CofE bishops - doing the right thing (at last)

Watching the Church of England do the right thing can sometimes feel like watching a dogged oil tanker reverse into a tight parking space at night, with no wing mirrors and an upside down map. It'll get there eventually but its not clear how and it can take so many different attempts arrival seems unlikely.

This week a platoon of bishops signed a letter to the Observor calling on the government to pass a series of ammendments to its proposal to cap benefit payments to families. About time, of course, and the church has not been silent on the government's work so far, but this still marks a significant departure. This is partly because it includes a series of additions to improve the proposal, highly specific and drafted with the help of a major charity. They all look eminnently sensible. It is also partly because 18 bishops signed the letter, a rare and impressive show of unity, although one which does you wondering why on earth the others didn't.

And what a joy it is to see the right wing papers have to cope with a sensible, thoughtful and intellectual reproach from the heart of establishment England against an extremist government. In the wake of the St Paul's protests (ongoing) which saw an out pouring of bile from the Sun, etc, it is nothing short of delightful to find that the church is not fearful of doing the right thing in the face of bigotted unpopularity.

Should we forget?

My Spanish friend told me of his mother's reaction when she heard about Britain's two minute silence to observe the war dead on 11 November. "That," she said, "is a civilised country." There is something much more humbling about a silence than there is about a cheer, or a trumpet blast, or a "hell yeah".

A few days earlier a German friend had told me how much he liked the red 'poppies' the British wear to mark Remembrance Sunday; the ambiguity of the symbol, he argued, gave a suitably de-politicised badge which the whole country, regardless of political affiliation, could rally around. More attractive too, he argued, than any equivalent in Europe.

Buying a poppy can almost be done on auto-pilot for most of us at this time of year but it also brings on soul searching - many in 1919 thought we should forget, not remember. The line between commemoration and valorisation is surprisingly thin. At my church the two minute silence began with the playing of the Last Post, the beautiful, haunting military bugle call. 'For the Fallen', the poem read to commemorate the day, is only steps from noting 'dulce et decorum est pro patria mori'. But to refuse these rituals on the grounds that they glamorise would be to throw the baby out with the bath water. Far more dangerous that we forget the horrors of war than that in remembering we also do so with some pride in the sacrifice. Sometimes we inherit traditions; sometimes we choose them.

The British obsession with drinking

The British are unusually childish when it comes to alcohol. From binge drinking in city streets after hours all the way to the precious giggle which accompanies the offer of a glass of wine at a genteel drinks party; it all betokens a weirdly teenage obsession with booze. I met a vicar who boasted that she never offered her guests tea or coffee, but wine, evidence of her urbane taste apparently but also the last thing I would want at a vicarage. I've been to lunch parties where the an offer of wine was greeted by: 'Oh I shouldn't, but I will'; or 'You know me, I wish I could, but I can't', and a comradely chuckle at such an illicit desire. To request a soft drink shows you are no fun or, worse, a flat out refusal of hospitality. Alcohol is special, desirable and naughty - for 14 year olds and for 60 year olds.

The teetotallers are in on this too. The deliberately intoned 'No thank you, I don't drink', is just as desperate for attention as asking for a second glass. What is it about booze that is so terrifying for those who reject it (on anything other than health grounds) and so tantalising for those who are convinced of its naughtiness? Given that almost no social situation is without the offer of alcohol, and drinking it has become almost a social requirement at many events, why doesn't it elicit the same reaction as water or Coca Cola? It is time for the British to snap out of this adolescent attitude to alcohol which is as embarrassing as the antiquated attitude to sex espoused in the Carry On films. Drink it if you like; don't if you don't. Either way don't make an exhibition of your sense of fun or your purity.

The Bible warns against drunkenness repeatedly (Ephesians 5:18; Proverbs 23:29-35) but rarely against drinking alcohol at all, presumably because water was far more dangerous for your health. Indeed wine became the centre piece of the Mass, as a representative for Christ's blood. This doesn't stop many Christian denominations from departing from Christ's own example in preferring Ribena to red wine in the Eucharist. The fear is presumably that one drink will lead to another, just as some Christian student groups disapprove of full frontal hugging on the grounds that it might lead to sex. This seems like a very odd notion for everyone apart from alcoholics and the most sexually depraved, who form only a small minority of society and so also most Christian groups. Who can't trust themselves with a hug or a single glass of wine? It seems possible, even, that it is the teetotallers and those who refuse any bodily contact who might be at most risk of falling of the other end of the wagon. The prayer is 'Lead us not into temptation' and not 'Do not tempt us'; without temptation how can we learn to resist? The most responsible attitude is to drink when appropriate, and to drink as much as is responsible, but not to deny it entirely on grounds of purity.

