The Land For The People?

The Family Farm Tax has come into effect today, to force working farmers of many decades’ standing who formally inherited their parents’ farms to sell them to the giant American agribusinesses with which this Government was hand in glove.

As are all Epstein Class regimes, whether officially centrist or officially right-wing. Taken together or even separately, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are just about the Platonic form of an Epstein Class party. When Donald Trump waxed lyrical about Winston Churchill, then Micheál Martin did not retort with a rendition of Come Out Ye Black and Tans, but instead defended hardcore Atlanticism. Ireland is no more neutral than the green and orange stripes of the Tricolour. Shannon Airport is heavily involved in the war with Iran, because of course it is. And corporate America is landbanking Ireland, because of course it is.

The Duke of Devonshire is trying to put up the rent paid by his County Waterford tenants to €50 per hectare by 2029. While that is only about a quarter of the market rate today, and about one fourteenth of the present average rent for agricultural land, then the problem is the market, and who knows how much €50 per hectare would therefore be worth by 2029? As for colonialism, His Grace is only exercising his property rights under the Constitution of the Republic of Ireland, which has had more than long enough to change those arrangements.

As well as advocating such decidedly un-American expropriation, Irish-Americans remain as lacking as ever in any self-awareness about their own presence on the ancestral lands of the Lenape and the Massachusett, or about their own fanatical support for the settler colonists who were violently expelling the Catholic Church from the Holy Land and from at least two of its neighbours. But Ireland really is in the midst of a colonial land grab. As is Britain.

A Triflin' Friend Indeed?

All publicity is good publicity, and the people who booked Kanye West knew that as well as he did. He has not applied for a visa to enter the United Kingdom, and there has never been any chance that he would have been granted one, but that has always been the point.

A visa ban, never mind a full-blown exclusion order, would sell truckloads of West's material to a generation of Britons that until then had been barely, if at all, aware of his existence. If the stakeholders in Wireless Festival had no stake in that, then, well, it is impossible to finish that sentence. Of course they are in.

But who should be out? While perish the thought that the politicians who decided these things, or at the very least their parties and the like, might eventually benefit from some trickle-down, on the principles that would be cited to prevent West's entry, who else should be similarly inhibited, and why?

Khudaya, Rahem Kar

Fair play to Dame Sarah Mullally, who knew exactly which buttons to press at her installation. The winner of the recent Gorton and Denton by-election had been criticised for having issued a leaflet in Urdu, while Spanish was the language of both countries that had outstanding territorial disputes with the United Kingdom, so the Kyrie was sung in Urdu, while the Gospel was read in Spanish.

Alas, then, that in the readings for the Annunciation, Archbishop Richard Moth found himself having to read out, ostensibly from Isaiah, the dated and banal “a young woman shall conceive”, which would of course have been an everyday occurrence, while the passage from Hebrews 10 was omitted completely, when it has never been more urgent to proclaim the futility of the animal sacrifices of the Old Covenant. Christians must resist to the utmost any attempted restoration of the Temple cult, as is now being actively pursued with physical violence against the Christians of the Holy Land and of the wider region, including Pierre Moawad, whom the IDF has just admitted to having killed “by mistake” in Lebanon.

That brings us to the fact that there are at present three great threats to the unity of the Catholic Church. One is that the Society of Saint Pius X will consecrate more bishops, and the second is the German Synodal Way. The bishops of Bangladesh have declined the Government’s new monthly honorarium and festival allowance for religious leaders, lest it subject the steadily growing Church there to undue influence in future. The rapidly declining Church in Germany needs to refuse the Kirchensteuer, and call for its abolition at least for Catholics, since it had given everyone who paid it the notion that they were entitled to a say on doctrine. Nothing is worth that.

Most Catholics, however, will never directly encounter either the SSPX or the Synodal Way, much less will almost anyone else be affected by either of them. Whereas the third threat comes from the activities of Bishop Robert Barron, whose Word on Fire apostolate has done real good, yet who turned up to an Easter luncheon in Holy Week at all, never mind with Donald Trump, Paula White and Franklin Graham. At that event, Trump compared himself to Jesus on Palm Sunday, White compared Trump to Jesus on Good Friday and Easter Sunday, and Graham gave thanks to God for having raised up Trump to deliver victory to Israel over Iran. Days earlier, the Israelis had prevented the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem and the Franciscan Custos of the Holy Land from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Palm Sunday. Bishop Barron did not mention that, but he has spoken in the past of the need to “re-Judaize Catholicism”. Urgent action is now required.

Benefits Bonanza Day?

It delivers a pitifully low pension by international standards, and even for that people are soon going to have to wait until beyond average male life expectancy, but the triple lock does at least put money in the pockets of the people who spent it, thereby injecting it into the consumer economy, and thus employing the young.

The same is true of the sickness and disability benefits that have in fact been cut to what we all know will be a widely fatal extent, despite the lie that Keir Starmer had "backed down" on such cuts, a lie to rank with Starmer's having in any way kept Britain out of the war with Iran (and notice that we can afford that), with his having been state secondary educated, with his heading "the most working-class Cabinet ever",  with his having been "a human rights lawyer" rather than a ruthless securocrat even by the standards of a Director of Public Prosecutions, and with his graciously and heroically having lifted the two-child benefit cap when in fact he had withdrawn the whip from seven Labour MPs because they had voted for nothing more than such an amendment to the Humble Address, and when that amendment had been defeated, then they had voted with the Government.

37 per cent of people on Universal Credit are in work, including 59 per cent of those who will benefit from the lifting of the two-child cap, so the problem is low pay. Most of the rest are medically unable to work, an extremely difficult status to attain. If you doubt that, then try it. PIP, on the other hand, is an in-work benefit. You do not get it for having a specific condition, but for how your conditions affect your life. You most certainly cannot self-certify onto it. Again, try it. By giving money to people who spent it, PIP stimulates our consumer economy, as sickness and disability benefits in general do, as the triple lock does, and as the lifting of the two-child benefit cap will, all while declaring the social and cultural value of the direct beneficiaries.

There is a case for Motability to buy only vehicles manufactured in the United Kingdom, but show me a PIP claimant who had been bought a BMW or a Mercedes on Motability. And how many more times? You may have constipation, or tennis elbow, or whatever, while also on Motability, and that would be listed among your conditions on the paperwork. But nothing like that could be grounds for the award. The cost of leasing your vehicle is deducted from your PIP, costing the State not one penny piece more than you would in any case have received. If you did put that towards a "premium" car, then you yourself would have to pay the difference. For a vehicle that you still would not own. Without Motability, far fewer physically disabled people would be able to work. Motability buys, and then owns, one in five new cars purchased in this country, which also translates into a lot of people's jobs. Some of those people are on PIP. Since PIP is an in-work benefit.

He Got That Ambition, Baby, Look At His Eyes

Drug dealer buy Jordans, crackhead buy crack,

And a white man get paid off of all of that.

If only by months, Kanye West is even older than I am. He is also even more middle-class; his mother was Chair of the Department of English, Communications, Media and Theater at Chicago State University.

West's language is no worse than Donald Trump's, and West is not the Commander-in-Chief of at least 24 military bases on British soil. If Trump followed through tomorrow, then those installations should be closed. In fact, the threat alone is a war crime, so close them, anyway.

Trump is the second President of the United States in succession to be senile in office, but the block on the Twenty-fifth Amendment this time is that the Cabinet hawks do not want JD Vance as Acting President at all, never mind going into the next Presidential election process.

And West claims that manic episodes led him to record and release Heil Hitler, and to market a T-shirt featuring a swastika. We are at war in Ukraine for those who wore the Sonnenrad and the Wolfsangel. They may as well wear a swastika, and they sometimes do. But it is quite some manic episode to get a record out or to get a T-shirt into the shops. Was everyone involved thus afflicted? Nor can it be ignored that there are plenty of Jews both in the music industry and in the rag trade.

Drug dealer buy Jordans, crackhead buy crack,

And a white man get paid off of all of that.

Christus Surrexit, Alleluia, Alleluia!

Surrexit in vere, alleluia, alleluia!

Closing The Philes?

Hearts prepare to break at the rumoured impending dismissals of Liz Kendall and Peter Kyle.

Kendall worked both for Harriet Harman and for Patricia Hewitt before Hewitt handed on to her the parliamentary seat that she herself had been passed by Greville Janner.

And Kyle is the close friend, closest ally, and former lover of Ivor Caplin, as well as an erstwhile Special Adviser to Hilary Armstrong, in whose Whips' Office Caplin served alongside Dan Norris.

An Attack On One

There is no NATO without the United States, so for all practical purposes NATO no longer exists. Not even The New York Times can still be bothered to get its name right. Far from NATO’s having kept the peace, its expansion has directly caused the war in Ukraine. Finland looks silly for having joined. Sweden looks downright irresponsible for having sacrificed its work and reputation in peacemaking and in aid.

