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.
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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”.
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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.