you need get only 32% or 36% to get a grade C. In other words a bad failure in any other exam system is enough to get you a Grade C, with still lower marks getting you a pass at D or E grades (i.e. abysmal failure). Thus the league tables for the best local schools look like Albanian election results in the Stalinist glory days, with over 99% of the electors voting with joy for Enva Hoxa. Reading, Kendrick and Abbey Schools regularly get 97 to 100% of their pupils with at least 5 GCSEs at grade C. Of course, this Stalinist 100% includes their dumbest pupils with the basic 5 "C"s and their best with 11 or even more Grade A*s. So the statistics conceal as much as they reveal. The fact that you have an A* grade as well as the basic A is grim testimony to grade inflation.

As you descend the tables, like descending the circles of Hell, you get schools with 50%, 40%, even only 20% getting 5 C"s. You can only imagine the moral of staff in such places. The John Madejski Academy was recently launched in the grim South Reading housing estate of Whitley, replacing an earlier massively failing school (Thamesmead, formerly Ashmead). Despite an investment of $50 million on gleaming new buildings, IT facilities, etc, it is plainly still one of those schools where the "middle classes would rather eat their own livers" than let any child of theirs step inside. The JMA hit the national press recently as one of the 5 worst schools in the country. It must be mortifying for local multi-millionaire and philanthropist John Madejski who also bankrolls the local soccer team, various museums and art galleries. But, as a very successful businessman, he probably reflects that you win some, you lose some. The very worst in town (Phoenix College, previously Reading Alternative School) is not even on the tables for obvious reasons. It is always a really bad sign when a school or business changes its name and even worse when it is changed twice. No wonder that a parishioner at Christ the King church, across the road from the JMA, works a second job cleaning toilets at midnight to send his daughter to a private school.

A more scarey figure for education is the percentage of pupils who carry knives. Plainly the league tables don't carry this more useful piece of information. My cynical take is that the percentage of knife carriers is in inverse proportion to the GCSE results. So Reading, Kendrick and Abbey have zero slashers while JMA and a few others have 20%+. I have no statistics or metal detectors to back this hunch, but I would sooner not use my vital organs as a knife detector. So I and most other adults ignore the more abominable misbehaviour by underclass youths, on the buses and elsewhere.

The problem with statistics is that they are a basis for decision making at all levels of private industry, local and national government. One of my acid-tongued, but extremely well informed friends at church tells me of one policy document circulating in the civil service in London which basically recommends writing off the lowest 30- 50% of the British population - those below social classes ABC1. Decades of ever increasing investment in education have produced consistently disappointing results and it is not clear that further increases would create any better returns. Needless to say, I want to get my hands on this paper to see what sort of recommendations it is proposing, but obviously no one in authority would ever admit to entertaining such lines of thought for a second or sponsoring such Darwinian thinking. Given some of the utterly appalling proposals coming from the "elite", such as near-compulsory organ donation, it will be interesting to see how long it takes such ruthless thinking to surface into the public domain.

Organs of Coercion

Dear Stan,

Here is a fascinating and depressing article by Melanie Phillips. It echoes concerns about organ transplantation which have been discussed on Catholic websites for the past few years, i.e. are the moribund donors really "deceased" when the transplant team move in?. As Melanie is from a traditional Jewish background, her cogent comment shows that it is not an exclusively Catholic area of moral anxiety. The immediate cause of her article was the recent proposal by the Reverend Blair's sinister successor Gordon Brown that you have to opt out of donating your organs rather than opting in. As one contributer to another website noted, it is not bad enough that the Government plunders our wallets while we are alive, it now wants to asset strip our corpses. And it could be a fantastically lucrative business, selling everything from kidneys and hearts to bone to the private medical trade.

At least Phoney Tony only squandered our money.

Bill

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January 14, 2008
Organs of Coercion
Daily Mail, 14 January 2008

The news that Gordon Brown has thrown his weight behind a move to register everyone automatically as an organ donor unless they opt out has all the hallmarks of a major spin operation.