Purchasing Misery for Children

Quelle surprise - children with huge amounts of stuff but who enjoy little real communication with their parents are unhappy, and British children suffer the worse, ranking bottom of the UN's table of well being. Parents spend the least amount of their time their children in this country, are more stressed personally, rarely communicate about things that matter (rather than giving commands) and are more inclined to spend time with their children in purchasing things for their bedrooms. It is depressing and predictable.

The parents are, in a sense to blame, but to take the chain of responsibility back only so far is to do parents a disservice and to ignore the effects of our social environment. In a free market economy the only standard of success and self worth is possession and so, inevitably, parents find that their only role is to be the procurer of products for their children. Just as children are told in adverts that goods will make them happy so parents are instructed that, if good parenting is making their offspring happy, so their job must be to pay for stuff. Meanwhile the pressure to produce ever bigger profits by working ever longer hours and reducing themselves to automotrons in the service of businesses means that the ability of parents to do anything other than work and shop is reduced anyway.

Of course the equation doesn't work - you can't buy your way to a happier future nor can you purchase it for your children. This is nothing new but what is remarkable is how we have failed to act on it. In this way is capitalism so impressively tenacious. Even with the knowledge that economic success is often a poisoned chalice it is still impossible to avoid it - partly because of the structure of work and the demands of earning money, but much more importantly because capitalism instills its values in those who participate in it, which is almost all of us. You might know, intellectually, that your child would rather you spent more time together, but the desire to consume, and need to finance this consumption, is so overwhelming that even free time becomes subsumed into the need to earn more and work harder.

Church vs. Mosque

As a medieval historian I am sensitive, perhaps overly so, about the accusation that my subject doesn't matter - a point raised usually in the context that unless you're saving a life (read: training as a doctor) what you're doing doesn't really count.

This was, to some extent, disproved during my trip to the cathedral church of Cordoba, a vast renaissance edifice built in the centre of one of the most spectacular medieval mosques in Europe. This is widely recognised by historians and visitors as an appalling act of architectural vandalism and a miserable piece of symbolism, emphasising cultrual chauvanism and religious intolerance. Even Carlos V, the king who authorised the construction of the church and who was responsible for a huge amount of muscular church building in what was formerly Al Andalus, damned the creation after he saw its completion. Indeed for three centuries after Cordoba was taken by the Christians the mosque was maintained more or less intact.

The modern cathedal chapter, to judge from its visitor guide, which is given for free to every visitor to the church, does not share this opinion. Indeed the mosque, one of the most extraordinary pieces of architecture in the world and a rare survivor from the ninth century, merits only a cursory summary in the guide - two sides - while the cathedral, an impressive building for its domination and power but otherwise rather familiar from every other church in Andalucia, receives a wealth of attention - and three sides.

The leaflet goes further, however, in emphasising the destruction of the Muslims and the restoration of the Christians. Some of the quotes are quite extraordinary in their revision of history.

It is an historical fact that [the Visigothic church] was destroyed during the Islamic period in order to build the subsequent Mosque... the dominating Muslims proceeded to the demolition of the martyr's church

In fact after the Islamic conquest, the church was divided between Muslims and Christians. The Moors were reknown for a high degree of religious tolerance: Abd ar-Rahman I, the builder of the first mosque, allowed the Christians to rebuild their ruined churches. Evenually he purchased the Christian half of the church and rebuilt it as a mosque, which seems almost civilised compared to the wholesale destruction and rebuilding of mosques as churches across Andalucia after the reconquista.

[The consecration of the mosque as a church] was a matter of recuperating a sacred space that had suffered the imposition of a faith that was foreign and distant from the Christian experience... the reforms of the church were motivated by the need to restore the cult that had been interrupted by Islamic domination

This could hardly have been the case after almost five centuries of Muslim rule. It would be as reasonable to argue that Christianity was a foriegn experience for the pagans who had worshipped in Spain for millenia before Christ.

Indeed the building of the church could hardly be

a response to the desire of contemplating Christian symbols, or the inconvenience of celebrating the Liturgy amid a sea of columns

It is transparently an act of religious domination, a word often used in the guide to describe the Muslims but never the Christians, who merely 'restore' the true religion of Spain.

There is hardly any mention of the controversy of the new building, which is described as

an ingenious integration of the caliph structures within the gothic, renaissance, and baroque creations.

