Unto them that hash up small things...

...shall a Mighty Project be Given! Today’s the day for a big announcement — the route for HS2, a projected high speed London-Birmingham rail link through Buckinghamshire that has stirred strong feelings from our neighbours in the Chilterns, mainly on environmental grounds. Of course any large infrastructure project has to go somewhere, and there may be some tweaks in the mix after months of consultation, or not.

Historically, however annoyed people are, there have been thought to be few votes in transport. I remember a Community Forum years ago in Bracknell where groups were asked what really mattered to them and everyone was amazed that people said the main thing holding them back in their lives and businesses was the weakness and patchiness of UK transport in comparison with most other Western European nations.

There are some bright spots in the English transport firmament, but to achieve the kind of consistent system they have in Germany or Scandinavia you need to take a consistent approach over many years. Short-termism is the name of the UK game, in investment of all kinds.
This makes, inevitably, for a Great Car society, because at least people can get around that way even if is slow, expensive and ecologicaly questionable.

So is One Big Sexy project the answer? The fact is that any transport network is only as strong as its weakest link. There’s real weakness in English transport at its most local level, including lack of integration with infrequent and unreliable bus services. You can’t get to work five miles away in Wycombe from here for 9·00 a.m. by public transport because all the buses are dong the school run, so people jump in the car. If we really have £27Bn to spend, there are almost certainly other ways to increase the capacity of the network (double deckers, someone suggested) more dramatically, along existing lines.

Finally, the project seems to rely on the good times rolling again financially by 2016. They may, but rumbles abound about the Private Finance Initiative, a “privatisation good, government money bad” means the UK government has used for a while to finance infrastructure instead of public bonds.

The general effect is turning out much like trying to pay off your mortgage on your credit card.

For example a Christmas Tree for the Treasury costs £40 in cash, or £875 by PFI! The gross sums indicate that the UK has received benefit of £60BN from PFI for a cost to the Taxpayer of £260BN. The commitments extend in some cases thirty years into the future. Hmmm. And people wonder how we got into debt... Only from the most short-term of perspectives can it be that brilliant to pile on another £27BN of debt to our grandchildren for ten minutes off the time to Birmingham. You’d think.

Benefits off the Back of the Envelope

Governments come, governments go. And when they come, they have to translate ideals that raised a cheer among the party conference faithful into practical policy. It’s not easy, and the new coalition deserve credit for trying. So, this week, comes the first draft of a radical shake-up of benefits. This can’t be a sacred Cow, because it’s the Biggie. Any reform that doesn’t affect the largest elements is just tinkering. However, benefits is where rubber hits road for the poorest and most vulnerable members of society, and it is a test of character, a window into the soul, how the system (= the rest of us) chooses to treat them.

So this week the PM has announced:

1. Universal Child Benefit will be scrapped for people earning enough money to pay higher rate income tax because surely they don’t need it.
   
   
2. Benefits out will be capped at £500 a week because, er, surely poor families can’t need it either. The people who write the Daily Mail won’t think they do, anyway.
   

Both these notions sound promising, perhaps, until you try to enact them. The scheme for doing the first, assuming it is OK to depart from the principle of Universality, will be wildly inequitable because of the Income Tax system. Household A have one earner of £44K a year. Household B have two partners each earning £42K = £84K. The £84K couple keep their benefit, and the £42K one loses it. Duh? this also puts a hefty premium for the middle classes on not staying home to look after their children, something else people thought this government didn’t want to penalise

Meanwhile in £500 a week Benefit land, presuming people aren’t on the fiddle, if you really do have 13 kids, you really do need £500 a week. Penalising the poor little rats because there are so many of them is positively Dickensian. They can’t help being born.

Oh Dear.

On the back of an old envelope from years ago is even more radical thinking, associated by some with Sir Brandon Rhys-Williams. He was Tory MP for Kensington (and an MEP) back in the eighties. On the back of his envelope, if I remember it right, he calculated a radical shake up that really was radical.

