<![CDATA[PROFESSOR IAN LINDEN - Latest Blogs]]>Tue, 10 Mar 2026 13:10:47 +0000Weebly<![CDATA[the church & the wars in the Middle East]]>Mon, 09 Mar 2026 18:47:48 GMThttps://www.ianlinden.com/latest-blogs/the-church-the-wars-in-the-middle-east“I don’t need international law”, Trump told the world in January;  his “own morality”, his “own mind” was all that he needed to formulate foreign policy. Trump’s mind and morality do not inspire confidence.  

No reasonable person in a democracy would willingly agree to tolerate or endorse lawlessness within their own nation-state, so why is lawlessness between States once more acceptable?  If law and moral principles underpin a successful economy and a harmonious society, why should we consider them superfluous to the conduct of international relations?  Yet, political leaders are balancing speaking clearly in defense of international law with avoiding alienating Trump.

If there were no ‘structures of sin’, covetousness and the quest for power and dominance, if humanity overcame its failings and all became virtuous citizens, we might do without laws, national and international.   But for the time being, our attempts at formulating and enforcing just laws is as good as it gets. 

Thomas Aquinas roots ‘natural law’ in human nature tapping into God’s eternal law.   Catholic social teaching with its virtues, values and principles of compassion, solidarity and justice is an important expression of it.  And the Eucharist mediates a specifically Christian form of globalisation, relativizing national and ethnic identities, giving sense and transcendental meaning to a common humanity seeking the common good.

The Vatican, internationalist in outlook, now led by an American born citizen of Peru continues to promote its conception of international peace and justice which it sees as inseparable. This means rules about the conduct of war must be respected and the promotion of existing conventions about the rights of peoples within nations as well as those crossing borders in flight from persecution and danger.  But Papal teaching is essentially that war should be outlawed especially as it is the nature of modern weaponry to cross the boundary between combatant and non combatant and to maximise damage. On the very first day of the attack on Iran, bombing killed over a hundred 7-12 girls in a school.

An extraordinary social video came out of the White House last Thursday: alongside clips from Top Gun, Spiderman, and perhaps a nod at Trump’s ancestry, Braveheart actual ‘strike footage’ from Iran illustrating the promised “death and destruction all day long”.  Entitled ‘Justice the American Way’, its moral depravity is striking.   Just as Archbishop Blaise Cupich of Chicago wrote in response, it depicted a “real war with real death and real suffering being treated like it’s a video game”: an ‘American Way’ which ignores the very existence of international law and the values it attempts to preserve.   Pete Hegseth, self-styled US secretary of State for War, a man responsible for command of the largest military force in the world both approved it and appeared in it.  

Archbishop Cupich is a refreshingly clear voice of condemnation and focus on the victims of war.  But the response of many Church leaders to wars and conflict is to call for reconciliation.  It is sometimes as if the Church is hovering between and above the oppressor and the oppressed, the torturer and the tortured.  This was the gist of the theological critique directed in 1985 at the height of the struggle against apartheid in part at what they called ‘Church theology’ distinguishing it from the ‘State theology’ and their own prophetic voice. The Kairos document, signed by some 180 Christian leaders, began life in the Institute of Contextual Theology led by the late Albert Nolan, a Dominican friar and Frank Chikane from the Apostolic Faith Church, soon to become the General-Secretary of the South African Council of Churches.  There is a contemporary Palestinian Kairos document too. 

The point is that conflict between two individuals in a family is not like that between ethnic groups, different religious groups and States.  Their reconciliation demands repentance expressed in justice restored, some sense of historical antecedents, culpabilities acknowledged and remedied before any genuine resolution.  There is not going to be any reconciliation between the barbaric regime in Iran and today’s American government.  At best there will be some kind of transactional agreement after thousands are killed from the air.

After the Second World War, the Church supported the creation of the UN and its international institutions.  These were  intended to protect and develop the principles of international law pioneered by the League of Nations Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ).  The prime purpose of these was to reduce and eliminate causes and justifications for States going to war again.
Catholic statesmen made a significant  input into the creation, in 1952, of the European Iron and Steel Community which by 1993  had evolved into the European Union as defined by the Maastricht Treaty.  The EU and its predecessors have produced, embodied in its institutions,  a unique body of supra-national law, its consequential judicial proceedings respected within the courts of its member States. 

But law to be effective must be enforceable.  The UN International Court of Justice (ICJ), set up in 1945, suffered, and suffers, from the limitations of needing  States’ consent to be a party to a dispute in the court, and the lack of enforcement procedures after adjudication.   South Africa’s filing a complaint, called a ‘Memorial’, garnering support from other countries for their application under the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, against Israel’s conduct in Gaza was an almost unique event.  In this sense the court’s power is to provide more of a moral than a punitive constraint. 

Trials, convictions and punishment of individuals for the most serious offences, such as war crimes and genocide, have taken place in the International Criminal Tribunal  for the Former Yugoslavia, 1993-2017, and the International Tribunal for Rwanda after the genocide (1994-2015).  The International Criminal Court  (ICC) set up in 2002 has issued several warrants for arrests.  But it has been mainly African offenders who have seen the inside of a prison cell.  The USA, Russia and China play no part in this judicial body.  Trump’s administration positively tries to undermine it with sanctions.

In an important 1999 speech in Chicago, with the somewhat Catholic title “Doctrine of the International Community”, Tony Blair reflected on the beginning of three months of bombing  of Serbia in response to Milosevic’s forces’ mass murders of Muslim men and boys in Kosovo.  Tony Blair set five conditions for getting involved in other people’s conflicts.  Does the case for intervention hold water? Have all diplomatic options been exhausted? Can military operations be sensibly and prudently undertaken?  Are we prepared for the long haul?  Are our national interests involved?   The plight of the Kosovan people was in his mind.  His own failure to apply these criteria to the Iraq invasion was a tragedy.  Keeping close to America, sharing in its military interventions had overridden all other considerations.  He should re-read his speech and apply his conditions to Iran.  Sir Keir Starmer thankfully seems to have done so.   And being  verbally attacked by Trump is a kind of assurance you are doing the right thing.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

]]><![CDATA[WHAT NEXT FOR REFORM?]]>Thu, 05 Mar 2026 16:34:35 GMThttps://www.ianlinden.com/latest-blogs/what-next-for-reformAt last week’s Gorton and Denton by-election results, the neatly coiffed man wearing an expensive suit, large pale blue tie and air of superiority was the Reform candidate, Matthew Goodwin, not the Conservative, Charlotte Cadden. Perhaps a sartorial come hither to Tory MPs watching her lose her deposit? 

Unlike the winner, the Green candidate Hannah Spencer who took 12% more of the vote than Reform, and who entered politics to oppose greyhound racing, Goodwin’s political debut might have had  more equine undertones: Macbeth’s “vaulting ambition that o’erleaps itself and falls on the other [side]”.  Ms. Spencer stood in the Manchester mayoral election, was a member of the local Council, a plumber specializing in the installation of the new heat pumps – illustrating the essential political  qualities of fortitude and managing the impossible, – and, unlike Goodwin, was genuinely working class.

But wait a moment, didn’t a Matthew Goodwin author a number of books on the “new elite” in Britain, identity politics and suchlike.  Yes, one and the same.  So why wasn’t Professor Goodwin, a recent recruit to Reform endorsement, wearing a jacket with leather patches and corduroy trousers, or arranging a little tousling of the hair?  Why the unexpected dress code?

I went away and read his Penguin 2023 book Virtues, Voice and Values and understood why.  He’d moved from explaining to joining what he called the national populist ‘counter-revolution’.  And, at a fair guess, within a year or two would be leading it.  Or what was left of it.  We TV viewers weren’t supposed to ponder his career trajectory. 

