Most churches stand out. St. Columba’s is hidden. Attending church there was like going to a house mass—nobody walking past suspects you’re going to a sacred gathering.

(Best wishes to the bride and groom—your lovely wedding is an auspicious start to your lives together.)

I attended Palm Sunday mass at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Oxford’s Blackbird Leys neighborhood. The church had such a large congregation, and such a narrow door, that I actually had to stand in line to enter.

Pictured: Re-entering Sacred Heart after the outdoor blessing of palms.

As a teen lector, Palm Sunday was The Show, the big mass, full of quick glances from Father Ed Bell that said, “Don’t screw this up, kid.” This mass at Sacred Heart was quite the opposite, relaxed and occasionally chaotic.

I was back at St. Peter’s, my home parish, for Holy Thursday mass. Each parish only has one mass on this day. For a multicultural parish like ours, this means celebrating that diversity by including as many languages and musical traditions as possible in the service. One year I counted 14 languages on Holy Thursday at St. Peter’s. This year, I think there were 8.

I mentioned on the 508 show that St. Peter’s had a good conversation about race a few weeks back, and that the measure of such a conversation is not the quality of that conversation, but what comes from it. For his Holy Thursday homily, Msgr. Scollen described some of the race conversation for those who weren’t there, and outlined the steps to our becoming a “beloved community.” Holy Thursday mass is also marked by a large-scale and literal washing of each other’s feet mid-way through the service, so the topic of building friendships and serving each other could not have been more fitting. I was not the only parishioner very happy to see this follow-through on “the beloved community,” and I hope I have many excuses in the coming months to blog more about how people are making that happen.

זאָג כאָטש להבֿדיל

Zack Berger’s new book of English and Yiddish poetry, Not in the Same Breath, is out.

Scott in Afghanistan

Worcester Magazine profiled of Scott Schaeffer-Duffy, who’s just returned from Afghanistan, where he was meeting with youth committed to building peace.

Nonviolent Solutions

If you want to catch up with Worcester’s Center for Nonviolent Solutions, Brian Goslow published a profile of the group in, of all places, Fifty Plus Advocate.

Forming Habits

My Lenten habits went OK this year. Could have been better, could have been worse. It’s not that my Lenten vows are so strenuous—it’s that forming new habits of any kind is tough for me.

Leo “Zen Habits” Babauta, one of the more useful sources of info on habit-building, is putting together an online Habit Course, and I’m lucky to be one of the beta testers. I’ll let you know how it goes, and how the course stacks up.

“Song for Holy Saturday”

Following tradition, here’s a link to this poem by James K. Baxter.

My favorite Holy Week post

Andrew Sullivan says Yes:

Does a force exist that is behind everything we are and see and know? Is that force benign? Does that force love us? Was the only way that truth could be revealed was by God becoming man and sacrificing himself to show us the only way to save ourselves?

It is about
picking a side for yourself
in that old, drawn-out war
they call ‘civil’.

Then around you,
the ever-cumulous skies,
the revolting lands,
the tumultuous seas,
cannot even decide on their own names.

But oddly,
you know exactly
who you are,
where you stand.

Will you join me in the prayers of concern. Let us pray.

God the Creator, we adore you for creating the universe, full of potential to unfold; for creating our world, teeming with life and the possibility to develop.

God the Christ, we marvel that you have come among us; that we can find you in the least of these, the most unassuming of our neighbours.

God the Holy Spirit, we ask you to fill us with your power, now comforting, now challenging, as you invite us to participate in the continuing creation, transformation, and renewal of our cosmos.

We confess the shortcomings in the past few weeks, the inadequacies we felt in ourselves, especially in our democratic processes, during the election campaign.

We first confess that we have seen injustice but failed to speak out. God, forgive us in your mercy.

We confess our lack of compassion, our inconsiderate thoughts and ill-considered words against our neighbours.

God, give us time to amend our ways and the occasion to say sorry, to heal our community.

God, we thank you for the chance to talk to our neighbours – to find common ground in discussion, to argue the best way forward.

We thank you for the election officers, the vote-counting staff, and all who carry out their duties without fear or favour.

We thank you for the glimpses of heaven as we campaign for your realm to realize itself, so your will be done, on earth as in heaven.

We thank you for the kairos moment, the opening, that three days after the elections, we still feel empowered, not resigned to fate, but actively watching and participating in the formation of our common history.

We thank you for the camaraderie among friends and comrades, as we walked together, ate and drank together, struggled and worked together.

We thank you for the civility and courtesy between rivals during the election campaign: A polite nod across the hall, leaving room for manœuvre; firm handshakes at the platform, building bridges for future co-operation.

We pray for the winners. May they retain their spirit of service. May they gain in humility and in wisdom.

We pray for those who lost. May they not be devastated in disappointment and grief, but stay hopeful and connected, continuing to contribute to their neighbourhoods.

We pray for our country, having elected a hung parliament for the first time in decades.

