From Friday 27 January a Yemeni family tuning in to the BBC World Service Arabic broadcasts would be disappointed.  To save £28 million towards a shortfall caused by inflation and freezing of the license fee, BBC radio’s ten language services are being shut down and several hundred staff made redundant.  It’s digital or TV now for those who can afford it.  

Yemen is a destitute, hungry, war-torn country.  Few will have the money to buy a mobile phone to catch the only independent news on-line.    This unseen discrimination against the poorest in the world may seem a minor, distant matter.  But it is small part of a bigger picture.  And we should be concerned. 

For the last few years, the UK has been behaving as if it didn’t have enough money to pursue a coherent Foreign, Commonwealth and Development policy (FCDO).  Yet we were one of the 19 founder signatories of the OECD (Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development) in 1960.  It numbers 38 democracies today.  Its mandate is to promote ‘a collaboration in policy standards to promote sustainable growth”.  It describes development assistance as directed at “economic development and welfare of developing countries”.  Do we really share these goals?  There is growing evidence we don’t. 

In 2021 the aid budget was ‘temporarily’ (weasel words – it is likely to stay that way until the end of the decade) reduced from the UN target of 0.7% of GNP (Gross National Product) to 0.5%.  This amounted to a cut of 21% from £14.5 billion to c.£11.4 billion of which c.£7.14 billion (62.6%) was in the form of direct bilateral aid to individual countries, some of it via the World Food Programme, for example feeding the starving in Yemen.  The overall budget for Yemen was halved in 2021 from £221 million to £114 million.  Yet need continued to grow. 
 
Cuts in spending for Lebanon are another egregious example.  In July 2021, a year after a huge explosion in a port warehouse caused extensive devastation in Beirut, and on top of Lebanon’s economic collapse, the incoming British ambassador, Ian Collard, inherited an aid budget of £140 million cut from £260 million for the period 2019-2020.   According to the newspaper  L’Orient Today a further 2021-2022 cut was scheduled to reduce the budget to c. £32 million.  Lebanon hosts 2.2 million Syrian refugees and over 200, 000 Palestinians. Its total population is 5.6 million, 40% of whom now require humanitarian assistance.   It doesn’t take much imagination to predict the impact of across-the-board cuts of this magnitude on British embassies’ capacity to promote ‘economic development and welfare’.  You might have thought that Lebanon, a failed State, tucked perilously between Israel and Syria, would fall within the Foreign and Development Office priority category, alongside Syria and Afghanistan.  Not so. 

In June 2020 Boris Johnson described the aid budget as a “giant cashpoint in the sky” and amalgamated our development ministry with the Foreign Office.  But who is making the withdrawals and for what purpose?  The Home Office for one.   A more accurate description is the budget for plugging holes - of which there are many such as the rising cost of housing and feeding refugees in this country.
   
We have an aid ceiling in the UK.  So payment of hotels, for food and other burgeoning refugee expenses cannot be covered by adding to the overall budget which  is fixed.  An interesting set of submissions to a December 2022 Parliamentary Select Committee on International Aid on the funding of asylum seekers and economic migrants arriving in UK, (on-line thanks to the Washington and London based Global Center for Development), provides detailed evidence.  12% of the UK aid budget is being used to meet some of the current Treasury shortfall.  And the sum could double.  Just as the effects of climate change are being felt, this means drastic cuts in life-saving humanitarian aid let alone development aid.  £700 million went to East Africa to mitigate the consequences of the 2016-2018 droughts.  £156 million was budgeted for last year’s continuing and no less severe drought. 

Over 150,000 thousand applicants for asylum in Britain are waiting for a decision on their status, tens of thousands have been waiting for over three years.  In Germany, using a UNHCR triage system, the wait is on average 6-7 months.  We are dealing with far fewer Ukrainian refugees than Germany which has issued six times the number of UK visas, or neighbouring Poland which has accepted 1.26 million.  Yet, here in the UK the arrival of 45,750 people in small boats in 2022 is treated as a national crisis while the inefficiency and waste of the Home Office is covered by money taken from the world’s hungry. 

