Fire in the Bible indicates the presence of God, purifying humanity or as a symbol of divine judgement motivating change and conversion.  In many States of the USA, wildfires now occur perennially growing in number.  Trump’s gleeful denial of, and contribution to, climate change has an impact not just on America’s future but on the rest of the world, on what Pope Francis in Laudato Si calls memorably “our common home”.   The secular term applicable to Trump’s energy policies might be a ‘crime against humanity’ – or against the future of humanity – and  in the language of faith on considering Creation in Genesis, a sin against ‘the Spirit of God moving over the waters” (the Hebrew word evokes an image of a bird hovering).

A raging wildfire hit the East Anglian coast south of Dunwich last weekend.  It led BBC News.  Two ladies out walking  found the tiny fire that started it all but had neither sand nor water to put it out.  At the fire’s southern most extent, the prompt and courageous action of the fire service, drawn from all over Suffolk and beyond, saved the historic Coast Guard Cottages, a National Trust  centre. 
​
The centre offered holiday accommodation, pleasant staff and a café with passable coffee, a favourite destination for walks, a serene beach below the cliffs.  No-one ever imagined the cottages would feature on television, and in newspapers, overlooking some 370 acres of blackened heathland on one side and Sizewell B on the other, part National Trust nature reserve and part Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) bird sanctuary.

Reading about the coastal area burning west of Bordeaux and a huge blaze heading for Madrid is one thing.   Seeing a beautiful landscape turned to ashes on your doorstep, where once a swathe of purple heather led to the cliffs and a shimmering sea, home to a unique collection of flora and fauna, is another.  Climate change creates hotter, drier conditions that make wildfires more likely and, spreading fast, increasingly dangerous.   It isn’t only what happens to other people.

But this is not a message that oil-companies and most political Parties faced with difficult choices want to hear.  They needn’t worry.   As the fire moved underground into the roots of the vegetation, with no more exciting pictures of billowing flames and new devastation, The Daily Telegraph published on 1 August a little divisive distraction.  “Rewilding Blamed for Suffolk Wildfire” headed a rambling article based on a few off-hand comments from local inhabitants of the neighbouring village of Weselton, where evacuees had been housed, alongside interviews with sundry knowledgeable experts and commentators.  

The mistake of the RSPB according to the – atypical - local vox pop cited was pursuing a “green agenda”  – brought on presumably by wishing to preserve a suitable habitat for its varied and rare birds, its raison d’etre.   The National Trust  were also accused of having ‘overlooked in the name of green projects’’ – none cited – residents’ interests.  Though for many these interests included eco-tourism and catering for beach holidays, not necessarily exclusive if you enjoyed watching the terns plummet into the sea to take small fish in their sudden vertical dives. 

The Telegraph article does carry a response from the RSPB pointing out that it cuts firebreaks on the land, improves water retention and conducts public awareness campaigns on the dangers of barbecues and leaving rubbish.  The National Trust, apart from warning people not to fall off the cliffs, and correct dog behaviour, also has large notices about fire hazards and barbecues.
Only one problem: the area had not be ‘rewilded’; it was no more nor less wild than when I first walked its paths over 25 years ago.  The area had been routinely managed, grazed by cattle, deer and muntjac.  The Telegraph article was at best tendentious and gave a  false impression of local reaction which was predominantly shock and sadness. 

And there were plenty of relevant follow-up stories waiting.  Tucked in the past coverage is mention that the Suffolk Fire Service - surprisingly - had to rent a commercial helicopter, thereby acquiring an easily available source of water, the sea, which could be scooped up and dropped along the fire service’s frontline.  It made a difference.  These wildfires are a national issue and require national assets.  Why can’t the UK have a dedicated helicopter at the disposal of fire-fighters ready to go just as a local fire crew is ready to go?  Four, one for each nation, would be desirable but probably utopian.  And is it beyond IT companies to have a number on all mobiles connecting to the local fire service, on the basis of  location, rather than a generic emergency number?  At this rate, we are going to need one.  Like heart attacks, in a terrain that is dry, highly combustible and starting to burn, every minute counts.

There is still some mileage in the old arguments about the value of rewilding but it is hardly a priority as temperatures soar, droughts occur, rivers dry up and devastating fires break out in many European countries.  Wildfires are more likely to occur in nature reserves simply because they frequently have considerable human through-put.   And nor does rewilding itself or the preservation of unique habitats and areas of outstanding beauty cause fires. 