The book is not only about a clash of values in Britain, our divided society, but the assumption that voice and virtues are the prerogative of the ‘new elite’.  On the altar of the ‘new politics’  Good win describes the ‘liberal progressive’  triptych:  cultural liberalism, human rights - for black, ethnic, and sexual minorities - and ‘hyper-globalisation’.  In recent years, these have created a significant reaction, to EU membership, immigration, regional unemployment, with a perception of an insulting condescension by a new elite made up of academics,  journalists, creative artists, Oxbridge graduates, and the rich towards those without university education, particularly White blue collar workers.  Add cultural discomfort with growing numbers of women in elite positions and resultant changes in family life - allegedly for the worse.  The result, Goodwin argues,  is a nation increasingly  divided into ‘traditionalists’ and ‘radical progressives’, the new elite and the ‘left-behinds’, the ‘anywheres’ and ‘nowheres’,  cosmopolitan London plus the big cities against the rest of the country.

The book provides an historical perspective with comparative statistics on changing opinions and control of key institutions and power structures, but all shoe-horned in a variety of binary  categories, subsets of the one theme: how a dominant, arrogant new elite rejected, neglected, the country’s - 20-25% - minority whose values, voice and virtue it discounted.  Like most binary stories it sounds compelling until you step back and think about it.

The book, apparently a Sunday Times bestseller, has several flaws.  There is much emphasis on the big picture in which politics has been transformed from primarily seeking economic goals to cultural ones.  That is not an either-or though a quick reader might come away thinking it was.  Nor is there any significant elaboration of the core content of one side of the divide, the supposedly despised British, traditionalist values. 

The word ‘England’ appears only in the last chapter as if it can be used interchangeably with Britain.  So it is as if the cultures of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland are all the same.  No mention that the population of the UK has, of course,  been created by waves of migrants from Vikings and Normans to Huguenots and Flemish weavers, to Irish dock workers, Jewish, Polish immigrants to Commonwealth and Muslim arrivals, Vietnamese, Hong Kong, and Ukrainian refugees, each bringing something new to different parts of the country and to “British culture”.   ‘Diversity’ isn’t some new elite obsession, it’s in our genes. 

Then there is the problem of agency and the implicit causality found throughout the book. The new elite doesn’t cause the problem, the divisions, nor invent globalization, nor economic transformation from the industrial to financial services and the information economy, it has limited agency and struggles to gain some control.  It is an effect.

Employment has always relied on particular sets of skills with formal education required to perform complex tasks becoming increasingly important.  And the epochal changes from agricultural to industrial to information economies have changed society, the nature of power and how people live.  So most probably will AI. 

Goodwin makes it difficult to understand the demands made on Government by these changes.  In a number of instances, the ‘new elite’ becomes a ‘class’; he conflates them with university graduates (rising to some 50% getting a university education today from 5% in the 1960s).  This makes even less sense now that even post-doctoral qualifications do not always result in elite jobs.

The casting of - implicit - blame over the new elite in Goodwin’s book can only be justified by its failure to ‘level up’ and achieve some degree of redistribution. But the odds against this are impressive: Brexit and COVID damage to the economy, a right-wing Press, and mighty, mobile transnational companies, and investors,  more interested in profits than social stability and social justice. 

Attempts at redistribution have been made.  Tony Blair made a dent in child poverty.  Gordon Brown did his poverty reduction by stealth on the assumption that if the public noticed it, being anti-tax, they would vote Tory.  Just coping  with socio-economic change has been overwhelming.  The pace of economic transformation has been ferociously fast in the 21st. century.  No Party radical and progressive enough to bring about the necessary change gets elected or re-elected.

There is a glaring omission in the book:  Churches and secular NGOs which cut across Goodwin’s social binary divisions.  Only a fleeting mention occurs of their contribution to poverty alleviation, sustaining and promoting values, requiring  virtues of their members.    Remove the charitable work of the Anglican and Catholic Churches most notably  - but that of others too including Muslims and Jews – and the gap between the poor minority and the rest would be much greater, the voice of the poorest heard or heeded even less.  Nothing either on the impact of their faith-based global consciousness.   But are these the missing ingredients of Goodwin’s ‘British values’? 

The irony of Goodwin’s career move is how many ‘new elite’ boxes he ticks himself.  He stars in State of the Nation on GB News, was a former associate fellow of Chatham House, a former member of the Government’s anti-Muslim Hatred working group, and his Father was CEO of the Greater Manchester Strategic Health Authority.  He did not convince the Gorton and Denton electorate.  A populist he might be but not popular enough.

Nigel Farage, though, has some proven appeal.  He too ticks several elite boxes though he never went to university; he was Private school educated and a former city trader, and worth a few million.  He better keep waving his pint of bitter around and keep up his man-of-the-people performance.  He’s going to have competition for the Reform leadership.
 
 
]]><![CDATA[EPSTEIN, ROYALTY & THE BAD-BROTHER SYNDROME]]>Thu, 19 Feb 2026 18:45:56 GMThttps://www.ianlinden.com/latest-blogs/epstein-royalty-the-bad-brother-syndrome
We hear “nobody is above the Law” more in hope than expectation.   So it is heartening to hear that the Thames Valley Police arrested Mr. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor,  younger brother of King Charles, former inglorious Duke of York, and former Special Representative for Trade and International Investment, 2001-2011, on suspicion of misconduct in public office.  The mighty are rarely pulled down from their thrones as the Magnificat recommends.  Despite almost a rule of omerta, efforts to cover up some of the worst incidences of royal misbehaviour in the past  - misplaced patriotic instinct? - have rarely succeeded.  Today’s is a very British news bomb-shell. 

Wikipedia already knew of several surprising incidents of commercial wheeler-dealing by “Air-miles Andy”.  But Chris Bryant noted in the House of Commons in February 2011 how “it was very difficult to see in whose interests he was acting“. For some of the time, his own is the suspicion.  Prince Andrew was also something of a royal arms trader on our behalf,  and was close, Bryant believed, to Libya’s Gaddafi and allegedly to a notorious Libyan arms dealer.  

So could all this have been averted?   Could the Security Services via Tony Blair have warned the Queen that making Andrew a Special Representative, let loose globally, was a bad risk?  Perhaps they did and he did.  Then again, Peter Mandleson was put in the House of Lords so he could serve as Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills in October 2008 in Gordon Brown’s Government, just a few months before Epstein’s conviction for procuring a child for prostitution.   Was it considered improper then to intervene or, indeed, build up files on Ministers and members of the royal family involved with Epstein’s rich and powerful network?    We’ll never know. 

Between 2017-2025 the British Security Services stopped 43 late-stage terrorist attacks.  They deserve recognition for getting it right first time, and most times, a rare ability in today’s State.  Unsurprisingly, what else they were doing is not in the public domain.  But it would be interesting to know how they handled the rumbling Epstein scandals and the goings-on of the Duke of York.

In mitigation, despite the Good Friday agreement in 1998, our Security Services didn’t suddenly have time on their hands.   Osama Bin Laden had bobbed up in 1996 with some worrying suggestions about what jihadists needed to do to the “corrupt West”, and not just its ‘lackeys’ in the Middle East, and even before 9/11, went on to bomb American embassies in Africa with huge casualties.  But it was only in late October last year that, amidst the fall-out from the Epstein affair and the Palace’s distancing itself from the Duke of York, that The Telegraph reported that the Intelligence agencies had come out and declared Andrew a potential national security risk. 

The royals have suffered twice in living memory from the bad-brother syndrome.  In his 10 December 1936 letter of abdication Edward, the eldest son of King George V, let his “irrevocable determination to renounce the throne” be known.   Then using the title, Duke of Windsor, Edward with the twice divorced American, Wallis Simpson, for whom he had sacrificed kingship, travelled to France and married. 