We pray for those in the process of forming a new government, not just those behind closed doors, but also those who gather to continue to engage, and those who contact their representatives to support and advise them in their exploration.

We pray that this process does not simply become an abstract power game, but a transformation that will hold this society together more coherently, keeping in mind all of our neighbours, especially those most vulnerable in our community, those who live among us but have no voice, and those in faraway lands whose lives are nonetheless affected by what happens in these our islands.

Almighty Father, we pray all this in the name of Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit: one God, now and forever. Amen.

See also the earlier prayer ‘Praying for the elections, seriously’.

One thing to keep in mind (for trans-Atlantic readers especially): This is neither an electoral college for a president, nor a baseball or American-football game. This is more soccer or cricket – with a draw being a possible and valid result – and a parliamentary system which should lead to some arrangement with a level of Cabinet collective responsibility. Arnold Schwarzenegger spoke too soon by congratulating David Cameron on his ‘victory’.

Much of the spotlight should be on Nick Clegg, Leader of the Liberal Democrats. The electorate has delivered a hung parliament that they (and, to lesser extent before 1997, the Labour Party) had asked for over the decades, in exchange for what they promised: proportional representation (not alternative vote plus). They should not squander this mandate, this kairos moment.

If instead, Mr Clegg wants to disappoint his voters, many voted tactically for him just to keep to Tories out, he can join with the Conservatives in coalition. He will thus quickly ruin the fortunes of his party for yet another generation, possibly also taking British politics down with them. Indeed, he would also be carrying out a coup d’état by subtly rewriting the constitutional rules to affirm the primacy of the party with only plurality, but not majority, in the House of Commons – let alone popular vote – at the expense of the incumbent Prime Minister, as current convention requires. He cannot talk his way out of this one, though many of his fellow party members seem already to start trying – totally on form, not out of character at all for the Liberal Democrats.

There is still a lot to play for. If these chaps do not deliver, the electorate needs to give them another hung parliament (likely very soon) – one even more ‘hung’, with more minor-party MPs and independents – which will have the mandate to try again. The Greens need to prepare for this worse scenario as well as the better one I outlined before. I might gently add that Caroline has finally made the breakthrough for us now … the party should have allowed Sara Parkin and Jonathon Porritt to make it two decades earlier, in 1992. Some friends might disagree with me, but in any case: Don’t mess this one up.

‘One of the most encouraging developments in the emergent intellectual space [...] has been a new willingness to advocate the Necessary rather than the merely Practical.’ – Mike Davis, Who will build the ark? New Left Review 61 (January/February 2010)

Political events since mid-2009, especially the parliamentary expenses scandal, accentuated long-standing symptoms in the British body politic, eliciting predictions of doom (in the form of further voter disengagement, among others) and calls for reform. Among these, many an opinion poll suggested the possibility of a hung Parliament, and many a campaign group called for a referendum on reforming the electoral system of first-past-the-post (FPTP). Peter Tatchell outlined the case for electoral reform in the inaugural issue of this Review. Beyond this, the wide Left ought also to think a few more steps ahead.

Politics may be the art of the possible, full of contingencies and often driven by chronological events. In contrast, statesmanship requires identifying turning points, grasping the kairos moment, and making the seemingly-impossible happen. ‘You never want a serious crisis to go to waste’, as Rahm Emanuel said. Rather than simply being pushed by the waves of political events, it is advisable for those of us on the progressive side of the political spectrum – who still believe in the power of politics, both to hold our society together and for positive change – to plan and prepare for the consequences of a possible hung Parliament and a referendum on electoral reform.

Hung Parliament

To start, we need to recognize that, as Vernon Bogdanor pointed out in a recent talk in Oxford, that the House of Lords is now permanently ‘hung’. A new constitutional convention for Britain is emerging where no party enjoys majority in that chamber of Parliament. Electoral arithmetic – in a variety of systems – has so far produced similar results in the devolved assemblies and the Scottish Parliament. A ‘hung’ Parliament – in truth, a newly-‘hung’ House of Commons in addition to the other place – may present itself after the next general election. In this section, I will deal with the immediate consequences of this. (This will accentuate the issues with FPTP and electoral system reform; that I will treat in the next section.)

A possible scenario is a Tory (plus Liberal Democrat?) plurality a few seats short of a majority. The Liberal Democrats, or (an)other smaller party(ies), may be in a position to be the kingmaker. For simplicity of argument, I will take an unlikely scenario where the Conservatives are one seat short of majority and – in the hope of forming a coalition Government – offering a Cabinet post to a Green; more complicated exercises are left for the reader – especially Liberal Democrats, who need to think through this carefully – but the point to be made is the same.

