Why criticise Jerry Seinfeld, always solidly middle-class and sensible?

The last time Jerry Seinfeld caught so much stick was in 2015 when he threw in the towel on comedy appearances at American universities.

Going back to the 1990s, Seinfeld was my favourite sitcom, even though, living in the UK at the time, I had to depend on the vagaries of BBC2’s late night/early morning schedule when the show was supposed to be shown around 12:50 a.m. — and was often replaced by something else. Arrgh!

Returning to the present day, Seinfeld’s recent comedy show for Netflix, Unfrosted, tells the story of the 1960s breakfast sensation, PopTarts. Reviews on both sides of the Atlantic say that it is not very funny. I cannot say, as I do not subscribe to Netflix.

Seinfeld also went back on his resolve on no longer appearing at university venues, having shown up a few days ago at Duke University to deliver the commencement address. He was heckled and booed. A number of students walked out on him.

I do not understand why people object to Jerry Seinfeld as a person. Even when his sitcom swept ratings charts in the United States, most viewers got the impression that he was just a normal, middle-class sort of man. His was always the voice of common sense in the show as his friends temporarily went off the deep end over amusing, everyday situations gone bad.

On Thursday, May 16, 2024, The Telegraph piled in on Seinfeld, reportedly a billionaire with a large collection of motor cars (emphases mine):

American universities have a habit of inviting a celebrity or leading figure in their field to deliver a commencement address to their students as they graduate, and, on paper, few are more distinguished than Seinfeld, one of comedy’s few billionaires whose achievements are unmatched within his field.

Yet, as he was about to deliver his speech, dozens of students simply walked out, booing loudly as they departed. Others remained, but unfurled ‘Free Palestine’ flags, and hurled abuse at the comedian as he delivered his address. Amidst cries of “Disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest”, Seinfeld – who, one imagines, had seldom had such a vitriolic reaction since his early days on the comedy circuit – delivered a would-be inspirational speech in which he urged his listeners to work hard, listen to those wiser than themselves and find someone to grow old with. 

For Seinfeld, merely showing up is not an option:

“Whatever you’re doing, I don’t care if it’s your job, your hobby, a relationship, getting a reservation at M Sushi, make an effort,” he said. “Just pure, stupid, no-real-idea-what-I’m-doing-here effort. Effort always yields a positive value, even if the outcome of the effort is absolute failure of the desired result. This is a rule of life. Just swing the bat and pray is not a bad approach to a lot of things.”

The students were upset that, as a Jew, Seinfeld stands with Israel. What else would they expect?

In a recent interview, he claimed that “the struggle of being Jewish is somewhat ancient…[there have been] thousands of years of struggle, and Israel is the latest one…antisemitism seems to be rekindling in some areas.” He visited the country at the end of last year, and expressed his support for them in the current situation, telling the Times of Israel that he would “always stand with Israel and the Jewish people”; something guaranteed to infuriate the pro-Palestinian sector of America’s student population. Hence the rather less than welcoming response at Duke, where, ironically, two of Seinfeld’s own children studied …

… In any case, he could hardly have been surprised by the reaction, given that, as far back as 2015, Seinfeld had advised his fellow comics not to perform at university campuses …

Seinfeld has not changed his mind about the comedic dearth English-speaking countries are experiencing:

… in widely reported remarks that he made on the New Yorker Radio Hour podcast, the comedian also declared that the recent downturn in scripted comedy was “the result of the extreme left and PC crap, and people worrying so much about offending other people.”

Warming to his theme, Seinfeld declared that “When you write a script, and it goes into four or five different hands, committee groups – ‘Here’s our thought about this joke’ – well, that’s the end of your comedy.”

He’s only telling the truth, isn’t he?

He says that stand-up comedy affords a certain amount of freedom for the performer:

In the same podcast, Seinfeld said that he felt a degree of freedom in being a stand-up comedian rather than a creator of a show such as his eponymous sitcom. “With certain comedians now, people are having fun with them stepping over the line, and us all laughing about it,” he said. “But again, it’s the stand-ups that really have the freedom to do it because no one else gets the blame if it doesn’t go down well. He or she can take all the blame [themselves].”

The reason I enjoyed Seinfeld so much was that it was as if I were watching four real-life New Yorkers rather than a set of actors playing roles. I also enjoyed creator Larry (Curb Your Enthusiasm) David’s description of it as ‘a show about nothing’:

One of the mantras of the sitcom Seinfeld was “no hugging, no learning”; the characters in it were believably flawed, and stayed that way, and, in contrast to the far more touchy-feely likes of Friends and (eventually) Frasier, there was to be no moment where the show’s protagonists learnt to become better people.

Well, that also portrays an eternal truth about human nature: most people do not change. Change comes with television land. Furthermore, whatever lessons are learned at the end of one week’s show are forgotten by the next. Without those flaws, there is no show — and no comedy.

The Telegraph has a go at Seinfeld’s choices in life which have made him a rich man seeking out obscure comedy clubs to ply his trade. Again, I fail to see what is wrong with that:

… the problem remains that Seinfeld himself now looks hopelessly out of touch, sequestering himself away in vast apartments in Manhattan and mansions in the Hamptons, where he keeps a classic car collection of over 150 vehicles that is said to be worth over £80 million.

In many regards, Seinfeld’s post-sitcom career has been the exact opposite of his near-contemporary Kelsey Grammer, who has struggled to find a role as iconic as that of Frasier Crane. Seinfeld could hardly be described as reclusive, but he has seldom acted in others’ projects, save for self-mocking cameos as himself, and his appearance in Unfrosted is notable for being the first time that he has portrayed another (non-animated) character on-screen in a leading role.

Instead, what seems to drive him is spending his days writing jokes, which he then performs at unassuming comedy clubs: a process detailed in his 2002 documentary Comedian, which was released shortly after his sitcom came to an end in 1998. The film may have one of the funniest trailers ever made, but, perhaps unwittingly, it’s also an acute glimpse into the psyche of a man who wants to have his cake and eat it.

Seinfeld claims to value the cut and thrust of being on stage in front of audiences who treat him the same way as any other performer, but no other performers in such venues have the luxuries of private jets, multiple expensive residences all over the world – complete, if the rumours are accurate, with a $17,000 coffee maker – and well-paid PR staff on hand to flatter his considerable ego at all times.

I do not know how old the author of The Telegraph article is, but those who read about Seinfeld during the years when Seinfeld aired knew that he was always a private person. Furthermore, why would people care about what he does with his money? If he were more left-wing in his views, would The Telegraph suddenly love him? It would seem so.

The article concludes, laying out Jerry Seinfeld’s many — no doubt inherent — middle class characteristics:

One of the reasons why the Duke appearance may have been so upsetting for Seinfeld is that he is, in many regards, identical to the ‘Jerry’ persona that he displayed in his sitcom for over a decade: uptight, misanthropic and cynical. For someone who could, theoretically, been at the top of the A-list, he is a curiously detached presence in the entertainment industry.

He never wanted to be at the top of the A-list, though, and he made that clear in the 1990s. He is being true to himself. I disagree that he is ‘misanthropic and cynical’. As for being ‘uptight’, so are most middle class men and women. We care about hygiene, like Jerry did in the sitcom. We care about fairness and objectivity, ways that Jerry encouraged Elaine and George to adopt rather than navel-gaze.

Fortunately, The Telegraph article states just how successful Seinfeld continues to be, living long past its 1998 expiry date:

That Seinfeld was one of the great comedic innovators, performers and writers of the past half-century cannot be repeated enough. Many of the catchphrases from it – “No soup for you!” “Not that there’s anything wrong with that” – long ago entered the common lexicon and are cited and quoted by TikTok users who were not even born when the show ended.

The man whose sitcom was bought by Netflix for $500 million in 2021 remains big business …

Good for him. He’s done most things right without making his life an open book in the media.

These were his parting words to the Duke graduates:

“I need to tell you as a comedian, do not lose your sense of humour,” Seinfeld said. “You can have no idea at this point in your life how much you’re going to need it to get through …”

That is so true.

Jerry Seinfeld is a true product of the middle class. What is so wrong with that?

Thoughts on the Resurrection — and humanity

Many of us think that Easter is but one day.

There we would be mistaken. Eastertide runs all the way to Pentecost Sunday, which comes 50 days later. Sunday Lectionary readings continue to point us to the holy mystery of Christ’s resurrection and the promise of eternal bodily resurrection on the Last Day.

On Easter Day, a number of articles appeared in the press discussing the most important feast in the Church calendar. If Christ had not risen from the dead, then our hope as Christians is in vain.

Christ’s disciples did not understand or believe that He would actually rise from the dead on the third day. It was incomprehensible to them, even though Jesus had said this would happen. Furthermore, He raised his good friend Lazarus from the dead several days beforehand. The Critic explored this in light of Mark’s Gospel, ‘This vision glorious’, concerning the women who found our Lord’s tomb empty (emphases mine):

And they went out quickly, and fled from the sepulchre; for they trembled and were amazed: neither said they any thing to any man; for they were afraid (Mark 16:8)

This is the description in Saint Mark’s Gospel of the response of the women at the empty Tomb on the first Easter Day. It is, scholars think, the earliest of the four Gospel accounts of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. We might think that it lacks Easter joy. “Fled … trembled … amazed … afraid”: these are not words that immediately come to mind when wishing someone a “Happy Easter”. Indeed, the fact that these women were initially silent in the face of the empty Tomb — and, for good measure, an angelic vision declaring “he is risen; he is not here” — overturns any assumption that the Resurrection of Jesus was received as a straightforward “all is good, no need to worry” affirmation.

As we realise when reading Saint Mark’s account of the Resurrection of Jesus alongside those in the other gospels, there is nothing straightforward, easily comprehended about the Resurrection. The accounts by the four Evangelists do not at all neatly, comfortably sit beside each other. The timelines, the characters, the events cannot be straightforwardly pieced together, as if we were watching the concluding episode of a television series, or reading the final chapter of an airport novel. 

The various timelines, characters, and events in the accounts given of the Resurrection in the four Gospels are infinitely richer and more demanding. They are witnessing to and seeking to convey to us something of the explosion of divine presence, light, and life that occurred at that Tomb on the first Easter Day. Little wonder that the four Gospel accounts are anything but straightforward; little wonder that they can appear confused, even contradictory. Language, experience, recollection — all these are stretched far beyond what they can possibly contain on the first Easter Day. The One who is eternal Light and Life, the mighty Creator of all that is, touches and fills the Tomb with creative, life-giving power. 

Neat, comfortable, easily comprehended accounts of the empty Tomb would utterly fail to convey the explosive outpouring of this creative, life-giving power. No straightforward affirmation, the Resurrection of Jesus brings us, with those women at the Tomb, to be silenced in awe and reverence before the revelation of God’s life-giving presence and saving purposes …

The current — and long-running — trend to see Christianity as a social justice project undermines the Resurrection:

There is little that quite so undermines the proclamation of the Resurrection of Jesus, the Easter faith, than regarding it as an affirmation of a political or cultural project. Neatly fitting the Resurrection into political or cultural visions, as a convenient, helpful prop, is to profoundly misunderstand (if not deny) the faith of Easter. It is to entirely set aside Saint Mark’s account of the reaction of the women at the empty Tomb, rendering their reaction unnecessary and inappropriate rather than the authentic witness to God’s presence and act in the Resurrection. 

Let us reflect on this, not just on Easter, which seems an eternity ago for some, but during the rest of Eastertide:

… let us heed the response of the women at the empty Tomb, recognising in that response the witness to the out-pouring of Eternal Light and Life, bringing to humanity — broken, confused, and foolish as we are — participation in the Resurrection life, anticipated now and having its fullness in the life of the world to come …

May Easter Day renew us — amidst whatever tombs, whatever defeats and failures and fears we know — in this enduring hope, this vision glorious.

Another theme which runs from the Crucifixion through to the Resurrection is that of forgiveness, which is so difficult. It can be for me, anyway, particularly in serious situations when people who know how to help have been unhelpful.

It is easier to hold on to grudges against such people than it is to forgive them.

Another article in The Critic, ‘Try Christianity’, explores our difficulty in forgiving others, something that Jesus did so readily, yet He suffered much more hurt than we do.

Let’s start with apologies, something else few of us do:

… the pen of P. G. Wodehouse still manages to express a multitude of sentiments from the pews. On this occasion I’m thinking specifically of a line from The Man Upstairs: “It is a good rule of life never to apologise. The right sort of people don’t want apologies, and the wrong sort of people want to take a mean advantage of them.” In his narration, Wodehouse has summed up how many Anglicans, perhaps even many English Christians, think about God, sin, confession and forgiveness.

While Wodehouse has a point, I would venture that his view on apologies pertains to most people, not just English Christians.

Furthermore, our reluctance to forgive varies among cultures. For some, the mantra is, ‘Don’t get mad, get even’.

The article points us, using the words of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer in the first paragraph below, to our Lord’s example that we remember on Good Friday:

… we are confronted by this God-Man who allows himself to be vulnerable, who confidently demands contrition, and whose property is always to have mercy …

Many of us still believe and act on the conviction that contrition and forgiveness is really rather complicated and perhaps should be avoided. Or that it can only be extended when the one wronged has returned to a position of power and the enfeebled supplicant comes begging. Examples are superfluous here — you will know when your hackles are raised by injustice or snobbery or idiocy. 

The quality of mercy is so alien to the wounded creature that it simply must be a miracle. Today that quality is one which we see in the most maligned of persons, the Man of Nazareth, hanging on the cross. “A man of sorrows”, Isaiah called him, “acquainted with grief — despised and rejected.” When soldiers struck and mocked him he returned “Father, forgive them.” When the thief next to him asked for clemency, he granted it.

Even when we assent to a conceptual understanding of Christian forgiveness we qualify it. As Cosimo de Medici wryly put it, “We read that we ought to forgive our enemies; but we do not read that we ought to forgive our friends.” However, Jesus’ business on earth was not finished until he had assured his friend Peter, the one who denied him, of his consistency.  

Today we remember that Jesus of Nazareth decided that forgiveness was worth dying for. And his life and death stand as an example and challenge to us still.

Well, one would not have seen either of these two themes in the media between Good Friday and Easter, March 29 and March 31, 2024.

A third article in The Critic examined the BBC’s online headlines on March 29:

… it is Good Friday, and the front page of the BBC website appears to have precisely no references to the occasion. The “culture” section contains articles about Beyoncé, the Oscars (that holy ceremony!), Godzilla x Kong and “What we know about the accusations against Diddy”. Stirring stuff. 

Buried deep on the site’s “Topics” section is a “Religion” page. Recent articles include “Rastafarian faith mentor dies, aged 73” (RIP to him) and “UK’s first Turkish mosque faces threat to its future”. Nothing about Easter — though there is a guide to celebrating Holi, which is nice.

A fourth article in The Critic points the finger of blame at the established Church for promoting social justice ideology, ‘The Church of England is practising a secular religion’:

Church attendance is of course declining. One in five worshippers has disappeared since 2019 alone. Is the Church of England spending more and more money on dubious forms of “anti-racism” under the delusion that it will attract young leftists to its services on Sundays? Or perhaps this quasi-theological endeavour is just a more winnable cause than encouraging religious belief and practice. Justin Welby cannot fill his churches but he can fill his heart with a sense of righteousness. 

This isn’t good enough — not for anyone. An obsessive interest in the sacred values of equality diversity and inclusion can distract believers from the divine, but it also threatens the social functions of the Church of England. The Church is one of the last major foundations of tradition left in the United Kingdom, along with the monarchy. The identitarian left has been tearing at the stitches holding us together for a number of years. To imitate its most fanatical tendencies is to encourage divisiveness rather than inclusion.

The Church of England should stop enabling these phenomena. Granted, to place the blame for its diminished status entirely on “woke Welby” would be naive. The problem predates the current Archbishop of Canterbury. A Telegraph analysis shows that church attendance has more than halved since 1987. However, the embrace of secular religion is exacerbating rather than ameliorating its decline.

This year, the Easter services at Canterbury Cathedral featured the Lord’s Prayer recited in Urdu or Swahili, led by native speakers of those languages. On the face of it, it’s something inclusive. Yet, people in every non-English speaking country recite the Lord’s Prayer in their own tongues. When, on holiday, I used to attend services at the Reformed Church of France, I joined everyone in reciting it in French. Therefore, what’s the big deal?

The Telegraph covered the story (as did GB News) in ‘Canterbury Cathedral reads Lord’s Prayer in Urdu and Swahili during Easter service’:

At the 10am service shown on the BBC, The Very Rev Dr David Monteith, Dean of Canterbury Cathedral, invited each member of the congregation to say the Lord’s Prayer in their own language, while it was led in Urdu on the microphone by a member from Pakistan. The subtitles on the screen were in English.

At an earlier service, aired on Radio 4, the prayer was led in Swahili.

The Dean said: “We invite congregations to say the Lord’s Prayer in their own first language at most of our communion services …

“From time to time, we invite someone to lead in their preferred language of prayer – today it’s in Congo Swahili as he was ordained in Zaire, and by a member of the Community of St Anselm from Pakistan …”

Then came Justin Welby’s sermon, which had nothing to do with the Resurrection, the core tenet of the Christian faith:

Shortly after the Lord’s Prayer was said, the Most Rev Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, used his Easter sermon at the cathedral to condemn “the evil of people smugglers” in the wake of a row over the Clapham chemical attacker being granted asylum.

The article also points out:

Several Church of England dioceses faced backlash after appointing individuals or teams to address racial inequality in their regions amid concerns they would alienate ordinary worshippers.

However, dissent is also present elsewhere in the world. Anglican church groupings outside the UK are at odds with Welby:

The Archbishop has been struggling to unite the Anglican Communion because of the row on same-sex blessings.

The conservative Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches (GSFA), which represents churches on every continent and the majority of Anglicans worldwide, has previously said that it expects the organisation to “formally disassociate” from both the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Church of England.

However, it was not only Justin Welby pulling the identity politics strings. In the United States, Joe Biden’s administration declared Easter Sunday, of all days, Trans Visibility Day.

And here I thought that Joe Biden was a Catholic.

The Telegraph had an article on the story, ‘Joe Biden has betrayed Christian America’. The most telling sentence was this one:

And certainly he had dozens of other dates on the transgender awareness calendar, including a whole week in November, he could have chosen instead.

Returning to the UK, on April 3, The Telegraph‘s Madeline Grant wrote about Richard Dawkins having his cake and eating it in ‘Christianity’s decline has unleashed terrible new gods’:

… Professor Dawkins’ admission that he considers himself a “cultural Christian”, who is, at the very least, ambivalent about Anglicanism’s decline is an undeniably contradictory position for a man who in the past campaigned relentlessly against any role for Christianity in public life, railing against faith schools and charitable status for churches.

Before we start preparing the baptismal font, it’s worth noting that Dawkins says he remains “happy” with the UK’s declining Christian faith, and that those beliefs are “nonsense”. But he also says that he enjoys living in a Christian society. This betrays a certain level of cultural free-riding. The survival of society’s Christian undercurrent depends on others buying into the “nonsense” even if he doesn’t.

Grant gives us an example of the ‘terrible new gods’ — Scotland’s new Hate Crime Act which came into force on April 1:

By the New Atheist logic, it ought to be the most rational place in the UK since de-Christianisation has occurred there at a faster rate. Membership of the national Church of Scotland has fallen by 35 per cent in 10 years and the Scottish Churches Trust warns that 700 Christian places of worship will probably close in the next few years. A Scottish friend recently explained that every place where he’d come to faith – where he was christened, where his father was buried – had been shut or sold. This is not only a national tragedy, but a personal one.

New Atheism assumed that, as people abandoned Christianity they would embrace a sort of enlightened, secular position. The death of Christian Scotland shows this was wrong. Faith there has been replaced by derangement and the birthplace of the Scottish enlightenment – which rose out of Christian principles – now worships intolerant new gods.

The SNP’s draconian hate crime legislation is a totemic example. Merely stating facts of biology might earn you a visit from the Scottish police. But perhaps Christianity has shaped even this. It cannot be a coincidence that Scotland, home of John Knox, is now at the forefront of the denigration of women. The SNP’s new blasphemy laws are just the latest blast of that trumpet … 

… Much of what atheists ascribed to vague concepts of “reason” emerged out of the faith which informed the West’s intellectual, moral, and, yes, scientific life – a cultural oxygen we breathe but never see …

… The world isn’t morally neutral, and never has been.

