Obviously this was a joke, but is it that different from Lucy Connolly? Sir Keir as DPP did all he could to get someone locked up for a joke about an airport bomb
I'm generally a peaceable man, but whoever came up with Making Tax Digital For Income Tax needs to die in a fire.
Just a question, if a Muslim had done what this lady did but had said it about Jews would you support them being arrested or not?
I will answer, but what difference does putting "Just a question" make there?
So what is the answer?
Why did you preface your question with "Just a question"? What else would it be?
So the answer is, if it was a Muslim you’d call for their arrest. I thought so.
I can't speak for isam but what I'd say is that we need consistency. Genuine incitement to violence is the obvious red line. Should hate speech be prosecuted? Maybe in some form. Trouble is the term hate has been trivialised.
Don't worry, that nutter is speaking for me anyway
Trump has just promised that “all hell will rain down on Iran in 48 hours”
Is he gonna do it? Is he gonna nuke them?
He owes himself a full blown wrath of God Armageddon. One for the history books.
I mean, what's the point of having nukes if you can't actually use them?
Simple. To stop others from invading you or using their nukes against you.
If nukes stop being a deterrent and start being a weapon to be used 'tactically' then we're all fucked.
First thing I'd do is relocate out of London.
Have you not seen “Threads”? That nuclear apocalypse movie that begins with, er, trouble in Iran?
“Not being in London” is not going to save you from having your eyeballs melted and weird sores covering your face that look like Rice Krispies in tomato soup, and then you die, not if it really kicks off. Also then we all stop speaking English and just grunt
Probably not, but if I relocate to Cornwall or the Scottish Highlands I reckon I'd have a few more days before face melting commences relative to London.
Morocco. That came out top in my spreadsheet back in 2022. Around Fes/Meknes, or in the coastal plains East of Casablanca.
Though now Covid restrictions are gone Chile, Uruguay and Argentina come back into play.
Chile. Good choice
The winelands are lovely
A trillion miles from anywhere
Alternatively the Margaret River area in Western Australia. It’s idyllically green and lovely with a near-Mediterranean climate
I did a food festival there for the gazette and they showed us around the region. On one coastal walk the guide pointed to a huge, isolated, slightly odd house with epic views of the sea
The guide explained it was literally owned and developed by an American billionaire as a bolt hole and a bunker if everything went to shit
Read a sci-fi story recently about the fate of a rich guy in his bunker after an apocalypse, which I think I will cling to in the event that the worst happens. It's "Bee Speaker" by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Technically it's the third in the War Dogs trilogy, but all three books stand as stories on their own.
The books might annoy you though. The main characters have morals.
I was going to post a post saying that I can't stand Adrian Tchaikovsky and one of his books was one of the reasons why I (mostly) abandoned science fiction in favour of military history.
Then I went through my library history and discovered that it wasn't Adrian Tchaikovsky but was instead "The Quantum Thief" by Hannu Rajaniemi.
Obviously this was a joke, but is it that different from Lucy Connolly? Sir Keir as DPP did all he could to get someone locked up for a joke about an airport bomb
I'm generally a peaceable man, but whoever came up with Making Tax Digital For Income Tax needs to die in a fire.
Just a question, if a Muslim had done what this lady did but had said it about Jews would you support them being arrested or not?
I will answer, but what difference does putting "Just a question" make there?
So what is the answer?
Why did you preface your question with "Just a question"? What else would it be?
So the answer is, if it was a Muslim you’d call for their arrest. I thought so.
I can't speak for isam but what I'd say is that we need consistency. Genuine incitement to violence is the obvious red line. Should hate speech be prosecuted? Maybe in some form. Trouble is the term hate has been trivialised.
Don't worry, that nutter is speaking for me anyway
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
It is not 'far right nonsense' to preserve our ancient Christian churches, it is what conservatives should be doing!
Of course it is nonsense
The conservative party has to be a broad church not pandering to a pew. !!!
The COE has vast wealth and must not receive taxpayers subsidies
If you have no interest fighting to preserve our Christian heritage in the culture wars BigG then really you shouldn't be in the Conservative Party at all, indeed you shouldn't even be in the LDs given they also back restoring the VAT exemption for places of worship as do Reform.
You should probably just go off and join Starmer Labour or even the Greens!
My christian heritage is very different to yours and Jesus would not agree that the wealth of the church should be not used to maintain its estate
As for the rest of your post it is hysterical nonsense
Trump has just promised that “all hell will rain down on Iran in 48 hours”
Is he gonna do it? Is he gonna nuke them?
He owes himself a full blown wrath of God Armageddon. One for the history books.
I mean, what's the point of having nukes if you can't actually use them?
Simple. To stop others from invading you or using their nukes against you.
If nukes stop being a deterrent and start being a weapon to be used 'tactically' then we're all fucked.
First thing I'd do is relocate out of London.
Have you not seen “Threads”? That nuclear apocalypse movie that begins with, er, trouble in Iran?
“Not being in London” is not going to save you from having your eyeballs melted and weird sores covering your face that look like Rice Krispies in tomato soup, and then you die, not if it really kicks off. Also then we all stop speaking English and just grunt
Probably not, but if I relocate to Cornwall or the Scottish Highlands I reckon I'd have a few more days before face melting commences relative to London.
Morocco. That came out top in my spreadsheet back in 2022. Around Fes/Meknes, or in the coastal plains East of Casablanca.
Though now Covid restrictions are gone Chile, Uruguay and Argentina come back into play.
Chile. Good choice
The winelands are lovely
A trillion miles from anywhere
Alternatively the Margaret River area in Western Australia. It’s idyllically green and lovely with a near-Mediterranean climate
I did a food festival there for the gazette and they showed us around the region. On one coastal walk the guide pointed to a huge, isolated, slightly odd house with epic views of the sea
The guide explained it was literally owned and developed by an American billionaire as a bolt hole and a bunker if everything went to shit
Read a sci-fi story recently about the fate of a rich guy in his bunker after an apocalypse, which I think I will cling to in the event that the worst happens. It's "Bee Speaker" by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Technically it's the third in the War Dogs trilogy, but all three books stand as stories on their own.
The books might annoy you though. The main characters have morals.
I was going to post a post saying that I can't stand Adrian Tchaikovsky and one of his books was one of the reasons why I (mostly) abandoned science fiction in favour of military history.
Then I went through my library history and discovered that it wasn't Adrian Tchaikovsky but was instead "The Quantum Thief" by Hannu Rajaniemi.
There you go. True story, dat.
Just finished listening to an Adrian Tchaikovsky today, The Doors of Eden. Not one of his best at all, but then he is so prolific they cannot all be bangers.
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
Obviously you've not seen Kemi Badenoch's tweets this evening.
Britain is a Christian country.
The Conservative Party will always celebrate our Christian heritage with deeds, not just words.
This Easter, we want to ensure local churches are properly maintained and repaired so we’re announcing a plan to restore funding for the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme which the government has recently placed caps on.
Churches matter. They aren’t just important places of worship, in many towns and villages they are the centre of the community and the pride of local people, often steeped in hundreds of years of history. It is critical we maintain them properly, because when they’re gone, this history and heritage could be lost forever.
@Conservatives believe we have a responsibility to protect our churches and make sure they endure for future generations. What are we for if not to conserve the very best of our country and our society for those yet to come?
Conservatives will protect our heritage and build a stronger country.
I just hate this stuff and it turns me completely off them. They’re at their best when they start speaking to actual working people. Then they’ve got some traction with me.
Many working people also care about the preservation of our historic churches
Not when the COE has billions to do it themselves
The CoE is both moderately well off, and quite poor. They have a lot of assets (both land and investments), but not a lot of cash flow, and they have some very expensive buildings to maintain.
They have huge assets they can sell and it is not the taxpayers responsility to fund them
Church assets are one of those things that look bigger than they are
A lot of the church's billions is the pension fund. And a lot of the rest is the sort of building that looks like an asset but is really a liability.
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
It is not 'far right nonsense' to preserve our ancient Christian churches, it is what conservatives should be doing!
Of course it is nonsense
The conservative party has to be a broad church not pandering to a pew. !!!
The COE has vast wealth and must not receive taxpayers subsidies
My brother in law worked his life in the COE
He has the best pension you can imagine. The pay, given his Cambridge University background was not great, but Pension gold standard.
COE has rotting Church Estate.
It also owns huge tranches of land and property.
Politics and Religion don't sit as happy bedfelloes imho
The COE was the Tory Party at prayer, that's not been the case for 30 years.
Any other Tory Leader and I'd think this was an attempt to shore up old Tory vote.
With her, I suspect more a Tory Tea Party extreme right fundamental evangelism.
When Trump says jump, Badenoch and Farage desperately trying to jump highest
Tommy R is already sat in the balcony.
The LDs also back restoring the VAT exemption for churches and other listed places of worship and Davey is certainly not Trumpite or Faragite
Exemptions that apply specifically to places of worship but not other community venues? Stop the privileging of religion.
Some community hall built in the 1960s or 2000s does not need preservation anything like a medieval church does, what a ludicrous comment!
Then have exemptions based on age of buildings or listed status if we want preservation. I don't see why the building's purpose being 'worship' ought to be a qualifying factor for relief though.
Obviously this was a joke, but is it that different from Lucy Connolly? Sir Keir as DPP did all he could to get someone locked up for a joke about an airport bomb
I'm generally a peaceable man, but whoever came up with Making Tax Digital For Income Tax needs to die in a fire.
Just a question, if a Muslim had done what this lady did but had said it about Jews would you support them being arrested or not?
I will answer, but what difference does putting "Just a question" make there?
So what is the answer?
Why did you preface your question with "Just a question"? What else would it be?
So the answer is, if it was a Muslim you’d call for their arrest. I thought so.
I can't speak for isam but what I'd say is that we need consistency. Genuine incitement to violence is the obvious red line. Should hate speech be prosecuted? Maybe in some form. Trouble is the term hate has been trivialised.
Don't worry, that nutter is speaking for me anyway
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
Obviously you've not seen Kemi Badenoch's tweets this evening.
Britain is a Christian country.
The Conservative Party will always celebrate our Christian heritage with deeds, not just words.
This Easter, we want to ensure local churches are properly maintained and repaired so we’re announcing a plan to restore funding for the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme which the government has recently placed caps on.
Churches matter. They aren’t just important places of worship, in many towns and villages they are the centre of the community and the pride of local people, often steeped in hundreds of years of history. It is critical we maintain them properly, because when they’re gone, this history and heritage could be lost forever.
@Conservatives believe we have a responsibility to protect our churches and make sure they endure for future generations. What are we for if not to conserve the very best of our country and our society for those yet to come?
Conservatives will protect our heritage and build a stronger country.
I just hate this stuff and it turns me completely off them. They’re at their best when they start speaking to actual working people. Then they’ve got some traction with me.
Many working people also care about the preservation of our historic churches
Not when the COE has billions to do it themselves
Having billions in mainly land assets, which includes churches and cathedrals, does not mean billions in income.
Church of England annual income is just over £1 billion but most of that comes from Parish giving and to fund priests and Parish work with the rest from commissioners investments. This is only restoring the VAT exemption for churches anyway
So you're proposing socialism and giving benefits to the rich.
They should sell some assets to pay for the maintenance.
No, like Kemi and Jenrick and even the LDs keeping the VAT exemption for our historic Christian churches, there is no state funding just reducing costs and tax burden on churches, ie even Thatcherite unlike this awful socialist Labour government who removed the VAT exemption.
The buildings belong to the nation's church and the C of E has enough to do funding its own clergy and Parish work
Surely Jesus would be far happier to see the incredibly wealthy C of E's funds spent on worthy poor people rather than to repair a church roof.
It does that too, plenty of foodbanks supported by the C of E, restoring the VAT exemption would mean it could do more of that and not have to spend more on repairing church roofs than it has to by adding VAT costs on too
There is or are some imaginative ideas about to make local churches even better for the community. Our local Church is used frequently by groups and hosts Hindu weddings and clubs.
There's a Church in Earlsfield which does a weekly community meal for those on their own.
Bringing the community into the Church is an integral part of bringing the Church into the community.
When first built, churches were used for activities that have since been relegated to church halls.
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
Obviously you've not seen Kemi Badenoch's tweets this evening.
Britain is a Christian country.
The Conservative Party will always celebrate our Christian heritage with deeds, not just words.
This Easter, we want to ensure local churches are properly maintained and repaired so we’re announcing a plan to restore funding for the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme which the government has recently placed caps on.
Churches matter. They aren’t just important places of worship, in many towns and villages they are the centre of the community and the pride of local people, often steeped in hundreds of years of history. It is critical we maintain them properly, because when they’re gone, this history and heritage could be lost forever.
@Conservatives believe we have a responsibility to protect our churches and make sure they endure for future generations. What are we for if not to conserve the very best of our country and our society for those yet to come?
Conservatives will protect our heritage and build a stronger country.
No I hadnt and I do not agree the taxpayer should fund the wealthy COE estate
The Church of England does not unfortunately have the money to maintain all of England's parish churches. It can help cathedrals, but not others. I don't think it's altogether understood how many they are or how much money they cost to run. Tewkesbury Abbey, for example, calculates its costs to survive at £10 per minute. OK, that's an extreme case, but even for Linton Parish Church in Herefordshire it was £300 a week 15 years ago.
Let's say a reasonable average would be that a church costs £50,000 a year to keep open. It's probably on the low side, but let's see what that gets us.
There are 27,000 of them.
I make that £1.35 billion a year.
They would need a rather more than 10% return on their assets to stay afloat without drawing on capital to manage that. They're getting more like 3.5% and an income of £430 million. Not negligible, but not sufficient.
Or, to put it crudely, they would need to find just under £1 billion from capital every year to survive on their investments alone. So it would all be gone in around 10 years on current figures.
In Wales, they are squaring this circle by rapidly closing parish churches, especially in your diocese (which is in colossal financial doo-doo anyway). I would not like to think the same will be true in England, although it already is with the Nonconfromist chapels precisely because they don't have endowments, but if we want to save parish churches even just as architectural landmarks we will need to think about where the money comes from.
Is that an argument for or against VAT on church repairs? No. The argument against VAT is it's a stupid tax designed by stupid people and tinkered with usually for stupid reasons. Far better to get rid, or radically reform it so it's a much lower rate but on absolutely everything. But Hyufd isn't talking total nonsense on this.
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
It is not 'far right nonsense' to preserve our ancient Christian churches, it is what conservatives should be doing!
Of course it is nonsense
The conservative party has to be a broad church not pandering to a pew. !!!
The COE has vast wealth and must not receive taxpayers subsidies
Not all churches are C of E.
That's true. Some have been sold off for mosques or posh flats.
Are you aware of any CofE churches sold of for mosques? Because if so you should report it. By law, when sold, they may be sold to other Christian groups or converted to secular purposes but must not be used as a place of worship by a non-Christian religion.
Really? Not sure why that would be necessary. Not that I know of it happening, but can they convert to secular pupose and then turn into a mosque?
I think I remember stories of a methodist church becoming a mosque in Wiltshire but that might have been a rumour.
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
It is not 'far right nonsense' to preserve our ancient Christian churches, it is what conservatives should be doing!
Of course it is nonsense
The conservative party has to be a broad church not pandering to a pew. !!!
The COE has vast wealth and must not receive taxpayers subsidies
Not all churches are C of E.
That's true. Some have been sold off for mosques or posh flats.
Are you aware of any CofE churches sold of for mosques? Because if so you should report it. By law, when sold, they may be sold to other Christian groups or converted to secular purposes but must not be used as a place of worship by a non-Christian religion.
Really? Not sure why that would be necessary. Not that I know of it happening, but can they convert to secular pupose and then turn into a mosque?
I think I remember stories of a methodist church becoming a mosque in Wiltshire but that might have been a rumour.
Methodist churches don't have restrictive covenants on them that I know of.
Covenants would remain even after sale, yes. You could demolish the building and use the site, but not convert the building.
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
Obviously you've not seen Kemi Badenoch's tweets this evening.
Britain is a Christian country.
The Conservative Party will always celebrate our Christian heritage with deeds, not just words.
This Easter, we want to ensure local churches are properly maintained and repaired so we’re announcing a plan to restore funding for the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme which the government has recently placed caps on.
Churches matter. They aren’t just important places of worship, in many towns and villages they are the centre of the community and the pride of local people, often steeped in hundreds of years of history. It is critical we maintain them properly, because when they’re gone, this history and heritage could be lost forever.
@Conservatives believe we have a responsibility to protect our churches and make sure they endure for future generations. What are we for if not to conserve the very best of our country and our society for those yet to come?
Conservatives will protect our heritage and build a stronger country.
No I hadnt and I do not agree the taxpayer should fund the wealthy COE estate
It is a VAT exemption which should have been retained to preserve our historic Christian churches, what a pathetic philistine remark from you!
All this dates back to George Osborne's omnishambles budget. Which tells us two things, one of which is that Rachel Reeves is just working her way through an old Treasury wishlist.
A VAT exemption on repairs to all listed buildings would be more consistent. Or perhaps to Grade 1 listed buildings.
That is basically what it was iirc and I can't be bothered to look up the details. It might be why Osborne missed the political significance for the Conservative Party at Prayer if not for the fact he missed the significance of most of his other measures as well.
Labour confirmed they recognised the budget as a collection of measures they'd been rejecting every year for a decade. Now Reeves has found the list in an old Treasury drawer. It's trivial stuff that upsets people and achieves nothing but pleases civil servants by smoothing out edge cases, like why there is VAT on some hot food but not other hot food.
The views should be good at least through Monday. (In the past, I have seen quite spectacular sunsets over the Jackson Visitor Center, which is named after the late senator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_M._Jackson )
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
It is not 'far right nonsense' to preserve our ancient Christian churches, it is what conservatives should be doing!
Of course it is nonsense
The conservative party has to be a broad church not pandering to a pew. !!!
The COE has vast wealth and must not receive taxpayers subsidies
If you have no interest fighting to preserve our Christian heritage in the culture wars BigG then really you shouldn't be in the Conservative Party at all, indeed you shouldn't even be in the LDs given they also back restoring the VAT exemption for places of worship as do Reform.
You should probably just go off and join Starmer Labour or even the Greens!
Tax breaks and Lottery handouts for Mosques.
An interesting Reform policy.
Mainly for historic churches and cathedrals but Listed Mosques and Synagogues and Temples could also apply
It is (or was) the "Listed Places of Worship" scheme - so covers all places of worship.
The stats are that the Church of England has half of England's Grade 1 Listed buildings, so I think some specific support is justified. The setup they have in France, with ancient churches maintained by the Govt (aiui) is far more expensive.
I'd say restitution of the 5% VAT rate for all listed buildings, or Grade 1 listed buildings, would be a good compromise - and would also help with developers who burn them down.
The arguments about "but but but they are so rich" have been a red herring for a very long time, as the wealth was overwhelmingly dedicated to staff pensions, and each local church is a separate charity. The implication is that staff pension funds should be ransacked to maintain buildings, which is absurd on its face.
Let’s be hopeful and presume even Trump isn’t mad enough to drop nukes on Qom. What then is he threatening to do to Iran with his “overwhelming force”. How is he going to take them “back to the Stone Age” and “rain terror”?
He’s got about 10,000 marines there hasn’t he? What can they do? Seize Kharg island maybe? Then what?
This is hardly going to terrify the Iranians back to the Neolithic. So what is he up to?
I'm off this now. I find detailed military stuff an eyeglazer. But just one interjection, I'm not keen on your "mad" here. It would be an act of unmitigated evil. The madness of it is relevant but secondary. So, revised framing, let's presume Donald Trump isn't EVIL enough to nuke Iran. Then, yes fine, as we were, how is he going to etc etc ... ??
I’ve just spent 50 minutes reading military experts on X so you don’t have to. They all believe Trump is going to do “something big” - he’s gone too far to chicken out this time. And he’s put his pieces in place
The two good but unlikely options are
1. They’re wrong. He’s bluffing again 2. Iran blinks and surrenders
More likely are these options
3. A ground assault that goes surprisingly well, America seizes key sites with minor losses and Iran surrenders 4. A ground assault that goes predictably badly, America is sucked into a new Vietnam/iraq and the world spirals into a terrifying energy shortage, and much else
And finally
5. Nukes
The obvious thing would be to embargo Iranian exports through Hormuz. Is he co-ordinating with the other Persian Gulf countries? One senses that he prefers dropping bombs to make a point.
The order of ease would be:
1) Stop Iran's oil exports 2) Open Hormuz to allow Arab oil exports ... big gap ... 3) Invade Iran
Inevitably Leon turns the volume up to 11 and thinks the hardest option is the only one available.
lol
How are you going to do 1 and 2? It’s not exactly easy. America and Israel have been trying their best for weeks with all their energy
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
Obviously you've not seen Kemi Badenoch's tweets this evening.
Britain is a Christian country.
The Conservative Party will always celebrate our Christian heritage with deeds, not just words.
This Easter, we want to ensure local churches are properly maintained and repaired so we’re announcing a plan to restore funding for the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme which the government has recently placed caps on.
Churches matter. They aren’t just important places of worship, in many towns and villages they are the centre of the community and the pride of local people, often steeped in hundreds of years of history. It is critical we maintain them properly, because when they’re gone, this history and heritage could be lost forever.
@Conservatives believe we have a responsibility to protect our churches and make sure they endure for future generations. What are we for if not to conserve the very best of our country and our society for those yet to come?
Conservatives will protect our heritage and build a stronger country.
