An overlooked article in the Telegraph reveals that serving British soldiers continue to endure crumbling substandard living accommodation at a time when the political elites in London are more focused on averting a tube strike and pandering to the whims of the RMT union and its overpaid train drivers than looking after the welfare of those who do a truly difficult and irreplaceable job.
The article quotes a complaint written to the letter’s page of Soldier Magazine, detailing conditions that should rightly cause many red faces at the Ministry of Defence:
The letter from an unnamed soldier complained: “We are constantly without hot water, have only three showers per platoon and not all of them work.
The rooms at Somme Barracks in Catterick are “falling to bits”, the soldier wrote.
“We have made every attempt to make them bearable to live in, but their poor condition is now starting to affect the lad’s morale.”
The response given to the soldier by the Ministry of Defence spokesman is breathtakingly dismissive and arrogant, and is worth quoting in full:
The accommodation at Somme Barracks is not condemned. The MOD has already invested some £1.2 million in improving the site in 2011 and 2012, redecorating and upgrading a number of areas including flooring, toilet facilities and utilities rooms.
We will continue to invest in the barracks and are replacing boilers supplying hot water to blocks 11 and 12. This work should be finished by May 2, 2014.
Comprehensive maintenance service is provided but occupants must report any problem promptly to the help desk or repair work may be delayed.
Essentially, the government’s response to a serving soldier’s complaint about appalling accommodation is to call him a liar, boast about supposed renovations that clearly delivered no noticeable improvement when they were completed two years ago, and then to blame the squalid conditions on the soldiers themselves, claiming that they did not report the issue to the help desk as one would a malfunctioning BlackBerry.
Compare the serving soldier’s description of substandard British army accommodation with this grim account of army housing in backward-sliding Russia, taken from the excellent book “Putin’s Russia” by the late journalist Anna Politkovskaya:
[The soldier’s] home is a dreadful officers’ hostel with peeling stairwells, half derelict and eery … The windows of many now uninhabited flats are dark … We go up to the second floor, and behind a peeling door is a squalid, spartan room … There is no hot water, and it is cold, draughty and uncomfortable.
It is a much overlooked outrage that some in the British army live in accommodation that can be described in very similar terms to Russian army lodgings, the Russian army being synonymous with mistreatment of its soldiers. The comparison is even more galling when one considers the fact that the Chief of the Defence Staff earns £250,000 per year, and the Permanent Undersecretary of Defence an impressive £185,000 for his bureaucratic skills.
The story has gained very little traction in the media aside from the Daily Telegraph story, and with much of the national media’ attention focused on the upcoming European elections it is unlikely to do so. But even if the Conservative-led coalition government remains committed to its policy of diminishing Britain’s military capability though underinvestment and spending cuts, ministers could at least ensure that all serving personnel have the dignity of adequate housing.
It is neither astonishing nor controversial to observe that the British political establishment – politicians and their client political journalists alike – have only animosity and contempt towards the UK Independence Party and the 30 per cent or more of the British electorate who are likely to vote for them at the European Parliament elections later in May.
From their attempt to pre-ordain the outcome of the recent Nick Clegg vs Nigel Farage debates on Britain’s place in the EU to their laser focus on UKIP’s lunatic fringe, the British media has not been shy to express its negative opinion of euroscepticism or those who in any way seek to change the status quo of Britain’s place sulking at the periphery of EU decision-making.
But there are few examples of this bias – borne out of desperation to discredit the insurgent party and a refusal to engage on any issues of real substance – more telling than the BBC’s latest ‘interview’ with Nigel Farage. Nick Robinson asks the questions, and the thrust of his interrogation is this: because Farage employs his wife, a German citizen, as his personal secretary, UKIP’s arguments about unrestricted European immigration causing downward pressure on wages and reduced employment of indigenous workers are hypocritical, and that Nigel Farage is therefore totally discredited and borderline corrupt himself.
