All your charity are belong to us

January 16, 2011 at 10:31 pm (Uncategorized)
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It’s rather difficult to write anything coherent about the Big Society, not least because other than Dave (and I’m not even certain about Dave), nobody knows what exactly it’s supposed to be. There is some not unattractive rhetoric about volunteering, which we’d all like to see more of; there’s also more than a sneaking suspicion that Dave is trying to get public services on the cheap by palming them off on the voluntary sector. Anyone looking for philosophical clarity is, one fears, looking in vain.

But murky waters don’t deter us round here, do they? There are still things that can usefully be said, and a good starting point is a recent pair of thought-provoking pieces by Ed West over at the Telegraph. One is on the failure of the coalition government to deliver its promised bonfire of the quangos, and we’ll return to this theme presently. First, however, let us ponder the fate of the YWCA.

Come on, you remember the YWCA. I mean, surely you remember these guys:

The reference is to the Young Men’s Christian Association, proprietor of establishments where a young man down on his luck can stay until he gets his feet back on the ground, as well as getting himself clean, having a good meal etc. The YWCA is the women’s equivalent.

Or it was until recently. You see, the British section of the YWCA (though not the international body) has just rebranded. And here’s the surprise. One may have expected, in this secular age, the “Christian” bit of the name to be ditched in the name of diversity. Less expected would be the YWCA ditching all four words in its name and adopting the cryptic title “Platform 51”. Presumably this is meant to better reflect its focus, although what “Platform 51” actually signifies is a mystery to me. Which may not be coincidental.

Ed explains:

In a sense the name doesn’t matter; what’s significant is how the charity has changed, and what it says about the nature of do-gooding.

The YWCA was founded in 1855 with the aim of providing spiritual and moral support to young women against the physical and moral poverty of the new cities, and it did this, among other things, by running prayer groups. In contrast today’s YWCA now “lobb[ies] for changes in the law and policies to help all women”, and its chairman is a former equality quango manager Helen Wollaston.

Indeed its brochure states: “We campaigned for the Equality Act to protect pregnant schoolgirls and teenage mums from discrimination, harassment and victimisation. Young mums told us about their experiences, including being advised to leave school, not having access to a full curriculum and being stopped from sitting exams because they were pregnant. They are now legally entitled to the same education as anyone else.”

Well, quite. This may well be legitimate activity, it’s just a very long way removed from the founding principles of the YWCA, which is perhaps why the name change is fitting.

A remarkably similar story could be told about the National Council for One Parent Families, which these days operates under the auspices of Gingerbread, both charities having merged in 2007.[1] The National Council was originally set up in 1918 as the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and her Child, as a response to the rise in illegitimate births during the First World War. Its purpose was to encourage a more humane and tolerant attitude towards young women who, let’s be frank, were treated in a very cruel way by contemporary society. While it too was a rather stern Christian-inspired charity, it did a commendable amount to help unfortunate young women, including encouraging the churches to set up homes for them, and helping to have adoption properly regulated for the first time.

Where this parallels the YWCA is that by 1971, when it changed its name, the National Council would have been virtually unrecognisable to its founders. Its concept of the unmarried mother’s state as an unfortunate one did not survive fashionable 1960s ideas of sexual morality; its charitable functions had been largely taken over by council social services departments; therefore, it reinvented itself as a feminist advocacy group, which concentrated on lobbying the government for very detailed changes to things like tax law and the rate of child benefit.

I pass no comment here on whether the old or the new versions are more legitimate. Both have been reflections of the prevailing culture. The interesting thing is the evolution over time. One side of this, of course, is mission creep, the occupational hazard of the do-gooder. That’s how Amnesty, since it dropped its ban on domestic campaigning, has developed a whole range of policies that have very little to do with Amnesty’s historic remit of supporting prisoners of conscience. But what interests me more is the changing relationship between the voluntary/charitable sector and the state.

This is something we’re familiar with locally in terms of the grantocracy. We can trace much of the phenomenon back to a pacification strategy developed by the Northern Ireland Office under Douglas Hurd and Tom King back in the 1980s. A key aspect of that was to counter Sinn Féin’s popularity in areas like west Belfast by funnelling development funding through agencies run by the Catholic hierarchy – a strategy so blatant that some local priests remonstrated with their bishops about being turned into political pawns.[2] Under the New Dispensation, and with US and EU peace money flowing in, this has reached the point where the peace industry is now the largest employer in the north.