Recognising Christianity’s cultural impact is the first step. The bigger task facing the West is living out these values in an age when they are increasingly under threat.

On Easter Day, The Telegraph‘s Tim Stanley, an agnostic turned Roman Catholic, wrote about the horror of what assisted dying — euthanasia — legislation could bring to the UK. At the end, he had this to say about the impact that widespread unbelief has had on Holy Week and Easter:

Christ died on Good Friday, but for much of the zeitgeist he has never risen again, setting the context for this debate that is minus the hope that once brightened the lives of Westerners even in war or plague.

I thank God I am a Christian. I would have to fake it if I weren’t. In an atheistic culture, beyond the here and now, there is little to live for – and when the here and now become unbearable, nowhere to turn but death.

It is up to us as individuals, with or without the help of the Church and the media, to keep the spirit of forgiveness and the hope of bodily resurrection alive. How do we do that? By studying the Bible, verse by verse.

Hard times for America’s middle class

It has become tiring to constantly — so it seems — hear and read that the Conservatives have plunged the UK into a cost of living crisis and that we are the only people on earth experiencing such a dire situation.

Anyone who knows a second European language will know that EU countries are also experiencing similar hard times.

Interestingly enough, so are the middle class from across the pond whom The Guardian interviewed for a feature published on April 9, 2024, ‘”I run out of money each month”: the Americans borrowing to cover daily expenses’. Five people’s stories are included. Three of them follow.

Keep in mind this is happening under a sainted Democrat administration, that of Joe Biden.

Most of the people interviewed rely on credit cards to get them through the month. The credit card debt is piling up in many cases.

Inflation, particularly where groceries are concerned, is a huge problem. However, health care expenses are an even bigger worry.

We discover that:

US consumer borrowing rose by $14.1bn in February, driven by the largest increase in credit card balances in three months. Analysts believe that the soaring cost of consumer debt for US households could affect president Biden’s chances for re-election, as for the first time on record, interest payments on credit cards and car loans are as big a financial burden for Americans as their mortgage interest.

Respondents to an online callout about personal levels of consumer borrowing in the US included adults of all ages and from areas across the country, with most saying they were now struggling to repay their debts.

Robin, 70, a retired arts teacher in California, depends on an annual Social Security income of $14,000. She said that she is used to being frugal but recent price hikes are defeating her best efforts at economising:

I became disabled and retired about 20 years ago …

Now, because prices have gone up dramatically – for bread, gas, everything – I run out of money each month, so I end up paying for necessities with my credit card. This has been going on for at least six months. I’m so worried. How will I ever pay this back when everything costs more and more?

I can usually manage the regular things. I rent a room for $450. My monthly credit card payment is $100, I like to pay it down as fast as possible.

It’s the unexpected expenses I struggle with, and they happen all the time, don’t they: new car tyres, taking my dog to the vet. I owe $2,500 dollars and I chip away at it, but what if my rent goes up? What if my 1997 vehicle needs to be replaced?

If the Federal Reserve would lower the interest rates, I’d at least be able to pay less interest on my debts. It’s so stressful, and lots of people are in this situation.

However, the Federal Reserve has no plans to change its policy at the moment:

The Federal Reserve announced on Wednesday that it would leave US interest rates at 5.25% to 5.5% – a 25-year high – where they have been since July.

Donna from Oregon, 63, is an accountant who suffered a foot injury. She makes $50,000 a year. Her private insurance excess is $10,000 [Obamacare, another Democrat initiative], which she is trying to pay off for surgery she had on her foot. Even an accountant taking advantage of 0% credit cards can be defeated by soaring costs of goods and services:

The last couple of years, when inflation hit really hard, that’s when my credit card borrowing started, as I haven’t had a raise in three years.

I’m now playing the credit card swap game: large expenses such as car repairs go on a 0% card. I then carefully monitor the expiration date of that deal on a spreadsheet and eventually transfer the balance to a new 0% interest card …

Wages aren’t catching up with costs. Handymen charge $125 per hour now in my area. You can’t make $24 an hour and pay someone $125 an hour to do your maintenance. In 2008 I made $65,000 before I lost that job. How am I supposed to get by on 15% less than I was making 15 years ago?

She has had to dip into her retirement fund to make ends meet:

The 0% credit cards have been a godsend, but this year I’ve pulled $7,000 out of my retirement fund to pay off some of my debts, and over the past couple of years I’ve taken out 10% of my retirement pot to cover bills. This will be impossible to replenish.

The surgery cost $9,200, 25% of my net annual income of $36,112 after taxes and social security – no wonder I’ve had to live off credit cards and retirement savings!

It’s frightening to pull from my retirement fund just to get by, wondering how poor I’ll be when I finally do retire, if I’ll be able to maintain my home. If you’ve worked your whole life, it’s just not right.

Chris, 52, is a special education teacher who lives in Denver and works two jobs. He worries about the long term effect on his health, which he was already paying for previously. He:

racked up $47,000 in loans because of unaffordable healthcare bills and essential home repairs over the past three years.

In 2020 he was finally debt-free after paying off $54,000 since his divorce, he says, but then a $12,000 medical bill came in, two HVAC [air conditioning] units in his house needed replacing and some trees removing.

Chris borrowed $33,000, then took out another $17,000 loan to help repay the first.

He says:

… although I increased my salary from $65,000 to $125,000 last year by teaching summer school and additional classes. Denver is pretty expensive, and I pay child support, so I ended up working a second job, driving for a ride-share company, to fight my way out of this debt.

I drive all night over the weekend to make $1,000 extra a month, so sometimes I worry about my health. I hope I can keep this up for a few more months, I still owe $14,000. Most Americans I know have a second job.

A fourth interviewee, whose story features at the end, concluded by saying:

The American economy is so cut-throat that people are too scared to take annual leave. The rat race is toxic, and the American dream? It’s dead for the majority.

So, there you have it, my fellow Britons. Be grateful for the flawed NHS and the ability to take annual leave. The grass isn’t always greener on the other side.

Britain’s Labour Party marks centennial milestone

One hundred years ago this week, on January 22, 1924, Ramsay MacDonald became Britain’s first Labour Prime Minister.

He was one of six so far. The others were Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson, James Callaghan, Tony Blair — and the Blair-appointed, unelected Gordon Brown.

Another centenary occurred this week: Lenin’s death and Stalin’s rise to power, but that’s another story.

1920s Labour

Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour Party was a mix of workers and intellectuals, with each group having its own political philosophy.

Historian David Torrance’s article for UnHerd, ‘Labour was never a revolutionary movement’, tells us that MacDonald had to manage the expectations of both while solving the nation’s problems (emphases mine):

… MacDonald himself could see the bigger picture. And his account of a historic day betrayed both his shock at what had just happened, as well as his apprehension at what was to come: “Without fuss, the firing of guns, the flying of new flags, the Labour Gov[ernmen]t has come in… Now for burdens & worries. Our greatest difficulties will be to get to work. Our purposes need preparation, & during preparation we shall appear to be doing nothing – and to our own people to be breaking our pledges.”

This was prescient. Over the next nine months Britain’s first Labour Prime Minister would find himself battling on a number of fronts: for acceptance by voters, co-operation with not one but two opposition parties in Parliament (Liberals and Conservatives) and most of all for support from his own colleagues, many of whom were deeply uneasy that a party with only 191 MPs had taken office at all.

The Labour Party as represented in Parliament was complex. Its structure betrayed its chaotic inception, more a fusion of local bodies and ideological factions than a combined party under a unitary authority. The civil servant Percy Grigg described a “Trade Union element”, which was more interested in moderate “bread and butter” politics than the abstract economic and social doctrine favoured by the party’s faction of “intellectuals”. And this second grouping included both former Liberals and those who had emerged from the Independent Labour Party (ILP), a separate but affiliated group. Grigg called the ILP-ers “Montagnards” after the most radical political group during the French Revolution, and remarked they followed “the lead of the Clyde in Scotland and Mr. [George] Lansbury in England”. Inclined to be unhappy at the moderation displayed by the trade unionists and intellectuals, the Montagnards would only be satisfied with the building of the New Jerusalem.

… After two months in government, Ramsay MacDonald — consumed by international as well as domestic affairs — grew concerned at the failure of his backbenchers to respond adequately to the “new conditions”. Some of what he called the “disappointed ones” had become “as hostile as though they were not of us”.

… MacDonald worked hard to make … housing legislation a reality, formally recognised the Soviet Union and brokered a new settlement between France and Germany, something he hoped would boost trade as well as soothing post-war wounds. But with only 191 MPs, and a ministry dependent on Liberal votes, he couldn’t do everything …

The rest of the MacDonald story is well known. His first administration lost a confidence vote in October 1924 …

An election was held and the Conservative MP Stanley Baldwin was returned to power.

Five years later, in June 1929, MacDonald became Prime Minister again:

of another minority government, although this time Labour was the single largest party with 287 seats. In the midst of rising unemployment and a sterling crisis, the government agreed to resign in August 1931, but then the King persuaded MacDonald to head a “National” government. Labour’s National Executive Committee voted to expel all those who remained in office, and in the election that followed, the National government was returned with a majority of nearly 500 (mostly Tories) and the “official” Labour Party was reduced to just 52 MPs.

As his was a National Government, the Cabinet had to comprise MPs from other political parties, not just Labour. Wikipedia says:

The National Government’s huge majority left MacDonald with the largest mandate ever won by a British Prime Minister at a democratic election, but MacDonald had only a small following of National Labour men in Parliament. He was ageing rapidly, and was increasingly a figurehead. In control of domestic policy were Conservatives Stanley Baldwin as Lord President and Neville Chamberlain the chancellor of the exchequer, together with National Liberal Walter Runciman at the Board of Trade.^[88] …

MacDonald was deeply affected by the anger and bitterness caused by the fall of the Labour government. He continued to regard himself as a true Labour man, but the rupturing of virtually all his old friendships left him an isolated figure.

Welsh Labour

Most Britons connect Wales with Labour from its inception to the present day. They are not wrong, but the reality is more nuanced.

Professor Brad Evans from the University of Bath described the rise and decline of Welsh Labour in another UnHerd article, ‘How Labour lost the Welsh Valleys’:

Last year, I found myself back in the Rhondda valley and the village where I spent most of my childhood. As I walked through its typically inclement grey terraced streets, I came upon the boarded-up premises of the Ton and Pentre Labour and Progressive Club. Dereliction and a sense of decaying nobility are common features of the streets here, with clubs, institutes, chapels and all other sites of congregation looking the same. This vacant building that held many notable trade union meetings was one of the longest-running working men’s establishments in the Rhondda. Now it stands as a monument to failure. What can be said about such a relic, whose name alone testifies to everything this valley once stood for?

Because these former mining valleys in the wilds of Glamorgan were the cradle of working-class politics in Britain. Revolutionary socialism is almost as old as the mining communities in these hills: the red flag of socialism was flown for the very first time in anger over the skies of Merthyr Tydfil in 1831. And, in time, this people and landscape gave rise to the British labour movement and the party that bears its name, a party that knew who it represented and what it wanted to change.

Keir Hardie, Labour’s founding father, was elected MP for the Merthyr and Aberdare constituency only a few years before he would oversee the transition from the Independent Labour Party to the more familiar abbreviated title in 1906. A former miner who first entered the darkness of the pits at just 10-years old, he knew first-hand the toils and struggles faced by these hardened communities, and never forgot them in Parliament, wearing a deerstalker and tweed jacket in place of the expected top hat and tails. But Hardie himself never lived to see the party he conceived in power. An idealist and a pacifist, he died a broken man in 1915, as his contentious objections to the First World War (on the basis of the working-class dead and war profiteering) went unheeded.

Of Ramsay MacDonald, Evans writes:

Just nine years later though, and 100 years ago this week, the Labour Party did form its first government. It was led, though, by a Scot, Ramsay Macdonald, later expelled as a traitor and a turncoat for his collaboration with the Conservatives.

Even so, South Wales remained loyal to Labour:

as the Labour Party split and reformed, mutated and reorganised, South Wales remained its natural home. It was here that institutions later synonymous with the party, such as the National Union of Miners, were first established. And the area produced the radical autodidactic streak that gave Labour’s second prime minister, Clement At[t]lee, his greatest lieutenant: Nye Bevan gained his education in the libraries and reading rooms of Tredegar’s Miners’ institutes, arguably the most impressive educational bodies promoting the socialist cause anywhere in Europe.

Everything went well until one day in 1966, a mining disaster still remembered to this day:

… in the valleys of South Wales, a different tragedy bears a single name: Aberfan. That was the village where, on the morning of 21 October 1966, approximately 105,000 cubic metres of discarded coal waste slid into the community and engulfed the Pant Glas school and houses below. Half the town’s children were wiped out by the black avalanche that sped down the slopes, along with 28 adults.

I will add here that Queen Elizabeth II was so moved that she took an extraordinary step: she visited Aberfan in the wake of the tragedy to see what had happened and to converse with the townspeople. Monarchs had not been known for visiting the scenes of disasters outside of wartime.

Unfortunately, the people of Aberfan trusted Labour, and Labour broke that trust in the years that followed:

Aberfan had already been foretold through numerous warnings, and in previous slippages in both the village itself and nearby. But even as the slurry settled and the spoil began to be cleared, the story was only just beginning … John Collins, whose entire family was taken by the black mountain, later said: “I was tormented by the fact that the people I was seeking justice from were my people — a Labour government, a Labour council, a Labour nationalised coal board.” This Establishment cover-up was fatal. As veteran BBC broadcaster Vincent Kane later added: “Half a dozen or so organisations or individuals should have brought help to those stricken people, but instead they betrayed them.”

The central figure in this episode was Lord Robens who, as Chairman of the National Coal Board, continually presented himself as a defender of coal, while overseeing widespread pit closures. His arrogance was matched only by the lack of compassion he showed towards the families of the bereaved. Insult piled upon injury as the official tribunal into the cause of the disaster was marred by misinformation, delays and attempts to obstruct the truth. And the victims could see it — as a father of one of the bereaved children cried out when giving evidence: “Buried alive by the National Coal Board. That is what I want to see on record. That is the feeling of those present. Those are the words we want to go on the certificate”.

Worse was to follow: it was at the behest of the Labour Minister for Wales — the valleys-born George Thomas, later Lord Tonypandy — that the villagers themselves were required [to] pay to remove remaining slag heaps still towering over their homes from the disaster relief fund. But this tragedy was to become the epicentre of a far greater conjuncture, where Wales began to reckon with all the false promises of industrialisation and unionism.

In the decades that followed, the people of South Wales looked for something to replace Labour but there was nothing:

If there is no history of South Wales without Aberfan, there is no complete history of the Labour Party which does not chapter the devastation and fury it sowed in this heartland. And, while the latter part of the Sixties was marked by the beginnings of a turn away from Labour, the following decade saw nothing arrive to replace it. Voter turnout in elections started to decline, while industrial action by the miners threw the country into darkness, a faction of the working class seemingly at war with the country — and, after the 1974 election, at war with a Labour government too.

Even Neil Kinnock’s time as Labour leader could not restore the people’s confidence in the party:

A son of the valleys, the Tredegar-born Neil Kinnock, would later assume the helm as Margaret Thatcher instigated a very different kind of revolution. An impressive intellect and pragmatist, Kinnock’s accent and bearing connected the party back to its past. He could speak with genuine feeling of the strength of those communities, “who could work eight hours underground and then come up and play football”. But that would in part be his undoing: a conservative national press constantly mocked his “boyo” persona. And while he could give voice to South Wales through his own, it ultimately became the voice of political defeat, as the pits central to valley-life were shut and sealed, something the Labour Party proved powerless to stop …

Kinnock was probably the last leader of the Labour Party as it was originally conceived. But he was ultimately given the impossible task of trying to lead a party born in another age, a product of the dire need to have political representation to counter the exploitative nature of industrial capitalism. Now, it has lost its identity, just as much as the people it represented were losing theirs.

Tony Blair seemed to end all hope:

… as Blair opened more of the country to the punishing writ of the free market, the last vestiges of industry petered out. The last of the pits closed, and some of the most prominent local employers such as Hoover in Merthyr and the Polikoff’s and Burberry factories in the Rhondda, dramatically cut their workforce, until their inevitable closure a decade or so later.

Ironically, it was through Blair’s initiative of devolution, which gave Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland their respective assemblies — some would say parliaments — that Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party, came to prominence:

With the National Assembly for Wales established in 1997 following devolution in the Principality, the strength of support for Plaid Cymru, which had been gathering momentum since Aberfan, was now evident in the valley heartlands. By 1999 they would even manage to win seats in the once unimaginable ward of the Rhondda, where the old joke ran that even a Smurf would win should they be dressed in red. Blair’s appeal to Middle England was traded in Wales, and the party barely scrapes ahead of the Conservatives nationally now.

Evans concludes:

Today, as the party seeks to commemorate 100 years of its electable “progress”, it should turn is attention the places which gave the party its name and yet where poverty and abandonment persist. While you can be sure that disdain for the Conservative Party is still strongly felt, the Labour Party is regarded with something equally dangerous: an apathetic rolling of the eyes by a people whose rolling hills speaks to the layered memories of resigned weathering. Even as another Keir looks set to return the Labour Party to power, Ton and Pentre Labour and Progressive Club won’t suddenly reopen. Suspended in neglect, its rooms will remain empty as another electoral season passes. And all the while, what passes for progress will continue arriving at these towns from elsewhere, just explanations that try and fail to make sense of the greatest dereliction — the dereliction of the mind and soul of a people.

Left wing versus Right wing economics

While John Maynard Keynes was a member of the Liberal Party, Labour have adopted a Keynesian approach to economics, particularly in contrast to that of Friedrich Hayek, as can be seen in the chart below (click here for a larger version):

Note Keynes’s advocacy of a short-term focus, the belief that people have an ‘animal spirit’ (irrationality), that bad businesses should be kept afloat and, perhaps most important of all, that government acts in the public’s best interest.

Hmm.

As a commenter to another UnHerd article, Tom McTague’s ‘Labour is stalked by treachery’, put it:

To the leftist, the good is the enemy of the perfect.

The article explains how one can arrive at that conclusion:

The conservative philosopher Maurice Cowling wrote that the essence of liberalism was the belief that “there can be a reconciliation of all difficulties and differences” in life (which he said was plainly false). In The Meaning of Conservatism, Roger Scruton argued that this was the liberal faith that lay at the heart of today’s “spirit of improvement” — the inclination of the liberal, as he put it, to “change whatever he cannot find better reason to retain”. Conservatives like Scruton and Cowling, by contrast, do not believe all difficulties and differences can be reconciled — or, in fact, should be. To govern is to weigh up competing goods and to make least worst choices based on incomplete information.

I couldn’t agree more.

Keir Starmer, who might well become the UK’s next Prime Minister, is known for his policy flip flops. He, too, operates on a ‘spirit of improvement’ and ‘change’ level. The problem is that you can’t please everyone:

In one obvious sense, he has already been tried and found guilty of betrayal by the Left for breaking the promises he made to secure the leadership. During the Labour leadership campaign, Starmer pledged to “reverse the Tories’ cuts to corporation tax” only to then order his MPs to vote against the Tories’ own decision to reverse their own cuts themselves. He also pledged to “defend free movement as we leave the EU”, only to then make keeping out of free movement a red line in any future relationship with the EU. But the fundamental challenge for Starmer is that it is impossible for him to reconcile all of the competing promises he has made to the wider electorate and so will, inevitably, betray someone …

Today, Labour’s economic plan remains markedly empty …

The obvious danger for a future Starmer government is that without an economic strategy, there won’t be enough money to build a new Britain or fix its crumbling public realm. Instead of doing all three of the missions Starmer set himself, he will not be able to do any. And so difficult choices will follow. Should this happen, it will not be long before the ghost of Ramsay MacDonald once again starts to haunt the Labour party.

Even behind the scenes, Labour prove themselves to be contradictory.

On January 3, Guido Fawkes pointed out Labour’s hypocrisy when it comes to using consultants:

The FT has dug into the numbers this morning and found that, despite Labour squawking about government use of consultants and promising “tough new rules” to restrict it, the party has massively increased its own work with companies. Labour got £287,000 in donations of staff time from consultancies in the year to September 2023, which is up four times from only £72,000 in 12 months before …

The biggest contribution of hours came from EY UK which provided £138,000-worth. Readers might remember [shadow chancellor] Rachel Reeves using her party conference speech in October to say Labour “will slash government consultancy spending, which has almost quadrupled in just six years”. 