This guide probably reveals more of the insecurity and defensiveness of a church on the decline than the muscular military Christianity of the Reconquista but it is a sad example of the tensions that still exist between religions and the contortion of history to fit political aims. It also demonstrates an inability to understand the lessons of history for the confidence to engage with those of other beliefs.

Evil, bankers and anthropology

An anthropologist friend of mine almost took up a job with a giant consultancy firm in Germany a few weeks ago, saved only by his own lefty instincts. No doubt it was a close shave. But an anthropological study, although of a rather unacademic variety, into bankers was begun this week by Joris Luyendijk.

His findings so far are interesting rather than revelatory but he does warn us of the importance of distinguishing between different groups within the banking sector. It is this humanising of people usually referred to only in groups which presents a real challenge to those of us who read the news and form opinions about society. How easy it is to generalise and condemn, or to see nothing but triumph and success in the faces of our enemies. The reality is, of course, more complicated. There are different types of bankers, different jobs in the banking sector, and as many different types of people as there are people.

Often the activities that we wish to condemn - short term profiteering, incompetant investment, encouraging debt onto those who can't afford it - are committed by institutions or enforced by an office culture that runs roughshod over employees more human instincts. The individual is lost in this equation or is party to the offence rather than the author of it. Should we judge and, if so, whom should we judge? It is very, very easy to see the speck in a banker's eye before we remove the log in our own. Similarly it is easier to condemn en masse than to pick apart the moral failures of a large institution and find its source. Who can doubt that some of the most descpicable and stupid actions, with the most widely and profoundly pernicious consequences, of any in recent decades have been committed by the arrogance, idiocy and blindness of banking institutions and some of their workers? The question is how do we, as individuals, respond to this?

Hell is a High Rise Office Block

As my train drew into London last night it was dawdling on the empty track outside Paddington. Outside my window office blocks towered to every side, every floor lit and empty. The scene was almost gruesome - layer after layer of identical strip lit, double glazed, climate controlled expanses; row after row of small desks and big chairs stretched out one after the other. How extraordinary that this ethos has come to govern office architecture for so long. Although it was inevitable that at some point the drive to increase profit would lead to the principle of 'pile 'em high; sell 'em cheap' being applied to work spaces, that it would endure for so long is almost incomprehensible. It is not only amazing that talented workers would continue to apply for jobs in these kind of battery-farm conditions but that companies would disregard the obvious benefits of providing their employees with more stimulating surroundings. Illness, inefficiency and poor attention spans are only some of the miserable effects of these conditions, and yet they are subject to remarkable little public criticism let alone political attention. Even the bankers and lawyers of Canary Wharf appear to be more willing to put up with this architectural monotony than to insist on improvements at a fraction of a cost of their annual bonus.

I spent some time working for a large company in a large, bland, open plan office, I can remember how miserable it was having no variation in temperature, light quality or view and how difficult it was to focus in an open plan space. Perhaps it is the destruction of the unions that has led to this inability to claim a working environment that will actual help employees work? Perhaps our sensibility is too accustomed to experiencing illness, headaches and misery at work to expect anything different? Or possibly we just don't think architects can do better? The architects offer only a spineless kowtowing to the profiteering requirements of developers. No matter how spectacular the exterior might appear, no matter how grand the architect's name, neither developer nor designer appears to have given any thought to the experience (or efficiency) of the office block's users. The 'Gherkin' in London is a case in point - unusual looking, very recently built, and design by the much lauded and once-great designer of tedious, identikit office blocks Norman Foster, but hell to work in.

Britain tries to limit pro-choice policy

Nobody would wish an abortion upon their closest enemy. Not only for the psychological trauma and misery inflicted upon the mother and father, but also for the death of a foetus that could grow up to live a full adult life. But we also know what damage an unwanted pregnancy can wreak, and, again, not just on the parents but on the baby too. A lapse of judgement, a faulty contraceptive, a rape - and a whole life time of repercussions, some good, perhaps, but many not.

Indeed the decision to have, or not to have, an abortion seems to me to be of such magnitude that the process by which an answer is found must be critical to making the right one. And that process is, obviously, almost overwhelmingly challenging, upsetting and difficult. Who to get advice from? Who to make the decision? How long to decide it? Etc. Tory politician Nadine Dorries wants abortion providers, such as the universally lauded Marie Stopes, to be barred from giving advice in favour of 'independent' counsellors - including religious groups and for the decision making period to be lengthened. Her argument that MS et al have a vested interest in persuading women to have abortions is so implausible as to be almost offensive but perhaps her point is a good one. Isn't more time and greater independence desirable?