The Home Office under Priti Patel and Suella Braverman appears incapable of managing, timely processing and integrating any arrivals.  Part of the problem is the plethora of un-coordinated special programmes for select categories of refugees from Ukraine, Hong Kong, Afghanistan and Syria.  Home Office staff don’t even have an adequate data-base and rely on spreadsheets.  But at the root is a dysfunctional Home Office led since July 2018, the date of Priti Patel’s appointment, by Ministers simply not up to the job.  They have played to the Conservative back benches while expenditure and backlog soared, rhetoric rather than action.  Pre-Covid, 2018, the government was spending £370 million on refugee costs in the UK.  Today it is projected to be c. £2.7 billion.  And this will come out of the aid budget.
 
The OECD does acknowledge that members may want to fund refugees from their aid budgets for the first year after their arrival [my italics].  But none of the G7 countries are funding most of what are called ‘in-donor costs’ from aid in the way Britain does.  This expedient is not illegal, simply unethical. It is condemned by a wide range of British NGOs concerned with human rights, the plight of refugees and international development aid. 
 
Dipping into the aid budget began in a small way in 2009 under Gordon Brown and expanded under David Cameron. It reached unacceptable proportions under Johnson, Truss and Sunak.  Priti Patel’s more than £120 million Migration and Economic Development Partnership, a deportation scheme in collaboration with an authoritarian African State, Rwanda, further championed by Suella Braverman, is the embodiment of the way our former vision of development assistance, and that of the OECD, has been deliberately degraded.
   
So no surprise.  ‘Global Britain’ is an empty slogan put about in 2016 to provide Brexit with the illusion of grand purpose.    “The whole idea of having a coherent, consistent portfolio of development action has disappeared”, in the words of Geography Professor Michael Collyer of Sussex University.  By 2030 it is reckoned conflict and fragile States will be home to 85% of the world’s poor.  We neglect them at our peril. 
 
Britain does not need empty slogans.  We need to nurture clear foreign and development policy objectives, to pursue them and to hold out for an ethical dimension within a coherent FCDO strategy.  We should not be making the poor of the world pay for the failures of incompetent Ministers. 

See TheArticle  14/02/2023     ​

In The Two Popes Anthony Hopkins as Pope Benedict XVI and Jonathan Pryce as Pope Francis - then Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio - portray two very different personalities but also a touching, indeed charming, relationship between the two.  The Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles’s film is taken up with their - obviously imagined - conversations and discussions.  Who might know to what degree screenplay and reality coincide?  Archbishop Georg Gänswein, Benedict’s private secretary, for one. 

After Francis became Pope in February 2013, Gänswein retained his role as prefect to the papal household but moved to the monastery in the Vatican gardens where he cared for the Pope Emeritus for the next ten years.  On 12 January, with Benedict interred in the crypt of St. Peter’s, and with the help of an Italian journalist, Archbishop Gänswein published Nothing but the Truth: My Life Beside Pope Benedict XVI.
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His story is of Benedict’s exemplary papacy.  He clearly has a filial love for Benedict.  But this is no feel-good story.  Not quite as contentious as Spare, the Duke of Sussex, Harry’s tell-all, but a detailed memoir revealing a lot more than Vatican decorum would normally permit, some of it petty. 
     
Previews of Gänswein’s book revealed written exchanges which showed important unresolved disagreements and tensions between the two Popes.  There was, it seems, disagreement over Pope Francis curbing the growing celebration of the Latin Mass, his opening up of debate on the question of priestly celibacy in the context of the 2019 Synod on the Church in the Amazon, and his openness to considering the plight of couples divorced but in a civil marriage and not allowed to receive communion.  Add to that Francis’ Synodale Weg (Synodal Path), his innovative rolling global consultation on the future of the Church focused on mission, participation and communion.  During 2022 the consultation surfaced more neuralgic issues: the ordination of women – entirely off piste for John Paul II - and the blessing of same-sex marriages.  The message from his opponents: Pope Francis was capitulating to the ‘modern zeitgeist’. 

Publishing Nothing but the Truth, with the moderating and restraining presence of Benedict gone, Gänswein is expressing the views of a minority of bishops.   When Pope John Paul II died in 2005, Cardinal Ratzinger, the intellectual German Professor who became Pope Benedict XVI was the ‘continuity’ candidate.  But Cardinal Bergoglio, the ‘Italian’ Argentine who personified a global Church and reflected the Latin American origins of ‘the preferential option for the poor’ offered a different compass bearing.  He won the second largest number of votes from the assembled cardinals in 2005 and a majority in 2013. 
  
The two Popes shared common concerns and commitments but embodied two different and apparently incompatible visions of the needs and future of the Church, as well as having two different personalities and priorities. Popes don’t just live in an ecclesiastical or theological world.  The context in which they grow up, the historical moment, their experience of life differs and matters. 
  