The Sunday newspapers ran prominent stories about the proposal, which is piggy-backing on tomorrow’s government review aimed at boosting the number of organs donated for transplant. Mr. Brown himself penned an article arguing that voluntary organ donation should be replaced by an opt-out system. Similarly, the BBC had clearly been primed with information to promote the story to pride of place.

If this is supposed to assist Mr Brown’s new year campaign to restore his waning political fortunes, it’s a pretty rum way of going about it. To begin with, the idea is not even new. England’s Chief Medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, first proposed such an opt-out system last summer. Maybe Mr Brown thinks he can humanise his image by capitalising on the distress of people suffering or dying for want of a transplantable organ.

Undoubtedly, the impulse to give people the gift of life after one’s own death is a noble one. But if Mr Brown really imagines that he will win popular acclaim by saying that the state will whip out people’s hearts or kidneys without their consent, his advisers undoubtedly need a brain transplant.

For the implications are truly terrifying. There is no more fundamental human right than control over our own bodies and what is done to them, both in life and death.

The inescapable implication of a donor opt-out is that we no longer possess such control. The presumption instead is that the state controls our bodies and can do what it likes with them after it declares us to be dead.

If the medical profession alone were to suggest this — as its leadership most lamentably is doing — it would be alarmingly coercive. For the Government to be backing it, however, deepens coercion into something even more threatening.

Volunteering to donate your organs is one thing. Making it compulsory unless you opt out transforms an act of altruism into state oppression.

Sir Liam attempts to defuse public hostility by saying soothingly that opting out would be an ‘inalienable right’. On the contrary - being forced to opt out of automatic donation destroys our inalienable right to control what happens to us.

It is a weaselly, back-door means of trapping people into having something done to them when they are declared to be dead which may be unacceptable to them in life. Opting out requires an effort. Many will simply forget to do so. That is the cynical calculation behind the scheme. In addition, what will happen - as inevitably as night follows day —is that people will be put under great pressure not to opt out.

Patients who have done so may well be discriminated against. Chillingly, hospitals are to be rated according to the number of dead patients they ‘convert’ into donors. It is hard to imagine a more sinister incentive for the wholesale abuse of vulnerable patients.

There is, however, a yet more fundamental objection to the opt-out proposal. This is the serious doubt whether people whose organs are harvested are indeed dead.

All the evidence suggests that organs are harvested not from the dead but from the dying. In other words, at the time the organs are removed the patients are still alive.

This is because, in these cases, the criterion doctors use to decide that someone has died is the death of the brain stem. This is said to be ‘brain death’, and thus death itself.

However, it does not follow at all that the rest of the brain has also ceased to function. Yet no tests are carried out on other parts of the brain to establish whether all activity there has actually ceased or not.

As a result, people are declared dead while their heart is still beating unassisted and blood is still circulating round the body. Most of us would think such patients are not dead but very much alive.

Indeed former transplant doctors, who became so horrified by the implications of what they were doing that they abandoned the practice, say that organs for transplant are only viable if the donor is still alive — since when the body is really dead the organs become useless to anyone else, as they die too.

Brain stem death is in fact merely a convenient definition that allows surgeons to remove organs from a living body while they are still being nourished by its blood supply.

Such observations provoke outrage in transplant doctors who claim there is no basis for such ‘scaremongering’, which will cause more people to die because potential organ donors will be unreasonably frightened off. But among such doctors, their own behaviour gives the game away.

Some give ‘brain stem dead’ patients a general anaesthetic before removing their organs. But whoever heard of anaesthetising a corpse? The reason they do it is because of a sharp rise in blood pressure during the organ removal. Some doctors claim they administer the anaesthetic simply because it stops the excessive bleeding caused by this blood pressure rise. But a rise in blood pressure during any surgical procedure is an indication that the body is experiencing physical distress.

