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“The abuse and manipulation of God's name to justify this and any other war is the gravest sin we can commit at the present time”.
Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, Patriarch of Jerusalem, 17 March 2026. What do Peter Hegsmith, US Secretary of Defence, Naim Qassem, secretary-General of Hezbollah, and Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israeli Minister of National Security, have in common? They all believe that military force is there to fulfill their version of God’s will. Deus Vult, God Wills it. That their use of force does not conform to the laws of war does not seem to bother them. Their own might is always right because it has a divine purpose whether inspired by Christian nationalism, extreme forms of Islamist thinking or Zionist Judaism. Modern warfare has become an exercise in increasing the distance between those perpetrating the killing and the reality on the ground. ‘Collateral damage’ sounds like storm damage - to a building. But those words frequently indicate dead and maimed children, women and other non-combatants. Political leaders, military chiefs and nuclear scientists, called ‘high value targets’, are “taken out”, not assassinated. With them often die their wives, children, and friends; it has been reported that Israel calibrates the number deemed acceptable against the estimated importance of each target. ‘States have “capabilities”: the vast array of technical resources capable of overwhelming an enemy not their capacity to resolve conflict diplomatically. Vague euphemisms, the ‘cuttlefish ink’ Orwell described in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language”, are spurted out daily trying to obscure what television news reveals thanks to courageous war correspondents. At the opposite pole from military euphemism is the word ‘terrorist’, covering a multitude of sins. The once functional definition of terrorism - violent actions by a sub-state actor to achieve political goals by instilling fear in communities is increasingly inadequate. States themselves can, and do, terrorise their citizens. Iran is an obvious example. Sub-state actors become a part of a government, or at some point take over the State itself. If terrorism simply means violence to achieve political aims there is no moral reason not to accuse brutal States of ‘terrorism’ Madeleine Albright, US Secretary of State under President Bill Clinton 1997-2001 pointed out – at a later date - that the United States has often had "limited success when declaring war against nouns”. Slovenly use of language creates a pernicious loop with what Orwell called ‘foolish thoughts’ and with what we today call ‘spin’. This loop characterises the arsenal of disinformation and propaganda used to quieten citizens’ moral concerns about today’s wars. Had he not been a “Christian atheist” confronted by totalitarianism, Orwell might have added how misuse of language and poor theology links to ‘foolish thoughts’ about war and God’s will. Christian nationalists are a good example. Just war theory, both Islamic and Christian, makes the distinction between combatants and non-combatants. But the nature of today’s weapons, modern warfare, the relationships within civil society created by Islamist dispensations, or implanted in other religious communities by propagandists, makes distinguishing actual combatants more difficult. Today’s war in the Lebanon makes it almost impossible. If a war is God’s Will, it seems, the Divine Will overrides moral restraints. Trump and his circle convince themselves with their own misleading language. Given the information available to his Intelligence agencies, the US Administration’s misconception about likely reaction to their attack on Iran is startling. Iran obviously had been long preparing for war and would prove a resolute opponent, drawing in Hezbollah, yet the White House didn’t anticipate blocking of the Straits of Hormuz. Hezbollah’s origins lie in the war between Israel and the Palestinians and Israel’s 1978 and 1982 invasions of Lebanon targeting refugees and the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s (PLO) militia. Lebanon had fallen apart into a civil war between ten different religious communities and their militias, segregated along sectarian lines. Export of its 1979 Islamic revolution was the foreign policy of the Islamic Republic of Iran lead by Ayatollah Khomenei. Hezbollah initially saw itself as an integral part of this new dispensation. In 1983 it placed