I don't remember every detail but I think the essence was that everybody, universally, got paid their tax allowance (in those days about £1500) in cash. You abolished all benefits, except child benefit (because children don't have tax codes) and a few given through the NHS for specific care purposes. You then radically simplified the tax system along Isle of Man / Jersey lines so that everybody paid income tax with no allowances, but at a lower rate. On eighties figures, once you abolished all loopholes but reduced the rate so it wasn’t worth cheating, things panned out such that to get the same tax take you would need a marginal rate of taxation around 18%.

This would suit everybody except those who make their livings by playing the system, or helping other people play the system. But transitioning to it would not be easy, and along the way, any government that tried it would pretty much annoy everybody. wonder how an approach like this would model, thirty years on?

Ride a dead horse...

As our politicians try to find ingenious ways to save cash, Private Eye tells us that in 2007, The Ministry of Defence managed to find £700m of efficiency ssings, whilst the National Audit Office found that MoD’s procurement budget had ballooned by £733m the same year through “deliberate delays.” The dear old NHS last year saw a 2% rise in the number of nurses, 6% in the number of medical consultants, and 12% in the number of managers.

Meanwhile, in Churches all over the country, some programmed activities stagger on way past their sell-by date, bereft of passion, commitment and support, running on guilt and the fading memory of supposedly glorious days gone by.

Into these troubling predicaments ride Jeff and Caroline Wilkinson of Towson, Maryland, USA, (h/t Ali Kaan) with a breakthrough discovery for manegement consultants everywhere:

The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed on from generation to generation, says that, "When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount." However, in modern business, education and government, a whole range of far more advanced strategies are often employed, such as:

1. Buying a stronger whip.
2. Changing riders.
3. Threatening the horse with termination.
4. Appointing a committee to study the horse.
5. Arranging to visit other countries to see how others ride dead horses.
6. Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included.
7. Reclassifying the dead horse as "living impaired".
8. Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse.
9. Harnessing several dead horses together to increase the speed.
10. Providing additional funding and/or training to increase the dead horse's performance.
11. Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse's performance.
12. Declaring that as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overhead, and therefore contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the economy than do some other horses.
13. Rewriting the expected performance requirements on all horses.
14. Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.

One might add “introducing a new appraisal scheme” and “setting smart targets.” Why don’t Christians have a more coherent internalised theology of death and resurrection? We are called to what St Paul called “carrying about in the body the death of the Lord Jesus so that the life of the Lord Jesus may live through us.” That’s why churches rot away on the outside, but are continually renewed within, by God’s good providence.

Inability or refusal to grasp and internalise this basic “life and death” principle of Christianity leads to triumphalism, dead institutonalism, infallibilism, fundmentalisms various, and paranoia about being persecuted. It saps energy and stirs contention. It encourages Christians in stormy waters to cling to the wreckage, when they should be putting out into the deep.

Real Easter faith, is accepting the deadness of what really is dead and to trusting in God, who raises the dead, for all that is to be. As demonstrated by Jesus on the night of his arrest, saving faith is about knowing we have come from God and are returning to him, whatever may come in between...

image of King Wenceslas riding a horse upside down from Adam Paul: All rights reserved. Used by kind permission.

Shrinking the Footprint

The Church environmental campaign (Website and resources here) held a launch day at Lambeth Palace, led by the Bishop of London and Joan Ruddock, UK Minister for Climate Change and Energy. People were there from every part of the country, with interesting local presentations from Exeter, Newcastle and London dioceses. This took me back to our various awareness raising sessions in the diocese in 2007, and reminded me how far we have to go.

It’s now over 30 years since the Lambeth Conference called for “Urgent and Instant Action” on this one. That call was followed by 20 years of doing almost nothing! These were the days of Mrs Thatcher, with her famous ignorance and antipathy about alternative energy. The outlook now is entirely different, as exactly the events the scientists indicated would happen are unfolding around us.

