CentreRight

Let's suppose that we weren't in a pre-election phase, and that it was alleged that a minister - not the Prime Minister, just any old minister - had been alleged to bully his staff so severely that he had to be dressed down by the Cabinet Secretary and those staff were driven to calling an anti-bullying charity.  Suppose then that the minister involved stated that these allegations were "lies" and that his political allies went all over the press saying that these were manufactured allegations, that the book was a work of fiction, that the allegations were generated by the minister's political enemies and politically motivated.  Then suppose that an anti-bullying charity confirmed that in fact they had been contacted as alleged - indeed on multiple occasions.

Wouldn't that be a bit more than "politically damaging"?  If it were anyone other than the prime minister, and anytime other than pre-election, mightn't it actually be a potential resignation matter?

Sir Nicholas Winterton has been widely criticized for his contention that MPs should be able to claim for first-class travel.  Almost every senior journalist I know travels first class when on business and travelling any significant distance.  I travel first class on business and standard class when I travel with my family.  Why?  In first class, I get a seat, I have food and drinks brought to me (so I don't have to interrupt my work), there are usually not children running around or crying, and I am usually not jammed in to a level that is uncomfortable and interferes with my ability to work.  Sir Nicholas is obviously correct to say that the sort of people in standard class (students with large ruck-sacks, friends chatting, people listening to music loudly on their headphones, parents battling to keep their children amused) are quite different sorts of people from those in first class (business people, those seeking quiet, those who prefer their own company).

Losing a child young is a terrible thing, and I am sorry that Gordon Brown and David Cameron have both had to go through that.  But do we really want to choose our government on the basis of which party leader we feel more sorry for?

So, let's see.  If you're Irish, and you suffer a terrible, unprecedented recession and you end up with a serious deficit problem, your public sector workers have huge pay cuts, your taxes rise, and you accept this and tough it out in a good-humoured manner.

If you're German, and you suffer a bad structural competitiveness problem as a consequence of an unprecedented political event (the absorption of East Germany) and problems managing the government's pensions commitments, you endure a decade of economic stagnation and a high pension age.  But you tough it out with solid discipline and hard work.

But if you're Greece, and you have been consistently ill-disciplined, lied and defrauded your way into the euro, failed to abide by even the most basic of accounting norms, regularly failed to implement European rules and regulations properly, even to the extent that your courts are not regarded by the top European Courts as properly constituted judicial authorities, run up huge debts that you can't service, and at the height of your problems elected a government that promised to raise spending even more, then because you make a fuss and have strikes and vaguely threaten revolution, you're supposed to be given tens of billions of euros instead of cutting back??

And for being sceptical about doing this, at a time when their economic recovery has stalled, the Germans are seen as the bad guys!?

Which do you suppose is the greater scandal:

a) MPs having collectively to pay back about £1m of claims over about a five year period virtually all of which was claimed as allowances in accordance with advice provided by those hired to advise them on such claims, and, since very widespread, by definition in accord with the norms of behaviour within the institution concerned.

b) £30m being spent over a five year period on an 80-staff system to monitor and advise upon MP allowance claims in the future.  Spend £30m to save £1m.  Great deal.

No prizes for guessing which I think is the real scandal.  And no prizes for guessing whether as many column inches will be devoted to the latter as were devoted to the former.

The other day, I posted concerning five things to do to avoid throwing away the election, namely being right, worthy of victory, clear, relevantly substantive, and proportionate.  Some of you expressed an interest in how I thought we were doing on these.

Are we throwing the Election away?  Even if, like UK Polling Report, one rejects the view that the Conservatives need an eleven point lead to get an overall majority, a lead of only seven points is nerves-making territory.

Here are five things to do.  There's no guarantee that if you do these things you will win, but if you lose doing this, at least you won't have thrown the Election away.

Qua political issue, I find homosexuality one of the least interesting things to think about.  If I never had to write another political article or give another political speech about homosexuality, my life would be that much richer, and whenever I have written here about issues touching upon homosexuality, I have tried hard to avoid discussing my own point of view.  Alas! politicians do not share my tastes.  They go on and on and on about homosexuality.  The latest is Mr Cameron, with his "astonishing attack on the Church of England over its attitudes to homosexuality." (hat tip, Cranmer).