Dr David Hill, a retired anaesthetist who has long expressed deep concern about organ donation, has written that if patients react in similar fashion when their organs are being removed, the most logical conclusion is that they are not in fact dead.

In recent years, ‘brain stem death’ has been increasingly questioned as we realise how little we know about the brain. Doctors are discovering that, among patients in a persistent vegetative state whose brains are presumed to have stopped functioning, there is in fact a large amount of brain activity. The implications for what patients presumed to be ‘brain dead’ might be experiencing are simply unknowable.

More and more experts have been expressing increasing concern about brain stem death and organ donation. Three doctors wrote in a medical journal last year that declaring patients dead for the purposes of harvesting their organs was in effect a fiction, and that prospective organ donors were not being told the truth.

And a professor of philosophy and expert in medical ethics, Michael Potts, has drawn the horrifying conclusion: ‘Since the patient is not truly dead until his or her organs are removed, it is the process of organ donation itself that causes the donor’s death.’

In Britain, however, the medical establishment backs organ donation and the proposed opt-out scheme. This is because the British Medical Association and the medical royal colleges long ago lost their own ethical plot.

Renouncing the core medical precept, ‘First do no harm’, they have come to believe instead in the amoral doctrine that the end justifies the means.

As a result, from abortion, embryo research and cloning to starving and dehydrating ‘dispensable’ patients to death, respect for human life has been replaced by the belief that individual lives are merely instrumental to the creation of the happiness of the greatest number.

This way lies the most alarming infringement of human rights and a descent into tyranny.
A system the public believes embodies the highest form of altruism rests instead on deception and unlawful killing. Far from being forced into an automatic/opt- out donation system, people should finally be told the truth.

The Rocky Horror Service Book

The satirical magazine "Private Eye" has a long-running column "The Rocky Horror Service Book" which pokes endless, merciless and well-deserved mockery at modern religious follies. Many of the magazine's staff are practising Christians, so they know what they are talking about. The problem with being a satirist is that so-called "real life" is far more ludicrous than anything you could possibly dream up. So when you get religious services such as "The Ceremony of Divorce of a Married Couple" or "The Rite of Blessing of a Lesbian Creche", you are never quite sure if it is a piss-take or a factual report. In the 1960s a young British "theologian" published a book in which he argued that in order to survive Christianity would have to abandon its belief in God. Admittedly the Monty Python team started a few years later, but this book was not an early draft of a Python sketch, along the lines of the Ministry of Silly Walks or the Dead Parrot. It was allegedly serious.

As one writer commented on this book, it raised a serious question of where the boundaries of heresy lay in the Christian and more specifically the Anglican church. Was this an acceptable position for a person who could call themselves Anglican? After all, an "Anglican" bishop in good standing had recently published "Honest to God". One intelligent reviewer commented "The most immediately striking thing about Bishop Robinson is that he is an atheist". Of course the atheist question could not be honestly faced without ripping the Anglican Church into countless fragments. Instead the Anglican Church has staggered on for decades through "crisis" after "crisis" which could only be evaded by fudging the crucial questions of Authority, Doctrine and Faith. You had countless de facto schisms on the questions of the Resurrection, gay rights, women priests, scriptural authority and much more, but no de jure schism.

This total disunity was one of the basic facts of religious life which baffled any informed Catholic who witnessed the Anglican/Catholic ARCIC discussions since the 1970s. Who on earth were we talking to, whom did they represent and how could the resulting "Agreed Statements" be binding on any but the faction of Anglicans who might happen to accept them? Also what on earth were the British Catholic delegates telling the Anglicans? Were they honestly updating Rome and how could the Pope or Cardinal Ratzinger play along with this preposterous circus? Of course, the train hit the buffers with an unholy crash once Ratzinger and Co saw one "agreement" and raised piercing questions as to its ambiguities. An appalled Anglican delegate exclaimed that they had been wasting time for the past twenty years. Well, of course you have, Bishop. Any informed Catholic could have told you that 20 years earlier.....

