Outside In

I remember a while back I attended a lecture by Terry Eagleton, a rather dull sermon on… well goodness knows, some pseudo-Marxist bluster no doubt. Even so, despite the overwhelming boredom that is my principal memory of the event, one thing Eagleton mentioned did in fact stick with me, and…

Martin Kettle writes here about what seems all of a sudden to have become a pressing subject, that being the teaching of history in our schools. And he makes the important point that one might find it difficult to teach a common history within a land that is no longer…

It is Labour’s recognition that it has been abandoned by what are now being called ‘C2 voters’, and discussion on how to rectify that uncomfortable fact, that seems to be the narrative taking precedence in the post-election post-mortem. Whilst simplistic caricature needs to be avoided, not least because it risks…

Immigration has all of a sudden become a hot issue for the left. Stung by the mass-abandonment of the Labour Party by ‘C2 voters’, they are grasping around for anything they think could be turned into the totemic issue for the lower socio-economic classes and so, naturally, have stumbled upon…

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…