As an adolescent during the Second World War Joseph Ratzinger, forced into membership of Hitler Youth and conscripted into the army, was forming his views of the world.  He saw National Socialism, a rag-bag of fascist and racist ideas, reduce his country to an unimaginable nightmare of destruction and genocide.  In 1968 as a theology professor in Tubingen he witnessed another rag-bag of political ideas, this time from the student Left, and supported by lecturers, disrupting the university’s intellectual life.  He was deeply, perhaps disproportionately, upset.  I once asked his fellow German Cardinal Walter Kasper if accounts of the impact of this experience hadn’t been exaggerated.    But he confirmed their accuracy.  The events at Tubingen had a lasting effect. 
  
After 1968, Rev. Professor Ratzinger turned from contributing to and championing the aggiornamento of the Second Vatican Council to worrying about to what extremes its ideas might lead.  Whilst serving as Pope John Paul II’s head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he censored and silenced theologians, notably proponents of the theology of liberation.  Was it for fear of what their ideas might develop into and where they might end up? Is it too much to suggest such anxieties might have had their origins in 1940s Germany?
 
On the other hand, many would say that it was during the Guerra Sucia, Argentina’s Dirty War, that the future Pope Francis went through his most critical experiences.  Between 1974 and 1983 when he was Jesuit Superior, the military regime murdered and tortured at least ten thousand of its opponents. Two of his Jesuits who refused to leave their work amongst the poor were taken and tortured by the military.  Reflecting on these events – and others agreed - Francis concluded that he had let his brethren down by failing to confront the regime and by overestimating the effect of quiet influence. 
 
Different formative experiences at different stages of their lives undoubtedly influenced the different leadership styles, personal behaviour, teaching and ecclesiastical priorities of the two Popes. We all have our comfort zones. To all appearances Pope Benedict’s natural environment was a theological seminar, faith seeking knowledge. Pope Francis is naturally at home meeting people, modelling respect for the individual and the simple demands of justice.  In 2017 I was amazed to see him, after a grueling day and a long conference, shaking hands with, and being photographed with, each person emerging from the packed aula.  His theology is as much about ‘show’ as ‘tell’. 

Cardinal Ratzinger as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and loyal servant to John Paul II, nurtured and enforced unity in the Church.  German and Polish experience had taught them that unity based on strength and solidarity was the necessary bulwark against first fascism then bureaucratic communism.  Divisive questioning was not to be tolerated.     Pope Francis believes in resolving questions that beset the universal Church by opening them up even when they are creating divisions.  He is treated with disdain and disloyalty by those who disagree with him.
 
For the last decade, the whole of Francis’ papacy, there have been not just two sources of authority in the Vatican, but two narratives mapped onto their personalities, mind-sets and teaching.  This is not about to stop.  The absence of Pope Emeritus Benedict’s restraining influence will, most likely, sharpen the disagreements and intensify disloyalty to Francis.  The divisive issues are real and important, but as The Two Popes shows, dialogue in friendship with mutual respect and a shared sense of responsibility is always possible.
 
Already battle lines are being drawn up over the election of the next Pope.  It is time passionate partisans find the words “I am right but you’re not wrong”, and for all to acknowledge that the principle “to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction” may apply to the papacy as well as to physics.


See The Article 16/01/2023   
 
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The delayed UK 2021 Census showed that the number of those identifying themselves as Christian had continued to fall and was now less than half of the overall population.   A flurry of news stories brought tidings of secular joy at further evidence of Christianity’s decline, and variations on ‘oh dear’ from the different Churches. 
 
British politicians still generally don’t ‘do God’, nor are they likely to. In this sense they may reflect public opinion, though the present Prime Minister does Diwali.  Pan to President Trump outside St. John’s Episcopal church parish house, Washington, Bible in hand.  US politicians, predominantly Republicans, for a variety of reasons increasingly do God. 

The US Democrats might look enviously at Britain’s comfortable secularity.  Evangelicals make up almost a quarter of the US population of 332 million and dominate American Protestantism.  They share related commitments and attitudes:   to biblical literalism, rejection of ideas other than their own, and for many, strange ideas about the end of the world alongside core Christian beliefs.  In November 2020, White evangelical Christians voted 84% for Trump - up from 77% in 2016 against Hillary Clinton.    The USA is in fact becoming more secular like the UK. Of people born in the US between 1981 and 1996 the respected Pew Foundation reported that 40% said they had no religion.  Yet US politics are becoming more religious. 