One thing we’ve been able to trace through the peace process is what’s happened to the voluntary sector – or to be more precise, the funded community sector. We’re not simply talking about extravagances like building a huge new theatre in Newtownabbey. (There may of course be a great appetite for Brecht in Rathcoole, but it would surprise me greatly.) We’re talking about a situation where a small charity will get a grant, will then get a suite of city centre offices and some professional staff, and find itself spending much of its time advising the government on its specialist area.

This is where Ed’s lament on the coalition’s failure to significantly reduce the number of quangos is probably a bit forlorn. In fact, I’d hazard a guess that the Big Society will mean more, not less, quangos, and here’s why.

It’s not just that the structure of government in Britain probably requires a certain number of quangos (though there are certainly too many). More to the point is how we conceive of a quango. Classically, a quango is a government body hived off and given a semi-autonomous agency status. But what if it works the other way around? If a charity is largely funded by taxpayers’ money and spends most of its time and energy influencing government policy, hasn’t it become a quango in all but name?

It’s as well here to take the long view. The great flowering of charitable activity in the Victorian period took place in a context where the state was failing to provide even a basic level of care to its citizens who had been uprooted in the Industrial Revolution and were crammed into sprawling, poor, insanitary cities. Whatever the dreams of small-state libertarians, or the fears of those at the sharp end of benefit cuts, an out-and-out return to this situation is not likely.

We then see a development where after 1918, and particularly after 1945, Big State comes in to provide a safety net and obviates the need for a lot of the pre-existing charitable sector, which continues to thrive only in certain areas where the state either doesn’t intrude (animal welfare is a good example) or works through voluntary agencies (overseas disaster relief). Although, and this is important, there is no Chinese wall dividing the two.

Let’s bring in the material factor here. Over the past couple of decades, many charities have become increasingly dependent on public money. Lottery money, fair enough, is not strictly taxpayer money, but fulfils many of the same functions. On top of that, factor in direct grants from government departments such as the DCLG and DfID, local councils or, for that matter, quangos. One can’t blame often cash-strapped charities for taking what they can get (though bureaucratic processes favour better-off charities who are better at filling out grant applications), but obviously there are strings attached.

Let’s take another example, that of Stonewall. As you know, Stonewall cut its teeth as a campaigning organisation, though it’s long since won virtually all of its demands. It has also, under New Labour, become increasingly involved in what’s termed “policy development”. I know Stonewall is often criticised by the more agitprop wing of gay activism for becoming the government’s in-house gay lobby (to which one might add pointed questions about exactly how representative it is), but Mr Ben Summerskill and his associates might respond that they’ve exchanged independence for influence – such as having a scrutiny role over just about any government policy that might conceivably affect gay people. Now, Stonewall is not quite a quango yet – it still does independent stuff, and its state funding is outweighed by private and corporate donations – but we might look on it as a transitional form, like Archæopteryx.

So what does this mean for the quango state? I would argue, as a counterpoint to Ed, that the whole Big Society programme is likely to mean an increase, not a decrease, in the size of the quango state. Oh sure, there may be fewer bodies officially styled as quangos. But we’ll see more and more charities and voluntary bodies[3] which are funded to a greater or lesser degree by the state, do work on the state’s behalf, and increasingly come to function as quangos.

In days of yore, Marxist theoreticians used to talk about “state capitalism”, as an organic tendency of the state and capital to fuse. Perhaps, in thinking about how the third sector is going, we might have a category of “state voluntarism”.

[1] On the history of the National Council as a mirror for changing social attitudes, there is exhaustive detail in Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain, Chapter 8.

[2] There’s an obvious parallel with New Labour’s largely unsuccessful attempts to counter Muslim radicalisation by writing cheques to people like Ed Husain.

[3] One bellwether to watch is Citizens UK, the umbrella group of largely faith-based charities that’s been very enthusiastic about the Big Society, notwithstanding its support from the arresting combination of the Catholic hierarchy and the trade unions.

