Has the Pope a more effective critique of capitalism than the St Paul’s protestors?
If only bankers resigned as easily as clergy, one wag Twittered when the news broke that the Dean of St Paul’s was to become the latest cleric step down as the result of the way the church has handled the capitalism-in-crisis protest by the side of the cathedral this week. Still, as one protestor put it, it is all good publicity for the cause.
But is it? The received wisdom in Westminster is that if a minister was on the front page of the newspapers for four or five days then he, rather than the original issue, had become the story and he should resign. At St Paul’s the church, rather than the excesses of capitalism, has become the story. The scalps of a couple of prominent clerics are not much of a prize if you are setting out to overthrow the world financial order.
The Vatican has just demonstrated a different way of proceeding. The Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace has issued a major document ahead of this week’s meeting of world leaders for the G20 summit in Cannes, where the international monetary system and strengthening financial regulations is on the agenda. It calls for a more ethical approach to finance, the redistribution of wealth, and end to rampant speculation and the establishment of a global central bank to which national banks would have to cede power.
The document has been branded “quasi-Marxist” on Wall St where commentators who supposed the Pope was a closet Republican because of his opposition to abortion and gay marriage, have been brought sharply up against the radical stance of Catholic Social Teaching on economics.
Rome has been highly critical of the consequences of the Big Bang deregulation of the financial sector in 1986 for it dissolved not just financial restraints but also moral ones which glorified the values of utilitarianism and individualism at the expense of the common good. Economic liberalism does not just spurn rules and controls; it promotes selfishness.
FollowJust before two o’clock tomorrow afternoon the world’s seven billionth person will be born, according to the United Nations population estimating clock which is adding nearly 150 people a minute to the number of us living on this planet. Internet folk have been having great fun with computer programmes like the one which informed me, from my date of birth, that when I was born I was the 2,595,249,671st person alive on Earth.
But for others the occasion is an gloomy reminder of our ecological predicament. Their argument goes something like this: more people, at the rate of an extra two every second = more mouths to feed, more environmental degradation, more species extinction, more global warming and an even bigger demand on the planet’s depleting resources. We are going to breed ourselves out of existence. It is no coincidence that Seven Billion Day falls on Hallowe’en, the scariest day in the calendar.
A man stood up at a conference the other day and told us that over-population was the problem which underlay all others. Nothing would improve until effective population control was put in place. Should start by getting rid of Americans, I asked him, since they consume 35 per cent of the world’s resources even though they are only 6 per cent of the world’s people? The entire population of what used to be called the Third World uses up only the same quantity of the world’s resources as the United States.
Or should we perhaps begin with the Dutch? In Holland there are more people per square kilometre than anywhere else in the world, apart from odd little principalities like Monaco, Gibraltar or Vatican City – which has its own singular policy to birth control, requiring almost all its residents to be men.
There is more nonsense talked about population than almost any subject in international politics. That has been so since Thomas Malthus first predicted in 1798 that human reproduction would eventually end in famine and catastrophe. Malthus failed to foresee the Agricultural Revolution which increased food production radically.
On Monday evening I went to the Not the St Paul’s Cathedral Service to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Hymns Ancient and Modern. It had been transferred at the last minute to Southwark Cathedral after Wren’s great building to the north of the river was closed to the public because of the tents of a group of anti-capitalist protestors. After the service I crossed the Wobbly Bridge between the two worlds.
The encampment of perhaps 100 small nylon tents with half a dozen little marquees nestled in the lee of the north side of the cathedral and to the side of the steps at the great West door. Neat little pathways had been made between the tents. There was a wider fenced passageway to the entrance to the crypt. The north transept doors, and the fenced churchyard around it, were clear. It was contained rather than sprawling.
Outside the food marquee was a board asking for donations which began with soya milk and concluded with prepared meats. To the side a different hand had added in capitals NO MEAT. This is a coalition of paradox, as its ragbag of demands – from an end to bankers’ greed, NHS reforms and McDonalds hamburgers to calls for action on climate change and new homes for the Dale Farm travellers – demonstrated.
What the protestors called a General Assembly was underway. It had been advertised to start at 8pm but a large group had gathered 40 minutes earlier. The protestors claim not to have leaders but a woman was up at the front with a microphone, trying to resist moves from the impatient gathering to start the meeting early. She was unsuccessful. The meeting began, disenfranchising anyone who was due to arrive at the appointed time.
