I don’t normally buy a weekend paper as it costs twice the price for a double dose of news padding, celeb superficialities and lifestyle irrelevancies. I save the money.

But I purchased The Times on Saturday and got a good return on my £1.50 as it included a courageous article by Matthew Parris, ‘As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God’ (here)

I have noted before (The church and the melt down of Blairs Britian) that Parris is an ‘excellent and stimulating writer’ with whom I frequently disagree. But in Saturday’s article he shows a tenacious commitment to hard facts and a gutsy willingness to follow the evidence even against the atheist and socially liberal tide of which he himself is part, and I enjoy honouring him here.

(The equally stimulating but more prejudiced columnist from the same school, Johann Hari, has occasionally showed a similar and unexpected honesty. In an August article in The Independent (we need to stop being such cowards about islam) he admitted that considerations of personal safety had biased his writing about Islam: ‘I am ashamed to say I would be more scathing if I was discussing Christianity. One reason is fear: the image of Theo Van Gogh lying on a pavement crying “Can’t we just talk about this?”’

It takes some courage to confess publicly to your own cowardice and prejudice, and Hari should be honoured for this too.)

Back to Saturday’s article: Based on his time in Africa, Parris argues – much to his own atheist embarrassment – that the contribution Christian evangelism makes on the continent is enormous and good. It is sharply distinct from and a necessary precondition to effective work by secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts.

Why? Faced with the apathy, anxiety, fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, and the tribal hierarchy in rural areas, and the swaggering ‘big man’ gangster politics of the African city, it is “Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther… (that) smashes straight through” this debilitating  philosophical/spiritual framework. Christianity liberates.” (It) changes people’s hearts. It brings spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good,” says Parris. Through Christianity people’s attitudes and belief systems are changed for the better.

As Africa today, so Britain yesterday. A century ago Max Weber first made the intellectual connection between the Protestant work ethic and the rise of capitalism, but Christianity’s impact in the UK hasn’t been restricted to the economy. It is that same faith, especially post-Reformation Christianity, that has provided the life-force and moral framework for the flowering of initiative, creativity, energy, discipline, freedom, rationality, individualism, truthfulness, modesty, order, excellence, sense of service and community that in turn has led this small island to having such an extraordinary impact worldwide in all areas of human endeavour over the past half-millennium.

And now, as our secularised society sinks slowly into its 21st century torpor of lethargy, cynicism, selfishness, consumerism and superficiality, and as we use up the moral and spiritual capital left to us by previous generations, we have a fundamental choice:(a) We can ignore reality, give in to apathy, descend into shabby mediocrity and – well, will the last person out of the country please turn off the lights? Or (b) we can renew and revitalise the deep Christian roots of our society.

The New Year is a time for new resolutions. I’ve made mine.

Happy 2009!

A story against myself that amply illustrates our self-interested feelings-based society:
I’m normally careful to avoid driving while talking on my mobile phone. If it rings, I’ll pull over before answering.

I must have been suffering from some post-Christmas amnesia as I certainly wasn’t attentive as I should have been. I had stopped the car at traffic lights on Green Street near my home when my mobile rang. I answered briefly and, as I put the phone down, was horrified to see a police officer climbing out of the well-marked police car waiting at the lights immediately in front of me. He had spotted my illegal activity through his rear-view mirror.
I was caught bang-to-rights and had no excuse. A £60 fine and three penalty points were staring me in the face.

The officer knocked hard on my window and I opened the driver’s door to a wave of belligerent self-centredness. “You’re taking the piss out of me using your mobile right behind my car,” he accused me aggressively as if the whole world orientated around him. “I wasn’t intending to take the piss,” I replied politely but firmly. This was true; regrettably I hadn’t even noticed him or his patrol car.

To my relief without a further word he slammed the door, stormed back to his vehicle and roared off through the now-green lights.

So that was it. I kept my clean driving licence although, if he had taken the matter further, objectively I had certainly (if briefly) broken the law and a conviction would have been the inevitable result.

But because I hadn’t set out to hurt the feelings, upset the self-esteem or insult the ego of one of Her Majesty’s boys in blue, he didn’t pursue the matter and I avoided conviction.

So feelings rule and subjective self-regard overrules objective law-breaking – to my benefit on this occasion.

I pointed out almost a year ago (Convictions in court by Kleenex?) that our court system has become dependent on subjective touchy-feely emotion-based ‘evidence’. So too, it seems, has our police service.

Whatever happened to objective truth, professional detachment and hard facts within the UK’s due process of law?

Christmas, we are told, is a time for families and friends. Especially it’s a time for children to enjoy the warmth of the home hearth, the embrace of the wider family of grandparents, aunts and uncles, the magic of Father Christmas, the sparkle of Christmas lights, the excitement of presents under the Christmas tree and the reassuring constant of the traditional turkey, Christmas pudding and Christmas crackers at the family table.

