‘If you can’t find a book, write it yourself!’

I’m currently reading ‘Seeking Justice’ by Keith Hebden. He handed me a free copy to review on here, and I’ll do that when I’ve finished it. But its started me thinking about a book I want to write. Its not that I think he’s gotten anything wrong in his approach, its just I feel there’s a pretty big gap waiting to be fulfilled.

Sowing the seeds: Tax is Liberating

Its the 6th birthday of Graham’s Grumbles today! To celebrate, I’m posting something here which I wrote for Student Christian Movement‘s blog series leading in to their Seeds of Liberation conference.

Tax has always been a contentious topic. In 1773, Britain tried to force American colonists to pay taxes on tea imports. In an act of civil disobedience, crates of tea worth nearly £1million in today’s money were thrown off ships and into the harbour. What became known as the Boston Tea Party became a rallying cry for many on issues of who gets taxed, by whom and at what rates.

Kony 2012

An awful lot has already been said about Kony 2012, the campaign to draw Westerners’ attention to a hitherto rather forgotten warlord in Africa. Its covered the internet, and has received its share of criticism, primarily its reliance on white people to tell an African story, the focus on lobbying US senators not Ugandan diplomats, and the connections with military interests. But where has this campaign even come from? Who’s actually asking us to give them a voice? Who’s paying the piper and thus calling the tune?

A Housing Culture Crisis?

Today’s revelations about the state of Britain’s housing make for grim reading, but tucked away behind a lot of the reporting is a fundamentally flawed attitude towards housing ownership as one of life’s ultimate aims. It may not be a stretch of the imagination to name it as a contributing factor to our current crisis.

The Ramifications of Free Choice

There is an argument that about free choice that goes something like this: I have the right to make my mind up, and to decide as a I choose but if somehow my decision results in a later problem or inconvenience to myself, it wasn’t free choice in the first place. This arguments is applied in everything from bank bailouts to sexual health to the Christian doctrine of Salvation.

Scrapping compulsory retire is good, right?

The abolition of the Default Retirement Age seems to be a happening very quietly. For some it will come as a relief, and in the simplest terms, it isn’t exactly the fairest arrangement to have an arbitrary age at which an employer can “dump” you. But the drawbacks might well cause a problem in future years, and could end up hurting people at both ends of the age scale.

Train tickets rise, but what about the roads?

It may have come to your attention that train ticket prices are rising by something like 6%, or more like 12% for some in the South East. The easiest complaints to make centre around the effect of vampiric companies drawing profits from government subsidy. But these rises are based largely on the assumption that passengers should pay more and the government, i.e. the taxpayers, i.e. the passengers, should pay less. Privatisation/Nationalisation aside, this logic needs examining.

What could a 21st Century Workhouse look like?

The danger with predicting a repeat of history is the very messy way in which history partially repeats, subjected to the changing circumstances of the day. Someone commented on my choice of words in a previous post, daring me into a bet on whether or not this government would reintroduce the Workhouse system for administering the poor. They say “don’t feed the trolls”, but I’ll never learn…

Common Wealth Network: what should it do?

I’m writing this on here but also sending it to the organisers of the network: its something that’s been bugging me. Or rather, the question “what can Christians who reject the mass distraction of the ‘Big Society’ do?” has been bugging me, but then someone else wrote a 5000 word declaration on pretty much that. But a declaration alone can do nothing, especially not one that contains more theology and politics than it does practicalities. You can find the declaration here.

Corporate Tax: A time for Jubilee?

I’ve already written a fairly long political post advocating a movement for a reconnection of the World’s richest with those closer to the bottom of society through correct payment of taxes. This, if you’ll permit me, is a theological post. It feels wrong to divide the politics from the theology, but I’ll admit it took me a while to remember what now seems so thoroughly obvious: Jubilee – perhaps the single most radical command in the Torah, the earliest books of the Christian bible.