10 Comments

This charming man

August 30, 2010 at 6:54 pm (Atheism, Catholicism, Uncategorized)
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Here’s an absolutely lovely quote from Titus Oates of the National ‘Secular’ Society:

For too long the Jewish community behaved like an arrogant, unaccountable arm of the government and of the law aided at every turn by a fifth column of Jews whose primary, indeed seemingly only, loyalty is to their own kind. Having so comprehensively abused their place in the corridors of power, they now need to be banished from them.

Oh, I’m sorry. Mr Oates was in fact talking about Catholics. So that’s all right then.

As Mr Oates is weighing in on the Chesney affair, there are one or two other points in his barking mad editorial that are worth remarking on. Let’s just note in passing that, as far as we can tell from the Hutchinson report, the cover-up was instigated by the government and police, while the Church authorities were brought in to get Chesney out of the way. Mr Oates of course cannot admit this, as in the NSS view of the world the State is a God-term. It’s the same way that, while he references the Ryan Report, one will find no acknowledgement that not a single child would have gone into the industrial schools without the approval of the Department of Education, the Garda Síochána and the courts. Which is not to deny Church responsibility, just to point out that the responsibility wasn’t the Church’s alone.

What’s also remarkable about this is that Mr Oates ventilates rather a lot on the Irish state. Maybe my memory is faulty, but I thought Willie Whitelaw was a minister in the British government. And that the RUC had its headquarters in Belfast, not in Dublin. Of course, this is rather inconvenient for the flow of Mr Oates’ argument, given that his view of the Irish nation is roughly equivalent to that of a nineteenth-century Punch cartoonist. So the Brits get quietly brushed under the carpet.

Finally, note the reference to the government being riddled with fifth columnists who need to be sent packing. Nice to see that our 21st-century rationalists can still channel the spirit of the 1840s when it suits them. Of course, this all very reminiscent of the episode a couple of years back when NSS honorary associate Mary Honeyball MEP called on the Labour Party to keep papists off the front bench, and followed it up with paranoid ravings about the Vatican’s alleged stranglehold on the British parliament and mass media. Or their other honorary associate, the sane and rational Johann Hari, who is living proof that you can take the boy out of Govan but you can’t take the Rangers Supporters Club out of the boy.

Indeed, Mr Oates has quite the track record at this sort of witch-hunting, having argued, for instance, that Mark Thompson is unfit to head the BBC because he’s a Catholic. Not that it’s ever stopped the BBC running fawning interviews with Mr Oates, where he can be confident that his many terminological inexactitudes will never be challenged.

If Mr Oates is really that worried about popish fifth columnists, and fancies campaigning for the reinstatement of the Test Acts, perhaps he could have a word with new equality minister Lynne Featherstone, who is on record as opining that religious believers shouldn’t be employed in the public sector. Ms Featherstone is not yet, I see, one of the NSS’s small army of honorary associates, but I think she’d fit right in.

And since Mr Oates will be on our screens and in our papers a good deal more over the coming weeks in his capacity as co-leader with Peter Tatchell of the No Popery Coalition, it will be worth keeping a close eye on him.

41 Comments

Birmingham Three: the plot continues to thicken

August 22, 2010 at 10:35 pm (Catholicism, Uncategorized)
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I must apologise for the lack of service here the past while. Evidently, your host is somewhat lacking in the old Protestant work ethic. Moreover, I’m a firm believer in the philosophy that, if you’re feeling out of sorts, the blogosphere is not going to make you feel better. There are certain things that might make you feel better, like a Wodehouse novel, a box set of The Prisoner or a glass of dark liquid, but the blogosphere is not one of them. It tends to have a bad effect on the blood pressure.

Anyway, the Birmingham Three saga is more uncontainable than ever. I gotta give mad props to my main man Will Crawley, who was covering it on this morning’s Sunday Sequence, and big up also to Martin Beckford on the Telegraph. It’s certainly one in the eye for those ecclesiastical bullies who would rather have the whole affair silenced.