A couple of observations to start. Firstly, this blog is in agreement with the need to curb the persistent practice of politicians (be it MPs or MEPs) hiring family members purportedly to serve as ‘staff’. Sometimes it seems as though absolutely nothing was learned as a result of the parliamentary expenses scandal, when various relatives of politicians were found to be on official payrolls with nominal job titles but no demonstrable evidence of working to earn their money. Though the ideal of competitive and non-discriminatory hiring practices for political staffing jobs may never be reached, we could at least stop politicians from overlooking genuine talent in order to hire gormless relatives. That being said, there is no indication or suggestion that Nigel Farage’s wife is anything other than competent and qualified.
Secondly, this blog supports a liberal, open immigration policy. That is not to refute the various arguments on immigration made by UKIP, or to endorse them; whatever the net effect of unrestricted European immigration on wages and unemployment of British-born workers, it is best debated on other pages. But this blog sees only benefits to making it as easy as possible for skilled and talented people from all over the world to come and to contribute to Britain.
Back to the interview.
Not content with asking his simplistic question – “how can you claim to defend British jobs when you employ a German secretary?” – one time, Nick Robinson indulges himself with a lengthy Jeremy Paxman-style grilling, repeating the insinuation of hypocrisy and scandal (in his trademark bemused and facetious manner) in various different permutations:
You’ve warned about Europeans taking British jobs. Your wife is German! She is your secretary. She’s paid for by the British taxpayer … Was your wife taking someone else’s job then?
Farage’s response – that in his particular case, the hours and demands of the work (late nights at his house) made the secretary role particularly well suited to a spouse, making her the logical choice – did not satisfy Robinson, who continued:
You try to turn everything into a joke. You have a campaign that says that Europeans are taking British jobs. You employ a German woman to work in your office. She happens to be your wife. She happens to spend many hundreds of thousands of British taxpayers’ money. How do you justify it?
Nick Robinson knows full well that Farage’s (and UKIP’s) argument about British jobs being under threat – whether it is a legitimate concern or not – refers to the lower end of the job market, the low-skilled positions, and not to more highly skilled or specialised political staffers. But acknowledging this basic fact would undermine the attack on Farage’s credibility, and so Robinson declines to recognise the distinction.
Farage also points out that Robinson is singling him out for hiring a relative, something that is regrettably common and largely unremarkable in Westminster:
One in four MPs at Westminster employs a close family relative, but actually what’s happening the past two weeks, of 73 British MEPs, I’m the one who is being singled out, and [the press is] saying “goodness me Mr. Farage, you’re costing the British taxpayer an awful lot of money.”
At least one disaffected member of the public spoke wisdom, shouting “What about economic policies?” in the background. Quite right too – what about economic policy? What of the genuine economic costs and benefits of continued British EU membership vs a negotiated secession? The BBC was clearly not interested in following these important lines of enquiry. or asking about specific policy prescriptions.
Gazing on the scene from his adopted home in America, Andrew Sullivan (whose British political acuity has diminished with his years of absence) actually saw Nick Robinson’s glib attempt to concoct a scandal as an example to praise and emulate:
The idea that they [Washington press correspondents] would wreck their access by asking a politician questions that he really doesn’t want to answer – “Isn’t your wife German?” (see above), “Can you give us evidence for your crazy pregnancy stories?” – is preposterous.
So I give you the above video, by the intrepid BBC political reporter, Nick Robinson. Watch him go for the jugular, and watch him not release his grip until the prey is whimpering, near-lifeless on the ground.
Nick Robinson, intrepid?
This really speaks more about the parlous state of political journalism in Washington D.C. than it does about anything else. So deferential are the Washington press corps to those in power – and Sullivan rightly refers to the recent annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner – that any hounding or questioning of a party leader must in itself seem dedicated and fearless. A closer attention to the specific question being asked, however, would have shown that Robinson’s approach was far from being brave or principled. Sullivan is right about the non-deferential tone of British political interviews being a positive thing, but dead wrong in singling out this particular establishment hatchet-job as the pinnacle of good journalism.
