European Political News

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?'

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?'

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

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…)

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…)

Back in early December I posted a run-down of the list of weekly columns on the Wardman Wire, using the excuse that the site “has been a bit of a building site recently with a lot of changes”. I’m pleased to say that the move from a personal political blog to a site with a wider team of writers is nearly complete - so there may be a bit more stability round here for the next few months (at least in terms of who is writing). This is an extra Blog Platform column to map out where we are and where we may be going. What Happens each Week I’m doing a rundown by day this time. There’s more to say, but I’ll keep this post as short as I can manage. Now that the rate of change on the blog is slowing down (at least in terms of new and guest writers), I’ll see if I can be more reliable at making sure that things appear on the right day. Our practice is - with one or two exceptions - to publish the column each day at 11:00am, to give time for the article to hit the RSS feed in time for the lunch break. Then nothing else appears until perhaps 4pm. As ever, the best way not to miss anything is to subscribe to our RSS feed. Nearly Every day “The Daily Roundup” is currently a roundup of 10 or a dozen newspaper stories designed to provide “blog fodder” for our readers. It focuses on interesting and occasionally unusual stories. On good days it is published around 1am; on not quite so good days with breakfast or a little later. As you can see from the podcast player in the sidebar, we experimented with a daily podcast - I hope to take that forward, but I’m thinking about a practical approach. The “Morning Funny” (which needs a better name) is a cartoon or joke which appears at the start of the day - usually at around 9:00am. There are agreements in place with 5 or 6 different cartoonists to reproduce their work, and I sometimes re-recycle a joke from the Adam Smith Institute Jokester; make that “used to re-recycle” - he has retired. Monday “The Day Job” is about what bloggers do when they are not blogging. I have only done one of these, and intend to increase the frequency. Tuesday “Politics Decoded” is Garbos weekly political comment column - running for 6 months now. Garbo publishes his “bon mots” before lunch on a Tuesday with the reliability of Mr Gordon asking Mr Cameron questions at PMQs instead of answering them. (more…)