Take from Caesar what is Caesar's

I visited St Paul's Cathedral yesterday with my kids, who are 8 and 7. I wanted them to walk round it, ask why it was there, feel the history and climb the dome. I was shocked to find that the entry price on the door was £14.50 for me and about £6 each for them: nearly £30 for the three of us. That's steep: we could all have watched a same-again Pixar animation for half the price or gone to a cathedral of science in South Kensington for nothing. This shocked me, and not just as a Londoner, or because I had always got in free as a kid or, as an adult, take a Micawberish view of life and am usually a bit hard up at the wrong end of the month, which this was.

So I looked more closely and saw that entry was free if you are attending a religious service or intending to pray. This struck me as odd. Christianity is an evangelical religion: it seeks to convert heathens. People who attend services or wish to pray will already be believers. People who aren't believers tend not to. Why deter those who need to come to Christ by stinging them financially unless they are prepared to commit the sin of lying about their intention?

I challenged the man on the till, who referred me - rather wearily, I thought - to the Chapter House. Dragging my children by the ears I set off, but bumped into a cleric on the way. He said that I was not the first to raise the matter and invited us into a quiet place to discuss it.

Initially we took up strange positions: I, an unbeliever, trying to make the moral case for free admission; he, a cleric, trying to make the utilitarian case for charging. There was a touch of dishonesty in both our positions.

My case:

• A religion that seeks to convert undermines its purpose by deterring those who don't believe and welcoming only those who already do.
• It most deters those who are poor, many of whom the Church might consider most in need of it.
• I'm a bleedin' Londoner (OK, probably the weakest string in my bow, but I'm an emotional guy, and no one messes with my kids' education).

His case:

• The Church of England gets no state support, has to raise its own money, and traditional sources are dwindling in an increasingly secular world.
• Across the UK, the Church owns over 6,000 Grade 1 listed buildings which it is required to maintain, unsupported, at great expense, quite apart from those listed at Grade 2 and below.
• Most people who come to visit St Paul's do so purely as sightseers: they would visit Trafalgar Square, Madame Tussaud's or London Zoo in the same spirit. Compared to them, St Paul's is relatively cheap.
• Voluntary donation schemes have not raised anything like the money needed to maintain St Paul's, let alone lesser churches and the infrastructure that supports them.

I said that I thought the case he was making for charging - and at this level - made complete sense in financial terms (in fact it was pretty well unanswerable), but not in terms of the Church's mission, which St Paul's was surely there to represent and promote. Nor did it make sense in terms of encouraging non-religious but well-disposed people like me, who would make a point of speaking with their kids about the significance of such buildings and the beliefs that lay behind them so that they can, one day, make up their own minds. Had they, the Church, I wanted to know, given up on that; on us?

We then touched on what I think is fundamental to all of this: the demise of religious institutions in a secular age. And here, in a spirit close to lamentation and in a manner more sociological than religious, we began to agree. What he had said was true: most people do see a cathedral as no different from Big Ben or Nelson's Column; most will be no less indifferent to the Church's message than to the genesis of Parliament or naval strategy during the Napoleonic Wars. Are people able any more to have a point of reference (any point of reference) outside the self from which to derive - and with which to debate - meaning?

"People criticise David Cameron," he said, "but the Church has been doing 'The Big Society' for years." And so it has.

I wanted to say more, to talk and listen all afternoon, but one of the kids, who had been promised the climb to the top of the dome, had started to gnaw my right leg in frustration, and my legs are not one of their '5 a day' as prescribed by the secular authority.

The man said that he could give us a free pass to get in. I said that I would donate £10 and gave a fiver each to the kids to put in the donation box as we passed. And they got a right and proper and respectful tour of St Paul's Cathedral from me that day, so they did, and by the end of it I like to think they had a fair idea of where that money - which would have bought all of five ice creams - had gone. And they wowed at the view from the top.

I am not sure that I was right, or that my motives were pure (not that one is necessarily dependent on the other); I disagreed with the utilitarian response I got from the man, and I stand by that; but my God, I like to think I got a flavour of the predicament for them, and for the rest of us too, and I feel just a bit humbler - if not poorer - as a result.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

Leon Trotsky would have admired modern Britain: it is a backward country that has achieved a state of permanent revolution while the Germans sit in bourgeois comfort. This is no less so in true-blue Buckinghamshire, where I stable my own Trojan Horse, where the Conservative Party holds 46 of the 57 seats (on fewer than half the votes mind!) and which achieves unintended year on year what the international revolutionary movement failed for decades to foment on purpose.