The BBC had a golden opportunity to ask some real questions of Nigel Farage, to delve into policy differences with the other parties or at least to engage in a bit of speculation and expectations-setting with regard to the upcoming European elections. But they weren’t interested in the policy discussion (the noble option) or in analysing the polls (the political infotainment option). They went instead for the classic hatchet job, the interview ambush that neither educates the informed viewer or grabs the attention of the casual viewer, serving instead only to give David Cameron, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg some weak ammunition for their negative anti-UKIP political ads.
This was the cheap and tawdry approach taken by a news organisation (if this interview and other recent form is anything to go by) that is becoming increasingly lazy and only comfortable discussing the European Union debate through the existing lens of Labour vs Conservative, more Europe vs a little bit less Europe. The alternative – an end to British membership of the EU – is seen as so radical and threatening to the establishment that it must simply be ignored, or (when feigning ignorance is no longer possible) loudly ridiculed and discredited.
Polling day is on Thursday 22nd May. Soon we will know whether the Nick Robinson strategy has been enough to save the British political establishment from electoral humiliation.
One of the aspects of British life that this blog finds hardest to tolerate and justify – aside from our lack of a written constitution, the complete absence of checks on Parliamentary power, our deference to government authority and the eternally unrealistic expectations heaped upon the England football team – is the fact that in the year 2014, our supposedly liberal democracy maintains the absurdity that is an established church (and de facto national religion).
The notion that Britain is a Christian nation has been a laughable, if ubiquitous proposition for many years now. To arrive at the conclusion that the UK is a Christian land, one has to redefine Christianity not as a religion, a set of beliefs, teachings or practices, but rather as some woolly abstract incorporating cherry-picked elements of history, patriotism, nationalism, whiteness, tradition, middle class anxiety and fear of change. The rather more trustworthy indicators such as weekly church attendance, changing census data and the public’s knowledge of basic Christian tenets point stubbornly and persistently in the opposite direction.
David Cameron, always more comfortable on the woollier side of a debate, naturally favoured the abstract markers of Britain as a “Christian” nation when he made his recent intervention, a rare instance of a senior politician addressing matters of faith which also conveniently eclipsed the ongoing media coverage of his incompetent handling of the Maria Miller expenses scandal.
First comes Cameron’s woolliness:
In an article in the Church Times ahead of Easter Sunday, Mr Cameron acknowledged that he is a “bit vague” on the “more difficult parts of faith” but said he has “deep respect” for the national role of the Church.
He said: “I am a member of the Church of England, and, I suspect, a rather classic one: not that regular in attendance, and a bit vague on some of the more difficult parts of the faith.
And then the pivot toward the bold assertion that despite the fact that Cameron is a religious zealot by today’s standards, “vague faith” such as this on the part of a dwindling segment of the population can be extrapolated to mean broad national consent for the primacy of one religion and denomination over all others:
He said: “I believe we should be more confident about our status as a Christian country, more ambitious about expanding the role of faith-based organisations, and, frankly, more evangelical about a faith that compels us to get out there and make a difference to people’s lives.
But the emphasis really is on the word ‘dwindling’. The Rt Rev Graham James, Bishop of Norwich, inadvertently gives the game away when he seeks to explain what he claims are “heartening” church attendance figures:
These figures are a welcome reminder of the work and service undertaken by the Church of England annually – 1,000 couples married, 2,600 baptisms celebrated and over 3,000 funerals conducted every week of the year.
The fact that there were 400 more departures than additions to the ranks of the faithful in his diocese may have failed to set off alarm bells in the head of the Bishop of Norwich, but for the more numerate reader it does illustrate rather starkly the problem faced by the wider church.
Once it has been explained that 2,600 minus 3,000 equals a net loss of 400, the Rt Rev Graham James (and the Church of England as a whole) must concede the fact that a higher number of Christian funerals than baptisms represents a real and existential threat, or else they are essentially admitting that the sacraments of the church are no real way to measure the faith of the people, and that they therefore no longer matter. An admission of the latter seems unlikely.