Leftist mindset

In March 2023, Will Lloyd, who works at the Labour-supporting New Statesman, wrote a fascinating article for The Times, ‘Yes, the left are as miserable as they seem’, in which he contrasts them with conservatives:

If you can count on the left for anything, it is earnest miserablism. Political movements are more than the sum of policy papers and press conferences. Over time they acquire their own characteristic idioms, gaits and dress codes. Beards are more common on the left than the right, for instance …

Joylessness, too, comes with this territory, a stereotype that has remarkably solid groundings in social science. Left-wing political views tend to shake hands with high neuroticism, which is associated in individuals with anxiety and overthinking, and in political movements with consistently blowing elections. In the US, a 2021 paper by Catherine Gimbrone, Lisa Bates, Seth Prins and Katherine Keyes entitled “The politics of depression: Diverging trends in internalising symptoms among US adolescents by political beliefs” took the emotional temperature of 12th-grade (year 13) students between 2005 and 2018. It found that liberal girls, with liberal boys following them, experienced surging rates of depressive symptoms. Conservative teenagers, perhaps inured to inequality or the climate crisis or the rise of populism by their beliefs, were not nearly so sad.

Were these distressed teenagers left-wing because they were miserable, or miserable because they were left-wing? The paper does not quite give an answer. I wonder if both can be simultaneously true. Misery, in any case, was tied to ideology.

Considering these findings, the economist Tyler Cowen claimed that “you cannot understand the American public intellectual sphere” without a grasp of the close connection between left thinking and depressive tendencies. The same holds in Britain, and not just among public intellectuals. Over the past ten years I have attended demos, protests, drum circles, vigils, Marxist reading groups, union meetings and picket lines. At each of these gatherings there was usually talk of “joy” and “care”, though little of either in evidence.

I know few natural Tories, fewer cradle Labourites, and many born-again, creedal leftwingers. The Tories … have wafted through these crisis years without once discussing therapy with me, or reaching for antidepressants. The same cannot be said of the others.

Once you are aware of this link between private sadness and publicly proclaimed left-wing beliefs, it is difficult ever to forget. New Labour’s behind-closed-doors difficulties begin to make more sense when you understand that many of its leading players were not the happiest warriors …

Of course, the right has its own pathologies. An obdurate lack of empathy and, more recently, a bovine, unconvincing embrace of “man in the street” aspirations …

But there is a reason why the ingenious left-wing German essayist Walter Benjamin railed against “left-wing melancholia” in the Thirties. There is a reason, too, why the most brilliant British left thinker of his generation, Mark Fisher, wrote most insightfully about depression, not capitalism. A movement that longs, in its depths, for a utopia that will never be built is usually going to be unhappy. This constant state of unfulfilled desire, the painful political equivalent of unrequited love, is the birthmark the left can never truly hide.

Don’t let American squalor happen here

This brings me to my last article from UnHerd, ‘Why American cities are squalid’.

I’m not sure that the article explained why this is, although one of the comments to it certainly did — Democrat control:

There aren’t many Republican cities (this chart shows 10 of 51 cities over quarter of a million):

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2014/08/08/chart-of-the-week-the-most-liberal-and-conservative-big-cities/

And those are the smaller/less diverse/higher trust ones like Jacksonville, Fl and Anchorage, Alaska.

I will let readers examine the article and the comments for themselves, because they are too depressing to detail here: violent deaths, vagrants urinating on public transport, a homeless person defecating in the middle of a food court and so on.

I worry about Glasgow with its upcoming shooting galleries that will make a declining city even more unsafe.

I worry even more about London, with its high rate of stabbings and homeless in shop doorways.

What could that could lead to? Every American city I know about on the decline started with a high crime rate. From there it went to homelessness, open consumption of drugs in the street and uncontrolled behaviour, e.g. using public spaces as a toilet.

What all these cities had and have in common are Democrat mayors and Democrat-controlled councils.

Conclusion

Which brings me back to Labour. Look at how they cared for the people of Aberfan. They cared nothing about the good people of Aberfan.

Labour won’t care about you, either. They’ll say anything to get in power then ignore their many promises, left unfulfilled.

Good news: the world has become healthier and better educated since 1820

One could be forgiven for thinking that the world is going down the plughole.

However, an illuminating survey from Our World In Data shows that this is not so. The organisation’s survey, which covers the years from 1820 to 2019, illustrates ‘The World as 100 People’. I found it elsewhere online and felt duty bound to share it. Note that the world’s population has increased seven-fold during that time, from 1.1 billion to 7.7 billion people. Click here for an enlarged version:

This is worth sharing with family and friends, especially children, who are panicked at school and worried about an apocalyptic future.

Also worth noting is Newsweek‘s 2024 Future Possibilities Index which places the United Kingdom at the top of the list of countries best placed to succeed in the coming years. Denmark comes second and the United States comes third. Click here for an enlarged version:

Admittedly, Newsweek‘s survey is along the lines of ‘building back better’, but it covers six economic criteria for success — Exabyte (high tech), Wellbeing, Net Zero, Circular, Bio Growth and Experience.

It is 61 pages long but comes with an executive summary at the beginning.

It is well worth reading, as it is something to be happy about in the doldrums of winter. Enjoy!

What Eve’s curse has wrought: recent news

Yesterday’s post on Genesis 3:16 was about God’s curse on Eve and all women following her transgression in the Garden of Eden: eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge (of Good and Evil).

God’s dual curse involved womankind’s difficulty with childbearing and with husbands (men in general), their two primary relationship groups.

Throughout history, women have suffered with both. There is no real relief in sight, although the effects may be partially mitigated through faith and godly living.

Below are examples of how the curse of Eve has played out in recent times.

Childbirth

On October 19, 2023, the House of Commons held a debate on Baby Awareness Week concerning the alarming levels of infant mortality in NHS trusts.

MPs discussed the findings of Donna Ockenden’s eponymous report on this topic and personal experiences. I hadn’t intended to watch it, but I happened to be preparing dinner at the time. It was shocking.

Most moving was the testimony from Patricia Gibson, the SNP MP for North Ayrshire and Arran, excerpted below (emphases mine):

… I always want to participate in this debate every year because I think it is an important moment—a very difficult moment, but an important one—in the parliamentary calendar. It is significant that the theme this year is the implementation of the findings of the Ockenden report in Britain, because that report was very important. We all remember concerns raised in the past about neonatal services in East Kent and Morecambe Bay, and the focus today on the work undertaken by Donna Ockenden in her maternity review into the care provided by Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust really matters.

Donna Ockenden is currently conducting an investigation into maternity services at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust. That comes in the wake of the fact that in the past, concerns have been raised about a further 21 NHS trusts in England with a mortality rate that is over 10% more than the average for that type of organisation, with higher than expected rates of stillbirth and neonatal death.

To be clear, I do not for one minute suggest that this is not a UK-wide problem, as I know to my personal cost. As the Minister will know, concerns remain that, despite a reduction in stillbirths across the UK, their number is still too high compared with many similar European countries, and there remain significant variations across the UK. Those variations are a concern. We know that they could be, and probably are, exacerbated by the socioeconomic wellbeing of communities. We know that inequality is linked to higher stillbirth rates and poorer outcomes for babies. Of course, the quality of local services is also a huge factor, and this must continue to command our attention.

When the Ockenden report was published earlier this year, it catalogued mistakes and failings compounded by cover-ups. At that time, I remember listening to parents on the news and hearing about what they had been through—the stillbirths they had borne, the destruction it had caused to their lives, the debilitating grief, the lack of answers and the dismissive attitude of those they had trusted to deliver their baby safely after the event. I do not want to again rehearse the nightmare experience I had of stillbirth, but when that report hit the media, every single word that those parents said brought it back to me. I had exactly the same experience when my son, baby Kenneth, was stillborn on 15 October 2009—ironically, Baby Loss Awareness Day.

That stillbirth happened for the same reasons that the parents described in the wake of the Ockenden report. Why are we still repeating the same mistakes again and again? I have a theory about that, which I will move on to in a moment. It was entirely down to poor care and failings and the dismissive attitude I experienced when I presented in clear distress and pain at my due date, suffering from a very extreme form of pre-eclampsia called HELLP syndrome. I remember all of it—particularly when I hear other parents speaking of very similar stories—as though it were yesterday, even though it is now 14 years later. I heard parents describing the same things that happened to me, and I am in despair that this continues to be the case. I hope it is not the case, but I fear that I will hear this again from other parents, because it is not improving. I alluded to that in my intervention on the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham [Tim Loughton, Conservative], and I will come back to it.

While I am on the issue of maternal health, expectant mothers are not being told that when they develop pre-eclampsia, which is often linked to stillbirths, that means they are automatically at greater risk of heart attacks and strokes. Nobody is telling them that they are exposed to this risk. I did not find out until about five years after I came out of hospital. Where is the support? Where is the long-term monitoring of these women? This is another issue I have started raising every year in the baby loss awareness debate. We are talking about maternal care. We should be talking about long-term maternal care and monitoring the health of women who develop pre-eclampsia …

… We are seeing too many maternity failings, and now deep concerns are being raised about Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust. I understand that the trust faces a criminal investigation into its maternity failings, so I will not say any more about it. The problem is that when failures happen—and this, for me, is the nub of the matter—as they did in my case at the Southern General in Glasgow, now renamed the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital, lessons continue to be not just unlearned but actively shunned. I feel confident that I am speaking on behalf of so many parents who have gone through similar things when I say that there is active hostility towards questions raised about why the baby died. In my case, I was dismissed, then upon discharge attempts were made to ignore me. Then I was blamed; it was my fault, apparently, because I had missed the viewing of a video about a baby being born—so, obviously, it was my fault that my baby died.

It was then suggested that I had gone mad and what I said could not be relied upon because my memory was not clear. To be absolutely clear, I had not gone mad. I could not afford that luxury, because I was forced to recover and find out what happened to my son. I have witnessed so many other parents being put in that position. It is true that the mother is not always conscious after a stillbirth. Certainly in my case, there was a whole range of medical staff at all levels gathered around me, scratching their heads while my liver ruptured and I almost died alongside my baby. Indeed, my husband was told to say his goodbyes to me, because I was not expected to live. This level of denial, this evasion, this complete inability to admit and recognise that serious mistakes had been made that directly led to the death of my son and almost cost my own life—I know that is the case, because I had to commission two independent reports when nobody in the NHS would help me—is not unusual. That is the problem. That kind of evasion and tactics are straight out of the NHS playbook wherever it happens in the UK, and it is truly awful.

I understand that health boards and health trusts want to cover their backs when things go wrong, but if that is the primary focus—sadly, it appears to be—where is the learning? Perhaps that is why the stillbirth of so many babies could be prevented. If mistakes cannot be admitted when they are made, how can anyone learn from them? I have heard people say in this Chamber today that we do not want to play a blame game. Nobody wants to play a blame game, but everybody is entitled to accountability, and that is what is lacking. We should not need independent reviews. Health boards should be able to look at their practices and procedures, and themselves admit what went wrong. It should not require a third party. Mothers deserve better, fathers deserve better, and our babies certainly deserve better.

Every time I hear of a maternity provision scandal that has led to stillbirths—sadly, I hear it too often—my heart breaks all over again. I know exactly what those parents are facing, continue to face, and must live with for the rest of their lives—a baby stillborn, a much-longed-for child lost, whose stillbirth was entirely preventable.

… Some people talk about workforce pressure, and it has been mentioned today. However, to go back to the point made by the hon. Member for Truro and Falmouth (Cherilyn Mackrory [Conservative]), for me and, I think, many of the parents who have gone through this, the fundamental problem is the wilful refusal to admit when mistakes have happened and to identify what lessons can be learned in order to prevent something similar happening again. To seek to evade responsibility, to make parents feel that the stillbirth of their child is somehow their own fault or, even worse, that everyone should just move on and get on with their lives after the event because these things happen—that is how I was treated, and I know from the testimony I have heard from other parents that that is how parents are often treated—compounds grief that already threatens to overwhelm those affected by such a tragedy. I do not want to hear of another health board or NHS trust that has been found following an independent investigation to have failed parents and babies promising to learn lessons. Those are just words.

When expectant mums present at hospitals, they should be listened to, not made to feel that they are in the way or do not matter. How hospitals engage with parents during pregnancy and after tragedy really matters. I have been banging on about this since I secured my first debate about stillbirth in 2016, and I will not stop banging on about it. I am fearful that things will never truly change in the way that they need to, and that simply piles agony on top of tragedy. I thank Donna Ockenden for her important work, and I know she will continue to be assiduous in these matters in relation to other work that she is currently undertaking, but the health boards and health trusts need to be much more transparent and open with parents when mistakes happen. For all the recommendations of the Ockenden report—there are many, and they are all important—we will continue to see preventable stillbirths unless the culture of cover-ups is ended. When the tragedy of stillbirth strikes, parents need to know why it happened and how it can be prevented from happening again. That is all; a baby cannot be brought back to life, but parents can be given those kinds of reassurances and answers. That is really important to moving on and looking to some kind of future.

It upsets me to say this, but I have absolutely no confidence that lessons were learned in my case, and I know that many parents feel exactly the same. However, I am very pleased to participate again in this annual debate, because these things need to be said, and they need to keep being said until health boards and NHS trusts stop covering up mistakes and have honest conversations when tragedies happen, as sometimes they will. Parents who are bereaved do not want to litigate; they want answers. It is time that NHS trusts and health boards were big enough, smart enough and sensitive enough to understand that. Until mistakes stop being covered up, babies will continue to die, because failures that lead to tragedies will not be remedied or addressed. That is the true scandal of stillbirth, and it is one of the many reasons why Baby Loss Awareness Week is so very important, to shine a light on these awful, preventable deaths for which no one seems to want to be held accountable.

I will just add a postscript here about a cousin of mine who gave birth five times in the 1990s in the United States with the best of private health care.

John MacArthur and Matthew Henry both suggest that godly living will prevent bad experiences in pregnancy and childbirth, but one of my cousins is a devout Catholic and was at the time when she was pregnant. She is middle class and her husband is financially self-sufficient, better off than most men in his social cohort.

Nevertheless, my cousin had horrific third trimesters with each pregnancy resulting in pre-eclampsia. Therefore, I object to men, especially ordained men, intimating that a woman’s godly living will alleviate suffering when she is carrying a child. All I can say about my cousin and other godly women living through those life-threatening situations is that their plight might be a form of sanctification: imposed suffering from on high for greater spiritual refinement. I don’t have an answer.

Fortunately, my cousin recovered and has five healthy adult sons who bring her much happiness.

Men

What more needs to be said about the role of men in women’s lives that hasn’t already been said?

Below are a few recent news items exploring the ongoing war between the sexes.

Divorce

In the Philippines, which is still predominantly Roman Catholic, women want the law changed to allow for divorce. On December 28, 2023, The Telegraph carried the story, ‘Divorce in the Philippines: “My husband beat me over and over — I still can’t legally divorce him”‘:

Ana takes out her phone and scrolls through the grim set of photos. In them, her face is purple and swollen, her lip cut – it wasn’t the first time her husband struck her, but the 48-year-old hopes it will be the last.

“He followed me with a wooden stick and hit me over and over,” says Ana, whose name has been changed. “I remember thinking, this time he’s going to kill me … I shouted for help but I don’t think anyone heard. So I ran.”

As she sat in hospital later that night in August, Ana came to a stark realisation: after 19 years, two daughters, and plenty of violence, she wanted a divorce.

There’s only one problem: in the Philippines, it’s illegal.

“I don’t want him in my life anymore,” Ana says. “Separation isn’t enough, I cannot say that is freedom. It would be like a bird in a cage – you cannot fly wherever you go, because you are married so you are linked … But in the Philippines, the law doesn’t stand with me.”

The southeast Asian country is the only place outside the Vatican which prohibits divorce, trapping thousands of people in marriages that are loveless at best, abusive and exploitative at worst.

But now, as new legislation creeps through Congress, there are mounting hopes that change may finally be on the horizon in this conservative, Catholic country …

“I’m a Catholic, I go to church, but I also believe it’s my human right to become divorced. I want to try to convince others of that too,” says Ana, between bites of a homemade custard tart.

“In the meantime, I’m not giving up on love. Where there’s life, there’s love.”

There was a time when divorce was allowed for everyone in the Philippines, but that all changed with independence:

Though banned during the Spanish colonial era, divorce on the grounds of adultery or concubinage was legalised in 1917 under American occupation, and further expanded by the Japanese when they took control during World War Two.

But in 1950, when the newly independent country’s Civil Code came into effect, these changes were repealed.

Today, only Muslims can obtain a divorce in the Philippines:

Today, most couples – bar Muslims, who are covered by Sharia laws which allow for divorce – have two options: legal separation, which doesn’t end a marriage but allows people to split their assets; or annulment, which voids the nuptials and enables individuals to remarry, as the union never existed in the eyes of the law.

Every other couple has to jump through highly challenging legal and financial hoops to obtain some sort of separation:

… the grounds are narrow, the process bureaucratic, the courts stretched and the costs extortionate.

Gaining an annulment, for instance, involves proving someone was forced into a marriage or mentally unsound on their wedding day. Brookman, a solicitors firm specialising in divorce, warns a “large amount of evidence” is required – and the costs often spiral to “roughly the average salary” in the Philippines.

“Some say it’s an anti-poor, pro-rich process because it takes quite a bit of effort, resources and money to gain an annulment,” says Carlos Conde, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch. “People who have access to lawyers can go through the process, but for the majority of poor Filipinos that’s just not an option. And so they stay in toxic relationships.”

Even where people do have the funds, the outcome is far from guaranteed. Take Stella Sibonga. The 46-year-old filed for an annulment in 2013, keen to give marriage a second chance with her long-term boyfriend. Five years prior, she left a decade-long union she described as “traumatic and miserable”.

Yet, 300,000 pesos (roughly £4,300) and 10 years later, Ms Sibonga remains married to the “wrong man”.

“I have no idea when I’ll get a final verdict,” she says. “In the meantime, people say I’m living in sin with my boyfriend, they judge me for it… Really, it’s a nightmare.”

Catholic clergy are firmly opposed to a divorce law in the Philippines, and legislators tread carefully:

“We remain steadfast in our position that divorce will never be pro-family, pro-children, and pro-marriage,” Father Jerome Secillano, the executive secretary of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines, said in September. He has previously criticised “legislators who rather focus on breaking marriages and the family rather than fixing them”.

The church has huge influence in the Philippines, where nearly 80 per cent of the population is Catholic.

“The main difficulty is the opposition to the divorce bill by this powerful block led by the Catholic church and religious fundamental groups,” says Mr Conde. “Many legislators are not keen to butt heads with or offend the church … it is tough to do battle against them.”

I understand the clergy’s point, but some things just cannot be fixed.

The country’s 2012 reproductive health bill still hadn’t been implemented in 2022. The Church had blocked it with religious threats against legislators:

The fight to ensure access to contraception was a case in point. After more than a decade of gruelling debate, negotiations and lobbying, the Reproductive Health (RH) law finally passed in 2012 – only for full implementation to be blocked for years amid legal challenges from the church.

In 2022, government figures suggested 42 per cent of women still had an unmet need for family planning, meaning they wanted to use contraception but were not able to access it. Over half of pregnancies in the Philippines are “unintended”.

“The Catholic hierarchy in the country was vociferously against the RH bill, so much so that it threatened the authors of the measure with excommunication and defeat at the polls,” says Mr Lagman [Edcel Lagman, congressman and author of the divorce bill in the House of Representatives]. But he thinks the fight for divorce could be easier.

“Although representatives of the church have stated that as an institution, it is strongly against the measure, I think that this time around it is not as vehement in its opposition,” he adds. “All Catholic countries worldwide, except for the Philippines, have already legalised absolute divorce. This is a recognition that divorce does not violate Catholic dogma.”

This is the state of play with the proposed divorce bill:

“Now, for the first time, both the House and the Senate have approved their respective measures at the committee level,” Edcel Lagman, congressman and author of the divorce bill in the House of Representatives, told the Telegraph.

“I am still very optimistic that the present Congress will pass the divorce bill and President Ferdinand Marcos Jr, who has said before that he is pro-divorce, will sign the measure into law… The Philippines needs a divorce law, and we need it now – it is not some dangerous spectre that we must fight against.”