Obviously, most theological debate has only a remote relation to how Christians live their everyday lives. But the theological confusion still percolates to the grass roots in bizarre ways. In 1990 I was invited to a wedding of two workmates. It was to be held on the south edge of Oxford. The bride's father was an Emeritus Professor at Oxford, so her family was plainly far better connected socially than mine. I parked my car in a nearby road, which made me wish I had invested in better security. It was part of the unlovely, crime-ridden public housing estates whose residents mostly worked in the local car factories. Neither the houses nor the factories feature prominently in the Oxford tourist website and brochures. I wondered how my colleagues chose to get married in such a dump.

I walked 100 yards, turned a corner and it was like Alice going through the looking glass. I found a picture postcard ancient church in a beautiful tree filled churchyard - obviously built when this area was a tiny village remote from Oxford. The bride turned up in full flowing attire, the organ played, the families beamed, the wedding proceeded.......except, of course, it was not a wedding. The blushing bride had been down the aisle once before and Anglican rules forbid the remarriage of divorcees in Church, as Prince Charles and Camilla discovered. You had to be fairly alert to notice the difference - in one crucial sentence, when the vicar said that we were witnessing the blessing of their wedding already recognised by law. The real legal business had already been done in the local registry office, but these places tend to be as appealing as the Secretary of State's premises in Michigan. You want a proper church experience to remember your special day and take pretty pictures, especially if your father has some social status.........

The problem with these faux-weddings arises with the systematic dilution of doctrine on marriage; whatever clever form of words is used, the indelible impression on people who are not religiously knowledgeable is that divorce and remarriage are perfectly OK. Admittedly, the whole Anglican church exists only because a fat guy in the 16th century wanted a divorce, so trying to adhere to traditional Christian doctrine and accommodate the sexual frailties of 21st century England is more difficult than squaring the circle. It is like an old sweater unravelling - once the threads are pulled, they keep disintegrating.

The tensions within the Catholic community in England are not much different. You can see some of the problems that the clergy face in the weddings and funerals I have attended in recent years. One unforgettable fiasco at the end of 2005 highlighted some of their difficulties of conscience. The music group in which I sing had been invited to perform at this wedding. We diligently prepared and rehearsed, and turned up way ahead of time at St James. Father Dominic waited for the bride at the front door of the church in the freezing cold of New Years Eve....and waited and waited. Finally she appeared half an hour late and the ceremony got under way. Come communion time, not a single person came up for communion. Neither the bride nor the groom received communion. We were up in the choir loft, so by the time we realised what was happening it was too late to race downstairs and receive communion to spare Father's embarrassment. Why on earth bother to get married in church at all if it meant so little to you?

As a postscript a few group members waited at the church for ages afterwards to collect our long-agreed fee. A wedding guest had to go into the town centre to get the cash from an ATM. If we had not got it that day, we would plainly never have got it. It's not that we're mercenary - we sing for love, but we agreed that we want musical contributions to be valued and did not want to undermine professional musicians who need a serious fee to survive. Finally, two of the group went back to their car parked in the mall across the road. With all the delays, they found they had overstayed the welcome extended to St James parishioners and were hit with a £30 fine.

As one priest contributer to "Faith" magazine noted many years ago, the clergy who take doctrine seriously face a horrible quandary in presiding at the marriage of many couples. Can we in good conscience preside over a "Catholic" marriage when we are morally certain that, in five years time, a Catholic marriage tribunal will agree to its annulment? This couple looked a prime example of this principle.

A wedding at St James where we sang in December 2007 highlighted another uncomfortable fact - apparent compromising on premarital chastity. I knew little about the couple until the service got under way and Fr Dominic was inserting words that at one time would have appeared only in the Rocky Horror Service Book. Along with the traditional prayer that they be blessed with children, he invoked blessings on their two year old son and prayed for the strengthening of their relationship already begun. Plainly the clergy have to welcome repentent sinners and people seeking to regularise their marital status, but I could not help feeling queasy at the whole tone of the event. As with the Oxford "wedding", (where again the happy couple had cohabited for years before the service) the public witness to a casual observer was that premarital sex and producing children out of wedlock was no big deal. But, for the umpteenth time, I was glad that I am not a priest because I cannot think of a way in which I would have firmly upheld Church teaching without alienating the couple, and thus their child and future children.