But is there any such thing as 'independent' advice? If we believe this decision is important then surely the first consequence we can affirm is that women must make this decision for themselves and not have legislators do it for them? Who could believe an MP has a better chance of making the right decision than the mother concerned? It would follow, surely, that women must be allowed to choose their advisers too and even the period of time that decision should take. For some it will be obvious, for others days if not weeks of agonising may be necessary. We can accept this and still allow a degree of protection - limiting advisers to those with a minimum level of qualification and setting some upper limit on decision making period. Although Dorries claims otherwise, this appears to be part of a gradual chipping away at the right to choose at every stage of having, and not having, an abortion, which the Conservative government have, until now, appeared willing to promote.

A final thought: even those who believe no abortion is acceptable do not need to affirm that it ought to be illegal. The Christian must love, forgive, help, aid and care but not condemn, ostracise or punish; loving your neighbour means allowing them to make decisions for themselves too.

Evangelical Teen Camps & 'Faith Healing'

I've been watching the half-hour long 'best of' clips compiled by Soul Survivor, an evangelical Christian festival aimed at teens. One of the most striking features, between clips of rock music that's pretty far off my taste, was an extended sermon by an attractive, young woman in friendly clothes with a nice, confident voice. I'm sure it wasn't sold as a 'sermon', come to thing of it. It was a loose collection of anecdotes about experiences she had had or heard about when people had been remarkably healed by prayer.

To take two examples:

1. John Wimber had visited an African village where a young boy had been cursed by the local 'witch doctor' after his parents had converted to Christianity. He was mute and shrunken but after Wimber's group prayed for a bit and the boy began to grow and speak. Soon he was fully developed for his age.

2. The woman reported an exchange with her nail technician, one of whom's arms was 1.5cm shorter than the other. After prayer again her arm miraculously grew to full length.

I'm not interested here to assess whether these events took place, although it is hard not to be a little sceptical, but rather what it would mean if they were true, which is what this woman evidently believed and what she was encouraging the enormous crowd of teens listening avidly to her talk.

First, what would it mean for the boy's parents in example 1? Had they not prayed for their son? Had they not prayed hard enough? Were their prayers not good enough? Were they not good enough Christians?

Secondly, what would it mean for other sufferers who don't get better? Her prayers were able to extend the arms of a person she had only just met but why do some good Christians, from loving churches, die from cancer? Were they not really that good? Did they pray wrongly?

Thirdly, did she change God's mind? Had God intended that the little boy should remain cursed unless a prayer group from the USA turned up to help? What about other little boys who are cursed but weren't on Wimber's itinerary, does God give up on them?

In other words does God only act when someone, typically an evangelical Christian, prays to him and why does he act sometimes but, apparantly, not others? My biggest fear about this kind of understanding of 'the power of prayer' is what it means for the practice overall. Prayer, it seems, is like a shopping list of physical ailments for God to fix. If you do it right, he fixes them. For some reason, unknown, He sometimes doesn't. In this sense He's like a capricious car mechanic and we're trying to buy an MOT. Anyone with some knowledge of the history of prayer knows that this is selling prayer far too short and that it simply doesn't reflect our experience of how God works. I don't intend to give a definition but prayer involves, at the very least, a listening exercise not a speaking one. It is about opening ourselves up as a channel or conduit, the traffic is two way. We are in dialogue not monologue.

Perfect Haiku

Writing a haiku as a westerner demands you give up so many intuitive assumptions about the kind of language and expectations poetry fulfills. Gone is metre, metaphor and theorising. No more lengthy wonderings about the internal life of the mind, instead just a crystal clear moment captured in language that perfectly reflects something observed. How hard it is to abandon the likening of one moment to another, or the deliberate shoe-horning in of a thought not an observation, and how perfect it is when a haiku does work and an observation speaks volumes.

Some of my favourite haiku:

Thirty pence each:
a cup of tea,
and a singing bird
(Issa)

Snail – baring
shoulders
to the moon
(Issa)

In the moonlight a worm
silently
drills through a chestnut
(Basho)

The skylark:
Its voice alone fell,
leaving nothing behind
(Ampu)

Each morning in spring
the birds and the toaster
doing their stuff
(Koji)

lend me your arms,
fast as thunderbolts,
for a pillow on my journey.

(Hendrik Doeff)

 

lily: 

out of the water 

out of itself

bass 

picking bugs 

off the moon 

(Nick Virgilio)

   

Some of my own: 

a chapel at night
above the towers –
stars

pigeon breast
puffed out and pulsates;
full of desire

by the tower –
below the window –
a man


a boat leaves behind
quiet quivers
on quiet waters

against the bank –
little lappers
from a paddle
  
unripe grape
between my fingers;
resting on a bruise

Evangelical Teen Camps

Writing in the Guardian, Tom Prosser criticises Christian teen festivals, calling them 'wicked', 'emotionally manipulative' and exploitative. His damning claim is based on two points: first, that the 'tactics' of those who run the camp are manipulative, tricking children into committing to Christianity; and secondly, that the theology of their organisers is suspect. These points do not seem sufficient, to me, to merit his condemnation.