No I hadnt and I do not agree the taxpayer should fund the wealthy COE estate
The Church of England does not unfortunately have the money to maintain all of England's parish churches. It can help cathedrals, but not others. I don't think it's altogether understood how many they are or how much money they cost to run. Tewkesbury Abbey, for example, calculates its costs to survive at £10 per minute. OK, that's an extreme case, but even for Linton Parish Church in Herefordshire it was £300 a week 15 years ago.
Let's say a reasonable average would be that a church costs £50,000 a year to keep open. It's probably on the low side, but let's see what that gets us.
There are 27,000 of them.
I make that £1.35 billion a year.
They would need a rather more than 10% return on their assets to stay afloat without drawing on income to manage that. They're getting more like 3.5% and an income of £430 million. Not negligible, but not sufficient.
Or, to put it crudely, they would need to find just under £1 billion from capital every year to survive on their investments alone. So it would all be gone in around 10 years on current figures.
In Wales, they are squaring this circle by rapidly closing parish churches, especially in your diocese (which is in colossal financial doo-doo anyway). I would not like to think the same will be true in England, although it already is with the Nonconfromist chapels precisely because they don't have endowments, but if we want to save parish churches even just as architectural landmarks we will need to think about where the money comes from.
Is that an argument for or against VAT on church repairs? No. The argument against VAT is it's a stupid tax designed by stupid people and tinkered with usually for stupid reasons. Far better to get rid, or radically reform it so it's a much lower rate but on absolutely everything. But Hyufd isn't talking total nonsense on this.
Our Parish Church where my mother, father and sister are buried and two of our children were married in is rarely open as you say
It is very sad but then support for the Church is dying almost literally but taxpayer funding cannot be the answer
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
Obviously you've not seen Kemi Badenoch's tweets this evening.
Britain is a Christian country.
The Conservative Party will always celebrate our Christian heritage with deeds, not just words.
This Easter, we want to ensure local churches are properly maintained and repaired so we’re announcing a plan to restore funding for the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme which the government has recently placed caps on.
Churches matter. They aren’t just important places of worship, in many towns and villages they are the centre of the community and the pride of local people, often steeped in hundreds of years of history. It is critical we maintain them properly, because when they’re gone, this history and heritage could be lost forever.
@Conservatives believe we have a responsibility to protect our churches and make sure they endure for future generations. What are we for if not to conserve the very best of our country and our society for those yet to come?
Conservatives will protect our heritage and build a stronger country.
I just hate this stuff and it turns me completely off them. They’re at their best when they start speaking to actual working people. Then they’ve got some traction with me.
Many working people also care about the preservation of our historic churches
Not when the COE has billions to do it themselves
The CoE is both moderately well off, and quite poor. They have a lot of assets (both land and investments), but not a lot of cash flow, and they have some very expensive buildings to maintain.
Hmmm. Lots of real estate an d no revenue. Monetise. Monetise.
IDEA!
Bitcoin mining. Churches are notoriously cold. So rent space to bitcoin miners to runs their servers - the waste heat heats the church.
The Lord Helps Those Who Help Themselves.
As long as the bitcoin miners pay for their own electricity.
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
Obviously you've not seen Kemi Badenoch's tweets this evening.
Britain is a Christian country.
The Conservative Party will always celebrate our Christian heritage with deeds, not just words.
This Easter, we want to ensure local churches are properly maintained and repaired so we’re announcing a plan to restore funding for the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme which the government has recently placed caps on.
Churches matter. They aren’t just important places of worship, in many towns and villages they are the centre of the community and the pride of local people, often steeped in hundreds of years of history. It is critical we maintain them properly, because when they’re gone, this history and heritage could be lost forever.
@Conservatives believe we have a responsibility to protect our churches and make sure they endure for future generations. What are we for if not to conserve the very best of our country and our society for those yet to come?
Conservatives will protect our heritage and build a stronger country.
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
It is not 'far right nonsense' to preserve our ancient Christian churches, it is what conservatives should be doing!
Of course it is nonsense
The conservative party has to be a broad church not pandering to a pew. !!!
The COE has vast wealth and must not receive taxpayers subsidies
If you have no interest fighting to preserve our Christian heritage in the culture wars BigG then really you shouldn't be in the Conservative Party at all, indeed you shouldn't even be in the LDs given they also back restoring the VAT exemption for places of worship as do Reform.
You should probably just go off and join Starmer Labour or even the Greens!
Tax breaks and Lottery handouts for Mosques.
An interesting Reform policy.
Mainly for historic churches and cathedrals but Listed Mosques and Synagogues and Temples could also apply
It is (or was) the "Listed Places of Worship" scheme - so covers all places of worship.
The stats are that the Church of England has half of England's Grade 1 Listed buildings, so I think some specific support is justified. The setup they have in France, with ancient churches maintained by the Govt (aiui) is far more expensive.
I'd say restitution of the 5% VAT rate for all listed buildings, or Grade 1 listed buildings, would be a good compromise - and would also help with developers who burn them down.
The arguments about "but but but they are so rich" have been a red herring for a very long time, as the wealth was overwhelmingly dedicated to staff pensions, and each local church is a separate charity. The implication is that staff pension funds should be ransacked to maintain buildings, which is absurd on its face.
It's also infamously bad at looking after churches, although the burning down of Notre Dame by incompetent renovators was an extreme case. Neglect and decay is more usual.
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
It is not 'far right nonsense' to preserve our ancient Christian churches, it is what conservatives should be doing!
Of course it is nonsense
The conservative party has to be a broad church not pandering to a pew. !!!
The COE has vast wealth and must not receive taxpayers subsidies
Not all churches are C of E.
That's true. Some have been sold off for mosques or posh flats.
Are you aware of any CofE churches sold of for mosques? Because if so you should report it. By law, when sold, they may be sold to other Christian groups or converted to secular purposes but must not be used as a place of worship by a non-Christian religion.
Really? Not sure why that would be necessary. Not that I know of it happening, but can they convert to secular pupose and then turn into a mosque?
I think I remember stories of a methodist church becoming a mosque in Wiltshire but that might have been a rumour.
Let’s be hopeful and presume even Trump isn’t mad enough to drop nukes on Qom. What then is he threatening to do to Iran with his “overwhelming force”. How is he going to take them “back to the Stone Age” and “rain terror”?
He’s got about 10,000 marines there hasn’t he? What can they do? Seize Kharg island maybe? Then what?
This is hardly going to terrify the Iranians back to the Neolithic. So what is he up to?
I'm off this now. I find detailed military stuff an eyeglazer. But just one interjection, I'm not keen on your "mad" here. It would be an act of unmitigated evil. The madness of it is relevant but secondary. So, revised framing, let's presume Donald Trump isn't EVIL enough to nuke Iran. Then, yes fine, as we were, how is he going to etc etc ... ??
I’ve just spent 50 minutes reading military experts on X so you don’t have to. They all believe Trump is going to do “something big” - he’s gone too far to chicken out this time. And he’s put his pieces in place
The two good but unlikely options are
1. They’re wrong. He’s bluffing again 2. Iran blinks and surrenders
More likely are these options
3. A ground assault that goes surprisingly well, America seizes key sites with minor losses and Iran surrenders 4. A ground assault that goes predictably badly, America is sucked into a new Vietnam/iraq and the world spirals into a terrifying energy shortage, and much else
And finally
5. Nukes
The obvious thing would be to embargo Iranian exports through Hormuz. Is he co-ordinating with the other Persian Gulf countries? One senses that he prefers dropping bombs to make a point.
The order of ease would be:
1) Stop Iran's oil exports 2) Open Hormuz to allow Arab oil exports ... big gap ... 3) Invade Iran
Inevitably Leon turns the volume up to 11 and thinks the hardest option is the only one available.
lol
How are you going to do 1 and 2? It’s not exactly easy. America and Israel have been trying their best for weeks with all their energy
No they haven't. Trump hasn't wanted to block Iranian oil because the global price would go even higher. Now some argue that if he did an embargo Iran might go full scorched earth (e.g attacking desalination plants) and take everyone else down with them. So it's an option with possible upsides and downsides. But they definitely haven't tried it.
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
Obviously you've not seen Kemi Badenoch's tweets this evening.
Britain is a Christian country.
The Conservative Party will always celebrate our Christian heritage with deeds, not just words.
This Easter, we want to ensure local churches are properly maintained and repaired so we’re announcing a plan to restore funding for the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme which the government has recently placed caps on.
Churches matter. They aren’t just important places of worship, in many towns and villages they are the centre of the community and the pride of local people, often steeped in hundreds of years of history. It is critical we maintain them properly, because when they’re gone, this history and heritage could be lost forever.
@Conservatives believe we have a responsibility to protect our churches and make sure they endure for future generations. What are we for if not to conserve the very best of our country and our society for those yet to come?
Conservatives will protect our heritage and build a stronger country.
No I hadnt and I do not agree the taxpayer should fund the wealthy COE estate
The Church of England does not unfortunately have the money to maintain all of England's parish churches. It can help cathedrals, but not others. I don't think it's altogether understood how many they are or how much money they cost to run. Tewkesbury Abbey, for example, calculates its costs to survive at £10 per minute. OK, that's an extreme case, but even for Linton Parish Church in Herefordshire it was £300 a week 15 years ago.
Let's say a reasonable average would be that a church costs £50,000 a year to keep open. It's probably on the low side, but let's see what that gets us.
There are 27,000 of them.
I make that £1.35 billion a year.
They would need a rather more than 10% return on their assets to stay afloat without drawing on capital to manage that. They're getting more like 3.5% and an income of £430 million. Not negligible, but not sufficient.
Or, to put it crudely, they would need to find just under £1 billion from capital every year to survive on their investments alone. So it would all be gone in around 10 years on current figures.
In Wales, they are squaring this circle by rapidly closing parish churches, especially in your diocese (which is in colossal financial doo-doo anyway). I would not like to think the same will be true in England, although it already is with the Nonconfromist chapels precisely because they don't have endowments, but if we want to save parish churches even just as architectural landmarks we will need to think about where the money comes from.
Is that an argument for or against VAT on church repairs? No. The argument against VAT is it's a stupid tax designed by stupid people and tinkered with usually for stupid reasons. Far better to get rid, or radically reform it so it's a much lower rate but on absolutely everything. But Hyufd isn't talking total nonsense on this.
Why can't there be some religious M&A to deal with this issue?
Obviously this was a joke, but is it that different from Lucy Connolly? Sir Keir as DPP did all he could to get someone locked up for a joke about an airport bomb
I'm generally a peaceable man, but whoever came up with Making Tax Digital For Income Tax needs to die in a fire.
Just a question, if a Muslim had done what this lady did but had said it about Jews would you support them being arrested or not?
I will answer, but what difference does putting "Just a question" make there?
So what is the answer?
Why did you preface your question with "Just a question"? What else would it be?
So the answer is, if it was a Muslim you’d call for their arrest. I thought so.
I can't speak for isam but what I'd say is that we need consistency. Genuine incitement to violence is the obvious red line. Should hate speech be prosecuted? Maybe in some form. Trouble is the term hate has been trivialised.
They're was a lot of controversy over a small number of imams at a couple of mosques in London who were staying on just the right side of the law while preaching in support of jihad. I believe the right-wing Press were successful in having the law changed to move the boundary of free speech so that they could be prosecuted. But, of course, the law isn't applied only to Muslims.
I'm terms of Mr Colville's tweet I think he'd be in a lot more difficulty if there were gangs of irate taxpayers trying to lay their hands on the person behind Making Tax Digital in order to immolate them. I think that's the material difference between the two cases and why one can be interpreted as a joke, while the other can be viewed as incitement.
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
Obviously you've not seen Kemi Badenoch's tweets this evening.
Britain is a Christian country.
The Conservative Party will always celebrate our Christian heritage with deeds, not just words.
This Easter, we want to ensure local churches are properly maintained and repaired so we’re announcing a plan to restore funding for the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme which the government has recently placed caps on.
Churches matter. They aren’t just important places of worship, in many towns and villages they are the centre of the community and the pride of local people, often steeped in hundreds of years of history. It is critical we maintain them properly, because when they’re gone, this history and heritage could be lost forever.
@Conservatives believe we have a responsibility to protect our churches and make sure they endure for future generations. What are we for if not to conserve the very best of our country and our society for those yet to come?
Conservatives will protect our heritage and build a stronger country.
No I hadnt and I do not agree the taxpayer should fund the wealthy COE estate
The Church of England does not unfortunately have the money to maintain all of England's parish churches. It can help cathedrals, but not others. I don't think it's altogether understood how many they are or how much money they cost to run. Tewkesbury Abbey, for example, calculates its costs to survive at £10 per minute. OK, that's an extreme case, but even for Linton Parish Church in Herefordshire it was £300 a week 15 years ago.
Let's say a reasonable average would be that a church costs £50,000 a year to keep open. It's probably on the low side, but let's see what that gets us.
There are 27,000 of them.
I make that £1.35 billion a year.
They would need a rather more than 10% return on their assets to stay afloat without drawing on capital to manage that. They're getting more like 3.5% and an income of £430 million. Not negligible, but not sufficient.
Or, to put it crudely, they would need to find just under £1 billion from capital every year to survive on their investments alone. So it would all be gone in around 10 years on current figures.
In Wales, they are squaring this circle by rapidly closing parish churches, especially in your diocese (which is in colossal financial doo-doo anyway). I would not like to think the same will be true in England, although it already is with the Nonconfromist chapels precisely because they don't have endowments, but if we want to save parish churches even just as architectural landmarks we will need to think about where the money comes from.
Is that an argument for or against VAT on church repairs? No. The argument against VAT is it's a stupid tax designed by stupid people and tinkered with usually for stupid reasons. Far better to get rid, or radically reform it so it's a much lower rate but on absolutely everything. But Hyufd isn't talking total nonsense on this.
I think CofE buildings are 16000 not 27000, but that does not change the substance of your point.
If you want an idea as to what an empty building, with no community life, would cost to keep open, it may perhaps be worth a look at the Churches Conservation Trust, which picks up redundant CofE churches judged to be worth preserving when no other use is found.
Trump has just promised that “all hell will rain down on Iran in 48 hours”
Is he gonna do it? Is he gonna nuke them?
He owes himself a full blown wrath of God Armageddon. One for the history books.
I mean, what's the point of having nukes if you can't actually use them?
Simple. To stop others from invading you or using their nukes against you.
If nukes stop being a deterrent and start being a weapon to be used 'tactically' then we're all fucked.
First thing I'd do is relocate out of London.
Have you not seen “Threads”? That nuclear apocalypse movie that begins with, er, trouble in Iran?
“Not being in London” is not going to save you from having your eyeballs melted and weird sores covering your face that look like Rice Krispies in tomato soup, and then you die, not if it really kicks off. Also then we all stop speaking English and just grunt
Probably not, but if I relocate to Cornwall or the Scottish Highlands I reckon I'd have a few more days before face melting commences relative to London.
Morocco. That came out top in my spreadsheet back in 2022. Around Fes/Meknes, or in the coastal plains East of Casablanca.
Though now Covid restrictions are gone Chile, Uruguay and Argentina come back into play.
Chile. Good choice
The winelands are lovely
A trillion miles from anywhere
Alternatively the Margaret River area in Western Australia. It’s idyllically green and lovely with a near-Mediterranean climate
I did a food festival there for the gazette and they showed us around the region. On one coastal walk the guide pointed to a huge, isolated, slightly odd house with epic views of the sea
The guide explained it was literally owned and developed by an American billionaire as a bolt hole and a bunker if everything went to shit
Read a sci-fi story recently about the fate of a rich guy in his bunker after an apocalypse, which I think I will cling to in the event that the worst happens. It's "Bee Speaker" by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Technically it's the third in the War Dogs trilogy, but all three books stand as stories on their own.
The books might annoy you though. The main characters have morals.
I was going to post a post saying that I can't stand Adrian Tchaikovsky and one of his books was one of the reasons why I (mostly) abandoned science fiction in favour of military history.
Then I went through my library history and discovered that it wasn't Adrian Tchaikovsky but was instead "The Quantum Thief" by Hannu Rajaniemi.
There you go. True story, dat.
Recommendations of books to avoid are also useful.
🚨BREAKING: Israel is preparing to strike Iranian energy facilities but is waiting for a green light from the U.S., a senior Israeli defense official said, adding it could come within the next week.
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
Obviously you've not seen Kemi Badenoch's tweets this evening.
Britain is a Christian country.
The Conservative Party will always celebrate our Christian heritage with deeds, not just words.
This Easter, we want to ensure local churches are properly maintained and repaired so we’re announcing a plan to restore funding for the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme which the government has recently placed caps on.
Churches matter. They aren’t just important places of worship, in many towns and villages they are the centre of the community and the pride of local people, often steeped in hundreds of years of history. It is critical we maintain them properly, because when they’re gone, this history and heritage could be lost forever.
@Conservatives believe we have a responsibility to protect our churches and make sure they endure for future generations. What are we for if not to conserve the very best of our country and our society for those yet to come?
Conservatives will protect our heritage and build a stronger country.
No I hadnt and I do not agree the taxpayer should fund the wealthy COE estate
The Church of England does not unfortunately have the money to maintain all of England's parish churches. It can help cathedrals, but not others. I don't think it's altogether understood how many they are or how much money they cost to run. Tewkesbury Abbey, for example, calculates its costs to survive at £10 per minute. OK, that's an extreme case, but even for Linton Parish Church in Herefordshire it was £300 a week 15 years ago.
Let's say a reasonable average would be that a church costs £50,000 a year to keep open. It's probably on the low side, but let's see what that gets us.
There are 27,000 of them.
I make that £1.35 billion a year.
They would need a rather more than 10% return on their assets to stay afloat without drawing on capital to manage that. They're getting more like 3.5% and an income of £430 million. Not negligible, but not sufficient.
Or, to put it crudely, they would need to find just under £1 billion from capital every year to survive on their investments alone. So it would all be gone in around 10 years on current figures.
In Wales, they are squaring this circle by rapidly closing parish churches, especially in your diocese (which is in colossal financial doo-doo anyway). I would not like to think the same will be true in England, although it already is with the Nonconfromist chapels precisely because they don't have endowments, but if we want to save parish churches even just as architectural landmarks we will need to think about where the money comes from.
Is that an argument for or against VAT on church repairs? No. The argument against VAT is it's a stupid tax designed by stupid people and tinkered with usually for stupid reasons. Far better to get rid, or radically reform it so it's a much lower rate but on absolutely everything. But Hyufd isn't talking total nonsense on this.
Why can't there be some religious M&A to deal with this issue?
Speaking as somebody who grew up in Newent, where no fewer than three different Christian groups used the parish church because the chapels for the other two had closed (it's now four) I would gently point out they already do...
(Incidentally, it went the other way, and when St Mary's had to be closed due to an unsafe tower in the 1970s the congregation were welcomed into the URC chapel along the street).
And of course the Church of Scotland has been schisming and remerging since the days of John Knox.
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
Obviously you've not seen Kemi Badenoch's tweets this evening.
Britain is a Christian country.
The Conservative Party will always celebrate our Christian heritage with deeds, not just words.
This Easter, we want to ensure local churches are properly maintained and repaired so we’re announcing a plan to restore funding for the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme which the government has recently placed caps on.
Churches matter. They aren’t just important places of worship, in many towns and villages they are the centre of the community and the pride of local people, often steeped in hundreds of years of history. It is critical we maintain them properly, because when they’re gone, this history and heritage could be lost forever.
@Conservatives believe we have a responsibility to protect our churches and make sure they endure for future generations. What are we for if not to conserve the very best of our country and our society for those yet to come?
Conservatives will protect our heritage and build a stronger country.
No I hadnt and I do not agree the taxpayer should fund the wealthy COE estate
The Church of England does not unfortunately have the money to maintain all of England's parish churches. It can help cathedrals, but not others. I don't think it's altogether understood how many they are or how much money they cost to run. Tewkesbury Abbey, for example, calculates its costs to survive at £10 per minute. OK, that's an extreme case, but even for Linton Parish Church in Herefordshire it was £300 a week 15 years ago.
Let's say a reasonable average would be that a church costs £50,000 a year to keep open. It's probably on the low side, but let's see what that gets us.
There are 27,000 of them.
I make that £1.35 billion a year.
They would need a rather more than 10% return on their assets to stay afloat without drawing on capital to manage that. They're getting more like 3.5% and an income of £430 million. Not negligible, but not sufficient.
Or, to put it crudely, they would need to find just under £1 billion from capital every year to survive on their investments alone. So it would all be gone in around 10 years on current figures.
In Wales, they are squaring this circle by rapidly closing parish churches, especially in your diocese (which is in colossal financial doo-doo anyway). I would not like to think the same will be true in England, although it already is with the Nonconfromist chapels precisely because they don't have endowments, but if we want to save parish churches even just as architectural landmarks we will need to think about where the money comes from.
Is that an argument for or against VAT on church repairs? No. The argument against VAT is it's a stupid tax designed by stupid people and tinkered with usually for stupid reasons. Far better to get rid, or radically reform it so it's a much lower rate but on absolutely everything. But Hyufd isn't talking total nonsense on this.
Why can't there be some religious M&A to deal with this issue?
Our rural churches have Catholics and evangelicals in them, they still need repairs and that still costs money
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
Obviously you've not seen Kemi Badenoch's tweets this evening.
Britain is a Christian country.
The Conservative Party will always celebrate our Christian heritage with deeds, not just words.
