Category: Current Affairs

I’ve just written to my local MP and I await a response. Does anyone else who frequents this wee blethering blog agree that the new tax changes display a breathtaking unconcern for the poor? Or am I just over-reacting, poorly informed, politically naive? Anyway, here’s the gist of what I wrote.

No doubt you are aware that tax changes as announced in the 2007 Budget come into force on Monday. And no doubt you have been part of the debate that led up to, and has followed from this change in basic rate Tax Regulations.

My questions are straightforward.

What possible justification does the Labour Party offer, for removing a tax band of 10% and doubling it to 20%, when it is both inevitable and self-evident that the consequences would be borne by the poorest income families in this country? Pensioners who work part time to supplement already meagre pensions, people on the minimum wage, young people starting work on the lower income scales, are so obviously the people who will be worst affected, that I am utterly astonished a Labour Government would do this to them.

What possible justification does the Labour Party offer for decreasing the tax band from 22% to 20%, when again it is clear those who will benefit most from this are people who are not on pensions or minimum wage? Important matters of political, social and moral principle have been leached from the conscience of the Labour party when a policy actually fulfils the saying, originally stated with steel edged irony "to those who have, more will be given, and those who have not, even what they have will be taken away".

My third question concerns the fact that these changes of Tax bands will be the focus of a discussion in one of the classes I teach at the Scottish Baptist College, based at University of the West of Scotland. What do you think will be the views of a widely representative group of people training to be ministers in Scotland, on the Labour Party’s policies from the perspectives of social justice, and ethically informed fiscal policy? Given the Labour Party’s origins in non-conformist Christian social conscience, I should have thought such a discussion might be of interest at least as one of the historic reference points of the Labour party – and also given the well publicised Christian values of a number of current Labour ministers.

I ask these questions courteously, from a genuine sense of social concern and moral outrage. I would be grateful for a response more than that my comments have been noted. because my final question is how I, as one who will now pay LESS tax, can in conscience vote for a party and for a Member of Parliament that penalises the poor? And does so by making the well off better off.

I look forward to your clarifications,

Yours with considerable disappointment

I’ve done a report and review of Doug Gay’s lecture on Honey from the Lion’s Belly: Theological Perspectives on Scottish Nationalism over at the Scottish Baptist College Blog. Didn’t say much about my own responses as I wanted to give a full and fair report to help others join the discussion. Have a look and if you’re inclined, perhaps enter the discussion through the comments.

The Good Friday post on this blog will be posted later.

Mary Chapin Carpenter’s most recent CD, The Calling, is one of the CD’s I’m listening to while doing the exercise bike thing. Sorry – but I’m a fair weather runner. Never been the slightest bit interested in padding through puddles, exhibiting pink legs turning blotchy red in the cold, and pretending that at my age I’m a serious contender for anything athletically ambitious. Just want to keep fit, burn stress, and enjoy the occasional guilt free chunk of chocolate!

Anyway, this CD is one of the better reflective collections to come out of the more progressive strains of country music I’ve listened to. Her tribute to the Dixie Chicks, ‘On with the song’, is a scathing comment on power hungry administrations, ridicule of those dehumanising dismissals of people who are ‘other’, and dripping scorn on those who use power to silence dissent and pretend that has something to do with the very democracy they go to war to defend.

This song throbs with the kind of anger that simply refuses to grant the power brokers the last word. There’s high moral value in some forms of defiance, especially when they are a refusal to risk collaboration by silence, by resignation or by fear.

This isn’t for the ones who blindly follow
Jingoistic bumper stickers telling you
To love it or leave it, and you’d better love Jesus
And get out of the way of the red, white and blue

This isn’t for the ones who buy their six packs
At the 7-Eleven where the clerk makes change
Whose accent makes clear he sure ain’t from here
They call him a camel jockey instead of his name

Chorus:
No this is for the ones who stand their ground
When the lines in the sand get deeper
When the whole world seems to be upside down
And the shots being taken get cheaper

This isn’t for the ones who would gladly swallow
Everything their leader would have them know
Bowing and kissing, while the truth goes missing
Bring it on he crows, putting on his big show