There has been real progress in the past 10 years, and scientific arguments which seemed so notional in 1978 is obvious and almost universally accepted now. This is a whole world issue — the UK only contributes 2% to the whole, but someone's got to give a lead. Copenhagen is absolutely crucial. To get it right world leaders need to pitch something real, but also doable. After years of childish denial and idiocy from US Governments, Obama is on the case, gathering the 16 nations who account for 80% of global emissions. This has to be encouraging.

People stick heads in the sand because they fear the consequences of confronting our fantasies about infinite growth and consumption, which has been the only show in town. Theologically, Christians have a rich tradition. It’s not just our measured pattern of feasting and fasting. There are big Scriptural concepts there — Shabat, Noachite Covenant, Shalom, Jubilee, Proportionality in reaping, Usury as a sin, Stewardship, and the vision of a whole earth groaining in futility for redemption. These are core messages of our theology, even if we’ve rather lost sight of some of them in the last century. It’s obviously time to focus on them again.

So what do we do? As well as joining anyone willing to come along on a public awareness changing exercise, the Carbon Trust, with whom the Church has been working closely, has developed a 5 Stage response model:

1. Mobilisation
   
2. Case for action
   
3. Opportunity assessment
   
4. Implementation Plan
   
5. Manage Implementation

We need to run several cycles of such processes at every level in our operations, building numbers of Eco-congregations, backing change in our schools (which account for a huge proportion of our emissions), managing buildings in new ways, changing our ways of life.. People need a bit of leadership and it’s all hands to the pump. Actually, there’s an immense amount of awareness and common sense in the UK about this, and the Climate Change Act was carried through with careful cross party preparation on the basis of common understanding.

We just have to get our rear ends into gear. The Enemy is Whinging Pom Cynicism, both corporate (“Anything that doesn’t solve the whole problem instantly is only a futile gesture so we’ll all have a good laugh at it”) and personal (“What I do doesn’t make a difference, so I think I’ll just carry on doing nothing”).

Pragmatically, the choices seem to be

• Mitigate,
• Adapt,
• Suffer.

The fact is we will have to do some of all three. How much of each is, to a certain extent up to us. Inaction like that which followed the 1978 Lambeth Conference call for urgent action will not get anyone anywhere, and there is time to make up.

It was thirty years ago today...

Mrs Thatcher taught the band to play. On this day in 1979 the Callaghan government lost a confidence motion in the house of commons (by 2 votes in over 600, I seem to remember) bringing to an end postwar concensus government — In Blairspeak, a pivotal point in British political history. The story may demonstrate the peril of delay in politics— it’s arguable that had Sunny Jim gone to the country the autumn before the winter of discontent, he might well have squeaked home on a sympathy vote. Still being counterfactual, had General Gaultieri managed to keep his army in his trousers and off the Falklands, the fortunes of the first Thatcher administration, deeply unpopular in 1982, might have been different. Who can say?

Thirty years on, the historical jury is out on what followed. One narrative says unions were tamed and the economy renewed as an enterprise engine, driven by financial wizards, unbridled by regulation. Another points out that social inequality soared, driven by a housing bubble and short-termism. Both narratives are right on their own buttons. Certainly banks ceased to be rather dowdy traditional “word is my bond” institutions, like the place Mary Poppins kept her umbrella.

Woody Allen once suggested all nature was a vast restaurant, everything eating everything. In that spirit Thatcherism released the genie that transformed all commerce into a vast betting shop. Recently, imagine if instead of bailing out banks from the top, government had helped people paying sub-prime mortgages from the other end. Could we have refloated the banks, through the micro-economy, bottom up? Of course not! That would be subsidizing fecklessness and irresponsibility.