After his brother Albert, Bertie,  became King George VI, Edward visited Germany in 1937 on the steamship Bremen at the invitation of the Nazi State Labour Front.  Preparations for war in Europe were well underway.  Buchenwald concentration camp has opened a few months earlier.  Some British tourists were still going to Germany but this was a semi-State visit and different.  The Duke of Windsor dutifully visited factories, inspected a SS unit, had tea with Goering, dinner with Goebbels, and  made a friendly, private visit to Hitler in Berghof, outside Berchtesgarden,  Bavaria - a thank you letter survives plus photographs. 

After Hitler’s invasion of France, the couple were given Nazi safe-passage south to Spain then,  in July 1940,  went on to stay with a rich banker in Lisbon.  The Marburg files reveal Operation Willi, discovered by US troops in 1945 in abandoned vehicles near Marburg Castle, near Hesse.  Correspondence between the German ambassador to Portugal and Berlin, shows a plot to co-opt, if necessary kidnap, Edward which ultimately failed.  Under Churchill’s pressure, Edward accepted a post as Governor of the Bahamas and sailed from Lisbon.

What to make of all this?   In 1936 a Joint Intelligence Committee was added to work with the tiny and somewhat ineffectual predecessor to MI5.  Baldwin, Churchill plus the Security Service, such as it was, handled the critical period 1937-1940 with  skill.  Edward fancied himself as mediator between Britain and Germany and was correspondingly vulnerable to his pro-Nazi wife, the German Foreign Minister, Joseph Ribbentrop, who was described as her ‘close friend’, and his own anger at his brother becoming king.  Like Andrew he became a national security risk.

Both Edward and Andrew seem to have had no sense of what might be meant by unacceptable company and association for a representative of the State.  Both had to leave their desirable residences in Windsor Great Park.  Both, lost their royal title and, perhaps unfairly, gained a reputation for treachery.  Both were provided with a cover-up costing money and time – to little avail – to retain the royal family’s image: a £12 million settlement for Virginia Giuffre while Edward, cheap at the price, received an annual allowance of £1.4 million, in today’s equivalent, and a Governor’s hat in a warm climate (he also realised some £250 million by selling two royal residences to King George VI).

The details of what exactly needed covering up is difficult to pin down.  The Marburg papers have him talking privately to a Spanish diplomat in 1940 contemplating the coming Blitz pushing Britain into peace negotiations.  But German counter-intelligence was playing games, and possibly putting their spin on his words reported back to Berlin.

Fast forward and, other than Epstein, nobody seems to know who knew what.  There are reports of pin-hole cameras for filming visitors’ activities found in rooms on Epstein’s  island.  Kompromat is to recruiting intelligence assets as an Arsenal match is to a ticket holder.  Were Epstein’s obsessively comprehensive archives for self-protection or for remunerative transactions with intelligence agencies, and if so, which ones?  We may never know.

Given the magnitude of the Epstein scandal, the other big question is could victims, and others, have been spared the consequences of the moral failings of its rich and powerful elite by swift and decisive action by the Security services?  What did the FBI/CIA have on Epstein and did they share it with the UK? And is the clandestine surveillance of those in authority  a proper and necessary  role for our Intelligence agencies?   Political policing of Left-wing activists became routine in the Cold War.   NGOs have not been spared their attention and, sometimes, infiltration in the past.   In democracies, effective parliamentary systems for the maintenance of standards in public life with appropriate monitoring, and less gullible political leaders, should obviate such surveillance. But do they?  

We now have one of the best Intelligence services in the world.  Lets hope our parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee are finding ways forward with them on such critical issues. 
 ​
]]><![CDATA[SOLIDARITY IN A TIME OF GLOBAL CRISIS]]>Sun, 15 Feb 2026 17:19:00 GMThttps://www.ianlinden.com/latest-blogs/solidarity-in-a-time-of-global-crisis“Every world crisis is, as the word denotes, a judgement and a decision out of which something new must come.  It is therefore an opportunity to hear the Word of God and for the Spirit to manifest its creative power to humanity. This is the hope that the prophets always maintain in their vision of judgement against the nations, and which the Church constantly repeats in the liturgy”. 
 
Pope Leo on today’s crisis?  No, Christopher Dawson, writing in 1941.  He was a Catholic historian and Vice-President of Cardinal Hinsley’s Sword of the Spirit which dropped pamphlets over Nazi Germany calling Catholics to resist and, in the 1960s, produced the Catholic Institute for International Relations (CIIR), later known as Progressio.  Led by Mildred Nevile, CIIR developed a distinctive approach to solidarity with, what was then known as, the ‘Third World’.

With his hope that ‘something new must come’, Dawson might be speaking directly to our current global crisis.  But what might it be?  And where might the Church be hoping the Spirit would be manifesting its creative power today?  The suffering and prophetic voices of women in and beyond the Church, and in the solidarity with them, suggests itself. 

Mothers are last in the family to eat in Gaza and in countless areas of conflict around the world.  Rape in wars continues unabated.  The sexual trafficking of women, treated as a passing story in our own cities, has now been brought into global prominence by a criminal elite, Epstein and his powerful, rich friends.  Then there is the suffering of women oppressed by – what is imagined as - 7th century Muslim religious duties, imposed as the law of the land, cruelly implemented, even by the denial of education making gender equality in Afghanistan a distant hoping against hope.  A movement of solidarity with the plight of vulnerable women has been increasingly coming to the fore. 

It was Pope John Paul II in his 1987 encyclical Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (On Social Concerns) who gave a straightforward definition of solidarity as a virtue: “a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good”.  It stuck because it bypassed binary arguments about the individual versus the communitarian, liberalism versus post-liberalism.  In that sense, and in that sense only, the Christian understanding of solidarity isn’t a political principle.  It is by definition a personal commitment to a type of relationship, to friendship and just social structures.  John Paul II also described what solidarity wasn’t: “not a feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of so many others”.   Solidarity was set in opposition to “structures of sin”, alongside individual moral failings, (he was celebrating the 20th anniversary of Pope Paul VI’s  Populorum Progressio which condemned unfair trade practices imposed on developing countries by powerful states).  If “economic structures of sin” sounds a little academic, think of the cruelty and violence embodied in the laws and social  structures of former Apartheid South Africa and in Israel – and the resistance to them, past and present.

I remember taking Rev. Frank Chikane, soon to be General-Secretary of the South African Council of Churches, 1987-1994,  but on the run, a target for the apartheid regime, to see the Archbishop of Canterbury and Cardinal Basil Hume.  There was an immediate rapport between Robert Runcie and Frank.  Runcie had been a tank commander in the Second World War and knew what it was like having someone intent on killing you.  Cardinal Hume was kind and welcoming but the ‘vibes’ were more formal.  On another occasion, I asked Cardinal Hume to make an appeal for the ANC brother of a young South African women who had come to London to try to save him.  He was about to be executed in Pretoria.  The Cardinal was sympathetic but clearly wasn’t going to do so.  And there was not much chance it would have had any result.  I later heard he had driven to Heathrow the next morning to comfort her before she returned to Johannesburg.   People are different.   They show solidarity in different ways.

Pope Francis, too different for conservative tastes, added his distinctive coda to John Paul II’s words in 2013 speaking off-the-cuff in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Bonaria, patron saint of sailors, in Cagliari, Sardinia.  Francis called for compassion for “real people who are suffering and starving” - rather than abstract statistics on poverty.  He lived up to his words.

Why choose Cagliari on a coastal hill in a town on an island in the Mediterranean?   The clue is in ‘Bonaria’, Good air/winds that had blown sailors in the 16th century, with their veneration of Our Lady with them to Santa María del Buen Ayre, Buenos Aires, Good Air, Francis’ former Argentinian Archdiocese for 15 years. The Cagliari meeting was at his request with local prisoners and the unemployed.  His solidarity with them came at a personal level: from recalling stories of family poverty in Italy and how his unemployed father had suffered during the Great Depression in Argentina.  Unemployment, denying a vital space for human creativity, was a “wound to human dignity”.   Francis came back often to the centrality of solidarity in a life of faith responding to injustice.