This isn’t for the man who can’t count the bodies
Can’t comfort the families, can’t say when he’s wrong
Claiming I’m the decider, like some sort of messiah
While another day passes and a hundred souls gone

Chorus

This is for the ones that I see above me
Three little stars in a great big sky
Light for the world and hope for the weary
They try

This isn’t for the ones with their radio signal
Calling for bonfires and boycotts they rave
Exhorting their listeners to spit on the sinners
While counting the bucks of advertising they’ll save

This isn’t for you and you know who you are
So do what you want ‘cuz I know that you can
But I’ve got to be true to myself and to you
So on with the song, I don’t give a damn

There’s now a book, When Art and Celebrity Collide. Telling the Dixie Chicks to Shut up and Sing, which examines the dominant male patriot mentality which seeks to silence artistic conscience and coerce them into compliance by seeking to ruin them economically. Chapin Carpenter’s song of support for  the ‘three little stars in a great big sky’, who dared to publicly disagree with Presidential policy, is itself an important negation of political bullying in the name of freedom.

I don’t pretend to know the best ways to tackle some of the threats to global peace we all now face – but I am sure that security isn’t secured by silencing conscience and rubbishing truth.

A couple of other tracks on this album are worth some further thought – I’ll maybe get to them in some later post.

I’ve been bothered for some time about the return of Dwain Chambers to the arena of International Athletics following a two year ban for taking performance enhancing drugs. This wasn’t a contested allegation, but a confirmed offence that has many consequences.

1. First it gave him an adavantage over other athletes in what is supposed to be a test of human ability, albeit natural ability trained, honed, tuned like an F1 car.
2. Second, by cheating others, the essential substructure of all fair competition was compromised, robbing others of prizes that they rightfully won, but which were awarded to the person who finished before them by knowingly enhancing his natural capacity.
3. Third, a sporting event that is supposed to celebrate the skill, endurance, strength, speed and instinctive response, and which in the 100 metres event counts speeds in digital fractions of a second, is tarnished to the point where every broken record or championship win is also tarnished till the winner is demonstrated as ‘clean’.
4. Fourth, drug testing of athletes uses advanced technology to detect offences, which means the deterrent is the fear and consequence of being found out. But if a drug is developed that is not detectable, how can any performance ever be completely clear of that corrosive skepticism which suspects all incredible performances of being tjust that, not believable.

And so on. Yet Dwain Chambers has taken his punishment, a two year ban. He now wants to make a comeback and prove what he can do as a ‘clean’ athlete. The controversy is all about whether or not he should ever run again at a professional and international level. He is still excluded from the possibility of going to the Olympics because the British Olypmic Committee still upholds the lifetime ban on athletes convicted of doping. Now that does seem unfair, given that plenty of other athletes with doping offences on their record have served a similar penalty to Chambers, and will be allowed to go. Further, he is off the invitation list for the events that make up every top athletes circuit of competitions. He has stated his remorse and openly acknowledged the wrong of what he did several times in interview, and again last night following his silver medal at the World Championships.

So here’s what makes me uneasy. I can argue for both sides in this debate. I do think that something is fundamentally ruined when an athlete cheats; a combination of personal integrity, trusted reputation, an ethic of fairness not far removed from justice, an ethos of assumed mutual admiration amongst peer competitors. To tear that nexus of values apart seems to me to do something to oneself in relation to others, that irrevocably ruins the possibility of recovering previous trust and transparency.

Yet I also think that as Chambers himself pleaded, nobody’s whole life should be blighted by one mistake if they take their punishment, admit they were wrong, and undertake to reform. In fact what Chambers was asking for was forgiveness. I am a passionate believer in second chances, in the forgiveness that allows a person to start again, in the gift of a new beginning that gives a person back their self-respect. As a Christian I hear his plea for forgiveness as one I cannot possibly refuse.

But what has my attitude to Dwain Chambers to do with any of this. Who should do the forgiving? The Olympic Committee? The athletes he cheated? His international team members whose own achievements were irrevocably spoiled? And what would forgiveness mean in practice? Does a refusal to allow him to race again mean he isn’t forgiven? Must forgiveness mean that a person is treated as if what they had previously done had never happened?

