One bright point of hope at last in the relentless march of statism and culture war: our civil servants are a weak and sickly bunch.  Or possibly they are just lead-swingers, depending on your credulity.  Or the lack of it.

A report published by the Cabinet Office has found that the average civil servant nabs two weeks of sickies a year.  The trend is rising.  In 2000 the average was 9.3 for women, 8.0 for men.  In 2001, it was 10.4 days for women, 8.5 for men.  Men are currently stuck on 8.5 days but the girlies have raced on to 11.3.  I haven’t found figures for 2002.  But in that year the three sickest government departments, apparently, were Transportation, Family & Community Services and, naturally, Health & Wellbeing.

The private sector is another story.  The outdoor life certainly seems one of rude health.  The check-shirted, blue-jeaned tough guys of oil and mining only succumb on 3.3 days a year.  Builders, who in my experience believe the common cold to be a rumour, take 4.2 days.

The lash of low rates of pay, presumably, forces expiring hotel and leisure staff to work – except on 4.6 days a year.  Across the board, the private sector average is about 30% below the public sector.  I can’t help thinking, though, that the Human Resources types who monitor these things have never ventured onto an average British dairy farm or they would find the differential quite incalculable because dairy farmers do actually have to be buried – and, if that won’t do it, cremated - before they will stop work.

It comes as no surprise to learn that ministers have set a target – yet another – of a 30% reduction from the 1998 sick-leave total.  They have decided in typical, arbitrary fashion that bureaucracy is, in fact, capable of emulating capitalism.  I suppose if in the face of all the known facts you cannot bring yourself to believe in differing human potentials and in the ineffably superior efficiency and work ethic of free enterprise you will never, never learn.

If I was Gordon Brown I wouldn’t bother about investigating all this.  If we can’t sack the lot of these people and slash our taxes the safest and best place for them is their sickbeds … or the pub … or the bingo hall … or the pier at Margate.  I suppose it might rain.

Americans who don’t realize how traditional complexities often linger in England in spite of the left/liberal tendency of British politics are surprised by the persistence of faith schools there. It shouldn’t surprise anyone, though, that the secular and multicultural commitments of the British state have now made faith schools an issue, or that the issue has its practical complexities that reflect something more general than peculiar English conditions.

The practical problem is that secular multicultural education is always bad, at least on any large scale, because schools of that kind can’t have educational goals that are more sustaining than pliability on the one hand and the effective pursuit of self-interest on the other. If the moral world consists solely of the conflicting purposes of various people, then you either teach children to do what they’re told or you teach them to get what they want. The results of such an outlook when applied to education are fundamental aimlessness, aggression, manipulation, boredom, stupidity, and general bad conduct. Everybody hates everybody, and nobody learns anything.

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That’s blog-life.  No sooner have I made my, of course, lengthy and laboured point than some guy goes and says it all so much more precisely.  And concisely.  That’s academics all over!

Thanks Kevin.

There has been no shortage of blogging about Rocco Buttiglioni.  He is, or was, good copy.  He brought about a colourfully chaotic passage in EU life, and we should all be grateful for that.  No doubt, the focus will now quickly move on.  His honesty and principle will not be much remembered.  Probably, there was never much chance that he could succeed to the Commission.  But it was a stand worth making, if only to remind us how dominant, arrogant and wrong the left is.

That said, one shouldn’t get too carried away with Rocco’s heroism.  He wasn’t proposing to expunge cultural marxism from the face of Europe.  Quite the contrary -  as a modern conservative politician he was a realist on social policy in the same way that his more or less post-socialist persecutors in the European Parliament are more or less realists on economic policy.  And he wanted that justice job.

So, with this post I will not pile more words onto the mountain of them blogged about the erstwhile Buttiglioni crisis.  Instead, I am going to ask you to make three leaps of the imagination.  If nothing else that is, as my foolish generation used to repeat ad nauseum, something completely different.