There is need for an immediate response to the rapid onset of climate change in Europe.  And this indeed should be part of a wider government strategy.  There are economic implications such as prioritizing investment in renewable sources of energy and carbon capture.  But wildfire prevention is also an obvious candidate for Prime Minister Burnham’s devolved approach to government.  As in the example of the importance of rapid helicopter support, there is need for well-thought out ways of finding more effective ways of making national assets, innovations, means of protection such as water storage available locally, plus adequate staffing for the fire services. 

We hear a much about national security and the urgent need for more/ better drones, ballistic missiles, AI controlled warfare and clever IT hackers.  As I passed by the Westleton to Dunwich road today, with its manned barrier ensuring unencumbered access for fire-engines, or looked again at the pictures of the new wasteland  once an area of natural beauty, a question comes to mind.   Shouldn’t we be asking if climate change is no less a clear and present danger to our national security than Putin?
​
Neglecting or ignoring the environmental impact of political and personal decisions is not limited to Trump and MAGA.  It seems inexplicable given the scientific evidence and obvious harm already evident.  In the words of Pope Francis’ Laudato Si: “Once the human being declares independence from reality and behaves with absolute dominion the very foundations of our life begin to crumble.…man sets himself up provoking a rebellion on the part of nature”.  The ravaged strip of Suffolk coast illustrates in microcosm what he means.
 

Under Conservative rule combatting Islamophobia tended to be relegated to the realm of  ‘whataboutery’ and to lack substance.  Government’s recent commitment to funding protective Mosque security, and the Muslim Trust for its work researching data on anti-Muslim hate crime and its victim support, is welcome.  Threats and attacks on Mosques, imams, and ‘microaggression’ against Muslims in distinctive dress – women in hijabs are particularly vulnerable - is growing.  The Trust estimates that every five days  a Mosque suffers hostile action of some sort. 

On 25 July, Muslim leaders, Mosque Councils, teachers and security experts were gathered in Birmingham for a national emergency meeting.  Meanwhile in Birmingham, the Department of Education is funding pilot school courses on antisemitism provided by the Archdiocese education service with the Catholic Education Service and the Board of Deputies of British Jews.   Combatting antisemitism remains a high priority, and for the Government, is clearly linked to Middle East foreign policy.  
  
Our big cities and Churches are noted for their diversity.  St. Ignatius’, Stamford Hill, for example, is pure London.  It has recently been resplendent with the flags of some 40 nations.  Irregular attendees might have thought them a tribute to the World Cup, though the Vatican flag over the door to the presbytery would have given pause for thought - no notable strikers fostered at the end of the Via della Conciliazione.  The 40 different nationalities/Londoners provided the display celebrating the annual parish festival.   But Muslims aren’t popular with Catholics from Nigeria where Christians have a hard time in the Islamic North.

The Church of its nature offers an identity that ought to  relativise nationality.   And St. Ignatius’, its priests, from the DRC, Nigeria and Philippines as well as from Britain, altar servers, readers and its people, form a religious microcosm of London, a defiant no pasaran to the manipulators of xenophobia.  They relate to ‘place’ and don’t need Andy Burnham to tell them about it.   But they also relate to the countries where the different generations, their parents or grandparents, came from and were born. Celebrating the significance of this religious gathering is not naïve romanticism.  Hackney and Tottenham, like many inner city communities, have had their riots with different ethnic groups on different sides. 

Such complex UK realities fall into the sphere of both theology and sociology.  They come under the heading of ‘integration’,  a catch-all like culture,  not often clearly defined.  Baroness Louise Casey analysed in a December 2016 study what works and what doesn’t work in the integration of Britain’s Muslim communities. 

Integration is  more of a subjective concept than at first sight. Should integration be ‘a two-way street’, each meeting half way.  Or, to stay with the traffic analogy, is an immigrant like a driver on the slip- road onto a motorway.  The traffic on the inside lane of the motorway needs to give way and let the slip-road driver in, but, once on the motorway, the driver must obey the highway code  and obey the overhead signs.  The second analogy might better fit the reality.  Neither option makes for an easy ride for the immigrant.  Least of all for the Muslim immigrant. 

Take Palestinians for example.  A Christian immigrant has an easier time than a Palestinian Muslim; they can integrate into widely accepted national bodies, the Christian churches.  Nor do they have an alcohol ban limiting socializing in pubs.   A Muslim joining a Mosque finds himself/ herself amongst a worshipping community that may have arrived only a generation ago, and may still be seen as ‘foreign’.   Worse, they daily risk encountering some degree of Islamophobia, influenced by perverse distortions of Islam  overseas, notably jihadist terrorism or the persecution of women in Afghanistan. 