More and more people here agree. In 2005, a survey by the polling company Social Weather Stations found 43 per cent of Filipinos supported legalising divorce “for irreconcilably separated couples,” while 45 per cent disagreed. This had shifted to 53 per cent in favour and 32 per cent against in the same survey in 2017.

We shall see what happens in 2024.

Virtual reality

However, a woman does not need to have to come into actual physical contact with a man in order to feel abused. Over the Christmas period, allegations of rape came to light from a girl experiencing virtual reality in the gaming world.

The story was all over media outlets. On January 2, 2024, The Times reported, ‘Police investigate “virtual rape” of girl in metaverse game’:

The police are investigating an alleged rape in the metaverse for the first time after a child was “attacked” while playing a virtual reality video game, it emerged last night.

The girl, who is under the age of 16, was not injured as there was no physical assault but is said to have suffered significant psychological and emotional trauma. She had been wearing an immersive headset while in a virtual “room” when she was attacked by several adult men, according to the Daily Mail …

Details of the virtual reality case are said to have been kept secret to protect the child involved, amid fears that a prosecution would not be possible. A senior officer familiar with the case said: “This child experienced psychological trauma similar to that of someone who has been physically raped. There is an emotional and psychological impact on the victim that is longer term than any physical injuries. It poses a number of challenges for law enforcement, given [that] current legislation is not set up for this.”

Donna Jones, the chairwoman of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners, told the newspaper that women and children deserved greater protection. She said: “We need to update our laws because they have not kept pace with the risks of harm that are developing from artificial intelligence and offending on platforms like the metaverse. The government needs to look at changing the law to protect women and children from harm in these virtual environments.”

The police believe that developments in gaming have opened up new avenues for cybercrime, including virtual robbery, ransomware, fraud and identity theft, but existing legislation is unlikely to cover rape in the metaverse. This is because sexual assault is defined in the Sexual Offences Act as the physical touching of another person sexually without their consent.

The nature of the metaverse also blurs geographical boundaries, making it difficult to determine which law enforcement agency has jurisdiction over an incident when users and perpetrators are in different countries.

This, in my opinion, was entirely preventable. A parent or two should have been guiding this girl from the get-go.

I am no gamer, but even I can see that the metaverse presents potential dangers, as The Times‘s Helen Rumbelow reported on January 3, ‘Young, female and vulnerable: a “rape” in the virtual world’:

I was exploring Horizon Worlds, using the Oculus headset, both brands owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta. This is where a British schoolgirl under the age of 16 was allegedly “gang-raped” by a group of online strangers.

The police are investigating whether, under the legislation, there is any crime here to prosecute. I used inverted commas around “gang-rape”, since the crime of rape is narrowly defined as someone being penetrated against their consent. That didn’t happen here: the child was alone with her VR headset, possibly thousands of miles from her antagonists, and was physically unharmed.

Instead, in a virtual space inside Horizon Worlds, her avatar was surrounded by male avatars. In 2022 Horizon Worlds introduced a “personal boundary” default setting that prevents other avatars coming within four feet of you, but if that was disabled then touch from other users can activate a buzz through your own Oculus controllers that you hold in each hand.

You can also see fairly crude — in every way — gestures of other avatars interacting with yours, and hear the voices of the people online who are conducting the attack, and maybe describing it. I heard legal experts talking about this case drift away from the vocabulary of sexual assault. Instead, they preferred “a distressing incident” that caused the girl psychological harm …

Many women have reported that they feel unsafe from attacks in these spaces. In 2018 an American mother provided screen evidence of how her seven-year-old daughter was being “gang-raped” by two boys in a playground in Roblox, the child-focused online game.

Sorry, but the mother never should have allowed that to happen. A seven-year-old should only be gaming even on children’s games with adult supervision.

Rumbelow went on to describe her 1990s time at Stanford University in Silicon Valley when virtual reality was being developed. Even then, online assaults were taking place, every bit as shocking. The perpetrator from the game then being tested was a student thousands of miles away at New York University.

Thirty years later, this was Rumbelow’s experience on Horizon Worlds:

When I go on Horizon Worlds the first danger I encounter is my family. Being blinded by a massive headset as you flail around the living room not only looks absurd but makes your rump vulnerable to smacking — once our human bodies are all suspended in their own vats, à la The Matrix, while our minds go virtual, this problem will be designed out.

I first give myself a female avatar called Nicky, with blonde hair and a red dress, and play a few different games in groups of virtual strangers. The vibe is quite “cruisey”: I can follow and message anyone I am hanging out with and I keep having to interrupt play to dismiss requests to privately connect. It’s like trying to play tennis with a bunch of men rushing on court to get my number …

I have the same height and power as males, and at one point in a haunted house game called Bonnie’s Revenge I am briefly surrounded by a bunch of unknown guys in a dark corridor. In real life this would be a heart-rate moment; instead I blast straight past them. I am repeatedly reminded that I have the mute button to turn off any characters that offend me …

When I re-enter Horizon Worlds with the avatar of a man called Nick, I play a game called Super Rumble (attracted by the name) that I had played before as a woman. As Nicky, I was ignored; as Nick I am called to “pack” with a team of boys against the only female avatar called “Rad Rachel”. “Let’s team on her,” says one British male teenager to our group (I have to remain silent or betray myself) …

At the end of the game we all troop down to the results area to see our scores. Rad Rachel did well but is still getting barracked, with guys up close sticking their guns to her head …

The Times‘s Sean Russell, an experienced gamer, also shared his virtual experiences, ‘I enjoyed playing in the metaverse, then I went in as a woman’:

I was in Meta’s Horizon Worlds metaverse and was standing outside a virtual comedy club for 30 seconds before a man said: “Want to see my balls?” That’s funny, I thought, no one had said that when my avatar was a man. In fact, when I was a man no one said a thing to me at all.

… In the 19 years I’ve been playing games online little has changed — women are treated the same as they always have been. The news that police are investigating the “virtual rape” of a young woman in a metaverse game is totally unsurprising.

Russell asks the question many of us might have posed to the 16-year-old about her virtual rape: Why not turn off the game?

Russell says there could be a deeper question to answer:

I would say it is a matter of requiring a new vocabulary to talk about these things. If a young woman cannot sit down in what is probably the safest place she has, her home, to play a game she enjoys, perhaps it’s not as easy as turning the game off. Perhaps the invasive psychological damage is done before any “act” has taken place.

Many minors are playing in the virtual universe:

The NSPCC estimates that 15 per cent of children aged five to ten have used a virtual reality headset and 6 per cent use one daily. Meanwhile, a game such as Fortnite (age rating 13+) has 23 million players a day, many of whom are children.

This is not the route a child, especially a girl, should be following. Play in the real world: sports, board games, bridge.

Bad girls

Returning to the real world, two stories caught my eye recently.

One is about the trend for kept women. They are not mistresses as no wife or marriage is involved, ergo they are concubines. However, they bill themselves as ‘stay-at-home girlfriends’, ‘trad wives’ or ‘hot housewives’, as a November 2023 article in UnHerd reveals. This is immorality posing as morality:

On a summer’s day, TikTok influencer Gwen The Milkmaid can be found frying up all-American comfort food dressed in a floral prairie dress. “I don’t want to be a boss babe. I want to be a frolicking mama. I want to spend my days baking bread, cuddling chickens, and drinking raw milk straight from the udder,” she writes in her TikTok caption. In another video, she smiles beatifically at her nearly 50,000 followers, giving the camera a view of her ample breasts as she bakes a fresh sourdough loaf.

Gwen is a self-proclaimed “trad-wife”, one of a number of women across TikTok, Instagram, and Reddit forums extolling a return to ultra-traditional gender roles and financial dependence on a male partner. Like the swinging dicks of WallStreetBets and crypto bros, the online trad-wife is an expression of 21st-century financial nihilism. Disillusioned by the girl-boss feminist fantasy, these young women are turning to men to pay off their loans and fund their lifestyles. And, why not? The good life isn’t coming any other way …

… the girlfriend’s main project is to keep herself: thin, young, and desirable. She is her main project and her job is, as Jia Tolentino has written, to “always be optimising” …

When having it all means doing it all, there’s an allure to doing almost nothing. “People used to ask me what’s your dream job,” Kay writes in one video caption. “I don’t dream of labour. I dream of living a soft, feminine life as a hot housewife. It’s as simple as that” …

As much as these women preach an easier, calmer life away from the grind, the #Tradwife or #SAHG is just the latest niche in the long trail of “girl online” content. This work is its own hustle and produces its own income. Gwen the Milkmaid, for example, has recently cast off an online presence as an adult content creator on Only Fans. And surely few people could be fooled by Kendel Kay’s half-hearted TikTok screed against girl-bossing as she shills for a green juice brand? It’s as if the response to financial nihilism is yet more nihilism.

The comments section to the article is one of UnHerd‘s most populated: 204 comments, most of them thought-provoking in opposing this trend.

And, finally, there is the case of the young middle-class woman who ran over her boyfriend in England.

On January 3, The Telegraph gave us the background and photos in ‘Alice Wood: From promising postgraduate to life in prison’:

With her own home, a loving fiancé and the chance to study for a postgraduate degree at Cambridge University, Alice Wood had a glittering future in store.

But following a moment of madness borne out of drunken jealousy last May, the 23-year-old now faces the prospect of spending the rest of her life in prison.

After accusing her boyfriend, Ryan Watson of flirting with another woman at a party, Wood lost her temper and used her Ford Fiesta as a weapon to mow him down and kill him.

Following a three week trial at Chester Crown Court, Wood showed no emotion when she was found guilty of murder.

She will be sentenced on Jan 29, but the judge told her that she may never be released from prison.

Wood grew up in Cheadle, Staffordshire with her two brothers. Her parents were divorced and she would live alternatively with her mother, a doctor’s receptionist and father, a furniture maker.

Bright and academically able, she excelled at school and dreamed of becoming a vet.

Following her A-levels she took a different path, winning a place at Manchester University to study for a degree in philosophy, ethics and theology …

She was preparing for her finals on the fateful night when she killed her boyfriend.

Despite being unable to take her exams, Wood has since been awarded her degree based on the work she had already completed.

She had also been offered a scholarship to study part time for a master’s degree at Cambridge University – an offer she will now be unable to take up.

Wood and Mr Watson met at the beginning of lockdown in March 2020 and despite the restrictions on social mixing were soon in a serious relationship.

Within six months they were engaged and the following year, with the help of Mr Watson’s parents, had bought their first home together in the village of Rode Heath in Cheshire.

Mr Watson, had started a job as a support worker at the brain injury charity Headway, where he was proving to be a popular member of the team.

Last May, he and some of his colleagues were invited to a birthday party for a member of staff in the Victoria Lounge Bar in Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent.

During the party, guests noticed how Mr Watson was circulating with ease, chatting with other attendees.

They also noted that Wood was less comfortable and appeared unhappy with the fact her fiance was paying other women any attention.

The trial heard how Mr Watson had “clicked” with fellow guest Tiffany Ferriday, leaving Wood feeling as if she was being snubbed by her boyfriend …

The couple then rowed on the nine-mile drive home, with prosecutors claiming Wood lost her temper.

Despite being three times over the drink drive limit, she got out of her boyfriend’s car and got into her own Ford Fiesta.

CCTV footage shown in court captured the moment Wood swerved onto the pavement and careered into Mr Watson, sending him flying over the bonnet.

He was able to get to his feet, but Wood then smashed into him again this time trapping underneath the vehicle.

Wood then drove for more than 500 feet with him trapped under the car causing fatal injuries.

Following the collision, she knocked on the door of a neighbour, telling them: “Please telephone an ambulance, I think I have run over my boyfriend.”

The Times has more detail of Mr Watson’s final moments of life, beginning with an overview of the party:

During the trial at Chester crown court, Andrew Ford KC for the prosecution said: “Ryan Watson was caught on camera having a good time, being a gregarious and outgoing party guest, having fun and dancing” …

Ford said Wood got into the Fiesta and reversed towards Watson, almost hitting him, before driving it backwards and forwards in what one witness compared to a “game of chicken”.

Watson walked away and stood in front of parked cars but Wood drove into him, turning off the road to hit him, the court was told. He was knocked on to the bonnet of her car but was able to stand afterwards.

Ford said: “She drove straight into Ryan Watson for the second time, head on. This time he did not go over the bonnet — she knocked him clean over, under the vehicle’s front end.”

She told her trial that she did not realise he was trapped beneath her car when she drove 158 metres before stopping. The court was told that Wood had 61 micrograms of alcohol per 100ml of breath. The legal limit is 35.

Wood showed no emotion as the jury returned its unanimous verdict after less than eight hours of deliberation. The judge, Michael Leeming, further remanded her in custody and told her she “may never be released”.

Dear, oh dear.

Conclusion

I hadn’t expected that Eve’s curse would have got me started on reading about sin more closely, but it has and here we have it.

I better understand why God detests sin so much and why Original Sin caused Him to pass the ultimate penalty on all of us: certain death with much unhappiness thrown into the mix for those who do not obey His commandments.

There is something to be said for living a godly life where those miseries are mitigated.

2023 survey of American free speech in higher education reveals fear, self-censorship

This week’s big news in the United States was the resignation of Dr Claudine Gay as president of Harvard University.

However, she is returning to a faculty position, so it is not as if she is out of a job.

The Libertarian site Reason posted ‘Harvard President Claudine Gay Resigns After Plagiarism Scandal’ and had this to say about free speech at the university:

… her brief tenure at Harvard has not been marked by some dramatic return to free speech principles. In 2023, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression ranked Harvard dead last on its college free speech list. Indeed, one might conclude that in order to restore free speech to Harvard, different leadership is sorely needed.

In any case, the plagiarism allegations had teeth. Reporters discovered numerous instances of Gay lazily copying other scholars’ exact passages without naming them and also failing to cite her sources. The political ideology of some of her accusers—including Christopher Rufo, a conservative writer and activist—makes no difference; Gay must be held to the same standards as other professors and students.

When Harvard’s governing board picks the next president, they should look for someone who both abides by principles of academic integrity and vows to improve the college’s free speech standing.

Intrigued, I found the FIRE survey of over 200 American universities and checked out Harvard, which is ranked ‘Abysmal’ for free speech on campus. That category must have been created for Harvard, because it is the only institution of higher education so ranked.

I commend the survey to parents and students alike. It shows that, on average, more than half of college students are a) afraid of being misunderstood by classmates or faculty and b) self-censor before voicing their opinions.

It is a sad state of affairs, to say the least. When I was earning my undergrad degree over four decades ago, we were taught that those four years were to encourage us to broaden our horizons and to think differently. We never had problems with self-censorship, biased lecturers or cancelled speakers.

Then again, tuition was much less expensive then and students were hardly considered ‘customers’ in the way they are now.

It is a parlous state of affairs. It would be interesting to see what a similar survey in the UK might uncover.

News in brief: French crimes, US-UK censorship and 2024’s geopolitics

A few news stories caught my eye this week, covering various topics.

French crimes

On Tuesday, November 28, 2023, six teenagers went on trial in Paris for the October 2020 murder of the teacher Samuel Paty, beheaded for showing certain cartoons in class.

On November 27, EuroNews reported (emphases mine):

The killing horrified France and prompted authorities to reaffirm the country’s cherished right to free speech and secularism.

Paty, a history and geography teacher, was killed near his school in the Paris suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine on 16 October by a radicalised 18-year-old refugee of Chechen origin, Abdoullakh Anzorov. The attacker was shot dead by the police …

The teacher had used the magazine as part of an ethics lesson discussing freedom of speech in France. Blasphemy is legal in the country, and there’s a long history of cartoons mocking religious figures …

All hearings in a Paris juvenile court are to be held without the media, in accordance with French law on minors.

Among those on trial is a 13-year-old girl accused of making false accusations for claiming that Paty had asked Muslim students to raise their hands and leave the classroom before showing the cartoons.

The truth was that the girl had never been in Paty’s class.

A heated debate erupted on social media over her false accusations. Her father, Brahim Chnina, and Islamist militant Abdelhakim Sefrioui posted videos denouncing the French teacher and naming him.

The teenager later told investigators that she had lied. She admitted she was not in the classroom that day and Paty made no such request.

Five other students at Paty’s school, aged 14 and 15 at the time, are charged with criminal conspiracy to prepare the commission of grievous bodily harm.

The investigation revealed that the attacker knew the teacher’s name and the address of his school, but did not have the means to identify him.

This is why Anzorov promised payments of € 300-350 to these children in exchange for waiting for Paty for several hours until he left the school and identifying him.

According to the investigation, one of the boys didn’t want to do it alone, so he convinced the others.

Le Monde reported that while they waited, Anzorov asked one of the boys to call the teenager who had first accused Paty, and she repeated the lie. She later told investigators she didn’t know the attacker was listening in.

All six teenagers face 2 1/2 years in prison. The trial is due to end on 8 December.

Eight other adults are due to be tried at a later date. They include the father of the teenage girl who was charged with making false allegations. At the time, he had posted videos on social media that called for mobilisation against the teacher.

This defies belief.

I remember listening to RMC (talk radio) and the Grandes Gueules (Big Mouths) show discussing whether it was right to show certain images, especially in school. The hosts and guests took the matter as read, never thinking for a moment that the teacher’s beheading was based on a seriously false premise.

I could not help but think about my recent post on Titus 3:1-3, wherein St Paul wrote this instruction for the churches in Crete, which Titus was overseeing for a time:

3 Remind them to be submissive to rulers and authorities, to be obedient, to be ready for every good work, ² to speak evil of no one, to avoid quarrelling, to be gentle, and to show perfect courtesy towards all people. ³ For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another.

It is understandable why Paul, in all his letters, made personal conduct a cornerstone of his theological message.

In other news — and Titus 3:1-3 fits in well here, too — a tantric yoga teacher has been arrested on suspicion of sexual exploitation.

I have read about this man before, when a number of Frenchwomen voiced complaints about him.

On Wednesday, November 29, EuroNews reported:

The leader of a multinational tantric yoga organisation has been arrested by French authorities on suspicion of indoctrinating female followers for sexual exploitation.

Gregorian Bivolaru, the Romanian guru at the heart of the Atman Yoga Federation, was detained on Tuesday during a massive police operation across the Paris region, according to a French judicial official.

The 71-year-old is an internationally known yoga teacher and author whose federation, also known as the Movement for Spiritual Integration into the Absolute (Misa), is headquartered in England.

The movement has many yoga schools and branches, a source close to the investigation said. “It is difficult to quantify the number of followers,” but “it’s several hundred people”.

Other alleged “important leaders” of the sect in France have been arrested, the source added.

According to French officials, the investigation into Bivolaru and the Federation began in July 2023 after reports were made of psychological manipulation and sexual exploitation within the organisation. Former Misa members first alerted authorities to the alleged abuses in July 2022.

Bivolaru is being charged with human trafficking, organised kidnapping, rape, and organised abuse of weakness by members of a sect, according to French authorities.

International police agency Interpol also issued a notice for Bivolaru’s arrest on behalf of authorities in Finland, where he is wanted for alleged aggravated trafficking of human beings.

The Altman Federation’s website and other sites on Bivolaru allege that he is the victim of a wide-ranging plot to discredit him.

The raids in France involved 175 police officers and resulted in 40 other arrests across the French capital, Seine-et-Marne, Val-de-Marne, and the Alpes-Maritimes …

Bivolaru, who was convicted of raping a minor in his native Romania, founded Misa in 1990. The organisation expanded internationally as the Atman Yoga Federation.

The French investigation found evidence that students were coerced into sexual activities that included participating in explicit video chats for monetary gain, according to the judicial official.

These alleged activities, purportedly carried out under the pretence of tantric yoga teachings, formed a part of an intricate system of financial exploitation and control, the official said.

Dear, oh dear. The article has a photo of him. I struggle to see how women could have found him appealing.

British companies that underpaid staff

Do we ever find out what companies in the United Kingdom are at fault for not paying their employees properly?

Yes, we do.

Although this report is from July, someone posted the Government link this week on a comments forum. N.B.: All the companies listed have since rectified their, erm, mistakes.

I include this to show that all manner of companies have underpaid staff, from hairdressers to household names.

It’s all rather shocking.

US-UK censorship plan

On Tuesday, November 28, the Public Substack posted an article showing how British and American miltary contractors created a ‘sweeping plan’ for global censorship in 2018.

It is worth reading, as one of the co-authors is Matt Taibbi, the investigative journalist who left Rolling Stone‘s employ a few years ago.

The article is full of acronyms — not surprsing, considering we are dealing with the elements of Big State — and strange names, the sort that would come out of a television spy series.