This Easter, we want to ensure local churches are properly maintained and repaired so we’re announcing a plan to restore funding for the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme which the government has recently placed caps on.
Churches matter. They aren’t just important places of worship, in many towns and villages they are the centre of the community and the pride of local people, often steeped in hundreds of years of history. It is critical we maintain them properly, because when they’re gone, this history and heritage could be lost forever.
@Conservatives believe we have a responsibility to protect our churches and make sure they endure for future generations. What are we for if not to conserve the very best of our country and our society for those yet to come?
Conservatives will protect our heritage and build a stronger country.
No I hadnt and I do not agree the taxpayer should fund the wealthy COE estate
The Church of England does not unfortunately have the money to maintain all of England's parish churches. It can help cathedrals, but not others. I don't think it's altogether understood how many they are or how much money they cost to run. Tewkesbury Abbey, for example, calculates its costs to survive at £10 per minute. OK, that's an extreme case, but even for Linton Parish Church in Herefordshire it was £300 a week 15 years ago.
Let's say a reasonable average would be that a church costs £50,000 a year to keep open. It's probably on the low side, but let's see what that gets us.
There are 27,000 of them.
I make that £1.35 billion a year.
They would need a rather more than 10% return on their assets to stay afloat without drawing on capital to manage that. They're getting more like 3.5% and an income of £430 million. Not negligible, but not sufficient.
Or, to put it crudely, they would need to find just under £1 billion from capital every year to survive on their investments alone. So it would all be gone in around 10 years on current figures.
In Wales, they are squaring this circle by rapidly closing parish churches, especially in your diocese (which is in colossal financial doo-doo anyway). I would not like to think the same will be true in England, although it already is with the Nonconfromist chapels precisely because they don't have endowments, but if we want to save parish churches even just as architectural landmarks we will need to think about where the money comes from.
Is that an argument for or against VAT on church repairs? No. The argument against VAT is it's a stupid tax designed by stupid people and tinkered with usually for stupid reasons. Far better to get rid, or radically reform it so it's a much lower rate but on absolutely everything. But Hyufd isn't talking total nonsense on this.
Why can't there be some religious M&A to deal with this issue?
Speaking as somebody who grew up in Newent, where no fewer than three different Christian groups used the parish church because the chapels for the other two had closed (it's now four) I would gently point out they already do...
(Incidentally, it went the other way, and when St Mary's had to be closed due to an unsafe tower in the 1970s the congregation were welcomed into the URC chapel along the street).
And of course the Church of Scotland has been schisming and remerging since the days of John Knox.
I assume Knox would be fine with whatever group had the most luxuriant beards.
Let’s be hopeful and presume even Trump isn’t mad enough to drop nukes on Qom. What then is he threatening to do to Iran with his “overwhelming force”. How is he going to take them “back to the Stone Age” and “rain terror”?
He’s got about 10,000 marines there hasn’t he? What can they do? Seize Kharg island maybe? Then what?
This is hardly going to terrify the Iranians back to the Neolithic. So what is he up to?
I'm off this now. I find detailed military stuff an eyeglazer. But just one interjection, I'm not keen on your "mad" here. It would be an act of unmitigated evil. The madness of it is relevant but secondary. So, revised framing, let's presume Donald Trump isn't EVIL enough to nuke Iran. Then, yes fine, as we were, how is he going to etc etc ... ??
I’ve just spent 50 minutes reading military experts on X so you don’t have to. They all believe Trump is going to do “something big” - he’s gone too far to chicken out this time. And he’s put his pieces in place
The two good but unlikely options are
1. They’re wrong. He’s bluffing again 2. Iran blinks and surrenders
More likely are these options
3. A ground assault that goes surprisingly well, America seizes key sites with minor losses and Iran surrenders 4. A ground assault that goes predictably badly, America is sucked into a new Vietnam/iraq and the world spirals into a terrifying energy shortage, and much else
And finally
5. Nukes
The obvious thing would be to embargo Iranian exports through Hormuz. Is he co-ordinating with the other Persian Gulf countries? One senses that he prefers dropping bombs to make a point.
The order of ease would be:
1) Stop Iran's oil exports 2) Open Hormuz to allow Arab oil exports ... big gap ... 3) Invade Iran
Inevitably Leon turns the volume up to 11 and thinks the hardest option is the only one available.
lol
How are you going to do 1 and 2? It’s not exactly easy. America and Israel have been trying their best for weeks with all their energy
No they haven't. Trump hasn't wanted to block Iranian oil because the global price would go even higher. Now some argue that if he did an embargo Iran might go full scorched earth (e.g attacking desalination plants) and take everyone else down with them. So it's an option with possible upsides and downsides. But they definitely haven't tried it.
That’s what I mean. I wasn’t clear - my bad
Just “stopping irans exports” has all kinds of unpleasant second order effects. Like another surge in oil prices and, as you say, guaranteed backlash from Iran taking out more oil infra elsewhere in the region
Opening the straits is very very difficult as it takes just a few missiles and drones to freak out insurers and then the tankers are stuck
Fact is there there are no easy options in Iran for America let alone any good options. Only degrees of bad
My guess is Donald will try this: not nukes, not yet. But Trump will seize kharg island and try to seize the Iranian coast next to the straits. He will simultaneously attack Iranian power stations and water supply hoping to cripple the regime within. Basically what Putin did to Ukraine
And it will probably fail and it will lead to horrible consequences worldwide. But at least it’s not nukes
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
Obviously you've not seen Kemi Badenoch's tweets this evening.
Britain is a Christian country.
The Conservative Party will always celebrate our Christian heritage with deeds, not just words.
This Easter, we want to ensure local churches are properly maintained and repaired so we’re announcing a plan to restore funding for the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme which the government has recently placed caps on.
Churches matter. They aren’t just important places of worship, in many towns and villages they are the centre of the community and the pride of local people, often steeped in hundreds of years of history. It is critical we maintain them properly, because when they’re gone, this history and heritage could be lost forever.
@Conservatives believe we have a responsibility to protect our churches and make sure they endure for future generations. What are we for if not to conserve the very best of our country and our society for those yet to come?
Conservatives will protect our heritage and build a stronger country.
No I hadnt and I do not agree the taxpayer should fund the wealthy COE estate
The Church of England does not unfortunately have the money to maintain all of England's parish churches. It can help cathedrals, but not others. I don't think it's altogether understood how many they are or how much money they cost to run. Tewkesbury Abbey, for example, calculates its costs to survive at £10 per minute. OK, that's an extreme case, but even for Linton Parish Church in Herefordshire it was £300 a week 15 years ago.
Let's say a reasonable average would be that a church costs £50,000 a year to keep open. It's probably on the low side, but let's see what that gets us.
There are 27,000 of them.
I make that £1.35 billion a year.
They would need a rather more than 10% return on their assets to stay afloat without drawing on capital to manage that. They're getting more like 3.5% and an income of £430 million. Not negligible, but not sufficient.
Or, to put it crudely, they would need to find just under £1 billion from capital every year to survive on their investments alone. So it would all be gone in around 10 years on current figures.
In Wales, they are squaring this circle by rapidly closing parish churches, especially in your diocese (which is in colossal financial doo-doo anyway). I would not like to think the same will be true in England, although it already is with the Nonconfromist chapels precisely because they don't have endowments, but if we want to save parish churches even just as architectural landmarks we will need to think about where the money comes from.
Is that an argument for or against VAT on church repairs? No. The argument against VAT is it's a stupid tax designed by stupid people and tinkered with usually for stupid reasons. Far better to get rid, or radically reform it so it's a much lower rate but on absolutely everything. But Hyufd isn't talking total nonsense on this.
Why can't there be some religious M&A to deal with this issue?
Speaking as somebody who grew up in Newent, where no fewer than three different Christian groups used the parish church because the chapels for the other two had closed (it's now four) I would gently point out they already do...
(Incidentally, it went the other way, and when St Mary's had to be closed due to an unsafe tower in the 1970s the congregation were welcomed into the URC chapel along the street).
And of course the Church of Scotland has been schisming and remerging since the days of John Knox.
I assume Knox would be fine with whatever group had the most luxuriant beards.
More likely, given Knox, the one that had the most alluring teenage girls.
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
Obviously you've not seen Kemi Badenoch's tweets this evening.
Britain is a Christian country.
The Conservative Party will always celebrate our Christian heritage with deeds, not just words.
This Easter, we want to ensure local churches are properly maintained and repaired so we’re announcing a plan to restore funding for the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme which the government has recently placed caps on.
Churches matter. They aren’t just important places of worship, in many towns and villages they are the centre of the community and the pride of local people, often steeped in hundreds of years of history. It is critical we maintain them properly, because when they’re gone, this history and heritage could be lost forever.
@Conservatives believe we have a responsibility to protect our churches and make sure they endure for future generations. What are we for if not to conserve the very best of our country and our society for those yet to come?
Conservatives will protect our heritage and build a stronger country.
No I hadnt and I do not agree the taxpayer should fund the wealthy COE estate
The Church of England does not unfortunately have the money to maintain all of England's parish churches. It can help cathedrals, but not others. I don't think it's altogether understood how many they are or how much money they cost to run. Tewkesbury Abbey, for example, calculates its costs to survive at £10 per minute. OK, that's an extreme case, but even for Linton Parish Church in Herefordshire it was £300 a week 15 years ago.
Let's say a reasonable average would be that a church costs £50,000 a year to keep open. It's probably on the low side, but let's see what that gets us.
There are 27,000 of them.
I make that £1.35 billion a year.
They would need a rather more than 10% return on their assets to stay afloat without drawing on income to manage that. They're getting more like 3.5% and an income of £430 million. Not negligible, but not sufficient.
Or, to put it crudely, they would need to find just under £1 billion from capital every year to survive on their investments alone. So it would all be gone in around 10 years on current figures.
In Wales, they are squaring this circle by rapidly closing parish churches, especially in your diocese (which is in colossal financial doo-doo anyway). I would not like to think the same will be true in England, although it already is with the Nonconfromist chapels precisely because they don't have endowments, but if we want to save parish churches even just as architectural landmarks we will need to think about where the money comes from.
Is that an argument for or against VAT on church repairs? No. The argument against VAT is it's a stupid tax designed by stupid people and tinkered with usually for stupid reasons. Far better to get rid, or radically reform it so it's a much lower rate but on absolutely everything. But Hyufd isn't talking total nonsense on this.
Our Parish Church where my mother, father and sister are buried and two of our children were married in is rarely open as you say
It is very sad but then support for the Church is dying almost literally but taxpayer funding cannot be the answer
Bullshit, 46% still defined themselves as Christian on the last census and we have a duty to preserve our ancient churches rather than removing the VAT exemption for them like Reeves did and Kemi and Jenrick have nor rightly said they will restore
Egyptian President El-Sisi: We appeal to the United States and the international community to save us from the unrestrained Ethiopian administration, which has caused harm to Egypt’s water security.
Egyptian President El-Sisi: We appeal to the United States and the international community to save us from the unrestrained Ethiopian administration, which has caused harm to Egypt’s water security.
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
Obviously you've not seen Kemi Badenoch's tweets this evening.
Britain is a Christian country.
The Conservative Party will always celebrate our Christian heritage with deeds, not just words.
This Easter, we want to ensure local churches are properly maintained and repaired so we’re announcing a plan to restore funding for the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme which the government has recently placed caps on.
Churches matter. They aren’t just important places of worship, in many towns and villages they are the centre of the community and the pride of local people, often steeped in hundreds of years of history. It is critical we maintain them properly, because when they’re gone, this history and heritage could be lost forever.
@Conservatives believe we have a responsibility to protect our churches and make sure they endure for future generations. What are we for if not to conserve the very best of our country and our society for those yet to come?
Conservatives will protect our heritage and build a stronger country.
No I hadnt and I do not agree the taxpayer should fund the wealthy COE estate
The Church of England does not unfortunately have the money to maintain all of England's parish churches. It can help cathedrals, but not others. I don't think it's altogether understood how many they are or how much money they cost to run. Tewkesbury Abbey, for example, calculates its costs to survive at £10 per minute. OK, that's an extreme case, but even for Linton Parish Church in Herefordshire it was £300 a week 15 years ago.
Let's say a reasonable average would be that a church costs £50,000 a year to keep open. It's probably on the low side, but let's see what that gets us.
There are 27,000 of them.
I make that £1.35 billion a year.
They would need a rather more than 10% return on their assets to stay afloat without drawing on capital to manage that. They're getting more like 3.5% and an income of £430 million. Not negligible, but not sufficient.
Or, to put it crudely, they would need to find just under £1 billion from capital every year to survive on their investments alone. So it would all be gone in around 10 years on current figures.
In Wales, they are squaring this circle by rapidly closing parish churches, especially in your diocese (which is in colossal financial doo-doo anyway). I would not like to think the same will be true in England, although it already is with the Nonconfromist chapels precisely because they don't have endowments, but if we want to save parish churches even just as architectural landmarks we will need to think about where the money comes from.
Is that an argument for or against VAT on church repairs? No. The argument against VAT is it's a stupid tax designed by stupid people and tinkered with usually for stupid reasons. Far better to get rid, or radically reform it so it's a much lower rate but on absolutely everything. But Hyufd isn't talking total nonsense on this.
The Church of England gets just over £1 billion in income a year once investments and share and rental income is added but that still only gets close to break even. As does the tourist income for cathedrals
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
Obviously you've not seen Kemi Badenoch's tweets this evening.
Britain is a Christian country.
The Conservative Party will always celebrate our Christian heritage with deeds, not just words.
This Easter, we want to ensure local churches are properly maintained and repaired so we’re announcing a plan to restore funding for the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme which the government has recently placed caps on.
Churches matter. They aren’t just important places of worship, in many towns and villages they are the centre of the community and the pride of local people, often steeped in hundreds of years of history. It is critical we maintain them properly, because when they’re gone, this history and heritage could be lost forever.
@Conservatives believe we have a responsibility to protect our churches and make sure they endure for future generations. What are we for if not to conserve the very best of our country and our society for those yet to come?
Conservatives will protect our heritage and build a stronger country.
I just hate this stuff and it turns me completely off them. They’re at their best when they start speaking to actual working people. Then they’ve got some traction with me.
Many working people also care about the preservation of our historic churches
Not when the COE has billions to do it themselves
The CoE is both moderately well off, and quite poor. They have a lot of assets (both land and investments), but not a lot of cash flow, and they have some very expensive buildings to maintain.
They have huge assets they can sell and it is not the taxpayers responsility to fund them
No, their ancient churches are most of their assets and need support from VAT exemption etc
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
It is not 'far right nonsense' to preserve our ancient Christian churches, it is what conservatives should be doing!
Of course it is nonsense
The conservative party has to be a broad church not pandering to a pew. !!!
The COE has vast wealth and must not receive taxpayers subsidies
If you have no interest fighting to preserve our Christian heritage in the culture wars BigG then really you shouldn't be in the Conservative Party at all, indeed you shouldn't even be in the LDs given they also back restoring the VAT exemption for places of worship as do Reform.
You should probably just go off and join Starmer Labour or even the Greens!
My christian heritage is very different to yours and Jesus would not agree that the wealth of the church should be not used to maintain its estate
As for the rest of your post it is hysterical nonsense
If you aren't willing to fight for our Christian heritage as Kemi and Jenrick are then really you are on the wrong side of the culture wars to the vast majority of conservatives
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
Obviously you've not seen Kemi Badenoch's tweets this evening.
Britain is a Christian country.
The Conservative Party will always celebrate our Christian heritage with deeds, not just words.
This Easter, we want to ensure local churches are properly maintained and repaired so we’re announcing a plan to restore funding for the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme which the government has recently placed caps on.
Churches matter. They aren’t just important places of worship, in many towns and villages they are the centre of the community and the pride of local people, often steeped in hundreds of years of history. It is critical we maintain them properly, because when they’re gone, this history and heritage could be lost forever.
@Conservatives believe we have a responsibility to protect our churches and make sure they endure for future generations. What are we for if not to conserve the very best of our country and our society for those yet to come?
Conservatives will protect our heritage and build a stronger country.
No I hadnt and I do not agree the taxpayer should fund the wealthy COE estate
The Church of England does not unfortunately have the money to maintain all of England's parish churches. It can help cathedrals, but not others. I don't think it's altogether understood how many they are or how much money they cost to run. Tewkesbury Abbey, for example, calculates its costs to survive at £10 per minute. OK, that's an extreme case, but even for Linton Parish Church in Herefordshire it was £300 a week 15 years ago.
Let's say a reasonable average would be that a church costs £50,000 a year to keep open. It's probably on the low side, but let's see what that gets us.
There are 27,000 of them.
I make that £1.35 billion a year.
They would need a rather more than 10% return on their assets to stay afloat without drawing on capital to manage that. They're getting more like 3.5% and an income of £430 million. Not negligible, but not sufficient.
Or, to put it crudely, they would need to find just under £1 billion from capital every year to survive on their investments alone. So it would all be gone in around 10 years on current figures.
In Wales, they are squaring this circle by rapidly closing parish churches, especially in your diocese (which is in colossal financial doo-doo anyway). I would not like to think the same will be true in England, although it already is with the Nonconfromist chapels precisely because they don't have endowments, but if we want to save parish churches even just as architectural landmarks we will need to think about where the money comes from.
Is that an argument for or against VAT on church repairs? No. The argument against VAT is it's a stupid tax designed by stupid people and tinkered with usually for stupid reasons. Far better to get rid, or radically reform it so it's a much lower rate but on absolutely everything. But Hyufd isn't talking total nonsense on this.
I think CofE buildings are 16000 not 27000, but that does not change the substance of your point.
If you want an idea as to what an empty building, with no community life, would cost to keep open, it may perhaps be worth a look at the Churches Conservation Trust, which picks up redundant CofE churches judged to be worth preserving when no other use is found.
If you want an idea as to what an empty building, with no community life, would cost to keep open, it may perhaps be worth a look at the Churches Conservation Trust, which picks up redundant CofE churches judged to be worth preserving when no other use is found.
It has core funding 2/3 from the UK Govt, and 1/3 from the Church Commissioners. It has 350 church buildings, and an income of about 12 million. So £35k per building.
Egyptian President El-Sisi: We appeal to the United States and the international community to save us from the unrestrained Ethiopian administration, which has caused harm to Egypt’s water security.
Peace prize winner in Ethiopia, not really lived up to the early credentials I guess.
Although as I understand it a potential conflict between Egypt and Ethiopia over water has been brewing for a long time.
Let’s be hopeful and presume even Trump isn’t mad enough to drop nukes on Qom. What then is he threatening to do to Iran with his “overwhelming force”. How is he going to take them “back to the Stone Age” and “rain terror”?
He’s got about 10,000 marines there hasn’t he? What can they do? Seize Kharg island maybe? Then what?
This is hardly going to terrify the Iranians back to the Neolithic. So what is he up to?
I'm off this now. I find detailed military stuff an eyeglazer. But just one interjection, I'm not keen on your "mad" here. It would be an act of unmitigated evil. The madness of it is relevant but secondary. So, revised framing, let's presume Donald Trump isn't EVIL enough to nuke Iran. Then, yes fine, as we were, how is he going to etc etc ... ??
I’ve just spent 50 minutes reading military experts on X so you don’t have to. They all believe Trump is going to do “something big” - he’s gone too far to chicken out this time. And he’s put his pieces in place
The two good but unlikely options are
1. They’re wrong. He’s bluffing again 2. Iran blinks and surrenders
More likely are these options
3. A ground assault that goes surprisingly well, America seizes key sites with minor losses and Iran surrenders 4. A ground assault that goes predictably badly, America is sucked into a new Vietnam/iraq and the world spirals into a terrifying energy shortage, and much else
And finally
5. Nukes
The obvious thing would be to embargo Iranian exports through Hormuz. Is he co-ordinating with the other Persian Gulf countries? One senses that he prefers dropping bombs to make a point.
The order of ease would be:
1) Stop Iran's oil exports 2) Open Hormuz to allow Arab oil exports ... big gap ... 3) Invade Iran
Inevitably Leon turns the volume up to 11 and thinks the hardest option is the only one available.
lol
How are you going to do 1 and 2? It’s not exactly easy. America and Israel have been trying their best for weeks with all their energy
No they haven't. Trump hasn't wanted to block Iranian oil because the global price would go even higher. Now some argue that if he did an embargo Iran might go full scorched earth (e.g attacking desalination plants) and take everyone else down with them. So it's an option with possible upsides and downsides. But they definitely haven't tried it.
That’s what I mean. I wasn’t clear - my bad
Just “stopping irans exports” has all kinds of unpleasant second order effects. Like another surge in oil prices and, as you say, guaranteed backlash from Iran taking out more oil infra elsewhere in the region
Opening the straits is very very difficult as it takes just a few missiles and drones to freak out insurers and then the tankers are stuck
Fact is there there are no easy options in Iran for America let alone any good options. Only degrees of bad
My guess is Donald will try this: not nukes, not yet. But Trump will seize kharg island and try to seize the Iranian coast next to the straits. He will simultaneously attack Iranian power stations and water supply hoping to cripple the regime within. Basically what Putin did to Ukraine
And it will probably fail and it will lead to horrible consequences worldwide. But at least it’s not nukes
He should just stop in the same spirit he started - with no thought for the consequences. That's the best bad option. And the easiest.
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
Obviously you've not seen Kemi Badenoch's tweets this evening.
Britain is a Christian country.
The Conservative Party will always celebrate our Christian heritage with deeds, not just words.