British Catholics might feel particular empathy with Muslims.   Henry VIII’s 1534 Act of Supremacy, declaring himself head of the Church tying religion to the political power of the throne and creating the Church of England, severed links with Rome.  By the 17th century Catholicism was largely seen as an alien religion, a fifth column in a Protestant country, persecuted and excluded from public office.  The physical threat was still apparent in 1780, the anti-Catholic Gordon riots lasted days destroying property.  The  restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in 1850 caused Protestant demonstrations. In 2008, Archbishop Rowan Williams’ championing ‘constructive accommodation’ toying with the idea of recognition for aspects of Shari’a Law, along the lines of  Jewish Beth Din courts, caused a major controversy.  He had launched a national Christian-Muslim Forum two years earlier.

The existence, and growth, of Britain’s over four million Muslim population is a highly politicised aspect of Britain’s demography. Islamophobia is a strong element in the xenophobia of far right-wing Parties.  The Jewish population of Britain is only some 300,000; antisemitic violence and hate speech is proportionately greater per head - and the Jewish community comparatively more effective in drawing attention to the hurt and anxiety it causes.

The Muslim Council of Great Britain (MCB) was formed in 1994 at Government instigation to provide a broadly representative organisation, some 500 affiliated Muslim bodies, with which to relate and give Muslims a public voice.   Whilst the MCB spoke out against acts of terrorism, relations soured in 2009 when Daud Abdullah, its Deputy- Secretary General signed a declaration from the Global Anti-Aggression Campaign, an international grouping of radical Muslims with links to Hamas and with some members allegedly from extremist jihadist organisations.  Hazel Blears MP, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, called for his resignation.  The declaration was a response to Israel’s assault on Gaza - with the customary rationale of curtailing rocket fire - over three weeks 2008-2009, Operation Cast Lead.  Gordon Brown’s Government condemned Daud for promoting violence.

The MCB Secretary-General, Abdul Bari, was unwilling to sack Abdullah on grounds that such government intervention  undermined the independence of a religious organization.  This was  both disingenuous and provocative, though he later willingly  accepted capacity building help from the TUC.  The Government adopted ‘a policy of non-engagement’ towards the Muslim Council, temporarily restoring relationships for five months before the 2010 general election.  ‘Non-Engagement’ has continued since then,  Governments officially refusing to associate with the MCB for sixteen years,  though individuals, both Stephen Timms MP and Nick Clegg MP for example, attended meetings even when holding  ministerial office.   

To find interlocutors for reports, consultations and advice, Government relied mainly on hand-picked Muslims mostly sympathetic to State sponsored programmes such as Prevent  - viewed as discriminatory by many  Muslims.  This had an alienating effect but did bring into national prominence several significant figures from the Muslim community.  The Church sought similar partners for its inter-faith dialogue with Muslims.

One of these, an outstanding leadership voice, Leicester’s Shaikh Ibrahim Mogra, himself a former deputy Secretary-General of the MCB, visited Pope Francis on 5 April 2017 as Co-Chair of the  Christian-Muslim Forum, one of four imams accompanied by Cardinal Vincent Nichols.  His reaction was typically warm: ”I think it’s going to be one of the most powerful messages that will go out to the Muslim world that the Christian communities are our friends….I think we should reciprocate that”.

Rejection of the Muslim Council did not encourage integration.  Prime Minister Burnham needs to put this right.   And the Church needs to recall Ibrahim Mogra’s delight at his welcome in the Vatican and could do more to show by example how wrong and misguided Islamophobia remains today.  

In Belfast in the mid-1980s I watched a fully armed British soldier, shouldering a rifle, inspecting a coach for weapons.  The coach was full of primary school children waiting to go to the Servite priory in Benburb for a weekend retreat away from home, a poor and rough part of the city.   At mass, there was a prayer in thanksgiving for ‘new shoes’ and, somewhat competitively,  for deceased grannies, first one who had died ‘a year ago’, followed by one who had died ‘a month ago’ and finally a granny who had shuffled off this mortal coil ‘a day ago’.  The celebrant wisely wound up the bidding prayers.   It was sweet and funny but, of course, apart from the first prayed for granny, many people actually were dying violently in the Troubles.

