Dear Reader,
Expert analysts often claim that the UK economy has a productivity problem, and it’s fair to say that the Pineapple bears some share of the responsibility. Our excuse is that a baby arrived in the office a few months ago, and the team here has been somewhat distracted. While he sleeps, we have assembled a traditional Pineapple roundup.
Speaking of babies, the great news of the last few months was of course the overturning of Roe v Wade. Yes, a beginning and not an ending, as Ross Douthat argued; yes, in one sense a drily technical ruling, as I observed at the Spectator. But the elderly nurse in Mississippi who wept tears of joy at this answer to decades of prayer, and the New Yorkers who marched in the street chanting “F***the Church, f*** the state,” accurately registered the importance of this moment. Personally I’m with the Mississippi nurse.
You often heard, in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s ruling, that pro-lifers are only concerned about unborn children, not about their fellow-humans who are actually walking around needing to be fed and housed and given medical care. I offered a response to this line of argument a couple of years ago:
This should be recognised as the kind of whataboutery which meets every humanitarian movement. When William Wilberforce was campaigning against the slave trade, it was argued—by, among others, the pioneering radical journalist William Cobbett—that Wilberforce was neglecting the suffering of British workers.
‘You seem to have a great affection,’ Cobbett sneered, ‘for the fat and lazy and laughing and singing and dancing negroes; they it is for whom you feel compassion: I feel for the care-worn, the ragged, the hard-pinched, the ill-treated, and beaten down and trampled upon labouring classes of England, Scotland, and Ireland.’
A similar argument is made today by those who wave away the rights of ‘foetuses’, while claiming that their real concern is for migrants and the poor. It is, now as then, a pitiful evasion.
All that said, the whataboutery is worth responding to. And the honest response is that, at the grassroots, pro-lifers are remarkably generous in caring for those at the margins of society. They give their time, their money, and even their homes: many adopt children whose parents are unable to raise them. Other pro-lifers devote their lives to offering practical help to vulnerable mothers and their children. Still others, knowing that each termination has at least two victims, help post-abortive women to find psychological and spiritual healing. And, yes, many pro-lifers work and campaign to support the already-born.
The pro-choice whataboutery is right in one sense: if you really believe every life is precious, that belief has serious consequences. It means that each life can be hoped for, even from the start, and that everyone has some responsibility to those around us. We defend each other now, and we defend each other later.
Usually people at least feign sympathetic interest when I tell them I’m writing an article about something or other. But reactions ranged from bafflement to disgust when I mentioned I was doing a thing on gasholders. “Victorian ruin porn,” one friend grimaced. Nevertheless, the article got written and I at least felt it expressed what I love about these gentle giants.
I had never thought twice about gasholders until a few months ago when, cruising down the Regents Canal by narrowboat, I found myself looking at Bethnal Green’s wrought-iron behemoths. Or was I looking through them? Like the Eiffel Tower, they combined delicacy with vastness. Perhaps you wouldn’t want one towering over your back garden, but I took to them as one doesn’t usually to decaying industrial architecture.
Afterwards a barrister in Oval wrote in to say that, as it happened, she had one towering over her back garden and nothing could be more delightful. So there, philistines.
“I don’t think Britain is going to become Angola, but…” is one of the more cheerful remarks I’ve heard this week in various state-of-the-nation conversations. This Economist briefing piles one crushing detail on top of another. The price of milk is up by a fifth, of energy by more than half. Recession is coming as reliably as Christmas. Workers of no previous revolutionary convictions are voting en masse to strike. Trust in the police, local councils and the NHS is dwindling fast. The weather is really hot.
The Economist compares our situation to the scorching, inflation-wracked summer of 1976. My fear is that we are about to re-run the late 70s and early 80s without the buffers. No North Sea oil to fund a massive expansion of benefits for the newly impoverished. No nationalised industries, and nationalised land, to sell off and fund the government’s way through a fiscal crisis. Far less social solidarity and peace, far higher levels of household debt. Probably a less competent government, too.
You could blame Boris, for gaining a mandate for change and then not bothering to do anything with it. (I expanded on this point for the excellent new online magazine Compact.) You could point to the deep structural issues with the British economy, the curse of bigness and the triumph of rentierism. But I sometimes wonder whether such political and economic deficiencies are symptoms, not causes; whether we have lost our way because we have forgotten the most important things of all; and whether we are waiting, not for a Thatcher or an Attlee, but for a new—doubtless very different—St Dunstan.
The baby stirs. So, briefly, some recommendations. Richard Bratby writes magnificently about the music of James MacMillan. Wessie du Toit’s new newsletter is one to watch. I know you’ve read enough anxious polemics about the Thing, but there is still room for more oblique writing on the subject—see Kathleen Stock’s witty sociological study of the seminar room and its changing politics. Mary Harrington pays a subtle and moving tribute to the Queen. James Pogue and Julia Yost document some American dissidents. Audrey Pollnow philosophises about sex. I wrote about Catholic continuities and about style. Justin Lee remembers an evangelical childhood. Michael Brendan Dougherty sees through Meta. Vibes are back.
And finally: The death of the composer Richard Connolly in May at the age of 94 had an extra poignancy for lovers of Australian poetry. Connolly was a living link with the great James McAuley, who died in 1976, and who collaborated with Connolly on a series of hymns which won the hearts of Australian Catholics. There’s a story about the two of them turning up at Sunday Mass, checking out the hymns listed, and the poet whispering to the composer: “We’re doing well today.” Connolly always used to say—sweetly if unpersuasively—that the magic was all in the words, so musical in themselves that they brought forth the tunes with little effort on his part. Such humility, in the service of such beautiful compositions as the one below, is a fine legacy. RIP.
Image: William Cobbett depicted by S. De Wilde as a porcupine with a snake’s tail, 1808. No idea what the context was. (Wikipedia/Creative Commons)