Monthly Archives: February 2008

Church, Politics

Dealing with Church Politics

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In a meeting on Monday, I used the term ‘Church Politics’ which was greeted with some surprise by one member of the committee who said that there wasn’t any politics in our Church… Didn’t take him long to concede that there was though…

The problem we have at the moment is what should have been purely and administrative issue, which thanks to a lost e-mail has spiralled into a much larger pastoral problem – probably the perfect example of why ‘Church Politics’ are so complicated.

Our situation relates to on of the church groups – like any other they exist under the umbrella of the PCC, so when ‘they’ wanted to buy equipment, it was actually the PCC who bought it and legally own it.

Back in 2006, they made a rejected bid for lottery funding for a community project they wanted to undertake, so went to the local council for advice. The expert there, who has a one hundred percent success rate at getting funding apparently, said that the problem was that they were too closely associated with the Church, as a result they effectively recreated their group as a separate legal entity. The problem came from the fact that they informed the PCC via an e-mail, which it seems was never received.

Roll on to just before Christmas, and all the PCC get an invitation to a launch event celebrating the group having received funding – since the group separated they had not had to consult the PCC about the application. However since the PCC hadn’t discussed their new group at all, most people still thought it was part of the PCC. The fact that they are a legally separate group is a bit of an issue because all the equipment bought by the group prior to the split is legally the property of the PCC, and anything bought afterwards is theirs. Since the PCC has to account for all it’s assets we unfortunately can’t just give away the equipment used by the group.

As a result there have been accusations flying around all over the place, and yesterday I ended up in a meeting with three of the group, the rector, and the advisor from Wokingham Borough trying to pick a way through the mess. On both sides we’ve got rather hurt and angry people, all of whom seem to be managing to repeatedly misunderstand each other. Hopefully we made a good deal of progress, but we still have to get everything sorted out.

So any lessons to learn? I think the biggest is that if you’re on a PCC, make sure that you know what your groups are doing. Our PCC, like most I expect, doesn’t hear anything much from any of their groups most of the time – there will maybe be the occasional request for money, but with this group, nobody really spotted what was happening. The issue here was that the notification to the PCC of the change consisted of verbal conversations with some members, none of whom actually seemed to take on board what was happening, and a single e-mail that got lost. The members of the group admitted that they didn’t really understand the wider implications of what they were doing when they wrote their constitution, and the expert from Wokingham Borough didn’t seem to understand the restrictions that a Church of England Church operated under either. The other lesson to learn is not to rely on e-mail – much like any other communication medium, messages can get lost.

Politics

Distraction Politics

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So there you are as a government, taking a significant amount of heat for wasting a large amount of money on something before following the advice other parties were giving in the first place, what do you do? Why not distract the general populace by re-launching a debate on immigration!

The hot new idea this time is for people to do citizenship tests to ‘prove their worth’ – this follows on from the last hot idea less than a year ago to have a points system, and of course a citizenship test has been in place anyway since 2005.

Of course the irony is that a large number of British Citizens (and probably MP’s) probably wouldn’t be able to pass the existing test anyway. For example, try this question:

Why did the Protestant Huguenots come from France to the UK in the 16th and 17th centuries?

Most will probably get this one wrong too:

Where does most of the money for local government come from?

a) The National Lottery
b) Council Tax
c) Central Government Funds
d) A local income tax

The correct answer being c.

Of course, the announcement kicks off the usual rash of misinformed public outcry, so the various forums are already full of the usual rubbish about immigrants coming in to claim benefits and so on. For the record, immigrants pay taxes but cannot claim any sort of benefit – when Beth came in one of the things I had to sign as her sponsor was a document saying that I would financially support her as there was no recourse to public funds. In terms of the existing charges (part of the proposal is that they should be more) the current charge to naturalise as a British Citizen is £655.

Of course what it won’t address is the groups that people seem to have most problems with, which is the Eastern European migrants, who being EU citizens don’t come under the normal immigration system. Incidentally, the inaccurate rubbish about them being a drain on resources extends to them also, as they also aren’t entitled to any benefits or social housing either – hence why most end up living in massively overcrowded conditions in the lowest quality private housing.

The idea that this latest announcement is just another round of rabble rousing spin becomes even more clear when you look at some of the more detailed documents that the government are producing – an interesting read is “The Economic and Fiscal Impact of Immigrationâ€? which the Home Office produced in October. Section 2 outlines the effect on public finances paragraph 2.2.6 stating that in the long run it is likely that the net fiscal contribution of an immigrant will be greater than that of a non-immigrant.