A month of so ago I went back to give a lecture in Queen’s College.  The Good Friday Agreement had come and felt long gone.   It was sad to see, after the great achievement ending sectarian killing and the creation of a new political dispensation, how little had changed.  Miles of walls separating working class unionist and nationalist communities, Catholic from Protestant, with gates shut early in the evening to separate them.  Only 10% of schools integrated.  Everything still fed into the sacred binary.  I was lecturing about Gaza, Palestine and Israel.  The Catholic students supported the Palestinians.  The Protestants far less. 

There are so many deaths still left uninvestigated.  So many families with no real idea what happened to their loved ones.   Their seeking answers after all this time, in a divided society with pockets of worrying residual thuggery, is an act both of courage and proof of how important is ‘closure’ for moving beyond grief.

Investigative journalism, finding out what others want to hide, is more dangerous: a great way to make powerful and/or dangerous enemies and for lawyers to guarantee investigations will need big budgets.   Even without punishing legal proceedings, the work takes time and time costs money.   With an impressive portfolio of articles, books and TV productions dating back to the 1970s,  John Ware is a notable survivor of a rare breed of journalist.

Ware’s Neither Confirm Nor Deny: British Intelligence, Lawless Agent Running and the Suppression of Truth, Merrion Press 2026, was published a few weeks ago.  It exposes and sifts the dirt in the dirty war known in Ireland as The Troubles.  It is a gift of truth for the many families of innocent victims whose deaths have been left uninvestigated, allegedly for national security reasons.

‘Neither Confirm Nor Deny’ is the refrain dear to the British Intelligence Services, used repeatedly by the Royal Ulster Constabulary, RUC,  MI5 and the FRU, the Army’s Force Research [agent running] Unit, and then by the British government.  It served to hide the crimes of the extraordinary number of covert agents who had penetrated rival loyalist and nationalist organisations and their armed wings notably the Irish Republican Army (IRA), Ulster Defense Association (UDA) and Freedom Fighters (UFF).   To survive and to harvest the hoped-for, high quality, intelligence highly placed agents were complicit in extreme violence.  Ware struggles with this moral dilemma throughout the book. 

The story focuses on the actions of two figures, Brian Nelson and Freddie Scappaticci (known as Stakeknife) and their handlers,  chronicling how they engaged or colluded in abductions, torture and killings of IRA targets.  Nelson was embedded in the UDA.   Scappaticci  worked his way up to a critical senior position in the IRA’s Internal Security Unit (ISU), and was in charge of compiling their assassination lists, participating in the commission of murders.  Stakeknife was too often in the habit of being in proximity to killings or abductions to absolve him from responsibility for them.  He led a charmed, reckless life. Even his wife did not know he was working for the British.

Evidence, meticulously compiled by Ware from FRU contact forms (CFs), recording meetings with the two agents, indicates that even when Nelson and Scappaticci warned in good time of a planned  assassination, no action appears to have been taken to protect the targets.  

Ware’s account suggests that senior officers in the different intelligence agencies valued their agents and potential intelligence ‘take’ more than the lives of potential and actual targets, however slim the evidence that they were active IRA members.  To name an agent was in all senses beyond the pale.    That their actions should not be totally outside the remit of criminal justice apparently less so.  Britain is not, of course, the only State responding to what is declared a national security threat to have condoned assassinations.

It was in September 1989, in response to great pressure and very late in the day, that Nelson and Scappaticci became enough of a concern for the Chief Constable of the RUC, Hugh Annesley (later Sir Hugh), to initiate an independent investigation.   In an attempt to show the UDA exclusively assassinated IRA gunmen, the UDA had been leaking documents demonstrating collusion between  loyalist paramilitaries and the security forces.  Chief Constable Annesley asked John Stevens (later Sir), a future Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, then deputy chief constable of Cambridgeshire, to undertake the investigation.  Laurie Sherwood, a CID inspector, Stevens’ special senior assistant, were the only heroes in this ugly saga.  They faced intractable systemic obstruction from the different intelligence services including the withholding of key documents and information as the highest authorities in the different agencies clung to what they hoped was ‘plausible deniability’.

The principal front-line handlers who failed to stop the killings and their agents who were complicit in them were working for a British army  military intelligence unit.  For some time even the existence of this unit was kept from Stevens.  From the Military’s point of view, this was war.  Most of the dead named in the cases against Nelson and Stakeknife were the enemy, active members of the IRA.  Around the world in warfare,  the consequence of treachery is often death. 

But several of those killed both by the IRA and UDA/UDF, with assistance from British agents, were innocent Catholics and not, as alleged, informers.   The irony is that Prime Minister Thatcher always insisted The Troubles weren’t a war between the  IRA and Britain.   So the IRA were not belligerents.  They were criminals and it followed they should be treated as criminals.  This included not  being given special treatment even if this meant making martyrs out of the hunger strikers.

