Anglicans and the Grand Order of Moose

there is a fun piece in Anglicans On Line this week drawing comparisons between the Church of England, the Roman Catholic Church,  and the Grand Order of Moose (no, me neither, but I should have), with particular reference to the ability of women to hold office and to the response to ill-doing within the ranks of those bodies.  You can read it here, and while it is amusing in a way, the point it makes is serious.  In particular, it refers to the "angry old men" who (this last is my own view) hate women, and cover their hate with supposed "arguments" against allowing women to hold office.

Just look back a little, you don't have to go far back, and remember that until 1961 female civli servants in the UK had to resign when they married.  Until at least the 1950s most female teachers were unmarried, not because they were dedicated spinsters married to their vocation, but because if they married they very often lost their jobs.  Many of them pretended to be single, and lived covertly with a partner to whom they were not married.  Women were not allowed to be ordained in the Church of England unti lthe 1990s.  There was a furious row at the time, but the Church remained strong, there are a great many women priests, and no lightning bolt came from heaven.  I am no theologian, but it is worth noting that according to the Gospels the first apostle was a woman.  Mary Magdalene.  Look it up.  Apostle to the apostles.

lack of intervention leads not to peace but war

in Syria, of course.  The shameful lack of intervention to stop the slaughter of Syria's people by its government has had regional repercussions which were not hard to foresee.  I speak of course of the Kurdish issue.  Turkey's brutal suppression of its Kurds is well known, and Syria has previously been helpful in this, booting the PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party) leader Abdullah Ocalan out of Damascus and enabling him to be arrested and extradited to Turkey, where he remains, serving a life sentence which will never be commuted.  But now, as the regime in Syria becomes increasingly savage and desperate, the various Kurdish groupings in the region, most of which do not trust each other or work together, are mobilising, to Turkey's dismay.  There have already been shootings and shellings across the Turkish-Syrian border, and there will be more.  With each Turkish life lost the rattle of the sabres is louder.  But NATO is deaf to it.  Turkey invoked the NATO charter this week, but was more or less ignored.  You can read a good piece by the excellent Michael Weiss here.

NATO's geopolitical reasons for its unwillingness to support its member state, Turkey, are for it to explain.  But it is worth noting that the only place in the wider region where the Kurds live at peace, not much repressed, and with a measure of self-determination, is Iraq.  And it was intervention that gave them that.

a disgraced lobbyist

some ex-MP and some other bloke

is loitering at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham - touting for what kind of custom exactly?

a questionable assessment

A certain John Howarth (prop. Public Impact Ltd, remember "Your Better Off With Labour"?) has published, inter alia, what is below, on the subject of the role of his MP, and the man he worked so hard to elect, Rob Wilson (Con, Reading E).  Leaving aside the tiresome grammatical and punctuation errors we have come to expect from Mr Howarth, there are some stunning logical lacunae here, which I leave readers to spot for themselves, knowing that readers of this blog are a fairly clever bunch.  I just wonder aloud here if Mr Howarth has in fact asked his MP these questions, as he is entitled to do, and also whether Mr Howarth has any idea what a Parliamentary Private Secretary actually does, and what that person's role is.  I answer the second question by noting that Mr H's protege and stooge, Martin Salter, made a spectacular balls-up of that role when he briefly had it, and was sacked after five weeks in the job.

One individual who cannot escape serious questioning on this is Mr Hunt’s PPS, the Reading East MP, Rob Wilson, who happens also to be my MP. I should say I bear Mr Wilson and his family no personal malice, I just usually think he’s profoundly, politically mistaken, prone to vacuous exercises in ‘spin’ and has real questions to answer, namely: did he advise Mr Hunt or was he in fact consulted by the Secretary of State on this matter? If so what scientific evidence was he personally made aware of by Civil Servants and did he express a view to the Secretary of State? Was the whole thing his idea or did the Secretary of State come to him with the notion? Does he, or did he ever agree with his Secretary of State, given what he now knows of the view of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists? Parliament and Mr Wilson’s constituents have the right to ask these questions.