With the struggle to maintain churches accumulated over decades of capital investment, in years of much more fervent religious observance than today, the Catholic clergy in Britain have got multiple overlapping and conflicting doctrinal and financial pressures to handle. The only reason we still have reasonably full churches is because of the massive recent East European immigration. And the Poles, Lithuanians and Slovaks are by and large not yet high earners so their financial contribution is not yet substantial. As with any business, no one wants to upset customers. Yet Jesus was seeking disciples, not satisfied consumers, and some people walked away from His "hard saying". He did not seek to entice them back and increase market share by diluting His message.

Funerals are an even worse quagmire for the clergy, with multiple opportunities to offend people at a very traumatic time. The brilliant funeral director Barry Albin-Dyer gives some grim and hilarious examples in his book "Don't Drop the Coffin!". One of my colleagues went to his grandfather's funeral service and was enraged beyond measure when the vicar got his grandfather's name wrong on several occasions. Admittedly, Anglican clergy have an extra hard burden to carry in England because any British person is entitled to an Anglican burial. Also, they do duty service at places like crematoria chapels where they conduct funerals almost on a production line basis and have practically no chance to meet the families beforehand. An extreme case for one Anglican vicar was the day when a funeral procession entered the chapel at the crematorium and the funeral director sidled up to him and whispered "Suicide". So you have 30 seconds to compose a comforting sermon on the theme of suicide for a congregation of total strangers.....

But conducting funerals for people who never darkened a church door is routine for clergymen. It is hardly surprising that the implicit message given at any number of funerals I have attended -- Catholic, Anglican, Baptist or United Reform -- is of Universal Salvation. The questions of repentence, forgiveness and damnation are mentioned fleetingly, if at all. The wise and humane old Roman advice to "Speak no ill of the dead" gets inflated into an evasion of basic questions about life and death and eternal life. One Anglican vicar in London wrote a wickedly funny piece on the gruesome banality of some funerals where the only touch of real religion is when someone's cellphone rings unintentionally and the ringtone theme is "Jesu Joy of Man's Desire".

Again, it is tasteless to mention money at a time like this, but like marriages, funerals are a source of income for clergy who are on very low stipends by UK and USA standards and you can hardly deny the insidious influence of the need to keep the customers happy. Funerals and weddings are also a possible occasion of grace for people who otherwise have no contact with religion. I know of one man who started going to Mass again after his father's funeral. Plainly our clergy deserve more encouragement, support and training in presenting the truths of religion and Catholic morality clearly but humanely, because the potential harvest is there. But it is not going to be reaped by soft words and evasion.

Old and New Labour - An Apology

Dear Stan,

Sorry for another update so soon, but I regret that I have been insufficiently rude to the Reverend Blair. It is admittedly hard work keeping track of his unbridled venality, as the information changes by the day. On Thursday 10th January the London "Evening Standard" ran a front page story that he was going to be paid a million dollars a year for services to J P Morgan. Just a minute, isn't he going to be a Middle East peace envoy, public speaker for hire, and possibly President of the European Union as well? How is he going to fit it all in? Well, the JPM job will be only part-time, the article explained. A article promptly appeared on the "Guardian" website explaining that a million a year for the Vicar of St Albion's wise counsel was good value from JPM's point of view. The Guardian often reads like the New Labour court circular, but this reeked higher than usual.

Come Friday 11th January, the "Telegraph" ran an update explaining that the JPM salary was actually $4 million a year for two days a month. This redefines "part-time", which most ordinary mortals understand as two or three days a week. Of course JPM are making truckloads of money from the reconstruction of Iraq - a situation which the Vicar played a supporting role in creating.