Steve Clifford, general director of the Evangelical Alliance and adviser to Soul Survivor, wrote back, but missed all the key points, although he did do a good job of defending the playing of rock music and so on at Christian festivals from the sneering of Prosser.

Each of the points Prosser made are important, to the first I think he is right that the use of music, dance and spectacle is intended to create an ethereal atmosphere, charged with religious significance and likely to stimulate a reaction that can be quickly identified as the 'Holy Spirit' by the organisers. A substantial part of the appeal of these events is the sense of transformation that be accessed so easily with the right conditions. Prosser goes to far, however, when he characterises this as a ploy to get teenagers to sign on the dotted line like the practices of door-to-door hucksters. The commitment is not odious, without financial demands, and which people keep only as long as they wish to. The signing of a 'contract' to "to include Jesus in their thoughts, words, and actions" is rather more dubious, but not, I think, a widespread practice and obviously more of an initiation ceremony than an out and out legal commitment.

To the second point, I agree again that the theology can be extraordinarily conservative in youth churches but if Prosser really believes, as he claims to, that "young people have a right to choose their religious beliefs", and he ought, then this kind of theology must be available to them. He claims: "Youngsters are threatened with divine judgment, and they are initiated into the world of charismatic Christian practices. At Soul Survivor, the largest Christian youth festival in the UK, teens have been told that witch doctors can maim children by cursing them. They have also been informed that God judges us on death for our deeds and thoughts, and they have been encouraged to practise physical healings."

I suspect not all these claims are true, and if they are, they are not widespread. Taken as a whole, they do not look deeply pernicious, indeed the idea of 'divine judgement' is surely to be expected at a religious festival? The reality is that evangelical teen festivals at their worst are ghastly rock concerts, but as long as the children who attend have fun the core message is overwhelmingly positive.

Evicting rioters must stop

The news that councils in England, with the backing of the Prime Minister, will start removing benefits and council homes from the families of those arrested for rioting - even before they are convicted of their offence - is loathsome, immoral and unjust. Off the top of my head, here are just some of the problems with this: it punishes families for the crimes of their children, it exceeds the punishments given in court for the crime committed, it uses the provision of shelter and welfare as a tool of punishment, it risks extending poverty and homelessness, it is likely to increase antagonism with the police and councils, it will break up communities, and, ultimately, it will increase the liklihood of crime in the future.

These changes are probably best seen as just one further step an a series of antagonistic and thoughtless acts of community vandalism by councils run with both eyes on wealthy, right-wing voters and a complete willingness to sacrifice the needs of council tenants to pursue those votes. Wandsworth, Westminster, Greenwich, Hammersmith and Fulham - the list of councils proposing to start evicting the families of rioters reads like a roster of far-right Tory-run model councils who have spend much of last few decades doing their best to make those in vulnerable positions feel ever less secure.

The 'TRUTH' about the riots

How quickly 'truths' become accepted and established. A glance through Facebook and Twitter informs me that two beliefs are becoming universally adopted: first, that what's needed is a merciless police battle with the rioters stopping short only of bullets; secondly, that the rioters are violent idiotic 'chavs' who riot because they were born that way, viz. working class. Few seem willing to wonder if these actions could be borne from their social or economic context - this is not to excuse horrible acts of violence and vandalism but to acknowledge that people carry them out not because rioting is their DNA but because they are in such a miserable situation that rioting becomes a desirable option. To greet these despicable actions with classist condemnations, to group being working class with being violent as if the two are simply different labels for the same phenomenon, is grossly wrong.

Nor is it patronising, bleeding-heart liberalism to contextualise these actions. No one should seek to deprive the rioters of their agency. What they are doing is wrong, but it is also not surprising, it is part and parcel of the changes to British society and politics that we are currently witnessing. As Martin Luther King said:

"When you cut facilities, slash jobs, abuse power, discriminate, drive people into deeper poverty and shoot people dead whilst refusing to provide answers or justice, the people will rise up and express their anger and frustration if you refuse to hear their cries. A riot is the language of the unheard."

Nations, like individuals, show their true colours in testing times. There are always two options - to go in with all guns blazing rubber bullets and tear gas; or to learn what wrong, to clean up the streets and to make sure that no one is so ever again so desperate, angry and dispossessed that this campaign of violence, vandalism and self defeat looks like a good idea. The choice is between revenge and compassion.