The Irish Bishops remained steadfastly opposed to armed struggle as a way of solving unjust social conditions, Northern Ireland’s problem of clashing identities, and were supported by Pope John Paul II in a passionate promotion of human rights and rejection of violence in an historic sermon in Drogheda during his October 1979 visit.   “What Christianity does forbid is to seek solutions to these situations by the ways of hatred, by the murdering of defenceless people, by the methods of terrorism”, he said.  His appeal to “the moral sense and Christian conviction of Irish men and women”…. “that nobody may ever call murder by any other name than murder” was anathema to both warring sides in the Troubles and those who spied on them .  
 
 
 
 

The growth of secularism in the last century has resulted in the role of the Christian Churches in television coverage of history often being written out of the script.  This is noticeable in otherwise well-made TV and radio documentaries,  much less so thankfully in historical scholarship.

The three episodes of James Rogan’s  Free Nelson Mandela, screened on Channel 4 in mid-June, provide a study of this failing in a TV documentary.   Crafted to engage an English-speaking and young audience the series has excellent South Africa library footage,  including of Nelson and Winnie Mandela,  and contemporary interviews with his 1980s fellow Robben Island prisoner, James Mange, and also of Albie Sachs,  badly damaged physically by car bomb in 1988, spiritually more intact than most of us.  There are also plenty of chances to hear from decrepit late 20th century musicians and the music from their  solidarity concerts, and to learn about Peter Hain and sports boycotts.   President P.W. Botha along with Reagan and Thatcher star as the villains.  Rogan neglects key players in resistance to apartheid; Communist Parties do not feature even as noises off, nor explored internally as part of the African National Congress (ANC), yet their role was crucial.  Zero on the role of the Churches.  Zero footage of Archbishop Tutu.

Most Gen Z have barely heard of the 1948-1994 apartheid regime,  know what it was, or how the ANC finally came to power.  So the series should be welcomed.  But it shows what happens when a sequence of compelling images is substituted for history.   Because the history of the end of apartheid, like all good history, is a quest for understanding, how one event leads to another, what precipitates change and why.
​ 
Rev. Frank Chikane, a pastor in the Apostolic Faith Mission (AFM), general-secretary of the South African Council of Churches (SACC),  1987-1994, trusted by Mandela, surviving poisoning by the regime in 1989, is captioned as ‘United Democratic Front’, at the time a huge coalition  of civil society organisations supportive of the ANC.   He was indeed Vice-President of the UDF Transvaal Branch for two  years whilst working in the radical Institute for Contextual Theology.   His impact as a Christian leader irrelevant?

You might also conclude from the evidence provided that, when it comes to significant international interventions,  viewers only need  know about the American and British anti-apartheid movements. Though both were gathering large crowds and had been promoting sanctions against South Africa for many years, it wasn’t until  August 1986, after the South African government initiated meetings with Mandela while in hospital in November 1985, that the US Senate passed a weak Bill implementing sanctions. 

Either Rogen doesn’t know, or doesn’t think it important, that inside South Africa the Free Nelson Mandela Campaign was a front for funding the expansion of the ANC within civil society.  In his first term as Social Democrat Prime Minister of Sweden from 1969-1976, Olaf Palme  began humanitarian funding of South African refugees in Central Africa.  He had concluded that the ending of apartheid must not remain another proxy arena for the Cold War, with the ANC solely supported by the Communist Parties of the Soviet Union and East Germany.  So, in the 1980s, he began undercover funding to support the peaceful development of ANC organization within South Africa.  In the fourth year of his second term, 1982-1986, he was shot dead in a Stockholm street next to his wife, almost certainly as a result of this intervention.

Swedish money passed into the country clandestinely through a number of channels: two of the most important were the trades unions and the Churches.   A small group of Christian leaders who were either members of, or supportive of, the ANC included Father Smangaliso Mkhatshwa, secretary-general of the South African Catholic Bishops Conference, Father Albert Nolan, undercover ANC member and Dominican Provincial, and Rev. Beyers Naudé, renegade ordained Minister in the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk (Dutch Reformed Church), and Frank Chikane himself. 

Thanks to wide consultations and deliberation, the group was able to direct Swedish money to where it was most needed in the internal movement.  For example, at the height of resistance, 1985-1986, the apartheid regime was decapitating by repeated arrests the Congress of South African Students, COSAS, the main ANC-front youth organization,.   Anarchy threatened: young people began ‘necklacing’ individuals suspected of being government informants and collaborators,  putting burning tyres around their necks.  The imperative was to fund training for youth leaders to instill discipline.  So via the Christian network COSAS became a funding priority.