I know why politicians do this, of course.  Homosexuality has achieved iconic status, such that declaring oneself pro-gay-rights is a way of saying one is "comfortable with the modern world": happy with working mothers, not too bothered if people take drugs, in touch with one's emotions, relaxed about teenagers having sex, enjoys pop music, does not despire Big Brother.  Whether homosexuals are happy to be employed in this way is a moot point.

I used to be much more interested in the politics of homosexuality.  That was when there were lots of important changes to be made or to prevent.  I was a long-time advocate of civil partnerships and of equalisation of the age of consent.  And I was a defender of Section 28, for the same reason.  Why?  Was this because I agree with Mr Cameron, that "our Lord Jesus was around today he would very much be backing a strong agenda on equality and equal rights, and not judging people on their sexuality".

My previous post seems to have generated some interest.  A couple of matters are worth exploring further.  In particular, I am interested in exploring the limits of toleration and what implications we can draw for equalities legislation.  Specifically, I shall contend (a) that I do not seek or require toleration of everything, but, instead, a broad-church tolerant society akin to the Anglican Church; (b) the key problem before us is that some people have come to believe that the requirement for private citizens to treat everyone equally is a primary matter, when in fact it is not and cannot be in any liberal society.

I am a member of a small minority grouping: Christians.  We are well aware that many of our beliefs are not shared by the considerable majority of society, and that a number of our beliefs and practices offend, shock, even disgust many right-thinking people.

Recent weeks have seen a spate of press stories about medical errors, some resulting in deaths, associated with private health contractors and out-of-hours staff.  Without wishing to comment on the specific cases, I want to suggest that it is not straightforward to say whether such events have any particular implications for private contracting or out-of-hours management.  For medical errors are widespread, in any event, and have been for many years.

Indeed, the 2000 US study, To err is human, found that medical errors accounted for some 44,000-98,000 deaths per year in the US.  UK studies have found analogous results.  Being killed by your doctor is one of the major causes of premature death - locum, private contractor, or regular NHS staff.

One of the worst effects of the Iraq invasion has been the loss of confidence in the virtue, for Britain and America, of invading foreign countries for moral reasons and the resurrection of the doctrines of realism, isolationism, and that matters occuring in countries "far away...about which we know little" are nothing to do with us. 

We had thought we had put this old-fashioned, outdated idea behind us, after it was totally discredited by resulting in the hideous mass slaughter of Rwanda and the massacre at Srebrenica.  Instead, under Blair we had the doctrine of liberal interventionism, spectacularly successful in Sierra Leone, Kosovo and Serbia.  But realism is a many-headed hydra, hard to kill, and with the slightest setback - in Iraq, for example - it has returned with a vengance.  So it is necessary to explain, once again, why morally-driven interventionism is justified.

Blair will be "grilled for six hours" today, as the BBC puts it, concerning why we went into Iraq and what happened subsequently.  Apparently the questioning is "likely to focus on the justification he gave for war in controversial government dossiers".  But the reason we invaded Iraq is obvious and the discussion of government dossiers is a total distraction from the questions that should really be being asked.

We invaded Iraq because we believed that, through the 1990s, Saddam Hussein, having fought a war against us in the early 1990s, had failed to live up to what were effectively his surrender terms, and instead had preferred to thumb his nose at us.  We believed that he had continued to build chemical and biological weapons and that he was attempting to develop a nuclear programme.  He was a sponsor of international terrorism, sending cheques to the families of suicide bombers in Israel and the Occupied Territories.  He had attempted to build a super-gun from parts exported from the UK and was rumoured to have plotted the kidnap or murder of George Bush senior.

Meanwhile he barbarically murdered his political opponents, including a particularly brutal putting down of the Shi'ites of southern Iraq, and we had found it necessary to maintain and enforce no-fly zones and engage in periodic bombing raids.  We had been forced, as part of containing his aggression towards us and towards his neighbours - aggression that had resulted in deaths on a scale of millions - to impose crippling sanctions on his country, sanctions that made life very miserable for ordinary innocent Iraqis.

