Time For Grace

 

I liked the three series of Jimmy McGovern’s prison drama Time, and I think he’s generally a class act (with Cracker being the pinnacle of his work, in my view). But there’s perhaps a key weakness here with Time - or at least, a potential weakness at this stage of his career. The attempted Christian faith subtext is, in my view, weakened by the fact that the writer isn’t conveying how stupendous the subject matter can be when grace is revealed in action. In other words, with the writer’s own faith, there’s a danger that it comes across as not strong or devoted enough to convey how capacious God’s love is when expressed through people like Marie-Louise, the chaplain.

Just as comedy isn’t as funny if there’s no smidgen of truth at the heart of it, faith-based subtext isn’t as powerful if there isn’t strong faith at the heart of the creative dispensations. It’s similar to what the philosopher Simone Weil’s pointed out when she said that:

“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvellous, intoxicating.”

Similarly, the most authentic grace is rarely timid or merely therapeutic - it erupts from the author’s pen or keyboard in an unmistakable way. Because there is no mistaking forgiving what seems unforgivable, and loving those who seem most unlovable. At its most potent, it takes possession of us, and leaves us in no doubt that we are tapping into something extraordinary.

With Time, I felt similar to how I felt with his previous drama Unforgivable – he understated what the transformation would look like if grace really did break through. The vivid sense of humanity's fallenness is handled with aplomb, but less so the breathtaking horizon towards which astounding grace points.

Now, I want to be sure I’m being fair to Jimmy McGovern here. I sense with Time that what he is doing is choosing to depict a scenario in subdued form because he is still writing about damaged people living in damaged institutions, but crucially, where the chaplain has lost faith in the system and is struggling with her own faith.

That may not strike me as strange - it’s great to explore a diverse range of feelings and emotions associated with the Christian faith, including the pain, struggles and doubts. The strange part, for me, though, is the timing. If a writer's work exhibits a developing, cumulative theological comprehension, then one might expect later works to deepen rather than diminish insights previously explored. Building on the wisdom of past prologues, 

I find myself wondering why Time seemed like theological retrogression in light of his brilliant drama Broken that aired about ten years ago. I think McGovern did the faith subtext better in Broken than in subsequent works like Time or Unforgivable – although the latter two dramas do very well in heeding Bonhoeffer’s warning about ‘cheap grace’. In Broken, Sean Bean brilliantly portrays a Catholic priest trying to shepherd deeply wounded people while carrying his own scars, but where the grace shone through much more tangibly, and not all cheaply either.

To be crystal clear, none of this diminishes McGovern's gifts as a writer, which remain formidable. If anything, it is because he has previously shown himself capable of portraying grace so memorably in Broken that the relative restraint of Time and Unforgivable feels noteworthy to me. In Time and Unforgivable, McGovern once again demonstrates an extraordinary understanding of human brokenness. What feels less certain, in my estimation, is whether he still believes, imaginatively at least, in a grace sufficiently large to redeem it.

The Majority Are Wrong About Net Zero

 

Distraught at the good news that the UK government has approved extraction from the Jackdaw gas field in the North Sea, the usual climate bedwetters have put on their parts about the cataclysmic effect this will have on the goal to reach "net zero".

Let me offer an alternative perspective. We have many big problems in the UK - one of the most serious of which is this crass, top-down imposition of “net zero”, with its projected economically ruinous cost of £500 billion, for which British taxpayers continue to foot the bill. It’s a policy of such folly that only the most reckless thinkers would support it - yet enough incompetent people in power do support it, so we have it unjustly imposed on us in the form of higher taxes, higher prices, less money in our pockets, and a less efficient economy. 

Now, I know what you might push back with. Opinion polls show that 60% to 65% of the public explicitly support the UK's legal commitment to cut emissions to net zero by 2050, so isn’t’ it more democratic that politicians enact it? I knew you were going to ask that - but in a word, no - not really, because it misses something important. Democracy has its merits, but it also comes with the hazard of throwing up advocation for highly damaging policies on the dubious pretext of uncritical consensus. These should be challenged at every juncture.