The response of many – both to the decline in church attendance and in attempts to loosen the Church of England’s disproportionate grip on the levers of power – has been to rail against the damage of that destructive group known as the “militant atheists”, those shadowy PC paramilitaries who fight the War On Christmas and dare to suggest that claiming religious objection does not exempt a person from their contract of employment or license to do business. The Daily Mail leads the charge from this side:
The truth is that there is a new breed of militant atheists who are capable of being as unreasoning as the most bone-headed creationist. Their intolerance is a strange mirror reflection of the bigotry of religious extremists.
‘Intolerance’ here is given the broad definition of the perpetual victim, an insult hurled by those who suddenly find themselves losing their ability to impose their values and lifestyle choices on everyone else.
According to this school of thought, it is bone-headedly ignorant to see anything wrong in the fact that our Head of State has a constitutional duty to defend one faith above all others, or that twenty-six members of that one faith alone are entitled to sit in the upper house of the British Parliament and participate in our lawmaking.
Neither do the traditionalist defenders agree on when, if at all, Britain might no longer be considered a Christian country. Would it be when more people regularly attend another faith or denomination’s services? If so, that ship has already sailed and Britain should once again be pledging fealty to Rome and the Holy See. Or perhaps the moment of severance can be declared when a majority of people no longer agree with Church teaching on matters such as gay marriage or equality for women? But again, that moment has been passed. More likely, their answer would be “never”, simply because they will it to be so.
Parliament and the Church – divorce is needed to save both institutions
None of this means that Christianity has lost its place as the predominant religion in Britain – indeed, this is one thing clearly supported by the 2011 census data. It is certainly true that among people expressing a religious affiliation, the vast majority identify as Christians. But there is a huge gulf between acknowledging this fact and deciding that British laws and the British system of government itself should continue to be organised around and influenced by the teachings of a religion that most people only identify with on a nominal, cultural basis.
And it is on this this basis that the Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, joined the debate with a proposal to disestablish the Church of England, in order to prevent any more unnecessary harm coming either to that church or to the rest of us.
Nick Clegg has said the church and state should be separated, a view he has expressed before but one that is likely to gain fresh currency after David Cameron described Britain as a Christian country.
Clegg, an atheist, said he would like to see the disestablishment of the Church of England, which would lead to the Queen’s removal as the head of the church.
“In the long run it would be better for the church and better for people of faith, and better for Anglicans, if the church and the state were over time to stand on their own two separate feet,” the deputy prime minister said on his LBC radio phone-in show. He said he did not think this would happen overnight.
Heads will surely explode at The Daily Mail, and the likes of Cristina Odone will stay up late into the night to pen angry rebuttals, but in fact here is a very sensible proposal that would help to keep the church out of some of the more hot-button political and social debates affecting the country as a whole, while going a few steps toward establishing a more sane, comprehensible constitution for the United Kingdom.
Indeed, many of the reasons given by apologists for why the UK is a Christian country are symptoms of an established church, not justifications for continuing to tolerate one – artefacts such as the Queen’s role as the head of the church, or the presence of the Lords Spiritual in the House of Lords, for example. But this is akin to claiming that an Egyptian mummy is a living, breathing human being – sure, the body parts are in the right place (just as the constitutional elements are in place for a British theocracy) but the heart does not beat, the blood does not flow and the brain does not think like a living person.
Nick Clegg goes on to claim that the Church of England would “thrive” if disestablishment were to occur, and this may well be the case. At present, the Church has to walk a tightrope with doctrine on one side and popular opinion on the other, making it appear weak and indecisive, and pleasing to no one. Unshackled from the state, however, the church could continue to discriminate against gays and women (or more hopefully recognise their equality) without dragging the rest of the country into the debate.
Mr Cameron said: “I think our arrangements work well in this country. We are a Christian country, we have an established church,” adding that disestablishment was “a long term Liberal idea but it is not a Conservative one.”
