The House voted No

The right idea? I'm not entirely certain, but I think—hope—so. However, this much I don't merely think, but know: drawing a parallel between Smoot-Hawley and the Republican naysayers is misguided. Smoot and Hawley were Republican congressmen—Smoot, a senator from Utah, and Hawley, a representative from Oregon—who sponsored a bill to impose tariffs on trade in an attempt to resurrect the ailing American economy. It was signed into law by the Republican President Herbert Hoover, against the protests and even pleas of manufacturers, bankers and economists.

It was an attempt to save industry by punishing it, an attempt to secure the free market by squashing it, an attempt to wrong-foot nothing short of human nature itself, and it gave us the Great Depression and the Second World War.

So when we draw parallels between Smoot-Hawley and today, who's on which side? Do we put people on sides according to their roles—a Republicans v. bankers grudge match, and the Republicans lose again—or do we look more deeply? The big mistake of Smoot and Hawley was to try to buck the market, and the Paulson Plan looks like an extremely costly attempt to do the same.

Henry Ford was one of the protesting manufacturers in 1930, and it was he who famously said, "History is bunk." Perhaps if he were alive today he would instead have given way to an earlier thinker on history, George Santayana, who equally famously wrote that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Psalm 95

This Tate & Brady version was originally written with nine four-line verses, but I asked myself (as I often do) whether it would work with eight-line verses. I chose to lose the last three, which are the famed "Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts" section, although it does in fact fit very well. I moved the second verse to the end, as well, because the eight-line verses fit together better that way. I wouldn't recommend doing that to your Bible, though!

Having removed the last section of the psalm, I realised that the tune Creation (adapted from a chorus in Haydn's oratorio of the same name) fits the metre, and I dare you to tell me it doesn't fit the words brilliantly.

O come, loud anthems let us sing,
loud thanks to our Almighty King,
for we our voices high should raise
when our salvation's Rock we praise;
for God, the Lord, enthroned in state
is with unrivalled glory great:
a King, superior far to all
whom gods the heathen falsely call.

The depths of earth are in his hand,
her secret wealth at his command;
the strength of hills that reach the skies
subjected to his empire lies;
the rolling ocean's vast abyss
by the same sovereign right is his;
'tis moved by his Almighty hand,
that formed and fixed the solid land.

Into his presence let us haste,
to thank him for his favours past:
to him address, in joyful songs,
the praise that to his name belongs.
O let us to his courts repair,
and bow with adoration there;
down on our knees devoutly all
before the Lord our Maker fall.

Tate & Brady

EDIT: Thought about it a bit more and decided you can't very well fall and then hasten, so I swapped the last verse about.

How do you solve a problem like the bin day?

Daniel Hannan frets that the next Conservative government may "go soft" on localism. Given that this morning's news was that Osborne wants to have an unelected quango keep a check on government spending—isn't that a large part of Parliament's job?—and Pickles wants to micro-manage our rubbish collections, one might wonder what else they're going to try to run from Whitehall. Well, Osborne would freeze council tax increases.

Contra Hannan, I'm not so hot on referenda, apart from on constitutional matters, as we live in a representative democracy, but our schools, hospitals and police services are all in desperate need of proper devolution, allowing the people on the ground, who know what the local situation needs, to manage the services for the benefit of those who use them.

It's inevitable, as Hannan also observes, that the closer a party gets to power, the less localist it becomes. One of the main benefits I was hoping the current Conservative front-bench would bring—one benefit among a limited number—is a more decentralised state; I was under no illusions that the decentralising instinct wanes as power approaches, but I hadn't expected it to be quite this bad. Here's hoping their proximity to power doesn't completely quench their enthusiasm for letting local people decide how to run their local affairs.

Under-Secretary John Byng?

The BBC reports that official who left top-secret intelligence documents on a train will be charged with the lowest level of offence under the Official Secrets Act, recognising that there was no criminal intent, just sheer ineptitude. On the one hand, you feel for the poor chap who was stupid enough to do this: he'll already have had his clearance revoked and been put in some lowly desk job elsewhere, and now he's being treated far more harshly than any of his colleagues who only lost details of the nation's children or something equally unimportant. But on the other hand, government data loss seems to be becoming dangerously routine; perhaps it is getting to the stage where, as Voltaire might have written, dans ce pays-ci, il est bon d'incarcérer de temps en temps un fonctionnaire pour encourager les autres.

Bradford, Bingley, Bust

After a few weeks of hoping that the Bradford and Bringley might just squeak through the credit crunch as an independent concern, or at the very least get bought up by a competitor, at last we know: the Bradford & Bingley is to be nationalised, its organs harvested, and then sold off as expeditiously as possible. By contrast with the government's wheeze with Northern Rock, which was to nationalise it and run it as a going concern, this is a positive step. Since the recent correction began, I've become slowly convinced that what we need is a system of public receivership similar to that of the United States, where the State catches a failed bank and sells off the pieces in an orderly fashion, thus avoiding contagion without introducing moral hazard. The orderly nature of the sell-off should ensure that the assets are not sold as "distressed", and as a result, fetch a price more reflective of their value, meaning that creditors, and in rare cases even shareholders, stand a better chance of getting some of their money back—eventually.

As a result of all this, the Chancellor is bringing forward legislation after the parliamentary recess. It will be very interesting to see exactly what he proposes as a long-term resolution.

Incidentally, here's an interesting Times article from almost exactly a year ago: US bank collapse is largest in 14 years.

Disclaimer: I have a small interest in the B&B. When I say "small", everyone's interest will be small; mine is just particularly small.

Lots in a name?

The Duchess of Alba, apparently a celebrity figure in her native Spain, is in the news for the usual celebrity problem: marriage, or the lack thereof. As is appropriate for a duchess, she is called Maria del Rosario Cayetana Alfonsa Victoria Eugenia Francisca Fitz-James Stuart y de Silva, which isn't so much a name as a small village.