Membership of NATO subjects our military personnel to the command of officers who were ultimately answerable to Viktor Orbán, or to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, or to Donald Trump. As a member both of the Executive Board and of the Gaza Executive Board of Trump’s Board of Peace, does Tony Blair retain a Labour Party membership card? If so, then why does anyone else? And does Trump’s British fan club now love Blair, who is the only British member of the Board of Peace?

The canonisation of NATO “because of Attlee” does not extend to the NHS, or to the public ownership of the utilities. That NATO was founded by Ernest Bevin on the principles of British trade unionism is a pious if self-regarding fiction that has a parallel in every original member state, including what was then Salazar’s Portugal.

And it is comical to assert that NATO was devised by Denis Healey, who was all of 31 when it was created, and who in any case went on to inflict monetarism on Britain, after he had perpetrated against the Chagossian people the evil that was later compounded by David Miliband of extraordinary rendition infamy.

But on Tuesday, the Chief Justice of the British Indian Ocean Territory overturned the 2004 ban on Chagossians living on the Chagos Islands, as four of them were already doing. Therefore, Chagos is now inhabited by people, by a people, with the right to self-determination. Never mind NATO. Celebrate that.

An Honest British Rebuke

Peter Hitchens writes:

I think King Charles should rebel against our government’s decision to grovel to President Donald Trump. Sir Keir Starmer has ordered our poor, kind, gentle monarch to travel to the ridiculous court of that erratic American Ayatollah. He has done so in spite of Mr Trump repeatedly insulting Britain. He derides us in spite of already being indulged with an unprecedented second State visit to this country last September. And do not forget Sir Keir’s distressing, wasted attempts to be civil and rational during their meetings and phone calls.

This is surely enough evidence that flattering this strange man only encourages him to be unpleasant. The Orange President has said many frightful and ignorant things about us, but perhaps the worst was his sneer that British servicemen and women had held back from the front line in Afghanistan.

Our soldiers shrug off such jibes, especially from a man who made such an effort to avoid combat in Vietnam. But those of us (I am one of them) whose family members took part in that conflict, and who counted every long, slow day of danger, are a bit more sensitive.

My suggestion is that HM should softly command the captain of his aircraft to divert to loyal Canada, as late as possible in the flight. I am sure the Canadians, whose monarch Charles is, would love to have him for a relaxing and good-humoured few days, free of crass rudeness and safe from Oval Office ambushes of the kind Mr Trump likes so much.

The people of Canada jolly well ought to be in front of Mr Trump, in the queue for such visits. Canada exists mainly because thousands of loyal British subjects fled north after being driven from their homes in the 1780s. They were cruelly persecuted and hounded by fanatical republican radicals, who could not have come to power alone, but sought the aid of Britain’s main enemy, France. Why should a noisy, rude inheritor of the rebels get a royal visit before loyal Canada does?

Just imagine the sheer glory of it, as President Trump, standing grandly by the red carpet at the Andrews airbase outside Washington, is told: ‘The King of England isn’t coming. He’s gone to Ottawa instead.’

I’d guess that a growing number of Americans would much enjoy such a snub. Mr Trump presumably wants a royal visit to try to shore up his shrivelling popularity. As things stand, his party is likely to do very badly in midterm elections this autumn. If it does badly enough, that may finish him off. He will not just be a loud, noisily quacking lame duck. He will have to abandon his worrying dreams of wangling a third term in the gold-leaf encrusted White House he increasingly treats as if it is his own.

Surrounded by flatterers, he grows more absurd all the time. An honest British rebuke would be good for him.

A month ago, I asked here: ‘Who does he think he is? The late Kim Il Sung? Perhaps the next thing will be a 100ft gold-plated statue staring out over the Potomac river.’

I thought I was joking. But it is always unwise to joke about Mr Trump’s grandeur. Last week a film was released of his planned Presidential Library, a flashy skyscraper destined to adorn Miami when he finally retires. As far as I could see from the video, the ‘library’ will contain no actual books, though it will have a golden escalator, a Boeing 747 and lo!, a gold-plated statue of Mr Trump.

The posture of this work of art, its fist raised, is remarkably similar to that of the monster idol of the late Kim Il Sung, supreme leader of North Korea, before which his subjects must bow their heads.

Kim’s image used to be gold-covered, too. It was stripped back to bronze after the Chinese, who North Korea had been begging for money, complained about the extravagance.

We Give Not To Our Princes

The King's Easter message last year, when he had good news to share about his cancer, and the then Queen's in 2020, in the throes of the pandemic, may have been the only two ever, and were certainly the only two in living memory. If you want to hear an Easter message, then do as the King will be doing and go to church. Herewith, Article XXXVII of the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion:

The King's Majesty hath the chief power in this Realm of England, and other his Dominions, unto whom the chief Government of all Estates of this Realm, whether they be Ecclesiastical or Civil, in all causes doth appertain, and is not, nor ought to be, subject to any foreign Jurisdiction.

Where we attribute to the King's Majesty the chief government, by which Titles we understand the minds of some slanderous folks to be offended; we give not to our Princes the ministering either of God's Word, or of the Sacraments, the which thing the Injunctions also lately set forth by Elizabeth our Queen do most plainly testify; but that only prerogative, which we see to have been given always to all godly Princes in holy Scriptures by God himself; that is, that they should rule all estates and degrees committed to their charge by God, whether they be Ecclesiastical or Temporal, and restrain with the civil sword the stubborn and evil-doers.

The Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this Realm of England.

The Laws of the Realm may punish Christian men with death, for heinous and grievous offences.

It is lawful for Christian men, at the commandment of the Magistrate, to wear weapons, and serve in the wars.

Working back, then, there are the formal condemnation that the Catholic Church has never made of Christian pacifism (indeed, of opposition to any war waged by the King), an insistence on capital punishment that it was notable needed to be made in 1571, a repudiation of Papal authority that in view of the first paragraph could only mean all of it, and a clarification that "we give not to our Princes the ministering either of God's Word, or of the Sacraments". Do as the King will be doing. Go to church.

Branch Lines

The Greens have rejected the renationalisation of energy, and that is one of several excellent reasons to reject the Greens, just as Ed Miliband's expected veto of any further drilling in the North Sea will be one of several excellent reasons to reject the Labour Party, including by means of disaffiliation from it on the part or my trade union, Unite. Instead, once we had harnessed the power of the State to deliver an all-of-the-above energy policy, then let there be an all-of-the-above transport policy based around public transport free at the point of use, including publicly owned railways running on publicly generated electricity. As Peter Hitchens writes:

Britain's latest, most modern stretch of railway line has been ready for use since October but has yet to carry a single passenger.

Nobody knows when it will. An ultra-modern station likewise sits unused in the handsome Buckinghamshire town of Winslow, gleaming with newness by day and glowing brilliantly by night, but no traveller can reach its smart platforms, for there are no trains, just security guards.

It is said that a lone nostalgic steam excursion has clanked its melancholy way through, as its patrons stared, baffled at the ghostly untouched buildings. Test trains, freshly-painted and pristine, occasionally pass through with nobody aboard.

Otherwise, the line, which will cost £7 billion if it is ever completed, is the preserve of blank-sided freight trains.

Official sources won't say much, but everyone in the rail business knows that the line is unused and wasted (imagine the revenues lost by this) because of a dispute between the rail unions and the Department for Transport.

The government, obsessed for years with getting rid of guards on trains, has for some reason decided to make this costly, badly-needed stretch of line into a railborne version of Custer's Last Stand.

The unions say that, after the knife rampage aboard a train at Huntingdon last November, the abolition of guards on trains is even dafter than it already was.

Most passengers, especially women worried about travelling alone, probably agree. It is fairly certain that the government will have to cave in anyway. So why not now?

This is not HS2, a whole other story of folly, an absurdly overengineered line made much more expensive than it needed to be.

This is East West Rail, a simple reconstruction of about 90 miles of track between Oxford and Cambridge, which has so far got halfway.

It is one of the very few East‑West lines in the country. It cleverly links all the country's north-south mainlines and the Great Western line to South Wales and the West of England, allowing passengers and goods to bypass congested London.

It is a project which in many ways explains what has gone wrong with modern Britain, and especially its transport system. Its rebuilding is a huge admission of error, in steel, concrete and money. For it should never have been shut in the first place.

The line between Oxford and Cambridge was foolishly closed in December 1967. Even Dr Richard Beeching – the axeman appointed, in 1961, to devastate the railways by Tory Transport Minister Ernest Marples – did not urge its closure. But the Labour government of Harold Wilson, presumably lobbied by the road haulage industry, killed it off anyway.

Sixty years ago, in the age of cheap oil, everyone thought that roads, cars and huge lorries were the future. They believed trains were relics of a dead age, destined for the nearest museum or scrapyard. But bit by bit it has dawned on the world, even on the British government, that railways are actually the modern answer.