This Easter, we want to ensure local churches are properly maintained and repaired so we’re announcing a plan to restore funding for the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme which the government has recently placed caps on.
Churches matter. They aren’t just important places of worship, in many towns and villages they are the centre of the community and the pride of local people, often steeped in hundreds of years of history. It is critical we maintain them properly, because when they’re gone, this history and heritage could be lost forever.
@Conservatives believe we have a responsibility to protect our churches and make sure they endure for future generations. What are we for if not to conserve the very best of our country and our society for those yet to come?
Conservatives will protect our heritage and build a stronger country.
No I hadnt and I do not agree the taxpayer should fund the wealthy COE estate
The Church of England does not unfortunately have the money to maintain all of England's parish churches. It can help cathedrals, but not others. I don't think it's altogether understood how many they are or how much money they cost to run. Tewkesbury Abbey, for example, calculates its costs to survive at £10 per minute. OK, that's an extreme case, but even for Linton Parish Church in Herefordshire it was £300 a week 15 years ago.
Let's say a reasonable average would be that a church costs £50,000 a year to keep open. It's probably on the low side, but let's see what that gets us.
There are 27,000 of them.
I make that £1.35 billion a year.
They would need a rather more than 10% return on their assets to stay afloat without drawing on capital to manage that. They're getting more like 3.5% and an income of £430 million. Not negligible, but not sufficient.
Or, to put it crudely, they would need to find just under £1 billion from capital every year to survive on their investments alone. So it would all be gone in around 10 years on current figures.
In Wales, they are squaring this circle by rapidly closing parish churches, especially in your diocese (which is in colossal financial doo-doo anyway). I would not like to think the same will be true in England, although it already is with the Nonconfromist chapels precisely because they don't have endowments, but if we want to save parish churches even just as architectural landmarks we will need to think about where the money comes from.
Is that an argument for or against VAT on church repairs? No. The argument against VAT is it's a stupid tax designed by stupid people and tinkered with usually for stupid reasons. Far better to get rid, or radically reform it so it's a much lower rate but on absolutely everything. But Hyufd isn't talking total nonsense on this.
Why can't there be some religious M&A to deal with this issue?
Speaking as somebody who grew up in Newent, where no fewer than three different Christian groups used the parish church because the chapels for the other two had closed (it's now four) I would gently point out they already do...
(Incidentally, it went the other way, and when St Mary's had to be closed due to an unsafe tower in the 1970s the congregation were welcomed into the URC chapel along the street).
And of course the Church of Scotland has been schisming and remerging since the days of John Knox.
Indeed. When I was involved several decades ago my CofE church had a Chinese congregation on Sudnay afternoons, who then moved out some years later and became the local Chinese Church.
They now have a Spanish Congregation, and a Spanish staff member. Things change and they evolve.
He's really popular among his supporters so it's understandable they are trying to capitalise on that, notwithstanding their general disdain for capitalisim.
As a former Corbyn guy I can see exactly where this ends.
He seems like he’s popular now but it won’t last.
There’s not going to be enough popcorn available for the almighty Green Party row between the LGBTQIA2S+ and the Islamists.
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
Obviously you've not seen Kemi Badenoch's tweets this evening.
Britain is a Christian country.
The Conservative Party will always celebrate our Christian heritage with deeds, not just words.
This Easter, we want to ensure local churches are properly maintained and repaired so we’re announcing a plan to restore funding for the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme which the government has recently placed caps on.
Churches matter. They aren’t just important places of worship, in many towns and villages they are the centre of the community and the pride of local people, often steeped in hundreds of years of history. It is critical we maintain them properly, because when they’re gone, this history and heritage could be lost forever.
@Conservatives believe we have a responsibility to protect our churches and make sure they endure for future generations. What are we for if not to conserve the very best of our country and our society for those yet to come?
Conservatives will protect our heritage and build a stronger country.
No I hadnt and I do not agree the taxpayer should fund the wealthy COE estate
The Church of England does not unfortunately have the money to maintain all of England's parish churches. It can help cathedrals, but not others. I don't think it's altogether understood how many they are or how much money they cost to run. Tewkesbury Abbey, for example, calculates its costs to survive at £10 per minute. OK, that's an extreme case, but even for Linton Parish Church in Herefordshire it was £300 a week 15 years ago.
Let's say a reasonable average would be that a church costs £50,000 a year to keep open. It's probably on the low side, but let's see what that gets us.
There are 27,000 of them.
I make that £1.35 billion a year.
They would need a rather more than 10% return on their assets to stay afloat without drawing on capital to manage that. They're getting more like 3.5% and an income of £430 million. Not negligible, but not sufficient.
Or, to put it crudely, they would need to find just under £1 billion from capital every year to survive on their investments alone. So it would all be gone in around 10 years on current figures.
In Wales, they are squaring this circle by rapidly closing parish churches, especially in your diocese (which is in colossal financial doo-doo anyway). I would not like to think the same will be true in England, although it already is with the Nonconfromist chapels precisely because they don't have endowments, but if we want to save parish churches even just as architectural landmarks we will need to think about where the money comes from.
Is that an argument for or against VAT on church repairs? No. The argument against VAT is it's a stupid tax designed by stupid people and tinkered with usually for stupid reasons. Far better to get rid, or radically reform it so it's a much lower rate but on absolutely everything. But Hyufd isn't talking total nonsense on this.
Why can't there be some religious M&A to deal with this issue?
Speaking as somebody who grew up in Newent, where no fewer than three different Christian groups used the parish church because the chapels for the other two had closed (it's now four) I would gently point out they already do...
(Incidentally, it went the other way, and when St Mary's had to be closed due to an unsafe tower in the 1970s the congregation were welcomed into the URC chapel along the street).
And of course the Church of Scotland has been schisming and remerging since the days of John Knox.
I assume Knox would be fine with whatever group had the most luxuriant beards.
More likely, given Knox, the one that had the most alluring teenage girls.
I wonder what he would have made of the current Monstrous Regimen of Women?
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
Obviously you've not seen Kemi Badenoch's tweets this evening.
Britain is a Christian country.
The Conservative Party will always celebrate our Christian heritage with deeds, not just words.
This Easter, we want to ensure local churches are properly maintained and repaired so we’re announcing a plan to restore funding for the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme which the government has recently placed caps on.
Churches matter. They aren’t just important places of worship, in many towns and villages they are the centre of the community and the pride of local people, often steeped in hundreds of years of history. It is critical we maintain them properly, because when they’re gone, this history and heritage could be lost forever.
@Conservatives believe we have a responsibility to protect our churches and make sure they endure for future generations. What are we for if not to conserve the very best of our country and our society for those yet to come?
Conservatives will protect our heritage and build a stronger country.
No I hadnt and I do not agree the taxpayer should fund the wealthy COE estate
The Church of England does not unfortunately have the money to maintain all of England's parish churches. It can help cathedrals, but not others. I don't think it's altogether understood how many they are or how much money they cost to run. Tewkesbury Abbey, for example, calculates its costs to survive at £10 per minute. OK, that's an extreme case, but even for Linton Parish Church in Herefordshire it was £300 a week 15 years ago.
Let's say a reasonable average would be that a church costs £50,000 a year to keep open. It's probably on the low side, but let's see what that gets us.
There are 27,000 of them.
I make that £1.35 billion a year.
They would need a rather more than 10% return on their assets to stay afloat without drawing on capital to manage that. They're getting more like 3.5% and an income of £430 million. Not negligible, but not sufficient.
Or, to put it crudely, they would need to find just under £1 billion from capital every year to survive on their investments alone. So it would all be gone in around 10 years on current figures.
In Wales, they are squaring this circle by rapidly closing parish churches, especially in your diocese (which is in colossal financial doo-doo anyway). I would not like to think the same will be true in England, although it already is with the Nonconfromist chapels precisely because they don't have endowments, but if we want to save parish churches even just as architectural landmarks we will need to think about where the money comes from.
Is that an argument for or against VAT on church repairs? No. The argument against VAT is it's a stupid tax designed by stupid people and tinkered with usually for stupid reasons. Far better to get rid, or radically reform it so it's a much lower rate but on absolutely everything. But Hyufd isn't talking total nonsense on this.
FWIW VAT usually considered the worst tax, except for all the others.
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
It is not 'far right nonsense' to preserve our ancient Christian churches, it is what conservatives should be doing!
Of course it is nonsense
The conservative party has to be a broad church not pandering to a pew. !!!
The COE has vast wealth and must not receive taxpayers subsidies
If you have no interest fighting to preserve our Christian heritage in the culture wars BigG then really you shouldn't be in the Conservative Party at all, indeed you shouldn't even be in the LDs given they also back restoring the VAT exemption for places of worship as do Reform.
You should probably just go off and join Starmer Labour or even the Greens!
My christian heritage is very different to yours and Jesus would not agree that the wealth of the church should be not used to maintain its estate
As for the rest of your post it is hysterical nonsense
If you aren't willing to fight for our Christian heritage as Kemi and Jenrick are then really you are on the wrong side of the culture wars to the vast majority of conservatives
Britain IS a Christian country in very significant ways. The English were converted in 600AD (some of the Celts and Romano Brits were Christian 300 years earlier). This has shaped us ever since - from our laws to our language. The monarch is still the head of our Established faith. We have an incredible inheritance - almost peerless - of magnificent Christian architecture, churches chapels and cathedrals
We also have much great Christian art and wonderfully British Christian music. The Anglican choral legacy is exceptional
It is not xenophobic to be proud of this, and a true conservative should seek to defend it and preserve it. Denying our Christian identity is a denial of our true identity
I'm in Camden and we have elections next month. The borough has been Labour controlled for most of its history, although a LD/Con alliance ran it 2006-10 and the Tories did 1968-71. The councillor breakdown is currently Lab 45, LD 6, Con 3, Grn 1.
What will happen at the election? I'm just thinking aloud here. Labour has been dominant for so long that it's hard to imagine them losing power, but Labour are historically unpopular, so my gut says they will. Campaigning is well under way. I think the Greens are well positioned in 8. The LibDems are well positioned in 11. The Tories... I'm not certain, but they could hold 2 and they could do well in Primrose Hill, taking them to 5. Andrew Feinstein's Camden People's Alliance, a sort of Your Party-affiliated thing, seem to have a deal with the Greens and could do well in the south of the borough. I'm uncertain here: could they get 6? Reform UK don't seem very active. I doubt they'll put up a full slate of candidates and I suspect they won't win anything. If we take those predictions, that would put Labour on 25, just short of the 28 needed for a majority. Although I feel they might do a lot worse!
The resultant mix would be a mess. No-one will want to go into an alliance with Labour, but I can't see a LD/Grn/Con/CPA alliance working either. In some seats, it's obvious who the contenders are, but in at least half the borough, Labour were so far ahead of all the other parties last time around that it is difficult for anti-Labour tactical voters to know who to vote for. There could be seats with very split votes, letting Labour hang on or thrusting forward an unexpected winner.
Is that going to be the picture across a lot of inner London? Green, LD, Your Party-affiliated groups, Reform and even the Conservatives doing well in places where they've done the groundwork and are the clear opposition to Labour, but fragmented council chambers, no overall control becoming commonplace?
Egyptian President El-Sisi: We appeal to the United States and the international community to save us from the unrestrained Ethiopian administration, which has caused harm to Egypt’s water security.
Peace prize winner in Ethiopia, not really lived up to the early credentials I guess.
Although as I understand it a potential conflict between Egypt and Ethiopia over water has been brewing for a long time.
It’s one of those many “geography lessons in the 1990s” that’s coming true in the 2020s, along with:
- ageing populations and the pensions timebomb - Climate change-triggered warfare and refugee crises - geopolitical reactions to Chinese hegemony - pesticide-driven collapses in insect populations
If you want to know the world of 30 years hence, look at the A-Level geography syllabus of now.
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
Obviously you've not seen Kemi Badenoch's tweets this evening.
Britain is a Christian country.
The Conservative Party will always celebrate our Christian heritage with deeds, not just words.
This Easter, we want to ensure local churches are properly maintained and repaired so we’re announcing a plan to restore funding for the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme which the government has recently placed caps on.
Churches matter. They aren’t just important places of worship, in many towns and villages they are the centre of the community and the pride of local people, often steeped in hundreds of years of history. It is critical we maintain them properly, because when they’re gone, this history and heritage could be lost forever.
@Conservatives believe we have a responsibility to protect our churches and make sure they endure for future generations. What are we for if not to conserve the very best of our country and our society for those yet to come?
Conservatives will protect our heritage and build a stronger country.
No I hadnt and I do not agree the taxpayer should fund the wealthy COE estate
The Church of England does not unfortunately have the money to maintain all of England's parish churches. It can help cathedrals, but not others. I don't think it's altogether understood how many they are or how much money they cost to run. Tewkesbury Abbey, for example, calculates its costs to survive at £10 per minute. OK, that's an extreme case, but even for Linton Parish Church in Herefordshire it was £300 a week 15 years ago.
Let's say a reasonable average would be that a church costs £50,000 a year to keep open. It's probably on the low side, but let's see what that gets us.
There are 27,000 of them.
I make that £1.35 billion a year.
They would need a rather more than 10% return on their assets to stay afloat without drawing on income to manage that. They're getting more like 3.5% and an income of £430 million. Not negligible, but not sufficient.
Or, to put it crudely, they would need to find just under £1 billion from capital every year to survive on their investments alone. So it would all be gone in around 10 years on current figures.
In Wales, they are squaring this circle by rapidly closing parish churches, especially in your diocese (which is in colossal financial doo-doo anyway). I would not like to think the same will be true in England, although it already is with the Nonconfromist chapels precisely because they don't have endowments, but if we want to save parish churches even just as architectural landmarks we will need to think about where the money comes from.
Is that an argument for or against VAT on church repairs? No. The argument against VAT is it's a stupid tax designed by stupid people and tinkered with usually for stupid reasons. Far better to get rid, or radically reform it so it's a much lower rate but on absolutely everything. But Hyufd isn't talking total nonsense on this.
Our Parish Church where my mother, father and sister are buried and two of our children were married in is rarely open as you say
It is very sad but then support for the Church is dying almost literally but taxpayer funding cannot be the answer
Bullshit, 46% still defined themselves as Christian on the last census and we have a duty to preserve our ancient churches rather than removing the VAT exemption for them like Reeves did and Kemi and Jenrick have nor rightly said they will restore
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
It is not 'far right nonsense' to preserve our ancient Christian churches, it is what conservatives should be doing!
Of course it is nonsense
The conservative party has to be a broad church not pandering to a pew. !!!
The COE has vast wealth and must not receive taxpayers subsidies
If you have no interest fighting to preserve our Christian heritage in the culture wars BigG then really you shouldn't be in the Conservative Party at all, indeed you shouldn't even be in the LDs given they also back restoring the VAT exemption for places of worship as do Reform.
You should probably just go off and join Starmer Labour or even the Greens!
My christian heritage is very different to yours and Jesus would not agree that the wealth of the church should be not used to maintain its estate
As for the rest of your post it is hysterical nonsense
If you aren't willing to fight for our Christian heritage as Kemi and Jenrick are then really you are on the wrong side of the culture wars to the vast majority of conservatives
Let’s be hopeful and presume even Trump isn’t mad enough to drop nukes on Qom. What then is he threatening to do to Iran with his “overwhelming force”. How is he going to take them “back to the Stone Age” and “rain terror”?
He’s got about 10,000 marines there hasn’t he? What can they do? Seize Kharg island maybe? Then what?
This is hardly going to terrify the Iranians back to the Neolithic. So what is he up to?
I'm off this now. I find detailed military stuff an eyeglazer. But just one interjection, I'm not keen on your "mad" here. It would be an act of unmitigated evil. The madness of it is relevant but secondary. So, revised framing, let's presume Donald Trump isn't EVIL enough to nuke Iran. Then, yes fine, as we were, how is he going to etc etc ... ??
I’ve just spent 50 minutes reading military experts on X so you don’t have to. They all believe Trump is going to do “something big” - he’s gone too far to chicken out this time. And he’s put his pieces in place
The two good but unlikely options are
1. They’re wrong. He’s bluffing again 2. Iran blinks and surrenders
More likely are these options
3. A ground assault that goes surprisingly well, America seizes key sites with minor losses and Iran surrenders 4. A ground assault that goes predictably badly, America is sucked into a new Vietnam/iraq and the world spirals into a terrifying energy shortage, and much else
And finally
5. Nukes
The obvious thing would be to embargo Iranian exports through Hormuz. Is he co-ordinating with the other Persian Gulf countries? One senses that he prefers dropping bombs to make a point.
The order of ease would be:
1) Stop Iran's oil exports 2) Open Hormuz to allow Arab oil exports ... big gap ... 3) Invade Iran
Inevitably Leon turns the volume up to 11 and thinks the hardest option is the only one available.
lol
How are you going to do 1 and 2? It’s not exactly easy. America and Israel have been trying their best for weeks with all their energy
No they haven't. Trump hasn't wanted to block Iranian oil because the global price would go even higher. Now some argue that if he did an embargo Iran might go full scorched earth (e.g attacking desalination plants) and take everyone else down with them. So it's an option with possible upsides and downsides. But they definitely haven't tried it.
That’s what I mean. I wasn’t clear - my bad
Just “stopping irans exports” has all kinds of unpleasant second order effects. Like another surge in oil prices and, as you say, guaranteed backlash from Iran taking out more oil infra elsewhere in the region
Opening the straits is very very difficult as it takes just a few missiles and drones to freak out insurers and then the tankers are stuck
Fact is there there are no easy options in Iran for America let alone any good options. Only degrees of bad
My guess is Donald will try this: not nukes, not yet. But Trump will seize kharg island and try to seize the Iranian coast next to the straits. He will simultaneously attack Iranian power stations and water supply hoping to cripple the regime within. Basically what Putin did to Ukraine
And it will probably fail and it will lead to horrible consequences worldwide. But at least it’s not nukes
He should just stop in the same spirit he started - with no thought for the consequences. That's the best bad option. And the easiest.
Well yeah. TACO
Let’s hope he goes for it. Trouble is I don’t think his ego can stand it, this time
Incidentally, and I don’t want to get your hopes up, there are truly wild rumours that he’s very sick in hospital and possibly dying. I think it’s probably bullshit and he’s gone silent BECAUSE there is an impending attack
Let’s be hopeful and presume even Trump isn’t mad enough to drop nukes on Qom. What then is he threatening to do to Iran with his “overwhelming force”. How is he going to take them “back to the Stone Age” and “rain terror”?
He’s got about 10,000 marines there hasn’t he? What can they do? Seize Kharg island maybe? Then what?
This is hardly going to terrify the Iranians back to the Neolithic. So what is he up to?
I'm off this now. I find detailed military stuff an eyeglazer. But just one interjection, I'm not keen on your "mad" here. It would be an act of unmitigated evil. The madness of it is relevant but secondary. So, revised framing, let's presume Donald Trump isn't EVIL enough to nuke Iran. Then, yes fine, as we were, how is he going to etc etc ... ??
I’ve just spent 50 minutes reading military experts on X so you don’t have to. They all believe Trump is going to do “something big” - he’s gone too far to chicken out this time. And he’s put his pieces in place
The two good but unlikely options are
1. They’re wrong. He’s bluffing again 2. Iran blinks and surrenders
More likely are these options
3. A ground assault that goes surprisingly well, America seizes key sites with minor losses and Iran surrenders 4. A ground assault that goes predictably badly, America is sucked into a new Vietnam/iraq and the world spirals into a terrifying energy shortage, and much else
And finally
5. Nukes
The obvious thing would be to embargo Iranian exports through Hormuz. Is he co-ordinating with the other Persian Gulf countries? One senses that he prefers dropping bombs to make a point.
The order of ease would be:
1) Stop Iran's oil exports 2) Open Hormuz to allow Arab oil exports ... big gap ... 3) Invade Iran
Inevitably Leon turns the volume up to 11 and thinks the hardest option is the only one available.
lol
How are you going to do 1 and 2? It’s not exactly easy. America and Israel have been trying their best for weeks with all their energy
No they haven't. Trump hasn't wanted to block Iranian oil because the global price would go even higher. Now some argue that if he did an embargo Iran might go full scorched earth (e.g attacking desalination plants) and take everyone else down with them. So it's an option with possible upsides and downsides. But they definitely haven't tried it.
That’s what I mean. I wasn’t clear - my bad
Just “stopping irans exports” has all kinds of unpleasant second order effects. Like another surge in oil prices and, as you say, guaranteed backlash from Iran taking out more oil infra elsewhere in the region
Opening the straits is very very difficult as it takes just a few missiles and drones to freak out insurers and then the tankers are stuck
Fact is there there are no easy options in Iran for America let alone any good options. Only degrees of bad
My guess is Donald will try this: not nukes, not yet. But Trump will seize kharg island and try to seize the Iranian coast next to the straits. He will simultaneously attack Iranian power stations and water supply hoping to cripple the regime within. Basically what Putin did to Ukraine
And it will probably fail and it will lead to horrible consequences worldwide. But at least it’s not nukes
He should just stop in the same spirit he started - with no thought for the consequences. That's the best bad option. And the easiest.
Well yeah. TACO
Let’s hope he goes for it. Trouble is I don’t think his ego can stand it, this time
Incidentally, and I don’t want to get your hopes up, there are truly wild rumours that he’s very sick in hospital and possibly dying. I think it’s probably bullshit and he’s gone silent BECAUSE there is an impending attack
More likely he's just having another round of treatment for his dementia.