As a nation which prides itself on being the most stable and settled in the world, and as a people with a name for a cautious, deliberate, pragmatic and almost hostile approach to change, this may seem odd. But, far from drawing on our supposed continuity and deeply-rooted sense of self, look how much changes at the hands of those who most loudly proclaim them, and how quickly; is redefined, renamed, reframed and, like so many wheels, reinvented all the time, even when they may not be wonky. It indicates neither confidence nor vitality but ... uncertainty.

Is it just possible that, to adapt a song about every England football manager that I can remember, We Don't Know What We're Doing?

Look particularly at government - at all levels. With or without recessions, in good times and in bad, it seems compelled to inaugurate change, and somewhat after the manner that Basil Fawlty approached the concept of panic; namely, as the great man said when asked to refrain from it: "What else is there to do?"

For example, when Gordon Brown became Labour Prime Minister, shortly after being voted the most successful ever Chancellor of the Exchequer [IPSOS-MORI poll of 300 academics, all members of the Political Studies Association, November 2006], remember how it was reported that he had used the word 'change' three hundred and nineteen times in his first speech to the Commons? What we needed was more of the same, surely?

And now that the obese and flatulent corpse on which Brown rode to power has burst, what is the solution to our woes and the key to our salvation? With what shall we mop up the mess? Why, 'change'! It was the Conservative Cameron's campaign slogan; great change, unprecedented change; change, moreover, that we, this sceptical and sensible people, must embrace. What we need from the Conservative party is a strong dose of our native caution, surely? Is this man preaching 'the Big Society' without having read his Edmund Burke?

And what of the great responsibilities of the state: education, health, the welfare of the unfortunate (or importunate, as you like)? Shouldn't these be based on a relatively settled and shared understanding of what the state is to provide, and based in turn on a reasonably clear social compact? Yes they should, but no they aren't.

Again, for all the dynamism of the rhetoric it betrays uncertainty; a vacuum into which rush all sorts of bogus, transitory and contradictory little certainties that will be replaced tomorrow.

No wonder that we are all lever-pullers now, and that we ask not "whether?", but only "how?".

My annual lecture: An Invitation

I would like to invite all followers to my forthcoming Wycombe Arts Society lecture at High Wycombe Town Hall on Monday 18th April at 7.30pm.

Taking an unashamedly Health and Safety approach to E.M Forster's A Passage to India, I shall venture that the author's true purpose was not to unmask the failings of Empire or even to attempt a more general treatment of cross-cultural understandings, both of which I regard as 'problematic', but rather to essay an early - indeed, seminal, if flawed - attempt to critique failures to carry out appropriate risk assessments before leading trips and journeys.

I shall contend that this message has never been more appropriate than today.

I look forward to seeing you both there.

More pedantry please!

Don't knock pedantry.

Bertrand Russell said that a pedant is simply someone who prefers their opinions to be right not wrong.

I'll add to that: a good pedant will be as prepared to challenge their own views as they are to challenge others'. This virtue is rare in the non-pedantic community, many of whose members are indifferent towards the quest for truth as well as being dogmatic about their relativism, which they fail to find an odd place to stand.

Edukashun, Eddukation, Edcutation

In the 19th century, extending schooling to those considered the scum of the earth was seen by many of their betters as threatening to general social wellbeing. But on the whole it was rightly embraced and valued by those who got it.

Today it's the reverse: unless we have a political purpose that requires us to lie about it, we lament and feel threatened by their lack of education despite pushing what passes for it at them at every opportunity.

Cameron is right in the wrong way

David Cameron is right to criticise the ideology behind multiculturalism and, in particular, the de facto segregation that has too often been the result of it. That a political leader in a position of power should do so is long overdue. Perhaps too long overdue.

But he is wrong to focus almost entirely on Muslims and Islamism. Firstly, it would be cheap and potentially dangerous political bandstanding even if he hadn't said it the day before the English Defence League march through Luton. Secondly, it encourages us to take our eye off the ball. The problem is much wider than Islamism.

Multiculturalism is a product of a broader - and, by the way, very Eurocentric - culture that makes a fetish of individuality, places often dubious notions of human rights over our core duty to the society that sustains us, and encourages social relations to amount to little more than a series of self-serving claims against people and institutions. These characteristics are deeply corrosive and entirely consistent with discourses from which, even now, no major party is able to free itself.

