Bishops and benefits

Bishops mixing in politics seem to upset the Daily Mail and assorted secularists in equal measure, albeit for very different reasons. And for that reason alone they deserve a big cheer.

I’ve been pondering my own reaction to yesterday’s letter from 43 bishops to the Telegraph (an interesting choice of destination) on the proposal to cap benefit increases.

I think the archbishop’s measured defence of his colleagues and his own views gets it about right in saying that this is a question about one little bit of a programme which needs some rethinking, not an attack on the whole programme, far less an attack on Iain Duncan Smith’s moral seriousness.

I also thought our own suffragan in these parts, the Bishop of Dudley, did a pretty good job of putting forward the case on the news programmes yesterday, and I’m generally persuaded this cap is not the best way forward.

However, I am a little concerned that fighting this particular battle may make it rather harder to fight for changes to what I think is a more important issue coming up. That issue is the payment of universal credit.

While there’s a lot to be said for the overall proposal, I worry about two specific parts of the plan as stated by the DWP:

• claimants will receive just one monthly payment, paid into a bank account in the same way as a monthly salary
• support with housing costs will go direct to the claimant as part of their monthly payment.

However much the Mail and its friends on the Tory right might exaggerate the problem of feckless scroungers, not everyone in receipt of benefit is going to direct their childcare to their children or their housing costs to their landlord. For some families, paying the whole benefit monthly to the claimant is going to feed drinking, drug and smoking habits with money intended for food, clothing and shelter.

At the very least weekly payment (even if it costs more) will be better, and paying rent to the housing association or landlord almost essential if people are not going to be put into significant debt or made homeless quite unnecessarily. 

(I note there’s a problem with housing benefit probably creating higher rents all round. I think part of the answer must lie in rent control. To those who think the latter distorts the market, I would say housing benefit has already done that and rent control is about correcting the market.)

To put it generously, some people need much more help to get to a point when they can budget.

Putting all the benefit money monthly into some people’s hands will, in my view, do more to hurt children than a below inflation cap on increases. And part of me is worried that by focussing on the cap, attention is being drawn away from a more serious problem we’re in danger of creating for ourselves.

But I’m no expert (and certainly less of one than our often very well informed bishops), just a slightly worried and ill-informed observer. 

Paid school governors: Ofsted’s worst idea yet?

I have no confidence in Sir Michael Wilshaw, Ofsted’s chief inspector. It is reported today that he wants to see paid school governors providing professional leadership to schools.

It seems to me that this is almost entirely to misunderstand the reason some schools are “underperforming”, and the way in which governing bodies are ideally about community ownership of the local school. It is also almost entirely at odds with David Cameron’s one headline (if vague and inchoate) idea of a “Big Society”. Paying professional governors would be a bigger state, and a smaller society.

There should already be a professional leadership team in schools: the senior management team led by the headteacher. In most schools it’s very good. Turning local volunteers into a second tier of management not only disrespects and devalues the expertise of the professional teachers, but it makes it harder and harder to find governors, risks setting up two competing leaderships, and damages the role of the governor as lay adviser, critical friend and community link.

At the same time it ignores the real problem which is that schools, particularly but by no means exclusively in deprived areas, are expected to take on the burdens of failed parenting, alongside family and community breakdown. Busing in professional governors will not only fail to address that problem, but is likely to worsen it by further distancing the school from the community.

The most recent indicator of that is the number of children who now start school still not having being toilet-trained, so that teaching assistants and and teachers alike are having to deal with children soiling themselves as a matter of routine rather than exception. How does Sir Michael expect paid governors to address the impact problems like that have on schooling?

A school cannot by itself address, far less mend, the ills of a breaking society. What needs addressing is the burden placed on schools already to deal with poor parenting, family breakdown, social alienation and the creation of a state funded underclass.

That is not to be complacent about academic standards in maths, science and English (amongst others) but it is to say the problem is not primarily one of school governance and leadership, but social collapse combined with an unrealistic understanding of what schools face and a hopelessly idealistic expectation of what education in school can achieve without supportive character formation in the home and wider community.

I see no way in which professional and paid governors would do anything to address that except to take more funding out of the provision of front-line services already stretched past their breaking point. Expecting to address major social problems by paying a few more people to digest ever more dead trees filled with the buzzwords du jour of an excessive and over-regulatory bureaucratic quango is to live in a fool’s paradise.

In short, we have a chief inspector of schools who doesn’t understand what today’s schools are like. He should go out there and get an education.

A U-turn a month

There’s an interesting bit of data collection by the Guardian which shows the present government doing roughly one U-turn every month, compared to less than one a year for Tony Blair.