The Tories – in this unlikely scenario – then offer a Cabinet post to Caroline Lucas (winning Brighton Pavilion) with portfolio for the environment (or energy and climate change). Hedging against this, the Tories say the alternative is a post for Nick Griffin (also winning in his Barking constituency) with a portfolio for home affairs. What is this new Green MP to do? Relinquishing this offer means the British National Party will have control over the policing, the state databases, and migration – not an attractive prospect. But if the Cabinet post is worth taking, what would be the red line be in the negotiation? That is to say, under what undesirable circumstances are you willing threaten to leave Government and/or withdraw supply and confidence?

The Irish Greens recently learnt this lesson the hard way. Their holding (and holding on to) the environment portfolio meant having to endorse new motorways over ecologically-sensitive sites, a decision made under another portfolio but held by Cabinet collective resposibility rules, unless the Greens are open to the prospect of leaving Government and returning the Opposition benches. Reluctant to do this, Greens there are at risk of becoming the ‘Mudguard of the Republic’, an unenviable office of State last held by the Irish Labour Party, whose electoral fortunes took a full decade to recover.

There is a feasible workaround to the problem of Westminster-style Cabinet collective responsibility in a coalition Government context. In New Zealand, after the upheaval of electoral reform (see below), the politicians arrived at an arrangement of ‘confidence and supply’, including the possibility of Cabinet posts for minor parties without share in collective responsibility, but rather with direct reporting to the Prime Minister.

A similar arrangement has been common practice in Germany, with the portfolio of foreign affairs given to the junior partner in Government, held variously by the Greens, the Socialists, and now the Liberals. Still, such an arrangement is not necessarily easy for the junior partner in Government: recall one of the turning point in post-Second World War German history was Joschka Fischer having to defend his military deployment in Yugoslavia in front of a rowdy conference of his own party.

These German, Irish, and Kiwi experiences should be object lessons for us in Britain: What is the Liberal Democrat foreign policy? It may become the British foreign policy, perhaps even as soon as this summer. And if one is in the position of the junior partner: What would the red line be in the negotiations? Are the electorate and party members at large entitled to know beforehand? How well-prepared do we want to be when this happens?

Electoral reform and party realignment

In April 2009, many were worried that the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa would get 67 % of parliamentary seats, thus wielding unchallenged constitution-amending powers. But in Britain, one-party state is not a far-fetched threat but the status quo. Since there is no entrenched, codified constitution, the governing party – even one elected by a minority of the popular vote – can ram through any legislation, even those of constitutional importance, through Parliament without consensus from any other party.

Had the ANC won its constitution-amending powers, it would have garnered two-thirds of the popular vote. Not so in Britain: the pathological FPTP electoral system, rather than encouraging consensus, facilitates a minority imposing its unchecked will over the majority with the impunity of a steamroller. (For example, in May 2009, we saw the retention of innocent people’s DNA data, pushed through the Commons, would have been judicially ruled unconstitutional had a written constitution so provided.)

This is the root of the toxic climate of political alienation and apathy now prevailing in Britain. Despite this sort of hurdles, political breakthrough has come from surprising quarters. The United Kingdom Independence Party (Ukip) emerged as the second-largest British party in the European Parliament election last June, garnering 16.5 % of the popular vote, second only to the Tories at 27.7 % and ahead of Labour’s 15.7 %.

Regardless of whether we agree with Ukip, it is a political innovator. To start, it revived and sharpened the traditional Tory–imperial rhetoric, offering an ersatz alliance of the interests of the parochial, jingoistic petty bourgeoisie and lumpenproletariat on one part, with those of the globalized, Anglospheric élite on the other. More important, Ukip broke away from its Conservative ideological cousin, despite the constraints of the FPTP system for the Westminster elections which has dominated national politics. It took advantage of the more-proportional electoral system offered by the elections at the European level, though paradoxically it aimed to dismantle this.

Again, the experience in New Zealand offers an object lesson of what may come in British politics after electoral reform. In 1996, the electoral system for the House of Representatives (the only chamber in the Kiwi parliament) changed from FPTP to an additional-member system (there named ‘Mixed Member Proportional’). After some initial partisan discomfort, new alignments emerged with smaller parties which have more ideological clarity.

This process of party realignment, though transiently painful, is ultimately healthy for the body politic. There are two or three ‘parties of conviction’ within each of the larger existent parties in Britain, waiting for the right time to break out. A realignment similar to that experienced by New Zealand may happen here with small parties of conviction breaking out of existing ones, favouring consensus (internal and external to each party) rather than electoral expediency. Ideological clarity, in a system with fewer ‘wasted votes’, offers the best prospect of re-engaging the voters and boosting turnout.

In preparation for this process after the upcoming electoral system reform, generous statesmen and stateswomen would do well to start identifying friends across party lines. People we can do business with in other parties – either in a hung Parliament scenario, in the upheaval of partisan realignment; or in the subsequent consensual, coalition Government (or Opposition). Party-internal groups such as Compass, Green Left, the Beveridge Group, Green Liberal Democrats, and the Co-operative Party will play important roles in this scheme. It would be good to seize the opportunity and sketch out some plans for it … behold: on the other side of the political spectrum, they seem to be doing this already (e.g. Ukip).