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Are liberals willing to practise religious discrimination? In the case of Chris Cranmer, it seems not. Mr Cranmer has won recognition of his satanism on board his Royal Navy ship, meaning that he is free to publicly practise satanic rituals and to have a funeral carried out by the Church of Satan.

But then we get to the case of Signor Buttiglione who has been deemed unacceptable for a position of responsibility with the EU because of his orthodox Catholicism - this despite a promise that he would keep his Catholic beliefs private.

Matthew Parris, in a column in the Sunday Times, wrote of Mr Buttiglione that,

“Signor Buttiglione claims that he has been the victim of anti-Christian discrimination ... I think Signor Buttiglione has indeed been the victim of anti-Christian discrimination, and that such discrimination is now in order ... Catholic teaching on contraception and abortion are unacceptable and insulting, not only to me but also the majority of Europeans, and the overwhelming majority of educated Europeans. I do not shrink from according special status to the educated, for they lead thought.” (via Conservative Commentary)

So, we’ve arrived at a situation where it’s thought reasonable to allow Satanism to be practised in the Royal Navy, but that Catholicism is too “insulting” to be accepted even as a private belief by a political candidate.

Liberals, in other words, will discriminate on the grounds of religion, but just aren’t concerned to discriminate against satanists. In fact, on one very liberal Australian website, satanism was declared to be admirable for its “frank and rational hedonism”. So I don’t like the chances of a return to a more traditional ordering of things, in which discrimination was practised against satanists rather than Christians, at leat not in modern liberal societies.

“Modern man does not love, but seeks refuge in love; does not hope, but seeks refuge in hope; does not believe, but seeks refuge in a dogma.” —Nicolás Gómez Dávila

I think that this outlines a central flaw in the modern soul.  Everything good and great exists as a means to a pitiful and self-serving end.  We justify our lives by the metric of personal satisfaction.

Something perfectly pointless, egregiously superficial and just plain corny has passed into history with the decision by ABC to drop Miss America from it’s 2005 schedule.  It isn’t a passing that will trouble many.  Last month’s pageant drew a record low of 9.8 million viewers.  The American public has pronounced sentence on the high heels and swimwear, the tiara tat and tearfulness in victory.  No more brilliantly smiling hopefuls from Abbeyville or Rainbow Springs will tell the nation that, yes, they adore children and just want the chance to work for a better world.  I don’t know what “totter off in peace” would be in Latin.  But something like that would seem to be appropriate.

OK, so what?  The Humourless Ones For Whom No Man Ever Cared will savour the moment, obviously.  But why should we bother about the passing of these cattle markets?  Well, it’s simple really.  We should bother because there is more to this than a minor, overdue triumph for sexual equality.  We should bother because of what it tells us about our own wives and daughters and the people they and we have become.

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When I was an Episcopalian — that’s what we call Anglicans in America — it seemed to me the name summed up the core belief that held the church together: they believed in bishops. It was pleasant being a bishop, it should be pleasant being a bishop, and if you didn’t go along with that you didn’t belong and you should go someplace else. Of course, there was more to it than that. Episcopalians also believed in relationships. People should be nice to each other, and accept and affirm each other in their mutually affirming whateverness, so long of course as the various whatevernesses stayed mutually affirming.

The effect was that you could think and do whatever you wanted as long as you approved of everyone else thinking and doing whatever he wanted, and you otherwise didn’t make waves. The Episcopal Church was thus a religion formed on the model of the politically correct managerial consumer society. Everybody pleased himself by following his own pursuits, within a structure that ruled quite effectively without seeming to do so because nothing could ever become an issue. How could anything be an issue, after all, when everything was either private taste, amusement, happy talk about celebrating otherness, or arranged by higher-ups over whom there was very little control? The only real issue was how to redefine apparent issues as non-issues as smoothly as possible. To make anything else an issue was to show you weren’t really an Episcopalian, because you had violated “Anglican comprehensiveness.” And besides, it wasn’t nice.

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