I mean, he wouldn't be silent just because he was planning to blow up the world, would he?
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
Obviously you've not seen Kemi Badenoch's tweets this evening.
Britain is a Christian country.
The Conservative Party will always celebrate our Christian heritage with deeds, not just words.
This Easter, we want to ensure local churches are properly maintained and repaired so we’re announcing a plan to restore funding for the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme which the government has recently placed caps on.
Churches matter. They aren’t just important places of worship, in many towns and villages they are the centre of the community and the pride of local people, often steeped in hundreds of years of history. It is critical we maintain them properly, because when they’re gone, this history and heritage could be lost forever.
@Conservatives believe we have a responsibility to protect our churches and make sure they endure for future generations. What are we for if not to conserve the very best of our country and our society for those yet to come?
Conservatives will protect our heritage and build a stronger country.
No I hadnt and I do not agree the taxpayer should fund the wealthy COE estate
The Church of England does not unfortunately have the money to maintain all of England's parish churches. It can help cathedrals, but not others. I don't think it's altogether understood how many they are or how much money they cost to run. Tewkesbury Abbey, for example, calculates its costs to survive at £10 per minute. OK, that's an extreme case, but even for Linton Parish Church in Herefordshire it was £300 a week 15 years ago.
Let's say a reasonable average would be that a church costs £50,000 a year to keep open. It's probably on the low side, but let's see what that gets us.
There are 27,000 of them.
I make that £1.35 billion a year.
They would need a rather more than 10% return on their assets to stay afloat without drawing on capital to manage that. They're getting more like 3.5% and an income of £430 million. Not negligible, but not sufficient.
Or, to put it crudely, they would need to find just under £1 billion from capital every year to survive on their investments alone. So it would all be gone in around 10 years on current figures.
In Wales, they are squaring this circle by rapidly closing parish churches, especially in your diocese (which is in colossal financial doo-doo anyway). I would not like to think the same will be true in England, although it already is with the Nonconfromist chapels precisely because they don't have endowments, but if we want to save parish churches even just as architectural landmarks we will need to think about where the money comes from.
Is that an argument for or against VAT on church repairs? No. The argument against VAT is it's a stupid tax designed by stupid people and tinkered with usually for stupid reasons. Far better to get rid, or radically reform it so it's a much lower rate but on absolutely everything. But Hyufd isn't talking total nonsense on this.
The Church of England gets just over £1 billion in income a year once investments and share and rental income is added but that still only gets close to break even. As does the tourist income for cathedrals
If you cannot live within your means then you have to cut your cloth accordingly
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
Obviously you've not seen Kemi Badenoch's tweets this evening.
Britain is a Christian country.
The Conservative Party will always celebrate our Christian heritage with deeds, not just words.
This Easter, we want to ensure local churches are properly maintained and repaired so we’re announcing a plan to restore funding for the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme which the government has recently placed caps on.
Churches matter. They aren’t just important places of worship, in many towns and villages they are the centre of the community and the pride of local people, often steeped in hundreds of years of history. It is critical we maintain them properly, because when they’re gone, this history and heritage could be lost forever.
@Conservatives believe we have a responsibility to protect our churches and make sure they endure for future generations. What are we for if not to conserve the very best of our country and our society for those yet to come?
Conservatives will protect our heritage and build a stronger country.
No I hadnt and I do not agree the taxpayer should fund the wealthy COE estate
The Church of England does not unfortunately have the money to maintain all of England's parish churches. It can help cathedrals, but not others. I don't think it's altogether understood how many they are or how much money they cost to run. Tewkesbury Abbey, for example, calculates its costs to survive at £10 per minute. OK, that's an extreme case, but even for Linton Parish Church in Herefordshire it was £300 a week 15 years ago.
Let's say a reasonable average would be that a church costs £50,000 a year to keep open. It's probably on the low side, but let's see what that gets us.
There are 27,000 of them.
I make that £1.35 billion a year.
They would need a rather more than 10% return on their assets to stay afloat without drawing on capital to manage that. They're getting more like 3.5% and an income of £430 million. Not negligible, but not sufficient.
Or, to put it crudely, they would need to find just under £1 billion from capital every year to survive on their investments alone. So it would all be gone in around 10 years on current figures.
In Wales, they are squaring this circle by rapidly closing parish churches, especially in your diocese (which is in colossal financial doo-doo anyway). I would not like to think the same will be true in England, although it already is with the Nonconfromist chapels precisely because they don't have endowments, but if we want to save parish churches even just as architectural landmarks we will need to think about where the money comes from.
Is that an argument for or against VAT on church repairs? No. The argument against VAT is it's a stupid tax designed by stupid people and tinkered with usually for stupid reasons. Far better to get rid, or radically reform it so it's a much lower rate but on absolutely everything. But Hyufd isn't talking total nonsense on this.
The Church of England gets just over £1 billion in income a year once investments and share and rental income is added but that still only gets close to break even. As does the tourist income for cathedrals
If you cannot live within your means then you have to cut your cloth accordingly
Let’s be hopeful and presume even Trump isn’t mad enough to drop nukes on Qom. What then is he threatening to do to Iran with his “overwhelming force”. How is he going to take them “back to the Stone Age” and “rain terror”?
He’s got about 10,000 marines there hasn’t he? What can they do? Seize Kharg island maybe? Then what?
This is hardly going to terrify the Iranians back to the Neolithic. So what is he up to?
I'm off this now. I find detailed military stuff an eyeglazer. But just one interjection, I'm not keen on your "mad" here. It would be an act of unmitigated evil. The madness of it is relevant but secondary. So, revised framing, let's presume Donald Trump isn't EVIL enough to nuke Iran. Then, yes fine, as we were, how is he going to etc etc ... ??
I’ve just spent 50 minutes reading military experts on X so you don’t have to. They all believe Trump is going to do “something big” - he’s gone too far to chicken out this time. And he’s put his pieces in place
The two good but unlikely options are
1. They’re wrong. He’s bluffing again 2. Iran blinks and surrenders
More likely are these options
3. A ground assault that goes surprisingly well, America seizes key sites with minor losses and Iran surrenders 4. A ground assault that goes predictably badly, America is sucked into a new Vietnam/iraq and the world spirals into a terrifying energy shortage, and much else
And finally
5. Nukes
The obvious thing would be to embargo Iranian exports through Hormuz. Is he co-ordinating with the other Persian Gulf countries? One senses that he prefers dropping bombs to make a point.
The order of ease would be:
1) Stop Iran's oil exports 2) Open Hormuz to allow Arab oil exports ... big gap ... 3) Invade Iran
Inevitably Leon turns the volume up to 11 and thinks the hardest option is the only one available.
lol
How are you going to do 1 and 2? It’s not exactly easy. America and Israel have been trying their best for weeks with all their energy
No they haven't. Trump hasn't wanted to block Iranian oil because the global price would go even higher. Now some argue that if he did an embargo Iran might go full scorched earth (e.g attacking desalination plants) and take everyone else down with them. So it's an option with possible upsides and downsides. But they definitely haven't tried it.
That’s what I mean. I wasn’t clear - my bad
Just “stopping irans exports” has all kinds of unpleasant second order effects. Like another surge in oil prices and, as you say, guaranteed backlash from Iran taking out more oil infra elsewhere in the region
Opening the straits is very very difficult as it takes just a few missiles and drones to freak out insurers and then the tankers are stuck
Fact is there there are no easy options in Iran for America let alone any good options. Only degrees of bad
My guess is Donald will try this: not nukes, not yet. But Trump will seize kharg island and try to seize the Iranian coast next to the straits. He will simultaneously attack Iranian power stations and water supply hoping to cripple the regime within. Basically what Putin did to Ukraine
And it will probably fail and it will lead to horrible consequences worldwide. But at least it’s not nukes
He should just stop in the same spirit he started - with no thought for the consequences. That's the best bad option. And the easiest.
Well yeah. TACO
Let’s hope he goes for it. Trouble is I don’t think his ego can stand it, this time
Incidentally, and I don’t want to get your hopes up, there are truly wild rumours that he’s very sick in hospital and possibly dying. I think it’s probably bullshit and he’s gone silent BECAUSE there is an impending attack
He's very old, people can go from mostly ok to bad pretty swiftly at that age, but I'll believe it when I see it. Cynically, I don't see such a thing leading to a more cohesive and less disruptive US foreign policy as far as the UK and allies are concerned.
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
It is not 'far right nonsense' to preserve our ancient Christian churches, it is what conservatives should be doing!
Of course it is nonsense
The conservative party has to be a broad church not pandering to a pew. !!!
The COE has vast wealth and must not receive taxpayers subsidies
If you have no interest fighting to preserve our Christian heritage in the culture wars BigG then really you shouldn't be in the Conservative Party at all, indeed you shouldn't even be in the LDs given they also back restoring the VAT exemption for places of worship as do Reform.
You should probably just go off and join Starmer Labour or even the Greens!
My christian heritage is very different to yours and Jesus would not agree that the wealth of the church should be not used to maintain its estate
As for the rest of your post it is hysterical nonsense
If you aren't willing to fight for our Christian heritage as Kemi and Jenrick are then really you are on the wrong side of the culture wars to the vast majority of conservatives
Britain IS a Christian country in very significant ways. The English were converted in 600AD (some of the Celts and Romano Brits were Christian 300 years earlier). This has shaped us ever since - from our laws to our language. The monarch is still the head of our Established faith. We have an incredible inheritance - almost peerless - of magnificent Christian architecture, churches chapels and cathedrals
We also have much great Christian art and wonderfully British Christian music. The Anglican choral legacy is exceptional
It is not xenophobic to be proud of this, and a true conservative should seek to defend it and preserve it. Denying our Christian identity is a denial of our true identity
God Save the King
Lots of folk express their pride in it. Hardly anyone is willing to invest time and/or money in keeping it alive. Things are now much more precarious than they were just ten years ago. It won't just keep muddling on. Reality is about to bit and bite hard.
Is that going to be the picture across a lot of inner London? Green, LD, Your Party-affiliated groups, Reform and even the Conservatives doing well in places where they've done the groundwork and are the clear opposition to Labour, but fragmented council chambers, no overall control becoming commonplace?
A lot of places are going to have to learn how to work in such situations. It happens all the time in other areas, but those not used to it can take an election cycle to figure it out, with poor implications in the meantime.
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
Obviously you've not seen Kemi Badenoch's tweets this evening.
Britain is a Christian country.
The Conservative Party will always celebrate our Christian heritage with deeds, not just words.
This Easter, we want to ensure local churches are properly maintained and repaired so we’re announcing a plan to restore funding for the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme which the government has recently placed caps on.
Churches matter. They aren’t just important places of worship, in many towns and villages they are the centre of the community and the pride of local people, often steeped in hundreds of years of history. It is critical we maintain them properly, because when they’re gone, this history and heritage could be lost forever.
@Conservatives believe we have a responsibility to protect our churches and make sure they endure for future generations. What are we for if not to conserve the very best of our country and our society for those yet to come?
Conservatives will protect our heritage and build a stronger country.
No I hadnt and I do not agree the taxpayer should fund the wealthy COE estate
The Church of England does not unfortunately have the money to maintain all of England's parish churches. It can help cathedrals, but not others. I don't think it's altogether understood how many they are or how much money they cost to run. Tewkesbury Abbey, for example, calculates its costs to survive at £10 per minute. OK, that's an extreme case, but even for Linton Parish Church in Herefordshire it was £300 a week 15 years ago.
Let's say a reasonable average would be that a church costs £50,000 a year to keep open. It's probably on the low side, but let's see what that gets us.
There are 27,000 of them.
I make that £1.35 billion a year.
They would need a rather more than 10% return on their assets to stay afloat without drawing on capital to manage that. They're getting more like 3.5% and an income of £430 million. Not negligible, but not sufficient.
Or, to put it crudely, they would need to find just under £1 billion from capital every year to survive on their investments alone. So it would all be gone in around 10 years on current figures.
In Wales, they are squaring this circle by rapidly closing parish churches, especially in your diocese (which is in colossal financial doo-doo anyway). I would not like to think the same will be true in England, although it already is with the Nonconfromist chapels precisely because they don't have endowments, but if we want to save parish churches even just as architectural landmarks we will need to think about where the money comes from.
Is that an argument for or against VAT on church repairs? No. The argument against VAT is it's a stupid tax designed by stupid people and tinkered with usually for stupid reasons. Far better to get rid, or radically reform it so it's a much lower rate but on absolutely everything. But Hyufd isn't talking total nonsense on this.
The Church of England gets just over £1 billion in income a year once investments and share and rental income is added but that still only gets close to break even. As does the tourist income for cathedrals
If you cannot live within your means then you have to cut your cloth accordingly
Do what any business does and cut costs
But that's the catch, isn't it? The only way to do that is to close churches. And who looks after them then? Some of course may not be worth preserving but I think we would feel rather a loss if the likes of Lichfield Cathedral or Malvern Priory were knocked down.
So we're back to private charities (which can't cope, as is being seen in Scotland) selling for other uses, which is not always possible, or the taxpayer via Heritage Scotland/English Heritage/Cadw.
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
It is not 'far right nonsense' to preserve our ancient Christian churches, it is what conservatives should be doing!
Of course it is nonsense
The conservative party has to be a broad church not pandering to a pew. !!!
The COE has vast wealth and must not receive taxpayers subsidies
If you have no interest fighting to preserve our Christian heritage in the culture wars BigG then really you shouldn't be in the Conservative Party at all, indeed you shouldn't even be in the LDs given they also back restoring the VAT exemption for places of worship as do Reform.
You should probably just go off and join Starmer Labour or even the Greens!
My christian heritage is very different to yours and Jesus would not agree that the wealth of the church should be not used to maintain its estate
As for the rest of your post it is hysterical nonsense
If you aren't willing to fight for our Christian heritage as Kemi and Jenrick are then really you are on the wrong side of the culture wars to the vast majority of conservatives
If dishonest racist Bob and dishonest liar Kemi are the golden Christian vision of the teachings of God. Then thank fuck I'm an Atheist.
I'm in Camden and we have elections next month. The borough has been Labour controlled for most of its history, although a LD/Con alliance ran it 2006-10 and the Tories did 1968-71. The councillor breakdown is currently Lab 45, LD 6, Con 3, Grn 1.
What will happen at the election? I'm just thinking aloud here. Labour has been dominant for so long that it's hard to imagine them losing power, but Labour are historically unpopular, so my gut says they will. Campaigning is well under way. I think the Greens are well positioned in 8. The LibDems are well positioned in 11. The Tories... I'm not certain, but they could hold 2 and they could do well in Primrose Hill, taking them to 5. Andrew Feinstein's Camden People's Alliance, a sort of Your Party-affiliated thing, seem to have a deal with the Greens and could do well in the south of the borough. I'm uncertain here: could they get 6? Reform UK don't seem very active. I doubt they'll put up a full slate of candidates and I suspect they won't win anything. If we take those predictions, that would put Labour on 25, just short of the 28 needed for a majority. Although I feel they might do a lot worse!
The resultant mix would be a mess. No-one will want to go into an alliance with Labour, but I can't see a LD/Grn/Con/CPA alliance working either. In some seats, it's obvious who the contenders are, but in at least half the borough, Labour were so far ahead of all the other parties last time around that it is difficult for anti-Labour tactical voters to know who to vote for. There could be seats with very split votes, letting Labour hang on or thrusting forward an unexpected winner.
Is that going to be the picture across a lot of inner London? Green, LD, Your Party-affiliated groups, Reform and even the Conservatives doing well in places where they've done the groundwork and are the clear opposition to Labour, but fragmented council chambers, no overall control becoming commonplace?
Here in Newham it's between Labour and the Newham Independents, the Muslim-based group led by Mehmood Mirza. The Greens may win some seats - no one else will (I suspect).
On another forum, I've predicted Labour 26, Newham Independents 26 and Greens 14 but that might overstate the Greens - not sure.
In my Ward, we've had leaflets from Labour, Newham Independents and the Conservatives for whom this is probably their best prospect. The Hindu businesses have Conservative posters, the Muslim businesses Newham Independent posters.
The trouble for the left is that whether they like to admit it or not, the basic morality of liberalism or fairness that they espouse is essentially rooted in Christianity. As for the right, they want to reclaim our Christian heritage but which bits exactly? I doubt it is medieval Catholicism or puritanism (Quakerism would be funny) so what exactly is it that they want to preserve beyond basic rituals and festivals? They don't seem to like contemporary Anglicanism much. The kind of wishy washy do goodery that I'm told goes down well on thought for the day?
As the Chief Constable of Manchester has said Jews in Britain live with a greater threat to their day to day safety than anyone else. Now our Christian heritage isn't exactly an unblemished record of kindness towards Jews is it? So what of our Christian heritage do we wish to keep?
🚨BREAKING: Israel is preparing to strike Iranian energy facilities but is waiting for a green light from the U.S., a senior Israeli defense official said, adding it could come within the next week.
I have no doubt Israel could take out Tehran's power grid in one night of bombing. Repeat as necessary in a new city each night.
It is what Putin could dream of in Ukraine - if he'd had air supremacy.
But he didn't.
Unfortunately for its neighbours, Iran can easily destroy desalination plants as by their nature, they are on the coast. Without water, what do Dubai and Kuwait and Bahrain and Abu Dhabi look like?
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
Obviously you've not seen Kemi Badenoch's tweets this evening.
Britain is a Christian country.
The Conservative Party will always celebrate our Christian heritage with deeds, not just words.
This Easter, we want to ensure local churches are properly maintained and repaired so we’re announcing a plan to restore funding for the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme which the government has recently placed caps on.
Churches matter. They aren’t just important places of worship, in many towns and villages they are the centre of the community and the pride of local people, often steeped in hundreds of years of history. It is critical we maintain them properly, because when they’re gone, this history and heritage could be lost forever.
@Conservatives believe we have a responsibility to protect our churches and make sure they endure for future generations. What are we for if not to conserve the very best of our country and our society for those yet to come?
Conservatives will protect our heritage and build a stronger country.
No I hadnt and I do not agree the taxpayer should fund the wealthy COE estate
The Church of England does not unfortunately have the money to maintain all of England's parish churches. It can help cathedrals, but not others. I don't think it's altogether understood how many they are or how much money they cost to run. Tewkesbury Abbey, for example, calculates its costs to survive at £10 per minute. OK, that's an extreme case, but even for Linton Parish Church in Herefordshire it was £300 a week 15 years ago.
Let's say a reasonable average would be that a church costs £50,000 a year to keep open. It's probably on the low side, but let's see what that gets us.
There are 27,000 of them.
I make that £1.35 billion a year.
They would need a rather more than 10% return on their assets to stay afloat without drawing on capital to manage that. They're getting more like 3.5% and an income of £430 million. Not negligible, but not sufficient.
Or, to put it crudely, they would need to find just under £1 billion from capital every year to survive on their investments alone. So it would all be gone in around 10 years on current figures.
In Wales, they are squaring this circle by rapidly closing parish churches, especially in your diocese (which is in colossal financial doo-doo anyway). I would not like to think the same will be true in England, although it already is with the Nonconfromist chapels precisely because they don't have endowments, but if we want to save parish churches even just as architectural landmarks we will need to think about where the money comes from.
Is that an argument for or against VAT on church repairs? No. The argument against VAT is it's a stupid tax designed by stupid people and tinkered with usually for stupid reasons. Far better to get rid, or radically reform it so it's a much lower rate but on absolutely everything. But Hyufd isn't talking total nonsense on this.
The Church of England gets just over £1 billion in income a year once investments and share and rental income is added but that still only gets close to break even. As does the tourist income for cathedrals
If you cannot live within your means then you have to cut your cloth accordingly
Do what any business does and cut costs
But that's the catch, isn't it? The only way to do that is to close churches. And who looks after them then? Some of course may not be worth preserving but I think we would feel rather a loss if the likes of Lichfield Cathedral or Malvern Priory were knocked down.
So we're back to private charities (which can't cope, as is being seen in Scotland) selling for other uses, which is not always possible, or the taxpayer via Heritage Scotland/English Heritage/Cadw.
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
Obviously you've not seen Kemi Badenoch's tweets this evening.
Britain is a Christian country.
The Conservative Party will always celebrate our Christian heritage with deeds, not just words.
This Easter, we want to ensure local churches are properly maintained and repaired so we’re announcing a plan to restore funding for the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme which the government has recently placed caps on.
Churches matter. They aren’t just important places of worship, in many towns and villages they are the centre of the community and the pride of local people, often steeped in hundreds of years of history. It is critical we maintain them properly, because when they’re gone, this history and heritage could be lost forever.
@Conservatives believe we have a responsibility to protect our churches and make sure they endure for future generations. What are we for if not to conserve the very best of our country and our society for those yet to come?
Conservatives will protect our heritage and build a stronger country.
No I hadnt and I do not agree the taxpayer should fund the wealthy COE estate
The Church of England does not unfortunately have the money to maintain all of England's parish churches. It can help cathedrals, but not others. I don't think it's altogether understood how many they are or how much money they cost to run. Tewkesbury Abbey, for example, calculates its costs to survive at £10 per minute. OK, that's an extreme case, but even for Linton Parish Church in Herefordshire it was £300 a week 15 years ago.
Let's say a reasonable average would be that a church costs £50,000 a year to keep open. It's probably on the low side, but let's see what that gets us.
There are 27,000 of them.
I make that £1.35 billion a year.
They would need a rather more than 10% return on their assets to stay afloat without drawing on capital to manage that. They're getting more like 3.5% and an income of £430 million. Not negligible, but not sufficient.