There was an emotional incontinence about that – and the subsequent proceedings with its formula of hand-signals the audience was instructed to use to indicate approval, or otherwise, of what speakers were saying before they had even finished talking.
But for all the irrational immediacy, and the lack of political coherence about their utopian idealism, the protestors were giving vent to a frustration which is felt by all those ordinary folks who have lost their jobs, homes or public services or seen the value of their pensions slashed by two-thirds over the past three years thanks to the malfunctioning and injustices of the global financial system. And they were doing so, for all their physical and intellectual messiness, without any sense of threat or menace.
There will be an empty chair in the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford on Tuesday, unless Richard Dawkins turns up to occupy it. The high priest of atheism has been invited there to debate with America’s leading Christian apologist, the analytic philosopher and theologian William Lane Craig. But the evolutionary biologist has declined the invitation. In response the promoters of the event have placed adverts on the side of the city’s coaches which sarcastically echo those famously splashed on London buses a couple of years back announcing: “There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” The new version says: “There is probably no Dawkins. Now stop worrying and enjoy Oct 25th at the Sheldonian Theatre.”
The ertswhile Professor for Public Understanding of Science was stung into a response, in a newspaper article, the other day. Craig, he announced, was a “deplorable apologist for genocide” with whom he would not share a platform. The genocide in question, it turns out, is that of the Canaanites in the Old Testament Book of Deuteronomy, which you might have expected our top atheist to point out is of dubious historical accuracy. But then any stick will do to beat a dogma.
In any case, there is another side to the story. William Lane Craig is a formidable debater. He has done battle with celebrity academic atheists including Daniel Dennett, Laurence Kraus, Lewis Wolpert, Peter Atkins, and Sam Harris. Not long after his exchange with the philosopher Anthony Flew, who was perhaps the leading atheist thinker of the late 20th century, Flew converted if not to Christianity to deism. Harris described Craig as “the one Christian apologist who has put the fear of God into many of my fellow atheists”.
And Christopher Hitchens said: “I can tell you that my brothers and sisters in the unbelieving community take him very seriously. He’s thought of as a very tough guy: very rigorous, very scholarly, very formidable”. After a televised debate in which the two locked horns one US atheist website pronounced: “Craig was flawless and unstoppable. Hitchens was rambling and incoherent, with the occasional rhetorical jab. Frankly, Craig spanked Hitchens like a foolish child.”
William Lane Craig is Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology in California. He is a conservative evangelical but he is smart, with a doctorate in philosophy from Birmingham and one in theology from Munich. He has developed such a reputation that when he began a 10-day speaking tour of Britain on Monday he drew an audience of 1,700 at the cavernous Central Hall in Westminster.
Why we cannot do without experiments on animals
A sad-eyed mournful-mouthed beagle stares out from a poster on a bus shelter by the front door of the Ear Institute of University College London. Below the melancholy dog blares the legend “Boycott Vivisection”. It is clearly intended to be a reprimand to the scientists passing through the door into one of the world’s leading research centres on hearing and deafness. Not that there are any experiments on dogs going on in the Institute, but then facts are not always the first currency when it comes to the emotive subject of experiments on animals.
The number of research procedures on animals carried out in the UK rose by 3 per cent last year. The figure has risen steadily over the last decade to just over 3.7 million in 2010. ‘Procedures’ is the term used by the Home Office which is looking at ways to meet a commitment in the Government’s coalition agreement to reduce the use of animals in scientific research. And it is a significant word, for behind it lies a major shift in animal experimentation.
The headline figure disguises considerable changes. Experiments on many of the kind of animals which most inspire protest among animal rights activists were down: dogs by 2 per cent, rabbits by 10 per cent and cats by 32 per cent. Even the eponymous guinea pigs were down 29 per cent. There was also a fall of 11 per cent in the number of animals used in toxicity trials, as thanks to rule changes one test can now be used to satisfy several regulatory requirements.
Where there was an increase was in mice and fish – the latter up a whopping 23 per cent. What that reveals is a switch to animals whose genes can be easily modified. An extraordinary 44 per cent of those “procedures” turn out not to be what most members of the public imagine as an “animal experiment” but merely the act of breeding transgenic creatures, which is mostly done by allowing mice to do what male and female mice do naturally anyway. But the nature of the experiments has undergone a notable change.