Excerpts follow:

A whistleblower has come forward with an explosive new trove of documents, rivaling or exceeding the Twitter Files and Facebook Files in scale and importance. They describe the activities of an “anti-disinformation” group called the Cyber Threat Intelligence League, or CTIL, that officially began as the volunteer project of data scientists and defense and intelligence veterans but whose tactics over time appear to have been absorbed into multiple official projects, including those of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The CTI League documents offer the missing link answers to key questions not addressed in the Twitter Files and Facebook Files. Combined, they offer a comprehensive picture of the birth of the “anti-disinformation” sector, or what we have called the Censorship Industrial Complex …

The whistleblower alleges that a leader of CTI League, a “former” British intelligence analyst, was “in the room” at the Obama White House in 2017 when she received the instructions to create a counter-disinformation project to stop a “repeat of 2016.”

Why 2016:

In every incident mentioned, the victims of misinformation were on the political Left, and they included Barack Obama, John Podesta, Hillary Clinton, and Emmanuel Macron. The report was open about the fact that its motivation for counter-misinformation were the twin political earthquakes of 2016: Brexit and the election of Trump.

A short series of explanatory excerpts follows:

… in 2019, US and UK military and intelligence contractors led by a former UK defense researcher, Sara-Jayne “SJ” Terp, developed the sweeping censorship framework. These contractors co-led CTIL, which partnered with CISA [the US Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency] in the spring of 2020.

In truth, the building of the Censorship Industrial Complex began even earlier — in 2018.

Internal CTIL Slack messages show Terp, her colleagues, and officials from DHS and Facebook all working closely together in the censorship process.

The CTIL framework and the public-private model are the seeds of what both the US and UK would put into place in 2020 and 2021, including masking censorship within cybersecurity institutions and counter-disinformation agendas; a heavy focus on stopping disfavored narratives, not just wrong facts; and pressuring social media platforms to take down information or take other actions to prevent content from going viral.

In the spring of 2020, CTIL began tracking and reporting disfavored content on social media, such as anti-lockdown narratives like “all jobs are essential,” “we won’t stay home,” and “open America now.” CTIL created a law enforcement channel for reporting content as part of these efforts. The organization also did research on individuals posting anti-lockdown hashtags like #freeCA and kept a spreadsheet with details from their Twitter bios. The group also discussed requesting “takedowns” and reporting website domains to registrars …

These documents came to us via a highly credible whistleblower. We were able to independently verify their legitimacy through extensive cross-checking of information to publicly available sources. The whistleblower said they were recruited to participate in CTIL through monthly cybersecurity meetings hosted by DHS.

The FBI declined to comment. CISA did not respond to our request for comment. And Terp and the other key CTIL leaders also did not respond to our requests for comment …

CTIL’s ultimate goal, said the whistleblower, ”was to become part of the federal government. In our weekly meetings, they made it clear that they were building these organizations within the federal government, and if you built the first iteration, we could secure a job for you.”

Terp’s plan, which she shared in presentations to information security and cybersecurity groups in 2019, was to create “Misinfosec communities” that would include government.

The MisinfoSec Working Group created (bold in the original):

… a censorship, influence, and anti-disinformation strategy called Adversarial Misinformation and Influence Tactics and Techniques (AMITT). They wrote AMITT by adapting a cybersecurity framework developed by MITRE, a major defense and intelligence contractor that has an annual budget of $1 to $2 billion in government funding.

Terp later used AMITT to develop the DISARM framework, which the World Health Organization then employed in “countering anti-vaccination campaigns across Europe.”

A key component of Terp’s work through CTIL, MisinfoSec, and AMITT was to insert the concept of “cognitive security” into the fields of cybersecurity and information security.

The sum total of the documents is a clear picture of a highly coordinated and sophisticated effort by the US and UK governments to build a domestic censorship effort and influence operations similar to the ones they have used in foreign countries. At one point, Terp openly referenced her work “in the background” on social media issues related to the Arab Spring. Another time, the whistleblower said, she expressed her own apparent surprise that she would ever use such tactics, developed for foreign nationals, against American citizens.

Sounds a lot like Britain’s 77th brigade, using tactics for foreign nationals against British citizens questioning coronavirus pandemic policy.

There’s more:

The ambitions of the 2020 pioneers of the Censorship Industrial Complex went far beyond simply urging Twitter to slap a warning label on Tweets, or to put individuals on blacklists. The AMITT framework calls for discrediting individuals as a necessary prerequisite of demanding censorship against them. It calls for training influencers to spread messages. And it calls for trying to get banks to cut off financial services to individuals who organize rallies or events.

When the project started in 2018 and 2019, the term ‘cognitive security’ was its buzzword:

“Cognitive security is the thing you want to have,” said Terp on a 2019 podcast. “You want to protect that cognitive layer. It basically, it’s about pollution. Misinformation, disinformation, is a form of pollution across the Internet.”

Military and intelligence are key features of CTIL leaders’ background:

Terp and Pablo Breuer, another CTIL leader, like [former Israeli defence official Ohad] Zaidenberg, had backgrounds in the military and were former military contractors. Both have worked for SOFWERX, “a collaborative project of the U.S. Special Forces Command and Doolittle Institute.” The latter transfers Air Force technology, through the Air Force Resource Lab, to the private sector.

According to Terp’s bio on the website of a consulting firm she created with Breuer, “She’s taught data science at Columbia University, was CTO of the UN’s big data team, designed machine learning algorithms and unmanned vehicle systems at the UK Ministry of Defence.

Breuer is a former US Navy commander. According to his bio, he was “military director of US Special Operations Command Donovan Group and senior military advisor and innovation officer to SOFWERX, the National Security Agency, and U.S. Cyber Command as well as being the Director of C4 at U.S. Naval Forces Central Command.” Breuer is listed as having been in the Navy during the creation of CTIL on his LinkedIn page.

They created a wide audience:

Breuer went on to describe how they thought they were getting around the First Amendment. His work with Terp, he explained, was a way to get “nontraditional partners into one room,” including “maybe somebody from one of the social media companies, maybe a few special forces operators, and some folks from Department of Homeland Security… to talk in a non-attribution, open environment in an unclassified way so that we can collaborate better, more freely and really start to change the way that we address some of these issues.”

The Misinfosec report advocated for sweeping government censorship and counter-misinformation. During the first six months of 2019, the authors say, they analyzed “incidents,” developed a reporting system, and shared their censorship vision with “numerous state, treaty and NGOs.”

Narratives are the keys to success:

The Misinfosec report focused on information that “changes beliefs” through “narratives,” and recommended a way to counter misinformation by attacking specific links in a “kill chain” or influence chain from the misinfo “incident” before it becomes a full-blown narrative …

The authors advocated for police, military, and intelligence involvement in censorship, across Five Eyes nations, and even suggested that Interpol should be involved …

The report flagged the need for a kind of pre-bunking to “preemptively inoculate a vulnerable population against messaging.” The report also pointed to the opportunity to use the DHS-funded Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs) as the homes for orchestrating public-private censorship, and argued that these ISACs should be used to promote confidence in government …

Terp’s view of “disinformation” was overtly political. “Most misinformation is actually true,” noted Terp in the 2019 podcast, “but set in the wrong context.” Terp is an eloquent explainer of the strategy of using “anti-disinformation” efforts to conduct influence operations. “You’re not trying to get people to believe lies most of the time. Most of the time, you’re trying to change their belief sets. And in fact, really, uh, deeper than that, you’re trying to change, to shift their internal narratives … the set of stories that are your baseline for your culture. So that might be the baseline for your culture as an American” …

They tracked posters calling for anti-lockdown protests as disinformation artifacts …

CTIL also worked to brainstorm counter-messaging for things like encouraging people to wear masks and discussed building an amplification network. “Repetition is truth,” said a CTIL member in one training …

When asked whether Terp or other CTIL leaders discussed their potential violation of the First Amendment, the whistleblower said, “They did not… The ethos was that if we get away with it, it’s legal, and there were no First Amendment concerns because we have a ‘public-private partnership’ — that’s the word they used to disguise those concerns. ‘Private people can do things public servants can’t do, and public servants can provide the leadership and coordination.’”

Yet, some CTIL members have been less than transparent:

… some CTIL members may have taken extreme measures to keep their identities a secret. The group’s handbook recommends using burner phones, creating pseudonymous identities, and generating fake AI faces using the “This person does not exist” website.

… CTIL is apparently still active, based on the LinkedIn pages of its members.

The Public Substack says they will post more on CTIL in the days and weeks ahead. One to follow.

Geopolitics in 2024: one scenario

A November 26 article on ConservativeHome explores what could happen after the next general election in the UK, which is likely to be next year. January 2025 is the cut-off month.

It assumes that Labour’s Keir Starmer will become the next Prime Minister and that Donald Trump is re-elected in the US:

A timeline where a newly-elected Starmer has to make cute with a Donald Trump restored to the White House is objectively funny. His putative Foreign Secretary protested Trump’s previous UK visits; his Chancellor-in-waiting has made abundantly clear her preference for Joe Biden. But if Starmer has any faith in the cringeworthy fantasy of a ‘Special Relationship’, he must make it work.

Yet Labour’s leader may well find himself in a position we can dub a “Reverse Harold Wilson”. Keeping in with the Americans has been the central plank of Britain’s Cold War foreign policy, but the sage of Huddersfield did manage to keep us out of the Vietnam imbroglio. By contrast, Starmer has pledged to continue support for Ukraine. But Trump wants to cut it off.

Volodymyr Zelensky is yesterday’s news. Overshadowed by the Israel-Gaza conflict and undermined by his persistent failure to live up to his promises on the battlefield, he finds himself reliant on a United States whose voters are increasingly unwilling to pay for his nation’s security. His calls for EU membership fall on deaf ears amongst so-called allies worried about the staggering cost.

Germany, France, Poland, and the rest are imminently set to cut off support. But one imagines, after another year of expensive stalemate, the Chancelleries of Europe will not be entirely inattentive to any Trump’s foaming about value for money. Since Starmer is in lockstep with the Government’s support for Ukraine, this would put Britain in an even more awkward position.

Picture the scenes. As country after country in Europe turns to nationalist governments, ignoring Brussels in reimposing border fences and negotiating repatriation schemes, Starmer scraps any form of deterrent policy and hands effective control of our asylum policy over to the EU. As Western leaders urge Zelensky to cut a deal, Starmer finds himself isolated in calling for Ukraine to fight on with whatever he can find in the MoD’s lost property cupboard. 

The cynic in me suggests Starmer’s liberal posturing won’t survive long in office. Managing migration will be one of Europe’s great 21st-century challenges, even if the Home Office may want to wish Africa away. Retaining any influence in Washington will always be more valuable than taking selfies in Kyiv. Starmer is more likely to spend a night in Trump Tower than go out on a limb for Zelensky.

Even so, the Labour leader cannot be expected to observe his potential geopolitical inheritance with anything more than dismay. Maybe he’ll get lucky. Biden may yet triumph over his opponent’s youth and inexperience. Europe’s social democrats may rally, the continent’s current rightwards turn proving less a return to the 1930s, and more the equivalent of a frustrated teenage emo phase.

Yet this seems unlikely. The arc of history is long, but it bends towards the politics of our Atlantic cousins and European friends becoming ever crazier … Today’s Europe looks like one with which Farage would be more comfortable than Starmer. Second referendum, anyone?

It’s not an impossible prospect. If a Labour government buckled under pressure over migration, a recession, or war in the Far East, the right-wing critique of our current settlement will only grow in strength. If it can break through, British politics may yet look more European, but just not in the way that Starmer might hope. 

We can but see.

That said, a week is a long time in politics.

Forbidden Bible Verses — Titus 2:6-8

The three-year Lectionary that many Catholics and Protestants hear in public worship gives us a great variety of Holy Scripture.

Yet, it doesn’t tell the whole story.

My series Forbidden Bible Verses — ones the Lectionary editors and their clergy omit — examines the passages we do not hear in church. These missing verses are also Essential Bible Verses, ones we should study with care and attention. Often, we find that they carry difficult messages and warnings.

Today’s reading is from the English Standard Version Anglicised (ESVUK) with commentary by Matthew Henry and John MacArthur.

Titus 2:6-8

⁶ Likewise, urge the younger men to be self-controlled. ⁷ Show yourself in all respects to be a model of good works, and in your teaching show integrity, dignity, ⁸ and sound speech that cannot be condemned, so that an opponent may be put to shame, having nothing evil to say about us.

———————————————————————————————————————-

Last week’s post concerned the duties of younger Christian women to be faithful, loving wives and mothers, staying at home.

In an era of feminism spanning at least six decades now, Paul’s instructions to Titus and to the older women in Crete to encourage godly behaviour in women of childbearing age appear archaic.

However, interestingly enough, on Sunday, November 5, 2023, The Guardian featured an article about British mothers increasingly leaving the workforce to care for their children. The paper presents this as an attack on the Conservative government, but there are certain eternal truths here in balancing childcare and work outside the home. Women cannot always ‘have it all’, as is so often said, even today. Excerpts follow, emphases mine:

About a quarter of a million mothers with young children have left their jobs because of difficulties with balancing work and childcare, according to a report by an equal rights charity that calls for the end of the “motherhood penalty”.

This juggling act, as well as the punitive cost, has led more than 249,124 working mothers of children aged four or under to leave their employer, according to the Fawcett Society.

A lack of flexible working arrangements and affordable childcare combined with “outdated and toxic attitudes around motherhood” were holding women back, said its chief executive, Jemima Olchawski.

Its survey of 3,000 working parents of preschoolers, conducted jointly with the recruitment firm Totaljobs, revealed that one in five working mothers had considered leaving their job because of the difficulties of balancing work and childcare. One in 10 had handed in their notice because of this, rising to 13% of single mothers …

Alongside the mothers exiting the workforce, the poll also revealed that three out of four working parents have had to take unpaid leave becuase of childcare responsibilities, with higher rates for women from non-white backgrounds and single mothers.

Today’s reading concerns young men, who also have responsibilities as Christians.

John MacArthur rightly posits in his 1993 sermon that it is difficult for Christians to reach the world in a non-worldly way and cites examples, including one which is relevant today:

And so, the Lord has put on hold the fullness of our fellowship and the fullness of our praise and worship, the fullness of our bliss and blessing, and left us here for the express purpose of being human agents of salvation for the lost.  And I really think that, for the most part, the evangelical church understands that.  For the most part, they agree on that purpose.  However, they do not necessarily agree on the means for carrying it out.  I suppose that isn’t anything new.  The church has always struggled with what technique or what methodology or what style it should use – what approach to reach the lost.  The church has in the past, and I think is today as much as at any time in my life, been confused about how we are to evangelize, how we are to reach the unsaved.

It can even reach somewhat bizarre proportions.  I doubt there has ever been anyone like Sister Paula.  You may have read about her in People magazine.  She describes herself as an open, transsexual Christian, preaching the gospel – Tammy Faye with a five-o’clock shadow.  Sister Paul was born Larry Neilson and supposedly became a Christian in 1950 as a twelve-year-old, innately effeminate boy.  After Larry became Paula in a sex change operation a few years ago, some female, Pentecostal, televangelist friend urged Larry/Paula to start a television ministry.  People magazine describe Sister Paula as 53 years old, six feet one and a half inches tall and built like a linebacker.

Now obviously this is ultimately unthinkable, inconceivable, absolutely bizarre.  And yet it does illustrate the fact that people think you can go to extreme lengths to become like the world and have a better chance of reaching the world.  Can you imagine anything more incongruous or more profane than a transsexual evangelist?  Yet Sister Paula believes that she can have a more effective ministry to people in our generation, she says, than the, quote, “typical straight Christian.”  Sister Paula’s philosophy is fundamentally the same philosophy as much of the church marketing that goes on today, although certainly none of them would want to see it taken to such an extreme.  But the philosophy is if we’re going to win the world we’ve got to get alongside them, become enough like them so they’re not threatened by us.  The notion that the church is to become like the world to win the world has frankly taken evangelicalism by storm today ...

We’ve really done everything we could to sidle up along with the world and sort of become a Christian counterpart to every worldly attraction.  We have Christian motorcycle gangs, Christian body building teams, Christian dance clubs, Christian amusement parks, and I even read about a Christian nudist colony.  Now wherever Christians got the idea that we would win the world by imitating the world, they didn’t get it out of the Bible.  There’s not a shred of biblical justification for that kind of thinking.  In fact, James made it very clear when he said friendship with the world is enmity with God.  And John put it this way: “If any man loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.  All that is in the world is the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life.”  Those things are all in the process of perishing and have nothing to do with eternal issues …

I think the principle is utterly foundational, and it is stated for us in Matthew chapter 5. Jesus put it as simply and directly as He could, and it cannot be improved upon.  He said this: “Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works and glorify your Father who is in heaven.”  Jesus basically said the ultimate evangelistic platform is created by the virtue of your lives.

Paul writes to Titus, who is working to bring order to the many new churches in Crete, that, just as younger women have certain duties to fulfil — ‘Likewise’ — young men must learn to be self-controlled (verse 8).

Young men, whom Paul considers in the Greek context as being under the age of 60, are, by and large, virile beings who are often forthright as well as physically strong.

Matthew Henry’s commentary refers to these characteristics but probably applying them more to young men in their teens, 20s and early 30s:

They are apt to be eager and hot, thoughtless and precipitant; therefore they must be earnestly called upon and exhorted to be considerate, not rash; advisable and submissive, not wilful and head-strong; humble and mild, not haughty and proud; for there are more young people ruined by pride than by any other sin. The young should be grave and solid in their deportment and manners, joining the seriousness of age with the liveliness and vigour of youth. This will make even those younger years to pass to good purpose, and yield matter of comfortable reflection when the evil days come; it will be preventive of much sin and sorrow, and lay the foundation for doing and enjoying much good. Such shall not mourn at the last, but have peace and comfort in death, and after it a glorious crown of life.

Henry refers there to verses from Ecclesiastes, which MacArthur cites in his sermon.

MacArthur reminds us of Paul’s exhortations that Christians are to display sincerely transformed lives so as not to give the enemy — Satan’s earthly agents — any room for criticism:

We are so to live, said Jesus, so to live to the glory of God that men can see the beauty of what God has done in us.  It’s what we’ve already looked at and we shall see again in Titus 2:10 – “we adorn the doctrine of God our Savior in every respect.”  What does that mean?  We demonstrate the beauty of a saving God by showing saved lives.  Sinners have to see the transforming power of Christ’s presence, not in some clever technique but in someone’s life.

That is exactly what Paul is calling for here in Titus.  He knows what the evangelistic strategy is to reach the remainder of the island of Crete and wherever else the Cretan Christians might journey.  He knows what the issues at hand are.  He knows what has to be done to make the Word of God to be honored, as he says in verse 5; to silence the opposers, as he says in verse 8; and “to adorn the doctrine of God our Savior in every respect,” as he said in verse 10.  He knows exactly what to do, and that’s what he calls for in chapter 2 – godly living.

We must proclaim the saving message, yes.  We must give a clear word about sin and judgment and repentance and faith.  But it has to be made believable by our lives.  It does no good to speak about a God who can save when you show a life that doesn’t evidence it.

MacArthur tells us that Titus was likely to have been in his early 30s at this point, therefore, Paul wants him to serve as an example to Cretan men:

Having discussed the old men, the old women, the young women, and now he comes to the young men.  This is most important to Titus because he is one of them – very likely a little bit younger than Timothy, who was probably in his upper thirties, we find Titus maybe in his early thirties.  Much younger than Paul, who now describes himself as the aged – he has gone past the sixty mark – somewhere in his middle sixties.  But Titus is specifically a young man himself, and so he has a unique contribution to make to young men that he couldn’t make to old men – nor could he make it to old women or young women since he does not understand personally the role that they uniquely play.  So this is really his group.  Therefore, though verse 6 is directed at the young men, verses 7 and 8 are directed at Titus.

You say, “Is this a change?  Is there only one verse, verse 6, very briefly addressed to young men and then he goes on to talk to Titus?”  No, I think the whole thing relates to young men, and what he says to young men in general in verse 6 he says to Titus in specific, in verses 7 and 8, because Titus is to be the example to all young men.  This is setting a pace of spiritual character and spiritual devotion that he couldn’t set for older men, not having reached that point in life, and he couldn’t set for older women or younger women because he does not know fully and personally the role of women.  This is his group, and so he is called on not only to exhort them in verse 6, but to set the example for them in verses 7 and 8. All of it then relates through him to the young men.

