Churches say there is enough for everyone

There is enough for everyone – that is the message of Poverty and Homelessness Action Week beginning on January 30.

The Methodist Church in Britain, the Baptist Union of Great Britain and the United Reformed Church are supporting the awareness-raising week run by Church Action on Poverty and Housing Justice. The three churches have recommended resources produced for the campaign to be used in worship services.

Paul Morrison, Policy Adviser for the Methodist Church in Britain, said Poverty and Homelessness Action Week was especially important this year as the country prepares for a general election.

“Poverty is not just the problem of some people having too little; it’s also a problem of some people having too much,” he said.

“From the very start, Methodism has been about sharing the gospel, and sharing was not just about telling people stories, it was about having compassion for who they are and the situation that each person finds themselves in.”

Revd Dr Rosemary Kidd, Faith and Unity Coordinator of the Baptist Union of Great Britain, said: “It is quite clear that some people are paid too much but we have no mechanism by which we measure what is too much. There is enough for everyone, it’s just that wealth is poorly distributed.”

Frank Kantor, Secretary for Church and Society at the United Reformed Church, said: “We want to hear from people who wish to contribute to the debate on incomes and inequality in the UK which will be a key issue in the run up to the next election”

HAT TIP: Methodist Church News

I think this is non negotiable. Empty properties need to be taken over and brought back into use. Equally I cannot justify some having many homes whilst others are without? Why not turn Buckingham Palace into social housing? After all Windsor Castle is not so far away.

Furthermore it is time to make extreme wealth history. Greed can only be given a place when needs are fully met.

I hope all of this will figure in the General Election but I am not at all optimistic. So may the church lead us in rage!

Labour party stunt - keep the public out!

Having bought today's Daily Mail in order to read the writings of Peter Watt, former General Secretary of the Labour Party, I found that what struck me most was not his views of Gordon Brown but a story that dated back to the General Election of 2001.

In order to show how hard the Labour Party was working for votes it was arranged for the media including TV crews to see Tessa Jowell campaigning at a service station on the M3. Jowell thought she had had a good reception, not realising that the public whom she had met were some 30 Labour Party members how had been bussed in for the occasion 30 minutes before Jowell's arrival.

Anyhow Watt sums up the event;

I simply didn't have the heart to tell her that there was no way we would let a senior Minister walk into a service station in the glare of the media and meet random members of the public.

I doubt that the Labour Party is unique in such a stunt. But when the electorate have to be kept out from even a film of interraction between senior politicians and the "public", it is no wonder that the gap betwen politicians and the public is such a gulf. If we are not even fit for their stunts, is it any wonder when the public grow angry at a disconnected political class who quite frankly are not exactly covered in glory.

Come the General Election, perhpas we should let 'em have it!

Welcome "A People's Charter for Democracy."

I have rarely felt greater disillusionment at the state of British politics than I do at present. As a result of greed within financial institutions and anapology of a Labour Government that has to all intents and purposes been in cahoots with such people, we now face a grim future. Already further education looks set to be a target of substantial cuts. Causes such as rectifying the housing crisis are very much on hold.

This blog will be very much a blog dedicated to resistance in 2010. It doesn't greatly matter who wins the General election. The three main parties are wedded to the sorts of cuts in public expenditure that we havn't seen for 20 years.At the same time they will find money for the Afghan War. And of course the bonus culture is likely to continue as obscenely as ever it has.

We need to make our minds up whether we are prepared to be screwed or whether we will fight back. One positive initiative which I would like to recommend is A People's Charter for Democracy. It seeks to make the state the servant of the people rather than as is all too often the other way round.

Here is the main thrust:



We therefore support the campaign for a republican Britain based on a written constitution that would:

end the rule of political elites and bureaucracies and instead create new local, regional and national Assemblies, representing diverse communities and workplaces
extend democracy through co-operative forms of ownership and workplace control of major corporations, enterprises and services
establish social rights to housing, education, health, transport, training, employment, pensions and care in older age
guarantee basic human rights to organise, strike, speak and act free from state surveillance and interference
safeguard the civil and religious rights of minority communities and adopt a “no borders” approach to refugees and asylum seekers
eliminate speculation and profit as the basis for society, ensuring that both ecological care and basic human needs shape production, consumption and lifestyles.

