From “BLACK AND BRITISH: A FORGOTTEN HISTORY” BY DAVID OLUSOGA, (pages 491-6) In June 1946 the British Cabinet Manpower Working Party determined that in order to meet her post war target, Britain would need 940,000 additional workers. By the end of the year they had raised their estimate to 1,346,000. To help fill this enormous…
Author: The Meeting Place
Black Lives Matter
…. “and so do white lives”, someone will instantly reply. Of course they do, but the point is that when some lives have been valued less, justice demands action to redress that inequality. We may applaud the present government’s intention to “level up” the North (even if we question its analysis and proposals), and no-one…
July 2020 First Thursday
Two matters in the news occupied most of our discussion: The impact of the Beijing Government’s actions on Hong Kong. Is it that Beijing is determined to subvert the 1997 One Country, Two Systems agreement with Britain and control Hong Kong- or is it a difference of interpretation of what that agreement meant? Since Deng…
Piketty’s proposals
The last mailing summarised Thomas Piketty’s account of how we got into our present position. This looks at his final chapter, where he puts forward proposals for a better economy and society in the future. He says: “New forms of social ownership will need to be developed, along with new ways of apportioning voting rights…
Thomas Piketty: Capital and Ideology
My Lent reading this year has been nothing explicitly “religious”: it was Thomas Piketty’s new book “Capitalism and Ideology”, published in French last Autumn and translated into English earlier this year. Though not religious or “spiritual” I would argue that it is at least as theological as some other books I was urged to read….
21st Century Endless War
Wilf Wilde at Wymington, January 18th, 2020 YEMEN, ARABIA AND THE MIDDLE EAST: A POST CHRISTMAS REFLECTION ON EMPIRE AND OIL YEMEN’S SAUDI PROPAGANDA STORY I have been working on Oil, Empire and the Middle East for the last decade, especially since the so called Arab Spring of 2011. I have wanted to talk on…
First Thursdays
Summary of First Thursday discussions Nov. 7th 2019 and Jan. 2nd 2020 The story of a 10-yr old boy who claimed that his ambition was to become a drug lord https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-50317250 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7656687/Boy-aged-TEN-dreams-County-Lines-drug-dealer.html provoked a discussion about the ideals offered to young people and the pressures put on them in society today. In the not too…
First Thursday, October 2019
Summary of the discussion October 3rd 2019: Zechariah talks about false prophets (13:4 to 6), people who wear hair shirts and beat themselves up to pretend they have a message from God. Our media and politics today are flooded with accusations of “Fake News”. In 1920s and 1930s Germany Joseph Goebbels knew the power of…
Summary First Thursday 5th September 2019
Micah chapter 4 (one of the readings for the morning prayers on September 5th) speaks of a time when nations “beat their swords into ploughshares, their spears into pruning-hooks” and do not “learn war and more”. In his book “Beyond Brexit” Vernon Bogdanor points out that the wars of the first half of the twentieth…
July 2019 First Thursday
Summary of the discussion, 4th July 2019 In the news was the growing conflict between the people of Hong Kong (or, at least, many of them) and the Beijing government, in its early stages at the beginning of July. Beijing, led by its President Xi Jinping, appears to be attempting to undermine what many in…