Riots are a sign of the times

What do the riots in Tottenham, Enfield and Brixton tell us about contemporary Britain? It seems to me there are two options: either there is a violent streak in all young men which simmers beneath the surface waiting for an excuse to be unleashed with little threat of criminal charges and rejoices at the chance to nick some electrical hardware; or else the social and economic context are important and riots are an indicator of wider changes in society.

The first is surely impossible to credit - albeit the rioters do seem to consist of young men unconnected to any protest or legitimate concern and are hell bent on causing mayhem, destruction and looting, but these traits are not endemic, genetic traits shared by all young men. To say so is to ignore the relative rarity of such violence and their correlation to poverty, unrest and inequality, whether in Toxteth, Tolpuddle, Brixton or Tottenham.

If the second is the case then I suggest three important factors to look at first: 1. the break down in community policing in London in the last few years after the enlightened policy making of the first Labour government; 2. rising inequality and the failure of living standards to advance significantly for the poorest members of society; 3. the effect of the cuts on poverty, misery and community. To treat these riots as a self contained example of the evil of certain segments of the population or to link them with recent protests by students or public sector workers is as disingenuous as it is contrary to the evidence and to common sense. Why is it now, in poor areas of the most unequal city in the country, that these events are taking place? Vandalism is the most perfect act of self defeat, of blind rage expressing itself in short term, selfish idiocy, of pointless hurt and pain, of dispossession by people with little or nothing holding them to normal society. The police, with all credibility and public trust shattered, have no ability to hold a fragile peace amongst fractured communities. There will be more where this came from over the next few years.

Is £100,000 a year enough for a top civil servant?

There's a popular trope in politics, driven particularly by the Tory media/News International, which says that top civil servants are paid too much - conning tax payers, not giving value for money and earning vastly more than those at the bottom of the profession. Tory ministers recently boasted of the amount they had 'saved' from public spending partly by sacking top staff or cutting their wages.

This is problematic for several reasons. First, ministers rarely consider whether the staff they sack will need to be replaced, creating either holes and problems in the delivery of services or leading to a re-hiring or expensive consultants. Secondly, 'savings' for the taxpayers usually means cuts they will have to endure in another form - as the government reduces fuel duty, imposes punitive rises in VAT and proposes canceling the top rate of income tax so they scrap essential services these could have paid for.

Thirdly, a point least often raised, is that the discourse of 'high pay' for top civil servants redirects attention from vast private sector salaries, the need for high quality individuals to run public services and the differential between pay in the public and private sectors. All of which is very helpful to a Conservative government filled with millionaires and desperate to slash and burn with as little censure or observations as possible, but we should be sceptical of any argument which turns cutting public expenditure into a virtue and casts public servants as grasping fat cats. Public sector pay is chronically low, we should never have to worry about paying 'too much' to those who provide services to the public, particularly to those who have managed to rise to the top. Good management is essential, particularly in a time of cuts, and it costs a lot of money to attract the kind of managers who will ensure that services survive the Tory government. Why shouldn't a top teacher earn a salary which, although much more than most other civil servants, is still less than any equivalent private sector salary? Which, after all, do we believe is most important?

Arrogance, cynicism and ignorance: the foundation of the 'Big Society'

Listening to Phillip Blond on this week's Beyond Belief reinforced to me the cynical, empty and arrogant assumptions behind the Conservative Party's 'Big Society'. This is nothing new of course, it has been well attested to by political commentators, Labour Party politicians and the archbishop of Canterbury. Even David Cameron appears to have lost faith on this empty, ill-considered slogan left over from a failed piece of electioneering, relaunching it time and time again with no new policy ideas, little funding and no sign of public confidence.

How staggering it is that the hubris of politicians leads them to believe that in dismantling the welfare state, the single most important force in helping voluntary organisations offer care in communities, it is politicians who must be central to its every reduction. Only a Conservative politician with staggeringly little experience outside public school and TV public relations could fail to understand how many small societies there are, and have always been, providing services in damaged communities, and how much they rely on the state funded bodies which he is attacking. How patronising it is for a lofty think tank wonk in Westminster to tell religious organisations he's letting them take over libraries, after school clubs and so on. What hypocrisy from a bunch of elite men at the centre of the political machine. I just keep remembering this delightful quote from Francis Maude, who admits to doing no volunteering and then has the arrogance to claim its unfair he's been asked (why on earth should he have to do anything?) - at the same time as he tells local communities to volunteer to fill in the short fall he is creating. Phillip Blond also seems to have memorised important and meaningful phrases very well, listening to him speak is full of soothingly old fashioned left-wingism, until he tries to talk about the welfare state or about religious organisations. The welfare state keeps people poor! Religious groups'll fill in all the gaps! They just need the cuts to help them get it off the ground! Volunteer groups always do it better than the state! Cuts are good for you!