For decades now the terms of the debate on this subject have been set by the emotive, sentimental or absolutist intolerance of animal rights activists. We rarely hear the other side of the story, from the scientists who have for years kept themselves in the shadows, for fear of attacks from animal rights extremists, the most violent of whom are now in jail.
I once got in a taxi and was asked by the cab-driver where I was from. “Middlesbrough,” I told him. “I hate Middlesbrough,” he replied bluntly, and then told a story which I found hard to credit.
Sometime during the 1980s he had gone with a group of Manchester United fans to watch his team play away. They travelled by train. But when they arrived at Middlesbrough station the local police were waiting to order them to remove their shoes and leave them on the platform.
They were then marched in their stocking feet for two or more miles in a column to the then ground, Ayresome Park, to watch the match standing shoeless on the cold concrete terraces. After the game they were marched back to the station to collect their footgear and get the train home.
At first I did not believe this story. How could the police have got away with that? What would the local paper or the civil liberties organisations have said? But it became all too credible when I was taken back to the 1980s during the debate in the House of Commons on Monday on Hillsborough – the biggest disaster in the history of English football, when 96 Liverpool fans were crushed to death and 700 were injured at the home of Sheffield Wednesday.
The Labour MP Andy Burnham disclosed the extent to which senior policemen ordered the doctoring on the notes of ordinary officers at the disaster to make them less embarrassing for the police. References to police shortcomings and poor radio communications were deleted. So were notes showing that fans got together in groups to carry the injured while dazed policemen sat weeping nearby. It revealed, one senior officer said of the fans, that “they were organised and we were not”.
Those words, Andy Burnham said, go to the heart of the untold story of Hillsborough. They “transport us back to a different time: an era of ‘them and us’, when football fans were the ‘enemy within’. They reveal an orchestrated campaign to put a slant on the events at Hillsborough so blame was shifted off the authorities and on to the victims. ”
Over the past two decades families and the middle-classes have taken to football. But back in the Eighties football was perceived as a national disease thanks to the hooligan behaviour of supporters who routinely invaded pitches, hurled missiles at players or fought in the streets before and after matches. They were a yob minority, but football was an overwhelmingly working class game and there were few voices of respectability to speak on behalf of supporters. Police and public regarded all fans with hostility.
In war the Glorious Dead fight on longer than you might suppose. When I was a reporter in Ireland in the 1980s, and the first rumblings of political peace were stirring in the Republican movement, one of the most persistent arguments against finally abandoning the bullet for the ballot was that to do so would somehow betray the sacrifice of those who had died in the struggle. As we look back this month on Britain’s 10 years at war in Afghanistan we should remember that.
We are in Afghanistan, we are told, to fight al-Qa’ida and keep the streets of Britain safe. That may have been true in 2001 or 2003 but is it now? It was not the Taliban who turned out to be harbouring Osama bin Laden but our ambiguous ally Pakistan whose military and political establishment is complex and dangerous. There must be serious doubts now as to whether Afghanistan is the base for al-Qa’ida’s terrorist operations.
But there is another classic Just War determinant. Besides asking about the purpose there is the question of whether this war is winnable. Received wisdom is that in the end the Afghans always win (though Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan might disagree) but in reality the history of Britain’s three military adventures in the territory in the days of Empire suggest that might can succeed, though only where its objectives are more limited than a full invasion and sustained occupation. So what are our objectives now?
Afghanistan is not Iraq. It is a much more primitive society. Indeed it is a little more than a collection of competing factions. Different warlords hold sway in the gas-rich more industrialized north, in the mountainous Tajik north-east with its emeralds and lapis lazuli, in the Iran-backed Persian-speaking Shia region of Herat, and in the Sunni villages of the Pashtun south where opium cultivation and local bandits rule. In the midst sits President Hamid Karzai, a pawn of the CIA since the 1980s, and the preferred placeman of the West still, ruling an economy fed by Western aid, choked with corruption and nepotism and where some of the richest drug barons have been members of the president’s family.
Who profits from the release of Gilad Shalit?