James reminds us that the Three have now passed more than a hundred days in exile, and that you have to commit a pretty serious crime for the secular courts to send you down for a hundred days. The draconian punishments meted out to three men who, it is admitted, have not committed any offence, seems more than a bit off. It’s all a bit strange, so let’s do a recap. I should say in advance that, while there are all sorts of interesting sidelines to the affair, not much is known for certain. However, even sticking to what’s known and making a bare minimum of deduction, the timeline prompts a number of questions.

Let’s go back to the beginning. In the autumn of 2007, a 20-year-old man approaches Birmingham Oratory seeking to become a priest. He isn’t accepted, but he does strike up this intense relationship with the Provost of the Oratory, Fr Paul Chavasse. The word is that there was no nookie involved – a “close but chaste” relationship is how it’s being put – and we must take that as read, but it was sufficiently visible a relationship to excite comment, especially as Fr Chavasse is as camp as a row of tents. (And yes, I know that camp and gay aren’t the same thing. But we’re talking here about impressions given.)

At this point we have to do a little deduction, so a health warning applies to this paragraph. We may reasonably assume that words were spoken amongst the Oratorians. One important thing to bear in mind is that even assuming there was no nookie involved – which would be difficult to prove either way – allowing the impression to be given that there might be would fall under the category of giving scandal. It’s also important to remember that the gay aspect, while it may add a bit of piquancy, is not necessary for giving scandal. For what it’s worth, those who know Fr Dermot Fenlon swear he isn’t homophobic and the authorities (in the person of Jack Valero) explicitly say he isn’t being accused of such. The fact is that if a middle-aged priest had formed a visibly intense (if chaste) relationship with a 20-year-old woman, it would still be inappropriate behaviour, or at the very least imprudent.

Now then. We are told there was disharmony in the community resulting from this affair. Not surprising, since it’s a tiny community – there are only ten or twelve priests at the best of times, and currently there are only five – and these small religious communities, very much like families, can harbour seething dissensions for a long time. It is further alleged that reports were made to Rome, which is how Fr Felix Selden came to be at the Oratory as Apostolic Visitor.

Fast forward to last December. Abruptly, Fr Chavasse resigns as both Provost of the Oratory and Actor of the Newman Cause. He vanishes from the Oratory, either having been sent away on a long-term retreat or being sent to a parish in America, depending on who you’re talking to. At any rate, he’s gone, and without explanation. Why so abruptly? Perhaps it had something to do with the upcoming papal visit and Newman beatification, with the prospect of B16 dropping into the Oratory for a meeting with the community. Perhaps it had something to do with that TV documentary crew that was hanging around the Oratory. Not being able to read the minds of Felix Selden and Ignatius Harrison, we don’t know.

This may have been the end of things, with the source of the dissension out of the picture. But no, around April rumours of the Chavasse affair begin leaking out into the press. This seems to have spooked the authorities, because it’s shortly afterwards, in May, that Fr Dermot Fenlon, Fr Philip Cleevely and Br Lewis Berry are sent to the Catholic equivalent of Guantánamo Bay – which is to say, ordered to monasteries some hundreds of miles apart to spend an indefinite period in quiet contemplation. With the stress very much on quiet. As with Fr Chavasse, there was no reason given, and the few statements coming from the Oratory served only to confuse things more.

Ten years ago, this might have just been a passing storm, but as we keep saying here, the blogosphere has changed Catholic affairs and meant that the old Tammany Hall methods – well, maybe they aren’t quite untenable, but they’re less tenable than they used to be. From a few disgruntled parishioners at the Oratory, who had seen four members of the community abruptly removed in a short space of time without explanation, this has gradually snowballed. Not least because the papal visit runs a distinct risk of turning into a fiasco even without trouble at Brum Oratory.

The whys and wherefores are obscure, except that the Chavasse affair was the proximate cause. Were the Three, as speculated, the ones who confronted Fr Chavasse? Did they, alternatively, protest the rather brutal removal and humiliation of the much-loved Chavasse? (The two are of course not contradictory.) Were there, given that all those concerned were heavily involved in the Newman Cause, ideological factors to do with the legacy of Newman? Was it just a matter of Church authorities’ well-established dislike for troublemakers? These are some of the questions that people are asking.