To this point, the tale I have told was completely common ground amongst world leaders.  The Russians, the French, the Germans - all those who became oh-so righteous with their "told you so's" later agreed at the time that Saddam had been building chemical and biological weapons and developing nuclear weapons.  It was for precisely this reason that they had supported the sanctions against him.

On this morning's Today programme, there was a discussion just after 6am about the British Social Attitudes survey.  I felt the characterisation of the two key results discussed was flawed.

First, it was suggested that the change in the proportion of people believing that practicing homosexuality was wrong, with "only" 36% now believing this (a remarkably high proportion, it seems to me) versus 62% in 1983, indicated that society had become more tolerant.  But this is precisely wrong.  Since, by definition, to be tolerant is a matter of how we deal with what we consider wrong or which impinges upon us in some way, we cannot become more tolerant by changing our moral opinions.  What happens instead, is that if we come to believe that something we previously thought wrong is not wrong, the issue of tolerating or not tolerating it disappears.

General Dannatt is reported in today's Telegraph as doubtful about the merits of fast jets and of Trident II.  Remind you of anyone?

Of course, his scepticism about fast jets is unsurprising, given that, as I explained to you previously (to some incredulity, I recall), manned air-to-air fighters are already in their final generation of development, and even the weapons already developed are unlikely to see full delivery of original planned procurements.  Many Cold War era hangover weapons are being reconsidered around the world - an example being the Obama administration's opposition to completion of the original F-22 Raptor delivery plans.  Even regarding fast air-to-ground weapons, there is a strong view within Congress that the JSF is the final generation weapon - a position taken by Robert Hale, for example.

I would not share the view the Telegraph attributes to General Dannatt that the UK's nuclear deterrent is "for the next few years….but maybe not forever".  My scepticism is about Trident II, not about nuclear weapons per se.  There are those that argue that a submarine-based system is cheap, gives high probability of target delivery, and offers the flexibility of both city-killing and lower yield weapons.  I'm not convinced, yet, on these points, but if they were right then we should indeed stick with that.  What we don't want is an absurdly expensive, obsolete vanity weapon that we cannot use and that does not deter anyone we might plausibly be threatened by - which is what I fear Trident II really is.

Martin and Cranmer have both discussed the refusal of seven Muslims to stand when the judge entered court at their trial, on the grounds that they stand for no-one but Allah.  Each of them attempts to argue that Islam includes no such rule.  Neither discusses what seems to me to be an interesting question of whether they would, in practice, have refused to stand had the judge been a man rather than a woman.

I personally find it inappropriate and (in the literal sense) offensive when non-Muslims attempt to pronounce upon what is or is not true Islam.  I certainly have no interest whatever in the opinions of non-Christians as to whether true Christianity "really" opposes all wars or forbids homosexual practice or the various other issues upon which non-Christians presume to pronounce.  (I have great interest in their views as to whether practicing homosexuality is right or whether we should all be pacifists, but that is quite a different matter from my regarding non-Christians as religious authorities, well-placed to pronounce upon the true nature of a religion they do not share.)  I imagine that many Muslims must feel much the same when Jack Straw or Tony Blair lecture them upon whether true Islam really requires women to wear veils.  Those that publicly disavow involvement in a religion have thereby disqualified themselves from pronouncing upon the "true" content of that religion.  (People can, of course, say things along the lines of "My understanding of the orthodox teaching of Islam is..." or "The form of Islam I have always found most attractive teaches, I believe, that..."  But neither the orthodox form of a religion nor the form I might find most attractive as a non-believer is the same thing as the "true" form of that religion - the form the god in question really commands/desires (if it exists and does issue commands/have desires).)

Martin and Cranmer are both quite right to be disturbed by the case, but not, in my view, because it involves any distortion of orthodox Islam (which they may well be right that it does).  Here is my take.

One way for terrorists to win is if they murder so many people and cause so much disruption (or so much terror) that we are forced to come to an accommodation with them - changing our foreign policy, say, surrendering control of certain countries to the leaders of the terrorists, making special allowance for the operation and flourishing of organisations backed by the terrorists within our own countries.