Few tropes are as short sighted or ignorant as that of 'Broken Britain': a nasty, damning sneer on how things look from houses in the Home Counties which rely on the Telegraph and nostalgic hearsay for their information about the world. The problem is almost as glossed and oversimplified as the solution: to fix broken Britain you first take away resources first from the poor and vulnerable, then from state sector institutions that provide services for the poorest people, then from voluntary organisations that vulnerable people rely on. That this outlook, a blinkered pessimism that judges without evidence and condemns without empathy, is so widespread and so instantly accepted shows how little information percolates through the right-wing media firewall to the kind of people who fill the political classes. Why bother hunting after examples of communities in impoverished areas supporting their own or attempting to form a nuanced conclusion based on actual observation and curiosity when an entire world view can be granted in two words? The seductive power that instant condemnation grants that suits both the Tory party and the boor by the bar: "I'll tell you why's this country's going to hell in a hand cart mate, it's the immigrants, the nanny state, health and safety, red tape, blah, blah, blah."

Why the powerful must be corrupt - and what to do about it

I am naturally hostile to any conception of politics or society that rests on an 'us and them' mentality, essentially because I doubt it to be true. There is usually so much middle gournd, such a long ladder between top and bottom, that to divide it at some point and cast the the ends as naturally opposed seems arbitrary. We all have more in common than we have differences - the fundamentals of our physiology are not illusory in this respect, even as wealth or geography create appalling inequalities we all find ourselves in essentially the same predicament as human beings.

Even the division between owner and worker seems more slippery than ever before in the age of digital communications and pension funds; my bank was one of the ones which went under spectacularly, had to be propped up by the government and is now paying its employees astonishingly well, I just feel happy if my interest rate stays about inflation. But the revelations of recent weeks about links between News International, the Metropolitan Police and the government reveal a degree of interpenetration that would surely surprise even the most jaded observer. Each provided funds, personnel and information to the other; restricting it from other institutions and neglecting their prime motivation. The structural imperatives of democracy, elections, the maintainance of law and order and the pursuit of readers and profit formed themselves quite naturally into a closed circuit running to its own logic which even the most heinous of actions against principal figures in the chain could not break (I think here particularly of how Rebecca Brooks ill treated Gordon Brown over the death of his son).

In this it seems overwhelmingly not only that a 'rogue reporter' is to blame, nor even a few 'evil' newspaper proprieters, but rather a huge number of people willed into a kind of automatic amorality by the unavoidable implications of capitalism and a tall hierarchy of power. Power, I think, does corrupt; not because the people who hold it are turned bad, drunk on their own superiority, although this does happen often enough, but because they are forced to act in certain ways to maintain their position. They have the capacity to resist, but not the power to resist and hold their position. Their fault was in choosing ambition and survival over integrity. It is a challenge given to almost all of us on a regular basis - admit to an unfashionable belief, quit an immoral job or call out a loved family member. We get stuck behaving how we are meant to behave, not how we ought to behave.

Should we expect our politicians to give up principles in favour of pragmatism, in a Machiavellian manner which the Tory party has always been proud of, or to fight for what is right in the sure knowledge that to do so will force them out of the system and deliberately undermine it? The latter is surely preferable but I suspect that the best alternative might be to remove the hierarchy of command and the narrow class of power-holders altogether. If the struture doesn't work, ditch it. Is it possible to give unto Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's or must the former, ultimately, ruin the latter; or the latter ruin the former? Let's instead abandon a situation where one or the other must take place - let's get rid of Caesar and let SPQR back in on the act of government.

What's inter-faith for?

I have always been, without thinking about it too hard, a supporter of inter-faith institutions and proposals. I believe in the value and interest of every religion and the importance of sharing that wisdom between all believers, particularly when it can promote peace, cooperation and friendship. At its root I hope it would reflect at a more widespread level my own experience of friendship with Muslims, Jews and Sikhs, something which has stimulated my own faith, and my fascination with other religions, more than any other encounters.

