Tuesday 28 February 2012

Dawkins and Hester in the media.

I was astonished twice in recent weeks to hear a couple of amazing interviews; one on radio and the other on television. The first one was on the Radio 4 breakfast news magazine and was with Richard Dawkins and Giles Fraser formerley of  St Paul's Cathedral. Dawkins was championing his mini census, taken on the back of the official census question which asks people to say which religion they are. Dawkins is not happy with the number of people who say they are Christian and wants to challenge this. His agenda is of course that if he can show that there are far less Christians (really) than the census throws up, we then reduce the grounds for claiming that we are a Christian country, and for having Christian emblems and people and rites in places of privilege and authority. With this latter argument I do not have a problem. Christianity does well to avoid being associated with privilege and power. However, Dawkins uses a very rigorous set of questions in order to weed out the vast majority. He asks questions about frequency of church attendance, prayer and Bible reading, Bible knowledge and so on. Those not able to answer the questions to Dawkins' satisfaction should then be reclassified as non Christians. There is something very arrogant about not allowing people to self describe or self define. Fraser emphasised this nicely when he challenged Dawkins according to his own principles and asked him to state the full title of Darwin's book on the origin of the species. Dawkins stumbled over that, at which Fraser asked if he could rightly claim to be an evolutionist? The lovely irony of the whole thing, the elephant in the room so to speak, was the fact that Dawkins could only do what he is doing because of the Christian legacy this country enjoys. It is precisely because we are a Christian country that he has the freedom to attack the Christian Faith in the way he does. It was a lovely piece of radio.

The other entertaining interview was with Stephen Hester over the massive losses incurred by RBS last year. Hester had the temerity to say that this was a sign of success: a sign that the bank was putting its house in order and moving away from high risk banking. Presumably this success was why he was awarded such a nice big bonus (again) by his board. O, to be able to redefine failure as success and enjoy the sweet fruits of having it named as such. I think Hester could do worse than tread the boards at comedy night at the Apollo.

Thursday 2 February 2012

Knights and the Force.

The government has an honours forfeiture committee! Wow, who'd have remembered. The few times that the infamously wicked have been stripped of their honours most of us will have forgotten the how of it. It should be said that those who have lost their titles in the past have done so for deeds much more nefarious than Mr Goodwin, usually involving people dying and or being tortured. But the government seemed to think that the public wanted him further punished, and this was about the only thing they could legally and swiftly do without asking anyone else's leave, save of course Her Majesty's.  But they have surely opened up a can of worms here. Everyone who is commenting thoughtfully on this is bringing up the question of all the others whose behaviour also helped get us into the financial mess. Will we, for the sake of moral consistency, see others pulled down too? No pressure from them was publicly forthcoming for Stephen Hester. What will this year's round of  Bankers Bonuses' reveal I wonder? 


More interesting however, is a comparison between the government's treatment of this, and their active involvement in forcing massive pay cuts on the Police Force. The Government won't interfere with publicly funded Bankers' bonuses, but when it comes to any other public body, they are swift to put the boot in. I am unable to believe that here is a government that really has the interests of the low paid, the disadvantaged, the marginalised, at heart. I hope I will see things which make me change my mind, for I do not want to be sucked into a stereotypical anti Tory myth about their bias to the well off, but that belief was certainly one of the things that made me vote labour to get Blair in, and abandon my more liberal normal voting instincts so that I could put my voting shoulder to the wheel as it were. I do believe that when the Tories came to power they had to be firm to resolve the debt crisis, and have gone along with some of their austerity package. But they could give just a little bit more to those whose need is greatest, and they could take more from those who do not need at all, and perhaps in the process, stem the tide of uncertainty and insecurity surrounding those treasures of British life, our NHS and our education system.