MacArthur explains the concept of young and old in Greek society at the time:

It refers, generally speaking, to men under sixty since sixty seems to be not only the cultural break point in that time, but even the one which Paul identifies in 1 Timothy when he talks about widows who are over the age of sixty.  Young men fill up a large category, then, somewhere from say twenty to sixty, or thereabouts.  And young men have their own set of special problems and dangers.  They are maybe more intense in some ways in the earlier part of that vast period called young.  But they seem to stretch through the whole period. There, the time when men are still basically virile and strong and aggressive, to one degree or another, and healthy and somewhat ambitious.  And those are dangerous years for all of us men.

MacArthur describes those dangers, which might well engender habits that are hard to break in old age:

First of all, there is the danger of laziness, laziness.  You might call it indulgence.  This is usually programmed.  But it’s also innate in fallenness.  Man, generally speaking, is lazy.  He needs some compunctions and some controls and some strong motivations to work.  But general laziness can be exacerbated in the home when men are young.  Lazy men are usually produced that lack discipline, where they’re never really taught to pull in the loose ends of their life and be constructive.  Lazy men are also produced in homes where there is partiality, where for whatever reason the parents have selected this particular individual for particular benefit and partiality.  And so he does not see himself as one among many but one above many, and therefore looks not at what he can do to serve others but what others can do to serve him, and that creates laziness.

Lazy men are usually produced also in homes where they were never taught hard work, homes where they were indulged and had plenty of money and plenty of goods.  Lazy men are produced in homes where parents are absent, where there is no father.  Lazy men are produced in homes where there is no particular concern about watching over them, and they are left to themselves without caring, without discipline, without work.  And left to do what they please, young men will choose to do nothing beneficial.  They become victims of their own program – lethargy.  It’s a dangerous time to be young if you don’t learn discipline, if you don’t learn work, if you don’t learn diligence.

Secondly, another danger of youth is freedom, freedom.  Turning young people loose from the family confines, the family accountability, the family scrutiny, too soon, too fast, too far – they get a car and they have total freedom.  They’re out from under strong influence; they’re out from under restraint.  They’re out from under consequences of their behavior. They’re out from under instruction.  They’re out from under discipline.  They’re out from under fatherly control.  And when they begin to do what they please in their freedom they usually please to do what is not honoring to God or productive.

The third danger is a decadent culture.  Young men being raised in a decadent culture are accustomed to vice.  Listen carefully.  Familiarity with vice does not produce disgust, it produces attachment.  Familiarity with vice does not produce disgust, it produces attachment.  Moral perceptions are blurred, sensibilities to evil are dulled, and when young people – young men – become accustom to vice they are victimized by its allurements.

Fourthly, another danger that comes to young men is godless education.  They are exposed in their education to attacks on God, attacks on Christ – both overt and covert.  They are exposed to attacks on the Bible.  Christianity is either ignored, laughed at, jeered at, or not considered at all as intellectual.  They go through a process of education that basically leaves God out or defines Him in human terms, and it’s powerful stuff because mentors and teachers and professors carry authority with them.  It’s a dangerous time as the foundations of life and the belief in God, which is so innate to the human heart and the reasonings as indicated in Romans 1, are attacked and devastated and shattered in the educational process and men lose their sense of reality about God.

And then in a general category, number five, I would say it’s dangerous just because of overall immaturity.  Immaturity has its own problems. Somebody said it’s too bad youth has to be wasted on the young, but that’s how it is.  And youth, because it is youth, is immature. Because it’s immature it has its own set of problems.  For example, temptation is strongest in youth.  Lusts are most compelling at that time.  Habits are formed that rarely can be killed, even in old age.  I have stood by the bed of dying men who have confessed to me with tears that they have never been able to overcome the habits of pornography that they began when they were youths.  Youth is a time that presents more opportunity for sin, more frequent opportunity for sin.  Youth is a time when ambition is strong, when pride is controlling.  Youth is a time of unwarranted confidence – confidence you don’t deserve because it’s never been tested and you’ve never been proven.  It’s a time of imagined invincibility.  It’s a time of lacking of experience, and experience mellows and softens and brings reality. It’s a dangerous, dangerous time.  And the future of the church is yet dependent on young men growing up in such dangerous times.

I have examples of the danger of young men left to their own devices or who come from unstable homes.

In last week’s post about women, I cited the 1965 paper, The Moynihan Report, by Daniel Patrick Moynihan who was a policy adviser to the US presidents Kennedy and Johnson. The Moynihan Report looked at the difficulties that black families were experiencing at the time. Their divorce rate had suddenly increased and many single mothers were claiming welfare.

Education Next has an excellent summary and tells us why Moynihan thought the single-parent household was unhelpful, especially for young black men. This was just under 60 years ago (bold in the original here):

The percentage of white births in the U.S. that was illegitimate, he wrote, had inched upward from 2 percent in 1940 to 3 percent in 1963. The black percentage, however, had jumped during these years from 16.8 percent to 23.6 percent, thereby remaining roughly eight times higher than among whites. Black divorce rates, too, had increased: in 1940 these had been the same for blacks and whites, but by 1964 the nonwhite (here as elsewhere he meant Negro) percentage had become 40 percent higher than that among whites. The result, he wrote, was that “Almost One-Fourth of Negro Families are Headed by Females.” 

“Incredible mistreatment” over the past three centuries, Moynihan continued, had forced Negro families in the United States into a “matriarchal structure.” This was not necessarily a bad thing, he added, but because such a structure was “so out of line with the rest of the American society,” it “seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well.” American society “presumes male leadership in private and public affairs…. A subculture, such as that of the Negro American, in which this is not the pattern, is placed at a distinct disadvantage.”

Moynihan, who was well-intentioned although later unfairly criticised, posited that young black males needed more men in their lives:

He also recommended military service, where there was an “utterly masculine world,” for young black men. It was clear from the report that he agonized most about the effects of job discrimination and unemployment on young black males, which (except during World War II and the Korean War years) had been at “disaster levels for 35 years.” 

Overall, Moynihan wanted both black and white families to be equally strong, and this involved traditional role models. For a time, until Moynihan received criticism from black activists, President Johnson supported his adviser’s report:

While Johnson did not specify what government ought to do, he promised to take action to improve black education, health care, employment, and housing, and especially to devise “social programs better designed to hold families together.” “The family,” he emphasized, “is the cornerstone of our society.” He announced that he would convene a White House Conference in the fall featuring “scholars, and experts, and outstanding Negro leaders—men of both races—and officials of government at every level.” The theme and title of the conference would be “To Fulfill These Rights.”

Civil rights leaders hailed Johnson’s address. Martin Luther King Jr. declared, “Never before has a president articulated the depths and dimensions [of the problems] more eloquently and profoundly.” Johnson himself later said, and rightly so, that this was his greatest civil-rights speech.

There was ample reason at that time for Johnson and Moynihan to hope for public action, because a powerful tide of American liberalism was then cresting at an unprecedentedly high level. By June 1965, a heavily Democratic Congress had either enacted or was about to enact a host of ambitious Great Society programs—an Elementary and Secondary Education Act, Medicare, Medicaid, a Voting Rights Act, reform of racist immigration law—that Johnson, a relentless advocate, had been urging upon it.

Historic developments in the pivotal summer of 1965, however, transformed the political climate in the United States, thereby deeply darkening the context in which the report was to enter the public realm. One was enormous military escalation, publicly announced in late July, of the nation’s involvement in Vietnam. This absorbed Johnson’s attention, diverted massive federal funds to the war effort, and unleashed increasingly furious political acrimony.

A little later, in early August, five days of violent and widely televised black demonstrations ravaged the Watts area of Los Angeles … The bloody “Watts Riot,” as it was called, was a disaster for the interracial, nonviolent civil rights movement—and for liberal hopes in general.

In last week’s post, I presented more American examples of family breakdown as well as British examples.

This week, I will look at the similar trajectory of family breakdown exclusively in Britain from 2009.

On November 27 that year, The Telegraph featured ‘Poor boys “turned into criminals” at school’, with white and black suffering equally because of lefty education trends:

In a damning report, it was claimed thousands of white British and black Caribbean boys from the poorest backgrounds were being consigned to a “lifetime of crime, drugs and prison” after being failed at school.

The report blamed the “ideological fads” of the left-wing educational establishment.

This included a hardcore of teachers who believed proper discipline “belonged to the Dark Age” and allowed pupils to run amok in classrooms and corridors.

It also identified the failure to teach reading effectively in primary schools, which led to large numbers of boys starting secondary school with poor literacy skills, fuelling a culture of frustration and resentment.

The conclusions – in a study published by the Centre for Policy Studies, a think-tank – come just days after Ofsted levelled a series of criticisms at English schools.

In its annual report, the watchdog said that a “stubborn core” of poor teaching was holding back progress at thousands of schools and warned of a persistent gap between rich and deprived pupils.

Some educational aspects have improved since then. In 2022 international scores, English schools have one of the best reading rates in the world. However, that does not do much for the cohort from 2009.

That said, unfortunately, things have not improved for white working class boys who are in the same boat as their minority counterparts. In some cases, whites are worse off.

Six years later, on October 30, 2015, the BBC reported (bold in the original):

If you’re white, male and poor enough to qualify for a free meal at school then you face the toughest challenge when starting out in life.

That’s what the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has said in “the most comprehensive review ever carried out on progress towards greater equality in Britain”.

The suggestion is because white male poor pupils do worse at school their chances of getting good jobs is reduced.

The EHRC, an organisation set up to get rid of discrimination, defines anyone who qualifies for a free school meal as poor …

1. Poor white boys got the worst results overall

2. White pupils in general did worse than all other race groups

3. Chinese pupils among boys and girls did the best

Each group did see improvements in their results over the five year period, but white boys saw the least improvements which suggests they are being left behind, according to the EHRC.

The Financial Times published a graph with 2015 higher education admissions showing that poor white boys were least likely to enter university:

An article that appeared in October 2015 in The Conservative Woman had more, positing the adverse effects of the lack of male teachers in schools:

Masculinity and white ethnicity are real issues in our schools. Besides the shortage of white male teachers, white working-class boys are an issue, too. When it comes to the academic performance of different ethnic groups and gender cohorts, they are at the bottom of the pile.

The Commons Select Committee on Education was informed recently by Professor Matthew Goodwin that these pupils suffer from ‘a status deficit’. He has worked out that PC labels such as ‘white privilege’ and ‘toxic masculinity’ are not helpful. Another expert, Dr Lee Elliot Major, told the committee that ‘we’ve created a narrow academic race system that is unwinnable for white working-class communities’ …

In contrast, the story of the UK’s BAME community is, largely, one of success, however hard-earned at times. The performance of our immigrant children has been particularly outstanding. The comparative success of London schools is mostly down to the disproportionate number of immigrants in the capital. It was ever the case. Immigrant families have, throughout history and across the world, been amongst the most hard-working. They are also the most inclined to place high value on education.

The growing alienation of white males from the teaching profession, however, can no longer be ignored. Too many children, girls as well as boys, are growing up without male role models playing much of a part in their lives. The feminisation of schools – teachers as social workers and PC warriors – is putting men off. Concerns about child abuse may be another factor. An unwarranted stigma can attach to a man who wishes to work with children, especially young children.

… Many white males are retreating in the face of the woke onslaught. In schools the lack of male teachers means that many children are missing out on a lack of gender diversity that may have a long-term impact. The under-performance of working-class white boys, meanwhile, is being neglected. They constitute a high proportion of school leavers who are uneducated, unemployable and unappeased.

Teenage boys are becoming more violent and prone to criminal activity.

On February 15, 2010, the Mail reported on an advertising campaign that year to discourage boys from beating up their girlfriends:

Teenage boys are being urged not to abuse their girlfriends as part of a new Government campaign which was launched today.

The campaign was launched after worrying new figures show that at least one in three women have been abused.

TV, radio, internet and poster ads will target young males aged 13 to 18 in an attempt to show the consequences of abusive relationships.

It is part of a wider effort by ministers to cut domestic violence against both women and younger girls.

Research published last year by the NSPCC found a quarter of teenage girls said they had been physically abused by their boyfriends.

One in six said they had been pressured into sex and one in three said they had gone further sexually than they had wanted to.

Three months later that year, on May 13, the Mail covered the harrowing story of two ten-year-old boys who raped an eight-year-old girl in west London:

She was eight years old and cuddling a teddy on her lap. Her long blonde hair was in a ponytail and it flicked around the back of her pink and white T-shirt as she spoke.

In different circumstances, this might have been a little girl making her first appearance on a primary school video – shy, slightly nervous, and probably hoping to say all the right things.

But the camera had been set up in a police interview room. The softly spoken blonde in front of her was a specially trained PC [police constable].

And what she said on film reduced the highest criminal court in the land to virtual silence yesterday.

With the startling candour of an innocent child, she told how two ten-year-old boys forced her to pull down her pants before taking it in turns to do something to her that made her bow her head and wipe her eyes when she described it.

She never used the word rape – but that was the charge the boys in Court 7 at the Old Bailey faced as they sat with their chins on their hands, flanked by their mothers and two lawyers, to watch her evidence on screen.

In one of the most remarkable cases ever to come before a jury, the allegation was that they lured her away from her home and into a field nearby.

Her testimony was so matter-of-fact that you had to keep reminding yourself of the ages involved.

Had the boys been under the age of criminal responsibility, none of the lawyers, police or jurors would have been here.

But ten, the law says, means they can effectively be tried as adults.

It made them the youngest defendants to appear on a rape charge, and compelled a little girl to relive the moment she said they assaulted her …

Fast forwarding to 2022, the Mail carried a story about the trial of several men who turned two boys into drug runners. ‘County lines’ refers to drug trafficking outside our major cities. Its scourge continues — made worse thanks to lockdown:

A gang of seven men face jail after two vulnerable children were exploited to became county lines schoolboy drug dealers.

Two men were found guilty of modern slavery offences, conspiracy to supply class A drugs, robbery and attempting to intimidate a witness following a four-week trial at Stoke-on-Trent Crown Court.

A further five pleaded guilty before the trial began and now all seven face setencing on a date to be fixed.

It came after an investigation was launched after concerns were raised to the police regarding the exploitation of a child in May 2019.

A designated team, working with multi-agency partners, investigated numerous allegations and visited many young people throughout a six-month period. Officers identified two child victims and multiple offenders by February 2020.

A large-scale enforcement operation was carried out across Stoke-on-Trent in February and March 2020, which saw Qasim Rafi, Umar Rafi, Usman Rafi, Muazzam Naseer, Haroon Hussain, Paul Harnett and Lee Comley arrested. Mohammed Hassnain Shabir was later arrested in September 2020.

The investigation, which involved Children’s Services at Staffordshire County Council and Stoke-on-Trent City Council, found the victims were coerced and exploited by a group of men. As a result, the children were arrested multiple times for drug offences, eventually disclosing the true nature of what occurred …

Returning to education, on November 28, 2021, the then-Secretary of State for Education, Nadhim Zahawi, launched an initiative to get more working-class white boys into university. The Mail reported:

A new national target is to be introduced in a bid to increase the number of white working-class males studying at university, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

Research shows that only 12.6 per cent of them go on to higher education by the age of 19 – the lowest of all demographic groups – and they are less likely to get good grades at school than their equally disadvantaged ethnic minority peers.

Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi has asked regulators at the Office for Students to renegotiate universities’ targets to address ‘regional inequalities and prior attainment in schools’.

Only a handful of institutions set goals for the number of white working-class males, while support for the group with bursaries and scholarships is non-existent. Some academics say concerns about the fate of white working-class teenagers have been ignored or dismissed as ‘Right-wing thinking’ …

Welcoming the new target, Oxford University chemistry professor Peter Edwards said: ‘White working-class males in Britain have traded places with ethnic minorities and are now the group most likely to fail educationally and to struggle in life.

‘It is quite clear to me that simply belonging to the racial group white working-class males is seen as inherent privilege – irrespective of any disadvantage that accompanies their situation.’

Earlier this year, the House of Commons Education Select Committee produced a report that found that white children on free school meals – especially boys – persistently underperform academically compared with other ethnic groups.

The committee’s chairman, Tory MP Robert Halfon, described the lack of action as ‘a scandal’ but applauded the OfS directive as a first step forward …

And, finally, on July 29, 2022, the Mail featured an editorial from author and professor Matt Goodwin, who is also a socio-political pollster, on educational neglect of poor white children — including girls:

Following a national drive to make undergraduate intakes more ‘diverse’, figures released on Thursday by the Department for Education showed that, for the first time, white young people are now proportionately the least likely of all major ethnic groups to attend our top universities.

Among Britain’s Chinese families, some 40.7 per cent of their youngsters made it to Oxford, Cambridge and others in the elite Russell Group in 2020-21. The figures for Asian young people were 16 per cent. It was 10.7 per cent for black families — and just 10.5 per cent among white ones.

Of course, in some ways, this is an inspirational success story. That children from non-white backgrounds are thriving in Britain’s educational system is something to celebrate …

In contrast, poor, white, working-class communities experience far higher rates of family breakdown, as well as other challenges that jeopardise academic success, from addiction to joblessness and mental and physical health problems. Nevertheless, much of the problem does lie firmly with the universities …

… if our universities really want to pursue racial equality, they should take a look at some other statistics released this week by the Department for Education.

These revealed the numbers of young people who go to university at all — not just the elite institutions. The results were even more striking. Fully 81 per cent of Chinese children, almost 66 per cent of Asian children and 48 per cent of mixed-race children go to any university nowadays.

The figure for white children? Just 40 per cent.

The numbers are even more damning when you look at the details. Among children who receive free school meals — that is, the white working-class — only 13.6 per cent go to university …

We need to challenge … dangerous and divisive woke ideology — one that is spinning such a misleading picture of modern Britain. Ours is not an institutionally racist country: quite the opposite.

As the latest statistics suggest, it is one of the best places in the world to be a member of an ethnic minority.

At the same time, we need to speak up loudly for white working-class children and recognise that the noble aim of increasing diversity in the classroom and the lecture hall — especially when couched in the language of ‘oppression’ and ‘white privilege’ — has costs as well.

Only by doing these things will we ensure that yet another generation of white working-class children do not find themselves so unfairly left behind — and watch aghast as our universities become even less representative of the country at large.

There endeth the statistics and crime stories about disadvantaged families and their children, particularly boys and young men.

Returning to our reading, MacArthur has a note on ‘self-controlled’ in verse 6, as it is in Greek:

So says Paul to Titus – “urge the young men to be sensible,” “to get control of themselves,” he means.  The word “urge” parakale, “come alongside and exhort or encourage” – a familiar New Testament word.  It means “to instruct, to teach, to counsel, direct, to guide, to exhort, to admonish.”  It’s a method of influencing through the spoken word, is what it is; a method of influencing through the spoken word – “come alongside and instruct them to be sensible.”  Now that word simply means “to control themselves.”  It’s that same word, sphrone. We’ve looked at it a number of times.  We saw it in chapter 1, verse 8; chapter 2, verse 2, 4, 5.  We’ll see it again down in verse 12.  That common word that simply means “to develop self-mastery, self-control, balance”; “to get their faculties and their appetites, their longings and the desires into harness, to develop discernment and judgment.”  Such exhortation, by the way, appears similarly to Timothy in 2 Timothy 2:22.   It appears in 1 Peter 5:5.  Young men must have self-control, self-mastery, balance. They must exhibit power over their appetites and their faculties.  These are essential if they are to be godly.  They’ve got to control their lives.  That means, parents, that when you are raising your children you need to teach your children conformity to holy standards, and that means you need to control them so that your control becomes their control in time.

Paul tells Titus to show himself in all respects to be a model of good works to younger men and in his teaching show integrity, dignity (verse 7) as well as sound speech that cannot be condemned — so that an opponent can be put to shame, having nothing evil to say about them (verse 8).

