One of the more frustrating elements of the discourse around XR is that commentators insist on pretending that XR’s aim is to promote a public policy response to climate change. It’s not, their aim is the overthrow of representative democracy & capitalism - & they don’t hide it!
So it’s just frustrating to see commentators scratch their heads and say “this will undermine their cause and alienate the electorate”. They don’t care about the electorate, they explicitly want to bypass the electorate and representative democracy. Again: they don’t hide this.
Like a number of Marxist organisations that have recently risen to public prominence, they have latched onto genuine public concern and use it as a mask for a much more sinister agenda. We should see them for who they claim to be not who we think they should be.
And the Church, yes even retired Archbishops, should have nothing - nothing at all - to do with this sinister anti-democratic, poverty-enabling, human-hating, campaign (as someone very wisely wrote in @TheCriticMag last year)
Well, well, well. Did you know that Paula Vennells is the progenitor of the Church of England’s Governance Review? The massive project to centralise all the power - currently dispersed to ensure checks and balances - across the Church?
The whole thing comes out of a secret Lessons Learned Review written by Paula Vennells and presented to the various Church authorities in 2020 (!! 👀 !!). This was a consequence of a failed Church Buildings Review where the various church bodies could not find consensus.
So what happened? Well basically it’s all about the big question that has since blown up and triggered the founding of @SaveTheParish: church closures.
So Napoleon. Why was it so bad? 1) It was just… dull. Nothing sparkled. There was no excitement. They somehow made the rise, reign, and fall of one of the most characterful men of history be boring.
2) There was no storyline. No drama. No tension. There was every opportunity to create a storyline but somehow they didn’t. History was just one thing after another, with a hint of ennui.
The scriptwriter needs a new day job.
3) Who even was he? He wheezed his way through the Siege of Toulon, wimped out of Egypt because he easily being cuckolded, fled his own coup d’état screaming. You are left with no hint of a reason why anyone would follow him to the bar never mind across the world.
This study, ably reported on by @MadsDavies, is an absolute shocker and should be a game changer. I hope you will forgive a long 🧵 but this is so important given how many other dioceses are implementing schemes following what we can safely call the Failed Wigan Model.
The plan?
😖Merge all the 33 parishes of Wigan into one super benefice with seven “parish hubs” (they love “hubs” in the new CofE).
😢Slash the number of clergy from 24 to 15 (they actually only got 13).
🎓Boost training for the laity.
📎Merge back-office functions.
I keep coming back to this interview and keep thinking how it betrays one of the huge unresolved questions in British politics: to what extent can a person whose whole philosophy runs against that of a gov’t oversee the implementation of their objectives? newstatesman.com/the-weekend-in…
In diplomacy it feels starker than elsewhere. If you believe in appeasement of Russia and China (which McDonald clearly did), how does that not affect the various options you present or arguments you make to ministers?
One of the shadow-scandals of the Raab resignation was that the British Ambassador to Spain was offering the Spanish that they could station police and troops in Gibraltar - entirely contrary to government policy. Was this supported by the Permanent Secretary?
So day three of Conference. What is it like? It’s like a wake, but no-one’s sure if the corpse is the Conservative Party or just Liz Truss’s ministry and, like every good wake, everyone’s getting smashed.
I presumed this would be like conferences in bad times before but it is a different level of bad. I have not met one person, not one, who weighs-in to defend her or the government (apart from those explicitly paid to do so - and even then… 👀).
This is totally different from conferences in the dark days of IDS or May, when people were debating questions of leadership and policy and there were genuinely two sides. The last few months of Boria saw strong defences of him being mounted. This week?
So the problem for Liz Truss & the party is this: the conservatives are no longer trusted on the economy and no longer trusted to be competent. This is no longer a question of winning the next election, it’s one of survival now. What should she do? Form a Grand Tory Coalition.
All parties under FPTP are coalitions and that is an unmitigated good thing. When Truss took power she decided to appoint only those who were internal political allies which, when not commanding the support of a majority of either MPs or total members, is foolhardy.
One consequence of this is that many of those appointed are untried and untrained. Like the Derby Ministry, a “Who? Who? Government”. In many cases Labour are fielding a more credible front bench than the governing party - that’s astonishing 12 years into power.