European Political News

The vocal lobbying of Catholic leaders in Scotland over the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill has undoubtedly raised the hackles of many commentators concerning the place of organised religion in public life – specifically the political arena. As a result, the demanding task of creating a durable public discourse for discussing ethics and understanding science has been reduced to voter management and angry counter-assertion.

This week, Pippa Wagstaff writes her first column for the Wardman Wire about events at the National Assembly for Wales (the Senedd) in Cardiff.

Which is why cricket is so great? It's one of the only games in the world where you have sufficient time to wander round a field thinking 'why am I doing this?'

Is the unthinkable about to happen in London? Is the unthinkable about to happen in London politics? Can that wild haired buffoon who made his name by fluffing his lines on a comedy panel quiz show really be the bookies favourite to become the next Mayor of London? Until just a few weeks ago [...]

Hmm, what to post on: the embryo research bill, celebrity trial outcomes: Jesus vs Heather Mills, the trials of being an England cricket fan … Despite the trend for calling this the ‘Bank Holiday Weekend’, it’s Easter. You know, that whole Jesus coming back from the dead thing. The inevitable seasonal survey this week found that over half of Britons believe Jesus rose from the dead, though about half of these believed that Jesus rose ’spiritually’. Whatever that means. As soon as we try to analyse or describe Easter, it suddenly loses most of its impact. The Beeb’s ‘The Passion‘ is doing a pretty decent job, and it does the job by just telling the story. So here are some extracts from a couple of well known stories for Easter Saturday. The longer one first “He is dead” Narcissa Malfoy called to the watchers. And now they shouted, now they yelled in triumph and stamped their feet, and through his eyelids Harry saw bursts of red and silver light shoot into the air in celebration “You see?” screeched Voldemort over the tumult. “Harry Potter is dead by my hand, and no man alive can threaten me now! Watch! Crucio!” Harry was thrown once, twice, three times into the air.. and when he fell to the ground for the last time the clearing echoed with jeers and shrieks of laughter. “Protego!” roared Harry, and the Shield Charm expanded in the middle of the hall, and Voldemort stared around for the source as Harry pulled off the Invisibility Cloak at last. The yell of shock, the cheers, the screams on every side of “Harry!” “HE’S ALIVE!” were stifled at once Voldemort and Harry began, at the same moment, to circle each other. “I don’t want anyone else to help,” Harry said loudly “It’s got to be like this, it’s got to be me…“You won’t be killing anyone else tonight,” said Harry as they circled and stared into each others eyes, green into red. ‘You won’t be able to kill any of them, ever again. Don’t you get it? I was ready to die to stop you hurting these people they’re protected from you. Haven’t you noticed how none of the spells you put on them are binding? You can’t torture them. You can’t touch them. You don’t learn from your mistakes, Riddle, do you?” an edge of the dazzling sun appeared over the sill of the nearest window. The light hit both of their faces at the same time, so that Voldemorts was suddenly a flaming blur. Harry heard the high voice shriek as he too, yelled his best hope to the heavens, pointing Dracos wand: ‘Avada Kedavra’ ‘Expelliamus’ The bang was like a cannon-blast and the golden flames that erupted between them, at the dead centre of the circle they had been treading, marked the point where the spells collided. Harry saw the Elder Wand fly high.. spinning through the air towards the master it would not kill, who had come to take full possession of it at last. And Harry, with the unerring skill of the Seeker, caught the wand in his free hand as Voldemort fell backwards, arms splayed, the slit pupils of the scarlet eyes rolling upwards Voldemort was dead, killed by his own rebounding curse, and Harry stood with two wands in his hand, staring down at his enemy’s shell. (JK Rowling Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Chapter 36 ‘The Flaw in the Plan’) and the shorter one “God made you alive with Christ… and having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.” (St. Pauls Letter to the Colossians, chapter 2 verse 13, 15) Any similarity to persons living, dead, or resurrected, is…. well you’ll have to ask JK Rowling that one. Have a happy Easter. As they say where I come from: Christ is risen! David Keen blogs at St. Aidan to Abbey Manor. Tags: easter story, david keen, touching base