Since Reagan (1981-1989), Republicanism has increasingly appropriated the themes of its powerful evangelical backers.  Thanks to the Republicans a package of religious issues, notably abortion, gay marriage, and gender, forced their way into Congress and the Supreme Court.  In the 1970s abortion, Roe versus Wade, was essentially a Catholic issue.  It had become a central evangelical concern by the 2020 Presidential election arousing passionate responses on both sides of the argument. 

Both the leading British Parties in their pursuit of electoral advantage look over their shoulder at the tactics of the two American Parties. Both have used data collection and targeted campaigning.  The Conservative Party has picked up a trick or two from the Republican Party, its wrecking ball tactics, its voter suppression. The Elections Act 2022 demands visual ID on the spurious grounds eliminating virtually non-existent identity fraud.  It will have the effect of discouraging minority, younger and poorer voters.
 
Much of our contemporary insecurity derives from the rise and increased threat of unaccountable, authoritarian regimes, but also from the undermining of democracy by the politics of irrationality, by culture wars, lies and deceit.   The takeover of American Protestantism by evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity decoupled faith from reason providing a religious antechamber to QAnon.  US democracy itself barely survived the stress-test set by Trump.  America’s slide in the last decade into near insurrection at the beginning of 2021, the British government’s rapid descent into the politics of factional farce, give a whole new meaning to the ‘special relationship’. 

David Hollinger in his recently published Christianity’s American Fate presents US Christianity as a religious ‘two party’ system mapped onto the two political Parties.   He labels the old mainstream Churches ‘ecumenical’: open to multi-culturalism and dialogue, at ease with enlightenment and science, committed to social justice - yet finding its congregations drifting away.  The alternative - well-defended, populist, aggressive and burgeoning - Christian communities are immersed in culture wars set on winning at all costs.  Reality is, of course, more nuanced with Jim Wallis’ evangelical Sojourners notable for its ‘social Gospel’.  Pastor Rick Warren’s Saddleback mega-church has charted new territory (see the success of his book A Purpose Driven Life) helping minorities and outsiders and working on AIDS and recovery from addiction. 
  
Roman Catholics like the evangelicals now make up nearly a quarter of the US population thanks to the growing number of Hispanic Americans.  According to the Pew Foundation, the largely Catholic 32 million Hispanic voters split one third Republican two-thirds Democrat.  But interestingly six out of ten White Catholics who attend mass monthly, or more often, voted for Trump in 2020 against 36% for their fellow Catholic Jo Biden.    At this time there were 22 Catholic senators of whom 10 were Republican and 12 Democrat compared to 1965 when all but two of the then 14 Catholic senators were Democrats.
 
Because of the size and wealth of the US Church, the Catholic Church globally has felt the backwash from this growing politicisation. The movement against the present Pope, motivated both by the style and inclusive openness of his papacy, outside the Vatican is primarily US-based.  In August 2018 Archbishop Carlo Viganò the Apostolic Nuncio (Vatican ambassador) to the USA from 2011-2016, led attempts to discredit Francis and push him to resign.  Viganò was supported by some two dozen US bishops.
   
The recently elected leading officials of the US Catholic Conference of Bishops (USCCB) give some idea of the Pope’s problem.   The President is Timothy Broglio, Archbishop to the military services, who in contradiction to the Pope’s message to get vaccinated called for a waiver for troops not wanting COVID vaccination.  Broglio has also linked clerical homosexuality to sex abuse scandals, a widely rejected assertion. 
 
The Vice-President is Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore chairman of the committee on Pro-Life Activities.  Victims of the Maryland clerical sex abuse have called for his resignation.  Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma is chairman of the key Committee on Priorities and Plans and current Secretary to the Conference.  He has spoken out in favour of abolishing the death penalty but has also expressed “deepest respect for Archbishop Viganò and his personal integrity." 

The former President of the USCCB, Archbishop Gomez of Los Angeles and Archbishop Coakley both hold advisory roles to a wealthy business association, NAPA (founded in a late 19th century in a small North California town of that name), which attracts super-rich members with strong right- wing views and Republican sympathies.  It promotes in sympathy with powerful figures in the US hierarchy an ecclesial-political agenda opposed in most ways to Pope Francis' vision for the Church and Society, expressed in his speeches and encyclicals and shared to a great extent here in Britain by the Anglican and Catholic leaderships.
 