Governments of both left and right have encouraged this social atomisation over the past 40 or so years. Margaret Thatcher merely extended a selfishly individualistic economic version of Labour's social reforms of the 1960s to her own class; the post-socialist left then replaced whatever social vision it once had with a servile and attenuated individual that was only good for ever-increasing therapeutic manipulation by the state.

Multiculturalism is entirely at home when those two agendas meet, as they have for too long.

I hope that's glib enough for a Saturday morning. Shoot me down. Please.

The Rich will always be with us, so let them pay for the privilege.

This is an edited and slightly adapted version of part of my response to Buckinghamshore County Council's consultation paper on its new budget, which I sent in today. The Council has to make big savings (this I acknowledge and understand) and has set out how it will do it and where the savings will come from.

I don't intend this post to cover all aspects of the consultation paper, but just two:

• A couple of general points about saving money spent on bureaucracy and reducing funding for youth provision (this is because it is my line of work)
• A critique of the decision to freeze Council Tax, the means by which local councils raise money from local people (this is because it pisses me right off).

What follows is a little more colourful than my response to the Council, but the argument is the same. What do you think?


1. Do you agree with the priorities in our Budget Strategy?

No.

If you disagree, can you tell us what you would do differently?

You could save money by reducing costly, time-consuming and onerous bureaucratic impositions on Council employees. These include many health & safety and risk assessment requirements, cumbersome recruitment, employment and staff management (including disciplinary) procedures, and an excessive preoccupation with micro-managing not just activity but also - I'm sad to say - inactivity at all levels. I acknowledge that there is little chance of reducing some of these burdens, because the fear of litigation that pervades government at all levels emerges as responsibilities you can't often dodge. However, as a Council employee I am horrified daily by the financial cost of them and the drain they impose on both what we do and the morale of the staff who do it (or, increasingly, and in part as a result, don't do it). There is certainly room for manoeuvre. Some button-pressers and lever-pullers will have to go as a result of purging these often pointless procedures, but some of the savings will allow you to create new jobs at the point of service delivery and in the administrative functions that directly support them, which are too often, and mistakenly, the first to go.

With regard to my speciality, rather than requiring all but two youth centres to close if community groups can't be found to run them within a few months, you should either fund and sustain a youth centre in each of the larger towns in the county (this would be fewer than half the number you run at present) or whole- or part-finance someone else to do it for you. These won't just be places where kids can go to play pool and table tennis, but centres offering a whole range of services for young people, so there will be cost savings and outcome benefits through integrating our work with partners'. It is already done in parts of the USA and the Scandinavian countries. This will give the opportunity to offer informal and developmental social education to those often most in need of it, and will reduce expenditure on more costly and long-term remedial work later on.


2. Do you agree with the proposal to freeze Council Tax?

No.

This decision is poor, unfair and shows weak leadership. The issue is not that poorer people can't afford a rise, but that richer people can. Buckinghamshire is one of the wealthiest counties in Britain. Sadly, it's also a good example of one of the most embarrassing things about Britain, which is the close and visible conjunction of private wealth and public squalor. Nothing shows this better than driving or (heaven help me) cycling along Burke's Road or Burgess Wood Road in Beaconsfield, crashing over potholes and slapdash road repairs past gated, 8-bedroom Hollywood mansions with four cars in the driveway, a nanny in every room and a gardener in every bed (or is it the other way round?).

Therefore you need to increase Council Tax on properties above a certain band. It will raise money, and you'll get away with it.

OK, higher income tax and reduced bankers' bonuses may or may not drive the wealthy abroad, but the citizens of Beaconsfield or Bledlow Ridge are hardly likely to move to Slough, are they? Nor are they likely to erode the Conservative Party's Ozymandian majority on the County Council, at least for the time being. So let them sell one of the Astons and, when they complain, make a gesture by fixing their roads first; but don't give in on the cash. Reinvest it in the more viable of the services you will otherwise be cutting. Who stands to lose? Maybe The Crazy Bear in Beaconsfield Old Town, BeetleBonnets Waxing Emporium and a few shoe shops, but that's about it.

If you really believe in 'the Big Society' - which is a noble idea with a longer heritage than many think, despite its present appearance of faddishness - then the fact that Buckinghamshire County Council raises more money locally and receives less in the form of government grants than almost any other should not just be celebrated, but extended.

Envy? Nah.

Here's your chance.