This is conservatism of the bad kind, the reflexive hanging on to tradition not because the alternative is untried and the status quo works well, but simply out of a reluctance to rock the boat, upset the party base or start a real, informed debate. Cameron believes that the current constitutional arrangement “works well”, but take this with a pinch of salt – he also believes that parliamentary oversight of the security services works very well indeed, though it transpired that they were undertaking far more extensive and intrusive surveillance than the public had ever been aware of or given their consent.
Religious believers who oppose such a move should look to the US, where faith has flourished alongside the country’s secular constitution. Indeed, in an interview with the New Statesman in 2008, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, (who went on to famously guest-edit the magazine) suggested that the church might benefit from such a move: “I can see that it’s by no means the end of the world if the establishment disappears. The strength of it is that the last vestiges of state sanction disappeared, so when you took a vote at the Welsh synod, it didn’t have to be nodded through by parliament afterwards. There is a certain integrity to that.”
What Rowan Williams delicately calls a “certain integrity” is actually just plain old democracy, properly executed, with each citizen having a voice and no powerful interests able to sway policy based on their own narrow interests. Both church and state can make decisions in their own interests without running to each other for contentious debate or rubber-stamp approval.
The British people, usually so quick to voice their distaste for money in politics and big donations from wealthy individuals, corporations or trades union, should ponder this simple fact: of all the business moguls, special interest groups and union barons jostling to influence British government policy in their favour, only one organisation is powerful enough to boast twenty-six loyal, paid representatives ready to do its bidding in the upper house of the British Parliament. Britain’s 100 biggest employers, ten largest unions and her wealthiest people combined do not have the lobbying and legislative clout of the Church of England, an organisation that commands a weekly attendance of just 1.8% of the UK’s population.
To say all of these things does not imply a hostility of any kind to religion and faith-based organisations, despite the misleading accusations of the traditionalists; regular readers will know that this blogger is a practicing (if somewhat Cameron-vague) Catholic. Indeed, disestablishment of the Church of England, combined with a loosening of the government’s hand on all matters of faith, can only benefit religious organisations, schools, charities and initiatives through the plurality that would immediately be created.
But even if disestablishment would cause difficulty or a degree of harm to the church, that alone is not a sufficient reason to preserve the status quo. It is not the business of government to pick winners and losers, to favour some more than others, and institutions (corporate or otherwise) who rely on state aid of any kind tend to fail regardless in the longer term.
Christianity – and the Church of England – have formed a huge part of who we are as a country, influencing our laws, culture, art and traditions. We should be very grateful for this – just ask anyone who suffers or whose life prospects are narrowed or extinguished under a modern day Muslim theocracy. But we should not be content merely to be better than Iran or Saudi Arabia – the time has come to do away with an established state church entirely.
In the year 2014, it is time to finally remove the theological shackles from the British constitution, and to take the state church off life support so it may live and breathe unaided. Committed Christians and Church of England members should have the confidence in their faith and institutions to accept, if not actively welcome, this change.
The ongoing public debate about the Snowden NSA leaks and government surveillance was effectively settled once and for all today, as former News of The World editor Andy Coulson informed the world how he would have acted had Edward Snowden approached him – rather than The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald – with his cache of classified security documents.
The former NoW editor Andy Coulson said he would have rejected the Edward Snowden story if it had been offered to him when he was editing the newspaper, the Old Bailey has heard.
Coulson told the phone hacking trial on Tuesday he felt the news story about US National Security Agency surveillance, based upon a cache of documents leaked by the whistleblower Snowden, would have endangered lives.
Andy Coulson – known by many of his peers as the Saint of Fleet Street – distinguished himself throughout his career by his unimpeachable journalistic ethics, frequently declining to run lucrative stories picked up by other newspapers because he could not be absolutely certain that the information had been gleaned from reputable sources or that its publication would serve the public interest.
Showing the steady, high-handed professional judgement which was the hallmark of his tenure as editor of the News of the World, The Guardian reports Coulson as saying:
“It’s a topical example, Edward Snowden. If they came to me at the News of the World, I think I would have turned them down,” he said, adding that the story on sweeping surveillance by the US government had “a potential for lives to be put at risk”.