The late Pope Benedict who died on New Year’s Eve will perhaps best be remembered in Britain for his Westminster Hall speech on 17 December 2010 about the moral underpinnings of democracy.  He found sympathetic listeners. “I would suggest that the world of reason and the world of faith - the world of secular rationality and the world of religious belief – need one another and should not be afraid to enter into a profound and ongoing dialogue, for the good of our civilization”.  A message the USA Republicans would do well to heed. 

Thanks to the theological common-sense and caution of the Evangelical Alliance in Britain, the Anglican Church and the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales as well as the Scottish Bishops, we have avoided the dangerous ecclesial-political convergence of the USA.  Catholicism and mainstream Protestantism remain wedded to both faith and reason and have an important contribution to make to our weakened democracies.  
 
The New Year holds many problems for both President Biden and Pope Francis who face heavy pressures that are related but different.     The erosion of democracy on both sides of the Atlantic needs urgent remedy.   And in 2023 commentators should resolve to remember that while numbers matter when it comes to church membership, numbers, vide the USA, are not necessarily a sign of good health.

See TheArticle 04/01/2023  
  
  
 
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How are Israel and Iran to avoid war?  Israel is an ally of the USA.   Iran is now an ally of Russia.   Iran is a theocracy with a regime-controlled press, all serious opposition candidates barred from elections.  Israel is a democracy with a free press and hotly contested elections.  Iran is in civil turmoil.  Israel and Palestine are in perennial conflict.  The enmity between Iran and Israel means that for years they have been on the brink of war. 

Whilst the political dynamics in each are, of course, very different the influence of religious extremism displays an odd recent convergence.  The well-known Shi’a extremism of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and Basij volunteers remains the force sustaining Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s theocratic tyranny in Iran against a persistent popular revolt.  But now in Israel the Prime Minister-elect, Benjamin Netanyahu is also beholden to Right-wing and Ultra-Orthodox extremists.  After the recent election he is head of a governing coalition holding only 64 out of 120 seats in the Knesset.

In both Iran and Israel, domestic politics and internal pressures encourage belligerent rhetoric so easily a prelude to military action.  In both countries, recent developments are pushing religious and political extremists to the fore as powerful arbiters of their countries’ future.  Religion in Iran, resting on the Qur’an, is the mainstay of unaccountable tyranny.  Religion in Israel, resting on the Hebrew Scriptures, the Torah, is used by some Jewish settlers to justify the dispossession of Palestinians.  Control of women or possession of land: both purposes considered divinely mandated.     And the problem with divine injunctions is that they brook no negotiation or compromise.

In Britain, there has been extensive coverage of the situation in Iran. Israel has been receiving far less attention.  For that reason the focus here will be on recent political changes in Israel and the rise of religious extremism.

After another round of inconclusive elections, the Israeli President, Isaac Herzog, gave Netanyahu an extension until 21 December to pull together a viable coalition government.  The slim majority he has built gives exceptional negotiating power to three extreme Right-wing and two Ultra-Orthodox Parties.  Here are some details drawn from Israel’s Press.
  
The most notable figure in the new government is Itamar Ben-Gvir, leader of the small Otzma Yehudit Party, hero of the West Bank settlers, a Jewish supremacist with national celebrity status.  In 2007 an Israeli court convicted him of incitement to racism. At the time he was associated with a youth movement declared a terrorist organisation by the Israeli government.  Ben-Gvir is now slated to head a new National Security Agency which will control Israel West Bank Border police. It requires little imagination to predict his effect on the West Bank’s Palestinian population. 
 
Ben-Gvir  teamed up with Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionist Party to win 225,000 votes in the March 2021 elections doubling to half a million in the November 2022 elections.  Smotrich campaigned to become Minister of Justice with the aim of restoring ‘the Torah justice system’, but failed.  Smotrich is a hardliner with an overtly anti-Arab and a homophobic track record.  Such are his extreme views that on a visit to UK this year the British Board of Jewish Deputies told him to go home.  He believes ‘following the Torah will lead to financial abundance’. Netanyahu has appointed him Minister of Finance for the next two years.  The Religious Zionist deal with Netanyahu, just concluded, opens up the possibility of a creeping annexation of the West Bank. 
 