On Christmas Eve, amidst the pile of seasonal cards offering good wishes, our postman delivered a communication from the Child Benefit Office informing us of a small but welcome increase in our weekly payments. It added marginally to the family Christmas cheer.

But the envelope also contained a colourful Christmas card-size leaflet from the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) promoting childcare. This was the asp amongst the roses – a dose of anti-children poison administered via cheerful cartoons of young children sitting in a line of cardboard boxes (“We play trains, Mum goes to work, Whoo whoo!”), playing drums and other noisy instruments (“We do music, Dad goes to the office, Rat-a-tat-tat!”) and messing around with bread dough (“We do cooking class, Mum goes to college, Mmmmm!”).

Of course there’s nothing wrong with the principle of affordable childcare. But the government sees us all as operational units, part of the staff and workforce of Great Britain Ltd, whose purpose in life is to produce goods and services that can be sold or used to help the economy.

Children get in the way of this great objective so they must be separated from their parents as soon as possible and parcelled off to the professionals. The government’s latest welfare reform plans announced earlier this month will require parents (mums of course) of children as young as one to prepare for work. And the state avidly promotes affordable childcare which, the DCSF leaflet tells us, ‘gives your children a great start’ that is ‘more fun for them’, ‘brilliant for them’ and provides ‘free early learning for them’. Whoo, whoo, whoo – and yippee too.

But at last other parts of government are waking up to the fact that the separation and break-up of families is contributing massively to the social problem of aimless rootless detached and disaffected youth. Absent fathers and, increasingly, absent working mothers are leaving the nation’s children in the hands of professional and emotionally uninvolved child-carers when young and at the mercies of latch-keys and empty homes when older.

The recent Cabinet Office paper Families in Britain, besides concluding that the children of married couples do better at school and have fewer emotional and behavioural problems, also acknowledges in Whitehall-speak that ‘an absent parent can be associated with adverse material and emotional outcomes’ for the children and ‘by definition lone parent families are cut off from some family functions’.

True, and if that is so what is the result when no parent is readily available for the child?

Affordable childcare can be helpful for families when used in proportion. But children’s first need is for parental time, commitment, emotional engagement and stability (known by ordinary people outside Whitehall as ‘love’) none of which can be properly provided by state-sponsored childminders.

It is revealing that the DCSF chose the family time of Christmas to send out its anti-children Christmas card. Government departments and ministries are regularly being reorganised and renamed as part of the ministerial game of musical chairs. Next time, how about the Department against Children and Families? Ed Balls will continue to be the right man for the job.

All was still and dark and, illuminated by the street lamps, a thick white frost lay on the cars in the road outside. Inside the house was quiet, the family in bed.

It was 5.30am and I crept downstairs for my early morning devotions. I had been increasingly burdened by the human tragedies that are filling our newspapers and TV screens. Mass murder and rape and the avoidable cholera outbreak of epidemic proportions amongst the grinding poverty of DR Congo and Zimbabwe; rocketing unemployment and home repossessions in the UK together with a series of individual tales of sickening human brutality such as the Baby P and ‘British Fritzl’ cases – wherever you look there seems to be unspeakable cruelty and unrelieved gloom.

I inserted Aled Jones’ The Christmas Album into the CD player and the hushed, almost haunting sound of his lone tenor voice gently filled the room. He sang the French carol ‘O Holy Night’ and a peace warmed my heart. ‘Long lay the world in sin and error pining, til He appeared and the soul felt its worth. O Holy Night… it is the night of the dear Saviour’s birth.’

The world was created a beautiful place, yet through sin and error, selfishness, greed and violence, humankind is destroying the environment and killing the people.

Yet there is hope, and it’s got nothing to do with financial bailouts, humanitarian aid programmes, a possible Copenhagen climate change deal or urgent United Nations resolutions about central and southern Africa.

It’s got everything to do with the Christ-child whose virgin birth we celebrate on 25th December. God hasn’t gone absent or given up on us despite our own best efforts to destroy ourselves and His creation. Instead through His Son He entered the world and became part of His own creation in order to rescue us from our own folly, stupidity and worse.

There in the Christ-child lies hope, real hope. In Jesus’ life, death and subsequent resurrection lies the real rescue plan that makes Gordon Brown’s well-intentioned efforts to “save the world” (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article5319124.ece) through jaw-dropping amounts of government borrowing look a little inadequate.

This Christmas we’ve got an opportunity to raise our eyes from the frailty and fragility of the Prime Minister’s plans – and even from the forthcoming Presidential inauguration of the latest political messiah Barak Obama – and look to Someone who is infinitely more reliable and competent at the rescue business.