bombs by the US embassy and marine barracks killing 241 Americans. The Ta’if Agreement mediated by Saudi Arabia and brokered by the Arab League, designed to end Lebanon’s civil war, was signed in 1989: Hezbollah was recognised as the sole militia responsible for future resistance. Modelled on Iran, Hezbollah created a multi-layered pyramidal structure for governance: a Majlis Shura al-Qarar, a consultative council of seven primarily clerical members, Sheik Naim Qassem amongst them, elected every three years by a convention of some 250 Hezbollah top cadres. There are executive, political, judicial, jihad/security and the parliamentary work, councils. By 1992 Ayatollah Khamenei, successor to Khomenei, was recommending Hezbollah adopt a policy of Infitah: participation in Lebanon’s elections. They maintain on average ten deputies in Lebanon’s parliament and are guaranteed two Government Ministers. According to Joseph Daher’s Hezbollah: The Political Economy of Lebanon’s Party of God, Pluto Press 2016, Hezbollah developed organisations for health, education, seminary training, orphans, and emergency aid. Islam compliant loans, zakat tithing, donations and discount cards aided the poor. An extensive education system plus a TV network, radio station and publishing outlets inculcated the principal of Iltizam, religious commitment and adherence to strict Islamist practice including the duty of supporting Hezbollah. Houses were rebuilt after bombing raids honouring the slogan ‘reconstruction, resistance and rebirth’. Disciplined lives became prosperous lives; a Shi’a middle class grew. The vision was a pure society uncorrupted by the West, an Islamic milieu, hala islamiyya, a ‘resistance society’ against the Zionist enemy. The provision of public services and charitable outreach, a ‘combination of consent and coercion’, in Daher’s words, encouraged Lebanese Shi’a acceptance of Hezbollah’s authority. Southern Lebanon, predominantly Shi’a, dotted with small towns with some ancient Christian villages, now under Israeli attack, has an agricultural economy. Its people are farmers plus well-off entrepreneurs, landowners and Hezbollah local government officials. There are possibly 60,000 fighters including part-time reservists and a UN peacekeeping force reduced to 7,500 mandated to secure a buffer zone south of the Litani river. A significant Shi’a community lives in the more mixed northern Beqaa Valley. It is easy, especially in war time, to interpret attempts to understand a party to a conflict as support for that party. Support is clearly not the intention of Daher’s Hezbollah. Nor is it mine. But for several reasons, including future negotiations, ignorance is not bliss as the Middle East today demonstrates. With its armed wing, trained by the Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Hezbollah poses an intractable problem for Lebanon’s army and government. Its rocket attacks provide Israel with their perennial justification for prolonged invasions of Lebanon and the bombing of “Hezbollah strongholds”. Over one million people, 18% of Lebanon’s population, have had to abandon their homes as the invading Israeli Defence Force (IDF) pushes further into the South again. In Dahieh, a densely populated southern suburb of Beirut, controlled by Hezbollah residents cannot easily be sorted into combatants and non-combatants. Bombs hit buildings which collapse burying people under rubble In Dahieh as in Gaza The death toll is already above 1,000, 10% children. An infinite gulf exists between the Will of a loving, merciful and compassionate God and the will to power that States, and non-state actors, exert in war. It cannot be bridged - least of all by euphemistic language, ignorance and disinformation. On his right biceps, Peter Hegseth has a Deus Vult tattoo. A chant from the First Crusade, it marks the clear and present danger of Christian Nationalism.
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Anger and apathy, Bankers and BREXIT, Corruption and COVID, the ABC of Britain’s decline, has determined our recent history. The Venerable Bede wrote in the 8th century that history should record the “evil of wicked men” to avoid sin, while describing the “good things of good men” to encourage virtue. James Macintyre’s insightful and balanced Gordon Brown: Power with Purpose, Bloomsbury 2026, falls into Bede’s ‘good men’ category encouraging virtue even though as the work of a journalist this biography is ‘a first rough draft of history’, and Gordon Brown remains a consequential figure.