We will initiate, encourage and support all actions such as campaigns to stop repossessions, occupations of threatened workplaces and the rejection of higher fuel and transport charges.

To this end, we will work to establish local and national Conventions for Democracy to build support for the transfer of political and economic power to the majority.


Now I know it isn't perfect and there are a couple of points that I would take issue with. But it represents at least a start as to forming the sort of perspective that is needed to inform the resistance to that which our masters have prepared for us.

Political porn - Hewitt and Hoon doing you know what.

I think that this is one of the sickest images imagineable from the Snow Plot against the Prime Minister. It certainly came close to separating me from my lunch.

Iain Dale is a very naughtyy boy.

A sung letter to Anjem Choudary

Often I think that Anjem Choudary does more than anyone to undermine the anti war message with his infantile antics. His recent talk about a march to Wootten Bassett is an example of the man's lack of sensitivity. Indeed rather than a spokesman for Islam I think that if he is not totally daft he has to be a mocker of the Allah he profeses to worship;

Anyhow this song puts him in context;



Rather than get angry with this man, we should laugh at him!

Predictions for 2010

As many people are sharing their predictions for 2010, here are mine;

1. Gordon Brown is replaced as Labour leader before the General Election.

2. The General Election leads to a hung Parliament with the Tories being the largest party.

3. Caroline Lucas becomes the first Green MP.

4. Afghanistan looks little better at end of year than at beginning of year

5. Unemployment peaks at 2.8 million.

6. Cuts in public expenditure face fierce opposition with some direct action.

7. The beginnings of a punk revival shocks the media and revitalises music after years of the Cowell stranglehold.

8. David Haye wins another version of the World Heavyweight Boxing Championship

9. Big Brother is saved- the programme not the surveillance state!

10. American pastor Steven L. Anderson goes to his rightful reward - a prison cell.


Last year I only got 2 right so these things may not happen. On the other hand this year I might just have received the spirit of prophecy. We shall see.

Urgent appeal - Bank Aid!

It's time to move from Band Aid to the pressing needs of Bank Aid!

Thanks to the Left Economics Advisory Panel you can support this cause. Prepared to be moved by this video;



Remember "Bleed the world! Let them know it's bonus time!"

Strangers from the east - A sermon for Epiphany based on Matt 2: 1-12

Miserable git that I am, I cannot help but feel that one of the great temptations of the church during the Christmas season is to collaborate in the sentimentalising of the story. After all so many of us have been caught up in the Christmas card imagery or seen our children in those Nativities when shepherds don dressing gowns for the cold nights of sheep watching in the fields that surround Bethlehem.

But today we have a story that begins in a wondrous way before ultimately providing a reality check when wise men turn out not to be so wise and so furnish an unstable King's insecurities with bloody consequences.

Yes, this is the story of those mysterious men of the east. They have become the stuff of legends. "We three Kings of Orient are " we sing yet the biblical account gives us no reason to assert either that they were Kings or that there were three of them. Instead Matthew tells us that they were magi and that they brought three gifts.

So first let's look at these men. Certainly Matthew tells us that they came from the east. And that might produce something of a shudder. After all that was the direction of amongst others Assyria, Babylon and Persia now ruled by Rome great enemy the Parthian Empire, the lands that had at various points ruled over Israel. Israel's conquerors yet also lands that through the voices of those taken captive, would have heard the stories of Israel and its God. Maybe that experience had left these men with at least an interest in Yahweh.

But what exactly are magi? To simply call them wise men does an injustice to Matthew's story. In a way these are the very sort of men who shouldn't figure in the story. Once magi had been dream interpreters but now they were effectively fortune tellers, the sort of people who don't exactly get a warm description in the Hebrew Bible or come to that within the early church. In short these men were foreigners who whatever their intentions were but heretics to the religiously orthodox. The Israeli BNP if there were such a thing would have suggested that men such as these should stay away along with their alien religious understandings.

