Antidisetablishmentarianism is a long word for “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”
An organist friend, who normally plays in town halls rather than churches, stood in at a nearby parish recently. “I rather enjoyed it,” he said. “The sermon was rational and sane. The people were warm and open. The choir were great. It was good experience intellectually, socially, and artistically great.” All that and a bit of God thrown in for good measure too.
It is stories like that which make the case against the fad for disestablishment which is in the air once again. Like the House of Lords, voting reform or republicanism the case against an established Church is an easy one for any idealistic sixth-former to make. You wouldn’t start from here. And yet here is where we are, and it sort of works.
Speaking not as an Anglican but a Roman Catholic, the case against disestablishment is not merely the old constitutional one about pulling a single thread from a deftly woven tapestry and causing a general unravelling. Untune but one string and hark what discord follows, as Shakespeare had it.
Establishment, as the Queen said recently, is sometimes misunderstood and “commonly under-appreciated”. It does far more than determine the dates of our national holidays. “Faith plays a key role in the identity of many millions of people, providing not only a system of belief but also a sense of belonging,” the monarch said. It subconsciously shapes the identify of the nation, creates a space for tolerance, counters the utilitarian assumptions which undergird our society’s attempts at ethics, and is a spur to the kind of social action which over the centuries has set up schools, hospitals and public services to feed the common good.
Disestablishmentarians routinely forget the extent to which the values of British civilisation draw on the Anglican settlement and underestimate the extent to which the tolerance it fostered is an important societal glue. Bishops in the House of Lords remind lawmakers that there are other values than individual freedom, materialism and consumerism; they speak for the vulnerable and voiceless. Vicars in the inner cities and rural areas are often the only resident professionals to minister to the disadvantaged as well as the lonely, sick and elderly. The Church of England’s presence in every parish makes it a kind of spiritual and pastoral national health service.
FollowThere’s something about a Harry. It’s a geezer name for diamond blokes – as both the prince of that name and a certain football manager have been reminding us all week. The slang is significant. Harry is not a proper name, it is an affectionate diminutive. Pet names don’t just shape the way we think about people; they appear to shape the way the name-holders behave.
The official name of Prince Harry, who qualified last week to pilot an Apache attack helicopter, is Prince Henry Charles Albert David of Wales. Henry James Redknapp, by contrast, was designated by his full name in the courtroom where he was acquitted of tax dodging, though football fans chanting their support at recent Spurs matches have preferred the more demotic Harry.
It is a popular name, the third most so in the list of parental choices last year. The more formal Henry, from which it derives, was a lot lower down. But Harrys are vernacular sorts of chaps. “There’s no way I’m going to put myself through Sandhurst and then sit on my arse back home while my boys are out fighting for their country,” His Royal Highness opined when his regiment was sent to Iraq and he was not. He responded by taking the rigorous Apache combat course which will destine him for Afghanistan, in contrast to the search and rescue helicopter training of his big brother William.
Harry Redknapp equally has never been one for the soft option. In several brushes with controversy over his decade as a manager he’s coped throughout with a laugh and a wink. He even had some of the jury repeatedly chuckling at his laddish comments. “He would say that, he’s an Arsenal supporter,” he quipped of one barrister.
But even if he had been found guilty many would still have regarded him as a loveable rascal. The comedian Ken Dodd, who was similarly acquitted of tax evasion, still tells nudge-and-wink gags mocking the Inland Revenue 30 years on and his audiences love it. Nor have Prince Harry’s various brushes with the law, smoking cannabis and under-age drinking, diminished public affection – not even when he went to a fancy dress party sporting a swastika armband.
Dutiful, reticent, humble before God – and not a banker
The virtues for which Her Majesty the Queen has been praised this week, on the 60th anniversary of her accession to the throne, are most illuminating for being so out of tune with the manner of the age: service, commitment, discretion, loyalty, resilience and – odd though it may be to say it of a monarch – modest, and not just in her use of breakfast Tupperware. Above all there is the sense of duty, or what her own mother called “your devoir”.
This is not the occasion on which to mirror those virtues with the ingrained vices of contemporary society. But it is interesting to contrast them with the self-absorbed short-termist individualism of our times which – for all the widespread rhetorical lamentation – shows no sign of going away. This week we had Sir David Higgins, the chief executive of the partly-public Network Rail, announce he would waive a possible £340,000 bonus this year. But it is not one-year waivers we need so much as a reformation of culture.
What the Queen shows is that the ideal of public service is not so much old-fashioned as timeless. The “culture of responsibility” which the Labour leader Ed Miliband appealed is not something that needs to be re-invented so much as re-discovered. And there is the Queen as the embodiment of it.
