Scotland
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The
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Chris Holligan
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The care system
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Victoria Law, a delegate at the Young Scotland Programme, writes for SR
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Lockerbie
An overview by Morag Kerr of the Justice for Megrahi Committee
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Today’s banner
Within a few hundred yards of Commonwealth House, Glasgow
Photograph by
Islay McLeod
The Kirk’s gospel
according to
St Marx
John Cameron
I would have preferred to see some discussion on the inherited culture of poverty in the UK where people feel marginalised, helpless and inferior, living only for the present.
More importantly, the scheme does not aid economic development but instead ‘sustains’ uncompetitive farmers on their land, holding back diversification and mechanisation. Hopefully this is not the ‘sustainability’ the committee has in mind but the fact is that both Fairtrade and the odious EU tariffs deny future generations the chance of a better life. It is also surely a matter of regret that the Kirk’s attachment to global warming alarmism has made it antipathetic to air-freighted African delicacies and high-value products.
Many commentators on the report, including the Scotsman’s Peter Smaill, have noted its relentless Presbyterian negativity and ‘the dreary left-wing bias evident on every page’. While it claims that capitalism has pushed millions into poverty there is no mention of the 500 million who have escaped since 1990 under broadly capitalist regimes.
The report also ignores the probability that within the next couple of decades, two-thirds of world GDP will be held by nations which were developing countries in the 20th century. It contains plaintive echoes of the Make Poverty History march round Edinburgh in 2005 which attracted speeches from the great and the good and the downright deplorable. Who can forget the pious hokum proclaimed by Gordon Brown, Jack McConnell, Alex Salmond, Bianca Jagger, various defunct pop-singers and the usual clerical suspects? It was a prelude to the Gleneagles G8 jolly where, it was confidently asserted, real and lasting improvements could be achieved for the poor of the world, especially in Africa.
The fact that anyone believed that after eight years of New Labour a summit led by Blair and Brown would achieve anything bears witness to the triumph of human hope over experience. There was some modest debt cancellation but UK development aid fell by 2% which was particularly damning given that the pair had earlier paraded their virtue all over Africa. The Kirk’s involvement in this fiasco is understandably not referred to in the report but its claim that ending poverty is an entirely feasible goal insults the reader’s intelligence.
Jesus, by contrast, knew the inevitability of poverty in our fallen state and called upon his followers to respond personally in every opportunity to help the suffering poor. I would have preferred to see some discussion on the inherited culture of poverty in the UK where people feel marginalised, helpless and inferior, living only for the present. It makes them fatalistic with high rates of divorce, abandoned mothers and feral children and discourages participation in community life or the use of such things as banks.
It is clear that a similar culture exists in much of the Third World as well as countries in the early stages of industrialisation and it is obviously not limited to capitalist nations. Sadly the practical Christianity of such social reformers as Frank Field and Iain Duncan Smith is absent from this rather predictable treatise on the Gospel according to St Marx.