Whoever is Prime Minister, the moral and the expedient often clash. Gordon Brown’s political misfortunes arose from tipping the balance towards morality and social justice. Like Angela Merkel and Theresa May, his father was a Protestant Minister. Rev. Dr. John Brown served as Church of Scotland Minister, from 1954 in Kirkcaldy for 13 years, revered enough by Gordon Brown to present a book of his sermons to Pope Benedict XVI in September 2010. But arguably his religious commitments also strongly influenced his political life. At Labour Party Conference in Manchester, September 2009, with polls dropping fast following his indecision over calling a general election, Prime Minister Brown deliberately challenged popular assertions that all parties were the same. He listed the impressive achievements since the 1997 General Election that he had been involved in: half a million children taken out of poverty, Sure Start, child benefit at record levels, numbers of pensioners below the poverty line halved, the Disability Discrimination Act, the minimum wage, the Winter fuel allowance, trebling of foreign aid, debt cancellation for the poorest countries. Then “crime cut by a third, “the shortest NHS waiting times in history” and a “legally enforceable right to early cancer screening and treatment within one week”. For ten years, of course, he had shared these achievements with Prime Minister Tony Blair. He was responsible, as Prime Minister himself, for the first ever Climate Change Act in 2008, and the Equality Act 2010, transposed from EU law, protecting everyone in Britain from discrimination in work, education, housing and provision of services. Compared with these achievements progress during 2010-2023 comes as a shock. In the 2008-2010 global economic crisis Gordon Brown rallied the G7 and G20 around his plan for a $1.1 trillion recovery package taken from national budgets – and taxpayers known as ‘quantitative easing’ to recapitalise the banks, boost demand and counter recession. He admitted responsibility for too light regulation of financial services, failure to spot the dangers of the market for sub-prime mortgages and the banks’ casino culture whilst the Conservative Party wanted less regulation. Brown’s dithering, his fall from grace in the public eye by 2009 and resultant electoral failure, illustrate a number of perennial features of British politics: the influence of the right-wing press such as the Daily Mail and, in the Murdoch empire, notably The Sun, on a public tired and suspicious of politicians, giving no second chances to political leaders it turns against. Labour leaders have always faced headwinds. Clement Attlee, who sustained a radical socio-economic programme for six years despite post-war bankruptcy, was defeated only in 1951. Later Labour governments walked a tightrope: policies promoting a more just society on one side, the imperative of winning general elections to implement such policies on the other. And Brown had a strong moral compass, combined with only a modest ability to connect with, and breakthrough to, a fractious public. Change ‘moral’ to ‘legal’ above and this could be said of Sir Keir Starmer. The turn of the millennium heralded a particularly sharp national decline in Christian faith and church attendance. No politician could safely ‘do God’. Kate Forbes, contender for the SNP leadership, and Tim Fallon, Liberal Democrat leader 2015-2017, were both damaged by disobeying Alistair Campbell’s golden rule. Reviewers have been positive about Power with Purpose focusing on issues of interest to themselves. Thus tensions between Brown and Blair over the years feature prominently, but the chapter “Joy in the Morning: Gordon Brown’s quiet faith” does not. There is only a passing mention in the Church Times which has hosted a podcast on the book instead. But few doubt Brown’s religious upbringing was influential in his politics. Brown became known for phoning NGOs to coordinate public advocacy for overseas aid and debt reduction with his own diplomacy and government action. He was also quite open in his relationship to the Churches and religion. If there is one speech - missed by Macintyre - which illustrates Brown’s Christian motivations and their significance for government policy as Chancellor of the Exchequer, it is ‘Economics of Hope’, his address to the Church of Scotland’s 1999 General Assembly, dedicated to his recently deceased father, a passionate call for debt relief to the poorest nations, increased aid, and the pursuit of the millennium development goals. “For it is our Christian teaching - the faith I was brought up in – that when some are poor, our whole society is impoverished; that when there is an injustice somewhere it is a threat to justice everywhere; that what – as Dr. King said – selfish men tear down, selfless men and women must build anew”. On 24 July 2008, after the ecumenical Walk for Witness in central London led by Archbishop Rowan Williams, Gordon Brown spoke on the moral imperative to reduce global poverty in the courtyard at Lambeth Palace. Brown and the march were promoting the millennium development goals (MDGs) lagging as the half-way mark passed to the 2015 closing date for reaching them. Some 650 Anglican bishops, politicians attending the 2008 Lambeth Conference, plus heads of NGOs were present. This was no sudden embrace of the Churches and NGOs. Brown has even joked about the wrong sort of approach to religion and politics recounting how his father told a story about a fellow minister’s choice of hymns after local elections: “Sometimes the congregation was asked to sing the hymn, ‘Now Thank We All Our God’. When the other party won he announced the hymn, ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind Forgive our Foolish Ways’. And in the event of “no overall control” he could always perform “God works in Mysterious Ways His Wonders to Perform”. Gordon Brown would be the first to say secular values could equally have motivated, and been in play, in government policies that prevailed from 1997-2010. And a quiet faith does not eliminate bad mistakes. But faith values truth in the exercise of power and enhances clarity of purpose. James Macintyre should be applauded for a good title, a good book, and daring to write sympathetically about religion and high political office. “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. At 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. |
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