Lament

Question Time:
The very excellent debater and communicator David Miliband was on Question Time this week. Reminded me of my own appearance in the audience over a year ago when he was also part of the panel. I still strongly lament that this very able politician is not Labour's leader even though brother Ed has improved in confidence and standing over the last two years. David still has the edge in my estimation and I hope that he may yet be leader one day.....

Once in a while I'm moved to tears by the death of someone truly significant in human history. This happened to me over the last couple of days when I heard of the death of Vaclav Havel, the dissident Czech play-writer who became former Czechoslovakia's first non-communist President in over forty years in late 1989. This remarkably courageous yet self-effacing intellectual whose origins in the Czech bourgeoisie made him an enemy of the communist authorities from the first became a symbol of passive intellectual resistance to an oppressive regime and ideology which had no legitimacy in post 1968 Czechoslovakia. Founder of the human rights organisation Charter '77 he spent 5 years in prison for protesting peacefully against the communist state. Yet even this didn't deter him. His reward was to be the post revolutionary president of his country, a role which he felt totally unsuited but which his countrymen felt was deservedly his. Even after he relinquished the presidency of what had by the become the Czech Republic he continued campaigning for various causes including human rights the world over and issues around the environment for the rest of his life. He devoted his life to the cause of human freedom was how one commentator described him and for this we all owe him a great debt of gratitude.

Planet Dinosaur

I've been watching this excellent series about these amazing long dead creatures which have fascinated me since I was a child. Certainly our knowledge of these creatures has increased substantially since then. We no longer necessarily think of huge, slow moving, long necked, long tailed creatures wading through swamps but know now that many of these creatures were not large at all and were much more similar to birds than reptiles. The episode about the 'dino-birds' was particularly fascinating in this regard.

I know some of my Christian friends and readers may have difficulties with some aspects of this interesting topic as it does raise some awkward questions particularly to those who take the Bible's story of creation very literally but I still find this topic fascinating as an expression of an eternal God at work in the world.

Finally I find it a little hard to believe in 'young earth' theories as an interpretation of Genesis given the length of time it has taken for the light from the nearest star to reach us. After all ''a thousand ages in Thy sight are but an evening gone''.

Labour one year on

The other week I had the good fortune to be in the audience at Question time where on the panel was the very excellent communicator and debater David Miliband, sadly side-lined in the new Labour order due to the victory of his younger brother Ed in last year's party leadership election. Over a year ago I was lamenting this happening and I still maintain that had Ed backed David rather than challenged him for the top post he would almost certainly been his right hand man and the shadow cabinet that much stronger as a result...

I know this is a little obsession of mine but as a long-term Labour voter I would like to see the best team in place, and not one of the party's brightest jewels being side-lined in this lamentable way. I cannot believe that I am the only Labour voter who shares this view.

I have been urged to make an entry again some while ago. What should I comment about? We're just at the end of the party conference season and I haven't even commented about the extraordinary phenomenon of our having in power a Conservative Liberal Coalition which seems so far to be working, not something I would have predicted before. This demonstrates to me that there is more flexibility in the British political system than I or perhaps any of us would have supposed and is in itself a good thing.

Apart from my doubts both about the new Labour leader and more especially how he came to be elected in preference to his clearer better known more experienced and better qualified to lead older brother I remain uncertain about the future for Labour in opposition. I may yet prove to be wrong but I suspect that they are likely to remain in opposition for a long time, at least five years, probably more. By then we may have a fairer electoral system in place thanks to the new found influence of the Liberals in government. This may hopefully have altered the adversarial character of British politics for good.

The Beginnings of the Anglican Church

I have been following the Tudor drama on BBC2 on Friday evenings and whilst I have my own reservations about the interpretation of history in this series it cannot evade the murky issue about how the Anglican church came into being. An infamous English King concerned about his need for a male heir set against decades of conflict in the previous century precisely over this issue of the succession, wishes to divorce his wife on the most debatable of theological grounds in order to marry a younger woman with whom he had become infatuated.

This is all set against the complex issues of the Reformation in the church and the divisions in opinion engendered both in the court and in the country as a whole.

Albeit the pope wouldn't grant the divorce so our king took matters into his own hands, wresting religious authority from the papacy and making himself head of the church in England. What an extraordinary story!

It hasn't escaped my notice that had Henry remained married to Catherine of Aragon he might still have gone on to marry Jane Seymour who did finally give him his male heir even if the child was to die in adolescence some years after Henry. But then we would not have had Elizabeth and it would then have been likely that after a brief flirtation with Protestantism we would have reverted to the Catholic fold under the Stuart monarchs. Things might have proved more harmonious in the longer term but we would have been deprived of the English translation of the bible until well into the 20th century. That would have been a major deprivation indeed!

The Passing of an Era

Yesterday I heard on the news that Harry Patch, the last veteran from the First World War and the last to have experienced at first hand the horrors of Trench Warfare, had passed away, scarcely a week after Henry Allingham, the oldest man in Europe and also penultimate World War one survivor, also passed away.

It seemed a moment to reflect on the significance of this. No Briton now survives who actually fought in the First World War. ( I'm uncertain if there are any survivors from other countries). As far as we as a nation are concerned the experience of fighting in that war is now outside living memory. What a horror story this was, by all accounts, and all for what? There wasn't the obvious moral crusade in fighting the evils of Naziism as in the Second World War. The Great War always seemed like an overdue longed-for 'punch up' between rather arrogant public schoolboys, each trying to prove who was the best and the strongest. It was a show-trial of rival national strengths.

True, Britain entered the war as Germany violated Belgian neutrality and the war began originally because of the threat posed to an anachronistic multi-national state called the Austro-Hungarian Empire by Balkan, and in particular Serbian, nationalism, but anyone who knows anything about the history would realise that with sufficient resolve diplomacy could have prevented the conflict. You see I was once a modern history student so I know about these things.

I feel really angry whenever I think about this war. I remember visiting a war memorial in Northern France a few years ago. I forget its name but I'll look it up. It began I think with a 'V'.

I was with a party of young Christians who had been holidaying in the Loire Valley in 2003 I seem to remember. I remember how angry I felt then at the appalling loss of life. How much of a who-ha there would be now. No government now would be allowed to get away with such losses as the combatants endured during that conflict.

Yet we are still fighting wars in far off places in countries which we scarcely understand still less really care about to make the world a safer place we are told. But are we, I ask. When has war ever really solved anything? It's said that allied vengeance towards Germany contributed towards the Second World War. Wars, like punch-ups in a school playground, often seem merely to increase rather than abate enmity. When will we ever learn, I ask?

Frankly, if it weren't for my faith I would despair of life. It makes me wonder how any thoughtful person remains cheerful with such a bleak history as this. Perhaps you could let me know your thoughts, whoever reads this.