And what's the Fitz-James Stuart doing in there, I hear you cry. Well, James FitzJames was the first Duke of Berwick, although he forfeited the title by attainder when his father, James II—which explains the Stuart—was exiled. But small hiccoughs like exile don't stop minor nobility's aspirations, and because there was a slight question mark over whether the forfeiture was properly carried out, the title was perpetuated. As is usual in this cut-throat world, mergers and acquisitions activity continued, and by the usual process of heredity coupled with appropriate deaths, the House of Alba eventually fell into the grubby mitts of the Duchy, which immediately re-branded itself, presumably with stickers proudly proclaiming, "New and Improved!"

It all makes the ambition of our peers seem positively anaemic, really.

Moral Maze, 24-Sep-2008

The Moral Maze, which seems to be turning more into the Political Maze every week, was this Wednesday all about religion, politics and the whole church-state thang. I'll save you a blow-by-blow account, but the first fifteen minutes or so are worth the entry fee, if only to hear Melanie Phillips and—I think it was—Clifford Longley both lay into Terry Sanderson of the National Secular Society, basically for being exceptionally disingenuous in claiming the objects of the NSS are simply to fight for a "neutral" space in which religious, irreligious and non-religious alike can participate. The way he presented the Society's aims was clearly aimed at making it sound as if the religious could agree wholeheartedly with his goal, as indeed many could, if that purely his objective. "Secularists aren't worried about religion, but about the separation of church and state," he opined.

But Longley actually quoted from the objects of the Society, which include the gem,

[The NSS] asserts that supernaturalism is based upon ignorance and assails it as the historic enemy of progress. (Source)

(I might add that the NSS website has a page encouraging people to 'de-baptise' themselves.) Anyway, cue much back-pedalling, and maniacal laughter from where I was sitting as Sanderson tried to justify the ways of atheism to man.

The next witness was Steve Chalke, who basically claimed to have absolutely no interest in seeing other people become Christians. I'd like to say I was disappointed, but to be honest, I half-expected him to say something dopey like that. Why the MM team invite Chalke is beyond me: the guy may be nice, and media-savvy, and all that kind of thing, but he's not exactly a deep thinker.

And briefly to close: Melanie Phillips rather needs to be disabused of the notion that we are a 'Christian country', while retaining her historically accurate perception that the Christian influence on this country was responsible for our liberal British values; I think I'd have preferred to have heard someone who takes a more thought-through and classically Protestant view of the church and state relations; and I think I'd have preferred to have had Claire Fox, with whom I would probably have disagreed violently, on the panel rather than Kenan Malik, who I thought didn't add terribly much value.

In all, probably 3 out of 5. Not brilliant, but some points of interest.

Augustine on magnets

I thought I'd hunt it down and share it with y'all. It's lovely, because it expresses in adult language the amazement that we probably all felt as children playing with magnets, before our teachers went and spoilt us with all their head-learnin'.

We know that the loadstone has a wonderful power of attracting iron. When I first saw it I was thunderstruck, for I saw an iron ring attracted and suspended by the stone; and then, as if it had communicated its own property to the iron it attracted, and had made it a substance like itself, this ring was put near another, and lifted it up; and as the first ring clung to the magnet, so did the second ring to the first. A third and a fourth were similarly added, so that there hung from the stone a kind of chain of rings, with their hoops connected, not interlinking, but attached together by their outer surface. Who would not be amazed at this virtue of the stone, subsisting as it does not only in itself, but transmitted through so many suspended rings, and binding them together by invisible links?

Yet far more astonishing is what I heard about this stone from my brother in the episcopate, Severus bishop of Milevis. He told me that Bathanarius, once count of Africa, when the bishop was dining with him, produced a magnet, and held it under a silver plate on which he placed a bit of iron; then as he moved his hand with the magnet underneath the plate, the iron upon the plate moved about accordingly. The intervening silver was not affected at all, but precisely as the magnet was moved backwards and forwards below it, no matter how quickly, so was the iron attracted above. I have related what I myself have witnessed; I have related what I was told by one whom I trust as I trust my own eyes.

Let me further say what I have read about this magnet. When a diamond is laid near it, it does not lift iron; or if it has already lifted it, as soon as the diamond approaches, it drops it [this seems unlikely — Ed.]. These stones come from India. But if we cease to admire them because they are now familiar, how much less must they admire them who procure them very easily and send them to us? (City of God, XXI.4)

The rest of the chapter, and its successor, contain some more phenomena, some of which are clearly myth, but others are known even to secondary school students. If you enjoy a puzzle, and have a decent science education, it's an amusing exercise to classify and identify them.

I just noticed…

I was reading a BBC news article, and it struck me: I don't think I've ever seen a BBC news article using, outside quoted speech, more than one sentence per paragraph. I'll bet even The Sun manages to do better than that, and they probably use more complicated sentences than subject-verb-object, too.

He said what?

Normally, I dismiss people who think that America could be sleep-walking towards fascism as conspiracy theorists and cranks. Today, I think I wish we knew more about the story of the famed mathematician, Kurt Goedel, who thought it possible to sneak a dictatorship past the US Constitution.

Why? Firstly, fascism sensu stricto entails an excessively cosy relationship between big business and big government; in fact, this is almost the definition of fascism. And secondly, on The World at One, I just heard a newsworthy American—dunno who, I missed the introduction—describe Congress as "not very efficient at law-making because of the bipartisan division." Yeah, those annoying congressmen and senators, talking and asking questions and disagreeing with each other! So much more efficient to have just one man take all the decisions…

Can theologians be trusted with anything?

I earlier commented that ministers of the church should leave illiteracy in the dismal science to ministers of state. I don't know who would be the glad recipient of an illiteracy in hard science, but Franz Delitzsch proves it necessary. On a minor point in Genesis 9:8–17, he writes,

The establishment of the rainbow as a covenant sign of the promise that there should be no flood again, presupposes that it appeared then for the first time in the vault and clouds of heaven. From this it may be inferred, not that it did not rain before the flood, which could hardly be reconciled with Gen. 2:5, but that the atmosphere was differently constituted; a supposition in perfect harmony with the facts of natural history, which point to differences in the climate of the earth's surface before and after the flood.

