Embarrassed to be British

My dear friend Professor Haruna and his wife have been denied visas for a three week visit to the UK by morons working for the UK Government.

It is alleged they did not have enough funds for the visit even though the plane tickets had been booked, I had given proof of my financial means as a “sponsor” and we had jumped through various obstructive hoops which seem designed to keep Nigerians visiting Britain at all.

They were due to stop by in the UK for a holiday before he attended an academic conference in Cologne.

This decision was decided on paperwork alone without an interview by an agency to which the Borders Agency has “outsourced” the processing of visas. How very “New Labour”.

We all know there are tens of thousands of “illegals” in Britain who do not even bother to fill in all those complicated forms. How does denying entry to a respected academic help to solve that problem?

As my son said after moving back from Tokyo, “No one in Britain does their job properly”. And I would add “particularly our civil servants”.

depArture Web Links

The most popular post on this blog is about depArture Art Centre in Limehouse because people landed here after a Google search.

DepArtures’ own web site took longer to be born than a baby elephant but is finally up.

Unfortunately, googling for it is difficult because it appears pages down the list and they have decided to give it a site name which does not match their name and has an Indian domain ID.  Search for it using Google India and it comes tops! Oh well…..

Since you might be looking for it here is the link to depArture art centre, Limehouse (http://depart.in).

And here art links to a couple of videos.  These replace the ones in an earlier post which are now defunct.

Gospel Choir class performance

depArture Arts Centre

Armed Intervention and “Peacekeeping” are not Peacemaking

More peacekeepers are dead in Darfur (click here for BBC report) where there is, sadly, no peace to be kept. There was a well argued case against foreign troops being sent to Darfur a few weeks ago on the BBC.

Why are our over heated politicians and media pundits crying for intervention in Darfur? Or, indeed, action against Mugabe, Burmese generals or other nasty governments? And why do we pretend we can bring peace to places like Afghanistan by parking soldiers there?

There is precious little that can be done when there is war – particularly civil war – by putting another army between the combatants. Iraq has shown the mess that follows regime change imposed by invasion.

Some people claim that the interventions in the dismembered Yugoslavia are a fine example of what intervention can do. Here is an article in London Review which might change minds. All we have done is crystallise many resentments. It does not take inspiration to prophesy that there is more grief to come in the Balkans.

When Jesus said “Blessed are the peacemakers” he was not thinking of men with guns or governments making economic sanctions and political gestures. Peacemaking is about making contact, giving respect and negotiating. And when peacemaking fails we have to admit that some problems may not have solutions.

Ranald Macaulay’s warped history

As someone who has often found the L’Abri crowd a help to my thinking I was disappointed to read “Reaction and Distraction” in the July edition of EN. This was Ranald Macaulay’s sloppy and one-eyed summary of British Christian History.

As a relative pygmy Macaulay is happy to debunk giants Spurgeon, Moody and Lloyd-Jones as misled pietists.

On the other hand he is happy to boost the reactionary William Wilberforce as an example of the kind of man we need to follow.

I have learnt to mistrust Presbyterian and Anglican church historians because they seem to hanker back to the days when their forebears had real power and so they see those times as some sort of “Golden Age”.

With regard to the abolition of slavery these one-eyed historians always fail to give due credit to the Quaker and non-conformist agitators who really shook up the smug Anglican accommodation to mass slavery and created the environment in which a change of law was acceptable. Some of the agitators were deists and “free-thinkers” who had no christian loyalty at all.

These pietist and sceptical agitators needed a member of the privileged classes to speak for them in parliament because only rich men who were Anglicans could buy their way into parliament.

Propagandists like Macaulay also underplay the effect of various slave rebellions which shook up the establishment and the campaigns of free black men to liberate their brothers.

They also do not report the ineffectual nature of the anti-slave trade bill and Wilberforce’s reluctance to press for real abolition which grew from his class based political conservatism. It was up to more “pietist” Methodists and Baptists to truly overturn slavery in the West Indies with the help of a number of insurrections by courageous slaves.

One unintended consequence of the bill was that merchant ships carrying slaves tended to throw the incriminating “cargo” into the water when a British Warship came near. An unfortunate and deadly “own goal”.

William Wilberforce was himself a somewhat self-focussed pietist and this reinforced his intense conservatism and his refusal to help his own oppressed countrymen. He somehow failed to see how sympathising with far-away slaves might have any connection with easing the sufferings of fellow Britons.

In the end selective histories like Macaulay’s are post-modern constructions which reflect the writer’s tastes rather than attempts to connect the reader with either the past or present.

Living and working in East London I am more grateful for the heritage of Spurgeon (our church was founded in the 1860’s) than all the social activists whose monuments are now mosques, museums or demolished. In the same way, the work of Lloyd Jones lives on whereas places like the Mayflower Centre are defunct.

Was William Wilberforce bad for the churches?

I am am fed up with dear old WW.  It has been impossible to avoid him and I am sure many a church member is tired of the “topical” references to his 200 year old Act by lazy preachers.  Nearly half of all references mistakenly credit WW with abolishing slavery when all he did was to make the trade illegal.

He may have been (marginally) good for some oppressed people but I think he did the churches considerable harm.  They began to see their mission in terms of civilising the British through publicity campaigns and social engineering.  The moral crusading of the 19th and 20th centuries continually hyped and lauded the achievements of the Clapham sect (while generally ignoring the work of quakers and rationalists) as it rushed down the blind alley of social meddling in the name of Jesus.

Everything was cast in terms of abolishing the next “slavery” (child labour, votes for women, even banning alcohol in the name of setting free the slaves of drink).  The current application of the slavery model is things like forced prostitution and chinese manufacturing.

Am I in favour of these bad things?  No, but we already have a criminal code which should be able to deal with wrongs done in our jurisdiction and I doubt whether we can do much about China.

And I do not remember Jesus  calling his disciples to do all this stuff.

The liberation of Black Americans came when THEY began to insist on taking their freedom.  Most liberties have to be taken rather than given.