So instead we've squirted billions into the banks from the top down to avert commercial kismet, hoping they’d start doing lovely things with the lolly. I do wonder what Mrs Thatcher’s old dad, a paragon of thrift and hard work, would have made of Fred the Shred, flying in fruit every day from Paris, replacing carpets rather than cleaning them, and sacking staff over the colour of the biscuits, whilst studiously ignoring abundant evidence that he was steering his liner over financial Niagara Falls. Apparently that was not feckless or irresponsible. It was wealth creating. Really?

If RBS had been allowed to go bust...? Among other things, Fred’s pension would have to have been be paid by the guarantee scheme, capped at £27,000. And if he had thought that sum insufficient he could, at the age of 51, have gone out and got a job. I can imagine Alderman Roberts wondering what would be so terribly wrong with that...

& North Korean Civil Liberties for all

Team Huddle. Diary Room. The Government, concerned about the waning popularity of Big Brother, is bringing the experience into all our homes. It’s proposing a new super database, to enable it to read all our emails, phone calls, and internet searches. And for added fun and expense, it’s proposing to farm out the job to some private company. That way, when the disks are left in a briefcase on the train, it’s somebody else’s fault. Only £12Bn, and Big Brother really will be tagging all our private conversations and outings on the internet. It’s all about terrorism, see? If the terrorists won, they’d take away our civil liberties, and we’d have a government that spied on us all the time...

But hang on,

1. It’s not easy for crimefighters to process and use the information they have now. Can you imagine how misleading and useless the proposed mass of unfocussed information could possibly be? Right now, the authorities need warrants, and, more importantly, some sense of direction, when they rifle our digital dustbins. It’s quality information, not sheer quantity, that aids detection. Beyond a certain point, excessive useless information actually misleads. Fascinating trails can lead nowhere, but be followed anyway. That’s how false convictions happen. And, take it from me, the real crooks will soon find ways to play this thing like a violin.
   
2. Collecting this mass of 99·999% useless information will be hell. So will sorting it, storing it, accessing it, and interpreting it. But all those activities can be guaranteed to be a Sunday School outing, compared to the joy of straightening out the mess when misperceptions occur. You can bet your bottom dollar that this activity will be solidly exempted from any data protection legislation. When the billions of cockups we can anticipate start piling up and impinging on our private lives, don’t think it’ll be easy to do anything about it.
3. Pub Licensing hours came in during the first world war to hasten the downfall of Kaiser Bill. Within four years, Kaiser Bill went and done an Untergang. Eighty years on, all we had was Kaiser Chiefs. But we still had our World War 1 licensing laws.
   Funny, isn’t it, how panic measures for one purpose stick around and find others?

I’m struggling with this whole hare-brained thang. But tell you what, we can all try this out for a day. There’s a group on Facebook called “cc all your private emails to Jacqui Smith Day.” Let’s all share our private information with the Home Secretary by blind copying everything to public.enquiries@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk. The Facebook group will say which day to do it, because we mustn’t overwhelm out poor hardworking Home Secretary with useless titbits, spam, and garbage. That would be a terrible waste of time, wouldn’t it? We can then measure how much Crime, War and International Terrorism fell that day, and, armed with that hard knowledge, we can all calculate whether this obvious erosion of our basic human rights is worth the candle. If we decide not to go ahead, anyone missing the scheme can move to North Korea, where nobody would bat an eyelid at this police method, and there’s a constant stream of Norman Wisdom movies on TV to keep them cheerful.

Blowing bubbles in Hard Times?

Are we Bishops out to get Gordon Brown? Heck no. All my Lords of Canterbury, York, Winchester, Durham and London meant in what they said at Christmas was exactly what they said. Desperate attempts by the Daily Telegraph to turn their sermons into a party personal campaign are ridiculous. No wonder DT’s readership has dwindled to under half what it used to be.

But what about Gordon Brown and the economy? Like most colleagues in funny hats, I have a great personal respect for the Prime Minister. His words at the Lambeth Conference were brilliant and impassioned, showing deep personal understanding of, familiarity with and commitment to the millennium development goals. They were entirely ignored by the UK flock of Salaried Hacks, who were trying to portray him at the time as all washed up and about to resign. In the flesh, he seemed nothing of the sort, and so it has proved. He wasn’t and he didn’t.