Oliver Tambo the exiled ANC leader (1967-1991), made it clear the ANC rejected such violence.   He had founded the ANC Youth League in 1944.  Tambo was himself a devout Anglican Christian.  I remember him meeting Archbishop Denis Hurley of Durban in the then Paddington Railway Hotel in 1983.  Choreographed to enter the hotel by different doors, they met out of sight.    Old friends, big hugs, beer and sandwiches ordered from room service.

The apartheid regime indicted Archbishop Hurley in 1984, not for his support for resistance to apartheid but under the Police Act for exposing - with the help of the Justice and Peace Commission - torture and atrocities committed by  "Koevoet" the apartheid paramilitary police unit in Namibia.    They dropped the case in the upheavals of 1985, then, in October 1988, badly burned Khanya House, the Bishops’ Conference headquarters, in an arson attack.   Two people, a nun and lay worker in the building narrowly escaped death.

As South Africa became ungovernable in the second half of the 1980s, with sanctions biting, the Rand plummeting, Anglo-American knocking on the door of  President P.W. Botha saying the game was up, Christians were playing a significant, if small, role in resistance.  Cricket boycotts, the great solidarity concerts, black protest in the USA and by our UK anti-apartheid movement, built the impetus of the campaign for sanctions.  And sanctions hurt those benefitting from apartheid.  Archbishop Hurley was never convinced it wouldn’t hurt ordinary Africans more.  When we visited Mama and Walter Sisulu (Deputy ANC President, 1991-1994, imprisoned for over 25 years with Mandela) in Soweto, just after his release, they both thanked him for all that he had done. He was much loved.

It was the resistance of those living with fear and the likelihood of arrest and torture, knowing they qualified for a bullet or bomb, building up overwhelming civic resistance and mass organization inside South Africa, who ended a regime which the world - apart from Israel, parts of the Tory Party and Reagan’s Republicans - had turned against. 

James Rogan is right: the massacre of students in 1976 protesting against making Afrikaans the language of instruction in schools was a turning point.  The State’s brutal response drew many into exile and guerilla training while the ANC took off internally  The underground Church focused on youth then - as Pope Leo does today.

History is a pandora’s box of stories left untold.  Rogan’s peg was the 50th anniversary of the Soweto massacres on 16 June.  Our own school children should know why we commemorate this anniversary and, to that end, Rogan does a good job.  It is a shame he 'disappeared' the Christians, and Communists, in the process.  Compelling visuals.  Poor history.
 
 
 
  

A week this Thursday, on 18th June, the Makerfield by-election takes place.  When the exit poll comes out that night it should be launch time for Andy Burnham.  He could burn up on the ramp with a bang or head towards Downing Street.  One poll gives him a ten point lead.  But maybe Reform-inclined voters are hiding from pollsters how they will vote; Burnham may not be a shoo-in.

Meanwhile the Prime Minister is not going to bow out quietly.  He persevered and survived the Corbynistas to  re-shape the Labour Party and win a spectacular general election victory in 2024.  Still holding over 400 of the 650 parliamentary seats, and after only two years in office, his response is legitimate and understandable – if not in the eyes of all beholders. Some 100 Labour MPs have come out in his support.

But it only takes 81 nominating a challenger to trigger a selection process that would most likely bring Andy Burnham in to land at 10 Downing Street.  And, after the evidence from the recent debacle  in the May local elections, there are at least that number who do not believe Starmer could win the next general election.  Ministers have personally asked him to go and junior Ministers have resigned. 

What is rarely calibrated in all this is future public support for Reform during the next three years whoever is Prime Minister; it may decline.  This becomes more likely as Reform Party leadership gains more exposure.  And such a decline would remove a major reason, but not every one, for removing Keir Starmer.

Two factors are at play: hard evidence of votes cast in the May local elections and the response to these results in the Parliamentary and wider Labour Party.  Public disenchantment with the two main Parties has become such that instant, radical change is now seen by many as needed, demanded and expected of a Prime Minister.  For a variety of reasons, it has not been forthcoming.

