Marcus Walker

How about we end this age

1) Blair: "The Labour Party is playing with fire; or, more accurately, with its future, and that of the country. I led the Labour Party for 13 years and through three general elections. It is a party largely of decent, well-meaning people who want the best for the country. Its mission is, as its 1994 rewritten constitution says, to ensure that “power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many not the few” and it’s a perfectly noble one. But I am afraid, like many progressive parties, it has an almost infinite capacity for self-delusion. It won the 2024 election not by acclaim, but by being an acceptable (credit to Keir Starmer) default option to a Conservative government the country felt had behaved unacceptably. However, partly because of the intellectual wasteland of the Corbyn years, it had no properly thought-through analysis of how the world was changing and what that meant for policy. Wes Streeting is a huge political talent and Andy Burnham was an outstanding member of my government. But this leadership debate has an extraordinarily retro 20th-century feel to it. Like most politicians, they’re anxious to distance themselves from the ‘Westminster bubble’. But Britain’s problem isn’t with a ‘Westminster’ bubble. It is with a ‘politics’ bubble. The politics of the future may be better understood by those presently outside politics. The world is turning on its axis and today’s politicians living in a 24/7 pressure cooker have barely time to recognise the turning let alone study it. These changes need long-term strategic thinking which is alien to the way most modern democracies function. The government’s principal problem isn’t Keir’s personality. Or a failure to communicate ‘our achievements’. Or a need to assert more strongly Labour’s ‘values’."

🌳Oak Apple Day: celebrate the Restoration of the Crown in 1660 📖Use the old service ordered to be used in churches for hundreds of years 🎼Purcell, Child, Batten, Byrd 🎶Hymns of a national, celebratory, variety 👨‍🍳Free food afterwards 🍷Parish bar will be open

As this was my day job for four years in Rome, I decided to read the Pope’s encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. Being free from the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rome, but with an appreciation of any deep thinking by a major Christian leader, I found it very interesting. In short: His underlying analysis of the situation is deeply Burkean - it’s all little platoons, as read and developed through the scriptural narrative; it’s humanity in its messiness and reality not idealised and perfected. I think I agree with this section entirely. The solutions are more mixed. While I can understand the instincts, he seems to slip into three presumptions that either need more work or are likely to backfire significantly: 1) the Luddite fallacy - that there is only so much work and once it’s taken away from a worker, nothing will replace it. AI might be a unique threat to humanity or it might be another step forward as we mechanise one thing and then open up others. 2) There is a belief in multilateral action that doesn’t seem to reflect either that such action is often dominated by dangerous pressure groups (see the WHO) or that the bad powers in the world just ignore it, leaving the good powers stranded (see China). 3) There is a trust in state action which (though reassuringly caveated) still ignores the fact that the state driving towards a ‘common good’ that is not actually shared by the public (as manifested by their revealed preference at the till) will often have seriously negative effects. But all round a much more subtle encyclical than those of his predecessor (which came firmly out of a left wing stable, economically and politically).

For Whitsunday we inaugurated our new service of Holy Communion in the High Church tradition. 🕊️🔥 Now celebrated every Sunday at 5pm in St Bartholomew the Less, the service follows the practices of High Church divines such as William Laud, John Cosin and Lancelot Andrewes.