They have much lower friction than road transport and so use much less fuel. If electrified they can be powered by any fuel, from coal to wind. They are also clean, quiet and safe. Alas, we have lost much in the years during which these truths have dawned in the minds of Whitehall.

I have a special interest in this stretch of track. My brother and I used to travel on it between our home in Oxford and a boarding school in Cambridge. Had he but known it, my brother might have shared some of his journeys with the mighty author of the Narnia books, C.S. Lewis. Lewis called it the 'Cantab Crawler' because it did not go very fast.

But he liked it for its directness, and it carried him regularly to his professorial duties in Cambridge from his hillside house in Oxford, till his death in 1963.

The names of its stations could have been set to music as a lament for village England and railway branch lines in general – Islip, Oddington, Marsh Gibbon & Poundon, Launton, Steeple Claydon, Verney Junction, Winslow, Swanbourne, Sandy, Potton, Gamlingay and Lord's Bridge.

At Marsh Gibbon & Poundon, the platform seemed to have sunk into the marsh, and steps had to be brought up to the carriages so that passengers could climb down. Otherwise, they would have had to jump.

We always seemed to reach that particular station at dusk, with gas lamps just coming on, and an ancient, bent and cadaverous porter in a peaked cap attending to the steps. I have often wondered if Lewis had modelled his gloriously pessimistic swamp-dwelling character Puddleglum on this remarkable man.

Both ends of the line, in those days, were more or less lost in the world before 1914, and the countryside between seemed extraordinarily private and unmodernised, with slow old pubs and creeper-covered vicarages amid the elms.

Much of it is the landscape of John Bunyan's classic The Pilgrim's Progress, and in those days it would have been recognisable to him. Not any more. The elms are all gone. The frenzy of building and hedge-grubbing which has swept England since those days has changed it utterly.

The line also has a place in global history, for its halfway point was at the town of Bletchley, easily reached by mathematical boffins from both England's great universities. And that is why Bletchley Park – now so famous – was chosen as the nation's secret codebreaking headquarters during the Second World War.

The tracks survived closure for a while. Until privatisation in the 1990s, the occasional goods train or Christmas shoppers' special bound for Milton Keynes passed that way.

But when, 15 years or so ago, I bicycled along the 90-mile route (or as close as I could get to it) to see what had happened, the cuttings were choked with brambles and the steel rails had evaporated – as expensive metal tends to do if you leave it lying around in modern Britain.

It probably takes longer to get from Oxford to Bletchley now by road than the 'Crawler' used to do. Try to drive between Oxford and Cambridge (or, worse, try to take the bus) and despite the spending of billions of pounds on new dual carriageways and costly engineering projects, it is an awkward and frustrating journey, involving an astounding number of roundabouts in Milton Keynes, a place which did not exist pre-1967.

Oddly, road engineers did know, back then, about 'induced demand'. This is an effect discovered in the USA, in St Louis, Missouri, in the 1930s – that road improvement schemes lead to increased traffic.

Anyone who doubts this only needs to visit the M25, but in the Britain of the 1960s the traffic chiefs and transport ministers acted as if this truth was unknown, and it was the season for axed railways and new bypasses.

Well, that season has at last come to an end. Why were we so stupid? Even a child at the time could see it was wrong.

Everywhere lines slashed by Beeching are coming to life again. The trains are fuller than ever despite their outrageous fares, and if we are to have a new oil shock then the government may have the sense to electrify the East West Rail line, something it has so far been too cheap, mean and short-sighted to do.

But first of all, it has to actually open it, and then get on with completing it all the way.

I long to travel on it once more, for the first time in nearly 60 years, though as I look out of the window searching for those lost spires and farms of long ago, and for the sunken platform at Marsh Gibbon, my view may be blurred a little by tears.

When Confronted By The Truth

Considering what those demanding an Easter message from the King normally thought of everything that he said and did, then they must want one purely to be annoyed by it. British monarchs have not traditionally delivered Easter messages, and if you want one of those, then go to church. Be grateful that you can, as Peter Oborne writes:

Harassment and violence against Christians call into question their long-term presence in Palestine and Israel, a respected Jerusalem think tank has warned.

In a shocking report, the Rossing Center, which aims to foster Jewish-Christian relations, records a “continued and expanding pattern of intimidation and aggression” against Christians in occupied East Jerusalem, including the Old City, and Israel.

It finds they are targeted not just as Christians but also – in the case of Palestinian Christians – as a national minority. 

The report blames Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government for what it calls “the recent surge in overt animosity towards Christianity”.

In a carefully worded intervention, the Rossing Center writes that a “renewed sense of Jewish identity finds its most extreme manifestation in right-wing ultranationalism, which has become a significant factor in Israeli society.

“This trend has been particularly evident among members of the current government and has been further intensified by the collective trauma experienced since October 7th 2023.”

The report does not mention Itamar Ben Gvir by name. But these comments will be widely interpreted as a direct reproach to Ben Gvir, who as security minister has responsibility for policing in Israel and occupied Palestinian territories including Jerusalem’s Old City.

In October 2023, following an upsurge in reported incidents of spitting aimed at Christians and Christian holy sites, Ben Gvir defended the practice as an “old Jewish tradition” which did not amount to criminal behaviour.

Early last month, he opened the way for a massive expansion of firearms licences. According to the Times of Israel, more than 300,000 Jewish residents of Jerusalem are now eligible to carry a gun.

Christians on Wednesday privately told Middle East Eye that they regard the widely touted prospect of a Ben Gvir premiership as dangerous for Christians and a calamity for Christianity in the Holy Land.

The Rossing Center report documented 155 incidents of harassment in 2025, but warns its figures represent no more than “the tip of the iceberg”.

Clergy harassed

The majority of the cases involve physical attacks, with clergy (monks, friars, nuns and priests) most likely to be targeted because of their “distinctive garments and visible Christian symbols”.

The interfaith think tank reports that “Clergy in areas such as Mount Zion and the Armenian Quarter report that harassment has become so routine that stepping outside can carry an almost certain risk of abuse”.

In a chilling finding it reports that these attacks are unlikely to be prosecuted.

The Rossing Center said it had aided victims in making complaints to the police.

“Most of the complaints were closed, some remain under investigation, and the rate of indictments is very low in relation to the scale of the phenomenon,” it said.

It also noted that “there is no police officer specifically designated to liaise with the Christian community in Israel”.

This religious persecution, it said, had reinforced among Christians “the perception that they are viewed not as an integral part of the land’s social fabric but as outsiders and, at times, unwanted guests”.

The Rossing Center has documented 59 attacks on church property, including graffiti, vandalism of religious statues, arson, garbage dumping and spitting at holy places.

Such attacks, it said, “feed a sense of vulnerability around sacred spaces and reinforces concern over the erosion of respect for Christian religious life in the public sphere”.

It also documented 18 recorded incidents of defacement of public signs.

The attacks, it said, “are humiliating and exhausting, producing a climate in which Christians feel increasingly unwelcome, pressured to conceal their identity, and uncertain about the future of their communities”.

In a powerful conclusion, the report finds that “Christian communities have been proudly rooted in the Holy Land for two thousand years. However, in recent years they have increasingly expressed serious concerns regarding the combination of forces that could drive younger generations away.”

The report highlighted its 2024 survey, which it said showed approximately half of all Christians under 45 were considering leaving the region.

The report was published after Israeli police blocked Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, patriarch of the Latin church, from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to celebrate the Palm Sunday mass.

Pizzaballa’s office said in a statement it had been the first time in centuries that the patriarch had been unable to celebrate the mass marking the start of Easter week in the church, which Christians believe is built on the site where Jesus was crucified, and later buried and resurrected.

The Israeli security presence has been ubiquitous in the Old City throughout Holy Week. An Israeli policeman stood guard outside the locked door of Holy Sepulchre to deter visitors from approaching.

A permanent security post called the “Israeli Police Division of the Holy Sepulchre Church” stands beside the door of the outer courtyard, with an Israeli flag flying beside it.

Worshippers have told MEE that armed Israeli police are in the habit of entering the ancient church intrusively, including the tomb of Christ itself.

They said Palestinian worshippers feel intimidated by their presence. MEE put these claims to the Israeli police, but no reply had been received at the time of publication.

The International Court of Justice ruled in July 2024 that Israel’s security presence in occupied East Jerusalem is illegal, and ordered Israel to end its occupation.

Israel defiantly insists that Jerusalem is its capital. Moreover, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims that Israel is the “guardian of Christianity” in the Middle East.

That is very different from the picture which emerges from the devastating Rossing Center report, published in Christianity’s most sacred city in the holiest week of the Christian year.