It is something of a cliché so say the Conservative Party lost the 2024 election rather than the Labour Party winning it.  The focus of Labour’s election strategy was ruthless, but its percentage of votes  was low, and the right wing vote was divided.   As two years have gone by, the shocking degree of disrepair left by successive Tory governments has emerged: for example in the parlous state of prisons, huge backlogs in the courts, HS2 and defense.  Starmer dwelt on this negligence long enough for the question to be asked what was he doing to remedy it?  He has not presented his answer convincingly.

There are three ways of finding the money to keep the show on the road: printing money, borrowing and taxation.  Printing money leads to inflation.  Inflation raises the cost of living as many people are barely coping.  Desperation leads to civil disorder and instability.

Borrowing is part of the problem not the solution.  Rachel Reeves chose to borrow £10 billion in her first year as Chancellor, and in subsequent years £20 billion.  When Labour took over, national debt stood at 101.3% of GDP, £2.7 trillion.  It rose to £2.9 trillion by the end of 2025 (that equals 3.37 trillion Euros compared to France’s 3.46 trillion, and Spain’s 1.7 trillion).  This enormous sum costs  the UK over £10 billion a month in interest payments.

We are paying investors in 10-year UK bonds 4.88% interest compared with France’s 3.68% and Spain’s 3.5%.  And the bond markets would further punish the UK if  borrowing increased to any degree.  The difference with other countries is a measure of the financial sector’s estimation of  relative stability.  When it comes to perceptions of stability, four Tory Prime Ministers since July 2016 doesn’t help, least of all when this includes a - mercifully brief  -exposure to Lizz Truss’ kamikaze economic policy.

So to pump some money into depressed public services there was mainly taxation, already high.  Notably, Reeves first budget raised capital gains tax from 10% to 18% for lower rate payers and from 20% to 24% for higher.  But it was a 1.2% increase in employers’ National Insurance contributions that generated the fiercest and most sustained reaction.  Investors went on strike, as much ‘holding the State to ransom’ - to use the hallowed phrase - as the junior doctors’ strikes .  No investment, no hiring new staff, no increase in GDP.
These are intractable problems and will remain so whoever is Prime Minister.  Under such constrained circumstances incremental gains across a wide front are the only safe way forward.  

The independent Institute for Government’s verdict on Rachel Reeves first budget in October 2024 was to “welcome signs of a coherent strategy” in it.   But it did not take long for the word ‘Plan’ to take on salvific significance amongst the mass media and opposition Parties.  The Labour Party had, and has, a plan for ‘reconstruction’ but it will take at least a decade to achieve results able to garner electoral advantage in an understandably impatient electorate.  Everyone conveniently forgets Field Marshall Moltke’s adage: “No plan survives the first encounter with the enemy”.  And there are several enemies not least the bond markets, the Hormuz straits, and Trump’s obsession with tariffs. 

The widespread perception in Party and public became that a  cautious, legal minded Prime Minister, indecisive in a job  primarily about taking key decisions, hadn’t got a Plan, and was not the right person to carry it out if he had.  Scrapping the two-child limit on universal credit in 2024,  not popular nationally, was an obvious signal to the Party of his true Labour values, and he muffed it. 
  
Keir Starmer has neither demonstrated Gordon Brown’s economic acumen nor does he have Tony Blair’s political touch, “the hand of history” on his shoulder, the ability to engage people in Party and public alike.   You can no more imagine Starmer speaking of ‘a people’s princess’ than using an expletive in public to describe the  interference from Trump and his courtiers in the UK’s domestic policy.

Starmer’s initial support for Israel’s wars, now wavering, has cost him and the Labour Party dear politically.  But in other respects he has shown a firm hand in international relations at a time when international law is collapsing, Trump is a menace and Putin a clear and present danger.  He is respected as our representative, particularly in Europe where he will get the best deal available for the UK’s future relationships with the EU.  He is widely recognized as a decent man, a talented lawyer, and will fight a civilized campaign to stay in power.

If Burnham pulls off Makerfield and then, as expected, beats Keir Starmer in a Labour leadership contest, it would be a dramatic return to national politics for him.  He will re-enter the “Westminster bubble” that  he set in opposition to his Northern identity and successful role as Mayor of Greater Manchester to define himself.  And he will need “a Plan”.
​
The bottom line, though, for Labour members is who best can keep the Trump-lite Reform Party out of Downing Street.  On Thursday 18 June some light will be shed on that question.  On it will hinge who is Prime Minister by the next Labour Party Conference.
 
 

Perhaps we have underestimated the importance of the Pope being  an American speaking a language which well over a billion globally understand.   Many young people around the world learn English as a second language.  And there is something immediate and arresting when Pope Leo writes or makes speeches in our own language about matters of great importance.