Aside from the man and his family, who benefits from the release of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier set free by Hamas militants after five years imprisonment in Gaza? Certainly not Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, who wrong-footed both Israel and his Hamas rivals last month by boldly going to the UN security council to request full membership for the state of Palestine. That move saw the popularity of this weak president shoot up, with even some young Hamas leaders supporting his strategy. The negotiations between Israel and Hamas for the release of Mr Shalit in exchange for 1,000 Palestinian prisoners seems designed to claw back some ground and punish Mr Abbas for his UN initiative.
The leaders of Hamas, whose popularity has been sinking thanks to economic problems in the Gaza area it controls, can feel on the front foot again. Prisoners are held in very high esteem in Palestinian society and the release of 470 yesterday, with 550 more to come next month, will boost Hamas’s popularity. That will strengthen its hand in negotiations with Mr Abbas’s Fatah faction which must happen before elections next April.
But Hamas, like Israel, has compromised in the prisoner swap and that must be a sign of hope for peace in that land. For a start there was an implicit recognition of Israel in the act of negotiating. And Hamas settled for a lower number of freed prisoners than it wanted – and it accepted the Israeli condition that some of those freed would not be allowed to return to their homes in the West Bank or Gaza. But Israel backed down on demands that a quarter of the prisoners would be deported to Turkey, Jordan, Qatar or Syria.
The gain for the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was that any weakening of the position of President Abbas reduces the prospects of a diplomatic deal which might require Israel to withdraw from occupied territories. And it garners support for him in the centre ground of Israeli politics where he has recently faced mass demonstrations over the state of the economy. After decades of preaching No Deal with Hamas he has also shown himself a pragmatist without sacrificing any fundamental ground on major issues. The Israeli Right do not like what they see as a deal which rewards terror. But he has gained more support in the centre than he has lost on the Right, though that could change if freed inmates go on to commit new acts of terror.
The definition of fat gets wider and wider
Chocolate Horlicks was the chief beverage of aid workers during the Ethiopian famine of 1984/5. This was because the proprietor of the Daily Mirror, one Robert Maxwell, had dispatched one of its reporters to the local supermarket to buy up its entire stock and take it personally, with much fanfare and photography, on a plane to the famine region. The trouble was, when it got there, the starving rural peasant farmers would not touch it. Their palates have not been corrupted by chocolate, one of the aid workers in the horror camp at Korem told me, offering me a cup. They were desperate to get rid of it somehow.
Corrupt palates is an interesting concept. Here in the West we are all presumably victims of that – which is why more than 60 per cent of English adults are now overweight or obese, making us one of the fattest nations in Europe. The Health Secretary Andrew Lansley announced another initiative to combat that the other day. The problem was that it was the same as all the previous initiatives on the subject: eat and drink less, he told us; take smaller portions and exercise more. Small wonder that health experts dismissed the initiative as, in the words of the chef and food campaigner Jamie Oliver, “worthless, regurgitated, patronising rubbish”.
But if we all know that why are we still fat, and getting fatter? There is more to it than individual decisions about diet and exercise. There have been numerous attempts in the past to explain this. Back in the Eighties Geoffrey Cannon wrote a book called Dieting Makes You Fat which hypothesised that our Stone Age ancestors, faced with periods of feast and famine, had developed the ability to store fat and then live off it in times of scarcity. The more periods of famine, the better the body had to become at getting fat. So diets (the equivalent of scarcity periods for the affluent) actually improve your ability to put on weight when you come off them. I’m not convinced. I think the problem is in the mind not the genes or the stomach. In the Fifties a psychologist called Leon Festinger came up with a theory he called cognitive dissonance. It sought to explain how people can hold two conflicting ideas in their head simultaneously. He had been studying a cult which was anticipating the end of the world. When the appointed day came, and the world failed to dematerialize, the group did not fall apart. Instead it grew.
This was because instead of concluding that they had shown themselves fools in giving away their worldly goods, they decided that the aliens who had been about to destroy the planet had decided to give humankind a second chance. This was news which needed even more zealous evangelization than the previous message. Failure only increased their fervour.
Polly Toynbee is a prolific journalist. She is certainly not a woman of few words. Yet she has been uncharacteristically reticent for the past three months over why she pulled out of a debate with the Christian apologist, William Lane Craig, the philosopher and New Testament scholar whose Reasonable Faith tour of the UK begins next week.