As Fares Abraham writes:

On Palm Sunday, Israeli police stopped Pierbattista Cardinal Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, and Francesco Ielpo, the Custos of the Holy Land, on their way to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. The church called the decision “manifestly unreasonable and grossly disproportionate,” noting that for the first time in centuries, its senior leaders were prevented from celebrating Palm Sunday at Christianity’s holiest shrine. Only after global outrage did Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reverse the restriction.

This event should alarm everyone, not just practicing Christians.

Palm Sunday is Christianity’s great anti-empire procession. Jesus entered Jerusalem without a chariot, legions, or spectacle. He came on a donkey. He did not arrive to flatter power but to expose it. He did not mirror the empires of his age; instead, he unmasked them. Palm Sunday is what happens when the Kingdom of God enters a city and reveals how insecure worldly power really is.

That is what makes this episode so revealing. A modern state with one of the world’s most sophisticated military and security apparatuses found itself threatened by a humble Christian observance. There is bitter irony in that. On the very day Christians remember Christ’s repudiation of imperial theater, armed power moved to police the memory of it.

Israel says this was about security during wartime. But even if one grants the seriousness of the moment, the facts still expose something deeper. The planned Mass reportedly would have involved fewer than 50 participants, within the gathering limits Israel itself was enforcing. U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee, rarely a critic of Israel, called the decision an “unfortunate overreach” and said it was “difficult to understand or justify.”

U.S. Senator Ted Cruz agreed that the security concerns should not have prevented the patriarch from entering the church. When Huckabee and Cruz are complaining that Israel has gone too far, Americans should pay attention.

Huckabee and Cruz now seem startled that a state they have treated as morally untouchable could trample Christian freedom in Jerusalem. But this is what happens when politicians spend years confusing biblical loyalty with political indulgence. Eventually the idol stops pretending to be holy.

Neither the leaders in Jerusalem nor those in Washington, DC should be romanticized as guardians of religious liberty simply because they wrap themselves in biblical language.

The deeper problem is not one bad decision that was quickly corrected. It is the logic underneath it.

For months, Muslim worship at Al Aqsa was heavily restricted, especially during Ramadan. Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall also lived under wartime limitations, so fairness requires saying plainly that this pressure was not borne by one community alone. But Palm Sunday revealed something that cannot be dismissed as routine.

When Pizzaballa was blocked from entering the church, the world saw how easily a broader security regime can become a mechanism of humiliation and control. It is hard not to see a pattern, or at least a test of limits. If the world shrugs when one holy site is constricted, power learns it may be able to constrict another. If the outrage is manageable, the precedent becomes useful. That is how freedom is narrowed, not always by one dramatic act, but by little steps.

Christians should be especially clear-eyed about what the Church of the Holy Sepulcher represents. It is not merely an ancient building or picturesque stop on a pilgrimage route. Christians have venerated this church for centuries as the site of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. In the grammar of Christian faith, this is not ornamental; it is the hinge. The church stands or falls on the confession that Jesus was crucified, buried, and raised from the dead. To obstruct worship there on Palm Sunday is an assault, symbolic if not yet total, on the public witness of the resurrection itself.

And the man who was barred is not some imported dignitary with little connection to the suffering people of the land. Pizzaballa is the highest Catholic authority in Jerusalem and across the Latin Patriarchate’s territory, which includes Israel, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, and Cyprus. For Palestinian Christians, he is a shepherd who has gone to Gaza, more than once, to stand with a battered flock. In 2023, he even said he was willing to offer himself in exchange for Israeli hostages. His presence has become a source of hope precisely because he has refused to abandon them.

Jesus wept over Jerusalem, not because the city lacked power but because it did not know the things that make for peace. He wept because he saw the use of sacred language coexisting with spiritual blindness. Two thousand years later, the tragedy remains. Jerusalem still knows how to control a crowd better than how to welcome peace. It still knows how to securitize holiness. It still knows how to mistake force for authority.

Palm Sunday announces that God’s answer to empire is not a stronger empire but a different King—one who rides into the city in a lowly manner but who exposes domination instead of sanctifying it. This King wept over Jerusalem even as its people were preparing to kill him.

That is the final irony here. The men with weapons, gates, and orders imagined they were controlling access to a church. But Palm Sunday has always been about something they cannot control: the public unveiling of a Kingdom that terrifies every empire precisely because it does not need to become one.

If Israel, backed by the most powerful friends in the West, still feels threatened by the memory of a peaceful procession led by the church, then perhaps we are seeing a gripping embodiment of how fragile power becomes when confronted by the truth of a donkey, a cross, and an empty tomb.

Rites and Rights

Easter is not of pagan origin, and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is entirely without parallel in mere mythology. When that article was published two years ago, then my Facebook post linking to it was Liked by the Editor of the Morning Star. Make of that what you will.

The King's Easter message could never have topped Donald Trump's comparison of himself to Jesus on Palm Sunday, followed by Paula White's comparison of Trump to Jesus on Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Nor Trump's announcement that "Christians everywhere rejoiced" on the first Easter Sunday. Nor even the time that Tony Blair expressed sympathy for the plight of Pontius Pilate.

Blair is now on Trump's Board of Peace. If Britain were not in the war with Iran, then Blair would have been expelled from the Labour Party, or his old groupies on the Labour benches would have rallied the huge intake that had been handpicked by Peter Mandelson and overthrown Keir Starmer, presumably in favour of Wes Streeting.

But that Starmer had kept us out of this war is stated as fact even by his opponents, who want Britain to join a war in which it had been from the start, just as they despise Starmer for being the "human rights lawyer" that his outriders claimed, rather than a ruthless securocrat even by the standards of a Director of Public Prosecutions.

The third Big Lie is that Starmer had a state secondary education, and that he now headed "the most working-class Cabinet ever" simply because the other members really did go to the state secondary schools that were attended by 94 per cent of the population. This is in fact the least working-class Labour Cabinet ever.

For the time being, though, I digress. The Israeli exclusion of the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem and of the Franciscan Custos of the Holy Land from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Palm Sunday attracted the negative comment even of Mike Huckabee, who may be positioning himself as a potential running mate capable of selling JD Vance to the Evangelical base. And whatever you thought of the death penalty, it is something else to bring it back for one ethnic group only, raucously celebrating that move on television while wearing lapel badges of the noose. Might the King have something to say about either of those developments? Might the "human rights lawyer"? 

On Troubled Waters

Yesterday's Chrism Mass started at 11, so one hour before the end of April Fool's Day, but I managed not to shout "Just Stop Oil". After all, someone already had stopped oil. That very morning, my bus fare had increased by 20 per cent, all of our water bills had gone up, and all of our energy bills had gone up merely by less than they might have done.

Yet the recent Green Party Conference rejected the renationalisation of energy. Noam Chomsky would vote either for that or for the Zarah Sultana wing of Your Party, and she is the only Your Party MP listed by Parliament, so they are both Epstein Class parties. As is every other party in the present House of Commons. There is none of those for which Jeffrey Epstein could not have voted, and for which Peter Mandelson could not vote, and for which Peter Thiel could not vote.

Patterns of Abuse

Feet from my feet, the photograph above my mother’s television has not after all had to be draped in black, as Saint Helenians give thanks that Jonathan the tortoise is still alive. His immortality ranks with that of Esther Rantzen, who is pulling the oldest trick in the manipulator’s book, that of being at death’s door for years on end. At least one of her homes was used at least once for the sexual abuse of at least one child, a girl of five, while if you look at the sheer number of media, and especially BBC, figures to have been found to have committed such offences, then it beggars belief that none such was ever reported to Childline. Give me Jonathan as a National Treasure any day.

In May, the supposedly hard as nails Shabana Mahmood tried to give nonces “chemical castration” instead of prison, where that proposal was received, not only by the inmates, as well as one might have expected. As an old lag, the word “nonce” is part of my culture. In that culture’s citadels, nonces are given the suspended sentences that we were not, or they are given the cushiest jobs inside, they are housed in the newest or the most recently refurbished wings, they have gym when ours has been cancelled, and so on. Why?

Well, like you, I have never met a paedophile. I mean, we may have done, in the way that we may have met a Muggletonian. But we are wholly unaware of having done so, you and I both. I apologise to any Muggletonian reading this. Yet this country’s elite cannot get out of bed, if that, without tripping over one or more nonces. And every single time, our betters had had no idea. Or so we are invariably expected to believe. The former Prince Andrew has relinquished his membership of the Order of the Garter, but Tony Blair retains his despite having been Prime Minister when he met Jeffrey Epstein. Like illegal drug use, the sexual abuse of children is fundamental to power in this country, both in itself and as a pretext for blackmail.