Consensus Parliament with power-sharing

Partisan realignment does not occur without labour pains. Loyalty to one’s own party, in the right measure, ensures strategic coherence and is often admirable. But, as I hope I have sketched out, a time may come when the greater goal of national and societal Common Good calls for – and warrants – the sacrifice of such loyalty for a time.

The current partisan configuration in Britain is not divinely ordained, but an ecology that developed within the existent electoral systems. Likewise, the actual fissures within each existent parties during the realignment process, while not random but with deep ideological roots, are still to be determined. These are to be called by the most astute stateswomen and statesmen with foresight in each party, if they are not barely to be driven by haphazard events. Take my own political tradition – the Greens – as an example: the ideological differences between Realo and Fundi, or (vulgo) ‘spikes’ and ‘fluffs’, has more than one time rend Green parties apart: in Germany, in the Netherlands, in Mexico, and now (lo!) in Ireland.

Such ideological undercurrents are not absent in other parties; taking the other two from the wide Left: The oft-heard accusations of Liberal Democrat ‘fence-sitting’ may come from the ideological dialectic between internal factions: one with neoliberal/libertarian instincts, the other social-democrat. Within the Labour Party, various configuration are possible: New and Old, Third Way versus Civil Republican, Mainstream against Militant; this dynamically-changing landscape awaits able and adroit hands to mould and then to hold.

The realignment may be a scary prospect for partisans, but the outcome for the whole of Britain can be better than the status quo. The adversarial nature of the Westminster Parliament, stemming from the incidental architectural heritage of Saint Stephen’s Chapel and reinforced by the FPTP electoral system, has sometimes become a gratuitous two-sided shouting match, caricatured as a Punch and Judy show. This contrasts (as Norman Davies explained in an appendix of his work of haute vulgarisation, Europe: A History) with the European continental political culture of the Hemicycle, expressed (again) architecturally in the layout of the debating chamber of the European Parliament – and in these isles, the Dáil and the Scottish Parliament.

As the Peace Process in Northern Ireland rolled on, the new U-shaped chamber in Stormont prophesied a move away from sectarian two-sidedness. An otherwise-unlikely but constitutionally-mandated permanent coalition Government, holding two parties from the extrema of the political spectrum, projects the peculiar effect of holding the society together. Britain can borrow from this culture of consensus and power-sharing in the neighbouring island. The new-format Westminster Hall debates in Parliament herald such a move, both architectually and politically, to a more hemicyclical arrangement.

This is what a constitution ought to do: to hold the society together, no matter who is in Government. A hung Parliament would give us an opening to consider – with due care – not only the designs of our electoral system, but also the wider scheme for this constitutional telos. Imagine a more generous, more vibrant politics in Britain. More diversity of opinions with smaller, coherent parties; accompanied with ideological conviction on the one hand, and consensus-building on the other. In all, much less partisan bickering and decisions driven by triangulation and crude expediency. A Britain where a ‘Government of All Talents’ is no longer a contrived piece of rhetoric, but naturally unfolds from the healthy constitution of the body politic. For the good of our country, let’s prepare for it. Let’s work towards it.

Last time I spoke from this lectern, I started by talking about a bank branch a few metres down High Street. I am going to talk about banks again. A nationalized bank at that. Seventy percent of the Royal Bank of Scotland is owned by Her Majesty’s Treasury … well, the better name is the taxpayers’ Treasury, our Treasury. In turn, RBS owns the NatWest bank in England; we have a branch down the road. Before I get too much into the banks, let me take a detour, and talk about oil. I promise to come back to banks … ’cause that seems to be where the action’s at, these days.

In 2003, I attended the Congress of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, in Ottawa, the capital of Canada. In one of the sessions, I heard for the first time about the idea of extracting petroleum from tar sands. A representative of the oil company Shell Canada explained that, to extract the oil from the tar sands, one burns a quarter of the oil to extract the other three quarters of the oil. This sounded very inefficient to my ears. But as the world is running out of oil, the companies are counting on oil being expensive enough one day soon for this to be worth their while.

One of the places where tar sands are found is the Alberta Province in Canada: there is the Canadian connection. Land inhabited by the indigenous peoples (or First Nations) of Canada such as the Beaver Lake Cree Nation, will become wasteland because of the removal of trees at the open-pit mines, and because of the toxic waste products from the oil extraction process on site. I am now wearing a T-shirt: in front it asks: ‘eat money?’ On the back, it has a saying, a short poem:

Only when the last tree has died
and the last river been poisoned
and the last fish been caught
will we realize we cannot eat money

Guess who said this? The Cree people. The same Cree people said this, decades if not centuries ago. A large area of Alberta, roughly the size of England, will be blighted in this way if it is not stopped.