Dr Craig has emerged in recent times as the scourge of the New Atheists. Over the years he has debated persuasively, as YouTube shows, with Peter Atkins, Daniel Dennett, Laurence Kraus, Lewis Wolpert and Sam Harris. His exchange with the man who was once the world’s leading atheist, the philosopher, Anthony Flew, was said to have been instrumental in Prof Flew’s late conversion to deism. Sam Harris has described Dr Craig as “the one Christian apologist who has put the fear of God into many of my fellow atheists”.
Perhaps that is why Richard Dawkins and AC Grayling refused to meet the American in debate. So it was all credit to Polly Toynbee when, as president of the British Humanist Association, she agreed to open Craig’s tour on Monday with a debate on the existence of God. That was in April.
But then in August she pulled out with the bald statement: “I hadn’t realised the nature of Mr Lane Craig’s debating style, and having now looked at his previous performances, this is not my kind of forum”. She has said nothing more since, apart from apologising for the inconvenience her withdrawal caused after many tickets had been sold. Perhaps she had seen Dr Craig’s debate with Christopher Hitchens of which an atheist website said: “Craig was flawless and unstoppable. Hitchens was rambling and incoherent, with the occasional rhetorical jab. Frankly, Craig spanked Hitchens like a foolish child.”
Arab spring turns to Christian winter
The resignation of Egypt’s finance minister in protest at the killing of 25 people by the Egyptian army yesterday has raised the temperature in an already over-heated situation. The largely peaceful revolution which overthrew the country’s then president, Hosni Mubarak – sweeping forward a tide of change throughout the Arab world – is in danger of descending into chaos and violence in the region’s most important country. We should be worried.
The Egyptian army, which stepped in to take charge, to popular acclaim, is at the centre of the growing crisis. Sectarian tensions are rising, strikes for higher salaries have become common among teachers, workers, doctors, nurses and bus drivers. Unemployment, poverty and inflation are high and economic growth low. In a country where more than 20 percent of the population exists below the poverty line – and the very poorest rely on groups like Muslim Brotherhood for food, medicines and schooling – the potential for trouble is growing rather than receding.
The violence against Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority is in part merely a symptom of all this for they stand to lose more than any other group in a country where the future could hold anything from a liberal democracy to an Islamic republic but where a drifting continuation of military rule increasingly appears the most likely option.
Those killed were Christian demonstrators who were protesting against the burning of a church in southern Egypt. Low-level discrimination against the Copts has been common for decades but the Islamist revival in recent times has heightened tensions. Still they were to some extent protected under the Mubarak regime which made gestures of support to the community, making Christmas an official holiday and allowing the building of new churches. It was part of President Mubarak’s approach of keeping order through divide-and-rule tactics plus a heavy-handed security machine.
The woman in the bed opposite was a pest. So the nurses thought. You could see why. She was in her Eighties and had some form of dementia. She pushed the button to call for help every five minutes. After days of the continual buzzing of her ceaseless summons the nurses moved the button out of her reach. But they popped in to check on her every 20 minutes or so. Who could blame them?
So there was no-one there when the old lady finally admitted a ghastly gurgle which proved to be her death rattle. One of the other patients pushed their buzzer. A nurse came fairly swiftly but the old woman was dead.
Yesterday’s report from the Care Quality Commission into the care of the elderly in Britain’s hospitals has far worse stories to tell than that. One incontinent patient was left unwashed despite asking for help. Patients were without intravenous fluids. Call bells were put out of patients’ reach, or not answered soon enough. Staff spoke to patients in a dismissive or disrespectful way. The elderly were not given the help they needed to eat.
After unannounced visits to 100 National Health Service hospitals it found that less than half feed old people properly or treat them with compassion or dignity. One in three hospitals needed to make improvements in one or both areas. One in five were so bad they were actually breaking the law in their treatment of the elderly.
I have spent a lot of time in hospitals over the past three months since my mother, who is 84, has been admitted no fewer than four times, for up to three weeks at a time. So I can add a couple of stories to the Care Quality Commission report. In addition to the old woman who couldn’t press her buzzer as she died there was a student doctor who came to see an old woman who had been without food for six hours during admission and asked her the same series of questions which the registrar has already asked. The student persisted despite the woman’s best efforts to cram a cheese sandwich into her mouth as she answered.
“Shall I come back when you’ve eaten,” she eventually asked, extremely belatedly, as the old lady did valiant battle with the bread, her false teeth and the duplicate Q&A. The old woman nodded.
