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After 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’.
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"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. What 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. |
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