Henry says:

(1.) Here is direction for his conversation: In all things showing thyself a pattern of good works, v. 7. Without this, he would pull down with one hand what he built with the other. Observe, Preachers of good works must be patterns of them also; good doctrine and good life must go together. Thou that teachest another, teachest thou not thyself? A defect here is a great blemish and a great hindrance. In all things; some read, above all things, or above all men. Instructing others in the particulars of their duty is necessary, and, above all things, example, especially that of the teacher himself, is needful; hereby both light and influence are more likely to go together. “Let them see a lively image of those virtues and graces in thy life which must be in theirs. Example may both teach and impress the things taught; when they see purity and gravity, sobriety and all good life, in thee, they may be more easily won and brought thereto themselves; they may become pious and holy, sober and righteous, as thou art.” Ministers must be examples to the flock, and the people followers of them, as they are of Christ. And here is direction, (2.) For his teaching and doctrine, as well as for his life: In doctrine showing uncorruptness, gravity, sincerity, sound speech, that cannot be condemned, v. 7, 8. They must make it appear that the design of their preaching is purely to advance the honour of God, the interest of Christ and his kingdom, and the welfare and happiness of souls; that this office was not entered into nor used with secular views, not from ambition nor covetousness, but a pure aim at the spiritual ends of its institution. In their preaching, therefore, the display of wit or parts, or of human learning or oratory, is not to be affected; but sound speech must be used, which cannot be condemned; scripture-language, as far as well may be, in expressing scripture-truths. This is sound speech, that cannot be condemned. We have more than once these duties of a minister set together … (3.) The reason both for the strictness of the minister’s life and the gravity and soundness of his preaching: That he who is of the contrary part may be ashamed, having no evil thing to say of you. Adversaries would be seeking occasion to reflect, and would do so could they find any thing amiss in doctrine or life; but, if both were right and good, such ministers might set calumny itself at defiance; they would have not evil thing to say justly, and so must be ashamed of their opposition. Observe, Faithful ministers will have enemies watching for their halting, such as will endeavour to find or pick holes in their teaching or behaviour; the more need therefore for them to look to themselves, that no just occasion be found against them. Opposition and calumny perhaps may not be escaped; men of corrupt minds will resist the truth, and often reproach the preachers and professors of it; but let them see that with well-doing they put to silence the ignorance of foolish men; that, when they speak evil of them as evil-doers; those may be ashamed who falsely accuse their good conversation in Christ. This is the direction to Titus himself, and so of the duties of free persons, male and female, old and young. 

MacArthur takes issue with the way the verses are set out:

… please notice the first three words of verse 7 – they really belong at the end of verse 6. The verse numbers are not inspired. They were put in later by men, and I think that there are a number of reasons why we would include that phrase at the end of verse 6 so that it reads, “Likewise urge the young men to be sensible in all things,” “in all things.”  First of all, that means that verse 7 begins with “Show yourself” and moves to the example model – “Show yourself to be an example” – from the exhortation emphasis of verse 6.  The word “yourself” then, in verse 7, becomes properly emphatic and introduces a new thought.

So the phrase “in all things” fits better at the end of verse 6 and stretches this matter of mental balance and self-mastery and self-control and balanced behavior in the Christian life to an almost infinite level – “in all things.”  Young men – so potentially volatile, impulsive, passionate, arrogant, ambitious, inexperienced – need to become the masters of all the areas of their lives. Everything needs to come under control.

The lack of self-mastery leads to potential dangers, as we saw in some of the news stories above:

So, Paul says you exhort young men to walk in the Spirit, to seek with all their might, to harness themselves and live in spiritual balance and self-control, and not to become victimized by those dangers that are lurking all around them.

Titus has to live the example in order that young men might follow it themselves:

You’ll notice in verse 7 the word “example,” and that’s obviously the key to it.  He is now going to say to Titus, “Look, for the sake of the young men exhort them, and that is to confront them verbally, but also for the sake of the young men set an example, and that is to confront them with the pattern of your life so that they can copy what you are.”  Any exhortation lacks force and impact and power without an example.  In fact, exhortation without example is that old word “hypocrisy.”  And hypocrisy never teaches people to do right; it always teaches people to do wrong …

“Speech” – that’s your conversation, what comes out of your mouth.  “Conduct” – that’s your lifestyle, the things you do, the places you go, the possessions you accumulate – every aspect of life.  “Love” – that’s your self-sacrificing service on behalf of others. Don’t ask them to do it unless you’re demonstrating your sacrificial life as well.  “Faith” – that means faithfulness, or consistency; demonstrate that you’re not a flash in the pan, you’re not a shooting star, you’re not a comet, you’re there for the long haul.  You’re not a spiritual sprinter.  You’re consistent; you’re trustworthy; you’re faithful; you’re unwavering; you’re uncompromising; you’re from start to finish.  And then he adds “purity” – hagneia, which has to do with moral, sexual purity on the inside and the outside.  “Be an example in all those areas – what you say, what you do, how you treat other people, your consistency, and your moral purity.  Be an example” …

The word “example,” a very interesting word.  It literally means “a blow,” like you would do with a hammer.  In fact, in John 20:25 the same word is used – “example” – to describe the print of the nails in the hands of Jesus.  When the hammer went in and drove the nail through, it left the print of the nail.  That’s the idea.  It’s the word for “a die, a mold, a model, a pattern you would trace over, some imprint or impress.”  You’re to be that.  You’re to be the perfect living imprint of virtue, the model that others can follow, the life they can trace their own life on.  This is crucial in influencing young men because young men look up to other men. They look up to men; they want a hero that they can follow – crucial that you live to become that spiritual hero.

Contrast with that Matthew 23:3, when Jesus indicted the Pharisees and said, “You don’t want to be like them, because they say and they don’t do.  You don’t want to be like that.”  Titus was called to be an example in a very broad area. Look at this, “be an example of good deeds.” That’s about as broad as you can get.  “Good” is kalos. It doesn’t mean superficial, cosmetic good. It means “inherent good, righteousness, nobility, moral excellence.”  So he says, “You be an example in the whole range of deeds, works, efforts” – that could be called righteous.  You be a pattern of spiritual goodness and righteousness that shows up in every single thing you do.  This is referring, obviously, to general conduct and general behavior. Your life is to be full of good works as an example to other young men of how they’re to live.  Young men, that’s to be your life.  You begin to control your life when you begin to understand that God wants your life to be full of good, righteous, holy deeds …

Young men must know the Word of God, and young men must live according to it.  That’s integrity.  The point is not that Titus is to speak pure doctrine. That was already told him in verse 1.  He was already told to speak sound doctrine.  Now he is being told to live in perfect accord with it, without defect.  This also is not the exhortation section.  If he was exhorting him to teach a certain way, you may have found it in verse 6. Here he’s talking about his example of living, and he is saying “maintain an example that shows uncorruptness as regards revealed truth.”

Contrary to what the Amish believe, MacArthur says there is no place and no time for sowing one’s wild oats:

There’s no premium, there’s no premium on “sowing your wild oats” while you’re young.  God doesn’t put any premium on adolescent iniquity, or on the iniquity of youth, or on the iniquity of adulthood.  There is no provision in God’s plan for you to have years and years of sinning.  At some point in time you stop that profligate life and become sage and obedient in your old age. Sin at any time in life is an offense to God, even in youth.  Youth is no excuse for it.  The Holy Spirit can restrain it. And if one puts the Word of God in the heart, lives close to the Word of God, he can be uncorrupt in living according to the teaching.

Paul wants Titus to demonstrate gravitas, or seriousness, in his life:

… he adds another word at the end of verse 7, “dignified,” semnots.  It’s used in 1 Timothy 3:8 and 11 to speak of deacons.  It means “seriousness,” “seriousness.”  He’s saying, “You need to be an example to young men of seriousness.”  Youth tends to be somewhat frivolous, wouldn’t you say?  Oh, particularly in our culture where we have taken entertainment to the level of a destructive disease, particularly in our culture where we live for entertainment, frivolity, trivia – dominates our culture. People can be frivolous and lack the ability to think seriously.  Young men are to learn to think seriously.  Does that mean you don’t laugh?  No, you do laugh.  God has given us laughter as a gift from Him, and there are times of joy and there’s a season to laugh.  But what it does mean is that you understand that things are serious, and you need to be serious when you’re dealing with serious things.

I suppose the error that Paul would have in mind of young men is not that they laugh when they should laugh, but that they laugh when they should cry.  They should have a mature understanding of the issues of life, death, time and eternity.

Then there is soundness in speech:

… in verse 8 he adds a final feature of this exemplary living.  He says you are to be “sound in speech which is beyond reproach.”  That’s right back where he started when he wrote to Timothy to be an example.  He started with Timothy on the subject of speech and then moved to others.  Here he starts with others and moves to this one of speech with Titus.  “Speech” is the word logos. Some have thought this meant “sound in the Word, having sound theology.”  No, Titus already has sound theology. He’s already been instructed to teach that “sound theology” in verse 1.  He must already know sound theology very, very well because he’s going to have to be able to locate and identify men who hold fast to the faithful Word, as indicated in chapter 1.  He’s not telling him here to teach sound theology. He’s simply telling him to talk in a healthy way. The word logos doesn’t always mean “the Word of God.” It can mean “talk, language, speech.”  That’s what it means in Ephesians 4:29.  It’s just the word for “speech.” That’s what it means in Colossians 4:6, “Let your speech be always with grace.”

The issue is not teaching; it’s not theology.  And the word “sound” here, hugis, is from hugiain, which means “to be healthy” or “to be wholesome.” We get the word hygiene from it, “to induce health, life-giving, health-giving.”  “Let your speech minister grace to the hearers.  Let it be health-giving, spiritually healthy, spiritually life-giving, edifying, building up.”  How healthy?  “So that it is beyond reproach.”  It is unable to be accused; it is unable to be condemned.

MacArthur ends with Ecclesiastes 11, to which Henry also referred:

Look at Ecclesiastes for a moment, because there’s a good concluding exhortation in chapter 11.  Ecclesiastes chapter 11, verse 9, is a good summation of what we have just learned.  “Rejoice, young man, during your childhood” – or your youth – “and let your heart be pleasant during the days of your young manhood.  And follow the impulses of your heart and the desires of your eyes.”  Stop there for a moment.

He’s saying, “You ought to enjoy your youth.  There’s nothing wrong with having fun and joy.  There’s nothing wrong with your heart being pleasant during the days of your young manhood. There’s nothing wrong with the thrills of youth and the exhilaration of adventure and discovery and love – achievement.  Nothing wrong with that.  Nothing wrong with following the impulses of your heart, those desires, those longings, those adventures that you really would love to fulfill. Nothing wrong with somehow capturing the delights and desires of your eyes. But just know this, God’s going to bring you to judgment for all those things.  You’re going to have to stand before God to account for the fact that some of those were wrong desires. And some of those were wrong impulses.  And some of that rejoicing was irresponsible.”

God doesn’t want to rain on your parade.  God doesn’t want to stop your joy and your fun in youth.  He just wants you to know you’ve got to give account for it.  So, verse 10, “remove vexation.” What’s that?  “Sadness, remorse, what makes you sorry.” Take anything out of your life that’s going to leave you with guilt and sorrow.  Remove it from your heart.  “And then put away” – not pain – but “put away,” – you’ll see in the margin – “evil from your body” – anything that’s going to produce an evil consequence, that’s going to inflict you with evil, because childhood in the prime of life are fleeting. And why would you want to fill it up with stuff that makes you sad and hurts you?  Put away the stuff that’s going to make you pain. Put away the stuff that’s going to make you weep, the things that are going to bring you into judgment before God.  Enjoy your youth but get it under control.

How do you do that?  Verse 1 of chapter 12, you do it by “remembering your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come and the years draw near when you’ll say, ‘I have no delight in them’” – the day is going to come when you can’t enjoy your old age.  “The day is going to come when you’re going to be old, and I’ll promise you won’t enjoy it,” he says.  “You won’t enjoy it, but you know what you will enjoy in your old age?  You will enjoy the wonderful memories of a well-spent youth.  But if when you get old and you can’t enjoy your old age and you can’t enjoy the memories of your youth, then you’ve got no delight.  So live your life in youth so that you can enjoy it all over again in old age.”

And then finally, the effect – to the exhortation and the example we add the effect.  Why all of this?  Why are young men to live this way?  Why are young women to live this way? Older women, older men?  Here it is, verse 8 – the purpose clause, the purpose result clause – “In order that the opponent may be put to shame, having nothing bad to say about us.” So that you can silence the critics of the faith, so that you will cause people to be shamed when they criticize Christianity. Boy, we’re a long way from that in this world, aren’t we? 

I couldn’t agree more.

Tomorrow’s post will carry resources for Christian boys and girls to strengthen them in the faith.

Next time — Titus 2:9-10

Ingestibles news: food, drink, tobacco

Many news items about ingestibles have appeared in recent weeks.

Here are but a few, arranged by category.

Drinks

Who knew that England’s wine production was such a success, despite our rather damp and cool summers over the past two years.

Coloured glass

Before going into England’s wine success, however, it should be noted that coloured glass is back in fashion.

However, this is not your grandmother’s transparent coloured glass selection of cranberry or teal green goblets. The new high-end glasses and containers happen to be opaque.

I wonder if this opacity is a short cut, obviating the artistry of traditional methods of colouring glass.

On October 22, 2023, The Guardian reported on the trend for coloured glass in general. The article includes photos of the new opaque glass (emphases mine):

After years of minimalist, clear wine glasses, tumblers and dishes, colourful glassware is making a comeback. Brightly hued glass pieces such as purple goblets from the 1970s and coral-pink 1930s candlesticks have seen sales rise 30% since last year, according to Narchie, an app for buying and selling vintage homeware.

And on the high street, John Lewis says that sales of drinkware in shades of damson, amber and cobalt have risen 71% on figures from the same week last year. The department store’s Confetti range – a modern collection decorated with flecks of colour – has gone up by 20%.

It’s a similar story at Ikea. “Customers are daring to introduce new energy and shades into their table settings,” says Paul Kinnen, home furnishing business leader for kitchens at the Swedish furniture retailer.

The opaque coloured glass did nothing to raise my appetite for a glass of cold water or a cocktail. Sometimes the old ways are the best.

That said, the article did cover something more interesting, which is the history of traditional transparent coloured glass dating back to ancient times:

“Coloured glass goes back to the bronze age,” says Dr Sally Cottam, secretary for the Association for the History of Glass. “Well, glass is naturally coloured a bluish green and you decolourise it using different compounds. In the Augustan period, you had vessels in every colour of the rainbow – some really quite tasteless, but fabulous in their own way. Then the Romans went crazy for colourless glass in the later first century. It became the norm, probably in part because the level of glass production increased and also because it lets you show off the colour of your wine.”

And decorative glass has never completely disappeared. Enamelled glass was very popular in the Islamic world; the Venetians rediscovered Roman polychromatic glass in the 15th century and the Victorians also loved it – “particularly cranberry and Bristol blue”, according to Cottam.

Fortunately, ancient traditions are once again in the ascendant:

A Bristol-based glassmaker has revived the Bristol Green shade, manufacturing it in the city for the first time in 200 years. This colour is famous in Europe and North America, and is the origin of the traditional dark green wine bottle. When wine-makers started using clear bottles, Bristol lost its glassmaking industry …

Award-winning designer Tom Dixon’s new collection of tableware and vases, called Bump, uses borosilicate – better known as lab glass, which is strong and withstands heat – and comes in a calming emerald green.

“Made from easily available, unlimited materials and completely recyclable, glass has served us for millennia,” says Dixon. “It is so ubiquitous that it’s easy to forget how extraordinary it is as a material, as packaging, as a precious object.”

Lovely. Enjoy some nostalgia, if not Granny’s, then something new that’s transparent yet coloured.

English wine

English winemakers are going from strength to strength.

I have tasted some of their products which certainly rival French wines. That was not the case 30 years ago.

On October 19, The Guardian told us:

Many English winemakers say they are expecting to harvest their biggest ever crop over the next few weeks as a combination of favourable weather conditions and expansion boosts production.

Gusbourne, the Kent-based producer and one of the first major wineries to complete its harvest, said it had gathered its largest ever crop, up 25% on last year.

The company, controlled by former Conservative party chair Lord Michael Ashcroft, said the warm growing season last year meant vines emerged from winter in a healthy condition and then enjoyed favourable weather during the flowering period between April and June this year, producing “an abundance of fruit”.

The big brands Nyetimber, Chapel Down and Ridgeview have all said they are expecting their largest ever crop as a result of the weather and investing in additional acreage.

Most production goes to sparkling wines, which will not be available for at least two years, but still wines made this year could be on shelves in the spring.

Ned Awty, the interim chief executive of the trade body WineGB, the national association for the wine industry in England and Wales, said: “This year is shaping up to be a high volume and high-quality harvest. We’ve had reports about impressive bunch size and weight and ripe fruit from all across the country.”

Andrew Carter, the chief executive of Chapel Down, which is two-thirds of the way through its harvest, said he was expecting its output to be “materially larger” than last year’s, and the brand’s previous record, set in 2018.

The group, based near Tenterden in Kent, has added 200 additional acres to take it to 750 under production. Carter said the weather had also been a factor in producing high-quality grapes.

“The weather this year has been truly exceptional,” he said. Carter said the wet July and August had helped vines stay healthy and had not led to problems with disease because the weather had remained cool, and then the warm, sunny September had helped to ripen grapes. “The balance of sugars and concentration of flavours in the grapes is a joy to behold,” he said.

Southern England is blessed with favourable conditions for wine production:

Britain’s winemaking industry is concentrated in Kent, but vineyards in Essex, Hampshire and Sussex also supply independent retailers and UK supermarkets. British wine is sold overseas and the industry has estimated that exports could be worth as much as £350m by 2040.

Winemakers have been expanding – more than doubling in the past decade – as financial investors bet on a market that has been helped by the changing climate and production becoming more professional …

There are now 943 vineyards across Great Britain, according to WineGB. The industry produced 12.2m bottles in 2022, a big step up on the 5.3m bottles in 2017 as investors have piled into the growing market.

Production is expected to reach 25m bottles by 2032, with 7,600 hectares (18,800 acres) of vines planted – almost double the 4,000 hectares (9,900 acres) under production at present.

Excellent news!

English sake

An even more amazing development is that of sake made in — who would have guessed it? — England.

On October 27, The Telegraph‘s Joel Hart wrote about the boom in sake in Great Britain, ‘How British sake became the calling card of the country’s hottest restaurants’:

Picture 10 drinks on tap, ranging from a light and crisp, aromatic brew with notes of apricot and almond to a luxurious pour delivering notes of lychee and cereal. No, these are not the latest beers to hit the market, nor are they wines – this is a line-up of “craft sake”, a new take on Japan’s famous fermented drink. 

At Kanpai, which was the UK and Europe’s first sake brewery and taproom when it opened in 2016, rice – rather than hops or grapes – takes centre stage. Sourced from paddy fields across three prefectures in Japan and fermented with water, yeast and koji (rice grain cultivated with a “magic mould” that kick-starts the yeast fermentation), the rice is transformed into drinks that have distinct styles for each season – and deliver a subtle nod to their surroundings. 

“The local London water has been making [our] delicious drinks for many years,” says Kanpai’s co-founder Lucy Wilson. “The hard water enables us to brew fuller flavoured styles of sake. [Its] minerality is fantastic for fermentation as it excites the yeast,” she explains, producing “lots of fruit-forward, delicate aromatics and bold, luscious flavours”.

Sake’s flavour profiles certainly give grape-derived wines a run for their money. With five traditional brewing styles, versions range from dry to sweet, elegant to complex, unfiltered to crystal clear, with still, sparkling, aged and ume-(plum) and yuzu-infused iterations now sold all over Britain. 

Sake pairings are becoming popular, especially with seafood:

The current vogue of omakase restaurants has also had a role in enhancing the drink’s image. The trend of yielding control to the chef (omakase translates as “I leave it in your hands”), diners can enjoy styles of sake tailored to the sushi they are served. “The rich umami flavours present in both Japanese sake and seafood make them a perfect match,” explains Endo Kazutoshi, a third-generation sushi master and executive chef/owner of Endo at the Rotunda in west London. “The pairing is not merely a chemical coincidence but [based on] wisdom passed down through centuries from master to apprentice.”

The article tells us about various British restaurants that showcase sake.

Ultimately:

For sake bars, it is important to showcase the drink on its own, so while it isn’t uncommon to find sake in cocktails, there has been a shift away from seeing it as an ingredient for mixologists …

When you enter the bar, bottles are displayed on the wall, from mildly sweet to dry, and from light and aromatic to rich and savoury. There’s a sake flight for those who want to explore different styles.

England is a perfect place for manufacturing sake from Japanese rice:

Dojima opened at Fordham Abbey in 2018 with the intent of restoring an ancestral family tradition dating back to 1830s Osaka. Having brewed in Japan, Korea and Myanmar, the family relocated to the UK and settled on the Cambridgeshire estate for their new site.