And the surprise is that we all, all of us, are funding this destruction. Not directly of course, but through our collective ownership of the Royal Bank of Scotland. A recent report Cashing in on Tar Sands (commissioned by campaign groups such as People and Planet, and researched by the thinktank Platform) set out the specifics of the Bank’s investment in tar-sand projects. This was flagged up in the newspaper The Guardian. The corporate responsibility chief of the Royal Bank was allowed the right of response. What did he say? I quote: ‘RBS [...] has not provided any finance directly to tar sands projects in the last three years’: end of quote. Watch out for the weasel words … the adverbs. I repeat, quote: ‘RBS [...] has not provided any finance directly to tar sands projects in the last three years’: end of quote. On Thursday 11th of March this was printed in The Guardian. Unlucky for him, on Wednesday 10th of March, a local paper in Alberta, the Calgary Herald reported that RBS opened an oil-and-gas advisory office there. It quoted RBS Canada executive Larry Maloney’s announcement, quote: ‘we feel there’s a good niche for us to play’: end of quote.

If you are surprised and outraged, well, the Members of Parliament on the parliamentary environmental audit committee were too, Tuesday 9th in the same week last month. The Treasury officials seemed nonchalant, though the MPs turned up the heat on them: the Treasury just wanted RBS to make money – as much money as possible, whatever the cost. So here you have a caricature – a real-life, bleeding-edge caricature – of what the Accra Confession is trying to tell us, to get us to recognize. The big structure – the Empire – rolls on, growing in the wrong places and sucking resources greedily like cancer. This is sold to us as economic growth – as something of value, the only thing of value, against which all else must be measured. But people’s lives – especially those of the poor and the indigenous peoples – see little improvement if at all. The environment is ruined. And the worst: we are inextricably bound up in the whole business. And this goes on, as our planet turns, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all year long, whether we notice it or not.

It would be pretty bad, pretty sad, if that were the end of the story. Thankfully, it is not. Another bank, this time the Co-operative Bank, is funding the Cree people in their court case against the tar-sand developers. If you have not noticed, the Co-operative Bank is also owned by some of us, its customer–members. People and Planet, a campaigning charity, is taking the Treasury to court for a judicial review on this matter. Our sisters and brothers in the Reformed-church family, the United Church of Canada, is working on the ground, trying to reconcile those who are bent … hell-bent … on this kind of development and those who look upon it with horror.

So there is some hope, though the shape of it is not entirely clear yet … this, as we would recognize between Easter and Pentecost. What are we to do? How do we get this power back, that is rightfully ours? As consumers, as investors, and taxpayers, as voters, and as Christians, followers of Jesus Christ … in all, as citizens both of this country and of the other country: there is something for us to do. As our sisters and brothers remind us through the Accra Confession: There is some confessing to do. There is some repenting to do. Some changing of minds. Some naming of idolatry. Some rejection of anathema. Telling apart Mammon from God. Yes, there is some work to do. We can talk about this after the service. Perhaps the discussion, and the action, will take as long as our lives. God help us. Send the workers. Come, Holy Spirit. Amen.

Luke 15:11–32 (Prodigal Son).

May I speak in the name of God: Creator, Christ, and Comforter. Amen.

A few years ago, I went to the National Theatre in London, to see Bertolt Brecht’s play The Life of Galileo, in a version by David Hare. With 20th-century hindsight, the German playwright Brecht retold the life-story of the 17th-century scientist Galileo Galilei. Today, on this Ash Wednesday, I want to talk about the nature and motivation of scientific pursuit: this play happens to provide some hooks for my thinking. So, at the risk of substituting a theatre review in the place of a sermon, here I go.

If you recall, Galileo championed the theory of Copernicus that the Earth orbits the Sun. The Church forced him to recant this view. The famous British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking says, ‘Galileo, perhaps more than any other single person, was responsible for the birth of modern science.’ Is this modern science a good thing in the round? Was the Church right to slow Galileo down after all? Galileo’s 17th-century contemporaries did not have the benefit of hindsight and retrospection: They were riding the wave of the Renaissance, pregnant with the prospect of rationalism’s triumph in the 19th and 20th centuries.

But now, a few decades after Brecht, no one in our times can be so sure of the liberating promises of rational progress anymore. It appears we are about to destroy many of the existing species in our biosphere, and make life more difficult for most of our own species, through man-made climate change. We may soon run out of cheap energy in the form of fossil fuels, leaving a large fraction of us too unskilled to cope with fuel poverty.

The longest-living legacy of the human species is likely to be our radioactive waste. It would be good if a few pieces of paper in the desert and some stone carvings survive this. But that looks unlikely; even if that is the case, those that survive would be the so-called ‘atomic-heritage’ manuals, teaching those to come how to safely manage the radioactivity. (Yes, some scientists are actually planning for this.) This is not the worst case scenario actually. But these manuals are not as interesting as the works of Dante Alighieri, depicted in one of the chapel windows.