It is a sad reflection on the power of inflation that $4 million bucks doesn't buy you much of a politician any more. Many years ago, two Conservative Members of Parliament received £1,000 ($2,000) each to ask questions in the House of Commons on behalf of their benefactor. Neither resigned or was forced to resign once the news broke. At the time you had to pay around £2,000 for a top class hooker in London, so you could buy two MPs for the price of a whore. At that rate, you could have bought a working majority in Parliament for $640,000, but mercifully I don't think the majority were that corrupt. Now you have to cough up $4 million for an utterly discredited creature like Blair. As one correspondent in today's "Telegraph" noted "JP Morgan omitted to follow the most elementary employment procedures - it failed to take up references from Tony Blair's previous employers: the people of the United Kingdom".

Even worse, I had assumed that, once Blair left office, he was at least off the public payroll. But, no, he still gets $180,000 a year from the taxpayers for an ex-PM's office expenses.

The best comment ever on political corruption is of course from "A Man for all Seasons", when Sir Richard Rich gives the crucial perjured evidence which convicts Sir Thomas More and is rewarded by being made Lord Lieutenant of Wales. Sir (later Saint) Thomas comments: "Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world.....But for Wales!"

Old and New Labour

Tony Blair is the exemplar of the "New Labour" politician, the successor to the founders of the British Labour political movement in the early 20th century and the welfare state in the late 1940s. I had an unexpected meeting with the ghost of the "Old Labour" party while walking along Addington Road in December.

This road lies a mile south of the town centre and, for much of its half-mile length, does not look particularly up market or appealing. With its undistinguished mixture of house styles from the 19th to the late 20th century, it could be any of a thousand unremarkable roads in British towns and cities. It is named after Lord Addington, the only Prime Minister to come from Reading. He is best remembered for a mocking rhyme comparing him to the great William Pitt:

"Pitt is to Addington
As London is to Paddington".

The only fact that makes Addington Road triply desirable is its location; close to the town centre, close to Reading University AND having both the top-ranking Reading School and the Royal Berkshire Hospital bordering on it. Near the west end, there used to be a long-neglected piece of overgrown ground which was once a playing field for Kendrick School, the best girls' school in town and one of the top 10 girls schools in the country. What sports they played on this sloping land I do not know. But nature abhors a vacuum, especially when there is so little new housing in a very desirable location, and finally builders bought the land and erected a mixture of houses and apartments. They thus created the only noteworthy feature in Addington Road - a curving terrace of 14 town houses, designed to evoke an 18th century Bath terrace. The 18th century originals in Bath, 70 miles west of Reading, sell for £3 to 4 million ($6-8 million). So the Reading imitations look like all-time bargains at only £500,000 ($1 million) each, especially as they provide 21st century features such as integral garages in the basement. You could even have a lift installed to provide disabled access, though at four stories high they must be the least likely homes ever touted as "disabled accessible".

Many housing developments in Reading provide some public amenity as part of the deal with the council giving them planning permission. So one apartment block next to the terrace was reserved for "essential workers" such as nurses. The Royal Berkshire Hospital is only a hundred yards away, but not many nurses or junior doctors can afford half a million pounds for accommodation. In addition, the semi circle of land in front of the concave terrace has been landscaped into the smallest park in town, and possibly the smallest in the whole country.

On entering it, I found a sign declaring it named after Lorenzo Quelch (1862-1937), a founder of the Labour Party in Reading in 1918 after a lifetime of working in various socialist movements. One of them was named the National Socialist Party - unexpectedly funny, in view of the later political career of Mr Hitler. But there have been so many parties, tendencies, breakaway groups, factions and sects in left-wing British politics in the last 200 years that it must be difficult finding a fresh and distinctive name for each new formation. I knew of one extreme left-wing "party" in Reading which consisted of one family of four people. Lorenzo used to live in Addington Road, which was one reason for naming a local landmark in his honour.