The Bishop of Norwich, the Rt Revd Graham James, had an interesting reflection on that in Thought for the Day on Monday, the actual anniversary of the day on which the 26-year-old princess discovered, far away in Kenya, that she had become Sovereign. He referred to the criticisms that were made in 1955 of the young Queen’s lack of modernity by the controversialist journalist John Grigg, then Lord Altrincham.
Criticising the young Queen’s speeches he said that “the personality conveyed by the utterances which are put into her mouth is that of a priggish schoolgirl captain of the hockey team”. Lord Altrincham wanted less of the reticence and restraint the nation has so come to value and more of the “feelings and passion” which have come to plague our self-indulgent times.
Wow! This is the most accomplished and assured first play I have seen for years. It is all the more extraordinary for being written by an Asian taxi driver from Middlesbrough who was driving his cab one night listening to Five Live when it announced a writing competition. Next day he sat down at his new computer.
Ishy Din reckons that over his years behind the wheel he has had, or overheard,160,000 conversations with his passengers. He has listened well. He has a finely-tuned ear for the rhythms of the conversation of working people – and their routine careless obscenities. Three older members of the audience walked out within the first five minutes in the face of a machine-gun barrage of the most offensive words in the English language.
That was a pity, because Din uses his command of the relentless demotic to lay bare an extraordinary range of emotion from the braggardly and blustering to the vulnerable and downright tender. Snookered takes place in a pool hall where four British-Pakistani men in their early twenties meet every year to commemorate the death of a friend with an untrammelled drinking session. The mood swings violently as the lager and JD shots are downed and the secrets and lies of the men’s lives are gradually laid bare in this expertly-paced piece of writing.
There is something immediately appealing about the idea that behavioural psychology can make people do things they otherwise wouldn’t. It’s called The Nudge. If you label two bins Recycling and Landfill you get less in the later than if it was labelled General Rubbish. The government wants to apply these insights to public life. Trials altering the wording on official forms, they say, have made doctors pay £1m more in tax. But the government’s idea that public bodies can reduce billions lost through fraud using The Nudge is less convincing.
Human beings are irrational. Telling a teenager that his mother will hate a new video game may make him more likely to buy it. Printing the image of a fly on a urinal will make men aim at it. But fraud is not something sub-conscious. It’s a crime that people deliberately set out to do. Something a good deal heftier than nudging is required to deal with that.
Must honour really be a thing of the past?
There are principles, and then there are politics. In law we may hold to the precept that a man is innocent until proven guilty. But politics, like football, is a different matter, as the cases of Chris Huhne and John Terry show. The pair stand accused, and that is enough for them to have lost the positions of Climate Change Secretary and captain of the England football team respectively. You cannot continue in your job once a serious charge has been levelled against you. That is the modern received wisdom.
We know this is wrong. A teacher friend of mine was suspended for nine months pending a trumped-up allegation that he had hit a pupil. You hear similar stories about teachers being falsely accused by pupils with a grudge or crush on them. An accusation is enough to sully in the politics of reputation. It’s more than the supposition of no smoke without fire. Nick Clegg has announced that if Huhne is exonerated he can return to the Cabinet. Perhaps so. But privately senior Lib Dems have been saying Huhne can never be party leader now. “He is tarnished goods,” said one. Even a charge appears to bring some taint.
The process by which Fred the Shred became Fred the Pleb is equally instructive. The former chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland, Fred Goodwin, was stripped of his knighthood by the Queen after a recent report into the RBS collapse by the Financial Services Authority. It sharply criticised him for excessive risk-taking which forced the taxpayer to stump up £45bn to prevent the entire UK banking sector collapsing. A knighthood awarded “for services to banking” was clearly unsustainable.
This is not to do with honours so much as honour. Goodwin has no right of appeal. Nor was he allowed to make representations to the Forfeiture Committee which humbled him. An honour is gratuitously given, and it can be similarly taken away. To ask whether this is fair is to miss the point. It is like asking why I should be stopped for speeding when faster cars are not. If I have broken the law that is enough and I must accept the consequences, or the Speed Awareness Course at any rate.
Yet honour does not operate like law. Indeed the very word now smacks of something archaic. It is a code from the 1950s about duty and loyalty, trust and taking responsibility, standards and self-discipline, all of them self-regulating. Of course it goes back much further than that. From Cicero to Enlightenment thinkers like Locke, Hume and Adam Smith the idea was commonplace that people will not act in accordance with the public interest without some incentive. Concern for their honour and reputation – rooted in what Dr Johnson defined as “nobility of soul, magnanimity, and a scorn of meanness” – was perceived as a prime motive.
