Happy Easter! But what a sad day after. ‘Ha muerto el Papa’, I told our taxi driver (thanks to Google Translate) on the way out of Seville on Monday morning, after a very Catholic weekend. Before the break I spoke in Parliament about the persecuted church abroad, and referenced my work as chair of the All-Party Group for Christians in the Holy Land (see here). I wasn’t aware until the obituaries that Pope Francis spoke every evening to a Catholic priest in Gaza.
Back in Wiltshire we have local elections, and my usual non-partisan activities have been infected with politics. I even donned a tabard and wielded a litter-picker, helping to prettify St Margaret’s Mead estate in Marlborough ‘with your local Conservative team’ (see here). Litter-picking is in fact a deeply satisfying experience - not just for the photo op - and I encourage everyone to try it.
Also in St Margaret’s Mead is the Marlborough youth club, a brilliant operation run by the lovely Lisa with help from Conservative councillor (just saying) Caroline Thomas; here I am with the gang. A great quality of our county is the spirit of self-help and mutual aid, but there remains a key role for the council in supporting this informal infrastructure and, of course, providing the statutory services of social care, children’s services, leisure and transport. All these things Conservative-run Wiltshire does well, while keeping down council tax. That’s not the story in neighbouring (Lib Dem) Somerset or (Labour) Swindon.
All is not well with young people in Britain. Here I am definitely non-partisan because Labour and Lib Dem colleagues in Parliament share my deep concern about eating disorders. I spoke in a debate led by Wera Hobhouse (Lib Dem, Bath) on this topic (see here). We have in Marlborough, at the Savernake Hospital, one of the country’s leading in-patient clinics for adult eating disorders, where adolescents can also attend out-patient appointments, in addition to their main treatment at Marlborough House in Swindon. It urgently needs more investment; GPs need more training in spotting and supporting young people in the early stages of ED; and we all need to recognise the crisis in adolescent mental health caused by - in a word - modernity, namely the combination of social media, over-stretched schools, over-stretched parents, and a culture that effectively tells children they’re on their own and can make of the world whatever they want. Instead of all that we need to restrict their internet use; equip schools and other public services to support young people properly; strengthen families in every practical way we can; and give young people a sense they belong to a society that has a use for them, a role and an identity that isn’t found by staring at their own image on an iphone.
Meanwhile we inch closer to a disgraceful peace in Ukraine; though any negotiated peace is in a sense disgraceful when one negotiant is an aggressive dictator who has invaded the other. Morally speaking only the unconditional surrender of Russia and its total expulsion from Ukrainian territory would be acceptable. But when it comes to geopolitics we deal in reality, not in moral ideals. There is, to my mind, an air of fantasy about the criticisms of the Trump administration’s proposed deal. What else is possible, except a de facto recognition of the facts on the ground?
It is easy to argue, and possibly right, that the West should have responded to the 2022 invasion (or better still the 2014 one) with overwhelming force, committing massive, immediate financial and military support to Ukraine, even sending our own troops and planes to help drive out the invaders. I think that was unrealistic, given our depleted post-Cold War militaries and post-Covid economies; and we do not know what Putin’s response to such a commitment by NATO would have been - it could well have been nuclear. These were not negligible considerations, and I understand why the world didn’t do more in 2022.
So here we are, with a stalemate costing a thousand casualties a day. The airy suggestion that we could somehow still help encompass the defeat of Russia feels, to me, dangerously post-truth. What we need now is for the fighting to stop, and for Europe - with the UK in a leading position - to make the investment in defence we all should have been making for decades.