Or, to put it crudely, they would need to find just under £1 billion from capital every year to survive on their investments alone. So it would all be gone in around 10 years on current figures.
In Wales, they are squaring this circle by rapidly closing parish churches, especially in your diocese (which is in colossal financial doo-doo anyway). I would not like to think the same will be true in England, although it already is with the Nonconfromist chapels precisely because they don't have endowments, but if we want to save parish churches even just as architectural landmarks we will need to think about where the money comes from.
Is that an argument for or against VAT on church repairs? No. The argument against VAT is it's a stupid tax designed by stupid people and tinkered with usually for stupid reasons. Far better to get rid, or radically reform it so it's a much lower rate but on absolutely everything. But Hyufd isn't talking total nonsense on this.
The Church of England gets just over £1 billion in income a year once investments and share and rental income is added but that still only gets close to break even. As does the tourist income for cathedrals
If you cannot live within your means then you have to cut your cloth accordingly
Do what any business does and cut costs
But that's the catch, isn't it? The only way to do that is to close churches. And who looks after them then? Some of course may not be worth preserving but I think we would feel rather a loss if the likes of Lichfield Cathedral or Malvern Priory were knocked down.
So we're back to private charities (which can't cope, as is being seen in Scotland) selling for other uses, which is not always possible, or the taxpayer via Heritage Scotland/English Heritage/Cadw.
🚨BREAKING: Israel is preparing to strike Iranian energy facilities but is waiting for a green light from the U.S., a senior Israeli defense official said, adding it could come within the next week.
I have no doubt Israel could take out Tehran's power grid in one night of bombing. Repeat as necessary in a new city each night.
It is what Putin could dream of in Ukraine - if he'd had air supremacy.
But he didn't.
Unfortunately for its neighbours, Iran can easily destroy desalination plants as by their nature, they are on the coast. Without water, what do Dubai and Kuwait and Bahrain and Abu Dhabi look like?
Israel really is turning into apartheid South Africa, they really do not give a poop about what happens to their neighbours as well their own racist legal policies.
The trouble for the left is that whether they like to admit it or not, the basic morality of liberalism or fairness that they espouse is essentially rooted in Christianity. As for the right, they want to reclaim our Christian heritage but which bits exactly? I doubt it is medieval Catholicism or puritanism (Quakerism would be funny) so what exactly is it that they want to preserve beyond basic rituals and festivals? They don't seem to like contemporary Anglicanism much. The kind of wishy washy do goodery that I'm told goes down well on thought for the day?
As the Chief Constable of Manchester has said Jews in Britain live with a greater threat to their day to day safety than anyone else. Now our Christian heritage isn't exactly an unblemished record of kindness towards Jews is it? So what of our Christian heritage do we wish to keep?
There's been a bit of a push in recent years to recognise some of the impacts of more than a thousand years of Christian dominated culture, particularly on what are optimistically considered 'universal' values , and I think that is all fair enough and I think has some solidity behind it, but the efforts can push a bit too far sometimes. I thought 'The air we breathe' by Glen Scrivener was well written, but got quite lazy in its arguments in the latter half.
The trouble for the left is that whether they like to admit it or not, the basic morality of liberalism or fairness that they espouse is essentially rooted in Christianity. As for the right, they want to reclaim our Christian heritage but which bits exactly? I doubt it is medieval Catholicism or puritanism (Quakerism would be funny) so what exactly is it that they want to preserve beyond basic rituals and festivals? They don't seem to like contemporary Anglicanism much. The kind of wishy washy do goodery that I'm told goes down well on thought for the day?
As the Chief Constable of Manchester has said Jews in Britain live with a greater threat to their day to day safety than anyone else. Now our Christian heritage isn't exactly an unblemished record of kindness towards Jews is it? So what of our Christian heritage do we wish to keep?
"the basic morality of liberalism or fairness that they espouse is essentially rooted in Christianity"
Don't many religions have those same principles? It's almost like having those morals bestows some kind of survival advantage.
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
It is not 'far right nonsense' to preserve our ancient Christian churches, it is what conservatives should be doing!
Of course it is nonsense
The conservative party has to be a broad church not pandering to a pew. !!!
The COE has vast wealth and must not receive taxpayers subsidies
If you have no interest fighting to preserve our Christian heritage in the culture wars BigG then really you shouldn't be in the Conservative Party at all, indeed you shouldn't even be in the LDs given they also back restoring the VAT exemption for places of worship as do Reform.
You should probably just go off and join Starmer Labour or even the Greens!
My christian heritage is very different to yours and Jesus would not agree that the wealth of the church should be not used to maintain its estate
As for the rest of your post it is hysterical nonsense
If you aren't willing to fight for our Christian heritage as Kemi and Jenrick are then really you are on the wrong side of the culture wars to the vast majority of conservatives
Britain IS a Christian country in very significant ways. The English were converted in 600AD (some of the Celts and Romano Brits were Christian 300 years earlier). This has shaped us ever since - from our laws to our language. The monarch is still the head of our Established faith. We have an incredible inheritance - almost peerless - of magnificent Christian architecture, churches chapels and cathedrals
We also have much great Christian art and wonderfully British Christian music. The Anglican choral legacy is exceptional
It is not xenophobic to be proud of this, and a true conservative should seek to defend it and preserve it. Denying our Christian identity is a denial of our true identity
God Save the King
Lots of folk express their pride in it. Hardly anyone is willing to invest time and/or money in keeping it alive. Things are now much more precarious than they were just ten years ago. It won't just keep muddling on. Reality is about to bit and bite hard.
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
It is not 'far right nonsense' to preserve our ancient Christian churches, it is what conservatives should be doing!
Of course it is nonsense
The conservative party has to be a broad church not pandering to a pew. !!!
The COE has vast wealth and must not receive taxpayers subsidies
If you have no interest fighting to preserve our Christian heritage in the culture wars BigG then really you shouldn't be in the Conservative Party at all, indeed you shouldn't even be in the LDs given they also back restoring the VAT exemption for places of worship as do Reform.
You should probably just go off and join Starmer Labour or even the Greens!
My christian heritage is very different to yours and Jesus would not agree that the wealth of the church should be not used to maintain its estate
As for the rest of your post it is hysterical nonsense
If you aren't willing to fight for our Christian heritage as Kemi and Jenrick are then really you are on the wrong side of the culture wars to the vast majority of conservatives
Britain IS a Christian country in very significant ways. The English were converted in 600AD (some of the Celts and Romano Brits were Christian 300 years earlier). This has shaped us ever since - from our laws to our language. The monarch is still the head of our Established faith. We have an incredible inheritance - almost peerless - of magnificent Christian architecture, churches chapels and cathedrals
We also have much great Christian art and wonderfully British Christian music. The Anglican choral legacy is exceptional
It is not xenophobic to be proud of this, and a true conservative should seek to defend it and preserve it. Denying our Christian identity is a denial of our true identity
God Save the King
Lots of folk express their pride in it. Hardly anyone is willing to invest time and/or money in keeping it alive. Things are now much more precarious than they were just ten years ago. It won't just keep muddling on. Reality is about to bit and bite hard.
Let’s be hopeful and presume even Trump isn’t mad enough to drop nukes on Qom. What then is he threatening to do to Iran with his “overwhelming force”. How is he going to take them “back to the Stone Age” and “rain terror”?
He’s got about 10,000 marines there hasn’t he? What can they do? Seize Kharg island maybe? Then what?
This is hardly going to terrify the Iranians back to the Neolithic. So what is he up to?
I'm off this now. I find detailed military stuff an eyeglazer. But just one interjection, I'm not keen on your "mad" here. It would be an act of unmitigated evil. The madness of it is relevant but secondary. So, revised framing, let's presume Donald Trump isn't EVIL enough to nuke Iran. Then, yes fine, as we were, how is he going to etc etc ... ??
I’ve just spent 50 minutes reading military experts on X so you don’t have to. They all believe Trump is going to do “something big” - he’s gone too far to chicken out this time. And he’s put his pieces in place
The two good but unlikely options are
1. They’re wrong. He’s bluffing again 2. Iran blinks and surrenders
More likely are these options
3. A ground assault that goes surprisingly well, America seizes key sites with minor losses and Iran surrenders 4. A ground assault that goes predictably badly, America is sucked into a new Vietnam/iraq and the world spirals into a terrifying energy shortage, and much else
And finally
5. Nukes
The obvious thing would be to embargo Iranian exports through Hormuz. Is he co-ordinating with the other Persian Gulf countries? One senses that he prefers dropping bombs to make a point.
The order of ease would be:
1) Stop Iran's oil exports 2) Open Hormuz to allow Arab oil exports ... big gap ... 3) Invade Iran
Inevitably Leon turns the volume up to 11 and thinks the hardest option is the only one available.
lol
How are you going to do 1 and 2? It’s not exactly easy. America and Israel have been trying their best for weeks with all their energy
No they haven't. Trump hasn't wanted to block Iranian oil because the global price would go even higher. Now some argue that if he did an embargo Iran might go full scorched earth (e.g attacking desalination plants) and take everyone else down with them. So it's an option with possible upsides and downsides. But they definitely haven't tried it.
That’s what I mean. I wasn’t clear - my bad
Just “stopping irans exports” has all kinds of unpleasant second order effects. Like another surge in oil prices and, as you say, guaranteed backlash from Iran taking out more oil infra elsewhere in the region
Opening the straits is very very difficult as it takes just a few missiles and drones to freak out insurers and then the tankers are stuck
Fact is there there are no easy options in Iran for America let alone any good options. Only degrees of bad
My guess is Donald will try this: not nukes, not yet. But Trump will seize kharg island and try to seize the Iranian coast next to the straits. He will simultaneously attack Iranian power stations and water supply hoping to cripple the regime within. Basically what Putin did to Ukraine
And it will probably fail and it will lead to horrible consequences worldwide. But at least it’s not nukes
He should just stop in the same spirit he started - with no thought for the consequences. That's the best bad option. And the easiest.
Well yeah. TACO
Let’s hope he goes for it. Trouble is I don’t think his ego can stand it, this time
Incidentally, and I don’t want to get your hopes up, there are truly wild rumours that he’s very sick in hospital and possibly dying. I think it’s probably bullshit and he’s gone silent BECAUSE there is an impending attack
It's not his ego that's the problem. He's able to rewrite history to suit his ego no problem.
The problem is the counterparty, Iran.
With tariffs, for example, the counterparties were all too happy for Trump to TACO and drop tariffs. With Greenland the Danes weren't going to insist that the US tried to invade. TACO suited everyone.
But the Iranians are mad at her at having their Supreme Leader killed, they've discovered they have some leverage for once, and they want to get something more than a return to the status quo.
So if Trump unilaterally declare an end to the bombing the Iranians are not likely to stop trying to hit US assets at middle east airbases, and they're not likely to reopen the Strait.
So he can't TACO. He's trapped.
It does look like Kharg island is where this goes next, and then we'll see how much worse things get as a result.
On Trumps health this seems to be a regular thing where he receives treatment through an intravenous drip. So he likely reappears next week with heavy makeup on his hand. No obituary just yet.
The trouble for the left is that whether they like to admit it or not, the basic morality of liberalism or fairness that they espouse is essentially rooted in Christianity. As for the right, they want to reclaim our Christian heritage but which bits exactly? I doubt it is medieval Catholicism or puritanism (Quakerism would be funny) so what exactly is it that they want to preserve beyond basic rituals and festivals? They don't seem to like contemporary Anglicanism much. The kind of wishy washy do goodery that I'm told goes down well on thought for the day?
As the Chief Constable of Manchester has said Jews in Britain live with a greater threat to their day to day safety than anyone else. Now our Christian heritage isn't exactly an unblemished record of kindness towards Jews is it? So what of our Christian heritage do we wish to keep?
The trouble for the left is that whether they like to admit it or not, the basic morality of liberalism or fairness that they espouse is essentially rooted in Christianity. As for the right, they want to reclaim our Christian heritage but which bits exactly? I doubt it is medieval Catholicism or puritanism (Quakerism would be funny) so what exactly is it that they want to preserve beyond basic rituals and festivals? They don't seem to like contemporary Anglicanism much. The kind of wishy washy do goodery that I'm told goes down well on thought for the day?
As the Chief Constable of Manchester has said Jews in Britain live with a greater threat to their day to day safety than anyone else. Now our Christian heritage isn't exactly an unblemished record of kindness towards Jews is it? So what of our Christian heritage do we wish to keep?
Why is that trouble for the left? (Also, the left are still not some homogeneous whole.)
🚨BREAKING: Israel is preparing to strike Iranian energy facilities but is waiting for a green light from the U.S., a senior Israeli defense official said, adding it could come within the next week.
I have no doubt Israel could take out Tehran's power grid in one night of bombing. Repeat as necessary in a new city each night.
It is what Putin could dream of in Ukraine - if he'd had air supremacy.
But he didn't.
Unfortunately for its neighbours, Iran can easily destroy desalination plants as by their nature, they are on the coast. Without water, what do Dubai and Kuwait and Bahrain and Abu Dhabi look like?
This just gets worse and worse. We really are at the point where there needs to be a break with the US (and Israel). We should be making it clear that this war was not only illegal but a disastrous mistake and it should stop now. The absolute last thing we need is any further escalation.
🚨BREAKING: Israel is preparing to strike Iranian energy facilities but is waiting for a green light from the U.S., a senior Israeli defense official said, adding it could come within the next week.
I have no doubt Israel could take out Tehran's power grid in one night of bombing. Repeat as necessary in a new city each night.
It is what Putin could dream of in Ukraine - if he'd had air supremacy.
But he didn't.
Unfortunately for its neighbours, Iran can easily destroy desalination plants as by their nature, they are on the coast. Without water, what do Dubai and Kuwait and Bahrain and Abu Dhabi look like?
This just gets worse and worse. We really are at the point where there needs to be a break with the US (and Israel). We should be making it clear that this war was not only illegal but a disastrous mistake and it should stop now. The absolute last thing we need is any further escalation.
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
It is not 'far right nonsense' to preserve our ancient Christian churches, it is what conservatives should be doing!
Of course it is nonsense
The conservative party has to be a broad church not pandering to a pew. !!!
The COE has vast wealth and must not receive taxpayers subsidies
If you have no interest fighting to preserve our Christian heritage in the culture wars BigG then really you shouldn't be in the Conservative Party at all, indeed you shouldn't even be in the LDs given they also back restoring the VAT exemption for places of worship as do Reform.
You should probably just go off and join Starmer Labour or even the Greens!
Tax breaks and Lottery handouts for Mosques.
An interesting Reform policy.
Mainly for historic churches and cathedrals but Listed Mosques and Synagogues and Temples could also apply
It is (or was) the "Listed Places of Worship" scheme - so covers all places of worship.
The stats are that the Church of England has half of England's Grade 1 Listed buildings, so I think some specific support is justified. The setup they have in France, with ancient churches maintained by the Govt (aiui) is far more expensive.
I'd say restitution of the 5% VAT rate for all listed buildings, or Grade 1 listed buildings, would be a good compromise - and would also help with developers who burn them down.
The arguments about "but but but they are so rich" have been a red herring for a very long time, as the wealth was overwhelmingly dedicated to staff pensions, and each local church is a separate charity. The implication is that staff pension funds should be ransacked to maintain buildings, which is absurd on its face.
It's also infamously bad at looking after churches, although the burning down of Notre Dame by incompetent renovators was an extreme case. Neglect and decay is more usual.
Having been involved in this stuff, I don't agree wrt to the Church of England. "Collapsing Church of England" is one of about 6 or 7 standard press templates - along with "Rich Church wants your money", "Naughty Vicar has affair with parishioner", "Trendy Vicar upsets congregation", "Church is dying with it's congregation", and several others. They just don't want positive stories, and their dream is to kill institutions; that's just our media.
The system is well set up with required 5 yearly inspections by an architect, sinking funds, long-term schedules of work/repair, and so on. And for the complexity of the buildings, the maintenance is cost-effective and a huge amount is done by volunteers.
AFAIK money raised for routine maintenance and repair by congregations in the CofE is of the order of £150-200 million per annum.
BigG's buildings point is interesting - I think he is mistaken but I'll do a comment after supper.
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
It is not 'far right nonsense' to preserve our ancient Christian churches, it is what conservatives should be doing!
Of course it is nonsense
The conservative party has to be a broad church not pandering to a pew. !!!
The COE has vast wealth and must not receive taxpayers subsidies
If you have no interest fighting to preserve our Christian heritage in the culture wars BigG then really you shouldn't be in the Conservative Party at all, indeed you shouldn't even be in the LDs given they also back restoring the VAT exemption for places of worship as do Reform.
You should probably just go off and join Starmer Labour or even the Greens!
My christian heritage is very different to yours and Jesus would not agree that the wealth of the church should be not used to maintain its estate
As for the rest of your post it is hysterical nonsense
If you aren't willing to fight for our Christian heritage as Kemi and Jenrick are then really you are on the wrong side of the culture wars to the vast majority of conservatives
If dishonest racist Bob and dishonest liar Kemi are the golden Christian vision of the teachings of God. Then thank fuck I'm an Atheist.
Davey is a practising Anglican I believe too.
Starmer is atheist though and Polanski describes himself as a non religious, non Zionist Jew
🚨BREAKING: Israel is preparing to strike Iranian energy facilities but is waiting for a green light from the U.S., a senior Israeli defense official said, adding it could come within the next week.
I have no doubt Israel could take out Tehran's power grid in one night of bombing. Repeat as necessary in a new city each night.
It is what Putin could dream of in Ukraine - if he'd had air supremacy.
But he didn't.
Unfortunately for its neighbours, Iran can easily destroy desalination plants as by their nature, they are on the coast. Without water, what do Dubai and Kuwait and Bahrain and Abu Dhabi look like?
Israel really is turning into apartheid South Africa, they really do not give a poop about what happens to their neighbours as well their own racist legal policies.
Obviously this was a joke, but is it that different from Lucy Connolly? Sir Keir as DPP did all he could to get someone locked up for a joke about an airport bomb
I'm generally a peaceable man, but whoever came up with Making Tax Digital For Income Tax needs to die in a fire.
Just a question, if a Muslim had done what this lady did but had said it about Jews would you support them being arrested or not?
I will answer, but what difference does putting "Just a question" make there?
So what is the answer?
Why did you preface your question with "Just a question"? What else would it be?
So the answer is, if it was a Muslim you’d call for their arrest. I thought so.
I can't speak for isam but what I'd say is that we need consistency. Genuine incitement to violence is the obvious red line. Should hate speech be prosecuted? Maybe in some form. Trouble is the term hate has been trivialised.
Don't worry, that nutter is speaking for me anyway
Obviously this was a joke, but is it that different from Lucy Connolly? Sir Keir as DPP did all he could to get someone locked up for a joke about an airport bomb
I'm generally a peaceable man, but whoever came up with Making Tax Digital For Income Tax needs to die in a fire.
Just a question, if a Muslim had done what this lady did but had said it about Jews would you support them being arrested or not?
I will answer, but what difference does putting "Just a question" make there?
So what is the answer?
Why did you preface your question with "Just a question"? What else would it be?
So the answer is, if it was a Muslim you’d call for their arrest. I thought so.
I can't speak for isam but what I'd say is that we need consistency. Genuine incitement to violence is the obvious red line. Should hate speech be prosecuted? Maybe in some form. Trouble is the term hate has been trivialised.
Don't worry, that nutter is speaking for me anyway
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
It is not 'far right nonsense' to preserve our ancient Christian churches, it is what conservatives should be doing!
Of course it is nonsense
The conservative party has to be a broad church not pandering to a pew. !!!
The COE has vast wealth and must not receive taxpayers subsidies
If you have no interest fighting to preserve our Christian heritage in the culture wars BigG then really you shouldn't be in the Conservative Party at all, indeed you shouldn't even be in the LDs given they also back restoring the VAT exemption for places of worship as do Reform.
You should probably just go off and join Starmer Labour or even the Greens!
My christian heritage is very different to yours and Jesus would not agree that the wealth of the church should be not used to maintain its estate
As for the rest of your post it is hysterical nonsense
If you aren't willing to fight for our Christian heritage as Kemi and Jenrick are then really you are on the wrong side of the culture wars to the vast majority of conservatives
Britain IS a Christian country in very significant ways. The English were converted in 600AD (some of the Celts and Romano Brits were Christian 300 years earlier). This has shaped us ever since - from our laws to our language. The monarch is still the head of our Established faith. We have an incredible inheritance - almost peerless - of magnificent Christian architecture, churches chapels and cathedrals
We also have much great Christian art and wonderfully British Christian music. The Anglican choral legacy is exceptional
It is not xenophobic to be proud of this, and a true conservative should seek to defend it and preserve it. Denying our Christian identity is a denial of our true identity
God Save the King
Lots of folk express their pride in it. Hardly anyone is willing to invest time and/or money in keeping it alive. Things are now much more precarious than they were just ten years ago. It won't just keep muddling on. Reality is about to bit and bite hard.
3 million still attend churches each week in the UK, more at Christmas and Easter and for the right preserving our Christian heritage is now effectively the key cause in the culture wars
🚨BREAKING: Israel is preparing to strike Iranian energy facilities but is waiting for a green light from the U.S., a senior Israeli defense official said, adding it could come within the next week.
I have no doubt Israel could take out Tehran's power grid in one night of bombing. Repeat as necessary in a new city each night.
It is what Putin could dream of in Ukraine - if he'd had air supremacy.