What is it that really outraged the public over the pay package of the RBS boss Stephen Hester? It doesn’t seem to be the fact that that he was due to be paid over £2m a year so much as that almost £1m came in the form of a bonus. If they’d given him the £2m in salary they would probably have got away with it. It’s the fact that it’s a bonus that has stirred the pot.
Bonus in its original Latin mean plain ‘good’ but it has taken on overtones of something extra and optional. You are paid for doing your job but you have to do something more to get a bonus. Yet the world is replete with exceptions.
The footballer Michael Owen was unusually hired by Manchester United in 2009 not on a salary but on a “pay-per-game played” basis, with a bonus for every goal he scored. Bonuses are woven into football finances with players getting appearance bonuses, loyalty bonuses, and bonuses for reaching various stages in Cup competitions. Some of these involve extra achievements, others are mere elements in the wage structure.
In restaurants the bonus, in the form of the tip, has become institutionalised as the service charge. It is unclear now whether the money goes to the waiters, is split with the kitchen staff, or just trousered by the management. Something similar has happened in banks, though in an even more corrupted form because bankers and traders are rewarded for taking risks not with their own money but with other people’s.
Can children’s learning suffer if they start school too soon?
Do we send our children to school too early? There is a deep ambiguity in the report by the National Audit Office into the state of the nation’s nursery provision. On the one hand it acknowledges that the Department of Education has done well providing nursery places for at least 15 hours a week for 95 per cent of our three and four-year-olds, in the face of increased demand. But it also questions whether the initiative – first introduced by Labour in 1998 but to which the Coalition government has kept commitment – is working. Children’s levels of development have improved at the age of five but there is no significant uplift in ability at age seven. Are nurseries good value for money in preparing out children for school, considering the scheme costs taxpayers some £1.9 billion a year?
The National Audit Office, in focusing on the money as it always does, is asking the wrong question here. A direct correlation between cash spent and early academic results is far too narrow a focus. All the research evidence internationally suggests that the key question is not the age at which children start learning but how the early years that learning are structured. Countries such as Hungary, Switzerland and Flemish-speaking Belgium are far more successful in teaching literacy and numeracy even though formal teaching of reading, writing or arithmetic does not start until children are six or seven.
Indeed it may be that starting school too young is damaging. An ability to recite numbers from 1 to 10, and even recognize the number symbols, can disguise a failure to understand that 8 is more than 3 if a child in not cognitively ready for the concept. Learning is complex. It does not occur in a vacuum. Rather it is determined by factors like class, culture and gender all of which shape the interests, knowledge and understanding. Far better results can come from an early years curriculum structured not to include the three Rs but focussing on skills such as speaking, paying attention, listening, using memory which can be acquired through structured play and interactions with other children. Once they have these skills, more academic learning comes more easily. The obsession of successive governments in testing seven-year-olds reveals an inability to understand the evidence of objective research here. The nursery years are when all that begins.
The term crony capitalism has re-entered the public debate. David Cameron and Nick Clegg have both used it when denouncing the way pay for company bosses has soared, and continues to do so despite the faltering economy. The chief executives of the top 100 FTSE companies last year each earned an average of £4.2 million in basic pay, bonuses, share incentives and pension contributions. That is a rise of more than 400 per cent in just over a decade. The ordinary board members of those companies netted a whopping 49 per cent rise last year alone. All this is happening as average wages stagnate and ordinary people lose their jobs.
And it is a nonsense that this in some way reflects their success in the way thy do their jobs. Last year shares in those companies rose by an annual average of just 1.7 per cent.
What all this suggests is that we have not merely been dragged into an economic downturn, but a fundamental shift of values in which excessive financial speculation has been normalised along with executive pay which is unrelated to performance. All that may have gone unnoticed during the good times when a high tide raised all boats. But when things get tough all that becomes unacceptable.
That’s not economics, it’s politics – though many studies suggest that gross pay inequalities make companies perform more poorly. The recent successes of the egalitarian John Lewis partnership offer the counter-example.
Since the financial deregulation which loosed our present problems began under Margaret Thatcher there is a tendency for fire to turn on the Conservatives or capitalism more generally, as it is driven by greed and has an inbuilt tendency to celebrate the intrinsically immoral.
Which brings us to crony capitalism. The term has been revived by the Tory MP Jesse Norman who provided the ideological underpinning for David Cameron’s Big Society. He has just published a paper contrasting real conservative wealth-creating capitalism with the corrupt neo-liberal brand which has held sway in the US and UK in recent decades and which he brands “crony capitalism”.
Moral capitalism? The short answer is Yes. But the long answer is No
Margaret Thatcher, as Meryl Streep so powerfully reminds us in The Iron Lady, was not averse to calling her colleagues spineless, boneless, suet puddings of men. Were she still on the public stage today one wonders what she would make of the members of the present Cabinet who have just rolled over and endorsed a decision to pay nearly £1m in bonus shares to the head of the Royal Bank of Scotland – the institution the government was forced to bail out at the end of 2008 when it reported the largest annual loss in UK corporate history.