It prompts the question: is this government really good at listening to reactions, or is it just incredibly ill-thought through in its initiatives?

When speeches were more than sound-bites

Today is Cicero’s birthday. My picture of Marcus Tullius Cicero is nowadays hopelessly coloured by the cynical (and I think quite accurate) portrait of the man in Steven Saylor’s excellent Roma sub rosa series, featuring Gordianus the Finder. 

Cicero was, I think, as dedicated to climbing the greasy pole as any modern politician, and at least as good at putting his own spin on his own achievements as any modern media manager. (One the great attractions of the Gordianus series is the way Saylor applies a hermeneutic of suspicion to Cicero’s speeches, which is nowhere showcased better than in his deconstruction of the Cataline conspiracy.)

However, where Cicero puts all modern politicians to shame is in his rhetoric. Yes, he uses it to manipulate the audience and massage the facts into compliance, but he does so magnificently, marrying form to function, pleasingness to persuasion and  elegance to evidence in making in case.

He was certainly capable of the sound-bite – “O tempera, O mores” probably wars with “Cui bono?” for the most quoted – but he located these in reasoned, impassioned and fluent discourses that appealed at their best to the heart through the mind and the mind through the heart.

Is it too much to suggest that our modern political discourse lacks something in comparison?

What would disestablishment mean?

One question quite frequently raised in the aftermath of General Synod’s inability to agree legislation making women eligible for episcopal orders is that of disestablishment. Some are proposing removing bishops from the Lords; others are protesting about the naked Erastianism of Parliament telling Synod to get with the programme.

I’m pondering what in practice disestablishment might mean. I don’t see the Welsh situation as a precedent, since it was cocooned in the established churches of the greater part of the state (England and Scotland).

In a nutshell, the vision behind establishment was that the Crown in Parliament governed her subjects under God, entrusting the charge for their spiritual peace to the bishops and clergy and their temporal peace to the magistrates.

Historically that was probably a late mediaeval polity which was being applied to an early modern nation. (Theologically the kindest thing that can be said about it is that it was a seriously over-realized eschatology.) It is unsurprising that it failed early on, yet was sufficiently substantial for everyone to act as if had succeeded. Over the succeeding centuries Parliament removed one legislative slice of the salami after another, until today it is at least as much illusion as substance.

However, the tendrils of establishment are wrapped around a great many things, and to talk of disestablishment is to ask which ones definitely need to be cut away. Essentially it would seem the answer must include those which presume the Church of England has a unique place in the constitution, and conversely those which presume being an English citizen is to be a member of the Church of England.

I think that list would have to include removing the following:

1. the place of the Crown as Supreme Governor and Defender of the Faith, and instead giving the monarch and consort the right to make any faith commitment or none.
2. the ex-offcio presence of bishops in the House of Lords, the provision of an Anglican Speaker’s chaplain, and Anglican prayers before each parliamentary session
3. any presumption of Anglican (perhaps Christian) chaplaincy in the Armed Forces, prisons and  hospitals, together with compulsory church parade etc.
4. any presumption of Anglican (perhaps Christian) leadership on national occasions such as Remembrance Sunday and royal events.
5. the right of any person to be baptized or married in their parish church solely by virtue of residence in the locality rather than membership of the church
6. the right of any person to be buried in the churchyard of the parish where they die

Are there other things which are essential to undoing the compact of establishment which treats an English citizen as a member  of the English Church, or are some of these not as essential as I think they are?

Update

As Cranmer reminded me on Twitter, I have somehow ignored the elephant in the room. Surely any move to disestablishment would also need a negotiated property settlement: to whom do the church buildings belong?

An apology for the education secretary

This is a public service announcement. Mr Gove was widely quoted today describing school governors’ meetings as:

Discussions that ramble on about peripheral issues, influenced by fads and anecdote, not facts and analysis.

Mr Gove was developing his education speech while also writing the section of his memoirs dealing with Cabinet meetings and accidentally misused the copy and paste function.

We would like to apologise for the education secretary.

Gay marriage and moral inconsistency

There’s been a huge amount today on the blogs, on Twitter and around the interwebs generally about the Church of England’s official submission to the Government’s consultation (their word, not mine) on same-sex marriage. Apparently it could be the end of the world as we know it.

It needs to be said that in this semi-rural town in Worcestershire, I haven’t heard a single flesh and blood person mention it all day. I suspect that, whatever vociferous proponents and opponents think, this is not a front-page issue for most people.

There are quite a few people who seem terribly indignant that they, as members of the Church of England, were not consulted on this response. However, while I’m sure there could have been greater transparency about the process of responding, the document  explicitly roots itself in the most recent agreed statement the Church of England has made on marriage, and one which virtually all clergy will have repeated several times already this year. It’s called the marriage service. It might need challenging, but it’s a democratically approved corporate view.