And so we are where we are. Fathers Fenlon and Cleevely are said to be in North America, and we do know that Brother Lewis has been sent off to South Africa for at least a year. Apropos of Brother Lewis, since he’s the youngest of the Three and still on the ordination track (actually, his ordination is taking an extraordinarily long time), away from home and cut off from his friends, he has been in a vulnerable enough position that you couldn’t blame him for taking whatever deal he’s been offered. Not least because these orders can be very persuasive when they put their minds to it. If I were a cynic with some knowledge of how Church affairs work, I would speculate that the next step would be to strong-arm Fr Philip into a deal, so then the blame could be placed on Fr Dermot as the ringleader who led the two young men astray. But we aren’t cynics here, are we?

Adding to the murkiness is the prospect of Fr Chavasse returning home for the papal visit, which does make it look rather as if he was in protective custody while the other three have been in extraordinary rendition. Cue some more scratching of heads.

Finally, although we give Uncle Jack Valero a bit of stick around here, I actually feel a little sorry for him. This sort of crisis management would tax the best of spin doctors. At this point, some transparency is the only rational way forward, but I sense that Selden and Harrison don’t have transparency in their vocabulary. It’s something that, these days, all clerics should know about; a good Latin word and everything.

27 Comments

How they are connected, part two

June 23, 2010 at 1:01 am (Catholicism, Uncategorized)

By popular demand, we’re going to continue tonight with our project of putting Clerical Whispers out of business worm’s eye view of English Catholic politics. I’d like to begin by thanking Dr Ivereigh for obfuscating elucidating certain matters around Catholic Voices, and if you feel inclined to get stuck into Austen, just remember he was game enough to go on Newsnight and debate with Sinéad O’Connor, which must have been like debating with David Icke, and raises some questions about the judgement of the Newsnight editors.

To begin with Catholic Voices – and we must enter the plea that the project’s shy and retiring nature invites speculation – perhaps we can recalibrate somewhat. From the websites of both CV and the Catholic Union, it certainly appears as if CV is a CU project, that it is operating under the auspices of the CU, and that it is being patronised by Dan Brennan. Notwithstanding that the CU may not actually have handed over a cheque – and I have no evidence to dispute Austen’s account – the CU has certainly lent its brand, which is as good as a cheque if not better. Having the imprimatur of the Catholic Union makes it much easier to raise money, and furthermore allows one to use “Catholic” in the title without having to go through the usual episcopal channels. One may further note that, while the CU is a membership organisation, said membership is not known for being very assertive, and most of the time Dan and Jamie are able to run the show very much as they see fit.

Well now. Let us for the moment turn our attention to matters broader and older, and I want particularly to muse on the intimate connection between institutional Catholicism and the Labour Party.

Catholics, as a group, are significantly more likely to vote Labour than the British electorate as a whole. In the 2005 election, Labour polled 35% of the vote, but surveys suggest the party pulled in 53% of the Catholic vote. Most parish priests vote Labour; the Bishops’ Conference is heavily, though not exclusively, Labour in its sympathies. This well-known situation simply does not compute for the No Popery brigade on Liberal Conspiracy, and is a constant source of baffled outrage for Catholic Tories like Damian Thompson, but is easily explicable. One factor is simply that Catholics are significantly more likely to be working class, and significantly more likely to be of immigrant background, than the societal norm. (This includes young Damo himself, who is of course of Irish extraction.)

There’s also the factor that the basic concepts of Social Catholicism – communitarian, anti-war, anti-poverty, in favour of society placing restrictions on the market so as to serve the common good – are a pretty good mesh for what we might loosely term Old Labour politics. Not such a good fit for undiluted Thatcherism, although the moderate Christian Democracy of someone like Chris Patten would be acceptable. There was also, a generation ago, the persistence of anti-Catholicism in some Tory circles, although today that prejudice has largely migrated to the liberal-left. Those are the sociological and ideological elements; there’s also a straightforward element of power politics.