Or is forgiveness more about not allowing our view of Chambers to be defined by his offence, and of valuing the human being he is? Are there offences in certain areas of life, that no matter how much the person who committed them now regrets it, make it impossible to turn the clock back and trust them again in the same situation? What would be a redemptive response to the mess this young man made of his life? But who of all those affected by his actions has the right, the power, to act and respond redemptively?

I confess to being in a dilemma about this – what do others think?

This briefly reported AOL news item is a really good example of the short story. Hardly a wasted word, just enough information to set context, a sense for the reader of just desserts in tension with ‘how unlucky can you get’!

And I love the hugely understated last half sentence, which leaves everything to the imagination!

Wish I could write a sermon as short and effective as this:

An armed robber picked the wrong target when he raided an Australian bar where a biker gang was holding a meeting — and ended up hog-tied and in hospital.

Police said the man and an accomplice, wearing bandanas and waving machetes, stormed into a club in a western Sydney suburb and ordered customers to lie on the ground as they tried to rob the till.

The noise attracted the attention of up to 50 members of the Southern Cross Cruiser Club, who had just started a club meeting in another room and who then decided to intervene.

Football commentators manufacture and then spend their lives reproducing cliches. One cliche suffering chronic impact deflation is, ‘Now they’ve got a mountain to climb’ – usually a reference to one or two goals conceded to a stronger team. In 1924 George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Everest said, ‘Because it’s there’; and another cliche was born.

Today in New Zealand, at the State funeral service for Sir Edmund Hillary, a tribute was paid by a representative of the Sherpa communities in Nepal. Following the conquest of Everest, Sir Edmund raised funds for schools, hospitals, bridges and other important social developments amongst these people. After a moving reference to Sir Edmund as a second father, the Sherpa representative said, ‘our loss is as great, and as heavy, as Mount Everest’. From those who live in the vast shadow and magnificent mass of Everest, the tribute carried an enormous weight of affection, respect and admiration. There is indeed something mountainous, vastly and reassuringly solid, about a great man, whose greatness was never self-proclaimed. It was articulated by others who recognised in him extraordinary strength of character and vast reservoirs of patient, compassionate concern for this planet and all of us who live here.

The comparison of Sir Edmund Hillary with the mountain he climbed and conquered, but forever respected, is one of those metaphors whose effectiveness borrows from the familiarity of the image. Everest is unique; the highest peak on the planet, a symbol of all that is beautiful, enduring, challenging and humbling, providing eyes and minds are clear enough to recognise what such a mountain means; human longing set in stone.

Rabindranath Tagore wrote  ‘The mountain remains unmoved / at its seeming defeat by the mist’.Once again words from one who had gazed on the gigantic permanence of mountains, the ephemeral beauty of mist, and who knew the things that last.  Sir Edmund Hillary was a great man, in a world now more familiar with celebrity, perhaps because it’s more user friendly; he was a man of substance and character, in a world fixated on image and personality; he was a man who long before live-aid and all the subsequent generations of collective media driven charity, made it his business to make life better for a little known people who lived in the shadow of Everest. Mist shrouds the mountain – but soon enough it evaporates, and what’s left is just as solid and great, and remains reassuringly there. The death of Sir Edmund Hillary diminishes all of us, consigns living greatness to the mists of memory; and for his beloved Sherpas, his death takes away one who was always reassuringly, there.

Minding my own business this morning listening to Radio Scotland when a discussion was going on about schools failing in their responsibilities to ensure pupils eat healthy food. Now apart from the fact that schools are places of learning, and teachers and head-teachers are not usually trained dieticians, and the main responsibility for a child’s health lies primarily with parents or other full time carers, and our entire culture is saturated (as in fats) with outlets for fast food, confections (or sweeties), foods high in sugar, sodium, fat and therefore calories – apart from all that, how does a school ensure that secondary school young adults – that’s right, forget children – young adults with the disposable money to buy what they want and  like to eat – how does a school do what it is accused of failing to do. How do you tell a teenager raised in a ‘consumer rules ok’ culture, that an apple is better than a Snickers, and a banana is better than chips.