“We knew that the UK would be a great place to set up if we were to make sake more globally recognised, as London sets trends for food, drink, fashion, arts and music,” explains Kumiko Hashimoto, a family member and the company’s PR and marketing director. “We could have perhaps just imported our family sake from Osaka, but we wanted to do more than that. We wanted to make sake in the UK using local water and the best rices from Japan.”

A sake produced from the well water of Fordham Abbey might be fresh and elegant (the Junmai Dojima) or honeyed and umami-rich (the vintage Cambridge version), but there are yet more styles in production within the county with the Sparkling Sake Brewery established there in 2021. It all points to a fizzing UK sake scene, where the first sip is unlikely to be your last.

How true. I had sake only once, in the United States, and that was 35 years ago. I must try it again.

The article ends with links for sake lovers and novices. There are even sake pairings with cheese, of all things (italics in the original):

Sake can be bought online at Kanpai and Moto, as well from shops including Sorakami and Tengu Sake.

A sake and cheese hamper curated by Erika Haigh can be purchased at La Fromagerie.

How extraordinary!

World Cheese Awards, Norway

Speaking of cheese, on Friday, October 27, the results of the World Cheese Awards held in Trondheim, Norway, were announced.

On Saturday, October 28, The Telegraph‘s Tomé Morrissey-Swan reported:

Delicate, creamy, buttery and soft, with mild peppery blue veins, Norway’s Nidelven blå, a pasteurised cow’s milk blue cheese made on a small farm two hours from Trondheim, was named the best cheese in the world at the World Cheese Awards on Friday.

At the event, held in Trondheim itself, the home favourite trumped a record number of entrants – 4,502 different cheeses submitted from across the globe – to be crowned supreme champion in front of a partisan home crowd. The winner beat a Belgian morbier-style cheese into second place, with a Swiss Alpine entrant coming third.

“This is really great,” said Moren Gangstad, the winning cheesemaker. “All of us who work in the dairy are here today, and we did not expect this. But it’s fantastic.”

Hmm.

I hadn’t heard of the World Cheese Awards until 2022, but the event has been running for decades:

Celebrating its 35th anniversary this year, the World Cheese Awards, run by the Guild of Fine Foods, has risen to be one of the world’s most respected food events, beamed online to viewers around the globe. Winners often see sales spike, with cheese buyers rushing to stock their product. 

Morrissey-Swan was there as a member of the judging panel:

In a huge gymnasium in Trondheim, which is well used to smelling this funky, 100 oversized trestle tables laden with around 45 cheeses each were prepared for the global judging panel of experts.

Despite this being my third year on the panel, I’m still not used to that smell. It’s the first thing that hits you – all the beautiful sweet, salty, musty notes blended with sweat and mould. Around 20 people watched from the stands, a bigger crowd than any football match I’ve ever played in …

Cheeses are evaluated on four categories: their look (is the rind appealing, is the colour consistent?), body and texture (they are squidged to assess moisture and fat content – harder to do with a cream cheese), aroma (does it small as expected? Ammonia can be good, but it shouldn’t smell off), and, most importantly, flavour and mouthfeel – it should be balanced and complex, with no bitter off-notes.

My table was stellar … We argued over the merits of paprika-smeared goat’s cheeses, smoky cow’s cheeses (is the smoke artificial or natural?), and a particularly beautiful cheese aged in sandstone that smelt just like roast mutton …

Each table awards products bronzes, silvers and golds, and one super gold, to be taken to a small panel of elite judges who, almost unfathomably, eat a hundred or more cheeses throughout the day. We dished out 12 golds on our table – others struggled to find one.

Being a French then a British cheese aficionado, I was desperate to find out how my two favourite countries fared.

Unfortunately, France won only one award in the top 16 cheeses. It came in at 13th with:

Goustal La Bergere from Société des Caves, FRANCE

The UK fared comparatively better, with two, in 12th and 16th places, respectively:

Sinodun Hill from Norton and Yarrow Cheese, UNITED KINGDOM

Wigmore from Village Maid Cheese, UNITED KINGDOM

A British cheesemaker explains why but says it’s good news in the long run:

… London-based cheese and cider expert, and World Cheese Awards veteran, Sam Wilkin thinks the range is becoming increasingly diverse. Indeed, judges hailed from all over, as did cheeses …

“We’ve become very anglo and eurocentric about cheese, but when you come to an event like this, you realise these cheeses are being made everywhere,” said Wilkin. “There are people doing delicious things, traditions being upheld, innovations happening, it’s really very exciting. I tried a camel cheese from Kazakhstan, and a viking cheese that, though certainly not to my palate, is a delicacy here in Norway and exemplifies that cheese is really just a way to preserve milk”…

It might not have been a great year for Britain, but British cheeses have won on 11 previous occasions, almost a third of the total winners, with Cornish Blue and Bath Blue winning in recent years. Cornish Kern, a more intense, longer-matured relation to the nettle-wrapped Cornish Yarg, was the most recent winner, picking up the top prize in 2017. Last year a gruyère earned top spot at the event in Newport, Wales.

Wilkin predicts the prize could be transformative for the winning dairy. “You hear wonderful stories of really small-scale cheeses winning the World Cheese Awards, and their businesses are transformed literally overnight. There are people I know waiting on the phone.” Nidelven blå isn’t currently sold in the UK, though around 300 shops in Norway stock it. Expect that to change soon.

My commiserations to France. They have not done well at the World Cheese Awards in recent years, which is disappointing.

French cuisine world’s best

After my disappointment at France not receiving more World Cheese Awards, I was encouraged to read an article in The Telegraph which appeared the following day on Sunday, October 29, ‘Ignore the statistics: French cuisine is the best in the world’, in which Anthony Peregrine told us about the new labelling law concerning restaurant food made on the premises:

… clearly this move is a good thing. Though the 175,000 figure includes bars, pubs, take-aways and even some bakeries, 4 per cent, if correct, remains unimpressive. It’s also a measure which the French catering business should have seen coming, following the flop of a similar, but voluntary, scheme introduced in 2014.

But it needs nuancing. French restaurants, like restaurants everywhere, have had a torrid time of late. Covid shut them down, staff subsequently proved unfindable, and prices have rocketed. An estimated 4,500 French restaurants shut down in 2022.

As one Languedoc restaurateur said: “We’re being strangled. The only way through for some is to buy in some dishes and trust that nobody minds. Which, generally, they don’t.”

Peregrine then listed ten categories in which France reigns supreme: truffles, oysters, cheese, choucroute, Charolais beef, mushrooms, foie gras, charcuterie, wine and bread.

I discovered the history of Camembert and Roquefort in his section on cheese:

Where to start? Camembert, obviously. South-east of Caen, the most famous rural hamlet in the world hosts tastings within a good little museum set-up. It explains, inter alia, how a priest on the run from the French Revolution taught local lass Marie Harel the rudiments of soft cheese making (maisonducamembert.com; £3.90). Then Roquefort, another titchy place (population 550), near Millau in the Aveyron. Legend suggests that a shepherd boy around there spotted a beautiful shepherdess, dumped his cheese sandwich in a damp cave and lit out to woo her. He failed, returned to his sandwich which, in the meantime had grown mouldy and, he discovered, delicious. Voilà Roquefort, still refined in those caves. Visit the Roquefort Société for £6.50 (roquefort-societe.com).

The bread section was also revealing:

This year’s best traditional Parisian baguette is made by Tharshan Selvarajah, a 37-year-old who arrived in France from Sri Lanka in 2006 – and is, apparently, allergic to flour. In the annual comp, last May, Mr Selvarajah’s bread topped 175 rivals. Among other perks, he now gets to deliver 30 baguettes a day to the Elysée Palace from his Au Levain des Pyrénées premises in the 20^th arrondissement (lepaindetharshan.fr).  Best bread nationally is from Gourmandises & Traditions in the village of Beaulieu, near Montpellier. I’ll say no more. There are already quite enough people ahead of me in the queue (boulangerie-gt.com).

Amazing.

Hazelnut shortage

I’d always thought that Italy and France produced the world’s hazelnuts.

Apparently not. It’s Turkey.

On October 10, The Times reported that 2023 was not a good year for one of my favourite nuts:

Christmas chocolate is in jeopardy … there is a looming hazelnut shortage. Crop levels of the favourite festive nut are lower than usual in Turkey, the world’s largest producer, due to bad weather and damage from wildfires. That means your Christmas choc — Ferrero Rocher or a bar of gianduja, depending on where you sit on the taste spectrum — is under threat.

Not to mention Nutella and imitations sold by other companies.

Oh, dear.

The article lists a number of other nuts that are equally ‘good for health’ but does not warn about the subsequent weight gain. It is all too easy to sit in front of the television with a bowl of nuts. I have been there before and gained weight that took a long time to shift because of the ageing process!

Drinking apple cider vinegar

This is another health experiment I tried after I lost weight after gorging on nuts: drinking apple cider vinegar.

Do not do it unless you have signs of diabetes. Well, I did not know that at the time. Mine was a short-lived experiment and I do not recommend it.

On October 28, The Telegraph posted a warning about drinking apple cider vinegar, but in the middle of the article:

… A summary of findings from a range of studies revealed a significant reduction in blood glucose and insulin in people who consumed vinegar compared with a control group. Again, it’s worth noting that this was vinegar in general, not specifically ACV, so it’s likely due to the acetic acid content rather than any special ACV magic.

Most of the research in this area has involved healthy volunteers, but there have been some small studies in people with type 2 diabetes that suggest that a shot of vinegar can be an effective way to reduce blood sugar following starchy carbs. So, does this mean everyone should be drinking vinegar shots with their meals? Crowe [Dr Tim Crowe, dietitian and host of the podcast Thinking Nutrition] has this advice, “No. If you don’t have diabetes, then your blood glucose is being regulated just fine.” Crowe goes on to advise that simply having a shot of vinegar wouldn’t be enough to counteract Type 2 diabetes. 

Crowe also says that he is not convinced that apple cider vinegar burns fat:

There have been several taste studies done that found that drinking vinegar in general can induce a slight feeling of nausea and a lessening of appetite. That does not negate that apple cider vinegar may have a small benefit on weight loss, but the mechanism here is that the ACV is probably making the person feel a little ill and reducing their appetite.

I can vouch for that.

Vinegar also has an adverse effect on teeth and prescription drugs:

Apart from the fact that drinking vinegar on its own is not exactly pleasant, there are some other drawbacks, as Crowe explains:

“ACV has a pH of around three, so it can dissolve the tooth structure when it comes into contact with the teeth. One study monitored dental erosion over 8 weeks and it went up 18 per cent in those taking vinegar. So, if you still want to take a daily shot of apple cider vinegar or any other type of vinegar, please dilute it first.”

Additionally, ACV can interact with certain drugs, such as diuretics and diabetes medications. If you are taking any medications, it’s a good idea to talk to your doctor first.

The most sensible way to ingest vinegar is via salad dressing:

… make up a tasty salad dressing by mixing it with olive oil, mustard, honey and dried herbs and enjoy it that way instead.

Eco-friendly restaurant charges

Moving on from health to restaurants, I was appalled to read this in The Telegraph on October 27, ‘Diners hit with “carbon footprint charge” on restaurant bills’:

Diners are being hit with carbon footprint charges on restaurant bills to “counterbalance the environmental impact” of meals.

Customers have reported charity donations for a scheme called Carbon Friendly Dining being added to restaurant cheques, on top of service fees.

The scheme, an initiative backed by retail consultancy Lightspeed, aims to tackle global warming by charging each cover £1.23 to pay for fruit trees to be planted in developing countries.

Carbon Friendly Dining’s website says the charge “helps counterbalance the environmental impact” of diners’ meals and “also help some of the poorest communities on the planet”. Celebrity chefs including Marco Pierre White and James Martin are among a number of restaurant owners to have signed up.

The cost of the donation is added on to the bill at the end of the meal. Diners can ask for it to be removed and staff are given instructions on how to take off the charge.

As with every other social cancer, this started in the United States:

The trend has previously caught on with climate-conscious eateries in California, with a similar scheme launched in 2018 adding a 1pc surcharge to bills to help farmers decarbonise.

Hilton hotels was also recently reported to have added a climate rating, similar to calorific ratings, to menus to let diners know the carbon impact of each dish.

It comes after this newspaper revealed how restaurants are increasingly adding optional charity donations onto bills, with psychology experts saying the trend was leaving people facing the prospect of social embarrassment when asking for the extra fees to be removed. 

A Carbon Friendly Dining spokesman said that the charges were “highly visible” and “completely optional” and that diners were given leaflets explaining the initiative’s goals.

I neither want nor need a lecture — or a ‘voluntary’ contribution to anything. I go to a restaurant to eat for enjoyment — and pay for the privilege of doing so.

One British diner told the Telegraph about his experience:

… one diner, who had noticed the additional fee when paying for a meal at a Cubitt House pub in London, said: “It really made me laugh when I spotted it, I thought adding 15pc service charge was cheeky but this takes the biscuit.

“If they are so concerned about the environment, why don’t they just stop selling meat? The sum was too small for me to bother complaining about but it’s very sneaky.”

Dozens of restaurants, pubs and hotels across the UK and internationally are listed as being signed up to the carbon offsetting donation on the scheme’s website …

Cubitt House was approached for comment.

Splitting the bill

On October 15, The Telegraph‘s veteran restaurant reviewer William Sitwell explained, ‘Why I’d rather pay the whole damn thing than split the restaurant bill’:

Hell is a busy place these days. But, wrote restaurateur James Chiavarini this week on Twitter: “Hell needs a special room for those who split the dinner bill item by item.”

And I couldn’t agree more. Indeed, if not a room then an annexe, an extension, or an entire wing. Chiavarini, whose family Italian restaurant Il Portico has traded in London’s Kensington for more than 50 years, posted his utterance having presided over yet another frustrating bill-splitting episode. 

“A table of 20 on a busy night,” he tells me, struggling to maintain his composure.

Interestingly, the restaurateur blames Tony Blair’s 2007 smoking ban, at which point diners traded in their cigarettes for more mobile phone interaction:

“I think I can trace this behaviour back to 2007,” says Chiavarini, “when the smoking ban came in and everyone starting bringing their phones to dinner. It changed human behaviour and micro bill splitting is a part of it.”

As he suggests, if you bring your phone into a restaurant you can’t leave the problems of the world on the other side of the restaurant door, so the romance of the dining experience lessens. People became more inward looking, more selfish, more mercurial. Bill-splitting goes mad.

And so it does.

Tony Blair has a lot for which to answer, the smoking ban being one of them that changed the UK forever — and not in a good way.

Smoking: Rishi Sunak as the heir to Blair

At the end of September, I about flipped when I saw on the news that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak wants to bring in an incremental New Zealand-style smoking ban.

As if that will stop our cost of living crisis or the migrant boats or the general social division that pervades the UK.

No, none of that is important to Rishi. Nor can he solve it, apparently, which is why he is turning his attention to cigarettes.

It should be noted that we are in the low double-digits when it comes to smoking rates, which explains why Britons have become fatter over the past 20 to 30 years.

On October 8, The Telegraph‘s Melanie McDonagh, a practising Catholic by the way, was equally appalled, contrasting Rishi’s faux conservativism with a freedom-loving artist in ‘Smoking David Hockney is a truer conservative than killjoy Rishi Sunak’:

If smoking has a bullish face, it is painter Sir David Hockney’s. From his farmstead in Normandy, the great man has surfaced to denounce Rishi Sunak’s proposal to ban the sale of cigarettes gradually.

Well done, that man.

Hockney gives his reasons for not giving up cigarettes anytime soon:

This, he says, “is just madness to me. I have smoked for 70 years. I started when I was 16 and I’m now 86 and I’m reasonably fine, thank you. I just love tobacco and I will go on smoking until I fall over”…

As he says defiantly, “Many artists have smoked. Picasso smoked and died at 91, Matisse smoked and died at 84 and Monet chain-smoked and died at 86. He smoked and painted at the same time. I can’t do that. I don’t smoke while I’m painting. I light a cigarette every 15 minutes when I stop to check what I’ve done … Why can’t Mr Sunak leave the smokers alone?”

I couldn’t agree more.

Ditto Melanie McDonagh:

Here, I say, is the authentic Conservative spirit. This is a man who has taken on board the health warnings and decided to ignore them all. He has calculated the risks, set them against the benefits and decided that he’s going to carry on with smoking because he likes it and it helps him paint …

When the New Zealand government, under bossy Jacinda Ardern, announced that it would be phasing out the sale of cigarettes, many Tories thought this is where progressive policies gets you. I wonder how they’re handling the prospect that a Tory PM will be introducing the same measure.

It’ll be an unwhipped free vote for Tory MPs – but will almost certainly be passed with the enthusiastic support of Labour. Sir Keir doesn’t need to worry about being called the nation’s nanny – the PM has taken that role on himself.

Compulsory clean living isn’t really what people vote Tory for, is it? I had reservations about Mr Sunak when, as chancellor, he aligned duty on drink in proportion to its strength, so port took a bigger hit than girly prosecco. But Mr Sunak doesn’t drink. Or smoke.

If he wants to be seen as the successor of Mrs Thatcher this is a funny route. She drank; Denis smoked. It’s come to a pretty pass when the heir of Churchill isn’t a Tory PM but David Hockney.

Yes, David Hockney, who probably never voted Conservative in his life, is more conservative than the PM, at least in this respect.

Countries that allow indoor smoking

On October 9, following on from the great Sunak proposal on banning cigarettes, The Telegraph‘s Chris Moss had an article in the Travel section, ‘The surprising countries where you can still smoke indoors’.

Bhutan is the biggest surprise of them all:

… not every country is clamping down; in some nations, the mood music around public smoking is reversing. In 2010 Bhutan was lauded all over the world for being the first country to ban tobacco sales and smoking in public places. The ban lasted for over a decade but, somewhat ironically, the Covid-19 pandemic “compelled policy makers to change course” and the sale of tobacco was legalised again. Dedicated rooms in bars and discotheques are once again free-to-smoke zones.

Excellent news. I wish Bhutan well in showing common sense.

Chris Moss summarises the varied — and surprising — smoking patchwork around the world:

Interestingly, there’s often no obvious connection between a country’s social values and its attitude to smoking. Albania completely bans smoking in bars and restaurants. Italy doesn’t. South Africa allows up to 25 per cent of a bar or restaurant to be set aside as a designated smoking area, though stricter laws are in the offing.

In Japanese restaurants and bars, smoking is permitted in all areas (although in practice many such places restrict or ban smoking). Danes can still enjoy a cigarette in smaller pubs, but most direct smokers to the streets. In Benin, meanwhile, smoking is banned in all indoor spaces.

In the US, the law changes from state to state, and can vary between neighbouring towns and districts. Economics as well as attitudes to freedom is a factor. Many Las Vegas casinos continue to allow smoking indoors. It’s also permitted in bars, taverns, and saloons where minors are prohibited or that don’t offer food service, in strip clubs and – as you’d expect in business-friendly America – on some floors at tobacco-related trade shows.

So common are smoking bans, these days, that it can be quite jarring when you walk into a restaurant on holiday and realise that smoking indoors is still permitted. I remember going to Porto about a decade ago, when smoking was already a social sin in the UK, and my astonishment on seeing a gutter below the counter in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant absolutely brim-full of cigarette butts.

Of course, an indoor smoking ban doesn’t always happen quite as planned. Some German states have banned smoking in bars, restaurants and sports stadiums, but according to the NGO coalition, the Smoke Free Partnership, compliance across the country is limited where laws do apply … 

If you are looking for a smoke-free holiday, South America is the destination for you. In December 2020, when Paraguay approved anti-smoking legislation, it became the first major region to achieve full smoke-free status. New Zealand is also on course to become an effective smoke-free nation. At the other end of the spectrum, the WHO calls out India, Tanzania and Indonesia as countries that only protect a small percentage of their populations with smoke-free zones.

Moss gave up smoking some time ago, but he still has fond memories of it:

As an ex-smoker I have to say I broadly – if begrudgingly – approve of the Sunak proposal, but can’t let go of some fond smoking memories. I still see two InterRail trips I took in the Eighties through the romantic haze of cigarette smoke on railway platforms and can still recall the pungent perfume of black tobacco – exotic, European, a bit dirty.

I started smoking in the Eighties, too. It brought me my best relationships, including marriage, and my best jobs.

With that, I’m off for a ciggie break. See you tomorrow.