Margaret Thatcher knew about Cyril Smith when she arranged his knighthood. Jimmy Savile’s knighthood was rejected four times by the relevant committee, until she absolutely insisted upon it for the man with whom she spent every New Year’s Eve, and on whose programmes she was so obsessed with appearing that her staff had to ration those appearances. Her closest lieutenant was Peter Morrison. She would have had sight of every file on Laurens van der Post. Smith was a highly eccentric and largely absentee MP for a tiny minority party, but he was a Thatcherite avant la lettre, who had left the Labour Party when he had started to see cars outside council houses. Thatcher’s father was also a Liberal until all of that fell apart between the Wars, and he was never a member of the Conservative Party. He, she and Smith were politically indistinguishable. That the Radical Right put out pamphlets demanding the legalisation of paedophile activity was mentioned in Our Friends in the North. That Thatcherite MPs were likely to commit sexual violence against boys with the full knowledge of the party hierarchy formed quite a major subplot in To Play the King, the middle series of the original House of Cards trilogy.

As Home Secretary, Mahmood has the power to revoke the citizenship of anyone whom she thought ought to be eligible for another nationality, whether or not they were. Bangladesh has consistently and understandably refused to have anything to do with the London-born Shamima Begum. Undoubtedly with the full cooperation of its British counterparts, Canadian intelligence was trafficking British girls to Syria to join the side that we were aiding and abetting there while bombing it across the Sykes-Picot Line in Iraq, where our intervention had created it in the first place. The 15-year-old Begum was married almost immediately upon her arrival in that country, and pregnant almost immediately after that. “She wanted it” is not an argument that would normally be admitted under such circumstances.

All of this had the enthusiastic support of the Liberal Democrats, of the Labour Party until 2015, and of more than 90 per cent of Labour MPs, as well as the whole of the party’s staff, to the very end, if it is not still going on. Both economically and internationally, and the connection between the two has never been more glaring, Labour is now far to the right of the Conservatives. Begum ought to be tried by a jury that, unless it were unanimously convinced beyond reasonable doubt of her guilt, ought to deliver a verdict of not guilty, which should be an enduring verdict, affording lifelong protection from double jeopardy. In the event of such a conviction, then like a 15-year-old runner for county lines, she would not be blameless, but like a 15-year-old runner for county lines, she would not be the most to blame.  If Nigel Farage is not answerable at all for things that he did when he was of voting age, then why is Begum so singularly deserving of punishment?

It bears repetition that even while bombing the IS that it had created in Iraq, NATO was so committed to the victory of IS in Syria, as has since been won, that via the NATO member state of Turkey, it trafficked British schoolgirls to Syria to hand over to IS. In at least one case, a 15-year-old was pregnant almost immediately, having been married so soon after her arrival that the arrangements had clearly been made in advance. Via the NATO member state of Turkey, IS fighters have been brought into Ukraine, carrying out the suicide bombing of the Kerch Bridge under British direction. Russia has long been bringing in Assadists against them. IS is now part of the side that we are backing in Ukraine. Do we know that our girls are not being smuggled into Ukraine, which is itself a global centre of sex trafficking, in order to be handed over to IS? Or our boys, to be sent to the front line?

The war in Afghanistan was in defence of the endemic abuse of boys, to which, whatever else may be said of the Taliban, they had been very actively opposed and not without success in seeking to eradicate, whereas the regime that we installed in their place actively colluded in it as surely as in the heroin trade. There is no minimum age for marriage either at federal level in the United States or at all in Saudi Arabia. A long line of child molesters has fled from the United States and elsewhere to Israel, which also has a huge child rape problem of its own, especially in the precious West Bank settlements.

Underage groupies have always been integral to rock and roll. We all know what at least used to be endemic at public schools. Popular entertainers slept with underage girls at the youth conferences of the political parties. And so on. Reading about the role in grooming gangs of fast food outlets, minicab offices, and other such establishments, I am not alone in asking to be told something that I did not already know from towns and villages that were still overwhelmingly white, and which were literally or practically 100 per cent so in the 1990s, when it was effectively less illegal than underage drinking for men in their twenties, or even older, to have sex with girls of 15, 14, or even younger.

White men who commit certain offences are “lone wolves”, black men who do so are “gang members”, and brown men who do so are “homegrown Islamist terrorists”, yet the crimes are the same. Likewise, a certain type of organised crime syndicate is a “grooming gang” or a “rape gang” when the members are South Asian, or Muslim, or both, but a “paedophile ring” when they are not, and most emphatically when they are all white and non-Muslim. But again, they are the same thing.

Last year, Radio Four broadcast a series on the Paedophile Information Exchange, a story known to readers of this blog throughout its 20 years of existence. If PIE was not a grooming gang and a rape gang, then what ever has been or could be? It was at the very heart of the Establishment, and las year, it was 40 years since the Thatcher Government secured a judicial fiat that, without bothering to ask Parliament, abolished the age of consent altogether. Gillick competence ought instead to be called Thatcher competence. The Major Government did write Thatcher competence into the Age of Legal Capacity (Scotland) Act 1991. But it is applied in Northern Ireland on no apparent authority. Even in England and Wales, it has never been subject to a parliamentary vote. Let there be one now.

PIE’s Patricia Hewitt took over Greville Janner’s seat. Then she passed it on to Liz Kendall, so it is obviously a right-wing Labour fiefdom. Britain is internationally known for the prevalence of kiddy-fiddling, but even within that, the right-wing Labour machine is something else. Having inherited his father’s seat, a man whose proclivities were common knowledge for 70 years handed it on to a PIE lady, who served in Tony Blair’s Cabinet before handing it on to the most overtly right-wing candidate for the Labour Leadership since 1994.

As Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, Kendall will now administer digital ID. At least that will no longer be Peter Kyle. One could almost admire his sheer gall in attacking Farage by comparing him to Savile. Like Anna Turley, Kyle was given his big break in politics by Hilary Armstrong, the Chief Whip whose Whips’ Office contained both Kyle’s close friend, closest ally, and sometime lover, Ivor Caplin, and Caplin’s close friend, Dan Norris. Along with the subsequently adjudicated and disqualified electoral fraud Phil Woolas, such was the Whips’ Office that forced through the Iraq War. Caplin, Norris and Woolas were all made Ministers a few weeks later. Up behind them has come Kyle, among others. Alastair Campbell had cut his teeth under Robert Maxwell, so there is that Epstein connection again. Norris does not turn up to Parliament, but has one of the best voting records, since despite his own suspension from the Labour whip,  the Labour Whips cast his proxy vote every single time; there was a blip on 10 March, but normal service was restored the next day.

Last month, the convicted paedophile Liron Woodcock-Velleman was given eight months, suspended for 15 months. His past “service” as a councillor, and the ruination of his “promising” political career, were accepted in mitigation. No wonder he and his parents were celebrating. At committee stage of what has become the Online Safety Act, Woodcock-Velleman gave the evidence of Hope Not Hate. When Labour returned to office in 2024, then Turley was both a Director and a Trustee of Hope Not Hate. As an ultimately successful parliamentary candidate in 2015, the then Ruth Smeeth described herself as “the Deputy Director of Hope Not Hate”. The American Embassy classified her as “strictly protect”. As Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent, she was recently made a Parliamentary Secretary in the Cabinet Office while remaining a Whip. Not bad for having lost her Commons seat to Jonathan Gullis. Even with the departure of Josh Simons, there are now four Parliamentary Secretaries under Darren Jones, and three Ministers of State. That amounts to a Prime Minister’s Department with, including Keir Starmer, nine Ministers, the most of any Department. They must do something. What is it?

Woodcock-Velleman’s offences were strikingly similar to those of another Labour councillor in London, Sam Gould, who offended while on the staff Wes Streeting. Streeting would have become Leader when, as expected in 2019, the Conservative majority had been much reduced in 2024 but Boris Johnson had remained Prime Minister. Yes, that was not much more than six years ago. If he were still an MP, then Streeting would certainly become Leader after the defeat of Labour by Reform UK in 2029, and he would do so unopposed because the nomination process now made a contested Labour Leadership Election effectively impossible. Streeting may then be Prime Minister within 18 months, since almost all Reform MPs will be freshers. The only thing stopping this is the high likelihood that he will lose his seat to Leanne Mohamad. But although the Greens came fifth at Ilford North in 2024, they took well over three times more votes than Streeting’s margin of victory.

In 2015, though, Streeting chaired the Leadership campaign of Jess Phillips, supported by Armstrong and Kyle. “I would stab Jeremy Corbyn in the front,” said the woman who was now “Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls”. She has accused British Pakistanis of importing wives for their disabled sons. She claims to have been rude and abusive towards Diane Abbott, although it is possible that she has built her reputation on lying about having used gutter language towards a woman who was old enough to be her mother. Phillips laughs at male suicides, at male cancers, at other men’s health issues, at violence against men, at problems in boys’ educational attainment, and at fathers denied access to their children. She has said that attacks of the kind that were seen in Cologne on the New Year’s Eve of 2015-16, “happen every week in Birmingham.”

