England – Page 7 – For the fainthearted . . .

Saint George and Shakespeare

Saint George’s Day coincides with the anniversary of the birth of William Shakespeare. The Bard enjoys invoking the name of the patron saint of England. “Cry God for England, Harry and Saint George!” he wrote in Henry V. Of course, God must have been on the side of the English, didn’t they win?

One wonders how seriously William Shakespeare took such lines, did he really think God was an Englishman? Probably not, this is the same writer who introduces humour into the tragedy of Hamlet with the dialogue of the …

Liberalism contained the seeds of its own destruction

More than twenty years ago, I attended a Christian Aid conference in London at which there were questions about the identity of the organization. A person in the small group discussions asserted strongly that there was no need to play up the “Christian” identity as everyone present, Christian or not, had a desire for justice.

I struggled to explain that the Christian dimension brought with it not a desire for justice, but an absolute commandment for justice. For a Christian, to work for justice for the poor was not a …

Joseph and Aquinas

19th March is the feast day of Saint Joseph the worker, it seems an appropriate day to think about working class politics.

In late teenage years, I belonged to the British Labour Party. It was a time when the party was closer to its traditional roots, when it was the natural party for working class voters, when there would have been no prospect of the so-called “red wall” of Labour held constituencies falling to Conservative candidates

The rebranding of the party under Tony Blair was still of a thing …

Invisible women

This past week marked the third anniversary of the death on 11th March 2018 of Sheila Capstick, a woman who devoted her life to a struggle for equality for women in the world of working men’s clubs and for the rights of working people in mining communities. News of the campaigner’s death was carried by the press in Yorkshire, but the Morning Star was the only national newspaper to report her passing. To have been a woman and to have been from a working class background left her doubly disadvantaged …

Things that weren’t intended

School resumes tomorrow after two months of “remote learning”, or two months of trying to teach lessons through Microsoft Teams, which is an altogether different thing from learning. Looking through exercise books at work done before Christmas is the only clue as to the point some of the students have reached, for some of them have done nothing since, at the instruction of the government, the school abruptly closed on 17th December.

Much of the work is indifferent, many of the students were already disengaged and listless. The prospects for …

Ignore the prophets of doom, the children will be fine

A BBC Radio 4 programme, perhaps in 2001, marking the sixtieth anniversary of the London blitz, included an opportunity for people to telephone with their own memories.

One man, then in his sixties, called and described how as a boy he and his mother were walking to the school he attended and that a schoolfriend was walking with them. Suddenly, there was an explosion caused by a bomb and they were showered with rubble. The man and his mother survived, the schoolfriend was killed. His mother told him to get …