But he didn't.
Unfortunately for its neighbours, Iran can easily destroy desalination plants as by their nature, they are on the coast. Without water, what do Dubai and Kuwait and Bahrain and Abu Dhabi look like?
Israel really is turning into apartheid South Africa, they really do not give a poop about what happens to their neighbours as well their own racist legal policies.
Alright Roger Waters!
Nah, my musical abilities are only matched by my ability to be subtle.
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
Obviously you've not seen Kemi Badenoch's tweets this evening.
Britain is a Christian country.
The Conservative Party will always celebrate our Christian heritage with deeds, not just words.
This Easter, we want to ensure local churches are properly maintained and repaired so we’re announcing a plan to restore funding for the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme which the government has recently placed caps on.
Churches matter. They aren’t just important places of worship, in many towns and villages they are the centre of the community and the pride of local people, often steeped in hundreds of years of history. It is critical we maintain them properly, because when they’re gone, this history and heritage could be lost forever.
@Conservatives believe we have a responsibility to protect our churches and make sure they endure for future generations. What are we for if not to conserve the very best of our country and our society for those yet to come?
Conservatives will protect our heritage and build a stronger country.
No I hadnt and I do not agree the taxpayer should fund the wealthy COE estate
The Church of England does not unfortunately have the money to maintain all of England's parish churches. It can help cathedrals, but not others. I don't think it's altogether understood how many they are or how much money they cost to run. Tewkesbury Abbey, for example, calculates its costs to survive at £10 per minute. OK, that's an extreme case, but even for Linton Parish Church in Herefordshire it was £300 a week 15 years ago.
Let's say a reasonable average would be that a church costs £50,000 a year to keep open. It's probably on the low side, but let's see what that gets us.
There are 27,000 of them.
I make that £1.35 billion a year.
They would need a rather more than 10% return on their assets to stay afloat without drawing on capital to manage that. They're getting more like 3.5% and an income of £430 million. Not negligible, but not sufficient.
Or, to put it crudely, they would need to find just under £1 billion from capital every year to survive on their investments alone. So it would all be gone in around 10 years on current figures.
In Wales, they are squaring this circle by rapidly closing parish churches, especially in your diocese (which is in colossal financial doo-doo anyway). I would not like to think the same will be true in England, although it already is with the Nonconfromist chapels precisely because they don't have endowments, but if we want to save parish churches even just as architectural landmarks we will need to think about where the money comes from.
Is that an argument for or against VAT on church repairs? No. The argument against VAT is it's a stupid tax designed by stupid people and tinkered with usually for stupid reasons. Far better to get rid, or radically reform it so it's a much lower rate but on absolutely everything. But Hyufd isn't talking total nonsense on this.
The Church of England gets just over £1 billion in income a year once investments and share and rental income is added but that still only gets close to break even. As does the tourist income for cathedrals
If you cannot live within your means then you have to cut your cloth accordingly
Do what any business does and cut costs
The church is NOT a business you complete philistine, it is the cultural heritage of the nation!!
It has cut costs but it should certainly not have to do so more than required because the hopeless Reeves removed the VAT exemption on church repairs
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
Obviously you've not seen Kemi Badenoch's tweets this evening.
Britain is a Christian country.
The Conservative Party will always celebrate our Christian heritage with deeds, not just words.
This Easter, we want to ensure local churches are properly maintained and repaired so we’re announcing a plan to restore funding for the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme which the government has recently placed caps on.
Churches matter. They aren’t just important places of worship, in many towns and villages they are the centre of the community and the pride of local people, often steeped in hundreds of years of history. It is critical we maintain them properly, because when they’re gone, this history and heritage could be lost forever.
@Conservatives believe we have a responsibility to protect our churches and make sure they endure for future generations. What are we for if not to conserve the very best of our country and our society for those yet to come?
Conservatives will protect our heritage and build a stronger country.
No I hadnt and I do not agree the taxpayer should fund the wealthy COE estate
The Church of England does not unfortunately have the money to maintain all of England's parish churches. It can help cathedrals, but not others. I don't think it's altogether understood how many they are or how much money they cost to run. Tewkesbury Abbey, for example, calculates its costs to survive at £10 per minute. OK, that's an extreme case, but even for Linton Parish Church in Herefordshire it was £300 a week 15 years ago.
Let's say a reasonable average would be that a church costs £50,000 a year to keep open. It's probably on the low side, but let's see what that gets us.
There are 27,000 of them.
I make that £1.35 billion a year.
They would need a rather more than 10% return on their assets to stay afloat without drawing on capital to manage that. They're getting more like 3.5% and an income of £430 million. Not negligible, but not sufficient.
Or, to put it crudely, they would need to find just under £1 billion from capital every year to survive on their investments alone. So it would all be gone in around 10 years on current figures.
In Wales, they are squaring this circle by rapidly closing parish churches, especially in your diocese (which is in colossal financial doo-doo anyway). I would not like to think the same will be true in England, although it already is with the Nonconfromist chapels precisely because they don't have endowments, but if we want to save parish churches even just as architectural landmarks we will need to think about where the money comes from.
Is that an argument for or against VAT on church repairs? No. The argument against VAT is it's a stupid tax designed by stupid people and tinkered with usually for stupid reasons. Far better to get rid, or radically reform it so it's a much lower rate but on absolutely everything. But Hyufd isn't talking total nonsense on this.
The Church of England gets just over £1 billion in income a year once investments and share and rental income is added but that still only gets close to break even. As does the tourist income for cathedrals
If you cannot live within your means then you have to cut your cloth accordingly
Do what any business does and cut costs
The church is NOT a business you complete philistine, it is the cultural heritage of the nation!!
It has cut costs but it should certainly not have to do so more than required because the hopeless Reeves removed the VAT exemption on church repairs
🚨BREAKING: Israel is preparing to strike Iranian energy facilities but is waiting for a green light from the U.S., a senior Israeli defense official said, adding it could come within the next week.
I have no doubt Israel could take out Tehran's power grid in one night of bombing. Repeat as necessary in a new city each night.
It is what Putin could dream of in Ukraine - if he'd had air supremacy.
But he didn't.
Unfortunately for its neighbours, Iran can easily destroy desalination plants as by their nature, they are on the coast. Without water, what do Dubai and Kuwait and Bahrain and Abu Dhabi look like?
This just gets worse and worse. We really are at the point where there needs to be a break with the US (and Israel). We should be making it clear that this war was not only illegal but a disastrous mistake and it should stop now. The absolute last thing we need is any further escalation.
I think that all the "middle rank" (in Carney's terms) countries should declare formal neutrality in Trump's War on Iran. That would wake him up, remind him that NATO and other countries are not his bitches to be shafted, and aiui give his forces and staff a formal 24 hours to exit or be interned for the duration (which would not be strictly enforced).
A number of European countries have already taken a stand - Switzerland and Austria have formally and publicly denied overflights citing tehir neutrality policy, which positions the USA as a belligerent power, rather than reacting quietly and being more nuanced. And Italy, Spain, France (and Germany>) have imposed restrictions.
Trump needs to know which way the world is turning, or he will not stop.
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
It is not 'far right nonsense' to preserve our ancient Christian churches, it is what conservatives should be doing!
Of course it is nonsense
The conservative party has to be a broad church not pandering to a pew. !!!
The COE has vast wealth and must not receive taxpayers subsidies
If you have no interest fighting to preserve our Christian heritage in the culture wars BigG then really you shouldn't be in the Conservative Party at all, indeed you shouldn't even be in the LDs given they also back restoring the VAT exemption for places of worship as do Reform.
You should probably just go off and join Starmer Labour or even the Greens!
My christian heritage is very different to yours and Jesus would not agree that the wealth of the church should be not used to maintain its estate
As for the rest of your post it is hysterical nonsense
If you aren't willing to fight for our Christian heritage as Kemi and Jenrick are then really you are on the wrong side of the culture wars to the vast majority of conservatives
Britain IS a Christian country in very significant ways. The English were converted in 600AD (some of the Celts and Romano Brits were Christian 300 years earlier). This has shaped us ever since - from our laws to our language. The monarch is still the head of our Established faith. We have an incredible inheritance - almost peerless - of magnificent Christian architecture, churches chapels and cathedrals
We also have much great Christian art and wonderfully British Christian music. The Anglican choral legacy is exceptional
It is not xenophobic to be proud of this, and a true conservative should seek to defend it and preserve it. Denying our Christian identity is a denial of our true identity
God Save the King
Lots of folk express their pride in it. Hardly anyone is willing to invest time and/or money in keeping it alive. Things are now much more precarious than they were just ten years ago. It won't just keep muddling on. Reality is about to bit and bite hard.
3 million still attend churches each week in the UK, more at Christmas and Easter and for the right preserving our Christian heritage is now effectively the key cause in the culture wars
Isn't Church of England weekly attendance well below 1 million now?
The trouble for the left is that whether they like to admit it or not, the basic morality of liberalism or fairness that they espouse is essentially rooted in Christianity. As for the right, they want to reclaim our Christian heritage but which bits exactly? I doubt it is medieval Catholicism or puritanism (Quakerism would be funny) so what exactly is it that they want to preserve beyond basic rituals and festivals? They don't seem to like contemporary Anglicanism much. The kind of wishy washy do goodery that I'm told goes down well on thought for the day?
As the Chief Constable of Manchester has said Jews in Britain live with a greater threat to their day to day safety than anyone else. Now our Christian heritage isn't exactly an unblemished record of kindness towards Jews is it? So what of our Christian heritage do we wish to keep?
"the basic morality of liberalism or fairness that they espouse is essentially rooted in Christianity"
Don't many religions have those same principles? It's almost like having those morals bestows some kind of survival advantage.
Not necessarily. That builds in an assumption that there is a subjective explanation for ethical principle. Whereas it is overwhelmingly implausible that, for example, 'torturing children for fun' is only wrong because because by chance it happens to have some survival value, and if it didn't it wouldn't be wrong at all.
The trouble for the left is that whether they like to admit it or not, the basic morality of liberalism or fairness that they espouse is essentially rooted in Christianity. As for the right, they want to reclaim our Christian heritage but which bits exactly? I doubt it is medieval Catholicism or puritanism (Quakerism would be funny) so what exactly is it that they want to preserve beyond basic rituals and festivals? They don't seem to like contemporary Anglicanism much. The kind of wishy washy do goodery that I'm told goes down well on thought for the day?
As the Chief Constable of Manchester has said Jews in Britain live with a greater threat to their day to day safety than anyone else. Now our Christian heritage isn't exactly an unblemished record of kindness towards Jews is it? So what of our Christian heritage do we wish to keep?
"the basic morality of liberalism or fairness that they espouse is essentially rooted in Christianity"
Don't many religions have those same principles? It's almost like having those morals bestows some kind of survival advantage.
This is part of the overargument of the rooted in Christianity premise. It'd be one thing to argue the historic and continued influences of it on the West in particular, and even beyond because of the spread of Western culture, but a) contrary examples in Christian societies are usually waved away as 'you only thing it wrong because of Christianity, therefore Christians doing the bad thing just proves the point even more' (even Dominion did a similar thing, albeit not from a proselytising position), which is incredibly convenient, and b) they often don't address any non-Christian examples of similar moralities at all - when a comparison to say why some of those things are particularly rooted in Christianity might be quite compelling and possibly even have some basis, but would be a more complex and muddy position to try to take.
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
Obviously you've not seen Kemi Badenoch's tweets this evening.
Britain is a Christian country.
The Conservative Party will always celebrate our Christian heritage with deeds, not just words.
This Easter, we want to ensure local churches are properly maintained and repaired so we’re announcing a plan to restore funding for the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme which the government has recently placed caps on.
Churches matter. They aren’t just important places of worship, in many towns and villages they are the centre of the community and the pride of local people, often steeped in hundreds of years of history. It is critical we maintain them properly, because when they’re gone, this history and heritage could be lost forever.
@Conservatives believe we have a responsibility to protect our churches and make sure they endure for future generations. What are we for if not to conserve the very best of our country and our society for those yet to come?
Conservatives will protect our heritage and build a stronger country.
No I hadnt and I do not agree the taxpayer should fund the wealthy COE estate
The Church of England does not unfortunately have the money to maintain all of England's parish churches. It can help cathedrals, but not others. I don't think it's altogether understood how many they are or how much money they cost to run. Tewkesbury Abbey, for example, calculates its costs to survive at £10 per minute. OK, that's an extreme case, but even for Linton Parish Church in Herefordshire it was £300 a week 15 years ago.
Let's say a reasonable average would be that a church costs £50,000 a year to keep open. It's probably on the low side, but let's see what that gets us.
There are 27,000 of them.
I make that £1.35 billion a year.
They would need a rather more than 10% return on their assets to stay afloat without drawing on capital to manage that. They're getting more like 3.5% and an income of £430 million. Not negligible, but not sufficient.
Or, to put it crudely, they would need to find just under £1 billion from capital every year to survive on their investments alone. So it would all be gone in around 10 years on current figures.
In Wales, they are squaring this circle by rapidly closing parish churches, especially in your diocese (which is in colossal financial doo-doo anyway). I would not like to think the same will be true in England, although it already is with the Nonconfromist chapels precisely because they don't have endowments, but if we want to save parish churches even just as architectural landmarks we will need to think about where the money comes from.
Is that an argument for or against VAT on church repairs? No. The argument against VAT is it's a stupid tax designed by stupid people and tinkered with usually for stupid reasons. Far better to get rid, or radically reform it so it's a much lower rate but on absolutely everything. But Hyufd isn't talking total nonsense on this.
The Church of England gets just over £1 billion in income a year once investments and share and rental income is added but that still only gets close to break even. As does the tourist income for cathedrals
If you cannot live within your means then you have to cut your cloth accordingly
Do what any business does and cut costs
But that's the catch, isn't it? The only way to do that is to close churches. And who looks after them then? Some of course may not be worth preserving but I think we would feel rather a loss if the likes of Lichfield Cathedral or Malvern Priory were knocked down.
So we're back to private charities (which can't cope, as is being seen in Scotland) selling for other uses, which is not always possible, or the taxpayer via Heritage Scotland/English Heritage/Cadw.
I've been in a couple of rather nice Wetherspoon pubs which were formerly places of Christian worship. Transformed in one way but very tastefully preserved.
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
It is not 'far right nonsense' to preserve our ancient Christian churches, it is what conservatives should be doing!
Of course it is nonsense
The conservative party has to be a broad church not pandering to a pew. !!!
The COE has vast wealth and must not receive taxpayers subsidies
If you have no interest fighting to preserve our Christian heritage in the culture wars BigG then really you shouldn't be in the Conservative Party at all, indeed you shouldn't even be in the LDs given they also back restoring the VAT exemption for places of worship as do Reform.
You should probably just go off and join Starmer Labour or even the Greens!
My christian heritage is very different to yours and Jesus would not agree that the wealth of the church should be not used to maintain its estate
As for the rest of your post it is hysterical nonsense
If you aren't willing to fight for our Christian heritage as Kemi and Jenrick are then really you are on the wrong side of the culture wars to the vast majority of conservatives
Britain IS a Christian country in very significant ways. The English were converted in 600AD (some of the Celts and Romano Brits were Christian 300 years earlier). This has shaped us ever since - from our laws to our language. The monarch is still the head of our Established faith. We have an incredible inheritance - almost peerless - of magnificent Christian architecture, churches chapels and cathedrals
We also have much great Christian art and wonderfully British Christian music. The Anglican choral legacy is exceptional
It is not xenophobic to be proud of this, and a true conservative should seek to defend it and preserve it. Denying our Christian identity is a denial of our true identity
God Save the King
Lots of folk express their pride in it. Hardly anyone is willing to invest time and/or money in keeping it alive. Things are now much more precarious than they were just ten years ago. It won't just keep muddling on. Reality is about to bit and bite hard.
3 million still attend churches each week in the UK, more at Christmas and Easter and for the right preserving our Christian heritage is now effectively the key cause in the culture wars
I think you are being naive. The purpose of the culture wars is not to preserve our Christian heritage. It’s to promote right-wing politicians and to grift money from the enraged. The culture wars put Trump into office, a man who has done basically nothing for Christianity, whatever his claims, and whose behaviour is consistently un-Christ-like.
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
It is not 'far right nonsense' to preserve our ancient Christian churches, it is what conservatives should be doing!
Of course it is nonsense
The conservative party has to be a broad church not pandering to a pew. !!!
The COE has vast wealth and must not receive taxpayers subsidies
If you have no interest fighting to preserve our Christian heritage in the culture wars BigG then really you shouldn't be in the Conservative Party at all, indeed you shouldn't even be in the LDs given they also back restoring the VAT exemption for places of worship as do Reform.
You should probably just go off and join Starmer Labour or even the Greens!
My christian heritage is very different to yours and Jesus would not agree that the wealth of the church should be not used to maintain its estate
As for the rest of your post it is hysterical nonsense
If you aren't willing to fight for our Christian heritage as Kemi and Jenrick are then really you are on the wrong side of the culture wars to the vast majority of conservatives
Britain IS a Christian country in very significant ways. The English were converted in 600AD (some of the Celts and Romano Brits were Christian 300 years earlier). This has shaped us ever since - from our laws to our language. The monarch is still the head of our Established faith. We have an incredible inheritance - almost peerless - of magnificent Christian architecture, churches chapels and cathedrals
We also have much great Christian art and wonderfully British Christian music. The Anglican choral legacy is exceptional
It is not xenophobic to be proud of this, and a true conservative should seek to defend it and preserve it. Denying our Christian identity is a denial of our true identity
God Save the King
Lots of folk express their pride in it. Hardly anyone is willing to invest time and/or money in keeping it alive. Things are now much more precarious than they were just ten years ago. It won't just keep muddling on. Reality is about to bit and bite hard.
Tax unbelievers
In all seriousness, there should be a Swedish-style Church (or nice building) tax at 1% which you can opt out of. Put your money where your mouth is, don’t expect others to pick up the bill.
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
It is not 'far right nonsense' to preserve our ancient Christian churches, it is what conservatives should be doing!
Of course it is nonsense
The conservative party has to be a broad church not pandering to a pew. !!!
The COE has vast wealth and must not receive taxpayers subsidies
If you have no interest fighting to preserve our Christian heritage in the culture wars BigG then really you shouldn't be in the Conservative Party at all, indeed you shouldn't even be in the LDs given they also back restoring the VAT exemption for places of worship as do Reform.
You should probably just go off and join Starmer Labour or even the Greens!
Tax breaks and Lottery handouts for Mosques.
An interesting Reform policy.
Mainly for historic churches and cathedrals but Listed Mosques and Synagogues and Temples could also apply
It is (or was) the "Listed Places of Worship" scheme - so covers all places of worship.
The stats are that the Church of England has half of England's Grade 1 Listed buildings, so I think some specific support is justified. The setup they have in France, with ancient churches maintained by the Govt (aiui) is far more expensive.
I'd say restitution of the 5% VAT rate for all listed buildings, or Grade 1 listed buildings, would be a good compromise - and would also help with developers who burn them down.
The arguments about "but but but they are so rich" have been a red herring for a very long time, as the wealth was overwhelmingly dedicated to staff pensions, and each local church is a separate charity. The implication is that staff pension funds should be ransacked to maintain buildings, which is absurd on its face.
It's also infamously bad at looking after churches, although the burning down of Notre Dame by incompetent renovators was an extreme case. Neglect and decay is more usual.
Having been involved in this stuff, I don't agree wrt to the Church of England. "Collapsing Church of England" is one of about 6 or 7 standard press templates - along with "Rich Church wants your money", "Naughty Vicar has affair with parishioner", "Trendy Vicar upsets congregation", "Church is dying with it's congregation", and several others. They just don't want positive stories, and their dream is to kill institutions; that's just our media.
The system is well set up with required 5 yearly inspections by an architect, sinking funds, long-term schedules of work/repair, and so on. And for the complexity of the buildings, the maintenance is cost-effective and a huge amount is done by volunteers.
AFAIK money raised for routine maintenance and repair by congregations in the CofE is of the order of £150-200 million per annum.
BigG's buildings point is interesting - I think he is mistaken but I'll do a comment after supper.
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
Obviously you've not seen Kemi Badenoch's tweets this evening.
Britain is a Christian country.
The Conservative Party will always celebrate our Christian heritage with deeds, not just words.
This Easter, we want to ensure local churches are properly maintained and repaired so we’re announcing a plan to restore funding for the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme which the government has recently placed caps on.
Churches matter. They aren’t just important places of worship, in many towns and villages they are the centre of the community and the pride of local people, often steeped in hundreds of years of history. It is critical we maintain them properly, because when they’re gone, this history and heritage could be lost forever.
@Conservatives believe we have a responsibility to protect our churches and make sure they endure for future generations. What are we for if not to conserve the very best of our country and our society for those yet to come?
Conservatives will protect our heritage and build a stronger country.
No I hadnt and I do not agree the taxpayer should fund the wealthy COE estate
The Church of England does not unfortunately have the money to maintain all of England's parish churches. It can help cathedrals, but not others. I don't think it's altogether understood how many they are or how much money they cost to run. Tewkesbury Abbey, for example, calculates its costs to survive at £10 per minute. OK, that's an extreme case, but even for Linton Parish Church in Herefordshire it was £300 a week 15 years ago.
Let's say a reasonable average would be that a church costs £50,000 a year to keep open. It's probably on the low side, but let's see what that gets us.
There are 27,000 of them.
I make that £1.35 billion a year.