Support for Net Zero is rather like a toxic marriage of dependency made on the condition that nobody actually reads the prenuptial agreement. Public devotion to Net Zero flourishes precisely because it operates behind a philosophical Rawslian 'veil of ignorance', whereby voters enthusiastically endorse an ideal without ever auditing the economic realities required to achieve it. It’s a luxury belief - or perhaps more accurately, an unexamined luxury good - because professed endorsement exceeds any personal civic immediate cost, as most of the costs are spread more thinly in terms of diffusely inflated consumer prices, stealth taxation, compounding inflation and unseen opportunity costs

It behoves the rest of us - those who see policies with more considered cost-benefit analyses - to continue the challenge against damaging political ideas like Net Zero. A bit like a situation when a young child thinks having ice cream for every meal is a good idea, but a responsible parent would counsel against it, having the child's longer term well-being and future best interests at heart. In fact, that analogy works especially well here, because it conveys the idea of an appealing, feel-good, short-term indulgence that ignores long-term health and consequences.

Similarly, voting MPs into power should not give them the right to convert someone else’s resources into communal property in such a reckless way. Coercion disguised as “democracy” is still coercion, and catastrophic policies that are mandated by narrow-minded elected politicians are still catastrophic, even if the majority have been primed into believing they prefer ice cream for dinner. 

Further reading:
People Are Finally Starting To Wake Up To The 'Net Zero' Madness
Net Zero: Created By Madness For Madness

Out Of The Fire, Into The Frying Pan, Then Back In The Fire

 

I think that a lot of our current extremes are so excessive because in the second half of the twentieth century we got it so badly wrong at the opposite extreme. I can think of four obvious examples: 

1)    Racism was one of the biggest stains on our past, especially when it was ingrained in socio-political legislature - but now we micromanage identity categories in ways that are just as divisive and prejudicial, we frequently see reverse racism, and we even see preposterous scenarios where the police were reluctant to properly investigate Pakistani grooming gangs for fear of being called racist.   

2)    Abuse scandals like those in Operation Yewtree came out of a culture in which abusers like Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris were so protected that victims were frequently dismissed - but now we have taken it so far the other way that we frequently blur the line between genuine abuse and social discomfort, creating a culture of fear, extreme behavioural inhibition (especially for many young men), and social over-policing. 

3)    Homophobia was so mainstream that gay people were openly shamed (in the UK, it was even illegal to be a practicing homosexual until the late sixties) - but now we treat many criticisms of gay/trans parades and ethical choices like a potential crime scene, even to the point that people have been reluctant to challenge and intervene when children have been harmed in plain sight, young people are actively encouraged to identify as whatever sex they wish, and people are being hounded, fired or prosecuted for having traditional views about the reality of biological sex. 

4)    Mental health issues were frequently misunderstood, misdiagnosed or ignored in the past - but now we’ve become so eager to pathologise every discomfort that we have cultivated a self‑perpetuating mental health crisis, where ordinary struggles are treated as symptoms and people are encouraged to see themselves as fragile (see my blog How We Made a Nation Too Fragile to Cope). 

Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s been great that in the second half of the twentieth century Western societies finally confronted past wrongs. But I think it’s fairly evident that in so many cases we lurched into their opposite extremes - where symbolic virtue has crept up in replacing real responsibility. We moved from tendentiously overlooking injustice to the grossest policing of language, where people are routinely being censored like the great dystopian novels predicted, and are regularly afraid to speak openly for fear of recriminations.

And just as imprudently, we’ve helped create a nation of fragility, where distinctions between genuine harm and the required tenacity in navigating life’s many character-building challenges have been blurred (often deliberately so).

And both extremes have this in common: they fail to honour the sovereignty of the individual – in respect, dignity, and in regard for their potential.

Why Burnham Will Be More Damaging Than Starmer

 

We are in the mania of a new Prime Minister who wants to meddle, fix things, make a big impression, and leave a populist legacy that could radically change the impression people have of Labour. But, alas, as ever, this comes with huge problems because, like with Starmer, Sunak, and all the recent centre-left governments before them, they remain clueless about what they are clueless about in terms of sound economic principles.

Burnham, like his predecessors, walks around announcing policy after policy, completely oblivious to most of the elementary and fundamental economic truisms that we’ve known about since before he was born. Things like; you can’t tax your way to prosperity; if you subsidise something you get more of it, and if you tax something you get less; you cannot print money or borrow excessively without eroding the real wages and savings of everyday citizens; redistributive measures are futile without economic growth, etc.

On top of that, when it comes to his so-called targets, he is oblivious to loads of very basic laws of unintended consequences, such as Goodhart’s Law (When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure) and Campbell’s Law (The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures), and the basics of the Laffer curve (push tax rates too high and it actually reduces government revenues, causes wealthy taxpayers to leave, disincentivises foreign investors), etc.

But what should also worry us alongside this absolute medley of ineptitudes - like I addressed in another way in my blog Beware of Honest, Well-Intentioned Politicians – is that, unlike Keir Starmer, Burnham possesses a populism (if you like that sort of thing) that makes his misguided economic interventionism far easier for the public to swallow.

