There was a time when the British, like their American and Canadian counterparts, believed in promoting equality. Now, all anyone cares about is equity. Housing equity. The UK, like the US, is entirely in the grip of the house-price inflationists. One of the most extreme examples is a recent BBC report, which reads like an investigation of satanic cults and their strange and twisted morality, but is actually about young workers who have not been able to afford to buy their own homes, and who, deep in their poverty-depraved hearts, wish secretly for… a decline in housing prices. Horreur! One “frustrated young professional” is quoted saying “I can’t wait for the crash. Bring it on… People talk about the crisis in the property market. But the real crisis is that so many people can’t afford a home of their own.” Terribly immature, the article suggests, as it goes on to quote a more mature voice, a 29-year-old teacher who “is old enough to remember the repossessions and negative equity that followed the crash in the early 1990s.” Even this otherwise reasonable person is being driven to vile wishes for a housing Armegeddon. “‘Morally, I feel bad about wanting it because I know people will end up on the street,’ she says. But unable to find anywhere affordable on her £30,000-a-year wage packet, she admits that doom-and-gloom headlines are giving her hope.”
Month: April 2008
The established church
One of the most seemingly archaic features of modern Britain — and the one that outsiders may be least prepared for — is the “established church”. Formal secularism takes many forms, in the US, Canada, France, Turkey; but one does get used to thinking of religion as no proper business of the state. Not in the UK, where the Queen is Defender of the Faith, and the Prime Minister had to wait until he had left office before he could comfortably change his religious affiliation. The highest position in society that anyone can aspire to who does not happen to be the first-born of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha — I mean, the House of Windsor — is to marry the first-born of this famous princely family, and a Catholic maiden, however virginal, may not aspire to this august status. (My impression is that current law currently restricts the spousal position to members of one sex as well, and the constitutional status of a same-sex civil partner of the heir to the throne is, so far as I can tell, still unresolved.) Apparently Jews, Muslims, and Wiccans are not formally excluded, though the tabloid press might raise a fuss if the next queen hosted witches’ sabbaths on a regular basis at Buckingham Palace. Balmoral might be another matter…
The most practical consequence of this establishment is that a large fraction of the state-funded schools (called “maintained schools”) are actually subsidiaries of the Church of England. The state provides most of the money, and the church gets impressionable children to proselytise at will. In some parts of the country these schools are selective and people get themselves and/or their children baptised to get them in; in Oxford, the C of E snapped up most of the good school sites long ago, and we’d have to travel far from home to find a non-church primary school. Not that that would do any good, given that daily Christian worship is required by law in all state schools. (To be precise, the communal worship must be “mainly of a broadly Christian character”, “which accord a special status to Jesus Christ”) There are literally no secular state-funded schools in the UK. You can worship whatever you want, as long as you do it in school, rather than in, say, a church or other such inappropriate institution.
Common Infirmities 