Then there is Avigdor Maoz, a former civil servant and former director of the Ministries of Housing and the Interior.  He is to be a Deputy Minister with responsibility for school curricula and for a new portfolio on Jewish National Identity.  What this means is not clear though for ‘Avi’ Maoz it entails opposition to Reform Judaism, Arabs, secularism and LGBTQ Israelis.  In 2019 he founded Noam, the Pleasantness Party! which holds a single seat, his own.  Another Ultra-Orthodox group led by Yitzchak Goldknopf, the United Torah Judaism Party, will hold the Construction and Housing portfolio.

There is more.  Netanyahu has just concluded a deal with Orthodox Rabbi Aryeh Deri, leader of the Shas Party, making him Deputy Prime Minister. He is the least extreme of the Orthodox minority Party figures, an experienced politician and fixer.  But he has a suspended sentence for criminal tax charges hanging over him.  There will have to be enabling legislation before he can take up ministerial positions.  If Netanyahu succeeds in getting this through, the two top political posts will be held by men facing longstanding corruption charges.

The Shas party holds eleven seats in the Knesset.  Deri is also appointed Health and Interior Minister before replacing Smoltrich when his two years as Finance Minister are up.  This leaves Netanyahu’s Likud with twelve Ministries, most notably Defence, Foreign Affairs and Justice.  
Not surprisingly this future Israeli government has sounded alarm bells in the Biden administration.  But it is also clearly not to the liking of Israel’s military leadership nor, most probably, to its powerful Intelligence services.  The rolling dispossession of Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the West Bank by Jewish settlers, the immiseration of Gaza, was presented by former Israeli governments, including those led by Netanyahu, as in the interests of National Security.  Henceforth an extreme right wing government may openly justify the settler onslaught on Palestinian land as Scriptural. 
 
How has this happened?  Israel has long been able to deal with external threats.  It is the perception of an internal threat that has given the extreme-Right a head of steam.  This fear took firmer hold after the May 2021 melt-down beginning with Arab evictions from East Jerusalem and police-worshipper skirmishes around the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount. Street conflict between Jews and Arabs spread around Israel’s major towns.  In turn this set off attacks and counterattacks from Gaza and the West Bank.  Over 250 Arabs were killed but also ten synagogues went up in flames, 112 Jewish homes burned and thirteen Jews were reported killed. The level of civil conflict and deaths this year remains high.  Such violence lends credence to the extreme-Right narrative of the enemy within. 

Both Israel and Iran have entered a new period of instability with new pressures liable to split their political elites and enhance the sense of threat.  Commentators now believe Iran has probably enough enriched uranium for an atomic warhead and it continues to project its military power in Syria, Yemen and Iraq.  Israel has wanted to destroy Iran’s nuclear capacity since well before the signing of the defunct nuclear accords in 2015. With Iran providing Russia with drones used to attack Ukraine the staying hand of the USA may loosen its grip on Israel.
  
Were Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, however, Tehran’s likely response would be the blockage of the three kilometre wide shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz (33 kilometres wide at narrowest point).  Shipping of over one third of the world’s natural gas and over a sixth of its oil production could stop overnight with catastrophic consequences for the global economy.

The present situation is not one in which peacemakers could gain traction.  But that makes it all the more imperative for moderate leadership of Shi’a Islam and Judaism globally to speak out and intervene at the highest levels possible before it is too late.  The Iranian centrifuges are spinning.  Events are raising the risks of an Iran-Israel war by the day.

See TheArticle  12/12/2022

​“Complete and utter rubbish” (Tony Blair). “A barrel-load of malicious nonsense”(John Major).  These are comments from political heavyweights on the fifth series of The Crown, now in the news.    Netflix must be laughing all the way to the bank.  But I don’t think we should laugh.  What is called “fictional dramatisation” is feeding a culture of misinformation.  Truth is becoming the collateral damage of the communications revolution and the quest for power and profit. 

Perhaps we should be grateful to Kellyane Conway, campaign manager and adviser to President Trump, speaking two days after his inauguration in January 2017.  Trump had been claiming that more people turned out in Washington DC to celebrate his victory than they did for President Obama’s.  Photographs of the two events left no doubt that this was nonsense — in fact, a straightforward lie.  Conway explained in a NBC Meet the Press interview that the President was simply providing “alternative facts”. 

We all jeered.  But she was alerting everyone that the USA was now tuning in to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and the sinister perversion of language he dubbed “Newspeak”.  Believing that Trump was cheated out of the last presidential election is an example of today’s “Goodthink”.  Nothing to laugh at.