In the face of almost universal public outrage, ministers initially remained shamefully silent on the decision, though they scurried about giving private briefings to journalists. Their line was that they had to do it for fear that Stephen Hester – the man charged with reviving the moribund institution – would quit along with the rest of the board, had the bonus been bounced.
The dumb decision, even before George Osborne ventured a dubious defence about contractual obligation, spoke with its own silent eloquence of the intuitive priorities of the Eton-Westminster coalition at the heart of this government. “We are all in it together,” their rhetoric proclaims as they require people to sacrifice their jobs in the public spending cuts which have knocked the life out of our falteringly recovering economy.
But though they insist on holding a hard line when it comes to those at the bottom – refusing even to compromise about excluding child benefit from the imminent benefits cap – they were ready to make concessions at the top end, arguing that without the mega-bonus the RBS directors might flounce out. “Holding the country to ransom,” Mrs Thatcher would have probably called it and refused to give into the concessions of the jellyfish public-school you-scratch-my-back Cabinet elite.
Fight religious illiteracy in the élite
It is amazing what a blindspot this country’s secular liberal Establishment continues to have about religion despite several decades of extraordinary global events which have repeatedly demonstrated the continuing influence of faith upon world events. The revolution in Iran, the collapse of communism, the international terrorism of 9/11 and most recently the Arab Spring – all of these were impossible to comprehend, or indeed to predict, without some understanding of religion.
So it’s interesting to see a bit of a fightback beginning. This week the thinktank Theos announced a series of The Westminster Faith Debates to take place from February to April to look at key areas like identity, schools, welfare, religious freedom and radicalisation. They are based on the £12m research programme Religion and Society led by Professor Linda Woodhead at Lancaster University. Their aim is to educate mandarins and diplomats in this area.
And they need educating. Whitehall is stuffed with religious illiterates, to borrow a choice phrase from Cristina Odone, the former editor of the Catholic Herald who has recently launched a new networking website called FreeFaith.com with the avowed purpose of “fighting the new atheist intolerance”. That intolerance is now located among the civil servants, politicians, journalists and academics who make up our mainstream elite.
The two megatrends that have shaped world politics for the past 30 years says, Fr Raymond J de Souza on the FreeFaith site, were the return of Ayatollah Khomeini to Iran in January 1979 and the first pilgrimage of Pope John Paul II, later that same year, back to Poland. The aftermath of those two journeys were the fall of communism and the rise of Islamism, both of which caught Western diplomats and politicians by surprise because they had no understanding of the underlying religious phenomena.
Does cowardice seems so despicable because we worry we’d do the same?
The world has rushed with glee to shower its scorn on Francesco Schettino, the man who ran aground the cruise liner Costa Concordia with the loss of at least 11 lives. His reckless behaviour looks set to see him charged with multiple manslaughter, abandoning a ship and causing a shipwreck. But what are we to make of the intensity of the vilification of the mariner who has been variously called Captain Coward, the craven captain, the most hated man in Italy and someone whose name will become a byword for dereliction of duty?
The judge handling the case has labelled his actions “inept, negligent and imprudent”.
Political pundits have seized upon him as a metaphor for Italy’s self-inflicted economic woes. And the words screamed at him by the chief coastguard after Schettino left the liner before it had been fully evacuated of passengers – “Vada a bordo, cazzo!” (Get back on board, you prick) – have been emblazoned on T-shirts, made into a dance-disco remix and are being sold as a phone ringtone.
And that concludes the case for the prosecution. But is there one for the defence?
Is human weakness is a crime, one commentators tentatively asked. It’s a line drawn from evolutionary psychology. What’s wrong with cowardice, the argument goes. Isn’t it just a pejorative way of describing the human survival instinct? When it comes down to it, aren’t we all hard-wired to save ourselves? If our ancestors hadn’t run away and avoided getting killed we wouldn’t be here in the first place, as Darwin might have said.
So why should we stigmatise a human quality that can’t be overcome? Is there any more culpability in cowardice than there is credit in courage, a quality seemingly given to some individuals more than others? Isn’t cowardice, as Ernest Hemingway put it, “simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination”. Discretion, as Shakespeare said, is the better part of valour.
Except, of course, that wasn’t Shakespeare qua Shakespeare. He put the words in the mouth of that fat foolish fraud Falstaff. The truth is that, if you want to follow Darwinian logic, we don’t survive as individuals; we survive as a species. And, as Shakespeare also shows, altruism too is wired into us, and in a more profoundly mysterious way. Greater love hath no man, and all that.