Clearly, there are some topics on which Delitzsch was a simple idiot. He was living in the nineteenth century, for Pete's sake, and he didn't understand how rainbows form. I've known the answer to this old chestnut since childhood; I think I might have run across a strict literalist who took this position, and realised immediately its weakness. On the other hand, to be fair to the chief proponents of literalism, AiG list this rainbow-myth as a factoid to be denied. They cite favourably exactly the same source I would cite, and I would add, lisez Chauvin, c'est notre maitre a tous.

From these words certain eminent theologians have been induced to deny that there was any rainbow before the deluge: which is frivolous. For the words of Moses do not signify, that a bow was then formed which did not previously exist; but that a mark was engraven upon it, which should give a sign of the divine favor towards men. …

Hence it is not for us to contend with philosophers respecting the rainbow; for although its colors are the effect of natural causes, yet they act profanely who attempt to deprive God of the right and authority which he has over his creatures.

Sometimes, it's quite sweet to read pre-17th century sources for their scientific innocence—there's a delightful passage of Augustine in which he describes, without a shade of understanding, magnetism—and then there are times when it's really quite refreshing to see how much they actually knew.

Give up yer aul sins!

In the 1960s, a television crew went to a Dublin school to film children telling their teacher Bible stories: well, I say Bible stories. Quite apart from the story of Saint Patrick, some of the little details rather make one wonder quite what the priest was telling them.

A team of Irish animators put cartoons to the voices, and has won awards all over the world for the resulting series of short films. The title comes from the very first episode about the death of John the Baptist, but here's one of the little darlin's explaining the birth of Jesus. Watch out for Herod, in "shocking tempers."

Well, well…

I never thought I'd get an interesting exegetical point from In Our Time, but they're doing "Miracles" today, and they've got Janet Soskice, Reader in Philosophical Theology at Cambridge, who is a Roman Catholic with her finger firmly on the pulse. She made the point that New Testament miracles exhibit a great continuity with Old Testament miracles in terms of their function and they are signs pointing to who Jesus is. And she pointed to the disciples' reaction, "Who is this, that even the wind and waves obey him?" and linked it to Psalm 107:

Some went down to the sea in ships,
doing business on the great waters;
they saw the deeds of the Lord,
his wondrous works in the deep.
For he commanded and raised the stormy wind,
which lifted up the waves of the sea.
They mounted up to heaven; they went down to the depths;
their courage melted away in their evil plight;
they reeled and staggered like drunken men
and were at their wits' end.
Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble,
and he delivered them from their distress.
He made the storm be still,
and the waves of the sea were hushed.

I have a faint memory of being pointed towards this before—the bit about reeling and staggering like drunken men is ringing bells—so perhaps this has been pointed out to me in a sermon before, and I've just forgotten. But I'm unlikely to forget it now!

BBC: Archbishop condemns City traders

The Archbishop of York has called share traders who cashed in on falling prices "bank robbers and asset strippers". (article)

If you're a minister of the church, you might prefer to leave economic illiteracy to ministers of state who are, after all, the experts.

Short-selling is not a problem "because it drives share prices down". Ordinary selling does that, too. All short-selling does is allow market participants to benefit from a drop in the share price, thereby revealing disparities between the market price and the 'real' price (whatever that means) more quickly. Moreover, short selling increases liquidity in the markets, keeps the wheels of ordinary trading rolling and allows people to take moderately complicated trading positions. The classic example is the pairs trade, where a trader shorts one company and goes long on the other, hoping that the long company will out-perform the short one.

Now, there is a danger with short-selling, as anyone paying attention to the news earlier this year will appreciate: fear, uncertainty and doubt are an unholy trinity which can easily send share prices reeling for no apparent reason. Therefore, short-sellers, who have a material interest in seeing a particular share's price plummet, have an incentive to spread malicious rumours in an attempt to cause that very event to occur. However, this isn't a fault of the mis-understood and much-maligned short-selling process, any more than the occasions when people pump up a share price with mis-information are a fault of the long-buying process.

So let's have a little sympathy for the shorters, shall we? They could lose potentially unlimited amounts of money, they're badly mis-understood, and they're being picked on by people who should know better. And also the Archbishop of York.

Closing the loop

Why liberalism?

Following on from Matthew Parris' article, relayed yesterday, and also from Nick Clegg's conference speech, which I watched on Wednesday, I thought it might be a good opportunity to recapitulate why I am and shall remain a liberal, committed to freedom for all and in all. As an exercise, I think it particularly interesting because, as I commented recently, Nick Clegg is very much 'my kind of liberal'.

Now, Clegg explained his liberalism in terms of a belief in the fundamental goodness of man. He said,

My basic view of human nature is that people are born with goodness in them. Of course, people can be selfish, cruel or violent, but I believe no-one starts that way. Most people, most of the time, will do the right thing: not just for themselves, but for their family, their neighbours, their community. They need to be trusted to make those choices. (Source, with edits.)

This will be a major shock to regular readers, so I'll break it to you carefully: I don't agree, at least not entirely. We aren't born with goodness in us, and we start with much more than the mere capacity for selfishness, cruelty and violence inside us. Chesterton is credited with observing that original sin is perhaps the only Christian doctrine which can be proved empirically, and we do well to heed the warning.

So why am I a liberal, if people are nasty, brutish and short(-tempered)? It's actually quite simple, and having cited Chesterton, it seems only just to cite Lewis, who said that he rejected slavery because while it may not be the case that no men are fit to be slaves, it is certainly the case that no men are fit to be masters.

Now, thus far I can go with Clegg: people generally don't behave in a completely misanthropic manner at the level of family and community; however, I would say this is because it's not in their own best interest to do so. Furthermore, we all know that even at this level, things can so easily go wrong. So I'm not a liberal because I think that everyone will just rub along and do the right thing if allowed to. It's demonstrably not true, and anyway, even if it were, I'd be a totalitarian: life would be so much easier if we had exactly one person who was "allowed to", a benevolent dictator telling us all when to jump, and how high.

No, I'm a liberal because I trust no-one—not even myself—enough to give them that kind of authority and, if you will excuse the lapse into maths-speak, I see the function as monotonic: the more power you have, the less I should trust you. So let's hear it for freedom, both the freedom to allocate your money as you wish, and the freedom to spend your time in the manner of your choosing!