Consequently, most of Burnham’s further meddling and fixing is just making a bad problem worse - and much of the country seems to like him more and more for it, which means the damage will probably be greater. 

Odds, Ends & Stray Musings: Advice About Conflict In Marriage

 

In a way that may seem counterintuitive, a thriving marriage is not a marriage without contention. A thriving marriage is a marriage with productive contention, promoting mutual growth and development. You’re both very different, with varying backgrounds and a unique set of experiences. Expect contention, but use it as a vehicle of good intentions to work towards improving yourself and each other.

Good advice I’ve learned along the way is that when beloveds are in conflict, they are wise to try to focus on the most intrinsic parts of the dispute, and not get sidelined by personal charges and accusatory tones. There are often extrinsic causes driving the disputes, and their provenance ought to be identified, but in the immediacy of the quarrel, couples are wise to stay on track of the intrinsic part of the dispute, and try to address it on its merits and demerits.

In other words, if your dispute is about how often the hoovering should be done, or whether as a couple you’re spending enough time with your in-laws - be sure to assess the arguments on their strengths and weaknesses, not on whether one of you is generally too untidy or too anti-social.

Uniquely Senseless Acts

 

In life, there are manifestly good actions with good outcomes, like when you buy a bunch of flowers for someone who needs some support. And there are manifestly bad actions, but with perceived good outcomes for one of the agents, like when a thief steals a bicycle and believes their life is better because they’ve gained a bicycle (although at some point they may learn that it isn't). 

But there is a third set, which I’d call self-defeating idiocy, which are manifestly bad actions with bad outcomes – that is, when someone does something that causes harm, inconvenience or loss to others, but derives no pleasure or increase themselves, probably even incurring detrimental outcomes (net losses), at least psychologically.

Examples of the third kind would be things like gross acts of vandalism: graffiti tags, wrecking a children’s playground area, setting fire to a communal bookcase for village book swaps, walking past a row of parked cars and breaking their wing mirrors, etc – the kind of thing we see reported too frequently in local newspapers.

Other things that spring to mind would be spiteful gossip, trolling strangers online without meaningful dialogue, malicious mockery or character assassination, that sort of thing.

There are lots of things that humans do that are bad, but done for some superficial gain – theft, reckless indulgence, fraud, manipulation, status seeking cruelty, tribal spite, etc. But acts of self defeating idiocy are uniquely senseless, because they harm everyone involved, confer no benefits to anyone, impress nobody, and only serve to humiliate and diminish the perpetrators, even if they are blind to it at the time.

Listen To What The Exes Say

If it helps, a good way to see through the devilish lies, control and deceptions wrought on society is to listen to what the most thoughtful, intelligent ex-members are saying - those who’ve escaped the snare, and seen the light by realising the lies, control and deceptions at the top of their institution.

 Listen to, for example: 

• The ex-Scientology members who discovered it’s a racket, and escaped the hegemony, and the aggressive way dissent is pathologised by the leaders as a moral failing. 

• The ex-Extinction Rebellion/Just Stop Oil members who got swept in by virtue-signalling and ideological purity tests, but who got near to the top and came to experience that the principal aims are nothing to do with the climate - they are principally about leftist control, cronyist power acquisition, fear-mongering and ideological influence. 

• The ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses (or other ex-religious-cult members) who’ve escaped information control, and fear‑based doctrines that kept them compliant for years for fear of social/familial shunning. 

• The ex-young earth creationists who came to understand that they had been manipulated, directly or indirectly, to dishonour God by believing lies about His creative methods, to suppress their own interpretive faculties, and repress their own curiosity, and entire branches of human knowledge. 

• Those who were manipulated by bad actors to doubt their own ‘gender’ identity, and who have come to see through the mass social contagion, and are now living more secure, fulfilled lives built on self‑understanding rather than external pressure. 

• Those who’ve escaped the authoritarian hell that is North Korea, and can now see clearly what a mass brainwashing dictatorship it is. 

We know that psychologically speaking, people rarely join harmful systems knowingly - they are usually drawn in by the perceived allure of certainty, meaning, in-group belonging, or self-congratulation. That’s why, relative to the total number of cases, few actually leave or escape with such unique insight and revelation regarding the internal contradictions, control, absolutism, social pressure, and fear of dissent. That’s also why those who’ve seen the light and have acquired enough insight and balance to evaluate their former plight are frequently worth listening to.