I could not help but marvel at the numerous overlapping ironies in naming this tiny patch of land after Lorenzo. What would he, who spent so much of his life fighting the "hydra-headed monster of capitalism" (aka Huntley and Palmer's Biscuits, the biggest employer in town), have made of a public park provided in a complex deal with a multi-million pound property company? What did he have in common with the smooth talking highly educated spokesmen of the local Labour party who named it after him? Lorenzo was born into desperate poverty. One of his childhood memories was trudging through the snow to pawn his mother's wedding ring. Lorenzo was a Sunday School teacher as well as a tireless politician. Quite a contrast to the privately educated "Phoney" Tony Blair with his eyewatering income and his association with a millionaire hard core pornographer. It was a sad reminder of how the most ardent dreams and noble desires of pioneers get twisted and soured over time.

But a few hundred yards to the east of this luxury development I was reminded of a different way in which the socialist dream had curdled in a probably predictable way. I used to work for the Department of Social Security in Reading and in 1976 I had to visit a house in Addington Road. Under the one roof there were two "families" claiming social security. Nowadays, in the spirit of Lewis Carroll, "family" means whatever you want it to mean. But this menage was an eyeopener to someone as young and naive as me. Upstairs, a man, his partner and their two children constituted one "family". Downstairs a woman and her four children constituted the second "family".

What made it unforgettable (and required my presence to write a report) was the fact that the man upstairs was the estranged husband of the downstairs woman. He had abandoned her to move in with his partner and sire two children, while his wife and four children lived on social security. But he had lost his job and thus the means to support a second household. Either he was a silver tongued SOB or his wife was excessively charitable, but she agreed to help him out by allowing him plus new family to return to the original family house and live on social security.

With the information I gleaned from my visit, the adjudicators back at the office agreed that was OK to pay them as two separate "households", even though they shared one none too large house which had not been subdivided into apartments. Even in 1976, in the early days of the sexual revolution, this "family" set up was obviously exceptional and there were few precedents to guide civil servants in making decisions. And, of course, any decision made could itself serve as a precedent for later decisions....

What is obvious is that this sort of behaviour is possible only for the wealthy or the poor who effectively have unlimited access to the funds extorted from the luckless taxpayer. At that time few of the general public were fully aware of what they were being forced to underwrite and I am sure most would have objected vigorously to funding such arrangements, if they had been allowed any influence in the matter. Yet it was an inevitable consequence of the Social Security legislation passed in the 1940s (under Lorenzo Quelch's Labour Party successors) and its later legal enhancements. It seemed so humane and essential for any modern civilised society - we look after the jobless and especially their children.

But now some sections of the Labour movement find themselves in effect condoning even more immoral behaviour. An extreme, though illuminating, recent example concerned a "family" where the three daughters aged 11, 13 and 15 had all conceived children. Needless to say, all three daughters had themselves been conceived without benefit of matrimony - we are now a whole generation on from my Addington Road "families". The grandmother, her three daughters and their children were living on around £25,000 ($50,000) per annum in combined Social Security and housing benefits. Also, needless to say, none of the "fathers" of these babies were making any contribution, nor were they ever likely to make any.

Roy Hattersley, one of the surviving relics of "Old Labour", makes a lucrative living as a media pundit and in one newspaper column he protested at the media vilification of this family and implied that the real tragedy was the poverty in which this family found themselves and about which the middle classes cared nothing. Plainly £25,000 a year was wholly inadequate. But the family's small house is obviously inadequate and they will doubtless soon be allocated a larger public house. What level of Social Security would relieve Roy's tender conscience without encouraging even more dim witted young women to produce babies on a production line basis? I hope he knows a guy who is expert at squaring circles. But people feel reluctant to suggest reforms which would take resources away from children in one parent families - "compassion" for poor children is a combined ace, king and queen card for the Social Security lobby. Some in the Labour Party, especially the religiously inspired such as Frank Field, see clearly the horrible morass that compassionate instincts have lead so many into and suggested reforms, but they are still very much in the minority.