There is also the sense that, with Trump and his courtiers in the White House, having the best of America in the Vatican is providential,  essential rather than incidental.  Trump manages to personify much that is worst in the USA.  Leo’s authoritative counter to Trump’s words and policies provides today’s youth with hope for the future and in the possibility of change.

It is not that the Pope and Vatican News have suddenly become demotic, reducing their vocabulary to the popular English cultivated by The Sun – sometimes Oxbridge -  journalists.  There is no fear of long words and sentences and they clearly and accurately express important ideas. There is no talking down to youth or diluting the Christian message for take-away consumption.  The language and embeddedness in previous papal teaching found in Leo’s Magnifica Humanitas is both traditional and typical of the broad expansive themes in the encyclicals of recent Popes.

In the three weeks following its publication we have had much learned commentary on AI and Catholic Social Teaching.  But what stands out in this encyclical?   There is a clear acknowledgement of recent historical humanism that shares many of the Church’s values,  with a willingness to name names and be concrete and specific.    “Certain events make it clear that history can also change when individuals truly take the dignity of everyone seriously: the civil rights movement in the United States of America, closely associated with the testimony of Martin Luther King Jr., or the end of apartheid in South Africa following the release of Nelson Mandela and his decision not to surrender the future to hatred.  In different contexts, many courageous and generous women have also stood out, including Saint Laura Montoya, Saint Teresa of Calcutta, Dorothy Day, Marie Skłodowska-Curie, Maria Montessori, Elisabeth Elliot, Wangari Maathai, Benazir Bhutto and countless others from every continent whose commitment has contributed to making history more humane”. 

This embrace of those who have struggled against injustice extends to what Leo calls “authentic culture and art” which  “preserve this spark, resisting the normalization of evil”.  As a result, he suggests certain works have taken on an almost prophetic significance: “Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony can be seen as a desire for unity; Guernica as a denunciation of dehumanization; Schindler’s List as a call not to consign the past to oblivion”.  This is not someone who thinks a global Church needs to deny its European past.

Citing Beethoven and Nelson Mandela presents an insurmountable criterion for both artistic and moral excellence.  But Leo partially lets us off.  “The twentieth-century Catholic author J.R.R. Tolkien….”, he writes – [approvingly] -  “described our responsibility in this way:  ‘It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.’   The civilization of love will not arise from a single or spectacular gesture, but from the sum total of small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanization.’  This feels comforting and reassuring, fresh, relevant, addressing us and our potential rather than a consistory of cardinals. 

Most importantly, Magnifica Humanitas shows a clear understanding of the preoccupations and anxiety of youth in the UK simply expressed.  It is not only that Gen Z (born 1997-2012) today look unlikely to have “a clean earth to till” and a climate to foster food security in the future. “For young people, job insecurity is particularly devastating.  As the Bishops of the United States of America have recalled, work is not merely a source of income but a crucial sphere in which identity is formed, friendships and relationships are forged, practical responsibilities are learned and one’s vocation is discerned. When access to work is hindered by high levels of unemployment, inadequate systems of training or structural barriers, many young people find the path to their human and professional fulfilment blocked”. 

Older Catholics find themselves in the unusual position of discovering their Gen Z grandchildren looking to Popes for leadership, direction and hope but rarely darkening the door of a church.  Francis gained their respect putting his weight behind countering climate change, manifesting in different ways his concern for the Palestinians, and, overall,  for his spontaneity and  accessibility.  Leo has also won many hearts by following Francis’ lead on these issues dear to youth,  notably by his condemnation of the Israeli and American wars in the Middle East.  Very few are likely to tackle a 42,000 word encyclical but very many are likely to appreciate Leo sharing their concern for their future. 

Magnifica Humanitas ends with the sub-title The Song of Hope: The Magnificat.  Perhaps the Peruvian side of the Pope coming to the fore, the Latin American theme of liberation having the last word?     It took me back to vespers with the Dominicans at their Mayfair priory, Johannesburg in the midst of the anti-apartheid struggle in the mid-1980s: one of the rare times when some of the mighty were being pulled down from their thrones.   Leo provides encouragement  today,  particularly pertinent for the older generation in this threatening time: “ With the same faith as Mary, let us become ‘weavers of hope’ in our world, sharing who we are and what we have, so that the presence of Jesus may grow among us and his Kingdom take shape”. 

True, becoming ‘tessitori di speranza’ rolls off the tongue better than ‘weavers of hope’.   But the reality is that there are a lot more potential weavers who are English-speaking than Italian.