There are two survival strategies open to us, the Homo sapiens species. The first is advocated by the so-called transhumanist extropians. These are people trying to live in gated communities, walled countries, with large arsenals of arms to keep everybody else out. These are people trying to preserve their bodily selves – or rather, their (near-)dead bodies – in cryogenic suites. (But who is going to keep them plugged in and frozen when our energy runs out?) These are people planning to colonize the Moon and Mars. This is rationalist thought, carried to its logical conclusion.

The second strategy is that of (what we now call) ‘the poor’ and the ‘hippies’. These are resourceful people who are self-sufficient and resilient, who have not been too-absorbed into the globalized monetary economy. They are of all sorts, and more likely to emerge from (what we now call) the global South. ‘All sorts’ are the keywords here: ‘all sorts’.

Let me return to Brecht’s depiction of the dynamics between Galileo the scientist and the Church of his times. The conventional, rationalist wisdom blames the Church for trying to limit the progress of science, and counts it fortunate (or, inevitable) that reason’s march cannot be halted, if paused by the ‘martyrdom’ of Copernicus and the forced recantation of Galileo. ‘Traitor of science!’ they cry, against Galileo.

Brecht, a socialist, cannot bring himself to totally demolish this rationalistic paradigm upfront, but he still questions it as any thinking person in the 20th century has to. The present production at the National Theatre had images from the Visible Earth project for the backdrop, but equally appropriate, if anachronistic and less subtle, there could have been a mushroom cloud, an utterly disappointing scene for gung-ho believers of absolute rationalism.

Following Brecht, I would also not go so far as to say that the Church had it right all along, but rationalism and blind progress certainly did not have it right all along. No, the Church definitely cannot smugly say ‘I told you so’. Perhaps the Church did not express herself in quite the right way? Can we, both as Christians and as scientists, learn from history?

‘What are we for?’, Brecht’s Galileo asks: Are we scientists to be ‘inventive dwarfs for hire’, working for the highest bidder? Or can we have ‘science in the service of humanity’ (as often attributed to Marie Curie)? ‘human-scale science’? Is it possible for the scientist to work, not for fame or profit, not even for the gratification of gratuitous ‘curiosity’, ‘Reason’ with a capital ‘R’, or ‘science for science’s sake’; but as a bird makes a nest, as a tree bears fruit, as a beaver builds a dam, as bees make honey? Or is this one of the human activities where it bound to be more complicated than that? Is it asking too much? or indeed, too little?

What I am trying to ask is: whether the scientific pursuit can be without the alienation of labour, as in the Marxian analysis – after Karl Marx; equally in the Christian sense, can it be a vocation. That is to say, can a scientist say nowadays: I am doing this neither for greed nor for fear? The Prodigal Son, in our reading this evening, was first bound … spellbound by greed for the imminent inheritance; then bound by the threat of poverty; before finally finding his home again, where he started. Can a scientist say: this my scientific pursuit is where my deepest joy meets the world’s deepest need: this is truly my calling?

These questions are even more poignant nowadays. Giles Fraser, a radical Christian cleric from St Paul’s Cathedral in London, wrote in the Church Times last month: ‘As modern science is so extremely expensive to conduct, often even too expensive for governments, it becomes something done by pharmaceutical companies and those manufacturing weapons. These days, it is in places such as these that most scientists work, and not in universities. This means that science is now done mostly by big business and to make money.’ Some present in this chapel know well that even the research and teaching done in universities are now driven by the profit motive, by the drive for commercialization, by the requirements of UK plc, rather than driven by curiosity and education.

[Story about freshers’ first physics tutorial in Oxford – ad lib.]

I ask again: Can we, both as Christians and as scientists, learn from history? Almost ten years into the new century, I am still trying to understand the last one. (Can one speak of ‘coming to terms’ with the 20th century?) It is as if humanity, or at least a large part of it, after learning how to read, write, and take the square root, has now graduated from school and reached adolescence. This young man (allow me to be gender specific here, which is not entirely inaccurate) – this young man, he then proceeds to squander the inheritance which his parents and ancestors stored up, all in a very short time, spending it in a self-destructive way, however instantly gratifying.

Does this sound familiar? Perhaps, one day he will find himself down with the pigs and suddenly change his mind (μετάνοια) – change his mind – repent. I just hope it won’t be too late to go back to his dad. What would his brother, living in the South, out in the farm, say? ‘Dad, I have always worked for you, but you never cooked a little young goat for me. This chap, he spent all his money at the brothel, but now you give him all this bling-bling and throw a big party for him!’ Me – after thinking this through, I now know slightly better how the Prodigal Son will feel, upon hearing this.

