Getting really cross

“Sell everything you own and buy yellow precious metal, fashioned in the form of one vertical long stick crossed with a horizontal shorter stick. And wear it publicly at all times, as a sign of your devotion to me. Blessed are the jewellery wearers for they shall inherit media attention” Book of Ratner ch19.v4

(As Jesus directed his followers in a previously little-known apocryphal bible book covering the Jewellery Company Years)

Determined cross wearers Shirley Chaplin and Nadia Eweida (a former nurse and a former British Airways worker) have taken their case to the European Court of Human Rights

Shirley Chaplin and Nadia Eweida take cross fight to Europe.
Shirley Chaplin said “hiding” her cross was akin to denying her faith
(headlines on the BBC report)

I can’t see that it matters what styles of jewellery people wear. I think that their employers have behaved insanely (although I bet they were a real trial to employ). Although, if you know that a job has a uniform and you refuse to stick to the uniform rules, you shouldn’t really take that job.

The problem is that the cross ladies picked this fight on purpose. To bolster the picture of the UK’s imaginary condition of “discrimination against Christians”.

Christian Concern website (find it yourself, if you want, I’m not keen to post a link) is always willing to place itself at the centre of any case that it can use to promote the fantasy that we live in a parallel universe in which European Christians are beingpersecuted.

Increasing numbers of Christians have been penalised for their faith in the public sphere, often due to equalities legislation and the promotion of homosexual rights. Some Christians have been threatened with disciplinary action, suspended, and even sacked for refusing to act against their consciences. At Christian Concern we vigorously resist any restrictions on freedom of speech and expression for Christians.(from Christian Concern)

What? Equalities legislation and homosexual rights are a threat to Christians?

Passing blithely over the irony that people who feel threatened by human rights legislation are resorting to the European Court of Human Rights for redress, do they claim that they are being compelled to become homosexual in order to get human rights? No, I think I get it, maybe they claim the right to persecute gay people is the human right that they are in danger of losing?

Christians have been sacked for refusing to act against their consciences? I would have much sympathy – nay, admiration – if their consciences were telling them they had to resist the government’s ongoing programme to attack the poor and the NHS or if they were campaigning against wars or using their resources to feed the hungry and house the homeless…

But their Christian consciences aren’t stirred by such insignificant social issues. Their moral sense is roused by rules about wearing jewellery in work.

And their consciences can only be accommodated by following the Book of Ratner and wearing jewellery with malice aforethought.

Oh, and spending vast resources on getting their own way through the courts. What would Jesus Do? Well, the same, obviously. I believe he was working on his latest designer jewellery collection for Argos when he was crucified. He thought the cross shape would be really great for the brand.

Another Canon Fired

(Sorry, they went of their own accord but I couldn’t resist the misleading headline. Maybe I should work for the Fail.) Another church minister has resigned in embarrassment over the CofE’s behaviour over the St Paul’s anti-capitalism camp. A part-time chaplain resigned, shortly after canon Giles Fraser’s resignation the other day.
While the Church of England is siding wholeheartedly with Mammon, for fear of losing £20k a day from the sale of cathedral trinkets, it seems that there may be a few of its staff who aren’t comfortable about the alliance. Maybe they thought the terms and conditions of their job included siding with the poor. In that case, I’d love to see the industrial tribunal case that would take place if they were to claim “constructive dismissal”.
It still somehow seems a bit shocking – despite the evidence of centuries – that the Church of England should be behaving quite so shamelessly as “the Tory party” at prayer.
Unfortunately for the powers at the Cathedral, their moves towards bailiffs and evictions came at the same time that the salaries of FTSE 400 directors were reported to have risen by 50% in the last year, at a time when everybody else is getting poorer at a rate of knots. Maybe the Cathedral bosses naively believe that this tiny minority of mega rich will happily spend some of their windfall millions in the cathedral gift shop.
St Paul’s has claimed

  • that they’d had to close the Cathedral on the grounds of “health and safety”. This is no blatant a misuse of the ideas of health and safety laws that you’d think the Daily Mail et al would be raging about “health and safety nazis” in St Paul’s. (Well. OK, you would never think that, to be honest.)
  • that people might trip over tents on their way to pray
  • that the cathedral is doing loads of good things for the poor in any case, so the protests were actually hurting the poor by stopping them getting in the wads of cash to do the aforementioned good things

This nonsense was clearly an embarrassment to those few clergy who had thought they were supposed to do something for society besides look after national monuments. Idealistic fools, who didn’t understand that they work for the big banks.
A commenter on Marina Hyde’s CIF column said:

Financial supporters of St. Paul’s Cathedral include:
Lloyds TSB Group plc, Goldman Sachs International, UBS Investment Bank, N M Rothschild & Sons Ltd, Prudential Plc, J.P. Morgan, London Stock Exchange, HSBC Holdings Plc, etc. Is it a case of “follow the money”? http://www.stpauls.co.uk/Support-St-Pauls/Our-Supporters

So I followed it:

300th Anniversary Campaign 2000 – 2008
The Dean and Chapter would like to thank all those who contributed to our £40 million campaign to conserve and restore St Paul’s Cathedral in celebration of the cathedral’s 300th anniversary.
We would specifically like to thank:
Robin Fleming and Family
Sir Paul and Lady Getty
The Garfield Weston Foundation
The City Bridge Trust
The St Paul’s Cathedral Trust in America
The Lennox Hannay Charitable Foundation
The Cadogan Charity
Lloyds TSB Group plc
An Independent Trust Associated with Barclays
City of London Corporation
City of London Endowment Trust
The Schroder Foundation
Goldman Sachs International
Mark Pigott OBE
The Wolfson Foundation
The Garfield Weston Trust for St Paul’s Cathedral
The Worshipful Company of Mercers
The Sunley Foundation
UBS Investment Bank
Mr Richard & Miss Clementine Hambro
McKinsey & Company
Roger Gabb
The Ernest Kleinwort Charitable Trust
CHK Charities Ltd
David Mayhew CBE
N M Rothschild & Sons Ltd
Sir Brian Williamson CBE
29thMay 1961 Charitable Trust
Dr Yury Beylin
Brunswick Group
Mr and Mrs William R Miller CBE
Lennox and Wyfold Foundation
Hugh & Catherine Stevenson
Skandinaviska Enskilda Bank
Roger Carlsson
The Clothworkers’ Foundation
The Headley Trust
Nicholas Oppenheimer
Prudential Plc
Simon & Virginia Robertson
The Capital Group
Lexicon Partners
Slaughter & May
Barry Bateman
Charterhouse Capital Partners LLP
Cinven
Cognetas
Electra Partners LLP
Land Securities
Standard Chartered Plc
JPMorgan Cazenove
J.P. Morgan
Cantor Fitzgerald L.P.
BGC Partners
Dulverton Trust
CMS Cameron McKenna LLP
The Freemasons’ Grand Charity
David Barnett
Len Blavatnik
Canary Wharf Group Plc
Lord Cockfield Memorial Trust
The Drapers’ Company
Man Group Plc Charitable Trust
London Stock Exchange
The Worshipful Company of Grocers
Stewart Newton
Sir David Walker
Sir Roger & Lady Gibbs
Sir Robert & Lady Finch
Peter and Stephanie Chapman
Fidelity UK Foundation
English Heritage
Wyfold Foundation
American Express
The Coutts Charitable Trust
The British Land Company Plc
HSBC Holdings Plc
Morden College
Aldgate & All Hallows Barking Exhibition Foundation
Jon B Lovelace
Richard & Ellen Sandor Family Foundation
The Scholl Foundation

£40 million towards the upkeep.

plus thry have ongoing Corporate Partners:

Lloyds Banking Group
Fidelity Investment Managers
CMS Cameron McKenna
London Stock Exchange
Sarasin & Partners
BGC Partners

Crime fictions

It’s almost a truism that anyone who makes a tear-stained televised appeal for help to solve a murder will probably be arrested within the week. It seems as if the more extravagant the grief that is willingly expressed on camera, the more likely that the person is guilty.

Even the BBC has noticed. Today it published a feature on the phenomenon .

And, now, I’ve stumbled across true-crime-in-the-media. 2.0:
Barbora Skrlova on MySpace Assuming this is an elaborate joke, albeit in poor taste, I am compelled to look for MySpace profiles of other notorious figures.

For instance, Myra Hindley seems to have half a dozen.

I type in Fred West and get a “Server is too busy” message a few times.
(Quick break to panic at the idea that half the global population has been taken with a lunatic desire to see which really evil people have a MySpace profile.) Then I find there’s an ill-starred 13 pages full of Fred Wests. Lose interest when I consider that most of them might indeed be real humans who just happen to be called Fred West. Then again, a fair number have headlines such as “Get a load of my floorboards”

On firmer ground with Rosemary West. After a good few innocently but unluckily named real US females who just happen to be called Rosemary West, I find a MySpace profile purporting to be from Fred West’s soulmate. In fact, there’s a link to a more convincing Fred West impersonator in her friend space..

What about Josef Fritzl? That one is actually quite scary. I can’t even work out if its meant to reference the Austrian maniac or the name is just a coincidence.

Michel Fourniret? The server times out. Then I get a
“We weren’t able to find a ” Michel Fourniret ” on MySpace”
message, which probably won’t be true for long.

(In case this name isn’t familiar to you, he’s the male half of a French version of a Rosemary-and-Fred-West couple. She lured young women for him to rape and murder, in exchange for his promise to murder her ex-husband. The family that slays together, stays together…….)

I can partly understand why sane people might create web pages for the truly evil. (Apart from an adolescent desire to shock people.) These sorts of crimes make most of us so uneasy about the nature of what it means to be human that humour becomes a necessary defence mechanism. Otherwise, it’s impossible to contemplate the things they have done.

All the same, I have to suspect that at least some of these tributes aren’t ironically post-modern comments on the nature of notoriety. Some of them have been put there by the very same sort of unspeakable beings who do such crimes.