Merlin, BBC One, 7:30pm

I watched Merlin, the new BBC One Saturday evening telly series, today. It's meant to a sort of "when they were young" for the story of the eponymous hero and his liege, Arthur Pendragon. I expected it to be perhaps mildly more interesting than Robin Hood and it didn't wildly exceed expectations; I'll probably watch it next week to see if it improves, but it's certainly no Doctor Who.

At least in Doctor Who, you expect inconsistencies with life as we know it. Well, this is the story of Merlin, so telekinesis and shape-shifting witches are all par for the course: but there are the customary persons of historically-unlikely ethnicity, which are somewhat distracting (you spend the next twenty seconds thinking, "Wasn't that girl Chinese?"), and then there's this trend for a kind of 'levelling' of Dark Age aristocracy, present in most modern films set around the era, which I find profoundly odd. Add to that a friendly dragon which talks to Merlin and tells him what to do, and the whole thing just seems, well, weird.

I'd think I'd probably be happier if the stories were handled what I'd call "properly": a bit more "strange women lying in ponds distributing swords" and a good deal less "supreme executive power deriving from a mandate from the masses", that's what they need.

Incidentally, I did wonder, thinking about Doctor Who while watching Merlin, whether anyone had ever written a space opera re-telling of the Arthur legend. Be nice to know of if it has happened.

Where did all our principles go?

After Anatole Kalestky asked, "Where did all the capitalists go?" last week, Matthew Parris in today's Times goes one—actually, one hundred—further, asking, "Where did all our principles go?"

He observes, with deadly accuracy, that especially in the UK, "ours is an age that has grown impatient with belief-systems in politics." To summarise his argument in the words of someone else, we appear to be giving up essential liberty for temporary security. We give up our economic liberties, expecting the government to use taxpayers' money to bale out failing companies and save economically unproductive jobs. We give up our civil liberties so that innocents, mostly ethnic and religious minorities, can be locked up without charge to make us feel 'safer'. We give up jury trials so that the suspicious can be thrown into prison more swiftly.

Parris is also right, I think, to identify our Anglo-Saxon and Scottish 'common sense' heritage, such a bulwark in other situations, as our chief failing. Pragmatism may be described as the all-American philosophy, but it certainly grew out of the British tradition, and we're left doing 'what works'. Not that 'what works', again as Parris rightly says, is entirely wrong-headed. People die in car crashes, so we make seatbelts compulsory. Landlords behave in an appallingly racist manner, and eventually we get the Race Relations Act. But we end up pressing this too far: and, warns Parris, the very principle of democracy itself would not be immune to such reasoning.

We live in an era in which the word 'ideologue' is an insult, when in fact it's a glorious word. It means that people actually talk about ideas, and about what makes for a good society, rather than the mere pursuit of 'what works'. The last Prime Minister could not even answer a simple question about political philosophy: wouldn't it be far better to have a Prime Minister, and a party, which knew the principles which are worth pursuing and pursued them?

None of the above should be taken to prejudice my earlier remarks on political philosophy, noting that you can have too much of a good thing. Moreover, I continue to agree with Parris that liberty is the value that we should cherish and hold to.

Torygraph: Government borrowing up 70%

Read all about it.

Now, if you or I were burdened with debt and struggling to pay the bills, we'd either try to increase our income or we'd spend less. The one thing we wouldn't do, if we were being sensible, is go to the bank and take out yet another massive loan. Why is it considered prudent to do to a country what would be reckless to do with a household?

Keeping the rumour-mill in check

I just received a text message which must have passed through numerous phones to get to me. If I've received it, then a reasonable number of others will have; perhaps some will find this post through Google. For comparison, then, the message is about persecution in India and is signed "Pst Steve Murrell,Dubai."

Although I can confirm, from contact with a friend in Sri Lanka, that the message itself is slightly inaccurate and a few days out-of-date, recent reports show that there are startlingly high levels of persecution in Orissa at present; Christians have fled, churches are on fire. If you pray for the persecuted church, don't forget Orissa.

UPDATE: my thanks to Steve Murrell himself who dropped by here to comment, as well as posting on his blog, that the text message doesn't even come from him. I'll repeat: the information in the text message is, in its details, inaccurate or out-of-date, but the overall message, that Orissa has recently experienced and is in danger of continuing to experience high levels of religious violence involving Christians (sadly, sometimes not only on the receiving end), is not untrue.

You don't have to be exasperatingly obtuse to work here, but it helps

I needed to ring the Revenue to get some tax and NI returned to me because I never pay either. I hasten to add, because I never earn enough and not because I'm a serial tax-evader. Getting the tax back was the easy part (or at least, I assume it'll be the easy part; it's meant to come next time I get paid), but the NI…

First phone call, I fail the security check and get directed to the local jobcentre to check what my records says. Much to-ing and fro-ing later, I discover that my record hasn't been updated by the Revenue since I first got my NI number and card. Can you believe it! I've moved at least three times since then, and they've been told my new address through the tax system at most of those addresses.

So, after I get over the initial dumbfoundedness of discovering that the HMRC is even more manifestly incompetent than anyone could have thought, I steel myself to telephone them again. Armed with my new discovery, I can confidently give them my details: "Currently, I'm living at Such-and-Such but your records probably say So-and-So"
"Oh," says the lady on the other end, "that must mean you can't have many dealing with us."
"Yeah," says I, "and when I do ring, I fail security because your records are out-of-date."

So, we move on to the question having my NI returned. "And why do you want to get it back?" asks my interlocutress.
"Because I didn't oughter pay it."
"What makes you say that?"
"Because I earn less than any threshold you'd care to name!"

And so we press on. "So were you paid weekly or monthly?"
"Neither; I'm paid on a contract basis."
"But were you paid weekly or monthly?"
"Look, this is what I'm trying to tell you. I get paid when the work's done: it's not weekly, it's not monthly, it's not regular."
"But what about the period for which you're claiming NI back?"
"This IS the period I'm claiming NI back for!"