If you remember the two strategies open to our species I mentioned earlier: which one are we to choose? Bob Marley sings in his song ‘So much trouble in the world’: ♪ ‘You see men sailing on their ego trips | Blast off on their space ship | Million miles from reality | No care for you, no care for me.’ ♫ Prodigal endeavours, such as space exploration, only become a legitimate exercise once we learn how to live sustainably, within the bounds of a planet. Rather than engineering ourselves to get out of this planet post-haste, we should first try to engineer ourselves to be able to stay in comfortably.

Maybe the Prodigal Son will eventually settle down, have a small family, and start thinking for his children. One can only hope. Amen.

From one o’clock to three in the afternoon, I attended the Green group of councillors to discuss budget proposals for Oxford City Council and Oxfordshire County Council, and election strategies.

From seven to about nine o’clock in the evening, I was glad to be at the launch of the inaugural issue of the Oxford Left Review. There I talked with three journalists (among other radical right-on comrades), from Aamulehti of Tampere, Corriere della Sera of Italy, and Samoa’s Environment Weekly. Very nice people they were.

Here is the table of contents for the inaugural issue of the Oxford Left Review (Issue 1, February 2010):

• Samual Burt: Equality and Republican Ideals
• Peter Tatchell: Voter Reform and the Left
• Stuart White: An End to Labourism
• Cailean Gallagher: Call to Scottish Labour
• Matthew Kennedy: The Putney Debates
• Jeremy Cliffe: A Fourth Way for Labour?
• Brian Melican: Germany’s Fragmented Left
• Christopher Jackson: The Return of Keynes
• George Irvin: Time for a Tobin Tax
• Kaihsu Tai: The Science of Copenhagen
• Sophie Lewis: COP15 – Activist’s Perspective
• Matthew Kennedy: Žižek review
• Roberta Klimt: Bennett review
• Noel Hatch: Today’s Lost Generation

Pace Radford, it was typeset in Palatino, to good effect dare I so say. All references to non-L——r party affiliation were cautiously scrubbed, for which I am (to be frank) a bit miffed. Despite that, it was an excellent effort by the editorial team in setting off this worthy initiative.

Near midnight, I refined my letter to the Oxford Times about public ownership of assets, after email-shots to follow up all the interesting discussions I had for the last 24 hours of politicking.

It is amazing that I am not getting paid to do any of this, but certainly it has been more fun than staring at molecules on the computer. Citizenship is a full-time job, and the work of a citizen is never done….

This week in England, we were asked to ‘Remember, remember the Fifth of November’, and this Sunday – Remembrance Sunday – to remember the soldiers. It is well that we remember these; but I wonder whether it would have served us even better to remember that there had been three Anglo-Afghan Wars, before getting ourselves into a fourth one. The Encyclopædia Britannica has them thus: ‘The first war demonstrated the ease of overrunning Afghanistan and the difficulty of holding it. The second war proved to be a Pyrrhic victory for the British.’ So remember the poppy fields in Afghanistan, as well as those in Flanders, when you see the poppies this autumn.

Kaihsu Tai, United Reformed Church, United Kingdom, 2009-06-05/21

The following sketch is written from my personal impression, based on several years of non-professional but serious study, observation, and discussion of the issues. Due to time constraints, I am not supplying references to the statements I make, but with modern resources it is not difficult to verify (or disprove as the case may be) most of them. I try to be frank and fair at the same time, but some might take this account to be polemical.

1 Identify the major climate change concerns and challenges for your region.

Primarily, for the United Kingdom (UK), climate change is less a physical hazard than a moral one. The UK is usually categorized as a ‘developed’ country, as measured in indices such as gross domestic product per capita. For the next decade or so, it is not difficult for those well-off (perhaps around half of the population) to adapt to the physical effects of climate change. However, the moral implications are more dire: as the first country to spark off the fossil-fueled Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, and one of the first to have the scientific and political capacity to realize the consequences of climate change since the 1980s (during the premiership of Margaret Thatcher), it cannot escape the moral responsibility about climate change. To complicate the matter, the intention to protect the competitiveness of London’s status as a major financial centre in a globalized world – the rump of an imperial past – hinders the political will to face down this moral hazard.

A secondary concern for the UK related to climate change is energy. Along with other member states of the European Union (EU), the UK feels an increasing pressure to ensure the long-term supply of energy, especially as its internal supplies of oil and gas are dwindling. Taking greenhouse-gas emission into consideration, each of the other sources in the energy mix (without going into detail) comes with political, environmental, and economic challenges. The stated political priority is to ‘keep the light on’ (this, while sometimes done in wasteful excess in the UK, is a luxury in many other parts of the world), and to make energy affordable to everybody, especially protecting by subsidy or other mechanisms the ‘fuel-poor’ – those who can become vulnerable when exposed to high energy prices, such as people on low/no income and old-age pensioners. Another strain on the energy demand is transport, fed by decades of car-centred infrastructure development and now aeroplanes, both cargo and passenger travel (this Mission Education School being one instance). These modes of transport are conventionally fossil-fueled, and are difficult – but not impossible – to retrofit with low/zero-carbon alternatives. However, it might be easier to replace them with alternative, public modes of transport.