It’s usually baffling how these spectacularly homicidal people find each other to begin these partnerships in crime.. Rosemary and Fred West; Michel and Monique Fourniret, the children who killed James Bulger; Myra Hindley and Ian Brady…… Do their eyes meet across the proverbial crowded room and they see the spark of a potential partner in homicide? Does it “take one to know one?”

Blimey, interactive web 2.0 must do away with so much of the uncertainty for such people. They could start by putting up profiles of their psycho role models …

Brother Sun, Sister Moon

Francis of Assisi. Hmm, what does Wikipedia say about him? “…Francis was inspired to devote himself to a life of poverty…..” He founded the Franciscan order which is pretty well synonymous with the concept of monastic poverty, in the face of the incredible wealth amassed by the other medieval monastic orders.

So, it’s a mite odd to find that, according to the Times

Armed guards brought in to protect Assisi church from beggars

Armed security guards have been brought in for the first time to protect visitors to the Franciscan church of Santa Maria degli Angeli at Assisi from “beggars, tramps and gypsies” who “disturb the peace of a place of prayer”…..
Claudio Ricci, mayor of Assisi and a member of Forza Italia, the party led by Silvio Berlusconi, said the friars’ decision to employ guards was in line with a new local ordinance cracking down on illegal immigrants, many of them Roma gypsies….

After all, those irritating poor people might be benefitting from the charitable impulses of the faithful, before they’ve unburdened themselves of worldly wealth in the church’s collection boxes. Leaving that much less to give to the Church. Even when the church in question is supposedly founded on concern for the poor.

(Some of which donated wealth is clearly going to be spent on paying armed security guards to drive away the irritatingly poor….. It’s almost pleasingly circular)

New Franciscan rule: Give to the wealthy.

And here’s a further story, which may seem slightly reminiscent of the above news item to anyone familiar with the history of the British Labour Party.

The Times Rich List shows that:

The richest 1,000 people in Britain have seen their wealth quadruple under Labour, according to The Sunday Times Rich List published today. Even under Gordon Brown’s brief premiership their fortunes have soared by 15%, just as the financial squeeze and faltering house prices have hit ordinary people.

Or, perhaps more pertinently for “ordinary people,” rising costs for food, utilities and local taxes. At the same time, the tax system has been changed to take more income tax from the lowest-paid, while everyone else pays less. (The government has promised rebellious Labour MPs that it will put this tax thing right but not yet explained how it’s going to work)

A new candidate for the Beatitudes: Blessed are the rich for they shall always get more.

Nulls Back

In case you have missed it, Nullifidian is back blogging – today with a nice catch of Archbishop Rowan Williams claiming that he cant come to terms with humans being created for a “Purpose.” Brilliant. Well worth reading.

Rose-tinted rearview mirror

From the BBC’s new department of rose tinted glasses:

At 6.30pm, when in times gone by most kids would be sitting round the dinner table, it is not difficult to find a group of teenage drinkers gulping vodka in a quiet corner of Leeds.
At the side of an old cricket pavilion, I found seven young girls and two older boys sharing cigarettes and alcohol. It is hard to imagine stumbling across such a scene 40 years ago.

Well, no it isn’t hard to imagine it at all. In fact, anyone who has been alive for more than about ten years would probably recognise that as a pretty normal scene to stumble across at any time. Or even, to have partaken in.

“Times gone by” when “most kids would be sitting round the dinner table?”

The natural reaction to this sort of bilge is to mention a bit of history. I am trying to rein this in and not go back to the Viking berserkers. I’ll just say, hmm, 40 years ago? Wasn’t that the approximate time of massive “mods” and “rockers” battles every Bank Holiday? They would never have smoked or drank while they were setting about each other with hammers and axes and bike chains, then….

Are we a nation of amnesiacs?

I can’t claim to have read this – too scholarly for light reading and way too costly to buy, but this book that I spotted on Amazon could put the subject in perspective
Becoming Delinquent: British and European Youth, 1650-1950 (Advances in Criminology) Pamela Cox, Dartmouth.

Note that its time span RUNS OUT in 1950. The blurb says it shows

“.. how certain themes have dominated European discourses of delinquency across this period, not least panics about urban culture, poor parenting, dangerous pleasures, family breakdown, national fitness and future social stability.”

Where are we now? Oh yes, 2007. So when was this golden age when all young people were playing Cluedo with their chums, camping with the Scouts or Guides, going to bell-ringing practice and volunteering to visit the housebound elderly?

Oh, that must have been in an Enid Blyton book, sorry. So, maybe we should all move to live in 1950s children’s literature.

There are indeed some places in England where the lucky teenage offspring of the rural middle class live like this. But even they are likely to be smoking and drinking when they get together. It goes with the territory of being a teenager.

I am not denying there are some seriously dangerous kids. Three men have been killed in a matter of weeks, just for doing the sane adult thing of speaking up when kids are acting badly.
But that doesn’t mean that every kid with a bottle of cider and a ten-pack of Benson and Hedges is a murderous moron.

Most of them are just normal teenagers, who will learn wisdom partly through doing some moderately stupid things, as we all do. And then forget it all again, of course, when they airbrush their own life history to conform to the Enid Blyton world image that even the BBC feels it has to present to the next generation.