And yet they come. Brought to Bethlehem by a star. This morning I see no point in specualting which star or cosmic happening they saw. We quite simply do not know. Indeed we have no evidence that events in the skies were causing any interest in Israel, least of all at the King's palace or at the Temple.

But Matthew tells us that they detected a happening in the skies. And this was an age in which cosmic events were linked in the popular imagination to the births of many great people. Now some astrologers of this time divied the heavens into areas dedicated to different countries. So when these men see happenings in that part of the skies associated with Israel, they sense a birth of a King in a land they have heard so much of. No wonder they stop of at Herod's Palace in Jerusalem. Where else would a King be born after all?

But in so doing they set off a chain of events. Certainly if these men came from much feared Parthia we can see how Rome as well as its semi Jewish puppets such as Herod were disturbed. After all the presence and the words spoken by the magi have within them the potential to create destabilisation. So Herod wastes no time in calling in his allies amongst the Jewish religious leadership to find where the future King would be born. And as they speak of the prophecies of Micah concerning a future leader coming out of Bethlehem, then Bethlehem becomes the target of power at its most brutish. A massacre ensues - a case of The Empire strikes back!

So why does Matthew offer this account? Quite simply it fits in with the portrayal he is about to offer of Jesus. Whilst Luke tells us of shepherds and the lowly as part of his conviction that Jesus brings role reversal, Matthew has his agenda too. Possibly the most Jewish of the gospels as shown by a predeliction for linking the story of Jesus to the prophecies of the Hebrew Bible, Matthew also presents a message that Jesus whilst being the fulfilment and more besides of Jewish expectation, is often discerned not so much by how own as by the outsiders who would in those days have been termed gentiles. Hence whilst Israel's King plots against the infant Jesus and the religious establishment is effectively his ally, it is foreigners, even heretics who discern the importance of Jesus and give him worship.

Now the story becomes for today. The outsiders have reacted for Jesus whilst insiders have plotted against him. You see the significance of outsiders is enhanced. And a question begins to take shape as to whether we who might see ourselves as insiders could possibly repeat the failings of insiders 2,000 years ago. Might we become so caught up in our structures and ways of being that we fail to discern God working among us? And might we so practice exclusion of those whom we consider outsiders as to be a stumbling block? Might we fail to see that God operates as shown by the example of Jesus not at the centres of power and respectability but on the margins with the poor, the dispossessed and those who are discontented with the neat answers of orthodoxy? For it is among such as these that we Christ revealing himself.

Our thinking upon thgis story so often ends with the gifts that these magi bring? They are indeed so familiar - gold, frankincense and myrrh. Rich in symbolism they are also with gold linked to Kingship and frankincense to worship and myrrh to death. And of course it is the myrrh that seems the strangest of gifts linked to death as it is. No wonder Brian's mother in "The Life of Brian" tries to give the myrrh back. To me it brings thoughts of how my father was joined up to a Funeral Club in the first week of his life. But of course it reminds us that the Jesus who is as a King and who is the centre of our worship is also truly human and will die - not just any death but the death motivated by love for us and in resistance of the forces of death in our world.

But now our scripture reading ends with the news of bad intent on the part of Herod. Magi will return another way. Soon Jesus and his family will be forced to seek asylum in Egypt. The blood of innocent children will soak the streets of Bethlehem. No room for sentimentality is left. The dark side of the world makes a claim for our attention. For now Matthew will go on to reveal how in the story of Jesus, light and evil, goodness and evil, love and hatred, are engaged in conflict. To follow Jesus is not a path of escapism from painful reality. It is about following a path that is illuminated by Jesus. And we who later in this service will renew our Covenant,will need to be as persistent in our discipleship as the magi were in their journey. And like them we need to be open to transformation and a changing within our plans. But it is far from being just about us. The Jesus we follow is truly the Light of the world. In him we see both the nature of divinity and the potential of humanity revealed. So as we leave the season of Christmas we return to our fractured world. Yet the good news of Christmas can never be fully left behind. We have discovered the potential of life. No longer are we left with tired realities of despair but we have met the Christ who is love for all of us. So knowing that he will not let us down my we live for him trusting in his help as we seek to identify with his redeeeming of the world.

Now may we live in the strength of the Lord.