The fact that Andy Coulson decided to weigh in on this contentious issue can only add further weight and moral credibility to the government’s argument that it has the unlimited right to take any action in the name of national security without either informing or seeking the consent of the public.
Coulson’s intervention is also a tremendous setback for The Guardian and The Washington Post newspapers, who only yesterday were boasting about their newly-won Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the Edward Snowden NSA leaks. Indeed, the judgement and reputation of the entire Pulitzer Prize committee must surely now be called into question for conferring an award on two newspapers who so egregiously violated what is already becoming known as the ‘Coulson Doctrine’ of fastidiously weighing the public interest before publishing sensational material.
Coulson could not be reached for further comment as he is currently standing trial at the Old Bailey on charges of phone hacking and committing perjury, absurd and hurtful accusations that were probably concocted by jealous rivals who can never live up to Coulson’s exemplary standards of professional and moral conduct.
After resigning from the Cabinet, her hands finally pried away from her grip on office, Maria Miller actually did something quite rare and notable, which deserves recognition and adoption by other outgoing ministers under similar circumstances. The Telegraph reports:
Mrs Miller said on Wednesday night she was giving her £17,000 ministerial severance payment to a charity in her constituency.
Unlike a number of her colleagues, Maria Miller was not trying to make a fortune at the expense of taxpayers. Her breach of the rules was significant and certainly warranted this outcome (which could have been achieved at much less stress had Miller shown the humility to realise and atone for her errors earlier rather than clinging on for as long as she did), but donating her ministerial severance payment in this way was quite a noble act, one that she was by no means compelled to take.
Miller did not have to do this, especially when there was nothing left to salvage of her ministerial career. For Miller, it seems, it was not so much about the money as it was an ugly manifestation of that right-to-serve mentality and scorn for public disapprobation that still infects so much of the political class.
In truth, the particulars of Maria Miller’s excessive expense claims are quite mild compared to some of the more well publicised excesses of other departed politicians – employing relatives to do fake jobs, claiming rent paid to themselves, expensive furniture, third homes, premium home electronics and moat cleaning – but this is no defence.
Serving as a Member of Parliament and representing your constituents at Westminster is a privilege, not a right. And with that privilege comes the obligation to behave in a manner that is entirely above reproach in all areas related to the carrying out of those parliamentary duties. These obligations, and the commensurate scrutiny, should only increase if the MP is also a minister of state.
Serving in the people’s house is not just another career path where mistakes and transgressions should be overlooked in light of someone being a nice guy, or having had an impeccable record thus far, or having a family to feed. All other considerations are secondary to adherence to a strict code of behaviour and an unwavering following of the spirit – not just the letter – of the rules.
Maria Miller’s expenses intrigue was a remnant from the original expenses scandal, and as such theoretically could not have taken place under the news rules. This much is a far, if mealy-mouthed defence – one cannot retroactively try someone for committing an act that was not illegal at the time. But there, all sympathy for Miller must end. The former Culture Secretary was obstructive and threatening in tone and action, both to the parliamentary expenses commissioner and to the press who were seeking more information. Anything less than full co-operation with such an investigation is unpardonable. These actions alone warranted her resignation from the Cabinet.
Even now, however, it seems as though David Cameron is firmly stuck in denial that Maria Miller had to go and that is unequivocal support of her was wrong and hugely damaging to the public trust. The Telegraph reports:
At Prime Minister’s Questions, Mr Cameron defended his decision to support Mrs Miller. He said: “If people clear themselves of a serious offence, you let them get on with their job. That is actually the right thing to do.”
There was widespread public anger after the standards committee overruled Kathryn Hudson, the independent standards Commissioner, who called for Mrs Miller to repay more that £40,000.
Once again, David Cameron’s blind loyalty prevents him from correctly reading either his moral compass or the public mood, thus helping to reinforce everyone’s worst thoughts and convictions about the political class.
How long will it now take to undo this setback, to repair this damage that could have been almost entirely prevented with a swift and honourable resignation?
Semi-Partisan Politics 