It is also interesting reading section 5 which talks about why companies are employing migrant workers rather than British born workers – it seems that the opinions of those running businesses is rather different from the general view in the media. In the low-skilled and low paid jobs, paragraph 5.2.2 states that the

“…overwhelming majority of employers across sectors and regions started to recruit migrant workers because they could not get applications from domestic workers…â€?

Paragraph 5.2.4 is perhaps even more damning about British workers:

“Native workers sometimes proved unreliable in certain sectors… Some employers had tried recruiting applicants via a Jobcentre, but found that they sometimes turned up for interviews purely to get a form signed to enable them to receive Jobseekers’ Allowance.â€?

In paragraph 5.2.5:

“Polish workers were generally valued in London, where they were seen as highly-motivated skilled workers who could fill a skills gap.�

Paragraph 5.2.6 said that one employer in the Finance and Accountancy sector was headhunting internationally due to the very small pool of qualified applicants in the UK. Section 5.2 continues highlighting other business surveys that show the same thing – the migrants that are apparently a drain on our resources are being actively sort by British business to plug gaps where British workers are either unwilling or unable to do the jobs.

All of this outcry again harks back to the point that Ekklesia made last month – it’s a lot easier to blame a group or groups of the population for societies ills rather than addressing the real issues. So youth get blamed for crime, lone parents get blamed for the breakdown in family values, migrants get accused of scrounging benefits. It all makes big headlines, but it never really achieves anything, as in most cases it’s not really addressing the real issues – it’s just distraction politics again.

Cars

The Fastest Milk Float in the West

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You say ‘electric car’ to most people in the UK, and the majority will think of the frustration of following a slow milk float in traffic. Certainly the milk float has contributed to the opinion that electric vehicles are generally pretty slow – indeed the production options for electric cars in the UK such as the G-Wiz, are really only viable as city cars – with top speeds of 40-50mph – quite apart from concerns over their safety in a crash. As a result, the environmental options for a car in the UK usually focus on hybrid cars such as the Toyota Prius or the competing Honda Civic Hybrid, both of which pair an electric motor with a regular petrol engine.

However, once you look in a bit more detail, you realise that in terms of performance, an electric motor has way more torque than a conventional engine – the problem with electric cars has always been the trade off between the weight of the batteries needed, against the range, against the performance, and in general range wins out resulting in slow moving electric vehicles. But it doesn’t have to be like that.

Over in Silicon Valley, it’s not just computer companies getting the attention. Over there is a company called Tesla Motors that is trying to disprove the ‘slow electric car’ moniker, with a British built electric roadster. The look will be fairly familiar – especially when you bear in mind that Lotus were involved with the design, and assemble the car in their factory in Hethel.

If you want to see one in action, Robert Scoble got a ride in the first production model, driven by Tesla Motors chairman Elon Musk. Needless to say he got the whole thing on video, and covers a lot of technical details about the car – this is the one to watch to find out how fast it goes, how cheap it is to run, what the range is and of course how much the thing actually costs.

What you don’t get with that of course is much of a view of the car in action. To get that, you need to watch a video recorded at the same time by Jason Calacanis as he struggles to keep up in a Corvette. The camerawork on the Calacanis video is a lot more wobbly – but there are some moments when you can quite literally see the Tesla roadster disappearing into the distance despite Calacanis having his foot to the floor trying to keep pace!

Movies & TV

The Ultimate Hidden TV?

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So there I was, sat in the opticians while Beth had her test flicking through Grand Designs magazine, and I came across an advert for a company called Mirror Media – probably just the kind of advert I’d skip over had I not been sat in a waiting room.

Anyway, on the Grand Designs TV show a couple of weeks ago they’d had a couple building a Addams Family style Gothic house, which in the living room had a grand fireplace with a mirror hung above, and then much to Kevin McCloud’s obvious disgust, a whopping great flat screen TV hung on the wall alongside – totally messing up the look of the room in his opinion. What Mirror Media are producing is something for those people, and all the other people who really don’t want a high-tech TV in their tasteful room, a TV that looks exactly like a mirror when it is turned off. They even do a bathroom version in case you want to watch the news whilst brushing your teeth, or sit and watch a movie in the bath.

Obviously it’s the kind of thing that would have to be seen in real life – my thought is that the mirror effect will have some effect on the detail and clarity of the picture. I’m also sure you pay a hefty premium for the mirror effect and frame too (they don’t mention prices on the site which always implies it will be expensive) so this is definitely something for those people with a lot of spare money floating around – still a clever idea though.