In bigger terms, Labour government since 1997 deserves credit for at least trying to adress many significant issues, often long term problems and trends around which predecessors failed. It’s striven nobly to use the fiscal system and other means to tackle Child Poverty and help pensioners. Having gotten us into the hole in Iraq, it’s trying to dig us out. It’s talked the talk on development, globalization and the environment, and sometimes even walked the walk.

At home, HMG has tried to address questions of social cohesion, although some of its initiatives here smack of boy scouts helping old ladies across a road they don’t need or want to cross. Education and, even more, healthcare are areas where it’s poured money in, although there’s still chronic doubt about bangs per buck. On Civil Liberties, the record is dubious, but, in fairness, this area of governance has been a chronic tidal race between ideals and pragmatism for all our rulers these past 500 years. Let’s be kind and draw a tactful veil over transportation and penal policy, both disaster areas. Since the days UK penal policy was transportation, all governments have been clueless about both.

On the Economy? By the wisdom of the world and curent economics Labour has played up, played up and played the game — and reaped many benefits for us all. It was a bit hilarious to see politicians on all sides clambering over each other as they turned on a sixpence last autumn about the need for tough regulation of financial institutions, after years of loud boasting about the virtues of low to zero regulation. However, it would be unfair to suggest our politicians were greedier or naughtier at the party trough than anybody else’s.

Fact is, We’re all in this mess together — The Church of England, the Bank of England, the Labour Party, the Conservative party, the owners of newspapers, and indeed everybody else in Britain with a house, or a pension, or money in a bank, is implicated up to the eyeballs. To look ahead in hard times, we need to address the “meta” level. As we all stand around the bonfire of the Vanties, trying to warm our hands, some “meta” questions strike me:

1. We need a reboot not a bailout, as the man said. It’s time to think different. The fantasy that the answer to one housing Ponzi is another is profoundly barmy. Debt fuelled growth is problematic. It makes everybody feel good for all the wrong reasons. The wealth is like fairies in Peter Pan — fine as long as you believe it really is wealth, but every time a house is undersold, a fairy dies. It’s certainly no substitute for hard work, added value, goods and services. Borrowing to bailout has to be paid for by future taxation. If we must borrow heavily off our children, perhaps even our grandchildren, as the UK did to defeat fascism in the 1940’s, at least let it be for a rational and worthy cause, not just more of the same.
2. Rich and Poor — the gap has widened, though the government has sincerely tried to reduce child poverty. This is exactly the global problem highlighted by the Pope at New Year. It’s right on the button and nothing like unique to the UK. But what do we do about it? What about the losers? What about savers? What about pensioners struggling with bills and taxes, often on fixed savings-based incomes for which they’ve worked damned hard, and which now seem so inadequate? MP’s read their post and know exactly who I mean — it matters that the poor are not forgotten.
   
3. Has our economic effort gotten out of balance? Not enough manufacturing, design and R&D — too many bubbles blown. Ingenuity that has been applied to repackaging debt as profit could now be applied to, er, what — the real world?
4. Was “more” in itself a sufficient object? — yes and no? It would have been, if we had a greater vision of how to invest it, perhaps. But then our greater vision would have been the sufficient object. So, logically, no. Sure we all need to feed outselves. There’s nothing wrong with growth, and lots that’s right with it, but it is not big enough to be the purpose of our civilisation in itself.

These concerns touch core traditional theology as well as secular economics. Christian theologians talk about social as well as personal regeneration. In the Christian Scriptures, Poverty and Justice are issues that will not go away, from the prophet Amos to the Letter of James or the beatitudes in Luke. The Old Testament principle of Jubilee, and its radical questioning of debt as an instrument of power speaks into this mess. It deserves serious contemplation, after years of being sidelined and thought unthinkable.