Looking back through an old diary I was surprised to discover that my life sometimes runs more in sync with the cadences of the Church’s liturgical calendar than those around me might imagine. In particular, and without any great consciousness about it, I have ended up finishing off and contributing to two books on Easter-related themes in the months of March and April. Right now I’m tidying up an overdue manuscript for Darton Longman and Todd called Threatened with Resurrection, examining the true cost and vocation of peacemaking in the Christian tradition. A couple of years ago I co-edited Consuming Passion, which looked at the way in which the doctrine of the Cross can be abused to excuse or even institutionalise retributive theology and ideas of messianic violence. Neither of these books is exactly controversy free, but they are unlikely to get me drummed out of any ecclesiastical club (because I studiously avoid the gold-studded membership cards) and also because, well, not many people know or care what I think! You need to be someone like the former Anglican Bishop of Durham, Dr David Jenkins, to make those kinds of waves - and with the cultural climate around religion growing both more hostile and more disinterested all at the same time, even that’s getting a bit difficult. Every so often someone repeats the old canard that Dr Jenkins, now retired but never retiring, “doesn’t believe in the resurrection” (he most certainly does, though not in the simplistic way it is usually affirmed or dismissed) or that he “said it was a conjuring trick with bones” (his point was precisely the opposite - namely that the kind of life God offers is not reducible to magic but is about a thoroughgoing transformation in and beyond the material world as we think we know it.) The whole ‘Durham saga’ was over 20 years ago but won’t quite stay buried. Ironic. This year, Easter controversy is thin on the ground so far. There isn’t even a tacky Channel 4 documentary ‘proving’ that the bones of Jesus have been found underneath a pub in Walthamstow. What we have instead is some relatively polite jousting about historical details in the BBC’s dramatisation of The Passion, an altogether less blood-lusting rendition than Mel Gibson’s film noir. It began on 16 March and ends on Easter Sunday. (more…)

It’s been a big week for sin. First, a Vatican official talked about sin in a newspaper interview. Not a big deal, they probably do it a lot of the time, but this suddenly became ‘Vatican announces 7 new deadly sins’, and before you could say Magisterium every blog and media outlet was following the story (but credit to Reuters for reporting the facts). It probably didn’t help that the Vatican was slow off the mark. This particular horse was 2 laps round the track by the time they shut the stable door and pointed out that everyone had got it wrong (they should have asked Rowan Williams for advice on that one). But it was all worth it for the this cartoon from Indexed (the Pope might not agree): Sin When You’re Winning Staying with horses, the weather accurately reasoned that a government who promote casinos probably weren’t going to tax gambling in the budget. After 2 days of the Cheltenham festival were cancelled, the wind abated, point made. The Director of Racing at William Hill estimates that around £500million is bet at Cheltenham. Meanwhile the UK is inching its way towards a US-style gambling regime (a country which has 7 times the UK rate of problem gambling), and the BMA wants gambling to be clinically recognised as an addiction. We have to ask in this context whether it’s right for an iconic event in the gamblers calendar to have royal patronage. Maybe the Queen Mother, God rest her soul, liked the occasional flutter. She could afford it. 300,000 other people can’t. The effect on the jockeys is something else, and the bigger the sport gets, the more we’ll see the kind of breakdowns that have hit cricket in the last year or two. Sin Tax: Error? And so to the budget. Sin hogged the headlines there as well. As most of his budget for this year had already been written for him 12 months ago by Gordon £rown, the only thing left for Alastair Darling to do was an upward tweak on fuel, drink and smokes. The Beeb called it a ’saints and sinners budget’, thus accepting implicitly the new Vatican line that pollution is a sin. Sin as a Power Tool? What is sin anyway? The Oscar-winning There Will Be Blood (don’t click the link with the volume up, it’s not pleasant) depicts sin as a tool used by the church to wield power over people. When Pastor Sunday finally has the upper hand over Daniel-Day Lewis’s amoral oil prospector, he humiliates him by having him ‘confess his sins’ in public, and submit to baptism. In turn the prospector’s confession is a sham, he is only going through with the charade in order to seal a deal on some land. Neither churchman nor capitalist takes sin seriously enough. (more…)

GK Chesterton said a lot of profound things, here is one of them: “Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough… It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again,” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again,” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike: it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.” Winehouse vs Dolls House Watch children at play for any length of time. Having fun comes naturally to them. How do we lose that ability? How come that so many adults need to dose up on alcohol, drugs or adrenaline before we even feel ready to enjoy ourselves? Okay, children are free from a lot of the worries the rest of us have: they don’t have a mortgage to pay, a bullying boss, a struggling marriage, or a hairline receding at the same speed that our waistline is expanding. But watching the kids at the school gate on ‘Book Day’ this week, all dressed as pirates, princesses and superheroes, it was hard not to smile and sense the joy and thrill they felt. A wrong attitude to fun? Author John Ortberg argues that for a long time Christians have had the wrong attitude to fun. Because the happier we are, the easier we find it to do what’s right, rather than be tempted to do something wrong. If you’re content with you’re lot, you won’t steal. If you’re enjoying life, an affair or a tax fiddle seems like a daft option. (more…)