The worrying thing is that the cultural elite who laughed at Kellyanne Conway have now embraced her “alternative facts” under its newly assumed guise of “re-imagining”.  In The Crown, for instance, Prince Charles sounds out John Major after an opinion poll has shown that the British public favour abdication.  Following Tony Blair’s election in May 1997 Prince Charles meets the new Prime Minister, hoping to find a way to marry Camilla Parker Bowles, then his “secret companion”, now his wife and Queen Consort.   Neither of these meetings happened. 

It is fine within drama documentaries to imagine conversations between real people, provided these conversations convey a truth.  The late Queen loved horses, so imagined conversations with her trainer can convey a truth.  When drama-documentaries imagine such private conversations, or present the results of hard-won investigative journalism, rather than audience-thrilling inventions, they stand up to scrutiny.
 
The Crown, though, deliberately mixes and blurs fact and fiction, using archive footage to reinforce its story-lines.   Such “re-imagining” joins the tidal wave of misinformation that characterises our postmodern era.  In this post-truth world, disclaimers are overlooked and cultural leaders seem to be parting company with facts in search of ratings.
 
Another king has recently come into focus: Richard III in Steve Coogan’s The Lost King.  The film, released in the UK this October, follows a pattern to which audiences are accustomed and which they enjoy, the story of the amateur who gets it right.  In The Dig (2021) a self-taught archaeologist played by Ralph Fiennes finds the Sutton Hoo Anglo-Saxon burial ship, resists discouragement and shares in the triumph.  In real life he was marginalised by the professionals.  The Lost King has a similar story – an amateur finds the body of a king, rather than a boat.  The screenplay shoehorns the story into the same template, with truth the first casualty. 

Sally Hawkins plays the amateur historian Philippa Langley, who gets it right about Richard III’s burial place despite the University of Leicester’s and its Archeological Services’ attempt to sideline her.   Richard Taylor, the University’s deputy-registrar, describes his portrayal in the film as derisive, obstructive, manipulative, amused at the king’s disability, and even rather sexist, bordering on defamation.  He has no redress.  This raises the question: does misrepresenting a character only matter if he or she is alive to suffer the consequences?
 
How about two centuries ago?  Frances O’Connor’s newly-released biopic Emily raises a further problem.   The Reverend Patrick Brontë’s evangelical curate, William Weightman, appears as the film’s guilt-stricken, hypocritical sex interest.  Emily and Weightman have a passionate affair with sex scenes in the hay.  But the lives of the Brontës are exceptionally well-documented and researched; there is no historical evidence that Emily Brontë had an affair with anyone.
 
The Rev. William Weightman was in reality a pious evangelical who died in 1842 from cholera, which he probably caught while visiting the sick in Haworth parish.  Much loved by his parishioners, he is honoured in Haworth church by a plaque that describes him as a man of “orthodox principles, active zeal, moral habits, learning and affability”. 

Weightman did indeed, as in the movie, send each of the Brontë sisters a Valentine and there is some evidence that there were warmer feelings between him and Emily’s younger sister Anne, but he was clearly no clerical sexual predator or hypocrite.  Does traducing the long-dead Emily Brontë and Weightman matter?  Is Frances O’Connor entitled to “re-imagine” the truth about them for our entertainment?
 
"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,” as Winston Smith obediently says in Nineteen Eighty-Four.  And as Stalin allegedly once said: “It’s difficult to predict the past” — though Putin’s Russia is doing its best.   Newspeak has clamped down on the people of China.  The Democrats are in an electoral struggle to keep crazy conspiracy theories at bay in the USA.  Here in the UK we should not be complacent: a high percentage of Tory Party membership is more than relaxed about a man accused of being an inveterate, compulsive liar holding the highest office of State.  There is real danger that fictional dramatisation is the soft power of the contemporary beast devouring the concept of truth.
 
When the difference between fact and fiction is deliberately blurred, when we can’t distinguish between the two, or can’t be bothered to, we end up accustomed to and reconciled to “re-imagining”, to “alternative facts”, and to falsehoods.  Drama-docs, biopics and fictional dramatisations certainly provide one of the three Reithian principles for the BBC: they entertain.   But we should not forget the other two: it is worth being vigilant to ensure that these art forms also inform and educate, rather than contribute to a culture of misinformation. 

See TheArticle  15/11/2022 
 
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