On Tuesday 2 September, Phillips told the House of Commons that, “South Yorkshire police should never have been left to investigate themselves in this matter, and moving those investigations to the NCA is absolutely the right thing to do. I would be lying if I said that over the years I had not met girls who talked to me about how police were part of not just the cover-up but the perpetration.” Read again those words of the Minister who refused a statutory inquiry, an inquiry that had been, and still is, demanded by the Muslim candidate whom she had beaten by only 693 votes at Birmingham Yardley, which he intends to contest again, the wonderful investigative journalist Jody McIntyre. Then read the Epstein Files and worry about inferior cultures with no respect for women and with endemic predation on young girls.

One of Epstein’s closest friends, with no diplomatic background, was made the British Ambassador to Washington while we guffawed at the then Prince Andrew and at Sarah Ferguson. Also as part of the restoration, Stephen Fry was knighted. He has never retracted his statement that, “It’s a great shame and we’re all very sorry that your uncle touched you in that nasty place – you get some of my sympathy – but your self-pity gets none of my sympathy.” When Fry’s novel The Hippopotamus was filmed, then the central character had to be aged up to 16. But he is younger than that in the book. The Liar has never been filmed. Sir Stephen is very much in the line of Sir Jimmy Savile and his close protector, Sir Keir Starmer.

Meanwhile, both Joe Docherty and Matthew Doyle were introduced to the House of Lords by Armstrong, yet she has had the gall to endorse a mercifully ignored book that claimed that the accused of the Cleveland child abuse scandal had been guilty all along. False allegations of sexual violence are fundamental to the demonisation of working-class and nonwhite males, which leads to violence that is not restricted to, but which undoubtedly includes, sexual humiliation such as at Medomsley Detention Centre, and such as the United Nations Human Rights Council, in a June 2024 report that was also highly critical of Hamas, found to be inflicted on Palestinian men and boys by the Israeli Defence Forces. A month later, the unrepentant Sde Teiman rapists held a defiant press conference, and their supporters rioted, among them Members of the Knesset and men in the uniforms of the IDF’s Force 100. Fear of the black male is fundamental to the capitalist system that was founded on the transatlantic slave trade, and the slave trade financed enclosure. There has always been One Struggle.

Was Rolf Harris a Pakistani? Was Chris Denning? Is Stuart Hall? Is Paul Gadd? There were and are Pakistani grooming gangs. But they were and are far from the only ones, and far from the most powerful. Boris Johnson was a pupil at a private school when Paedophile Action for Liberation, which later merged into PIE, said without challenge that it could shut down both the private school system and the youth criminal justice system by calling its members out on strike. As Prime Minister, Johnson described the money spent on investigating Medomsley as having been “spaffed up the wall”. Clearly, he could not see the problem. He had been groomed.

Of the same generation is Starmer, late of Reigate Grammar School, the Sunday Times Independent School of the Year 2025. Yes, it was private when Starmer was there. In the words of Doughty Street Chambers, on its page about Starmer, now amusingly removed from public view: “He was Director of Public Prosecutions and Head of the Crown Prosecution Service from 2008-2013. As DPP, Keir was responsible for all criminal prosecutions in England and Wales.” Therefore, Starmer would have been responsible for the decision not to charge Savile even if he had never seen the file. But that is in any case inconceivable. We are talking about Jimmy Savile here. That Starmer took the decision not to charge Savile has been repeated all over the place, far beyond parliamentary privilege. Starmer has never sued. Again, he could not see the problem. Again, he had been groomed.

Nor is it a purely British problem. For example, Robert Morris, who was a White House spiritual adviser during Donald Trump’s first term, has just been released after having served only six months of his 10-year sentence for the sexual abuse of a 12-year-old girl. Morris promotes the same prosperity theology as his close associate and Trump’s present guru, Paula White, who has recently told her followers not only to tithe to the State of Israel, but to do so by tithing to her. Betting on the war with Iran is not the only jaw-droppingly corrupt aspect of this Administration. After all, Trump grew up in the Marble Collegiate Church of Norman Vincent Peale, who even took Trump’s first wedding there. The Power of Positive Thinking was the old mainline American Protestant tradition reconfigured by the New Thought movement, and prosperity theology is that reconfiguration of Pentecostalism. It was only to be expected that White should head Trump’s White House Faith Office, sprinkling it with the stardust of her third and current husband, Jonathan Cain. Yes, the one out of Journey. Don’t stop believing, hold on to that feeling.

In the midst of all of this, it is painful to see Bishop Robert Barron, whose Word on Fire has done real good, turn up to an Easter luncheon in Holy Week at all, never mind with Trump and White, at which the former compared himself to Jesus on Palm Sunday, and the latter compared Trump to Jesus on Good Friday and Easter Sunday, the day on which, according to Trump, the rolled away stone and the Empty Tomb had the immediate effect that “Christians everywhere rejoiced”. Bishop Barron’s involvement in all of this risks creating a third great threat to the unity of the Catholic Church at this time, along with the impending consecration of more bishops by the Society of Saint Pius X, and along with the German Synodal Way. QAnon hallucinated that God had raised up Trump as a deliverer, but the Epstein Class is made up of centrists, right-wing populists, right-wing elitists, and the world’s only famous anarcho-syndicalist and libertarian socialist. Any party for which Epstein might have voted, or for which Peter Mandelson might vote, or for which Peter Thiel might vote, or for which Noam Chomsky might vote, is an Epstein Class party. That includes both main parties in the United States, and every party now in the House of Commons.

The Epstein Files call to mind Eusebius in Book I, Chapter XXXVI of his Life of Constantine: “But the crowning point of the tyrant’s wickedness was his having recourse to sorcery: sometimes for magic purposes ripping up women with child, at other times searching into the bowels of newborn infants. He slew lions also, and practised certain horrid arts for evoking demons, and averting the approaching war, hoping by these means to get the victory. In short, it is impossible to describe the manifold acts of oppression by which this tyrant of Rome enslaved his subjects: so that by this time they were reduced to the most extreme penury and want of necessary food, a scarcity such as our contemporaries do not remember ever before to have existed at Rome.”

That was Maxentius in 312, on the eve of the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, the eve on which Constantine received his famous vision of the Cross. In that Sign, Constantine conquered, and Christendom began, bringing at least some degree of restraint to intercourse with Saint Paul’s elemental spirits, which are Saint John’s fallen angels, and which the human race worships in the absence of Abrahamic monotheism, not as worthy of worship, which they are not, but as deserving of fear, which to an extent they are. They are real, and the startlingly similar accounts and depictions of demons on different sides of the world arise from different people’s and different peoples’ encounters with the same ones. They always return to the fore when the Faith is in retreat.

The extreme depravity did not go underground. It went, as it were, overground, continuing in circles so elite that the rest of us could not usually see them. But we have seen them from time to time, and this is one of those times. Such are both the roots and the fruits of the refusal of the recapitulation in Jesus Christ and His Church of all three of the Old Israel, Hellenism, and the Roman Empire. In hoc signo vinces. And we are back to Saint Helena.

Severe and Lifelong

Frances Ryan writes:

Look at the front pages or open a news app in the coming days and you’ll supposedly see the big events facing Britain. But here’s one that is likely to slip quietly under the radar: from next week, almost three-quarters of a million of the most severely ill and disabled people in the country could end up having a lifeline benefit cut in half.

Cast your mind back to last summer. As the nation sweated through a heatwave and Oasis reunited, ministers were trying to push through “welfare reform” – a nice euphemism for £5bn worth of cuts to disability benefits. A backbench rebellion meant that Keir Starmer was forced to halt his overhaul of personal independence payments (Pip), but MPs voted through a brutal universal credit cut. Ministers justified reducing support for people too disabled or ill to work by arguing it would remove the “perverse incentives” that discourage employment and trap people on long-term benefits, as if a twentysomething who is bedbound with ME just needs “incentivising” to get back to the building site.

Nine months later, that change will now come into effect. On paper, it’s the epitome of bureaucratic jargon: new claimants whose disability means they can’t work or prepare for a job will see their additional universal credit support, known as “the health element”, halved to £50 per week and then frozen. That’s unless they meet strict – in many ways, flawed – criteria for being terminally ill or having a condition that is “severe” and “lifelong”. But wade through the dense small print and the human cost is unmistakable: people who are enduring daily debilitating symptoms and often already struggling to pay the bills are going to have their lives made even harder, all while having no real prospect of getting a job.

Charities and disabled people’s organisations have told me they fear the change will push people into deep financial hardship and, in some cases, destitution. As Samuel Thomas, from the anti-poverty charity Z2K, starkly warned The Guardian this week: “Families losing out on this vital income could face eviction, go without food and heating, and lose access to the care they depend on.”