Personally, I think the question is much more open than the official response does. As I argued a while back, the key question is whether a committed loving relationship between people of the same sex is sufficiently like one between those of the opposite sex to be included within the institution of marriage. There are queer arguments against it as well as Christian ones. (As there are gay and Christian arguments for it.) Some, particularly those who are aware of the ways in which marriage has continued to change and grow as a social institution, will agree that it can and should now include gay couples. Others, particularly those who resist relativism and prioritise some kind of traditional ontology over cultural construction, will feel (at the very least) that it is a sufficiently different relationship to need a different kind of social institution.

Currently in the UK we have different institutions implying different types of equal relationship which give the same legal rights to those who have entered them. The existence of civil partnerships makes it harder, I think, to justify the arguments for gay marriage on the basis of equal rights. It is an argument, rather, about what sort of institution marriage is.

The fact is that procreative relationships regularly – perhaps normally – take place with little or no relationship to the institution of marriage. It is equally true that a very large proportion of marriages, including a great many conducted according to the rites and ceremonies of the Church of England, are “lifelong” as a romantic dream rather than a worked out and hard-headed commitment. The Church of England’s understanding of marriage has a fairly tenuous connection with a lot of actual marriages, or the ways people have and raise children.

A significant part of the pressure for including gay relationships within the institution of marriage is because in practice the institution has already been redefined as a romantic commitment between two individuals for as long it lasts, and wouldn’t it be nice if it was happily ever after. Indeed, the Church of England’s own Wedding Project has openly embraced a consumerist model of marriage. No longer are people signing up to a hallowed common institution in which each marriage is one and the same, but encouraged to request a personalised experience tailored to the uniqueness of their relationship.

Not all that many years ago, Michael Nazir-Ali called down a storm of opprobrium on his head (what’s new?) for calling couples who wanted marriage without children “self-indulgent”. But actually, he was at least being consistent, and, indeed uncomfortably but truly traditional, in his understanding of marriage.

It is genuinely a problem that there are a great many people who want to uphold “traditional marriage” (whatever exactly that is) when discussing same-sex marriage, but who don’t wish to “moralise” about the relationships of straight people. It is the inconsistency which gives rise to a lingering suspicion of “homophobia”.

Personally, I think there’s a serious conversation to be had. I just don’t see anyone – individual or organisation – really interested in doing anything other than getting their own way.

Queering marriage?

I’ve been pondering whether to write anything after last night’s Newsnight “debate” on marriage for same-sex couples infringed the Trades Description Act and placed a greater burden on the word “debate” than it could reasonable be expected to bear. You can watch it on iPlayer for a while if you have masochistic tendencies. Here are some of the things I’ve been thinking.

(While I think there is also a theological argument to be had – and you will find theologians arguing both sides of the debate too – I have deliberately here prescinded from those to focus on what I feel are more general issues.)

It is demonstrably the case that, historically, marriage has been quite a variable institution, not least in the number and age of wives permitted to one husband, the ease and motivations for divorce, and the concomitant understandings of marriage. There have been significant economic and community interests shaping it as a means of social alliance and peace, and a continuing regulation of procreation within those constraints for family inheritance and species survival.

Yet within that wide ranging diversity a continuing emphasis on the good of  the procreation of children and their proper upbringing (and therefore the survival of the community) is perhaps the most constant theme of what marriage was about. The household was where the next generation was conceived, and learnt to live in a community as well as being part of a unit of economic survival. Marriage, administered variously by church and state in Western society, was a single institution felt to have significant enough social ramifications beyond the relationship of two people to need regulating.

It is a pertinent question whether so many centuries of traditioned practice of a single institution of marriage recognised across society should be changed without a significant period of reflection and conversation on why it should be changed, rather than simply how to change it.

I think it further relevant that the government has seriously muddied its own equality argument by saying it will continue to provide civil partnerships for same-sex couples. It is in danger of creating new inequalities: straight couples will be able to choose between new civil marriage and new religious marriage, but not civil partnerships; gay couples can choose between civil partnerships and civil marriages, but not religious ones (even for religions that permit or encourage it).

At the heart of the debate (as I see it) is one question: is a committed romantic relationship between people of the same sex sufficiently like one between those of the opposite sex that it should be served by the same social institution. If the answer is “yes” then equal rights in the same institution is indeed the vital issue. If the answer is “no”, the question is not equality or equal rights in the same institution, but the provision of a equal but different institution with the same equal rights before the law.