They would need a rather more than 10% return on their assets to stay afloat without drawing on capital to manage that. They're getting more like 3.5% and an income of £430 million. Not negligible, but not sufficient.
Or, to put it crudely, they would need to find just under £1 billion from capital every year to survive on their investments alone. So it would all be gone in around 10 years on current figures.
In Wales, they are squaring this circle by rapidly closing parish churches, especially in your diocese (which is in colossal financial doo-doo anyway). I would not like to think the same will be true in England, although it already is with the Nonconfromist chapels precisely because they don't have endowments, but if we want to save parish churches even just as architectural landmarks we will need to think about where the money comes from.
Is that an argument for or against VAT on church repairs? No. The argument against VAT is it's a stupid tax designed by stupid people and tinkered with usually for stupid reasons. Far better to get rid, or radically reform it so it's a much lower rate but on absolutely everything. But Hyufd isn't talking total nonsense on this.
The Church of England gets just over £1 billion in income a year once investments and share and rental income is added but that still only gets close to break even. As does the tourist income for cathedrals
If you cannot live within your means then you have to cut your cloth accordingly
Do what any business does and cut costs
The church is NOT a business you complete philistine, it is the cultural heritage of the nation!!
It has cut costs but it should certainly not have to do so more than required because the hopeless Reeves removed the VAT exemption on church repairs
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
Obviously you've not seen Kemi Badenoch's tweets this evening.
Britain is a Christian country.
The Conservative Party will always celebrate our Christian heritage with deeds, not just words.
This Easter, we want to ensure local churches are properly maintained and repaired so we’re announcing a plan to restore funding for the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme which the government has recently placed caps on.
Churches matter. They aren’t just important places of worship, in many towns and villages they are the centre of the community and the pride of local people, often steeped in hundreds of years of history. It is critical we maintain them properly, because when they’re gone, this history and heritage could be lost forever.
@Conservatives believe we have a responsibility to protect our churches and make sure they endure for future generations. What are we for if not to conserve the very best of our country and our society for those yet to come?
Conservatives will protect our heritage and build a stronger country.
No I hadnt and I do not agree the taxpayer should fund the wealthy COE estate
The Church of England does not unfortunately have the money to maintain all of England's parish churches. It can help cathedrals, but not others. I don't think it's altogether understood how many they are or how much money they cost to run. Tewkesbury Abbey, for example, calculates its costs to survive at £10 per minute. OK, that's an extreme case, but even for Linton Parish Church in Herefordshire it was £300 a week 15 years ago.
Let's say a reasonable average would be that a church costs £50,000 a year to keep open. It's probably on the low side, but let's see what that gets us.
There are 27,000 of them.
I make that £1.35 billion a year.
They would need a rather more than 10% return on their assets to stay afloat without drawing on capital to manage that. They're getting more like 3.5% and an income of £430 million. Not negligible, but not sufficient.
Or, to put it crudely, they would need to find just under £1 billion from capital every year to survive on their investments alone. So it would all be gone in around 10 years on current figures.
In Wales, they are squaring this circle by rapidly closing parish churches, especially in your diocese (which is in colossal financial doo-doo anyway). I would not like to think the same will be true in England, although it already is with the Nonconfromist chapels precisely because they don't have endowments, but if we want to save parish churches even just as architectural landmarks we will need to think about where the money comes from.
Is that an argument for or against VAT on church repairs? No. The argument against VAT is it's a stupid tax designed by stupid people and tinkered with usually for stupid reasons. Far better to get rid, or radically reform it so it's a much lower rate but on absolutely everything. But Hyufd isn't talking total nonsense on this.
The Church of England gets just over £1 billion in income a year once investments and share and rental income is added but that still only gets close to break even. As does the tourist income for cathedrals
If you cannot live within your means then you have to cut your cloth accordingly
Do what any business does and cut costs
But that's the catch, isn't it? The only way to do that is to close churches. And who looks after them then? Some of course may not be worth preserving but I think we would feel rather a loss if the likes of Lichfield Cathedral or Malvern Priory were knocked down.
So we're back to private charities (which can't cope, as is being seen in Scotland) selling for other uses, which is not always possible, or the taxpayer via Heritage Scotland/English Heritage/Cadw.
I think most of those are care of English Heritage though.
One or two, perhaps, but I think most are in the care (or lack of care) of local landowners or sometimes the local parish. EH only has 400-odd sites in total, which Wikipedia tells me are the ones the government at some point thought important enough to take into public ownership. Ruined parish churches don't make the cut.
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
Obviously you've not seen Kemi Badenoch's tweets this evening.
Britain is a Christian country.
The Conservative Party will always celebrate our Christian heritage with deeds, not just words.
This Easter, we want to ensure local churches are properly maintained and repaired so we’re announcing a plan to restore funding for the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme which the government has recently placed caps on.
Churches matter. They aren’t just important places of worship, in many towns and villages they are the centre of the community and the pride of local people, often steeped in hundreds of years of history. It is critical we maintain them properly, because when they’re gone, this history and heritage could be lost forever.
@Conservatives believe we have a responsibility to protect our churches and make sure they endure for future generations. What are we for if not to conserve the very best of our country and our society for those yet to come?
Conservatives will protect our heritage and build a stronger country.
No I hadnt and I do not agree the taxpayer should fund the wealthy COE estate
The Church of England does not unfortunately have the money to maintain all of England's parish churches. It can help cathedrals, but not others. I don't think it's altogether understood how many they are or how much money they cost to run. Tewkesbury Abbey, for example, calculates its costs to survive at £10 per minute. OK, that's an extreme case, but even for Linton Parish Church in Herefordshire it was £300 a week 15 years ago.
Let's say a reasonable average would be that a church costs £50,000 a year to keep open. It's probably on the low side, but let's see what that gets us.
There are 27,000 of them.
I make that £1.35 billion a year.
They would need a rather more than 10% return on their assets to stay afloat without drawing on capital to manage that. They're getting more like 3.5% and an income of £430 million. Not negligible, but not sufficient.
Or, to put it crudely, they would need to find just under £1 billion from capital every year to survive on their investments alone. So it would all be gone in around 10 years on current figures.
In Wales, they are squaring this circle by rapidly closing parish churches, especially in your diocese (which is in colossal financial doo-doo anyway). I would not like to think the same will be true in England, although it already is with the Nonconfromist chapels precisely because they don't have endowments, but if we want to save parish churches even just as architectural landmarks we will need to think about where the money comes from.
Is that an argument for or against VAT on church repairs? No. The argument against VAT is it's a stupid tax designed by stupid people and tinkered with usually for stupid reasons. Far better to get rid, or radically reform it so it's a much lower rate but on absolutely everything. But Hyufd isn't talking total nonsense on this.
The Church of England gets just over £1 billion in income a year once investments and share and rental income is added but that still only gets close to break even. As does the tourist income for cathedrals
If you cannot live within your means then you have to cut your cloth accordingly
Do what any business does and cut costs
The church is NOT a business you complete philistine, it is the cultural heritage of the nation!!
It has cut costs but it should certainly not have to do so more than required because the hopeless Reeves removed the VAT exemption on church repairs
I'm happy as an atheist to contribute to preserving the cultural heritage of the nation, including churches in some cases, but ultimately faiths have to stand on their own two feet and ensure their relevance to the people of the current day and age. Many churchgoers make efforts to do just that in some admirable community and other works, but there isn't an inevitability that every part of the vast heritage can be maintained without the active faith element being significant enough to do so.
As a low key Christian I agree it is very niche and speaks to a minority
Far more important issues
Pleased he is in his natural home of far right nonsense
Obviously you've not seen Kemi Badenoch's tweets this evening.
Britain is a Christian country.
The Conservative Party will always celebrate our Christian heritage with deeds, not just words.
This Easter, we want to ensure local churches are properly maintained and repaired so we’re announcing a plan to restore funding for the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme which the government has recently placed caps on.
Churches matter. They aren’t just important places of worship, in many towns and villages they are the centre of the community and the pride of local people, often steeped in hundreds of years of history. It is critical we maintain them properly, because when they’re gone, this history and heritage could be lost forever.
@Conservatives believe we have a responsibility to protect our churches and make sure they endure for future generations. What are we for if not to conserve the very best of our country and our society for those yet to come?
Conservatives will protect our heritage and build a stronger country.
No I hadnt and I do not agree the taxpayer should fund the wealthy COE estate
The Church of England does not unfortunately have the money to maintain all of England's parish churches. It can help cathedrals, but not others. I don't think it's altogether understood how many they are or how much money they cost to run. Tewkesbury Abbey, for example, calculates its costs to survive at £10 per minute. OK, that's an extreme case, but even for Linton Parish Church in Herefordshire it was £300 a week 15 years ago.
Let's say a reasonable average would be that a church costs £50,000 a year to keep open. It's probably on the low side, but let's see what that gets us.
There are 27,000 of them.
I make that £1.35 billion a year.
They would need a rather more than 10% return on their assets to stay afloat without drawing on capital to manage that. They're getting more like 3.5% and an income of £430 million. Not negligible, but not sufficient.
Or, to put it crudely, they would need to find just under £1 billion from capital every year to survive on their investments alone. So it would all be gone in around 10 years on current figures.
In Wales, they are squaring this circle by rapidly closing parish churches, especially in your diocese (which is in colossal financial doo-doo anyway). I would not like to think the same will be true in England, although it already is with the Nonconfromist chapels precisely because they don't have endowments, but if we want to save parish churches even just as architectural landmarks we will need to think about where the money comes from.
Is that an argument for or against VAT on church repairs? No. The argument against VAT is it's a stupid tax designed by stupid people and tinkered with usually for stupid reasons. Far better to get rid, or radically reform it so it's a much lower rate but on absolutely everything. But Hyufd isn't talking total nonsense on this.
The Church of England gets just over £1 billion in income a year once investments and share and rental income is added but that still only gets close to break even. As does the tourist income for cathedrals
If you cannot live within your means then you have to cut your cloth accordingly
Do what any business does and cut costs
The church is NOT a business you complete philistine, it is the cultural heritage of the nation!!
It has cut costs but it should certainly not have to do so more than required because the hopeless Reeves removed the VAT exemption on church repairs!
If the CofE was sustainable with, say, 2,000 churches would that be a bad thing compared to it struggling to survive with ~16,000?
I read recently that the Victorians went mad with building churches and a lot of the churches they built were never well used because there wasn't the demand for them at the time either.
There's an issue with some historical churches being in the wrong place, following population movements, and so you might want to see what could be done to preserve some of those. A lot of precious history on those buildings.
But there are lots of churches where that is not so much the case. My daughter used to go to an indoor climbing centre that was in an old, but not that old, church building.
Comments
Then I went through my library history and discovered that it wasn't Adrian Tchaikovsky but was instead "The Quantum Thief" by Hannu Rajaniemi.
There you go. True story, dat.
As for the rest of your post it is hysterical nonsense
A lot of the church's billions is the pension fund. And a lot of the rest is the sort of building that looks like an asset but is really a liability.
IIRC cathedrals used to host markets in winter.
Let's say a reasonable average would be that a church costs £50,000 a year to keep open. It's probably on the low side, but let's see what that gets us.
There are 27,000 of them.
I make that £1.35 billion a year.
They would need a rather more than 10% return on their assets to stay afloat without drawing on capital to manage that. They're getting more like 3.5% and an income of £430 million. Not negligible, but not sufficient.
Or, to put it crudely, they would need to find just under £1 billion from capital every year to survive on their investments alone. So it would all be gone in around 10 years on current figures.
In Wales, they are squaring this circle by rapidly closing parish churches, especially in your diocese (which is in colossal financial doo-doo anyway). I would not like to think the same will be true in England, although it already is with the Nonconfromist chapels precisely because they don't have endowments, but if we want to save parish churches even just as architectural landmarks we will need to think about where the money comes from.
Is that an argument for or against VAT on church repairs? No. The argument against VAT is it's a stupid tax designed by stupid people and tinkered with usually for stupid reasons. Far better to get rid, or radically reform it so it's a much lower rate but on absolutely everything. But Hyufd isn't talking total nonsense on this.
https://tswyatt.substack.com/p/churches-to-mosques
Covenants would remain even after sale, yes. You could demolish the building and use the site, but not convert the building.
Labour confirmed they recognised the budget as a collection of measures they'd been rejecting every year for a decade. Now Reeves has found the list in an old Treasury drawer. It's trivial stuff that upsets people and achieves nothing but pleases civil servants by smoothing out edge cases, like why there is VAT on some hot food but not other hot food.
https://wnpf.org/our-priorities/parks-we-support/park-webcams/
The views should be good at least through Monday. (In the past, I have seen quite spectacular sunsets over the Jackson Visitor Center, which is named after the late senator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_M._Jackson )
The stats are that the Church of England has half of England's Grade 1 Listed buildings, so I think some specific support is justified. The setup they have in France, with ancient churches maintained by the Govt (aiui) is far more expensive.
I'd say restitution of the 5% VAT rate for all listed buildings, or Grade 1 listed buildings, would be a good compromise - and would also help with developers who burn them down.
The arguments about "but but but they are so rich" have been a red herring for a very long time, as the wealth was overwhelmingly dedicated to staff pensions, and each local church is a separate charity. The implication is that staff pension funds should be ransacked to maintain buildings, which is absurd on its face.
How are you going to do 1 and 2? It’s not exactly easy. America and Israel have been trying their best for weeks with all their energy
It is very sad but then support for the Church is dying almost literally but taxpayer funding cannot be the answer
https://share.google/Xj3YfnYTzcivuUdo9
https://www.churchofengland.org/resources/parish-reorganisation-and-church-property/closed-churches
Non CofE churches are different, and described here:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/disposal-of-redundant-churches-and-other-places-of-worship/disposal-of-redundant-churches
I'm terms of Mr Colville's tweet I think he'd be in a lot more difficulty if there were gangs of irate taxpayers trying to lay their hands on the person behind Making Tax Digital in order to immolate them. I think that's the material difference between the two cases and why one can be interpreted as a joke, while the other can be viewed as incitement.
If you want an idea as to what an empty building, with no community life, would cost to keep open, it may perhaps be worth a look at the Churches Conservation Trust, which picks up redundant CofE churches judged to be worth preserving when no other use is found.
$200 oil incoming?
https://x.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/2040505639697264642
(Incidentally, it went the other way, and when St Mary's had to be closed due to an unsafe tower in the 1970s the congregation were welcomed into the URC chapel along the street).
And of course the Church of Scotland has been schisming and remerging since the days of John Knox.
Just “stopping irans exports” has all kinds of unpleasant second order effects. Like another surge in oil prices and, as you say, guaranteed backlash from Iran taking out more oil infra elsewhere in the region
Opening the straits is very very difficult as it takes just a few missiles and drones to freak out insurers and then the tankers are stuck
Fact is there there are no easy options in Iran for
America let alone any good options. Only degrees of bad
My guess is Donald will try this: not nukes, not yet. But Trump will seize kharg island and try to seize the Iranian coast next to the straits. He will simultaneously attack Iranian power stations and water supply hoping to cripple the regime within. Basically what Putin did to Ukraine
And it will probably fail and it will lead to horrible consequences worldwide. But at least it’s not nukes
https://x.com/a_m_r_m1/status/2040458930086719967
Egyptian President El-Sisi: We appeal to the United States and the international community to save us from the unrestrained Ethiopian administration, which has caused harm to Egypt’s water security.
It has core funding 2/3 from the UK Govt, and 1/3 from the Church Commissioners. It has 350 church buildings, and an income of about 12 million. So £35k per building.
Although as I understand it a potential conflict between Egypt and Ethiopia over water has been brewing for a long time.
They now have a Spanish Congregation, and a Spanish staff member. Things change and they evolve.
Simple, unavoidable, does not distort. https://treasury.gov.au/review/tax-white-paper/which-taxes-cost-the-most
Britain IS a Christian country in very significant ways. The English were converted in 600AD (some of the Celts and Romano Brits were Christian 300 years earlier). This has shaped us ever since - from our laws to our language. The monarch is still the head of our Established faith. We have an incredible inheritance - almost peerless - of magnificent Christian architecture, churches chapels and cathedrals
We also have much great Christian art and wonderfully British Christian music. The Anglican choral legacy is exceptional
It is not xenophobic to be proud of this, and a true conservative should seek to defend it and preserve it. Denying our Christian identity is a denial of our true identity
God Save the King
What will happen at the election? I'm just thinking aloud here. Labour has been dominant for so long that it's hard to imagine them losing power, but Labour are historically unpopular, so my gut says they will. Campaigning is well under way. I think the Greens are well positioned in 8. The LibDems are well positioned in 11. The Tories... I'm not certain, but they could hold 2 and they could do well in Primrose Hill, taking them to 5. Andrew Feinstein's Camden People's Alliance, a sort of Your Party-affiliated thing, seem to have a deal with the Greens and could do well in the south of the borough. I'm uncertain here: could they get 6? Reform UK don't seem very active. I doubt they'll put up a full slate of candidates and I suspect they won't win anything. If we take those predictions, that would put Labour on 25, just short of the 28 needed for a majority. Although I feel they might do a lot worse!
The resultant mix would be a mess. No-one will want to go into an alliance with Labour, but I can't see a LD/Grn/Con/CPA alliance working either. In some seats, it's obvious who the contenders are, but in at least half the borough, Labour were so far ahead of all the other parties last time around that it is difficult for anti-Labour tactical voters to know who to vote for. There could be seats with very split votes, letting Labour hang on or thrusting forward an unexpected winner.
Is that going to be the picture across a lot of inner London? Green, LD, Your Party-affiliated groups, Reform and even the Conservatives doing well in places where they've done the groundwork and are the clear opposition to Labour, but fragmented council chambers, no overall control becoming commonplace?
- ageing populations and the pensions timebomb
- Climate change-triggered warfare and refugee crises
- geopolitical reactions to Chinese hegemony
- pesticide-driven collapses in insect populations
If you want to know the world of 30 years hence, look at the A-Level geography syllabus of now.
That was the King.
Let’s hope he goes for it. Trouble is I don’t think his ego can stand it, this time
Incidentally, and I don’t want to get your hopes up, there are truly wild rumours that he’s very sick in hospital and possibly dying. I think it’s probably bullshit and he’s gone silent BECAUSE there is an impending attack
I mean, he wouldn't be silent just because he was planning to blow up the world, would he?
Do what any business does and cut costs
Which Crusade would that be, now?
So we're back to private charities (which can't cope, as is being seen in Scotland) selling for other uses, which is not always possible, or the taxpayer via Heritage Scotland/English Heritage/Cadw.
On another forum, I've predicted Labour 26, Newham Independents 26 and Greens 14 but that might overstate the Greens - not sure.
In my Ward, we've had leaflets from Labour, Newham Independents and the Conservatives for whom this is probably their best prospect. The Hindu businesses have Conservative posters, the Muslim businesses Newham Independent posters.
As the Chief Constable of Manchester has said Jews in Britain live with a greater threat to their day to day safety than anyone else. Now our Christian heritage isn't exactly an unblemished record of kindness towards Jews is it? So what of our Christian heritage do we wish to keep?
It is what Putin could dream of in Ukraine - if he'd had air supremacy.
But he didn't.
Unfortunately for its neighbours, Iran can easily destroy desalination plants as by their nature, they are on the coast. Without water, what do Dubai and Kuwait and Bahrain and Abu Dhabi look like?
Don't many religions have those same principles? It's almost like having those morals bestows some kind of survival advantage.
The problem is the counterparty, Iran.
With tariffs, for example, the counterparties were all too happy for Trump to TACO and drop tariffs. With Greenland the Danes weren't going to insist that the US tried to invade. TACO suited everyone.
But the Iranians are mad at her at having their Supreme Leader killed, they've discovered they have some leverage for once, and they want to get something more than a return to the status quo.
So if Trump unilaterally declare an end to the bombing the Iranians are not likely to stop trying to hit US assets at middle east airbases, and they're not likely to reopen the Strait.
So he can't TACO. He's trapped.
It does look like Kharg island is where this goes next, and then we'll see how much worse things get as a result.
On Trumps health this seems to be a regular thing where he receives treatment through an intravenous drip. So he likely reappears next week with heavy makeup on his hand. No obituary just yet.
The system is well set up with required 5 yearly inspections by an architect, sinking funds, long-term schedules of work/repair, and so on. And for the complexity of the buildings, the maintenance is cost-effective and a huge amount is done by volunteers.
AFAIK money raised for routine maintenance and repair by congregations in the CofE is of the order of £150-200 million per annum.
BigG's buildings point is interesting - I think he is mistaken but I'll do a comment after supper.
Starmer is atheist though and Polanski describes himself as a non religious, non Zionist Jew
It has cut costs but it should certainly not have to do so more than required because the hopeless Reeves removed the VAT exemption on church repairs
A number of European countries have already taken a stand - Switzerland and Austria have formally and publicly denied overflights citing tehir neutrality policy, which positions the USA as a belligerent power, rather than reacting quietly and being more nuanced. And Italy, Spain, France (and Germany>) have imposed restrictions.
Trump needs to know which way the world is turning, or he will not stop.
I read recently that the Victorians went mad with building churches and a lot of the churches they built were never well used because there wasn't the demand for them at the time either.
There's an issue with some historical churches being in the wrong place, following population movements, and so you might want to see what could be done to preserve some of those. A lot of precious history on those buildings.
But there are lots of churches where that is not so much the case. My daughter used to go to an indoor climbing centre that was in an old, but not that old, church building.