The broad alignment of the bishops with Labour goes back decades, although in many ways the architect of its modern form was the late Archbishop Derek Worlock. This, by the way, was a dividing line of sorts with Cardinal Hume, who had a broader concept of integrating the hierarchy into the British establishment and thereby getting past the pervasive prejudice about Catholicism’s foreignness. Generally, though, the BCEW came to bear an uncanny resemblence to the Labour Party at prayer. To get a sense of the persistence of this sort of outlook, despite radical changes in the LP in the interim, you have to remember that the English episcopacy consists of a couple of dozen men who all know each other very well, who hold their jobs for long periods, who tend to think very much alike, and who in many ways resemble an old boys’ club. I’ve mentioned previously that it was Worlock who gave Vincent Nichols his leg up the greasy pole in the Liverpool archdiocese; it’s also worth remarking that, when +Derek was working his previous stint in Portsmouth, his private secretary was none other than a young Fr Cormac Murphy-O’Connor. It’s a small world, indeed.

Speaking of which, a useful area of investigation for future biographers would be the remarkably close relationship between Cardinal Cormac and Mr Tony Blair. This keeps on popping up in a number of different contexts. There would be, for instance, Gordon Brown’s offer of a peerage to Cormac on his retirement, so he could sit in the Lords alongside the C of E bishops and Chief Rabbi Sacks. It’s not exactly a pontifical secret that Cormac was desperate to accept this – charitably, it would be an outward sign of Catholicism having arrived at the highest rungs of society; less charitably, while Cormac is a very very nice man, he’s also a terrible snob – had it not been for that pesky provision of canon law that forbids priests from holding political office. See the case of Bruce Kent, and see also the current president of Paraguay. Cue anguished phone calls from the Cormac camp to the Canon Law Society looking for a loophole, until the Holy See made it clear that there wasn’t one.

A more enduring aspect of this relationship is the current heavy involvement of the Mr Tony Blair Faith Foundation in the organisation of the papal visit. Not many people are going to turn a profit from the visit – possibly the guys who are paying tribute to the Bavarian pontiff with commemorative Pope Benedict beer steins, but I somehow don’t think they’re official – however, I would be astonished if the Mr Tony Foundation actually took a serious hit to the bottom line.

The BCEW-New Labour relationship, though, has other elements to it as well, which have come to mute the Church’s voice as its leaders have sought influence. Now, of course the bishops will have to deal with whomever is in power and build up relationships with them. Vincent Nichols, a Scouser and therefore not one of the world’s natural Tories, has been spotted hobnobbing with the Conservative Christian Fellowship; no doubt feelers have gone out to the few Catholics left in the Lib Dems, although neither Charlie Kennedy nor David Laws has that much influence these days.

Lobbying ministers is fine, but lobbying ministers at the expense of any other methods, like, oh, making a public argument, is not. When the Sexual Orientation Regulations were going through parliament and the threat to the adoption agencies became clear, the word from Eccleston Square was “we’ve spoken to Mr Tony and he assures us we’ll be all right”. When the recent Children, Schools and Families Bill was going through, the line was “we’ve spoken to Ed Balls and he assures us we’ll be all right”. And when the assurances turned to dust? Having eschewed making the argument in public in favour of talking to ministers, the bishops came to the argument late and just looked completely unreasonable. Losing an argument is fine, but losing an argument by default through not turning up until the last minute, and doing this repeatedly, is not fine.

Perhaps a lesson could be learnt from Stonewall, who are also extremely close to New Labour and have gained so much from government largesse as to be effectively a quango, but who still do the basic stuff of lobbying MPs, working the media and so on.

Nor is this simply a matter of defending one’s own sectional interest. Take the invasion of Iraq. You will recall that John Paul II, despite his failing health, was a very strong voice against the war, and that the Holy See did a lot of diplomatic heavy lifting at the UN prior to the invasion. Getting a firm position from the bishops in the aggressor countries was a tougher job. In the US, there was a grand total of one prelate who condemned the war outright – that would be the rather splendid Bishop Botean, the Romanian Uniate eparch, who threatened to excommunicate any of his flock who took part – but it took some arm-twisting on the part of the Vatican to get even a weak formal statement on the general desirability of peace out of the 300-strong USCCB.