Injustice has moved not only NGOs but has also evoked, directly and indirectly, Government concern and concerted action.    Both Conservative and Labour governments have promoted protections for women in war, culminating in rape being made a distinct, recognized war crime.  The Metropolitan Police set up a new Violence Reduction Unit in 2022.  Domestic violence against women is a key part of it.  Women played the leading role in making both the above happen.

Governments obviously have the power, money and resources to achieve more than any number of NGOs, though very often in democracies it is pressure from  NGOs, such as the Catholic Institute for International Relations using  effective advocacy alongside public opinion, that lies behind or promotes new government initiatives.  Building up public opinion against the headwinds of a Right-Wing press is no easy task.   In addition, any response to today’s prophetic voices has to weigh up what is doable in different contexts, in the short term and what may require a life-time.  It is one thing to seek justice in a land led by a narcissistic sociopath showing symptoms of cognitive decline, another to deal with a Communist Party led by a ruthless dictator, and another for those living in democratic States with fragmenting political Parties.  Each situation will demand analysis and dictate a different expression of solidarity.  Seeing round corners is not just a political skill.

The UK has the chair of the UN Security Council for this month of February.  OXFAM and other NGOs will be pressing for progress in gender equality and in countering violence against women. In all societies, secular or religious, in back-streets and in global institutions, the creative power of the Spirit is at work, bringing the prophetic voices of women to bear.   Christians are called to be its head, heart and hands.
 

]]><![CDATA[EPSTEIN & MANDELSON: DEFEAT OF AN ELITE?]]>Mon, 09 Feb 2026 18:11:12 GMThttps://www.ianlinden.com/latest-blogs/epstein-mandelson-defeat-of-an-eliteThe Labour Party has entered a political Bermuda Triangle.  The relationship between Peter Mandleson now disgraced former UK Ambassador to Washington, and convicted US financier and criminal, the late Jeffrey Epstein, may have more damaging outcomes for the UK’s ruling Party than the Profumo affair did for the Conservatives in 1961-1963.  The then Secretary of State for War was exposed as having a sexual relationship with a 19-year old model who was also sleeping with a Soviet naval attaché.  The scandal acted as catalyst for the resignation of Harold Macmillan’s and the defeat of his successor, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, in the 1964 General Election.   But the exposure of Epstein’s activities has had wider consequences, not least for dozens of abused women coping with blighted lives, one who tragically took her own life. 

The political damage goes deep.  It plays into the - transatlantic – belief in corrupt elites acting with impunity and holding ordinary people in contempt.   As many MPs (aware that they were already held in disregard or worse by the public) have commented, it further discredits politicians.  It entrenches the – erroneous – belief: ‘they’re all the same’.  We will hear much about ‘regaining trust’.  But the behaviour of elites is an integral and understandable cause of widespread anger, it is not going away, and is not just based on envy. Nor is it unfounded .

The term ‘elite’ itself is ill-defined, amorphous.  It approaches the pejorative echoes of ‘communist’ during the Cold War, a generic name for the enemy, bad and threatening people.   It offers, as a result, scant insights into how to deal for the common good with actual elites.  

Here, then, is a functional definition which may be helpful: elites exercise authority and power over citizens, occupy top positions in institutions where they can increase their access to resources and wealth through national and international networks.  I say elites, plural, because the positions taken up in society by today’s elite are more varied than those in the 19th and early 20th centuries; 30% are now women, and a small number are non-White from the old empire.  A consistent feature, though, is the predominance of the wealthy.

Public suspicion of elites is not misplaced.  Epstein was convicted of procuring a child for prostitution in 2008 and for sexual trafficking of minors in 2019.  In the 1990s, Epstein was receiving prodigious fees for  financial services from wealthy clients, amassing some £600 million,  dodging tax on his two American Virgin Islands companies, and attracting an international elite including Mandelson.   But the US public’s justifiable suspicion had a bizarre side.   During Trump’s 2016 election campaign, extreme Right-Wing social media gave considerable mileage to variants of a story that Hilary Clinton led an international paedophile sex-trafficking conspiracy, run by a “satanic cabal of elites”, in one version operating beneath the Ping Pong Pizza parlour in Washington D.C. 

Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman pose and research several pertinent questions about elites in their Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite Belnap, Harvard 2023.  They use inclusion in Who’s Who for membership of the UK elite and a variety of other sources for data in an pioneering historical study with a detailed appendix on methodology for sociologists.   Their most significant use of statistical data explores what they call ‘elite recruitment’, how you join the club, and ‘elite reproduction’, explaining how elites sustain continuity in a changing world.  They document a complex story.

The Clarendon group of public  (i.e. private) schools, Charterhouse, Eton, Harrow, Malborough, Merchant Taylors, Rugby, Shrewsbury, St. Paul’s and Winchester is a key part of it.  In the second league comes the 350-plus Independent schools of the  Head’s Conference  or HMC, also to some degree, bar a few scholarships, ‘sieving’ out  children of less well-off families.  The contacts and friendships made at school are reinforced in Oxbridge dining clubs and on the sports fields.  The ‘Old Boy’s club’ can help in job hunting and the ascent through different hierarchies: government, law, business.   This was the main 20th century pathway before the Second World War when Britain’s military needed competent officers, not just ones with a sense of entitlement, ill-judged self-confidence and upper class accents.  The 1944 Education Act created competition from State-funded school pupils, aged 11-15 from 1947, then up to 16 in 1972, promoting a challenging meritocracy.   The 11-plus exam for Grammar Schools, and the development of separate Secondary Modern schools for those who failed it, created heartbreak for children.  And the route to the core of the elite remained stubbornly the same.  By the 2020s, Born to Rule finds 47% of the elite went to Independent schools compared with 10% of population,  and compared to less than 1% of the population nearly 9% attended  Clarendon schools with 35% going on to Oxbridge – including Mandelson the ‘meritocrat’ from Hendon Grammar School.

Privileged education remains the propellant boosting youth into an elite orbit.  But the rocket fuel also remains family money, large amounts of it.   Britain’s richest top 1% held 70% of national wealth in 1900 but, for a variety of reasons, loss of Empire, pressure from trades unions, not least, this dropped to 20% in 1980 hovering around that figure for several decades.  Recruitment into the elite has stayed steady around 20% of the wealthiest 1% in the country.

Born to Rule’s interviews provide  insights into elite thinking.  As might be expected, the wealthiest and most powerful expressed what would be considered Right-wing views about equality, tax and inheritance.  But with more varied occupations, creative artists, academics, media stars, more women, concerned with social justice,  a range of political positions were included bringing key aspects of social democrat and ‘progressive Left’ policy, a priority for poverty reduction, alongside racial and gender equality. 

The most striking change since the 1940s is in how today’s elite wish to be seen: ordinary, rewarded and rising due to their hard work.  Nothing to do with inheriting wealth or earning a fortune in the City.  A few of the wealthy elite speak in the book of their family wealth, innate skills, arrogantly confident in their judgement, ready to take big risks.   And these beliefs can be their downfall.

A chapter recommends what to do about elites but the recipe contains essentially the ingredients of what would be considered a socialist approach, taxing financial services’ transactions, high value property wealth and inheritance, VAT for public schools, 50% worker representation on corporate boards, a satisfying meal for the Left but indigestible for much of the British public. 

There is no nod towards the growth of international elites indicated in the volumes of Epstein correspondence.  And no mention of the international power of the US IT tech giants’, nor the related policies of the thuggish US elite – originally brought for transplantation to Europe by a Trump White House strategist, Steve Bannon.

Elites depend on a lack of accountability in political systems to sustain their impunity.  Investigative journalists, an almost extinct species, despite the elite proprietors controlling the media, need time and money to do their job.  Gordon Brown, former PM and  voice of the Manse, has proposed several times a range of doable measures Government can immediately implement to root out elite corruption.  As the Profumo and Epstein affairs illustrate, elites may not be defeated but they can be curbed.
 