But another way for the terrorists to win is if we respond to terrorism by turning ourselves into them or into what they want us to be; if we give up our goals and values and way of being.  Tony Blair used to give excellent expression to this point (though, alas, in this as in so much, his actions did not always match his rhetoric).  Barack Obama has begun to do so recently.

When Brown stood for the leadership, there should have been an election, as he had many opponents and doubters even then and it would have been healthy for the party to have an election given that it had been 13 years since the last one, but in the end no-one serious had the cojones.

Brown toyed with having an election in October 2007 (when he'd have lost), but when the Conservatives didn't roll over and die, and the opinion polls turned even slightly against him, he didn't have the cojones.

Let’s end the year on a cheerful note, by looking much further ahead.  Here are some things I’m optimistic about.  None of the below should be taken as a prediction – more as targets that we can reach if we want to.

'Tis the season to be making inaccurate forecasts.  Here are mine.

As this is published, I shall be at church celebrating the most profound moment in history (and one of the five most important so far - other candidates being the Creation, the Fall, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection).  What happened?  God became man.  What does that mean, and why did it matter?
Who is this Jesus, this "God the Son"?  In John 1 He is called called by the Greek term "logos", often translated "Word" (we shall consider another translation - and hence another meaning - shortly).  In Colossians 1 he is called the "image" of God.  In the Creed we say that Jesus is "eternally begotten of the Father" (i.e. of the Creator, the startpoint, the "I am" that simply is and had no beginning).
Through the past two thousand years, the Church has struggled to make sense of this.  The only positive account of this (i.e. an account that does not proceed by saying "it is not this way, and not that way" but, instead, says "it is something like this") that I am not aware of being condemned as heresy is the account offered by Melanchthon in Loci Communes (though I doubt it was original to Melanchthon).  Melanchthon describes the Son as "the image begotten by the deliberation of the Father", going on to say "He is called the Word because he is begotten by consideration.  He is called the image because the consideration is the image of the thing considered."
If this is a productive thought, then the Son is the Creator's self-conception, his self-awareness, and because God is perfect, His self-conception is a perfect image, sharing His essence.
But this is only the beginning.  For the term "Word" does not exhaust the meaning of the term "logos".  Logos was the term the philosopher Heraclitus used to describe that from which everything was made.  For Heraclitus the logos was the divine reason, the divine spark, the divine fire.  Everything in the world was in flux, undergoing change.  No thing, no material substance was constant.  Instead, what was invariant in the world was its principle of organisation.  We might be tempted to say that the logos were the laws of nature, but if those laws change (as perhaps they do) then Heraclitus' logos would be the principle according to which they change.
The Evangelist John says of his logos, his Word, clearly endorsing Heraclitus' position: "Through [the logos] all things were made; without Him nothing was made that has been made."
So, if we have it right, this logos, this Word is God's self-conception, the invariant principle in Creation, through which everything was made.  Clearly, we have before us a truly spectacular being.  But the most extraordinary thing is yet to come.  For John tells us "The [logos] became flesh and made his dwelling among us."
How amazing is that!  This spectacular being became human, living as one of us!  God's self-conception, that through which the entire universe was made, could become a man.
There was a purpose in the logos becoming a man, a great purpose, but let us focus on the wonder of the fact, rather the point, for a moment.  For it implies a quite extraordinary status for human beings.  Perhaps we knew this already - after all, in Genesis 1 we are taught that God made us in His own image.  But to recognise quite what this implies - that human beings are such that we can, in principle, encapsulate God's self-image, embody the organising principle of the Universe - is surely extraordinary.
In many ways, it is this part of the Christian story that most stretches one's credulity.  A world created to be good in essence, sin leading to death, people healed of infirmities, a man walking on water, people rising from the dead, sin conquered through an unjust death, salvation as a free gift for the faithful regardless of their wickedness, immortality - all these notions seem like they'd need pretty solid evidence to make one believe in them.  But, implausible as many of these ideas are, they are surely dwarfed in their bizarreness by the notion that the logos could become a man.
If that is right - if, if - then humanity is surely a remarkable thing.  And the sufferings and triumphs of humans take on a different status.  Certain secular thinkers believe that the key ethic in life concerns the promotion of pleasure and minimisation of pain, where pleasure and pain can be experienced by other creatures as well as humans.  Richard Dawkins considers a foetus to be human, but notes (which I suspect is true) that a foetus suffers less in an abortion than does a cow being slaughtered.  But a cow was not made in God's image, and the logos did not become a cow.
Perhaps, rather than focusing on how the Incarnation (the taking on of flesh) of the logos makes humans qualitatively superior to the other animals (for we are animals, created like the others), it might be more helpful to focus on how it should mould our thinking about humans in themselves.  When someone somewhere suffers or triumphs - regardless of how far she is from you, regardless of whether you have never seen her, regardless of whether she is related to you in some way or is in any sense useful to you - what suffers or triumphs is a being that could have been the logos made flesh.  Her suffering or triumph is, for that reason, one of the most important things in the entire universe - probably more important than obvious great events, such as hurricanes or asteroid strikes on Jupiter or supernovae or the swallowing of distant galaxies in black holes.  Knowing the Incarnation, we cannot continue to think tribally, to think that what really counts is the flourishing of ourselves and our families and friends.  Other humans cannot be things to use, obstacles we must overcome.  And no Christian society could insulate itself from the sufferings and triumphs of other societies, either.
The Incarnation thus tells us something remarkable about who we are, or at least who we could be.  If it really happened, it is not something humanity can ignore; it changes everything.