Were matters better in Britain? Well, in Scotland perhaps, where Cardinal Keith O’Brien isn’t known for mincing his words. South of the border, there was plenty of word-mincing – while statements were issued, these were of the “yes, well, obviously war is always a bad thing, y’know, in a very real sense” variety which wouldn’t have ruffled any feathers on Thought for the Day. What would have been great would have been a tough formal statement, allied to some lobbying of MPs. I can think off the top of my head of several Catholic MPs – Geraldine Smith, for instance, or Jon Cruddas – who initially voted for the war but then came to change their minds, and whose backbones could conceivably have been stiffened. Would it have made a difference to the vote in parliament? Possibly not, but it could have made the vote close enough to be interesting. But then, all that would have meant not worrying too much about your chummy relationship with Mr Tony.

And this brings us back to the whole question of communicating your case, and it’s clear the discreet lobbying impulse lives on. I read in the current issue of the Suppository that Archbishop Nichols has been lunching with newspaper editors, and yea, has even met Uncle Rupert himself. At least this demonstrates that +Vincent understands the necessity of a proactive press strategy, even if his concept of a press strategy is straight out of the 1950s, and exactly the sort of thing that pisses hacks off. A modest suggestion – it may benefit the English hierarchy if their press officers could take time out from feuding with each other to actually issue press releases. Schmoozing journos wouldn’t hurt either, but baby steps.

And it is indeed the general hopelessness of official channels that leads us to the necessity of freelance operations like Catholic Voices. Actually, we’ve seen a precursor to that in the recent past, in the shape of the Da Vinci Code Response Group, which operated under the aegis of the Archdiocese of Westminster but was formally autonomous. It’s not clear exactly what impact the DVCRG had either in terms of Dan Brown’s bottom line or in terms of debunking some of the mythology surrounding the book. What is clear is that the DVCRG got an article into the Spectator, and on that basis the party line at Westminster declared it a massive success.

Oh yes, I knew there was something else. The DVCRG consisted of nine or ten members of the great and the good who all had particular areas of expertise, but there were three people effectively driving it. The first was Peter Scally SJ, who runs a magazine called Thinking Faith which caters to the many insomniacs one finds in the Society of Jesus. The other two were entrepreneurial Opus Dei honcho Jack Valero, and this blog’s good friend, diminutive Catholic intellectual Dr Austen Ivereigh.

Does this seem familiar? You bet your ass it does. What would be surprising would be if there was a major event coming up and Beavis and Butt-head weren’t involved in the media side.

Rud eile: I’ve noticed that of late this blog has been getting quite a few hits from Vatican City IP addresses. I would like to imagine that this would be some staffer on the increasingly weird L’Osservatore Romano, whose cultural section has just done a five-part series on the Catholic significance of The Blues Brothers.

Rud eile fós: Did I mention Benedict XVI beer steins? What say youse to a Pius IX cologne? David Beckham had better look to his laurels.

28 Comments

Slobodan Antonić: Predsednik i većina

May 15, 2008 at 9:28 am (Balkans, Uncategorized)

„Upozoravam stranke koje su izgubile na izborima da se ne igraju voljom građana i pokušaju da formiraju vladu koja bi Srbiju vratila u devedesete godine. Neću dozvoliti tu vladu i sprečiću je demokratskim putem”.

Ovo je u izbornoj noći rekao Boris Tadić. Uz to, Tadić je kritikovao i neke ,„neonacističke medije”, najavljujući da će nova vlada, uz reforme u policiji i vojsci, sprovesti i „reformu u medijima”.

Moram priznati da su me ove Tadićeve izjave iznenadile. Tadić ima mnogo zasluga za konsolidaciju demokratije u Srbiji. On se rešio ekstremista iz stranke i ogradio od njihovog ruiniranja parlamentarizma. Usmerio je stranku ka političkom centru i umerio njenu političku retoriku. Zahvaljujući tome, dobio je predsedničke izbore 2004. Nakon njih, poštovao je predizborni dogovor i nije rušio vladu. Kao predsednik republike, demonstrirao je kako treba poštovati institucije parlamentarizma. Učestvovao je, sa svim parlamentarnim strankama, u donošenju novog ustava. U vladi sa Koštunicom pošteno se držao dogovorene politike. Bio je lojalan partner, sve dok kosovski vir nije prenapregao vladin brod, pa se on raspao.

