No doubt Lord Alli should not have been given a 10 Downing Street pass, but that is true of most who work there. BB (Before Blair), roughly 100 people were in the building. Today, it is 300. The quality of government has deteriorated as the numbers have swelled. At least Lord Alli has been genuinely useful. It is officially declared that he gave Sir Keir Starmer ‘multiple pairs of glasses’ worth £2,485. It was an inspired move. Until about April this year, Sir Keir did not wear spectacles on public occasions. Observers concentrated on his startled and unhappy-looking eyes because they were the only striking thing in his oddly inexpressive face. Once Lord Alli had found him the right frames (slightly reminiscent of old ‘National Health specs’, but with a reassuringly expensive finish), Sir Keir looked avuncular, wiser, more prime ministerial. An election landslide was in the bag.
Labour priggishness inevitably invites accusations of sleaze to mark its first hundred days. The charges are rather weak, so far. However, the fact that Jess Sargeant, who oversaw the unit for constitutional change at Labour Together, is now deputy director of the government’s Propriety and Constitution Group shows how tangled the ‘ethical’ web has become. Labour Together are the stormtroopers of Starmerite moderation, fanatically loyal to Morgan McSweeney, Labour’s Dominic Cummings. They are ill placed to inhabit the rarefied world of propriety, as defined in the civil service rulebook. Ms Sargeant is not neutral, and presumably not supposed to be. Therefore her appointment infringes propriety, as does Sue Gray, who made a similar error in reverse, moving from running government propriety and ethics to running Sir Keir. Starmerites are the political equivalent of Albigensians. They see themselves as ‘parfaits’, free of sin. Voters may soon disagree.
The very first item in the Democratic party’s 2024 ‘platform’ – roughly what we call a manifesto – published in time for its national convention in Chicago last week, was a ‘land acknowledgment’: ‘We gather together to state our values on lands that have been stewarded through many centuries by the ancestors and descendants of Tribal Nations who have been here since time immemorial. We honour the communities native to this continent, and recognise that our country was built on Indigenous homelands…’ The acknowledgement then becomes Chicago-specific: ‘We also recognise and honour the traditional homelands of the Anishinaabe, also known as the Council of the Three Fires: the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi Nations,’ plus ‘the many other tribes who consider this area their traditional homeland, including the Myaamia, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Sac and Fox, Peoria, Kaskaskia, Wea, Kickapoo, and Mascouten.’ Land acknowledgment ‘statements’ now feature in American public events. I have read a guide to doing them. You must find out ‘the indigenous people to whom the land belongs’ (no suggestion that it might belong to its current legal owners) and ‘Don’t sugarcoat the past. Use terms like genocide, ethnic cleansing, stolen land, and forced removal to reflect actions taken by colonisers.’ I wonder if this will catch on here. Should I, in my Sussex old rectory, arrange a ceremony to acknowledge the Church of England, which owned it until a century ago, and the Catholic church from which it (probably) misappropriated it? And the Normans who conquered everything near us in 1066, and the Saxons, whose name shows they were not indigenous? And the Romans, the Regni (Celts) and the Atrebates (Belgic)? Can’t think of any indigenous ones. Happy to acknowledge the lot: it is interesting to know who preceded one, but it would be a lifetime’s fruitless labour to attribute blame, as American land acknowledgments do. Imagine trying to start such a ceremony in Gaza or Jerusalem. Such a mentality causes unappeasable unhappiness.
A historic church in Derbyshire must stay unheated all winter because the diocese insists it install net-zero heating, and it can’t. The problem is widespread. The Diocese of Chichester, in which we live, bans new oil boilers in church from next year. It estimates its total cost of net-zero compliance as £69 million, of which £55 million will ‘require the diocese to seek funding sources’, a phrase that we translate as ‘parishioners’. It admits difficulties for listed buildings – ground-source heat pumps, for example, are simply impossible for our churchyard and water level – but cites Berwick church, which got heat pumps for the, to us, unimaginably large sum of £100,000. The guidance adds that ‘Churches that are being closed would come out of scope and their emissions deleted from the year’s emissions number’. The environmental logic is that the only good church is a dead one.
Years ago, I predicted in print that attacks on hunting, racing etc would develop into a wider attack on riding horses at all. It has come to pass, mainstream enough to be the cover piece (a well-researched one, I admit) in last Saturday’s Telegraph magazine. There is something about the zeitgeist which makes it hard for people to understand the idea of a working domestic animal. Wild animals and pets have roles which are understood, but the existence of a creature that does something for us – winning a race, jumping a fence, carrying a burden, is frowned on. Behind this disapproval lies an idea of the creature’s ‘natural’ state spoiled by human beings. This ignores breeding. Even if you put on one side the obvious fact that if horses were forbidden to serve humanity there would be hardly any left, it makes little sense to speak of, say, a thoroughbred, recovering its ‘real’ nature. If you let that happen it would, in effect, become extinct. We seem to be extending to animals the notion of the noble savage which has done so much harm to the way we look at human civilisation.
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