Clerically clueless - The Church and the protestors

It is difficult to understand quite what protestors expected to happen when they tried to ‘occupy’ the London Stock Exchange a couple of weeks ago. Firstly, it’s a pretty well used building already so is in little need of further ‘occupation’. Secondly, it’s a privately owned building. Even Britain’s supine Police force was unlikely to allow a well advertised act of breaking and entering to take place.

So the protest was rather silly from the off. But as they kicked their heels outside the stock exchange the protestors knew enough to know that they would get a warm welcome from the Church of England, an institution which has become rather silly itself.

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Correcting the contextualisers

All property is theft

The response of some to the riots which swept the UK last month was to say “Yes, we know this is criminality, but you can’t ignore the cuts/poverty” While stopping short of excusing the violence which left five dead and caused millions of pounds of damage there was an attempt by these people to ‘contextualise’ it.

Contextualising is often little more than pinning the tail of your pet political cause to the donkey of whatever is in the headlines that week. So it was with the riots. As Kristian Neimetz blogged for the Institute of Economic Affairs the riots had nothing to do with material poverty. Neimetz points out that:

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