Happy Christ-mas!

The past week has seen a big step forward for the growing culture of death in the UK.

The Director of Public Prosecutions decided it was not in the public interest to prosecute the parents of paralysed former rugby player Daniel James for their part in helping him die at the Swiss clinic Dignitas. The suicide of motor neurone disease sufferer Craig Ewert at the same clinic was the subject of a sympathetic documentary broadcast on Sky TV. And the BBC’s Panorama programme about Scottish former political firebrand and Parkinson’s Disease sufferer Margo MacDonald was entitled “I’ll die when I choose” – which indicates which side of the debate that programme was on.

So it’s been a good few days for the euthanasia and assisted suicide campaign. It seems Dignity in Dying (aka the Voluntary Euthanasia Society) and their chums have learnt the lessons of the gay rights movement over the past 15 years or so – that life is about public relations and press coverage. Corner the media and you’ve won the battle.

The extraordinary success of the homosexual movement which moved from quirky margins (‘the love that dares not speak its name’) to dominant mainstream in less than two decades resulted from the fact that it was almost entirely media driven. There was no discussion about the social effects, the health consequences or the moral issues involved in the gay lifestyle. Presentation beat principle, style trumped substance and we bought into it lock, stock and barrel. Gay became the new straight in our superficial celeb culture society, so Little Britain and Graham Norton usually occupy our weekend prime-time TV slots.

It was the seminal ’After The Ball’ by Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen, published in 1989, that first set out the gay media strategy. Their six-point programme was designed to change heterosexual perceptions of the gay community, and included (a) talking incessantly about homosexuality in public ‘to make gayness seem less furtive, alien and sinful’; (b) portraying homosexuals as victims; and (c) themselves ruthlessly sidelining some less acceptable members of the gay community such as ‘drag queens, bull dykes and the North American Man-Boy Love Association’.

I don’t know if the death lobby has a similar six-point strategy, but they are certainly talking incessantly. They are promoting those who assist and commit suicide as courageous selfless victims. And presumably they will begin also to distance themselves from the obscene horror shows that illustrate our current degradation of human life, such as the recent online suicide by a Florida teenager who killed himself in front of his webcam while computer users egged him on and the two Finnish students who, ten months apart, wrote suicide notes, posted YouTube videos and then went on killing sprees that included themselves.

They didn’t value life. Neither does our creeping and creepy death industry.

This week (Tuesday to be exact) sees the 400th anniversary of the birth of John Milton –‘epic poet, champion of freedom and attack-dog of the English republic’ (Boyd Tonkin in The Independent) – and there are to be celebratory exhibitions, lectures and events across the country to mark the occasion.

My hope is that, controversial as Milton was and is, this nonetheless will be an opportunity for us to reassess his foundational impact on the liberal democratic freedoms and human rights that we enjoy centuries later.

Yesterday was International Human Rights Day and I attended the launch of the ‘One Law for All’ campaign at the House of Lords. This is a drive to curb the influence of sharia law in Britain and it is strongly supported by the redoubtable Keith Porteous Wood and his National Secular Society.

No problem there, except that whenever the NSS and their ilk talk about the origins of our current freedoms and liberties, they trace them back to the Enlightenment and no further. They put reason in opposition to revelation and the Enlightenment in opposition to religion, and try to airbrush Christianity out of the history of our democracy.

This is of course biased – bigoted even – nonsense. The Magna Carta was not an Enlightenment document and the puritan Milton was not an Enlightenment figure, but they both had a huge influence on the development of our Parliamentary democracy. For instance Milton argued trenchantly against censorship and for freedom of conscience in a way that we would readily recognise today.

He has been lost to the younger generations as his literature has been removed from the school syllabus in recent years. I hope these Quartercentenary celebrations lead to his recovery as a major and formative historical personality.

The excellent new music and arts centre, Kings Place, behind Kings Cross station, is the venue for The Classical Opera Company’s current Mozart Week.

Last night my wife and I went there to listen to Mozart wizard, Ian Page, and six singers as they took us on a journey through all the composer’s operas from his first, Apollo et Hyacinthus, to his last, Die Zauberflote.  (Page points out the mysteriously neat chronological coincidence of the ‘A’ and ‘Z’ of Mozart’s operas.)

It was entrancing. Staged in the soaring Hall One which apparently is lined throughout in veneer garnered from a single, 500-year-old Black Forest oak and has ‘the elegance and grandeur of a Greek temple,’ Page’s skill at the piano and his authoritative and enthusiastic introduction to each piece, together with the rich variety of voices and personalities accompanying him – it all resulted in an evening to remember.