 
 
]]><![CDATA[TURNING PLOUGHSHARES INTO SWORDS]]>Tue, 03 Feb 2026 18:37:15 GMThttps://www.ianlinden.com/latest-blogs/turning-ploughshares-into-swordsAt a rough estimate, the Church runs 3,100 hospitals and 15,000 clinics in the Least Developed Countries (LDCs).  From Pope John XXII’s Mater et Magistra in 1961 to Pope Leo’s Fratelli Tutti in 2020, the Church has consistently called the rich nations to action: supporting the poorest, engaging their citizens in development, reducing indebtedness, extending the outreach and effectiveness of the Catholic agencies under the CARITAS INTERNATIONALIS umbrella (founded in 1951), and seeking integral human development for all.

If you were called to sum up in just three words what Catholic Social Teaching was about, you’d do no better than ‘Solidarity’, ‘Justice’ and ‘Compassion’.  And if you were to find four words most used to oppose NGO international development agencies and Official Development Assistance (ODA) it would be “Charity Begins at Home”.  The natural commitment to family, friends and community has been set up against helping the poorest overseas, either-or instead of and-and.  Who wants to join J.D. Vance in his justification for cutting aid?  Sadly increasing numbers.

Last year, Elon Musk froze some $58 billion in US ODA allocated for 2025: in other words for poverty alleviation, emergency humanitarian interventions, conflict prevention, peacebuilding,  global public goods such as health care and vaccination, or climate action.  Out of a total payroll of 10,000, 1,200 USAID staff were fired and 4,200 put on ‘administrative leave’.  Meanwhile substantial buildings occupied by USAID were handed over to Customs and Border Patrol.

The US Government’s only compliment to virtue was certain temporary waivers to cuts.  Parts of infrastructure were left standing amongst the wreckage of Federal foreign aid.  The priorities were telling.   Most of the temporary exemptions related to the spending of the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs and the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs.   After 13 February 2025, the latter received exemption for $5.3 billion expenditure of which $4.1 billion went to Israel and Egypt, plus more moderate sums to Taiwan and the Philippines’ military.  The announced USAID exemptions for - non-food - aid to Gaza, were $78 million and $156 million for the Red Cross’s work.

PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS, launched by President G.W. Bush in 2003, is estimated to have saved 26 million lives around the world.   It was operating in 2025 on 8% of its 2024 budget of $6.5 billion with consequences that hardly need spelling out.  The waiver covered - in theory -  all aspects of provision: antiretrovirals, testing, treatment and supply-chains. But the disruption caused by a 90 day freeze, let alone long term consequences, cost lives.  Money to pay local NGO staff suddenly disappeared globally with an immediate halt to their work amongst some of the world’s poorest people.

Global aid flows, currently between $170-180 billion, rose between 2019-2023 then dropped by 9% in 2024 and are currently falling at somewhere between 9-17%.  The UN Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) calculate 239 million people currently require humanitarian aid.  Between 2016-2019, UNOCHA reached some 130 million people but now has to adopt a prioritization programme for the very poorest, serving only 87 million, though hoping to return to 130 million in the future.  OXFAM’s statistics have a more powerful impact ; due to the US aid cuts “a child under five could die every forty seconds by 2030”. 

The justification for US aid cuts is allegedly to reduce national debt.  Trump’s acolytes complained about what they called ‘woke’ projects funded by USAID.  Would funding a feminist theatre company who, amongst their performances role play preventative health care, be ‘woke’ and suspect?  Women, of course, play an important educational role in health.   Even giving ‘woke’ the widest interpretation, projects that might be eligible for this description amount to an infinitesimal percentage of overall expenditure on aid.  And when a tiny fraction of a State institution’s activities are ill-judged, most people living in the real world would say such institutions were doing well. 

Aid is used to strengthen health systems.  HIV, Ebola (funding for prevention frozen then re-instated), Marburg, West Nile and new lethal viruses do not respect borders.  Can’t aid-detractors recognise even self-interest?

There is the recurrent  claim that development aid doesn’t work because it hasn’t jump-started the economies of poor countries.  If that is the criterion, one reply is that it rarely has been given a chance to work.   War, bad governance, and endemic corruption blight economic development.  If you need to bribe your way through several roadblocks to get to and into a port, export growth will be stunted.  Dealing with a wide range of problems, development aid, which  encompasses many different and vital interventions, makes a major contribution to human well-being.

It does contribute to economies.  Timely peace-building can avert war and subsequent collapse of the economy.  If half the workforce is infected with malaria -  thousands of their children dying from it - this harms productivity.   As the CEO of an international aid NGO working in three continents, I’ve stood admiring trained senior women in West African villages, some of them illiterate, chatting to mothers as the sun went down, cleverly passing on health messages that reduce infections.  Bonny babies in bathtubs, midwives learning literacy and becoming better midwives,  were a living testimony to the effectiveness of supporting health systems, providing finance and upskilling.  
 
In the UK, Sir Keir Starmer’s decision to reduce the ODA budget, between 2025-2027/8, from 0.5% to 0.3% of UK Gross National Income (GNI), came after a reduction from 0.7% to 0.5% made by  Conservative Governments.  Some 25% of this diminishing budget is still being spent on accommodating refugees in the UK.  In 2027/2028, Defence will be extracting £6.5 billion - not including funding for Ukraine - from today’s £14 billion aid budget 

The need for increased defense spending is itself  a knock-on from the policies of the Trump Presidency.  The UK Government’s mantra “this is a difficult decision” neglects mentioning the choice of alternative difficult decisions, such as wealth taxes - which come with greater political costs.   GNI percentage cuts, but less severe, have also been made in Germany, Europe’s other major donor, from its much higher peak of £28.5 billion in 2022.

No-one denies that despite foreign governmental and NGO funding for development, in much of Africa and parts of Asia, populations remain mired in poverty.   But this does not justify slashing development aid least of all treating it as if it were a criminal enterprise, what President Trump called “the left-wing scam known as USAID” ?

The causes of poverty are complex.  As a result the mix of international development aid needed to reduce poverty is complex.  Because it takes place abroad, the vast majority of people cannot directly see its benefits and can be misinformed.  We seem light years from Live Aid’s response to the Ethiopian famine in 1985.

Two final questions: Will our children and grandchildren be living in a world in which powerful States deny our common humanity – with further devastating consequences?   If and when they are told in school to consult the Oxford English Dictionary - or will it be AI - do we want them to find ‘archaic’ in brackets next to the word  ‘compassion’?  We may not have long to determine the answers.
 
 
 
 
]]><![CDATA[why DO WE LIKE POLICE PROCEDURALS?]]>Fri, 30 Jan 2026 08:57:45 GMThttps://www.ianlinden.com/latest-blogs/why-are-police-procedurals-so-popularAfter tea in the late 1940s, Dick Barton Special Agent, solving crimes and saving Britain with much derring-do, was on the BBC Light Programme.  In 1954, the 10-inch television brought Sherlock Holmes into the sitting room from Baker Street, and a year later kindly constable Dixon of Dock Green from London’s East End.  Policing got rougher in the 1960s with Z-cars.  By the 1990s, detectives were getting above themselves: Morse in his red Jaguar frequenting Oxford university, or the immaculate Poirot exposing posh villains.  You could also watch Maigret,  Commissaire in Paris’ Brigade Criminelle, catching sundry French criminals.    

Police procedurals are now as much part of British TV as Football.  They have a distinctive formal structure: predictable set-piece moments raising expectations and players with defined roles.  There’s the police chief trying to close the case, the ill-matched pair of cops who grow in mutual respect, the corrupt detective taking back-handers or the honest detective taken off the case only to solve it.  There’s Line of Duty, The Killing, Patience and multiple series to choose from.  