Eventually, she concluded that I ought to write a letter to the NI office, giving my name, NI number, address, employer's address, copies of every bit of paper relating to the claim and probably my inside leg measurement (which hasn't been updated since I was 3, no doubt). And then I suppose they'll write back and tell me that over-paid NI isn't their responsibility and I ought to write to the Milk Marketing Board. Argh!

On the plus side, there's got to be someone with a bit of nouse at the Revenue: hiring the exasperatingly obtuse is a cunning ploy on their part.

First Ecusa casualty

Ecusa has defrocked the Bishop of Pittsburgh, by a majority vote of 88 to 35 (4 abstentions) (via, also). His crime? "An open renunciation of the Doctrine, Discipline, or Worship of this Church" in describing the appointment of Gene Robinson as a "[departure] from the historic faith and order of the Church of Jesus Christ."

In addition to an article linked by the CT blog, there's also a piece in Religious Intelligence suggesting that the actions of the Presiding Bishop in bringing this action have run against canon law at almost every possible point; the suggestion is that if Bishop Duncan chose to have his day in court, he'd almost certainly win [1]. He may, of course, have decided that he simply wants out, and who would blame him?

At least when Rome kicked the true church out, she did it conclusively rather than piecemeal, and—which matters most, naturally—with style.

[1] Of course, quite apart from the legal question, there's always this biblical conundrum: how exactly do we see a passage like 1 Cor. 6:1–8 in this situation?

Who's the (H)BOS now?

My only excuse is that it was begging to be done.

Clarification

Robert Peston isn't to be trusted, and is an idiot (see? Google is always right). The government will be using existing legislation (confirmed this morning by Alistair Darling on Today) to over-ride the Competition Commission.

I've also come to a view on the Lloyds-HBOS merger as a shareholder. I'm not entirely convinced of the merits of the case from a business point-of-view, and I don't much like the equity issue. It means that my 375 Lloyds shares will become, in effect, 210 Lloyds shares and nearly 200 HBOS shares (currently; that's 165 "new" HBOS shares), if my sums are correct. Now, the issue makes sense if Lloyds shares are over-priced relative to HBOS shares, but I don't think that's the case. I know no bank wants to spend cash at the moment, but I would have preferred to see HBOS shareholders offered some cash rather than an all-share deal, as it would also have ensured that Lloyds shareholders weren't so nearly out-numbered.

Moreover, the dividend policy for the enlarged group is to issue scrip for this year, and next year they'll pay out 40% of earnings, which at least will be similar to Lloyds' policy previously. So that's, in effect, a passed dividend. Lloyds hadn't announced any intention to pass a dividend, although HBOS, of course, had, given that you can't hold a rights issue and pay a dividend.

Lloyds shares are down nearly 7% at the time of writing, in a market which is down less than 1%.

On a wider note: Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers—Morgan Stanley? Blimey.

For my visitors from Google…

I do have a little statistics compiling cookie which keeps track of how people get here; it's quite handy to know who's linked to me and so on. And I do enjoy reading the searches which bring people here; they're always good for a laugh. Today, for instance, I discovered I'm number two on Yahoo! UK for "THE BEST THING IN THE LIFE OF ISLAM". Poor chap got something quite different, I fear. There's also a surprising number of people who land through that picture of a baobab with which I illustrated my post a while back about the fruit of that tree. But perhaps the most memorable search is from a class of people who haven't quite found what they're looking for from me. So, for the benefit of those numerous visitors whose searches reveal what they really want me to say, and especially on account of the chappy/chappess from Deutsche Bank who dropped by today, I'll tell you want you all evidently want to hear.

Robert Peston is an idiot.

There's nothing like pandering to the "disgruntled banker" demographic, eh?

Amputation, the only solution

Danny Finkelstein proposes abolishing the Labour party (bankrupting it isn't enough, apparently). This wheeze would allow the Lib Dems to sit as a left-of-centre liberal party as the Tories' opponents. Apparently, the Lib Dems may be annoying, but Labour is unnecessary, and this would see the path clear to making Vince Cable Prime Minister, which in fact sounds quite sensible. He describes, in a manner I could never hope to emulate, the paradox at the core of Labour's democratic socialism—or, if you're a Blairite, social democracy—which is that

democratic socialism was founded on a spectacular misunderstanding about the world. Its proponents seriously believed that they could easily control everything while still being democratic. Throughout its entire history Labour has been backing away from a programme that was entirely impractical.

In a sense, that describes what happened to me as I started to ditch the socialism-in-a-market I used to believe in as a young adult (although to my shame, I also wanted wage caps): I began to realise that you just can't run everything, and the strong arm of the State will never work as well as the invisible hand of the market.

And this just in: Robert Peston, the exaggerater extraordinaire, is reporting that in order to smooth (smooth? ride roughshod! - Ed.) over any objections the Competition Commission may have regarding the mooted Lloyds-HBOS merger, the Government will legislate to itself the power to over-ride that body and the OFT. Great, yet more ill-thought-out and rushed legislation which will no doubt insinuate itself onto our statute book permanently. As a shareholder, I probably ought to take a view on the proposed merger, but frankly, I don't have the heart at the moment.

New banner

The words come from the Book of Psalms for Singing's metrisation of Psalm 73:23-28.

Metadiscussion: too hot to handle

The Reverend Professor Michael Reiss, scientist, Church of England minister, and Royal Society education director, has been asked for, and has tendered, his resignation from the latter position owing to his comments last week about creationism. He said that it should be discussed—discussed—in science classes if raised by pupils. Now, I'm not what you'd call much of a friend towards young-earth creationists, but even I can see that this is a bit rich. The Royal Society, apparently, thinks that even discussing discussing creationism is a bit too near the bone, and has given Reissers the chop.

'Cos this is how science works, see? We look at the evidence, decide, deduce and determine; and once that's done, we don't then go wasting our time looking at the evidence again or continuing to debate and discuss. After all, what good is that? It'd be like revisiting Newton's theory of gravitation: we all know that's settled, and there's no improv—

Oh no he won't! Oh yes he will!

