Lots and lots and lots of fuss about betting on the general election. Less attention is paid to the biggest bet of all – Rishi Sunak’s frightening flutter in opting for 4 July.
At Tuesday lunchtime, I was held up crossing the Mall by the procession for the state visit of the Emperor of Japan. I fumed a bit, but the modest crowd’s modest interest was soothing. How success is taken for granted. The recovery of Japan from disgrace, hunger and ruin was a miracle, the triumph of western, especially American, nation-building – such a miracle that everyone has forgotten it. When I was a boy, Hirohito, the wartime emperor, came on a controversial state visit. Private Eye ran the headline ‘There’s a nasty Nip in the air’. Now his blameless grandson passes unnoticed. Japan’s position as a stable force in the free world is now considerably more secure than that of Germany. As China creeps closer to trying to steal Taiwan, the benign power of Japan may prove crucial for the world order. Our election obsesses about minuscule differences over money. Hardly anyone discusses war and peace.
Nigel Farage thinks he might become leader of the Conservative party. The rules state that the leader must be a Conservative MP. Presumably, that would not automatically prevent Mr Farage, since Members of Parliament are free to join a different party at any time if it wishes to take them, and he knows he could not try unless he gets elected as the Reform candidate for Clacton on 4 July. There is a rule, however, that no member of the Conservative party can vote in any party election until he or she has joined for at least three months. Could Mr Farage therefore become leader of the Conservative party without being a member and so without being able to vote for himself? Or could his non-membership disqualify him from leading it? I doubt if the framers of the rules have yet considered this conundrum.
Labour’s proposed extensions of workers’ rights are rightly being attacked for the burdens they will place upon employers. But there is a point to add which is more moral than economic. Is it actually right, as the Labour manifesto puts it, to ‘[make] flexible working the default from day one for all workers’? Where do that and similar measures leave long-standing workers who have had time to display loyalty, competence etc in a way that no new employee can? Surely it is a legitimate expectation of work well done that its rewards should develop over time rather than just landing in everyone’s lap when it starts. Labour also complains about workers who suffer from zero-hours contracts, but its proposals are zero-hours contracts weirdly reversed – a business will incur serious obligations towards people who have worked for it for only 24 hours.
Next week, comprehensively eclipsed by secular events, the General Synod of the Church of England meets. There will be an attempt, led by the House of Bishops, to push through services for same-sex blessings (‘Living in Love and Faith’). There is a revolt, though, led by 11 bishops. The C of E rule is that no change of doctrine can be made without a two-thirds majority in all three Houses – Bishops, Clergy and Laity. In their statement, issued on Wednesday, the objectors declare that the new service involves ‘accepting a development that changes doctrine’. The doctrine in question is Canon B30, which states that ‘marriage is in its nature a union permanent and lifelong… of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others on either side’. Therefore, they say, the proposed way of proceeding without the two-thirds majorities, is unlawful, and goes back on what was earlier agreed. Behind the bishops’ statement is a strong wider movement called the Alliance, which is actively supported by about 20 per cent of C of E congregations, mainly the younger, growing ones which are predominantly evangelical, and will neither give in nor leave. We shall shortly hear more of this. It feels as if the Church is re-entering the sort of contest which convulsed it 30 years ago over women priests. Now as then, the ‘liberals’ (not quite the right word for people so ready to bend rules to get what they want) will probably win, but church unity will certainly lose.
The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford hotly denies a story in the Daily Telegraph that an Igbo mask has been removed from its display and forbidden to be seen by women, because that prohibition accords with the culture from which the object arises. The director, Laura van Broekhoven, adds, however: ‘The Museum’s online collections now carry a cultural context message, which allows users… to actively choose which items they wish to see, and which to remain blurred from view.’ The trouble is that this blurring is not on offer for everything. In my indigenous culture, whose people could be described as the First Nation of western liberals, we have an aversion to being told what to think when we look at objects. This insults our belief system and disturbs the spirits of our ancestors. ‘We are working with groups to allow them to decide how their own cultures are represented,’ says Professor van Broekhoven. So far as I know, no such groups coming from my culture (and that of at least 50 million people in Britain) have been allowed to decide how it is represented. A first step might be to enable people of our heritage to ‘blur out’ every notice about ‘decolonisation’ etc stuck next to objects in the collection so that we can contemplate them with full reverence.
For the first time in my life, roughly two thirds of which has been spent residing more in the country than the town, I have not heard a cuckoo in England this summer. Is this because of habitat loss or this spring’s terrible weather, or am I going deaf?
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