A lot of hoo-hah this Easter about David Cameron’s comments that the UK is a Christian country. A group of scientists and writers wrote an angry letter to the Telegraph calling this divisive.
Personally I think Cameron was trolling us—saying something deliberately controversial in order to provoke the liberal left. The European elections are looming, and I would be willing to bet that precisely the sort of people who are drifting from the Conservative Party to UKIP are the sort of people for whom the whole ‘we are a Christian nation’ schtick would resonate. Its a faux culture war in order to shore up the base. Continue reading
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My previous two posts were about the angst of privileged middle classes. I wrote first about the middle class habit of moving into the catchment area for good schools. Then I excused our tendency to maintain a less-than ethical existence. Untrained eyes could be forgiven for mistaking my motives in writing these posts. Am I not simply trying to assuage my own guilt at doing precisely those things?
Not so. I feel far less guilty about my complicity in all those middle-class clichés than perhaps I should. Rather, both posts were digressions of this one, in which I shall briefly discuss the ethics of Internet apps.
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In my quick post yesterday I touched on the trade-offs between self-interest and ethical living, and the middle-class pull to buy the best environment for one’s family. The modern Western lifestyle throws up anxieties like this all the time, because it turns out that pretty much everything we do is (on some level) unethical or hypocritical. Travelling to the shop in a car certainly harms the enivronment. Buying food when you get there will create landfill. Organic food is not Fair Trade, and vice-versa. Continue reading
Over the weekend I went to see Invincble at the Orange Tree in Richmond, a new play by Torben Betts. Its the kind of theatre I prefer: intimiate scenes in-the-round, teasing apart something relevant about contemporary life.
This one centres on an upper middle-class couple, Oliver and Emily, with a tragedy in their past and an warped sense of social responsibility. They have chosen to live among ‘ordinary’ people in the North of England. Rather than live in a middle-class ghetto and contribute to the extortionate London housing bubble, they profess a desire to improve this community. Emily plans to become a school governor and says she is setting up an Amnesty group and an artists’ collective. Continue reading
Fraser Nelson has written a much celebrated article for the Daily Telegraph about British Muslims, and how they have integrated into British life.
British Muslims don’t really feel a sense of otherness. In fact, polls show they’re much more likely to identify with Britishness than the general population. The Citizenship Survey found that most Muslims agree with two propositions: that Islam is the most important thing in their life, and that their primary loyalty lies with the British state. Most are baffled by the idea of a tension between the two.
Too often, Islam is in the news because of some sort of culture clash (for example, the row over the Mohammed cartoons or veils). But Nelson points out that this is often a media cliche and unrepresentative of most British Muslims. He lists several examples where Muslims have collaborated with Jewish groups and churches to ensure that diversity of faith is maintained. Continue reading