This morning, 'a source close to' Des Browne had gone on the record as saying that his friend and junior colleague at the Scotland Office, David Cairns, wasn't the minister rumoured to be contemplating resignation. This afternoon, Downing Street confirmed that Mr. Cairns has resigned. I feel compelled to remind readers of Lady Bracknell, and no, I'm not referring to handbags. Moreover, one hopes that Des Browne has a better grip on his brief than on the inner turmoils of his friends.

As you will know, cairns are piles of rocks found in Scotland, which often mark high points and graves. The question today is whether this Cairns too will mark a Scottish political high-point and a Scottish political grave.

Of chickens, eggs, works and faith

On our church's web-page, you can read the following description under "About us".

The church's vision is:

"Knowing, living, sharing Christ"

which is expressed in the following ways

• Service : Being equipped to use gifts in service – both in church and in the world.
• Worship : Encountering God in church services, groups and in life.
• Outreach : Spreading the good news of Jesus Christ, from Priory Street to the other side of the world.
• Relationships : Using our relationships to be role models pointing towards Christ.
• Discipleship : Learning how to follow Jesus better and making new disciples

Source

Of course, as aims they're not bad as such, it's just, well, look at it this way. There is a prominent poster displaying this in the lobby as you enter, smack in your eyes as you walk in, pretty much. The only document with anything like a summary of beliefs (the EA basis of faith which cannot possibly, because we are congregationalists, be our church confession) is pinned to a board in the corner of the back hall, and normally obscured by a door.

In short, at York Baptist, credo has been displaced by we do.

The good news, and I certainly wish neither to count my chickens nor to tempt fate, is that I may slowly be making some progress on this point. A reasonable and reasonably long chat with my pastor yesterday morning saw him, I think, begin to see why the issue of confessionalism ought to be taken more seriously than it has been. This will call for wisdom, especially as I need to know at what point one stops pushing and lets the thing roll on its own for a while.

Nick Clegg: My kinda Lib Dem

That the Liberal Democrats aren't Tories is hardly a surprise; what is somewhat more of a surprise, particular to older members of the party, is quite how similar Nick Clegg is willing for them to appear. In an interview with the Andrew Marr show yesterday to mark the start of conference season with the Lib Dems' offering in Bournemouth, Cleggy set out his scheme for government, to include abolishing a few government departments and sending the money back to the people who'd paid it in the first place, by cutting the basic rate. The BBC's correspondent in Bournemouth analyses the interview and policies here, including the expected reaction on some of the older members of the party.

Given that my move from socialism to liberalism hasn't overcome my bias against the Conservatives, voting for a Liberal Democrat at the next election was highly likely; now it seems almost inevitable. There's just one little concern I have, but I may write to Mr. Clegg's office to inquire as to whether he'd simply been quoted too loosely.

There would be more tax to pay for rich people who rely on "capital", rather than working, to make money, Mr Clegg added.

"People who rely on 'capital'": aren't they pensioners?

"There are no capitalists left"

Anatole Kaletsky describes the West's loss of faith in market economics, as demonstrated most pointedly in the nationalisation, with barely a whimper, of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the United States. While I'd perhaps quibble with Kaletsky's description of the Great Steel Protector as "the most capitalist" President the country has seen, I think it's quite fair to describe the US as "the most capitalist economy"; and there's no senior political voice in the States opposing this move. Where, as Kaletsky asks, did all the capitalists go?

A definitive description of 'dissonance'

To take time out from a conference on relativity theory to listen to a guy from Answers in Genesis (*ptoo*) rubbish the Big Bang model.

I've been listening to Issues, Etc. run an interview with such a chap about the LHC and how Big Bang theory is a "wax nose" because scientists keep changing it to take into account new theories and observations. It was an economist, John Maynard Keynes, who said, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"

I also heard a very interesting lecture today in which Frank Steiner, an astrophysicist from Ulm, explained that there is tantalising evidence that they might have found something for which cosmologists have been longing: matched circles in the sky [paper]. His group, in a later paper, suggests that the Universe is a finite-volume 3-torus.

While I'm on a roll, I wonder what the Lutheran view of the eternal state is. AiG ran an ad in the break which claims that Christ died to restore us to Eden. This is a popular view, I know, but not strictly accurate. I would contend that it's not strictly accurate to Scripture, and also that it's not the best way to read the Reformed confessions: we teach that we were created posse non peccare but we will be re-created non posse peccare and therefore that Christ died to bring us to something better than Eden (HC 58, BC 37, WCF 4, 32 & 33).

Gezwitschern

1. I darkened the door of a Lutheran church today.  To be precise, the Evangelischen Kirchegemeinde Koeln-Deutz.  All was well though, for I prayed to the Sacred Brain of St. John of Calvin and he protected me.
2. I never do think much of performance choirs in church.  It's not a spectator sport, darn it.  "Let all things be done to aid mutual edification." It's in St. Paul's Epistle to the Laodiceans.
3. My eyebrows went up half an inch when I flipped through and saw Sirach mentioned as the textual basis for one of the hymns.  That was followed by a whole inch when I realised it was Nun danket alle Gott!
4. German Lutherans sit down to sing.  Even the aforementioned Nun danket, which is lyrically rousing.  And no, it's not because they're all elderly and can't do standing; they stood for the reading of the Gospel.
5. And while we're on the singing, what gives with the unnecessarily elaborate introductions to hymns, with little-to-no musical connection with the melody to follow?  I refer interested parties to point number 2.
6. And another thing: little musical interludes where we all sing the Gloria in excelsis are not unwelcome, but only the over-65s know them any more, and certainly not your visitors from overseas.  Give us proper bulletins!
7. The Pfarrer nearly got it.  Being a Christian, he said, isn't about doing good things, because even atheists can do good things.  Brilliant, I thought.  Nope, he goes on, it's about following Jesus (by doing good things).  There's a memo somewhere that I missed, I swear.
8. You can always tell when it's the Lord's Prayer, whether the language is Chinese, German or whatever.  By contrast, I only recognised the Creed because I happen know it will begin with something like Wir glauben all' an einen Gott.
9. He made the sign of the cross over the elements.  Don't remember that bit happening in the Institution.  Also, it tends to imply that the Word isn't sufficient to make the Supper what(ever) it is.  Times like these, I love semper reformanda.
10. Only about half the congregation, and certainly less than that in the choir, took communion.  Huh?
11. The main reason I didn't participate was 'cos I didn't understand the instructions for when to come up.  Beadles, guys, they're the way forward!

