Society

This morning’s newspapers (and indeed the airwaves) are full of apocalyptic predictions about the future of the Church of England. The failure of the General Synod to ordain women bishops has surprised plenty of bishops, many of whom express their ‘deep sadness’ about the affair to the (£) Times’ Ruth Gledhill. Yet the threat of schism on this issue is not wholly surprising, not least because the Anglican Church has rarely taken happily to reform. From the storms over Matthew Parker’s 39 Articles to this latest controversy, the C of E’s evolution has often been fractious. However, as a relatively faithful parishioner of the CofE, this affair does surprise me in

Gulp. The General Synod of the Church of England has, against almost all expectations, rejected the ordination of women bishops. This seems to represent an early defeat for the incoming Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, who earlier had called on his fellow Anglicans to ‘finish the job’ and accept reform. Secularists and liberals will be baffled – just how fuddy-duddy are those members of the Synod who voted it down? Somehow there still are enough conservative evangelicals and Anglo-Caths in the Synod who are uncomfortable with the measure as it was presented. The chief controversy, it seems, was over provisions for parishes who did not want a woman bishop in charge.

1). Independents and the changing face of politics. The election of 12 independent police commissioners (at the latest count) in Dorset, Gwent, North Wales*, Hampshire, Warwickshire, West Mercia, Kent, Avon & Somerset, Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Surrey and Gloucestershire is cause for celebration. The aim of elected Police and Crime Commissioners is to localise power in communities, making it more accountable and therefore, one hopes, improve the quality of the service. Independent commissioners are, theoretically, the purest form of this. The same applies to George Ferguson, the newly elected independent mayor of Bristol. Their success also expresses the fact that this was a profoundly anti-politics election. The very low turnout was a

The problem about relative poverty is precisely its relativity. The child poverty index, which measures whether a family’s income is below 60 per cent of the average, is a case in point; when incomes go down, bingo, so does child poverty. Which means that one sure fire if controversial way to improve the Government’s child poverty record would be to drive down everyone’s earnings. Iain Duncan Smith, Work and Pensions Secretary, made just this point yesterday when he made a speech about whether the definition should be rather wider than it is. ‘As we saw last year,’ he observed, ‘when the child poverty level dropped by two per cent –

Last week, in the context of the discovery of the chessboard of Sir John Tenniel, the Times related a famous, possibly apocryphal story in which Aron Nimzowitsch mounted a table after yielding to a lesser player, shouting ‘why must I lose to this idiot?’ Nimzo is also in the news after the recent publication of a detailed monograph on his wilderness years in the Baltic and Scandinavia between the start of the first world war and his re-emergence into tournament play in the mid-1920s. The monograph (Aron Nimzowitsch on the Road to Chess Mastery 1886-1924) by Per Skjoldager and Jorn Erik Nielsen, is fascinating on Nimzo’s notorious disputes with Dr