Outside In

No doubt everyone will have read about Manish Sood today, the Labour Party candidate for North West Norfolk who stuck something of a spoke in the wheels of the election campaign by denouncing Gordon Brown as the worst Prime Minster this country has ever had and maintaining that he ought…

After Mass in Dundee Cathedral yesterday we were given two handouts. The first was from the SPUC (Society for the Protection of Unborn Children) and the second was a Scottish Bishops’ Election Statement. The SPUC handout was at pains to underline that they had no intention of telling anyone which…

A few times over the past couple of weeks I have mentioned the Westminster Declaration of Christian Conscience. Based on a similar manifesto first created in the United States (the Manhattan Declaration), the declaration seeks to offer an ecumenical statement of orthodox Christian belief, re-affirming particularly those issues that often…

It is becoming increasingly clear that, in an era when all three parties claim to offer change from the old politics, all three of them want to do little more than continue with the very orthodoxies that have brought the political system to its present wretchedness. Economically, there is little…

For this blog post I thought I’d give a quick review of the book Red Tory, which has thus far been quite a success, and elicited many reviews either side of the pond. To my mind, the American response has been much more thoughtful than the reception received here in…

This from the Rage Against God by Peter Hitchens, A new elite, wealthy and comfortable beyond the fantasies of any previous generation, abandons penal codes (especially against the possession of narcotics) and abolishes marital fidelity so as to licence its own comfortable indulgence. And so it permits the same freedoms…

I’ve been meaning to blog for a couple of days now on the absurd suggestion by the Royal College of Physicians that people should be banned from smoking in their own cars, regardless of whether they have anyone in the car with them or not. As usual, the protective shield…

A fascinating story today in the Telegraph, about millionaire businessman and founder of the Kwik Save chain of supermarkets, Albert Gubay, who has given away the vast majority of his fortune to charity in order to ‘fulfill a pact he had made with God’. In short, devout Roman Catholic Gubay,…

This is an article I have produced for ResPublica’s blog, the Disraeli Room. “Without power, you are pointless” Thus one glimpses the ideological point upon which William Brett’s recent article ‘Bring Back the Machine’ pivots. And, accepting for the moment the immanentised ethic upon which the assertion rests, one can concede…

Jon Cruddas has an interesting article in the Guardian today, offering some opinions on the toxic legacy bequeathed the nation by Margaret Thatcher, or more accurately her neo-liberal economic approach (Hayek, Chicago School, etc. etc.). As even the quickest glance at the comments will show, the commenters remain unimpressed –…