The Gospel on trial

I watched the absolutely brilliant God on Trial, shown yesterday on BBC Two at 2100. It's an hour and a half long and, I should say, required viewing: obviously, it's after the watershed and set in Auschwitz, so be prepared for robust language and moving scenes. The play, of course, stands in a tradition of "God in the dock" literature and events, starting with Abraham's pleas for Sodom, passing through Job and the Psalms, and into more modern Jewish experience, with the events of 70AD and particularly Masada referenced, as well as pogroms in Spain and Russia and finally, as God's accuser puts it, "Look around you."

The charge in this play is that God is in breach of his covenant with the Jews; the case for the defence has to keep moving, as more and more objections are lodged. I'll not spoil it by saying how it ends; instead, I want to remark upon possibly (from a Christian perspective, and Frank Cottrell Boyce, the playwright, is a Roman Catholic) the most moving, the most striking line in the whole ninety minutes of the play. It hit me like a brick—I forget at what point it comes, but it's in the middle somewhere—when God's accuser shouts, "What use is a God who suffers?"

What use, indeed. In that camp hut stood a huddled mass of frightened, persecuted people, humiliated and shaking in fear of their lives. What use is a God who suffers?

One man had concluded that the vastness of the universe proved that the God who loves is a myth. What use is a God who suffers?

Another had lost his mother, and yet another, his beloved sons. What use is a God who suffers?

The story of the trial in Auschwitz, whether it happened or no, originated with Elie Wiesel, but there's another play, written by a German Lutheran pastor, which also stands in the tradition of "God in the dock" literature. Let me quote an old Ed Clowney sermon, all the way back from from Urbana '73.

After World War II a play in West Berlin made a deep impression on the city. It was The Sign of Jonah by Günter Rutenborn. In a courtroom scene all the actors are found guilty in the evils of the war they have survived, and all transfer the blame to God. God is accused, found guilty and sentenced to become a human being, a wanderer on earth, deprived of his rights, homeless, hungry, thirsty. He shall know what it means to die. He himself shall die! And lose a son, and suffer the agonies of fatherhood. And when at last He dies, He shall be disgraced and ridiculed. (Source)

That central question hangs, I think, over the whole of God on Trial: What use is a God who suffers? Says Clowney,

God's amazing grace has done more than the most bitter blasphemy could propose. God's wrath has been poured out on earth already, and God himself has borne all its fury.

The God who judges is become the God who suffers, and all so that he can show himself the God who loves.

Recycled economics

Defra statistics from 06/07 reveal that Yorkshire and the Humber's "recovery rate", a measure of the efficiency of the local governments' recycling abilities [1], is only 37.1%, the second-worst in the country and well below the top rated region, which is the West Midlands at 58.4%. I don't profess to know how these figures work exactly, and in particular, I don't know that this figure represents anything remotely like a financial figure, but it must approach this as the activity of recovery is economically-productive [2]. However, I do know enough economics to be able to point out that both Yorkshire and the Humber and the West Midlands are missing a trick. The relevant principle is called "absolute advantage".

If the waste is worth carrying from my door to a central facility in York in order to be recycled, as we are so often assured it is, then an improvement in the recovery rate can make it worth carrying further. An improvement of 20 percentage points, if recycling is already an economically-viable and profitable activity [3] and provided it is sufficiently profitable, would make it worth shipping the waste from Yorkshire and the Humber to the West Midlands—for the payment of a certain consideration by the receiving councils. If this sum lies between the value of the 37% we can extract and the 58% that they can extract, then we make an enhanced profit on the waste, and they make a profit, too.

Of course, my analysis could fall flat on its face in two ways. Firstly, the absolute advantage could turn out to mask a comparative advantage which runs the other way. It's unlikely, but possible. Secondly, this argument would fail spectactularly if recycling isn't sufficiently economically-viable to make it worth shipping recyclable waste. But if it were so marginal an activity, one wonders why we would bother with it in the first place [4].

[1] The Defra article describes the "recovery rate" thus:

areas that recycle the most are not necessarily those that recover the most value from their waste. Recovery includes recycling, composting, incineration with energy recovery and Refuse Derived Fuel manufacture.

[2] And my long-standing objection, as a suffering council-tax payer, is that we don't see a penny of this vaunted benefit returned to us, the suppliers of this economically-valuable resource.
[3] On the other hand, one does wonder why, if this is true, the private sector hasn't taken the opportunity already. The rag-and-bone man used to be a common sight, after all.
[4] This isn't simply a laissez-faire capitalist objection to "not making a profit". Any profit from recycling derives from the fact that it is more efficient (in terms of energy and resources as well as labour and capital) to produce certain factors by recycling old ones than to mine or farm new. If recycling isn't profitable then it must be less efficient, and consequently worse for the environment, than producing new. And if recycling is worse for the environment…

Newsflash: Government has bucked the market

Apparently, this property was £193,950 just a couple of days ago.

Sorry, did I say "bucked"? I think I might have meant something quite different…

Hopeless and helpless

The Evangelical Alliance Basis of Faith seems to get worse every time I look at it. Perhaps it's just that I'm becoming slowly more confessional, I don't know. But it's wholly inadequate and not remotely up to the task when it comes to protecting against heresy and aberrant opinion, and it does not celebrate great and glorious gospel truths. Let me give you a run-down of the worst of the heresies and heterodoxies I managed to sneak past it with only an hour's effort.

You could be a Monophysite with a little trouble, a Nestorian with great ease, an outright semi-Pelagian, an easy-believist, seven shades of legalist or even a Perfectionist. You could deny the deity of each Person of the Holy Trinity, the historic Protestant definition of the canon of Scripture, the historicity of Adam and Eve, the doctrine of original sin or what Luther beautifully termed "the Great Exchange" (or double imputation). And that's excluding the ones which would only be aberrant at worst, or else which may not be mentioned because "the EA isn't a church", an excuse which has done far more damage than you'd think over the years. You could do all that (there are even legalistic easy-believists, dontcherknow) and still be called 'Evangelical'.