However, attending a presentation at the Cambridge University Divinity Faculty on 25 July 2011 was my first real engagement with an institutional inter-faith event. It was an odd evening, the talks, given by Jewish and Christian academics, and a Muslim student, were more negative than I had expected, focusing on necessity, pragmatism and conflict as much as on theology. The talk was intended not to find common ground between faiths but to find independent reasons within each religion for engaging in interfaith, a sensible approach surely but one which seeks to remind us how far some religions are from one another. Occasionally the talks were provocative, especially when considering the most grievous points of conflict, serving to make me wonder whether the Israel/Palestine issue, for example, is essentially impossible to overcome. One questioner at the end of the talks proposed one Islamic view on Judaism which he claimed was too fundamental to ignore, the Muslim student handled this aggressive point brilliantly but it left a sour taste in the mouth. Does inter-faith, speaking pragmatically, require some taboos in order to work? Marriage counselling presumably only works because the two sides have, at some point, been in love, they just need to recapture a sense of this original emotion, which is why discussion works; the same is not obviously true of religion. The study of comparative religion, in my opinion the most fascinating subject of them all, perhaps requires independence from engagement between individuals with chips on their shoulders.

My final surprise was that the discussion left relatively little room for individuals or friendship - there was some talk of love, agape, courage, 'eye to eye' and so on, but it was communities, religious texts, doctrine, prophesy and politics that absorbed the speakers' attention. After the talk I spoke to a priest from Leicester who told me that 'all you need for inter-faith work to happen is a few key players from either side to lead it'. When I suggested it was friendships between individual members of each group which really counted, his friend, also a priest, told me this was inter-faith too, as if a natural relationship between a Jew and a Christian could never be other than the meeting of religious representatives across a great religious divide. Maybe 'inter-faith' benefits from a fuzzy definition that allows academics and leaders to compare different scriptures in university settings while grouping this activity with hypothetical relationships between real religious believers, but I worry that it emphasises difference by its very name, excludes normal social activity and threatens to descend into an activity carried out by and for academics, priests and religious leaders. To use a cliche - can a top down structure deliver bottom up results?

Blue Labour

There's been a lot of talk recently of Blue Labour, Maurice Glasman's 'traditionalist' proposal for future Labour Party policy. It is an interesting idea, one now widely discredited in light of Glasman's recent remarks about immigration. This is a shame, not just for the sake of pluralism and discussion but because it did offer a coherant alternative to technocratic New Labour capitalism, Conservative libertarianism and 'old' Labour social democracy. It also seemed to resolve a problem many of us on the left who have always believe in the importance and value of a large and active state have felt concerned about for the last fifteen years: how to provide meaningful and progressive public services when the political class is now drawn from such a limited pool, when the major political parties vary so little in leadership or ideas, and when the dominant ethos and discourse is so childish, empty and right wing.

The answer is not distantly related to Cameron's 'big society' - the use of mutuals, trade unions, faith groups, community groups, cooperatives, etc - traditional aspects of left wing policy making stretching back decades and predate the Labour Party. To use of a horrible cliche: 'grass roots' politics, where it is associations of people outside politics but supported by government, carrying out political activities. Labour's obsession with Westminster politics, with statist changes, with business, the EU and the major levers of state could be replaced by focus on domestice policy, providing or helping people to provide services in local areas. The key to this idea is not social conservatism, although Glasman did stir in a healthy dose of it largely as a vote winner, but embracing and supporting communities which include social conservatives, socialists who are also concerned about immigration say.

It would not of course take the politicians out of politics, unlike Cameron's proposals it would require funding, an active state run by left wing politicians who understood the importance of taxation for the provision of a healthy public leaf in Britain. But perhaps it would allow the flourishing of real communities, locally specific engagement, the mixing of human beings with their neighbours and a diversity in public life.

The Greatest Building of All Time

A recent Guardian newspaper bit of puff asked columnists to write about the most formative cultural event they saw in the field they write about. So the pop critic picked seeing the Pixies in 1988, Adrian Searle chose an exhibition of Goya and Billington wrote about a performance of Pinter's No Man's Land.

So what would I pick, as an architectural historian?

There are a few great buildings I can think of visiting while a teenager, some overwhelming experiences and moments of inspiration, Durham Cathedral, the Houses of Parliament, St Peter's in Rome, and so on. But the moment at which my love of architecture first stirred properly was in the National Theatre in London when my Dad pointed out to me how the concrete had been cast in wooden moulds leaving an imprint of their grain which then decorated the walls. I found the idea fascinating and weird. These clear cut lines and curves, otherwise overwhelmingly a man-made creation but with a texture and softness from nature. The sober grey of the concrete suddenly become much less alien from the quiet browns of timber. I felt I could almost imagine the decisions being taken at the architects' meetings; for the first time I truly appreciated the level of detail and depth that architectural design could take.