Land management and agricultural production pose a third challenge. The impending changes caused by climate change to the UK’s physical terrain will compound the already-stressful requirements of nature conservation, wildlife biodiversity, food agriculture, biofuel and renewable energy production, archæological and historical preservation, flood prevention, housing, industry, business, and transport. The pros and cons – including the greenhouse-gas emissions – of various forms of agriculture and food production (including the option of importing food) is a topic for debate and investigation. Another related topic is the proper mix of economy in the UK among the four categories of agriculture, manufacturing, services, and finance.

Finally, the diffuse nature of climate change, at the most profound, may remind the UK body politic of its centuries of struggle for personal, individual freedom (‘liberty’ the learned term) on the one hand, and for a shared, collective polity (in the sweet vernacular ‘commonwealth’) on the other. Papered over with many sets of compromises in the last half-millennium, the present constitutional settlement appears stretched to its limit, by climate change but also by many other compounding problems. While further tinkering remains as ever an available option, some call for radical reform of – or for transcendence of contradiction in – British democracy, warranted by the many challenges it faces: climate change, financial chaos, peak oil, bankruptcy of trust in the political system, to name a few. Sixty years ago, the large-scale threat of the Second World War – and Britain’s response to it – redrew the boundaries of the UK’s realm, reshaped its character, and re-established the relationship between the people and the government. In the best case scenario, the response towards climate change may similarly come to define Britishness, deepen its meaning, revitalize the local economy, and renew the democracy.

2 Share the ways in which your church and other CWM churches in your region are involved in educating and informing persons about climate change.

The United Reformed Church’s (URC) monthly magazine Reform has hosted a two-page spread ‘green pages’ in every issue for nearly a year. This features news from the Eco-Congregation programme, Operation Noah (both sponsored by Churches Together in Britain and Ireland and other ecumenical bodies), and Christian Ecology Link (a charity which started as a fellowship of Christian members in the Green Party). Before the European Parliament elections earlier this year, the Conference of European Churches issued a booklet to give the churches focused questions for the candidates, especially on issues such as climate change and world development. More generally, the Joint Public Issues Committee of URC, Methodists, and Baptists keeps up the pressure from the churches on the government and other public bodies. The URC network of congregations called Commitment for Life is our way of supporting Christian Aid, which along with Tearfund are members of the umbrella campaign Stop Climate Chaos.

3 Briefly outline the position of your country’s government on the issue.

Within the UK, in addition to the central government based in London, there are three devolved national governments (Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland), the English regions (responsible for large-scale spatial planning and economic development), the principle local authorities (counties etc.) and in certain areas town and parish councils. Each of these are responsible for its own policy mandates. For many, climate change is on their agenda. However, the priority accorded depends on the political attitude and composition of their councils. Some of the local authorities are involved in community-led initiatives such as the Transition Towns movement.

Famously the UK – long-time a party to the Kyoto Protocol – is the first country to adopt legally-binding targets of greenhouse-gas emissions pursuant to its Climate Change Act 2008. A new Department of Energy and Climate Change within the government, and a Climate Change Committee independent thereof, have been created as part of the mechanism to manage an annual ‘carbon budget’. Though the Act binds the government, it is unclear who would have standing to seek judicial remedy if the carbon budget is not adhered to. The Climate Change Committee could shout from the rooftop but ultimately only has political – not legal – effect. The electorate may be the only control in the event of a breach, through its power to impose a political remedy – but its mind may well focus elsewhere when it reaches the ballot box.

The UK operates within the framework of EU strategy to manage climate change. Again, while the rhetoric of the EU is for emission targets, the control mechanism is an even-weaker Emissions Trading System (ETS). While each phase of ETS is more stringent than the last, it started with grandfathered quotas to existing emitters, in effect granting rights to pollute. Overall it is a laxed régime which some commentators deride as ‘hot air’. In this case, control is either directly financial–economic (for example, by purchasing emission permits to drive up the price or by forfeiting permits – that is, by not emitting the permitted amount), or indirectly through political control over EU institutions. More recently, there is a new scheme called ‘20-20-20 by 2020’, which promises 20 % reduction carbon emission, 20 % renewable energy in the mix, and 20 % better energy efficiency in about a decade. Without a clear implementation framework, it remains to be seen whether this is yet more hot air.

The UK ultimately is a party to the Kyoto Protocol and its international-law basis the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. It has contributed expertise to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change through scientists such as Sir John Houghton of the Meteorological Office. With government-endorsed reports and speeches by Lord (Nicholas) Stern (report commissioned by the Treasury) and Sir David King (former scientific advisor to the government), it contributes to the sense of urgency to tackle climate change. It is well-known that the régime of international law is notoriously inconsistent and generally weak. Worse, on the international level, the UK government at times appears ambivalent in negotiations. We shall see in Copenhagen later this year whether this assessment remains valid.