Here’s the extra rub: because the cut applies to new claimants but not current ones, if you apply for help next Monday, you’ll be on average £3,000 a year worse off by the end of the decade than if you’d applied this week. Worried about paying your mortgage while you’re off sick? You really should have timed that stroke better.

Disability benefit cuts, understandably, often seem as if they’re a concern for “other” people. While NHS waiting lists or crumbling school buildings feel as if they affect everyone, few of us scroll to find the latest news of out-of-work sickness benefits on our morning commute. Human beings, naturally, don’t tend to spend their lives worrying when and how bad luck might hit. But that the universal credit change will only affect “new” claimants says the quiet part out loud: anyone can become disabled or chronically ill at any point. And every time successive governments slash the safety net, we can’t know if it will be us, a loved one, or a stranger who will fall through it.

Now try reading this column’s first paragraph again: nearly three-quarters of a million of the most severely ill and disabled people in the country could “end up” having their benefits cut. This isn’t instant penury as the clocks strike midnight on Sunday. We don’t even know yet who the axe is going to fall on. That’s because – to quote the government’s own data – an estimated 730,000 “future recipients” of universal credit will miss out on the higher benefit rate by 2029-30. That’s a delivery driver who has not yet had the car crash that will paralyse him, a trainee teacher who’ll go on to get a bipolar diagnosis, a nurse who’s just caught that bad cough that will sadly develop into long Covid. Other “future” recipients will be people who are already ill or disabled now but haven’t yet claimed benefits (contrary to the rightwing workshy myth, most disabled people continue working through painful symptoms for as long as they can).

At the same time as disabled and sick people too unwell to work have part of their universal credit reduced, the standard allowance – the bit of universal credit that all claimants get, including healthy people able to hold down a job – will rightly increase. That is a not exactly subtle message from the government of who counts and who doesn’t.

Labour is hardly alone in this. It was not a coincidence that while plans to cut Pip saw a fierce backlash last summer, partly because many recipients use the benefit to help themselves access a job, cuts to universal credit out-of-work sickness benefits barely got a whisper. As with most minority groups, to the political and media class there are “good” disabled people and “bad” ones, typically defined as those who “contribute” to the Treasury and those who “take”.

Expect a similar shrug from much of the press and MPs this week. As the predicted energy hike puts household budgets under more pressure and unemployment looks set to rise to its highest levels since the Covid lockdowns, there are few political points to be won by defending people who can’t earn a wage. As we speak, ministers are reportedly weighing up whether disabled people under 24 should have to try to get a job before being eligible for disability benefits. That’s on top of considering whether all under-22s should be blocked from receiving the health element of universal credit entirely. First, they ration social security based on when someone falls ill. Next, it might be based on when we’re born.

Two things can be true at once: the benefits bill is rising (that notably includes pensions), and people whose health means they’re unable to work deserve help from the state to have a decent quality of life. Britain can cut the money disabled people need to eat regular meals and pay the rent. Or we can have an adult conversation about how an increasingly sick and ageing population is squared with the costs – and responsibilities – that come with it.

The latter requires far-reaching changes, from investing in mental health services and preventive healthcare and fixing the Access to Work scheme, to putting more onus on employers to improve workers’ health and, yes, introducing wealth taxes to address gaping inequality. No one should pretend any of this is easy. But it is necessary to ensure there will still be a safety net in the years to come. The unspoken truth is that’s something any of us could need.

Raise The Colours, Slay The Dragons

As well as having more MPs than all other non-Labour and non-Conservative parties put together, the underscrutinised Liberal Democrats lead more local authorities than the Conservatives. The Lib Dems have an overall majority on Oxfordshire County Council, which has given Raise the Colours formal notice to stop putting up flags.

But yesterday was the second anniversary of the deaths of James Kirby, James Henderson and John Chapman. While they were unarmed and delivering humanitarian aid, the IDF bombed those British veterans three times to make sure that they were dead, using British-made Elbit Hermes 450 drones, and using intelligence from the over 600 nightly reconnaissance missions flown for the Israelis, yet free of charge to them, from RAF Akrotiri. From the twenty-third of this month, raise in their honour both the Union Flag and the Palestinian flag, flanking in England the flag of the Patron Saint both of England and of Palestine.

Weak and Feeble, Heart and Stomach?

An ITV drama about a transgender Elizabeth I would not purport to be a documentary.

But had she been born a boy, then that would have had ramifications that would still be felt.

And Dylan Mulvaney has already played her mother, who in real life merely had her head cut off.

Anomalous Phenomena?

Of course Donald Trump is using Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, as UFOs are now known, as a distraction. Of course JD Vance is lapping it up. But the thing about UAPs is that you are never going to change the minds of the people who took the most interest. We cannot know that there is not extraterrestrial life, but we have no evidence that there is, much less that it has ever visited Earth. Any release of files would confirm that, thereby satisfying no one who did not already know it. The rest would only scream about another coverup.

Yet Vance is essentially correct. Saint Paul’s elemental spirits are Saint John’s fallen angels, and the human race worships them in the absence of Abrahamic monotheism, not as worthy of worship, which they are not, but as deserving of fear, which to an extent they are. They are real, and the startlingly similar accounts and depictions of demons on different sides of the world arise from different people’s and different peoples’ encounters with the same ones, often misidentified as alien visitations. The court of Tony Blair featured Carole Caplin and her clairvoyant mother, the Temazcal of Nancy Aguilar and the stone circle of the wonderfully monikered Jack Temple, Cherie’s BioElectric Shield that had been given to her by Hillary Clinton, and much else besides, just as Ronald Reagan had been heavily dependent on Joan Quigley. The demonic basis of the Epstein Class is undeniable and undenied.

One sign of hope is Artemis II. Ours is an improbably dominant species. Far from having been seen off by something much bigger, and endowed with fangs, or claws, or talons, or venom, or what have you, we alone have been to the Moon. Within two generations of that, though, we are afraid of words. Either we go to back to the Moon, and then to Mars and beyond, or we accept that we have entered our decline, the endpoint of which could only be extinction. Space is being both privatised and militarised, a very common combination but always a lethal one, and that by the country that does not recognise it as a common resource for all humanity. There needs to be a return to President Eisenhower’s proposal, in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly on 22 September 1960, for the principles of the Antarctic Treaty to be extended to Outer Space.

If God had not intended us to be a spacefaring species, then He would never have put anything up there for us to find. People who think that these missions impoverish anyone, even as an initial outlay, do not understand how the money supply works. As a sovereign state with its own free-floating, fiat currency, Britain has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling any inflationary effect.

Why, though, spend that currency on this? Welcome to the Anthropocene, that is why. Life is the geological force that shapes the Earth, and the emergence of human cognition fundamentally transforms the biosphere, not least by the uniquely human phenomenon of economic growth, so that human mastery of nuclear processes is beginning to create resources through the transmutation of elements, enabling us, among other things, to explore space and to exploit the resources of the Solar System. Vladimir Vernadsky and Krafft Ehricke will yet have their day. They may be having it now.

“To increase the power of Man over Nature, and to abolish the power of Man over Man,” said Leon Trotsky. “Dominion,” says the God of the Bible. Dominion over the beasts, thus over the land, and thus over everything on and under the land. Dominion over the fish, thus over the waters, and thus over everything in and under the waters. And dominion over the birds, thus over the sky, and thus over everything in the sky, as far up as the sky goes, and the sky goes up a very long way.

That dominion is entrusted so that we might “be fruitful and multiply”. Entrusted as it is to the whole human race, its purpose is, “To increase the power of Man over Nature, and to abolish the power of Man over Man.” Celebrate the full compatibility between the highest view of human demographic, economic, intellectual and cultural expansion and development, and the most active concern for the conservation of the natural world and of the treasures bequeathed by such expansion and development in the past. That means growth, industry, what someone once nearly called “the white heat of technology”, and the equitable distribution of their fruits among and within the nations of the world, for everyone to enjoy at least the standard of living that we ourselves already enjoyed.

Meanwhile, the Shroud of Turin is in the news again. Last August, The Times excited the excitable with the dismissal of the Shroud by Nicole Oresme. The Church had been proclaiming the Resurrection for 13 centuries before that turned up, and She has never expressed any view as to its authenticity, permitting devotion to it by those who found that helpful, but emphasising that it had no bearing on the Teachings of Jesus or on any point of doctrine. The Times and its tendency, however, seemed to have discovered Oresme as an authority.

“It’s a myth that Medieval people thought the Earth was flat; we know the Greeks knew the world was a sphere,” Greg Jenner tells the Radio Four audience at 18:52-18:56. There was Cosmas Indicopleustes, but he had no formal education and thus no influence. Apart from him, though, Jenner is right. But thus is kicked away a key pillar of the National Religion, as passed on in schools and pubs the length and breadth of the land. What next, that The Life of Brian never happened?

