A JUICY discussion enlivened Radio 4’s Sunday. After the Bishop of Oxford, Dr Steven Croft, wrote to Nigel Farage to condemn his proposals for mass deportation of illegal immigrants, William Crawley interviewed him head-to-head with the lay Anglican and Conservative turned Reform UK activist Tim Montgomerie.
Crawley, channelling his inner Paxman, started by asking whether the bishops had been “triggered” by Mr Farage. The Bishop countered that they wanted to “depoliticise” the issue of migration. But surely the level and nature of immigration, being substantially a consequence of government policies, is inherently political?
Mr Montgomerie was correct, unfortunately and uncomfortably, to note that immigration is at the “heart of a crisis in British democracy”, with mainstream parties promising to reduce immigration at successive elections only to preside over increases. Yet, even he sounded uncomfortable when Crawley asked him whether Reform really wanted to leave the UN Convention Against Torture.
The Bishop, meanwhile, was particularly upset that Mr Farage had launched his policy in his see city, which he described as one of the “kindest” in the country. As a relatively recent Oxford resident, I found it a place of grim economic inequality, with rents unaffordable on modest incomes. It also homed one of England’s most vicious child-grooming gangs. That sort of misapprehension of ordinary people’s lived experience might explain why bishops seem unable to understand why one third of adults currently say that they will vote for Reform UK.
The discussion could have done with more time to get beyond an exchange of ideological salvoes. Perhaps a model might be the civilised and creative discussion between the Labour MP Josh Simons and the former Conservative MP Miriam Cates on The World Tonight (Radio 4, Wednesday of last week) on how to reverse the record low birth-rate in England and Wales.
The architect Thomas Heatherwick has returned for a second series of Building Soul, criticising what he terms a “blandemic” of inhuman, lifeless architecture. In Episode 2, “Making ‘Making’ Great Again” (Radio 4, Monday of last week), he pondered why the sort of craftsmanship still routine in jewellery-making had been almost entirely lost in architecture.
He partly blamed architecture schools that primarily teach theory, remaining detached from the process of construction, as if that compromised intellectual rigour. The sort of practical intelligence that master builders had once brought to the design of buildings had been lost, although the tide was starting to turning.
He argued, interestingly, that architects had become too obsessed with perfection, even though the buildings and townscapes that we love have many flaws. A tolerance for imperfection and individuality allowed interesting buildings to be constructed even from mass-produced materials and common construction techniques
The core of his argument is that architecture has lost its soul. How often do we teach and preach about Christian understandings of the soul?