But what struck me most was the sheer unadulterated genius of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Born in 1756, he wrote his first symphony at 8 years of age and completed his first full opera at age 11. Composer of over 600 pieces many of which are utterly sublime (personally I can listen endlessly to most of his piano concertos), he died aged just 35 while working on his Requiem Mass.

Like a shooting star he enlightened the musical firmament for just a short while before he burnt out, but his legacy is enduring – more than 200 years after his death there is no sign of his popularity or signal influence waning.

But last night as I listened, uplifted not only by the ability of the performers to entertain and inspire but by the brilliance of Mozart’s music, I was struck again by the inadequacy of the atheist position. If there is no God, where does Mozart’s transcendent genius come from?

If we are here ultimately as the result of blind chance and chemical/biological processes and if there is no Intelligence behind the universe, Mozart must have been a chance phenomenon, the result of the roll of some cosmic dice (but then, who rolled the dice?).

How much more fulfilling, satisfying and true to acknowledge Mozart not only as a being created in his own right but also as a specific gift to humankind from a benevolent God who is interested in and involved with His creation.

We cannot now thank Mozart for his music but we can be elevated out of the world’s limitations of time and space (for us, yesterday evening at Kings Place) by offering gratitude to the Creator of the universe for His gift of Mozart’s creativity.

There is a story about a soldier of the 2nd Battalion The Parachute Regiment who, at the end of 24 hours of ditch-by-ditch, mound-by-mound, close-quarter fighting with well-positioned Argentine infantry at Goose Green in the Falklands, came across a tape of Beethoven’s Emperor Piano Concerto in the pocket of a dead Argentine soldier. Exhausted by his efforts, filthy from endless crawling through mud and crouching in ditches, his ears still ringing and nerves jangling, shocked by the lives of close colleagues lost during the fight, relieved that the enemy had surrendered and that the sounds of battle were stilled, and elated to be alive, he inserted the recording into his personal stereo and played the slow second movement.

Put yourself in the shaken soldier’s position and then listen to the genius of Beethoven in the simplicity of that tender and soothing piece. Besides the sheer universality of the music – the appreciation of which bound together two combatants from opposite sides of the world – I defy anyone to conclude from the music itself that there is no God.

Where else could such divine harmony come from?

I suppose it’s inevitable. Our natural rage at the unbelievable cruelty meted out to poor Baby P has to find a focus. We must vent our anger so we call for blood. Besides the guilty parents, people in power are a natural target; someone must be pilloried, someone must be shamed and someone’s head must roll. So Sharon Shoesmith, director of children’s services at Haringey, has been suspended, and would have been summarily sacked if Children’s Minister Ed Balls had his way.

In Newham we’ve had our own experience of failure to protect a vulnerable child. On 7th January 2002, while the Laming enquiry into Victoria Climbie’s death a couple of years earlier was still sitting, two-year-old Ainlee Walker (Labonte) died at the hands of her Plaistow-based parents. She suffered from hitting, scalding, burning and starving, had 64 scars, scabs and bruises and was half the weight of the average child of her age when she died. It was utterly awful. It received huge publicity although it stayed in the shadow of the Climbie case.

On that occasion the subsequent enquiry report got it right, pointing up systemic failures in Newham rather than individual inadequacies. No-one was forced to resign.

It appears that, besides the parents, it was again the failure of the system that caused Baby P’s death, but this time it is a different kind of failure. With Victoria Climbie and Ainlee Walker it was failure caused by the lack of proper co-operation and co-ordination between the agencies working in the child protection field. With Baby P it is failure caused by the process-driven, box-ticking, target-meeting culture that dominates and controls local authorities and – in the case of children’s work – distances social workers from their clients.

The fact that the mother of all box-tickers, Ofsted, recently gave Haringey’s children’s services the maximum three star rating (and, astonishingly, was appointed as one of the three agencies that authored this week’s report on Baby P’s death) says it all. Haringey managed to correctly tick Ofsted’s boxes and meet their targets; hence the glowing report. But slavishly filling in monitoring forms and mechanically meeting targets doesn’t save babies’ lives.

We’ve got to create a climate where local leadership and initiative is valued and personal relationships are fostered. The social worker must become free from the strait-jacket of process and the tyranny of form-filling, and enabled to look flexibly at each situation on its merits.

The issue is partly about trust. If we think that social workers on the ground generally are trying to do a good job, we will trust them and encourage them. If we think that they are not and cannot, then we will continue tying them up in red tape and getting them to jump through bureaucratic hoops. Their energies will go into satisfying the pen-pushers rather than helping their clients, and their relationships with both managers and clients will be wooden and ineffective.

I guess the director had to go. But the central problem wasn’t Sharon Shoesmith.