That is a genuine question. There are those who will say the relationships are the same, taking romantic love as the sole or primary defining qualification for them. There are those who will say they are not, insisting on the place of procreation as fundamental. I have not yet been overwhelmed by a conviction of the rightness of either answer.

And, lest we forget, there are those who will continue to argue for a queer critique of all marriage (much of it shared with womanist approaches) as hopelessly tainted by patriarchy and heterosexist history, and celebrate a different kind of model for relationships. In this argument the queering of marriage is not only a positive virtue, but a testimony to same-sex relationships being different from marriage, and perhaps even better by being freed from the taint of historic patriarchy and property rights.

There is a sense (to adapt Marx on religion) in which the criticism of marriage is the premise of all social criticism. Does the new gay desire for marriage represent the death of queer criticism and the triumph of hetero-normativity? Will only a celibate Catholic clergy, sworn to preach the virtues of marriage, be the last bastion of a lived out critique queering domesticity and romantic love? That would be irony indeed.

There are, in short, new queer as well as old straight voices insisting that the two relationships are not the same kind of thing. Whether these relationships should be given equality in the same institution, or be given two equal but different institutions is a serious and genuine question. And that is the debate I think we should be having first, before we are “consulted” on how to do it.

Stephen Sizer, the CCJ, and the accusation of anti-semitism

When it comes to Israel and Palestine (even to using those names together), most people are either biased or confused, or in some measure both. Most sites which discuss the topic tend to be partisan on one side or another. Looking especially at the comments on such sites, it is easy to accuse them of either anti-semitism or Islamophobia (or simply anti-Arab sentiment).

One prominent Christian activist who regularly gets accused of anti-Semitism is Stephen Sizer, an evangelical priest in Guildford Diocese. Certainly he is outspokenly pro-Palestinian, and to say the least, he has a record of keeping very dubious company. Nonetheless many of the attacks on him come from Zionist sympathisers and sites whose commenters are rabidly anti-Palestinian. That makes it easier for Sizer’s supporters to dismiss them, whatever the strength or weakness of their case.

However yesterday, the moderate and mainstream Council of Christians and Jews issued an unusual press statement, following criticism in the Jewish Chronicle and elsewhere, which effectively called for Stephen Sizer to be disciplined for posting a Facebook link to an unquestionably anti-semitic site.

What makes it so unusual is that the Bishop of Manchester (the Chair of CCJ) implicitly criticises the inaction of his fellow Bishop of Guildford. Nigel McCulloch of Manchester calls Sizer’s behaviour conduct “unbecoming a clergyman”, and the CCJ’s press release finishes by saying they have referred the incident to Surrey police as a hate crime.

Until recently I would have said Sizer was not anti-Semitic, and it is important to point out that he repudiates the accusation. I further note that only last autumn, I heard the CEO of the Board of Deputies of British Jews saying that he didn’t think Sizer was anti-Semitic, although he certainly kept anti-Semitic company because of his pro-Palestinian campaigning. (He is obviously not a Sizer supporter!)

Sizer does have some theological questions to put to the Christian Zionism more common in his conservative evangelical circles that ought to be considered – as Christian theology. It is an inescapable part of recognising that the New Testament and the Mishnah largely grew out of a contest between two visions for the future of Judaism, and that both Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity were the squabbling children of Second Temple Judaism. I don’t agree with many of the ways Sizer answers those questions, but they need to be faced.

In my view, however, his voice has moved so far to an uncritical support for Palestinians that it has also become an unthinking criticism of Israel. An awful lot of criticism of (as well as an awful lot of support for) Israel is uncritical. However, Sizer has seemed to align himself more and more not only with the unthinking, but with the racist and prejudiced rhetoric of some of Israel’s most vociferous enemies.

He may not have used it himself, but he links to it without criticism. He may not say it himself, but he seems willing to appear on platforms where other speakers indulge in it, and he does not seem to distance himself from it or them. I think that passes the point where it looks like guilt by association and looks more like guilt by complicity.

There may or may not be a case against him. If Surrey police think there is, his bishop can act. If they don’t then, given the labyrinthine law of the Church of England, and its protections for political and theological dissent, his bishop probably has no action available to him. It is not irrelevant also that Sizer’s church is at best semi-detached from the Church of England and wealthy enough to show the bishop two fingers.

Nonetheless, this will remain a story worth watching, for a very particular exploration of when anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian support is held to tip over into anti-Semitism. The CCJ thinks Sizer has crossed that line. I fear they may be right.

(Note: in the interests of transparency I should state that I am a member of CCJ, and that I also once (some 25 years ago) occasionally attended the church where Sizer was curate. His theology was too conservatively evangelical for me.)