Mr Wilson’s role is a kind of advisor and assistant to Mr Hunt – a role he also held while Mr Hunt was Secretary of State for Culture and Sport, or to some in the media and opposition benches ‘Minister for Murdoch’, so it isn’t as if they have only just met in the month since the re-shuffle. In fact Rob Wilson reportedly rejected a move to the whip’s office to remain Mr Hunt’s Aide de Camp (Reading Chronicle, 5 September 2012). If his advice was not sought either on the substance or the tactics of the announcement how can he remain in his junior role with any degree of self-respect? And if his position is no longer tenable without sacrificing any personal credibility, how can he justify to himself supporting a Secretary of State who has so blatantly neglected his duty to seek and give due weight to appropriate scientific advice.

oh dear what have I done

It seems that this post from a while ago, in which I reproduced certain cartoons published by the French satirical mag Charlie Hebdo, has been found "shocking" by at least one of my French followers and blog readers, who felt that publication might place people at risk.  Whoever thought that was both wrong and risible.  But even if they had been right it still would have been OK to publish the cartoons.  Because freedom of expression  is, er, not negotiable.  Got that?  Even if, especially if, publication causes offence.

kickass list

quite a lot of my readers are boys, and boys love lists, as any fule kno.  I have an iPhone (did I mention that?) and I made a playlist for it which I have called "kickass" because it gets me up and going on my way to work in the mornings, and because the tracks are all, in their different ways, about having and using power.  Here are the tracks, in alphabetical order:

'Alejandro'                                                                                     Lady Gaga
'Amazing'                                                                                       Kanye West
'Angela'                                                                                         Yannick Noah
'Bagpipes From Baghdad'                                                              Eminem
'Barbra Streisand'                                                                          Duck Sauce
'Bombe Humaine'                                                                          Soprano
'Bonkers'                                                                                      Dizzee Rascal
'Changing of the Guards'                                                                Patti Smith
'Cherie Coco'                                                                               Magic System and Soprano
'Deborah'                                                                                     T. Rex
'Dima'                                                                                          Zaho
'Du Style'                                                                                     Jena Lee
'Equivoque'                                                                                  Tunisiano
'Fire'                                                                                           (The Crazy World of)
                                                                                                  Arthur Brown
'Get It On'                                                                                  T. Rex
'Heavy Cross'                                                                             Gossip
'Inch'Allah'                                                                                  Grand Corps Malade/
                                                                                                  Reda Talliani
'Je Realise'                                                                                  Sinik and James Blunt
'Stan'                                                                                          Eminem
'Step Back'                                                                                 Shy'm and Odessa Thornhill
'Te Quiero'                                                                                 Stromae
'Toi + Moi'                                                                                 Gregoire
'Turning Japanese'                                                                       The Vapours
'Virginia Plain'                                                                             Roxy Music
'Welfare Mothers'                                                                       Neil Young
'What A Waste'                                                                          Ian Dury
'White Rabbit'                                                                            Jefferson Airplane
'You Really Got Me'                                                                  The Kinks
'3'                                                                                              Britney Spears


The choices I made surprised me a bit.  I went with how the tracks made me feel - in all cases energised and powerful.  No Bob Dylan, other than in a Patti Smith version.  Not one but two T. Rex.  Britney.  The Stromae 'Te Quiero' is actually about an unhappy relationship, but it's in there.  I may add to this list, though it's too long to listen to all of it on the way to work.  'First We Take Manhattan' by the great Lenny springs to mind.  Readers less familiar with the oeuvre that is French popular music, may I suggest you Spotify some of these, you might like them.  The Ian Dury would have been there anyway, but that track should be immortal for the lines

"I could be a writer with a growing reputation,
I could be the ticket man at Fulham railway station"

What tracks would you put on a playlist to make you go "Fuck yeah! World I'm a gunna kick yo' ass today!" - or similar?

You may guest post your list if you wish - just let me know.

Reading Labour in big trouble

or they should be.  For many years they have illegally used council tax payers' money for party political purposes, leading former MP Martin Salter to say, entirely accurately, "the council delivers my election leaflets".  Council premises have routinely been provided free of charge for party meetings, council resources used to promote candidates for election, council "campaigns" used in furtherance of the internal politics of Reading Labour, planning committees politically whipped - you get the picture.  None of this is new.  But in the age of Twitter and other online media (ffs, Twitter has been going since 2006, get with the programme, people) they've started putting this stuff in writing.  New councillor Richard Davies (Lab, Caversham) might be forgiven for tweeting that a Reading Borough council meeting about school places in east Reading was "our meeting" because of his naivety and inexperience, but the official Twitter feed of Reading and District Labour Party?  My man in the Civic Offices feels that an official complaint may be about to ping into someone's inbox, very soon indeed.