For the record, the statement of faith for Affinity, the conservative evangelical equivalent, is only moderately better. Evangelicalism still has its "seven thousand" who remain true to historic Protestant orthodoxy on these matters, but one does just wish that in one's own local congregation it wasn't so hard to get people to see the importance of confessing these things as true.

Scottish generosity?

The Prime Minister and his hapless Chancellor (for whom I feel a smidgen of pity) have announced, with great fanfare, the Master Plan for the Revitalisation the Housing Market in Times of Dire Necessity. The boundaries of the stamp duty limits shall be moved, so that the 1% band now commences at £175,000 rather than the £125,000 it was at previously. This inducement, they claim, will now kick-start the housing market and ensure that things won't go nasty like the last time a government tried to buck the market, oh no.

The fact that this wondrous scheme will only save home-buyers £1,750 at most, and—owing to the insane way stamp duty operates—help no-one buying a home above £175,000 at all, seems to have escaped the MPs for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath and Edinburgh Southwest. The typical house in the UK has lost more than this in value since the most recent peak, and even the typical first-time buyer property will have lost more than this. Removing such a small taxation burden, while broadly a good idea, is not going to kick-start anything, least of all an over-priced moribund housing market just looking for reasons to plummet.

Today's Times cartoon

Peter Brookes thinks she's a mistake; the apparent reference is to the views she takes, independent of the Republican party line.And me? Politically, I see things to like and things to dislike, as you might expect. But tactically, I agree with those commentators who state that selecting her was a move of sheer brilliance.

By adding grace to welcomed grace…

Last night's sermon was from Matt. 25:14–30, a passage which quite co-incidentally I had been discussing over at the Motley Fool discussion board. The sermon revolved, as you might expect, around the doctrine of eternal rewards, something which is certainly taught in Scripture but, I would hazard to guess, poorly understood.

I fear that our minister did little to help this confusion, especially since he managed to convey the message, "For sure, we're justified by faith but…" This is the kind of line which always causes me dismay, as it pushes the glorious doctrine of justification by faith, that articulus stantis vel cadentis ecclesiae [1], onto a back seat in favour of whatever the preacher has to talk about. It feels rather like a man who, faced with the Mona Lisa, wants to talk about the amazing arch bridge.

When justification by faith alone is displaced in this manner, it can only cause problems. At this point, I'd like to quote Michael Horton's A Better Way, which I mentioned earlier I was reading. I don't have it to hand, but somewhere in it he relates the following vignette.

One conservative evangelical pastor told me, "I just preach the Word. If I'm in Galatians, I sound like an antinomian; if I'm in the Sermon on the Mount, I sound like a legalist."

It wasn't our minister, but it might just as easily have been. Exegesis with lax systematic controls soon leads into dangerous territory, and the matter of eternal rewards in particular needs great care, lest the bruised reed be broken and the smouldering wick, snuffed out. However, exegesis which doesn't pick up all the points of the passage is even worse, as it's not even faithful to the text. Here are a couple of points which he did not draw out from the parable, which are of very great comfort.

Firstly, all those who entered into their master's joy received a reward for the work performed: no-one is received into the kingdom disappointed. Secondly, the gradation in the story came not from the servant's work but from the master's entrustment: the reward for the obedience comes not from our effort, or even our faithfulness, but from God's grace.

This is critical to see because otherwise, we can miss the greatest truths about obedience. By focussing on the importance of our obedience, we miss that this obedience comes from God; we ignore that he is the source of the opportunities to obey; and we miss that he is the one who determines what our obedience ought to be. In all, we treat obedience thanklessly, as if it is not a gracious gift of a loving God.

Moreover, we can give people unhealthy motivations for service. This is a clear danger of the Biblical doctrine, and a danger against which we must warn: just as the doctrine of free grace apart from works can lead to antinomianism, so also the doctrine of eternal reward for works can lead to a legalistic mind, competitive to boot.

Finally, we can be encouraged in the error of seeing our good works as being inherently good, rather than being so mixed with false motives and sinfulness that they are in need of a just and righteous Saviour whose only righteousness will justify not only persons but also our works. For the last word, I'm indebted to Bullinger; perhaps I should rather write, I'm indebted to God, who provided us with Bullinger.

God Gives a Reward for Good Works. For we teach that God gives a rich reward to those who do good works, according to that saying of the prophet: "Keep your voice from weeping, … for your work shall be rewarded" (Jer. 31:16; Isa., ch. 4). The Lord also said in the Gospel: "Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven" (Matt. 5:12), and, "Whoever gives to one of these my little ones a cup of cold water, truly, I say to you, he shall not lose his reward" (ch. 10:42). However, we do not ascribe this reward, which the Lord gives, to the merit of the man who receives it, but to the goodness, generosity and truthfulness of God who promises and gives it, and who, although he owes nothing to anyone, nevertheless promises that he will give a reward to his faithful worshippers; meanwhile he also gives them that they may honour him. Moreover, in the works even of the saints there is much that is unworthy of God and very much that is imperfect. But because God receives into favor and embraces those who do works for Christ's sake, he grants to them the promised reward. For in other respects our righteousnesses are compared to a filthy wrap (Isa. 64:6). And the Lord says in the Gospel: "When you have done all that is commanded you, say, 'We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty'" (Luke 17:10).

There Are No Merits of Men. Therefore, although we teach that God rewards our good deeds, yet at the same time we teach, with Augustine, that God does not crown in us our merits but his gifts. Accordingly we say that whatever reward we receive is also grace, and is more grace than reward, because the good we do, we do more through God than through ourselves, and because Paul says: "What have you that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if you had not received it?" (I Cor. 4:7). And this is what the blessed martyr Cyprian concluded from this verse: We are not to glory in anything in us, since nothing is our own. We therefore condemn those who defend the merits of men in such a way that they invalidate the grace of God. (Second Helvetic Confession, Art. 16)

[1] A phrase which certainly has its roots in Luther but which, in that form, Scott Clark traces to Alsted, a seventeenth-century German Reformed writer.