Newham in east London is an extraordinary place. One of the most deprived boroughs in the country and dominated by a superficial, self-promoting and authoritarian New Labour-controlled town hall, it is nonetheless a colourful, vital and ethnically-diverse place – “the most diverse place on the planet”.

Crime and fear of crime stalk the streets, Islamists plot atrocities (according to New Scotland Yard, Newham is one of the anti-terror squad’s top national ‘hot spots’), dirt and rubbish plague public places, and many live in awful grinding poverty by western standards. Even so there is a general cheerfulness and tolerance between the different communities that enables life to go on and flourish despite all the handicaps. I have lived here for 26 years and have no plans to leave. It’s a stimulating place to bring up a young family.

Given the recent rapid rise of religion in public life (see previous posts), Newham is at the cutting edge of this new era. While the town hall Kanute-like stays avowedly secular, the burgeoning faith communities are increasing their social impact. Churches, gurdwaras, mosques and temples are all active centres of their communities. Not without reason Newham has been branded “the unsecular city”.

It’s in this favourable context that my party, the Christian Peoples Alliance, is leading the charge to put religion back into Newham politics and public life. For instance, as a direct response to CPA’s success within the borough, councillors within Newham Labour Party last year formed a local branch of the Christian Socialist Movement (CSM) in order to counter the inroads CPA is making into the thriving Christian community. I have no problem with that: part of CPA’s mission is to prod and provoke the sleepy Christians within the major parties into taking Christian action within their own parties – being “salt and light” as Christ termed it.

Newham CSM has some odd policies but it holds church services and tries to grapple with real issues. The fact that it has even come into existence however is a trophy in CPA’s cupboard.

Another trophy is the increasing inclination of Labour members to quote the Bible in the council chamber:
Ever since I was elected for the Christian Peoples Alliance in 2002 as the sole opposition councillor representing the previously bedrock-Labour working-class area of Canning Town South (Labour since 1912, according to town hall records), the Labour Party has been fuming against our party. The anger and insults regularly thrown at us during council meetings, especially from the borough’s elected executive mayor Sir Robin Wales, have been extraordinary. His latest offering at a council meeting was to loudly swear (not much of a role model for the youth of the borough there) and to repeatedly bawl that we are “half-baked idiots”!

But some months ago Labour also started to quote the Bible against us to try to prove we aren’t Christian in our approach to politics. More recently they have started even to quote the Bible in order to support their own policies.

From my perspective there is an interesting parallel here with St Paul’s comment to the Philippians, that “some preach Christ out of envy or rivalry… (or) out of selfish ambition, not sincerely, supposing that they can stir up trouble for me… But why does it matter? The important thing is that in every way, whether from false motives or true, Christ is preached.”
For the record, at last Monday’s council meeting two members of the Labour Group – one was the mayor – quoted the following passages from the New Testament:
“I was a stranger and you invited me in. I needed clothes and you clothed me. I was sick and you looked after me.” (Matthew 25: 35, 36)
“By their fruit you shall know them.” (Matthew 7: 16)
A third justified his argument about a particular issue by pointing to Jesus’ apparent silence about it in all four Gospels
That’s not a bad input at one single council meeting of an officially secular council that is claimed to be the national Labour Party’s leading showcase borough.
Let’s hope the Word of God now begins to impact their actions as well as their speeches, in Newham and across London.

The London Development Agency is in deep manure. It has been investigated by Big Four accountants Deloittes, castigated for lack of accountability and transparency, accused of breathtaking incompetence, given large sums of money to firms that do not file accounts or keep records of how the funds were spent, and had six of its projects investigated by police over allegations of fraud.

Then last Friday Lee Jasper, the London Mayor’s chief race adviser, was suspended while the allegations of financial irregularities at the LDA are investigated by the police.

Not bad for the institution better known by the ironic cuddly sobriquet, ‘Ken’s piggy bank’.

But there’s an ominous side of LDA activity that has so far stayed below the radar screen. That is its role in the eviction and fracturing of Europe’s largest church, Kingsway International Christian Centre – or KICC for short.

Last year the LDA enticed KICC out of their property at Waterden Road, Hackney, because the land was needed for the 2012 Olympic Park. Assurances by the LDA that an alternative site would be provided for the 12,000 weekly worshippers persuaded the church to quietly leave its building in the autumn and work towards constructing a new building on the LDA-owned land at Beam Reach, Havering, Essex.

This was farcical. Did the LDA really think that a huge lively predominantly black inner-city church would fit in to that quiet semi-rural corner of Essex?

No. The LDA wasn’t at all concerned with the welfare of the church or the aptness of the move. They were simply concerned to get KICC out of its Hackney premises as quickly and quietly as possible, and therefore gave whatever assurances were necessary to achieve that end – including the offer of an entirely inappropriate site.

Surprise, surprise, ten days ago Havering Council and the London Thames Gateway Development Corporation both rejected KICC’s planning application. The church didn’t have a snowball’s chance in Hades.

The LDA of course cried crocodile tears of surprise and regret, and offered to work with KICC to work up an appeal. But meanwhile the church is left swinging in the wind with no permanent home. It is now forced into the last-ditch option of appealing to the minister of Communities and Local Government, Hazel Blears, to overturn the Havering/LTGDC decision.

LDA should have been a helpful handmaiden to KICC in its move. Instead they were a Machiavellian manipulator.

The result is unfair and unjust, and LDA’s involvement stinks.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Myq75L5eC58]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REaF_u1jr_0]

Last week I went to the ‘Passion for Life’ meeting at Central Hall, Westminster. It was part of a roadshow that various pro-life groups are running around the country in response to the government’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill (what a mouthful!) now before parliament. Lord David Alton and Ann Widdecombe MP are the main speakers.

The main objections to the Bill are that it will

(a) allow the creation of human/animal embryos, (b) hammer a nail in the coffin of fatherhood, and (c) further liberalise abortion law.
As I arrived, there were around 150 shrieking protestors outside, mainly from women’s rights and pro-abortion groups together with some SWP activists. Inside there were maybe 750 people, mainly Catholics I guess.

Unknown to the rest of us, around ten of the protestors – all women – slipped into the meeting too. Interestingly, they stayed completely silent until the moment David Alton showed pictures of aborted children. At this they jumped up to object loudly. But David had the loudspeaker. He simply raised the volume and continued calmly.

The protestors shouted their objections off and on during the following speeches. Some had to be escorted out by the stewards.

But the last speaker was the formidable Ann Widdecombe. You don’t want to get on the wrong side of her on a dark night. As most of the vocal protests were about abortion, that inevitably was the subject she majored on. She likes an argument.

As one of the protestors was being taken out she (the protestor) kept bellowing, “What about women’s rights? What about women’s rights?”

“What about women’s rights indeed,” Ms Widdecombe bellowed back. “What about the 50% of aborted children who were female? What rights did you give them?”

Brilliant. Simply unanswerable.

I’d hardly finished yesterday’s post about the rise of religion in politics when I spotted the latest edition of the centre-left current affairs magazine New Statesman on a news-stand. Guess what? They’ve a special 10 page report on “The God Issue”.

One of the major contributors, Sholto Byrnes, writes, “God is back… but the truth is that we’d never got rid of Him in the first place.”

Exactly.

In 1966 Time magazine famously asked, “Is God dead?”

In 2007 (November 1st), the Economist magazine published a series of major articles about global religion and concluded that in the 21st century religion is “playing a central role” in public life.

During the last century most UK politicians, media people and intellectuals reckoned that religion was becoming marginal to national life – certainly to politics and government. But even if they were right (they were), the recent rise of radical and political Islam has put religion firmly back on the agenda.
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