I watch too many movies.  One form I quite like is the thriller.  Here is a fairly common scene in a thriller.  Bad guy has woman and daughter tied up in their house, whilst pursuing the next phase of his nefarious plan.  Woman gets free; bashes bad guy on head with blunt statue conveniently on mantelpiece next to him; then whilst he is stunned, she frees her daughter and starts to flee.  But before they have made good their escape, the bad guy has recovered and pursues them with murderous intent.

Now, I don't know about you, but when I see this sort of oft-repeated movie scene, I want to yell at the screen to condemn the woman for a fool.  Because once she has committed to the path of violence in defence against a violent assailant, if she has the advantage she must take him out of the game.  If she bashes him on the head and knocks him out, then she ought to bash him again, and then bash his legs 'til they are broken and he cannot chase her, and bash his arms 'til he represents no physical threat at all.  Once violence has been resorted to, its exercise must be decisive - otherwise the woman invites her own death.  The fact that he is down, momentarily, does not make her breaking of his legs any less self defence.

I have never believed in human rights.  As a preacher once said: the only human right is to die, as the wages for your sin.  To have a right there must be a right-establishing authority (e.g. Parliament), right-arbitrating authorities (e.g. judges) and right-enforcing authorities (e.g. police, courts).  There are thus legal rights; for those sharing a religion, there are moral rights.  But, since there is no right-establishing authority for all humanity, no right-arbitrating judges for all humanity, and no pan-human police, there can be no human rights.

I'll have last bite at this for now (it is the Copenhagen Conference, after all!).

I'll cover two things in this last post:

1) I shall explain more about form (3) scepticism, and why it is a genuine position that should get more airtime.

2) I shall reflect a little more on why there is so little interest in or discussion of form (3) scepticism.

Earlier today I posted about climate action scepticism, arguing that climate change scepticism is only one of three important reasons one might have for opposing action to prevent climate change.  I pointed out that there is almost no discussion of whether it is worth trying to prevent climate change even if one believes it is occurring and has a material human-induced component.  I noted that climate change sceptics foolishly try to shout down anyone that wants - as I do - to oppose action to prevent climate change without opposing the science of global warming, whilst those that advocate action to prevent climate change find it convenient to ignore attempts to question the worth of trying to prevent climate change by construing any questions of this sort as attempts to dispute the mainstream science.

As I write, there are fifty messages on the board.  Virtually all of these attempt to dispute the science of global warming, many attacking me (remember, I oppose action to prevent climate change) for not opposing the mainstream science in this matter.  The number questioning whether the costs of action to prevent climate change outweigh the benefits?  Zero.  The number questioning why the BBC or newspapers devote so much space to debating the scientific question and so little to debating the costs and benefits of action?  Zero.  The useful contribution to opposing action to prevent climate change, given the overwhelming consensus in the policy community in favour of accepting mainstream science in this matter?  Zero.

My point precisely.