Church & State

I have been procrastinating with this post – it is a huge subject and not always easy to write about (nor read – I am not pulling my punches here, supporters of the church and royalists might want to look away). It is a summary of much that I have said before, but I do think we are at a critical moment with this.

Take it as read that almost every paragraph has at its end: that’s the trouble with being ruled by a system founded on mediaeval feudalism and land theft.

This is from Animal Trust:

The various Inclosures or Enclosures Acts, over the centuries, put land ownership and power into the hands of the few, displacing and removing the rights of local people who had often farmed their land for generations. It was the political sway of large landowners which enabled them to redistribute the land in their own favour. Not entirely dissimilar to the fate of the American Indians now on their reservations, the peasantry were immediately and hugely disadvantaged, offered smaller and inferior plots of land and a life of abject poverty. This land grab and power shift were further reinforced by the aristocratic rule of primogeniture (the rule of inheritance whereby everything passes to the firstborn or the firstborn male child) which ensured that those large estates were never broken up into smaller parcels. In the same way, there is far too much power now in the hands of the National Farmers’ Union and the road- and house-building industries. At a time when we have the greatest need for political and governmental transparency, lobbying by these and other interests carries on behind closed doors; wealthy and/or corrupt special interest groups continue to undermine democracy and shake our faith and trust, what’s left of them, in those we have elected to make decisions on behalf of all of us. Opacity and the revolving door whereby politicians, leaving office, are ushered into well-paid positions in industries where they have, as Members of Parliament, campaigned for looser regulation, or more funding in the form of subsidies, should be completely unacceptable and unthinkable.

And this is from my recent post:

Rewild the Church (and I Love Yew) – Animal Wild

50% of our land is owned by less than 1% of people. There is no land democracy. We, the unlanded, have no say. A campaign to persuade the royal family, the biggest landowner of them all, has met with some success: the Crown Estate has announced that they will release beavers and begin rewilding at Balmoral and the Duchy of Cornwall is expanding one of our rare temperate rainforests, but there is still a very long way to go. They could for example invest some of their huge profits from their estates into supporting tenant farmers who manage for wildlife.

And this is from another one:

Even more fungi, the Tree Register and a not so welcome presence in my hair – Animal Wild

But having watched Dispatches on Channel 4 last night, although the revelations were not new to me or surprising, the scale of the huge amounts of land and the income it generates for the king and the prince of Wales, in the form of the duchys of Cornwall and of Lancaster, and the special rules which apply (they voluntarily pay income tax on the revenue but are exempt from both corporation and capital gains tax) will have surprised many I suspect. There’s an argument that their and the Crown Estate’s ownership of most of the country’s foreshore and seabed (from low water to a twelve nautical mile limit) and, thanks to Tony Bliar (sic) in 2004, exploitation rights (generating royalties from wind and wave power), is better than its belonging to private individuals and companies so that at least it remains largely accessible and unspoilt. Dispatches proved that this is by no means always the case however, and as Guy Shrubsole whose new book The Lie of the Land is on my shelves waiting to be read points out, theft in the time of feudalism, which has never ended, is the only means by which the royal family and aristocracy came to own land in the first place. Some of the Crown Estate money goes back to the government in the end but that does not apply to the duchys. I happened to learn that money from intestate estates where no relatives can be found also finds its way to the royal family. The totals are not small sums – more than £1m to Charles from Cornwall in one year alone. Don’t they have enough? They could always sell some of their vast art collection much of which none of the rest of us ever get to see – we are not permitted even to see the full inventory of what the Royal Collection Trust’s website describes as “one of the largest and most important art collections in the world”.

The investigation was carried out in conjunction with the The Sunday Times where it has made headline news this morning. The royals do not just rake in money in this way from businesses but also schools, hospitals, prisons, councils, the RNLI, toll bridges, ferries, sewage pipes, pubs, churches, village halls and the military.

[King Charles will earn £11.4m over fifteen years by charging the NHS for ambulance storage.]

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Listening to reggae legend Big Youth whose style is probably best described as chanting and who laid the foundations of rap music (“Where were all them boys when I was chanting” he sings (?) of the younger generation), I was struck by a repeated phrase: “Church and State, hypocritical system”. It is a system which seems to me to be utterly corrupt.

The Church of England is digging itself ever deeper into the mire with the latest child abuse scandal, of which there have been so many in the Catholic and Anglican churches in particular. Justin Welby clung on, refusing to resign until further pressured and other senior, complicit figures are still resisting. A spokesman from the archbishop’s council explained how the church is already wriggling when it comes to financial compensation – if it didn’t happen on church property, not their problem. The church, he said, could not be held responsible for anybody abused by anyone anywhere in the country. He clearly didn’t realise or think about how that sounds. Smyth, the serial abuser, was closely associated with the church, a prominent evangelical Christian, and much of the abuse took place at Christian summer camps, here and abroad. The Bishop of Winchester, chair of the redress system was “not available” for comment. Now Welby has written an apologetic letter to the victims offering to meet. More than a bit late, mate. Smyth’s activities were covered up in 1982 and a culpable homicide case against him in Zimbabwe was dismissed. Smyth and Welby were close and sometimes attended the very same camps.