The Police Procedural’s formulary, like Evensong’s, is predictable, comforting and contains moral messages.  And you are safely at home on the sofa, ready for surprises though aware, more of less, what’s coming next.   If you aren’t, you haven’t watched enough.  Take opening scenes.  The purpose of showing an expanse of water, river, lake or sea is to allow the camera to close in on a body being washed up, floating face down.   Joggers in parks, woods or countryside will inevitably find any chance of achieving their personal best  spoilt after finding a leg or hand carelessly sticking out of the ground or grass.  If jogging with a dog, it’s a certainty the dog will disappear barking into the bushes.  And it’s not because of a rabbit.  Dogs have much to complain about their parts, often getting drugged or killed for barking out of turn. Though some receive a lot of patting, a sign that a character is a good guy.

Contemporary police dramas have found new ways to signal which character is good and which bad.  The detective used to look fondly at their child at bedtime, tuck them up, and gently shut the bedroom door.   That was a really good guy about to have a hard time before things came right.  If an American he was likely to get shot.  Or the child was going to be kidnapped   Or both.  But today we know the detective is a good person if he or she has a parent with dementia, visits them in the care home and is a dutiful son or daughter.   All good domestic signals.

After the discovery of the body, alone or with a subordinate the lead detective arrives, establishing the all-important police hierarchy.  The lifting of the blue-and-white tapes and the ceremonial ducking under are followed by complaints that junior uniformed police have allowed contamination of the crime scene.  This is extras’ big moment: to look sheepish.

The next set-piece, the morgue, features the ritual with the forensic pathologist pulling down the white sheet that covers the corpse to reveal an actor with a remarkable ability not to blink.  In case you’re not convinced the body on the trolley is dead, there often follows a funeral or burial scene with someone standing at a distance from the action either a mystery figure or the detective.  All very predictable.

But fear not, the creative spirit of TV or cinema isn’t dead - yet.   After the preliminaries, it’s time for intensive detective work – and for some viewers, beset by flash-backs and red-herrings, to lose track of the plot.   Time for countless murder investigators to develop their different characters through varied, but mostly miserable, relationships.  It’s a poor show if the hero isn’t estranged from his daughter, divorced, alcoholic, extremely grumpy or, more recently, putting autistic skills to good use.  Female detectives are specially burdened often dealing with a disrupted work-life balance, caring for rebellious teenagers and fathers with dementia.  Visits to care homes fill dull moments between action.  Dona Leon’s contented, connubial Venetian Commissario Brunetti, with his academic wife who makes tasty Italian family meals, reached German TV and Amazon Prime, the exception that proves the rule.

We now expect certain scenes to involve modern police kit: , helicopters, drone shots, CCTV replays, mobile phones which ring at critical moments, and laptops.  In fact, we know a computer geek, preferably hairy and disheveled, will be needed to make a crucial discovery.  But cars remain very important.  People cuffed, or having buddy conversations, are endlessly getting in and out of them, when they are not being blown up in them.   Though cars are petrol-driven.  No shoot-outs while recharging – yet.  Chases are still indispensable to the action, ideally with spectacular crashes along the way. 
 
A less pleasant innovation is the toilet scene featuring much unzipping in the Men’s.   The Back Alley, complete with dustbins, once the number one venue for fights, is being replaced by the Toilet.  Women detectives spot women suspects hiding guns in cisterns or changing their clothes behind lavatory doors. Or vomiting.  Someone being sick demonstrates they’re hungover, or afraid, or upset.  Directors need to pull the plug on such excesses of realism.

So all praise to Brendan Gleeson’s Bill Hodges, a retired cop tracking down the damaged, psychopathic killer, a preternaturally clever villain Brady Hartsfield, in Mr. Mercedes,  based faultlessly on Stephen King’s spooky trilogy, now streaming on Netflix.  Mr. Mercedes partly cracks the mold.   [ Spoiler alert] The opening scene is a view of a crowd queuing  in line for employment, not a lake or forest in sight.   A stolen car is the murder weapon.  Hodges is pursued unsuccessfully by the amorous widow next door.  He has a pet tortoise.  His police buddy Peter dies of natural causes but two captivating young people, Jerome and Holly,  befriend him and do his laptop tracking.   The killer’s mum is poisoned.  Jerome’s dog is spared.  Several characters have premonitions.  In the just-in-time ending Hodges finds the killer but has a heart attack and is unable to arrest him.

But there are also the set-pieces.  A car that blows up.  Hodges, overweight, unfit, grumpy but charming, courageous and kind, is fixated on an unsolved case and conducts an off-piste investigation.  He’s alienated from his daughter,  drinks a lot and lives on his own. Brian Gleeson is Bill Hodges just as Alec Guiness was, and always will be, John le Carré’s Smiley.  

What is the appeal of these dramas? They provide an hour or so of relative predictability in a world where we don’t know what’s going to happen next,  a world overtaken by darkness dominated by  powerful autocrats with scant regard for human life.  Watching, we enter another world where the good cop, or private eye, or sleuth, with their multiple quirks and defects, some like ours, defy the odds to defeat the murderous villain.   What’s not to like?   In the police procedural at least there’s justice after all.

If things get worse, though, I recommend switching genres to Pope Leo’s favourite movies: ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’, ‘The Sound of Music’, ‘Life is Beautiful’ and ‘Ordinary People’.   
 

]]><![CDATA[what's the problem with 'christian civilisation'?]]>Sun, 18 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ianlinden.com/latest-blogs/whats-the-problem-with-christian-civilisation"Today the meaning of words is ever more fluid and the concepts they represent increasingly ambiguous”, Pope Leo told gathered diplomats in the Vatican on 9 January 2026…“Or rather in the contortions of semantic ambiguity, language is becoming more and more a weapon with which to deceive, strike, or offend opponents,” he continued. “We need words once again to express distinct and clear realities unequivocally”.  But did they ever?  Some of the Pope’s listeners must have wondered.  Wasn’t ambiguity often useful when diplomats tried to reach mutually acceptable agreements? However, Leo was making a more general point not only addressing diplomats.

To illustrate the Pope’s remarks, the words ‘Christian civilisation’ are both fluid and ambiguous, and offensive when they came to prominence in Europe after the Second World War and were applied to still colonized peoples.   European cities were rubble, like Gaza is today, in many countries people starving, and the horror of the Nazi death camps filmed for all to see.  Some 2,500 Catholic priests from Czechoslovakia, Poland and Germany had been incarcerated in Dachau.   ‘Christian civilisation’ referred to a shocking absence.  
 
Christian humanitarianism, though,  was an important presence.   Oxford Professor of Modern History, Paul Betts’ Ruin and Renewal: Civilising Europe after the Second World War Profile Books, 2020, provides a comprehensive account of the role humanitarian organisations played and the extraordinary work of Americans and UNRRWA, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.

Set up in 1943, US Catholic Relief Services was one of the first to work in former enemy-controlled countries beginning in Italy and then in Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland.  Abbé Jean Rodhain, from Lorraine 30 kms. from the German border,  set up the Vatican Mission with funding from the deputy Vatican Secretary-of-State Giuseppe Montini, future Pope Paul VI.  Catholic relief workers focussed on the French and American zones in Germany, with an additional special mission to Bergen-Belsen.  Abbé Rodhain arrived within 24 hours of its liberation and pulled in teams from Germany.  The saintly Abbé Charles Amarin-Brand is remembered caring for its victims many dying of starvation and typhus, with particular concern for the children.   The Quakers, disproportionately present, followed a similar policy towards suffering Germans as did the majority Lutheran Church.  In Britain the Catholic Women’s League found UK families who would take in children from formerly Nazi Austria.  Together these efforts represented a significant Christian - charitable - universalism, a forerunner of the later hope for a universal civilisation based on the concept of a shared humanity.   In the words of Abbé Regnault from Belsen, there would be “no distinction between race or religion”…”since we are at the service of mankind”. 
 