U izbornoj noći, međutim, kao da se pred nama pojavio neko drugi. Kao da je umesto Tadića pred novinare izašao Čedomir Jovanović. Naime, ideja da volja građana nije isto što i parlamentarna većina tipična je za LDP. Kada je Tomislav Nikolić izabran za predsednika skupštine LDP je odmah porekao legitimitet tom izboru. „Tačno je, za Nikolića je glasala većina”, objašnjavao je Jovanović („Poligraf”, 9. maj 2007), ,,ali ta većina nije demokratska, ta većina nije onakva kakva mora biti da bismo mi poštovali volju te većine”.

Zato je Jovanović 2007. tražio od Tadića da nikako ne daje mandat suverenističkoj većini. „Predsednik republike”, tvrdio je Jovanović, „nema ustavnu obavezu da bilo kome da taj mandat. Pored toga što ga neko uverava da postoji većina, pitanje je karaktera te parlamentarne većine. Ako ta parlamentarna većina ugrožava ono što u Srbiji predsednik republike, njen demokratski lider treba da čuva, onda oni ne smeju dobiti taj mandat”.

Da li je moguće da je Tadić na to mislio kada je rekao da će „demokratskim putem” sprečiti obrazovanje suverenističke vlade? Nevolja je u tome što demokratske ustanove funkcionišu samo ako u njima sede ljudi odani demokratiji. Ako se u njima nađu oni koji opstruišu sistem, demokratija se izvrgava u suprotnost. U parlamentarizmu se podrazumeva da predsednik republike sastav vlade poverava onom ko ima većinu. To se podrazumeva i u našem ustavu. „Kandidata za predsednika vlade Narodnoj skupštini predlaže predsednik republike, pošto sasluša mišljenje predstavnika izabranih izbornih lista” (čl. 127). Predsedniku, po slovu Ustava, nije zabranjeno da predloži i nekoga ko nema većinu. Ali, takav predlog je besmislen zato što ne vodi izboru nove vlade. Postupak će morati da se ponavlja sve dotle dok predsednik ne predloži mandatara iz skupštinske većine.

Šta se, međutim, dešava ako predsednik neće da predloži mandatara iza koga stoji većina? Takvu mogućnost moderni ustavi ne uzimaju u obzir. Zato je nije imao u vidu ni naš. Ali, po duhu Ustava, predsednik je sastavni deo postupka obrazovanja skupštinske većine. On pomaže da se ona lakše artikuliše i da se odredi mandatar. On je možda i glavni akter tog dela demokratskog procesa. Zato predsednik koji neće da predloži mandatara iza koga je uspostavljena većina krši duh Ustava. U demokratskom sistemu to utvrđuje Ustavni sud. A predsednik koji povredi Ustav biće smenjen. Smenu pokreće trećina narodnih poslanika, o čemu mišljenje, u roku od 45 dana, daje Ustavni sud. Na kraju, glasovima dve trećine poslanika, predsednik biva razrešen dužnosti (čl. 118).

Jasno je da se odbijanjem predsednika da mandat za sastav vlade poveri onome ko obezbedi skupštinsku većinu otvara najdublja politička kriza. Reč je o zaoštravanju političkih odnosa sa nesagledivim posledicama. Jovanovićeva ideja iz 2007. bila je da predsednik, vrdajući sa davanjem mandata, sačeka da prođe rok od 90 dana i tako iznudi nove izbore. Odgovor na to bilo bi pokretanje postupka pred Ustavnim sudom. Ali, taj postupak, zavisno od većine u Ustavnom sudu, mogao bi da potraje. Mogu samo da zamislim u kakvim bi se političkim turbulencijama Srbija našla. Pola stranaka bi organizovalo izbore, druga polovina smenjivala predsednika, pola Srbije bi priznavalo jednu skupštinu i vladu, druga polovina drugu.

I ja se, kao i drugi komentatori, nadam da je one večeri Tadića samo ponela euforija. Ali, činjenica da je na trenutak i on izgubio glavu svedoči o teškim političkim iskušenjima. Ovo su odlučujući dani za demokratiju u Srbiji. Cela elita za nju odgovara, a najviše oni koji su na vrhu. I baš ljudi na vrhu treba da znaju da im u tome nikakva „reforma medija” neće pomoći. Istina o izneveravanju demokratije, u ime čega god da se izvrši, teško da će moći da bude sakrivena.

Via NSPM.

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