A very articulate health educationalist, doing a PhD on why primary schools are doing better on the healthy food conversion statistics, was able to tell us that young adults can’t be compelled to not eat unhealthy food, and you don’t change taste and appetite by draconian measures of compliance. Quite so. The young people interviewed had their own opinions of healthy food, I quote only one, and I regret that I am unable to reproduce the exact inflection used in his chosen adjective: "Healthy food juist tastes mingin!"

Suggestions to try to improve the situation in secondary schools have apparently included lunch time lock in, bag search, banning vending machines. The intended social control exerted by such measures I find worrying, and frankly, breathtakingly narrow minded and short sighted. What we put into our bodies is surely one of the most important freedoms and choices we have, always excepting dangerous substances. If in trying to combat obesity and change people’s eating habits, forcing social compliance towards healthier eating is acceptable, why not shut the chip shop? And if chips are so unhealthy (and of course they are if they are staple diet), why not make them a controlled substance, or measure or weigh people in the chip shop queue or at the confectionery stand? I know this is all daft stuff – but no more daft than thinking you can bag search at the school gate for Mars bars or crisps.

What grabbed my attention in this debate is the way a basic right to choose what we put into our own bodies can, at the suggestion of well meaning policy makers, simply be put up for grabs. It goes alongside the weekend revelation that what is already in my body, mainly my organs, are also up for grabs. The presumed consent debate is about who is presumed to own the vital organs and living tissue which at the moment embodies me. Unless I opt out of the assumed right the State wants to have to Nationalise my body, then my permission isn’t needed for others to take parts of me as donor organs. The bigger debate is about life-saving transplants, I know; and the tragic situations of people dying because donor organ availability can’t keep up with medical demand. But a presumption of ownership over a person’s body is a quite outrageous shift in our perception of human value, dignity and definitive freedoms.

I’m beginning to think it’s time to waken up to the danger of allowing daft, half baked proposals for social change to be spoken, argued for, given even minimal plausibility as serious debating points. Bag search teenagers for Mars bars; change the presumption of each person’s inviolate ownership of their own body; change from the presumption of innocence to that of guilt; extend by weeks the length of time a person can be held without charge; introduce universally required identity cards, and link these to employment, spending and other social activity; pay as you go road tax so that every journey is traceable and on someone else’s database; live move and have your being under the pervasive surveillance cameras in cities. Not all these social changes or proposals are daft – but cumulatively it’s hard to escape the feeling that freedom, privacy, personal value, are being eroded by stealth. Or am I just having a bad day?

The murder of Benazir Bhutto, and its aftermath of escalating casualties, is yet another atrocity visited on a world where exponents of terrorism, political enmity and religious hatred, ruthlessly use the publicity value of random lethal violence. No political or religious goals can escape the searching scrutiny of human beings applying human values to that inhuman moral nihilism that not only sees human lives as dispensable, but considers the inflicted death of others an acceptable means to a desired end. I have no moral calculus that enables me to work out whatever mad logic or rogue religious devotion triggers such destructive hatred.

Yet nothing I can write here, nor the familiar rhetoric of outrage and appalled condemnation from politicians, is likely to influence whatever powerfully corrosive forces fuel such outbursts of death-dealing animus. What I can do though, is take time to think and pray, to weigh carefully and consider contemplatively, how the Body of Christ can articulate the love of God, demonstrate the peace of the Gospel hopefully, embody the ministry of reconciliation practically, and give credible expression to the sorrow of the Crucified God who bears the infinite cost of redeeming humanity from our self-destructive ways.

‘Make me a channel of your peace, where there is hatred let me bring your love……’ That I think, is the kind of New Year resolution that will take grace to keep.

Kyrie Eleison

Christe Eleison

Kyrie Eleison

Here is a picture by Banksy that carries a similar message to the prvious post, about Bethlehem, nativity and the realities of militarised politics. The picture is its own comment, sermon, and prayer

Thanks to my friend Duncan for the link.