It is not unusual for perpetrators to go to Africa to resume their vile activities there. This is also from Animal Trust:

… then being physically warmed by teachers with extremely dodgy intentions, wandering hands and a worrying glint in their eye. I was educated privately and this sort of thing was an accepted commonplace. I largely enjoyed prep school and stayed out of trouble, but the headmistress, Miss Swinburne, was a nasty old sadist and canings and other beatings and humiliations of young children were the norm. Those were certainly different times. I will never forget my not unkind parents’ saying that what most impressed them about the school, when they were first shown around it, was the way in which the boys raised their caps and flattened themselves against the wall in terror when she hove into view. I mostly hated secondary school, a grim, joyless Victorian monstrosity, and although I was not ‘interfered with’ myself, everyone knew it went on (one teacher I liked told us that he’d written to the headmaster about it all, both to report it and to cover himself, but the letter was suppressed). I remain mentally scarred by the bullying. Years after I left a scandal finally broke, there were some swift, hushed-up exits, and one teacher served jail time …

As LBC’s James O’Brien said of what he knew was going on at his school, what he still can’t get his head around is why the grown-ups didn’t do anything. Paedophiles were indulged, known about, their crimes brushed under the carpet. It was a commonplace, the norm. As with the church, better to protect the institution at the cost of past, present and future victims. The late Derek Jones at my primary school, the subject of a very extensive police investigation, was especially prolific but he simply got shunted around from one job to another before emigrating to Kenya.

Isn’t it strange how paedophiles are drawn to and protected by the royal family too, in particular Peter Ball by his friend, then prince now king Charles. Jimmy Saville, Rolf Harris … Of course such people are drawn too to the church and private (in particular) education – there are their prey, and they know they will get away with it.

There is nothing new here. People may have forgotten about archbishop George Carey who, eventually and only temporarily, had his right to officiate removed after resigning from his post but not his orders nor his seat in the House of Lords because of his involvement in the cover-ups relating to, wait for it, Peter Ball and John Smyth.

It is all about the limitation of reputational damage creating an intrinsically and wholly immoral environment.

Fox hunting has its roots in feudalism too – it was in part a display of power and land ownership. It is going on right now – the hunt saboteurs are as busy as ever and there have been recent kills in spite of their best efforts.

It feels endless. The bishop of Gloucester said of Welby that he had “taken the institutional hit”. Again, did she not think about how that sounds?

Peter Ball was first reported in 1977 but did not quit as a bishop for fifteen years and was finally prosecuted as late as 2015. This is not all from some distant past, “different times” (that awful excuse so often trotted out): police in England and Wales reported 105,000 sexual offences against children in 2022-2023. Simply getting rid of a figurehead like Welby is not an answer. Headteachers would write positive references so that teachers would move on elsewhere without any fuss, without any damage to their institutions, as Alex Renton, a journalist and author of Stiff Upper Lip: secrets, crimes and the schooling of a ruling class, a title which says it all, says in his recent article.

Our monarchs, let’s not forget, are heads of both church and state.

The appalling abuses of the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland, usually run by Roman Catholic orders, went on from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries and, again, initial reactions to exposure from closely intertwined church and state were ones of denial, attempted abandonment of responsibility and cover-up.

There is, of course, so much more to say but I am trying to be reasonably brief.

Outraged farmers, who work in an industry also based on feudalistic ideals, are planning protests against the government’s new inheritance tax (IHT) rules. I am not entirely unsympathetic. I believe that IHT is a fundamentally unjust tax, imposed on the dead who have already paid tax on the money once. It was only ever supposed to affect the extremely wealthy but successive governments have refused to substantially raise the limits. But why should farmers be exempt? Everyone else has to pay it (over a certain level) – oh, wait, no, not the royals either – why shouldn’t they? They have not stopped self-mythologising since the Dig for Victory campaign in World War Two. I would hate to see big agribusiness take over smaller farms completely, the harm to farmed animals, wildlife and the environment are bad enough as it is, but the idea that farming and farming alone has some inalienable right to pass business down the generations is patently absurd. It is because of this that farmers are so resistant to change. Perhaps a good clear-out of all of these systems is what we really need. The protests planned so far will be peaceful, they say, but if they don’t get their way there are dark mutterings of stopping food supply and blocking every road in the country. If they do that, I do hope (it would only be fair) that they all get the same Draconian prison sentences as the Just Stop Oil protesters.

I have often repeated that when it comes to our abuse of animals, the book of Genesis with its possibly mistranslated use of the words “dominion” and “subduing” has a lot to answer for. The latest issue of PETA’s magazine has a fascinating article about the kindness theoretically inherent in the world’s religions, particularly in relation to animals, but as ever with religious texts, we ignore what we don’t like and interpret the rest to justify our actions. Muhammad, for example, condemned keeping animals in captivity, wearing their skins, experimenting on them and bullfighting. In 1569 pope Pius V forbade bullfighting. Why does the current incumbent not do the same, as PETA has campaigned for him to do?

The licensing of grouse moors is already a legal mess say Protect the Wild and NatureScot seems to be bowing to landowner pressure. Only a complete ban will do.

Church and state, church and state. I cannot get the words out of my head. The system is rotten to the core as manifestly as ever and we continue to be governed in this way in the 21st century based on crimes which took place in the Middle Ages.

Thank you if you have made it this far in the post – I am not saying I have all or any of the answers, but things need to change. The new government’s tax on employers (not working people according to Starmer) will of course affect workers less directly too, but financial black hole or not, they, like all governments, can always find money for things they want – £100m to be spent on an HS2 tunnel in Buckinghamshire and goodness knows how much on the Euston extension, although before the election he indicated that the entire futile, unwanted and corrupt project would be abandoned. This is not democracy any more than is being governed by old Etonians. .