Urbi et Orbi was first delivered by Blessed Gregory X, who was Pope from 1271 to 1276. The globus cruciger is at least 800 years older than that, and added the Cross to what had previously been Jupiter’s orb. The one used at Charles III’s Coronation was made for his Restored namesake in 1661, but of course the form is far older. Restoration, indeed. Not that the other side would have disagreed. Published in 1535, and still used as part of the Book of Common Prayer, the proto-Puritan Myles Coverdale had had no compunction in translating the verse that he numbered Psalm 96:10 (the numbering of the Psalms varies; another time), “Tell it out among the heathen that the Lord is King: and that it is He who hath made the round world so fast that it cannot be moved; and how that He shall judge the people righteously.”

“Fast” here does not mean “quickly”, but as in “hold fast”, nor does “cannot be moved” preclude the revolution of the Earth, but rather asserts that God has fastened it such that it could not be blown off course. Coverdale has always been known to have had his problems as a translator, yet I am not aware that this verse has ever been held up as one of them. The Psalms were probably collected in the fifth century BC, but several of them are far older even than that. In any case, the present point is that an English translator who had graduated from Cambridge in 1513 took it as a given that the Earth was round. Did the Ancient Israelites? Anyone with the Hebrew, do please let me know.

In 1514, Coverdale was ordained a Catholic priest. He was to depart from that in many ways, but not in this. Saint Gregory of Nyssa, who died in 395, describes a lunar eclipse as the projection of the “spherical shape” of the Earth onto the Moon. Through the subsequent centuries, we find “the rounded mass of the Earth” in Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, and “the terrestrial globe” in the Etymologies of Saint Isidore of Seville, before our very own Saint Bede the Venerable tells us that, “The Earth is like a globe.” At Jarrow. Where he died in 735.

Gerbert of Aurillac made a terrestrial globe and, as was common at the time, wrote a favourable commentary on the assertion of sphericity in the third-century work of Macrobius. In 999, Gerbert was elected Pope Sylvester II. In the thirteenth century, Saint Thomas Aquinas, in one of the first arguments advanced in his Summa Theologica, showed that it was possible to arrive at the same conclusion by different methods, since, “So it is indeed a same conclusion demonstrated by the astronomer and the physicist, for example, that the Earth is round.” Elsewhere, he taught that, “The Earth is not only round, but also small in comparison with the heavenly bodies.” Saint Thomas had studied under Saint Albert the Great, who must have had some concept of gravity, and who died in 1280.

In the fourteenth century, Oresme, of whom more anon, published his Treatise on the Sphere, inspired by the work of the same name by the thirteenth-century John of Sacrobosco, who might originally have been English, Scots or Irish. That earlier treatise was republished, completed, and commented upon, for many centuries. In turn, Oresme’s Treatise inspired the Imago Mundi of Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly, in which he made remarkably accurate calculations about the radius and volume of the Earth, about the climatic zones according to latitude, and about the polar regions, of which he wrote, in 1410, that, “Those who inhabit the Pole would have the Sun above their horizon for half the year, and for the other half, continuous night.”

Christopher Columbus owned and annotated a copy of the Imago Mundi. As he did of Pope Pius II’s Historia rerum ubique gestarum, which begins, “Almost everyone agrees that the shape of the world [i.e., the cosmos] is spherical [rotundam]; we agree in the same way about the Earth.” It goes on to discusses the measurements of the Earth’s circumference by Eratosthenes and Ptolemy, respectively from the third and second centuries BC. It is true that those ancient cosmologists held the Earth to be immobile at the centre of a closed sphere that was the universe, and that that error lived long after them, but neither they nor any of their successors held that the Earth was flat.

No one ever believed that, at least until the rise of modern Flat Earth Societies. The suggestion that this was the Medieval view can be dated precisely to January 1828, which saw the publication of The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, as highly fictionalised an account as one would expect from its author, Washington Irving, who also gave the world those noted works of historical realism, Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, as well as popularising the use of “Gotham” to refer to New York.

I nearly fell out of my chair at 28:26 in the above link, when Dr Seb Falk of Girton College, Cambridge referred, again as if they were unremarkable, to the events of 1277, about which readers of this site have known since 16 August 2007, but about which I have been writing elsewhere since no later than 2001, at first broadly in relation to John Milton; I came across the manuscript again recently, and while the style needs work, the thesis still stands up, so watch this space.

Science as that term is generally understood began at Paris in 1277, when Étienne Tempier, Bishop of Paris and Censor of the Sorbonne, responded to the growth of Aristotelianism by condemning from Scripture (i.e., explicitly from revelation as apprehended by the gift of faith) 219 propositions expressing the Aristotelian versions of several of fallen humanity’s ordinary beliefs.

Those beliefs were, and are, eternalism, the belief that the universe has always existed; animism, that the universe is an animal, a living and organic being; pantheism, that the universe is in itself the ultimate reality, the first cause, God; astrology, that all earthly phenomena are caused, or at least influenced, by the pantheistic movements of the stars; and cyclicism, that every event repeats exactly after a sufficiently long time the precise length of which varies according to culture, and has already so repeated itself, ad infinitum.

In particular, Tempier strongly insisted on God’s creation of the world ex nihilo, a truth which has always been axiomatically acknowledged as able to be known only from revelation by the faith that is itself mediated by the Church’s ministry of God’s Word and Sacraments, with the liturgical context of that ministry passing on from age to age and from place to place the Revelation recorded in and as the Bible and the Apostolic Tradition of which the Canon of Scripture is part.

This ruling of ecclesial authority as such made possible the discovery around 1330, by Jean Buridan, Rector of the Sorbonne, of what he himself called impetus, but which was in fact nothing other than the first principle of “Newtonian” Mechanics, and thus of “science”, Newton’s First Law, the law of inertia: that a body which has been struck will continue to move with constant velocity for so long as no force acts on it.

Buridan’s pupil Oresme, afterwards Bishop of Lisieux, developed this discovery vigorously and in detail, around 1360. The ideas of Buridan and Oresme spread throughout Europe’s universities for three centuries, and were especially associated with Spanish Salamanca, with Portuguese Coimbra, and with the Jesuits’ Collegio Romano, now the Gregorian University. They passed, through Leonardo da Vinci and others, to those who would formulate them in precise mathematical terms: Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Huygens, and finally Sir Isaac Newton in the conventionally foundational text of modern science, his Principia Mathematica of 1687.

Without the Christian Revelation, apprehended by the faith mediated in, as and through the life of the Church, human beings are by inclination eternalistic, animistic, pantheistic, astrological and cyclicistic; and in that intellectual condition, the scientific project is impossible. That is why science as we now understand the term never originated anywhere other than in Medieval Europe.

The reception of Newton’s Principia bespeaks a willingness, whether or not it can be identified in the work itself, to regard science as independent of the wider scientia crowned by regina scientiae, to have physics and the logical without metaphysics and the ontological, ratio unrelated to fides. This is disastrous for science, which cannot demonstrate, but rather must presuppose, the falseness of eternalism, animism, pantheism, astrology and cyclicism.

And it is also disastrous for art, because the world comes to be seen in terms of a logic newly detached from aesthetics, as from ethics. Thus, these become mere matters of taste or opinion, dislocated even from each other in defiance both of the whole Western philosophical tradition and to use in its ordinary manner a term deriving from Newton’s Early Modern age, of common sense.

In such an environment, art attracts increasing distrust as the morally evil is held up as having aesthetic, and not least literary, merit. Meanwhile, aesthetic experiences are so distinguished from everyday experiences that art is degraded to a frivolity and an indulgence. Thus, they are restricted to those who have the time and the money for it, indeed who actually have too much time on their hands and more money than they know what to do with.

At the same time, regard for the true and the good declines relentlessly in the supposedly superficial context of poor aesthetics, of literally false and bad art. Doctrinal orthodoxy and moral standards slip and slide where the liturgy and its accoutrements are less than adequately tasteful or edifying. Educational standards collapse and crime rockets in the midst of hideous architecture and décor. And so forth.

Forget, for the present purpose, Galileo, who was never imprisoned, who was never excommunicated, who died professing the Faith, the daughter who cared for whom in his last days became a nun, and so on. His error was not to say that the Earth moved around the Sun, although he could not prove that scientifically at the time; we happen to know, centuries later, that he was right, but that is not the same thing. Rather, his error was to say that the Church should teach heliocentrism as proved out of Scripture, which is in fact silent on the subject. His was not an erroneously low, but an erroneously high, doctrine of Biblical and ecclesial authority.

In the absence of scientific proof in his own age, he wanted his theory, which turns out to have been scientifically correct but which neither he nor anyone else could have known to have been so in those days, to be taught and believed on that authority, the authority of the Bible as interpreted by the Catholic Church. That, the Church refused to do. Who was on the side of science in that dispute? I think that we can all see the answer to that one. As, in the end, did he, dying as he did a Catholic in good standing. Buy the book here.