For many ‘Christian civilization’ now defined post-Nazi Western Europe as it confronted Stalin’s brutal repression in Russia and Eastern Europe. The sufferings of Cardinal Joséf Mindszenty rallied Catholics behind his 1946-1947 slogan ‘Hungary is Virgin Mary’s Country’.  Mindszenty spent many years  in captivity seen as a martyr for ‘Christian civilization’.   By 1951, from Liverpool to New York,  prayers were said for the Cardinal and to ask God’s forgiveness for his persecutors.  In the 1980s, Pope John Paul II, supporting the Polish national struggle, promoted devotion to Our Lady of Częstochowa.  In both instances the challenge to Europe pitted respect for  human rights and justice in the ‘Christian civilization’ of the West against the injustice of bureaucratic communism in the East.

The Christian basis of Christian democracy had been defined by the celebrated French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain who sought a pluralist society based on an ‘integral Christian humanism’, that he called a New Christendom.  De Gaulle appointed him French ambassador to the Vatican 1945-1948.   The  theme of Christian civilization worked well in strenuous efforts to ensure Communist Parties did not win elections held in Western Europe.  The Vatican, with CIA support,  threw itself behind the Italian Christian Democrats, defeating the Communist Party by a wide margin in Italy’s 1946 General Election.  And in Germany it served as a national  leitmotif in the success of German Chancellor, (1949-1953), Konrad Adenauer’s Christian Democratic Union Party (CDU) hardening divisions between East and West Germany.  

The 19th century justification for colonialism, ‘bringing Christian civilisation to benighted races’, rejected by the colonised as racism,  had not disappeared.  In apartheid South Africa, National Party Prime Minister during 1948-1954, D.F. Malan asserted that white South Africans faced two irreconcilable ways of life,  “barbarism and civilisation”, “heathenism and Christianity”.  For the Christian African National Congress (ANC) leader, Albert Luthuli (1898-1967), “civilisation was neither white, black or brown”, it was what UNESCO called ‘broad universal civilisation’.   
 
Decolonisation in the 1960s washed the slogan of ‘Christian civilisation’  into the gutters of history.  It remains in the sewer today thanks to Putin’s weaponizing of Patriarch Kirill’s brand of Russian Orthodoxy and Trump and his coterie’s cosying up to apocalyptic forms of evangelical Christianity.  
 
So, beyond the language of individual human rights, we are left with UNESCO’s insubstantial ‘broad universal civilisation’ to support the rights of communities and nations.  But the Church with its body of social teaching, developed organically,  can offer coherent meaning to the word ‘civilisation’, defining the attitudes, actions and relationships required to build a civilisation expressive of “love and genuine compassion”, the family  as its foundation, “the glue that holds the whole of civilisation together”.  And, with the caveat of St. John Paul II, Francis, Leo and their predecessors, technology and science “evaluated in the light of the centrality of the human person, the common good , and  the inner purpose of creation”.  A dynamic vision interpreted through the prism of integral human development, social, spiritual, cultural, economic and political relationships, and realised as a lifetime vocation. 
 
Pope Benedict XVI  in his magisterial Caritas in Veritate 2009 wrote:   “Reason, by itself, is capable of grasping the equality between men and of giving stability to their civic coexistence, but it cannot establish fraternity.   This originates in a transcendent vocation from God the Father, who loved us first, teaching us through the Son what fraternal charity is.” It sounds abstract and academic.  Much theological language does. But it speaks to the condition of Ukraine or Gaza or Sudan.  
 
For often it is believers in perverse ‘contortions’ of the Abrahamic faiths who are dropping the bombs.  To establish a ‘Christian civilisation’, shining its light upon a hill, the settlers in America dispossessed and killed the original inhabitants,  imported black slaves and, until the 1960s, denied  their descendants civil rights.  In Iran, where the BBC reports that families are paying $5,000 to retrieve the bodies of their loved ones, those who massacred them also pray to a Merciful and Compassionate God. 
 
Britain is a secular society.  Benedict’s insights reveal how secular societies lack an element essential to building a broad universal civilisation in a divided world.  Active Christians may now be only 9% , just possibly 12%, of the UK’s population. The BBC’s More of Less suggests there are no reliable statistics to confirm that the UK’s Christian community is growing.  That leaves Church leaders in the UK with quite a responsibility, a challenge, but a great opportunity.
 
 
 
 

]]><![CDATA[REDISCOVERING THE MEANING OF WORDS]]>Mon, 12 Jan 2026 15:32:30 GMThttps://www.ianlinden.com/latest-blogs/january-12th-2026What does imperialism mean?  Lenin’s 1917 Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism is the best known of the early twentieth century analyses.  Its eerie echoes denounce “the financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the people of the world by a handful of ‘advanced’ countries”.   It describes how “this ‘booty’ is shared between two or three powerful world marauders armed to the teeth”…. “who involve the whole world in their war over the sharing of their booty.”  In  moderate papal language, Catholic social teaching, and notably Pope Paul VI’s remarkable  Populorum Progressio published in 1967, expressed similar concerns.  Though the encyclical can be understood as the Church’s response to the threat of Communism in the new post-colonial ‘Third World’ countries.

‘American imperialism’ is an emotive phrase.  President Trump has given it a new lease of life.  His attack on Venezuela seizing Maduro and his wife, the killing of their guards, were a deliberate, graphic illustration of how the US sees its role in a world now dividing into imperial domains.  Maduro’s toppling has had one positive result: the freeing of some political prisoners.

Trump in a 3rd January speech, just after the attacks, set out the core thinking behind American intervention. “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again” was the message.  “We are reasserting American power, in a very powerful way, in our home region”, he said reading from a prepared speech expressing intentions which had already been set out in the November 2025 US National Security Document.  The neoliberal coterie around Trump are in competition with China, and Russia, for Latin America’s rare earths, minerals and, longer term, massive heavy crude oil reserves in Venezuela.  An important target audience was its dozen sovereign States, some like Mexico, Colombia, Uruguay and Brazil who were increasingly collaborating to challenge unacceptable US demands.

Trump is following in the footsteps of his incomparably more talented predecessor, James  Monroe, the fifth and last Founding Father to become President, whose policy in the 1820s sought to remove European colonial powers from the Americas.  Monroe bought Louisiana from the French for $15 million.  Fast forward two centuries,  Trump plans to buy Greenland and to tighten control over Latin America, implementing his ‘Donroe doctrine’.  In a recent New York Times interview he proclaimed his power was constrained only by ”my own morality” ….“I don’t need international law”.

Whatever its regional impact, US promotion of back to the future scenarios hastens the collapse of the post-Second World War international order based on international law: respect for national sovereignty enshrined in the UN Charter but compatible with the later idea of the ‘global common good’.  This required strict limitations on cross-border wars.   Pope Leo described it in a 9 January speech to diplomats as “completely undermined”.

In his traditional Sunday blessing he underlined  that the "well-being of the beloved Venezuelan people must prevail over all other considerations and lead to overcoming violence and pursuing paths of justice and peace, safeguarding the country’s sovereignty".  The Latin American bishops prayed for peace, unity and reconciliation for the Venezuelan people expressing closeness to victims of the attacks.  Aware of the might of US military and their own comparative weakness, most Western leaders have hesitated to speak out. 

The position of the Church from John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris 1963, Benedict XVI’s Caritas in Veritate, 2009 to Francis’ recent Fratelli Tutti, 2020 has been consistent.   Popes have called for a world order based on justice and peace and effective international organisations.  Matching action to thought, Trump has just withdrawn from 66 international bodies almost half of them UN-linked. 