Earlier this week I interviewed Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg in his parliamentary office. Such great revelations as emerged are mostly reserved, Im afraid, for Third Way magazine " which is not some kind of house journal for Blairism, but a Christian social ethics and current affairs monthly founded in the 1970s. What they had in mind in using the title “Third Way” was a re-framing of standard political discourse in terms of principles emerging from the biblical traditions of social thought. The Influence of Personal Convictions on Politics Anyway, the influence of religion and other personally grounded [notice I didnt say private] convictions in the political arena was obviously one of the issues I wanted to discuss with the new head of Britains third party " especially as there was a minor fuss when he proclaimed, shortly after his election as leader, that he was an atheist. Well, thats what most people think occurred. As a matter of fact, there was no such announcement. What happened was that Clegg responded to one of those quick fire interviews, was asked whether he believed in God, and was given only two possibilities, yes or no. So he chose the one that approximates closest to his view. On that basis many headlines and columns were written. This little episode certainly tells you rather more about media pigeonholing than it does about the subtleties of Mr Clegg, as you will find out when you read Mays Third Way. But it also highlights a rather important question that hardly figures at all on the commentariats agenda. As I put it in one of my sideways interrogations, How do you think not believing in God impacts on the way you conceive politics and the way you make political decisions? Though Nick Clegg is undoubtedly a thoughtful man, Im probably not breaking any embargoes by revealing that this question took him a bit by surprise. I suspect the same would be true of almost any figure in public life. We have got very used to enquiring about how religion should or should not enter into the political process through the pores of politicians who do God in other aspects of their lives (at least). However, it rarely occurs to anybody that non-belief might be anything more substantial than a rejection of, or aversion to, religious faith " whatever that means for the person doing the non-believing. (more…)

A quick note to say that Simon Barrow’s “Thinking Aloud” column has been delayed due to him being doorstepped by a visitor this morning. It should appear later this evening. Tags: simon barrow, thinking aloud

This is Dave Cole’s second “Politics Decoded” Guest Column. As we all know, America is the home of the free market. Right? Wrong. A story little-noticed outside the trade and financial press is an exception that proves, by the shock and anger it has caused, the general rule for US procurement to be a good distance away from the free market. Air to Air Refuelling Tankers The United States Air Force wanted to buy some new air-to-air refuelling tankers and have awarded the contract to EADS, who own Airbus, over Boeing; a European company over an American. Boeing were expected to win the US$4bn contract and, it seems, Boeing expected Boeing to win the contract. However, the EADS bid was technically superior, outscoring on just about every area on an evaluation. The deal was also conducted to the letter so that it would be hard to challenge on grounds of impropriety. Here is where the tale starts to become a little twisted. The Back Story Back in 2003, the USAF decided to lease some Boeing tanker aircraft as a stop-gap to replace its ageing fleet with an option to purchase after ten years. It turned out that a Pentagon staffer had been passing information to Boeing about the opposing EADS bid; said staffer had started working for Boeing by the time this was discovered. None of this is new, but it suggests that Boeing weren’t playing by the rules. One of the charges made against EADS is that it is receiving illegal subsidies, which seems pretty rich given Boeing’s actions. The Front Story Now, various congresspersons are mightily annoyed by the decision because, unsurprisingly, a contract for four billion dollars carries a lot of jobs with it. Senator John McCain was the driving force behind the investigation of Boeing over the lease-purchase deal. Moreover, he would want to see both best value for money and best equipment for troops and so would want to step on corruption in general and, in this case, get the better piece of kit. On the other side, Democrats are wanting jobs to stay in their areas rather than move overseas or to Arkansas, as will happen with EADS. Both Senators Clinton and Obama have criticised the deal and there is now to be a congressional inquiry. (more…)

In the film Minority Report Tom Cruise’s (clearly non-Japanese) character, having had a backstreet eye transplant to avoid detection by retinal scanners, walks through a shopping mall. The advertising billboards, who retinally scan passers by, start to talk to him: “Welcome back to Gap, Mr Yakamoto”. Minority Report sets retinal scanning and mass surveillance by marketing and security services in 2054 - nearly fifty years away. However, current Sunday night drama The Last Enemy fast forwards this to the (almost) present day. The programme homepage has various cautionary facts and figures about CCTV, fingerprinting and ID cards. It is a drama with a message, a cautionary tale about how much personal information we allow the state to hold, and how far we allow surveillance to invade our personal space. Whose side are they on? With the demise of the surveillance states behind the Iron Curtain, we have turned the microscope on our own society. Film and TV mythology give us 2 alternative pictures. These 2 interpretations both seem to strike a chord, and it’s hard to quantify how much we absorb these issues through the stories we tell ourselves in the visual arts, or think about them in opinion columns and blogs. Are they Saviour spies? In one future side we have Spooks/James Bond - the saviour spies who use technology and surveillance information to thwart evil and protect the world. Or surveillance spies? In the other possible future is The Last Enemy/Bourne trilogy, (and a host of other surveillance thrillers - e.g. Will Smiths Enemy of the State), where rogue elements within the security services use surveillance information to suppress the truth, manipulate people, and perpetrate evil. Despite well intentioned governments passing security laws and ratcheting up the surveillance for our own protection, there will always be someone (so runs the story) who will get their hands on the information and use it against us. Personally I’m more worried that it will be Disney or Tesco rather than Jack Straw, but it’s always the one you least expect. (more…)