Today’s imperialism might be described as “The Final Stage of Neo-liberalism”.   John Maynard Keynes’ impact on economic policy waned after the 1930s, neoliberal thinkers began to take his place, their proclaimed ideas, free market competition the essential dynamo of human development, choice - of material goods - and individual responsibility began entering the West’s political bloodstream.  Reagan and Thatcher, its 1980s’ champions,  achieved three major feats.  An ideology finessed as common sense.  Politics, the handmaid of economics emptied of social vision and purpose.  Words and slogans cleverly used to misinform the public where their true interests lay.  As Pope Leo told the diplomats on 9th January  “language is becoming more and more a weapon with which to deceive”, and all done in the name of freedom of expression.

George Monbiot’s and Peter Hutchison’s powerful bestseller The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism  Penguin, 2024, describes how neoliberalism decries an intrusive state and stultifying bureaucracy squandering taxpayers’ money.  The deregulated market unimpeded by the State  should determines that the “talented and hard-working will prevail, whereas the feckless, weak and incompetent will fail” [Trump’s ‘losers’]. 

One feature Monbiot and Hutchison enlarges on, shared by other ideologies, is that neoliberalism doesn’t deliver what it says on the tin.  “Its anonymity is both a symptom and a cause of its power”.
​
There are a variety of ways to deal  with the anger of its losers, their dreams of joining the winners abandoned.  Aside from repression of mass protest, diversion, what Monbiot and Hutchison call, ‘transfer of blame’, focussing resentment on the intrusive State, migrants, Muslims or ‘woke’  academics.  In its attack on them, neoliberalism  deploys evocative words and ideas: ‘freedom’ from ‘control by elites’ who hold ordinary people in contempt, individual ‘choice’ and ‘responsibility’.

Influencers, think-tanks, newspapers, social media and a whole TV channel, GB News, promote such themes and ideas. To achieve neoliberalism’s economic goals ‘strong leaders’, even authoritarianism, may be seen as desirable.  A worrying number of British youth hold this view.  

By freedom, not just abroad but at home too, is rarely meant freedom from homelessness, hunger and insecurity.  There have been only a handful of - urban - examples around the world of genuine participatory democracy controlling the politics and economics that effect daily lives.   Taxing the real elite of transnational oligarchies with their wealth laundered in London, or stashed away in off-shore havens in British dependencies, appears to be beyond the capability of our Government.  Meanwhile, every day across the world 25,000 people die of hunger and illnesses caused by malnutrition while indebted governments drastically cut aid budgets.  

Recapturing key words and slogans for a transformative politics is long overdue.  In Pope Leo’s words: “Rediscovering the meaning of words is perhaps one of the primary challenges of our time”.

We may actually have arrived at the final stage of imperialism and neoliberalism.  The last three years have shown that climate change crisis is already upon us.  Yet in 2022, the West’s five largest oil and gas companies recorded $134 billion in ‘excess profits’ ( $134 billion more than a ‘normal’ rate of return on capital investment). And some of the lords of Silicon Valley are worth more.  These are the main beneficiaries of Trump’s policies.

Such are today’s power elites whether in Riyadh, Moscow, Beijing or Washington.  According to OXFAM, the world’s richest 1% have a massively disproportionate share of carbon emissions. The lives and livelihoods of people around the world, including our own children and grandchildren, will be destroyed unless we, voters in surviving democracies, have the courage to take back control.
 
 
 
 

]]><![CDATA[GAZA: THE FATE OF THE PALESTINIANS & OF HUMANITARIANISM]]>Wed, 31 Dec 2025 21:33:23 GMThttps://www.ianlinden.com/latest-blogs/gaza-the-fate-of-the-palestinians-of-humanitarianismYou need to fall back on words such as evil and wicked, not much used these days, to describe the Israeli Government’s banning from Gaza of some 37 humanitarian NGOs after a re-registration process.   That ban ends, and sums up,  a year in which not even clever propaganda and disinformation could disguise the true purpose of IDF brutality.

But Palestinian national self determination was not the only human aspiration - perhaps - irreparably – damaged: humanitarianism itself is threatened.  The great ethical tradition of humanitarianism, arising from the Calvinism of Swiss businessman Henri Dunant, founder of the Red Cross in 1863, had by the 21st century become a leading aspect of humanist ethics.  The work of humanitarian agencies to relieve suffering and the protection given them by warring parties in exchange for a studied neutrality became in some sense a moral contract in the midst of conflict.  That contract comes under particular strain during a genocide and/or in ‘asymmetric’ warfare where one combatant is totally dominant.

The humanitarian contract cannot be imposed.  It depends on the consent of the combatants. The Israeli government, like Putin’s, does not seem to recognise that, over the years, agreed operational principles and international legal obligations have been established and ought to be respected.  One such principle is that humanitarian agencies are not obliged to divulge the names and other personal details of their employees to gain access to victims, and not obliged to divulge them to the warring parties.  The assumption is that civilized combatants do allow access for humanitarian aid to victims of war. This, as the European Union would call it, is the acquis of humanitarianism.  Not under Netanyahu, it isn’t. 

The 37 banned NGOs have refused on principle to disclose information about their staff.  Perhaps this appears somewhat abstract in a desperate situation.  And isn’t it understandable that the Israeli Intelligence agencies want to find out names of those working for the humanitarian NGOs if they suspect there are clandestine combatants amongst them?  Yes, but their Government does not need to compromise humanitarian aid workers to find out, nor question the bona fides of their organisations.  Internationally known organisations are internationally respected by governments mostly because of their bona fides. 
  
Internationally respected and trusted Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) (Doctors without Borders ) is amongst those banned.  It has some 1,000 staff in Gaza, runs two field hospitals and supports six major hospitals.   Suddenly the Israeli government, without presenting any evidence, asserted that two of its staff were active Hamas combatants.  Even supposing this were true, it does not justify shutting down the entire organization.  And if  MSF doctors had evidence available of staff being combatants they would  dismiss them. 
 
CARITAS JERUSALEM with its programme of mobile child clinics and some 130 staff working in Gaza is also banned.  But, according to the Latin Patriarch, “Caritas Jerusalem is an Ecclesiastical Legal Person, whose status and mission have been recognized by the State of Israel through the 1993 Fundamental Agreement and the subsequent 1997 Legal Personality Agreement signed between the Holy See and the State of Israel”, so re-registration does not apply.  So banning makes no sense and the Patriarch intends CARITAS' work to continue.  Meanwhile, the popemobile left in Bethlehem by Pope Francis in 2014 and converted by CARITAS into a flagship mobile clinic is prevented from even entering Gaza by reason of “dual use”. Dual use covers a wide spectrum of goods including the widest range of medical equipment  Some 'dual use' goods at exorbitant prices - enriching Egyptian, Israeli and Palestinian entrepreneurs- are available in markets, and allowed through.  
 
Some 1,500 health workers have already been killed by the IDF as well as hundreds of other humanitarian workers, some targeted as alleged Hamas supporters.  260 Palestinian media workers who, in the absence of foreign journalists, have been  getting news out have died because of their commitment to their profession.  Thousands of NGO workers have been excluded and the bans will eliminate more as the Israeli Government attempts to cow the Palestinians into total passivity and despair and force them out of Gaza.

On 30th December in response to the banning the Governments of Britain ,Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Japan and Norway, Sweden and Switzerland, signed a joint letter. It had only passing references to internationally recognized humanitarian principles while describing the current appalling conditions facing Palestinians in Gaza and what needs to be done.  They did mention “unreasonable restrictions on imports considered dual use”.   "Any attempt to stem their ability to operate is unacceptable", was their limit to criticism of the Israeli Government's ban on 37 major humanitarian organisations. 

Presumably Trump’s possible reaction to protest weighed heavily  in framing the ten Governments’ response. They made no reference to any penalties the Israeli government might incur .  There was no defense of the Geneva Conventions - beginning in 1864 - which enshrine hard-won humanitarian tradition and practice.   So far our own hierarchy has not issued a statement.  It is as if the rules based international order which offered some protection to weaker nations and peoples is being quietly abandoned.
 
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