Luke de Pulford: Why we all should care about this papal election

Luke de Pulford is training for the priesthood and lives in Rome.

The eyes of the world are on Rome. Who will be the new leader of the world's 1.2 billion Catholics? Will he be a liberal? Conservative? Will his election herald an apocalypse for the Catholic Church's counter-cultural teachings? More importantly: who cares?

Whatever your political views or religious beliefs, the Church matters. Catholicism has a reach and diversity unrivalled by any other institution. It is embedded in every corner of the earth. Its hierarchical structure means that a message or initiative from Rome can be disseminated to the smallest communities in the most remote parts of the world without any reference to any media outlet. As the head of this behemoth, the pope could, if he were really determined, mobilise on a scale that Barack Obama can only dream about.

In the midst of media-driven talk about the Church's decline, it's easy to forget that this is an institution unrivalled in longevity; an institution that has buried empires and ideologies from Rome to Communism and shows no sign of fading - it's bigger than it has ever been. You don't need to a doctorate in geo-politics or history to work out that seeking good relations with the figurehead of this group is a diplomatic no-brainer. When asked about the point of maintaining the UK's diplomatic ties to the Holy See, the former UK Ambassador, Francis Campbell, used to respond that there were two ways of looking at Vatican City: either as a religious fiefdom similar in influence to San Marino, or as another China.

Luke de Pulford: We must demand greater accountability and deeper debate about the cost of abortion

Luke de Pulford is studying philosophy in Rome

Hats off to Earl Howe, the Lords Health Minister, who admitted last week that his Department’s procedure for calculating the number and cost of publicly-funded independent sector abortions was wildly inaccurate and needed to change.

In an astonishing letter to Lord Alton, the crossbench peer, Howe provided revised figures for last year exposing the old estimate as 37,000 abortions and £30 million shy of the true numbers.

37,000 pregnancies and £30 million pounds of taxpayer’s money unaccounted for in a single year? That’s hardly an “oops” moment. Multiply those numbers by the years that the Department of Health has been using this staggeringly inaccurate system and we’re left hundreds of thousands of abortions and hundreds of millions of pounds that the DoH simply didn’t know about.

So how does a team of professional government accountants and statisticians go about getting such a seemingly simple calculation so badly wrong?

Luke de Pulford: How much are we paying for girls to be aborted and women to be forcibly sterilised?

Luke de Pulford works for a homelessness charity in Canning Town, East London.

On Monday, Viscount Craigavon, a crossbench peer, will ask the government what priority they are giving in international development to "population issues".

Well, since 1997, the Department for International Development has spent at least £350 million pounds on international population control programmes. In 2009-10 alone they splashed out a minimum of £55 million, excluding funding streams I have been unable to detect due to incomprehensible Sir Humphreyesque verbiage that, for some reason, is a mandatory feature of all parliamentary answers on the subject.

£55 million is a lot of money. It’s the equivalent of 6111 university places at the new maximum rate, 137,500 days on a hospital bed, 859,375 weeks of the dole and the annual income of 305,555 Burundians.

Against a backdrop of crushing austerity, we had better be getting value for money. And enthusiasts argue that we are. They link the export of their favoured method of population control to the Millennium Development Goals: who could argue with that?

Certainly not Andrew Mitchell, the International Development Secretary, who made the improvement of “sexual and reproductive health rights, including access to modern family planning methods and promoting women's choice, in the developing world” one of the government’s “top priorities”.

Luke de Pulford: Citizens UK's response to Islamism is constructive; the alternative would be a recipe for disaster

Luke de Pulford works for a homelessness charity in Canning Town, East London.

We always knew that some commentators on the Right were partial to a healthy dollop of alarmism but this is absurd.  Over the past few days, a story has been doing the rounds in the Party about the links between one of the trustees of the civil society organisation London Citizens – and affiliate of Citizens UK – and Hamas.

London Citizens – we’re told – is some sort of sanctuary for Islamist fundamentalists; guilty of “politically correct whitewashing of terrorist thugs and their radical supporters” (The Propagandist); and of “helping extremists with their denial rhetoric” (Harry’s Place).  

Serious stuff. And like most effective propaganda, it has a kernel of truth. Amongst the some 250 member institutions that make up London Citizens, you will find a few – very few – who hold views which the vast majority in this country would find reprehensible: Islamists, hard-line Zionists, those who want to eradicate Israel, the list goes on.

In fact, if some intrepid investigative journalist wanted to, they could fill page after scandal-laden page with dodgy individuals hidden amongst Citizens’ considerable ranks. But like the revelations of the last few days it would just contribute to the smokescreen obscuring the real debate here, which is about how we deal with cultural tensions in Britain.

Luke de Pulford: Why the Big Society should appeal to traditional Tories

Luke de Pulford works for a homelessness charity in Canning Town, East London.

It’s been a good few weeks for Big Society bashers. The weak economy, deteriorating approval ratings, Liverpool Council’s dramatic withdrawal from the pilot authority scheme, and Hoodless’ resignation have provided a great launching pad for sceptics’ missiles.

Given the high political capital of the Big Society, these strategic and predominantly partisan attacks should come as no surprise. What’s odd, though, is how quickly and ferociously MPs and hacks from the Tory Right have seized the opportunity to stick the boot in, ranging from reasonable and tentative expressions of concern to hysterical derision of ‘Alinskyite plots’ and ‘vapid aspirations’.

I had a stab at identifying the causes for this Tory ill-will towards the Big Society in an impertinently polemical piece for ConHome last December. It upset some commentators for painting with too broad a brush and casting aside all Tory criticism of the idea as anachronistic.

It’s worth saying, then, that, anachronistic or not, much of the motivation for this Tory dissent makes a lot of sense. It is rooted in a genuine concern for our Constitution, values and the political identity of the Conservative Party. To this mindset, the innovation and radicalism of the Big Society was always going to be challenging.

But it does not follow from this that being a Big Society believer somehow makes you an iconoclast. It follows even less that the Big Society’s novelty means that it must de facto be an inheritance from New Labour, as some would have us believe.

To the contrary, Big Society thinking can be applied to diverse policy areas in a way that addresses the concerns of the Right far more effectively than the stodgy structures currently available. And it can do it in a way that is consonant with the libertarianism that so many of the Big Society’s critics claim to espouse: by respecting the diversity of individuals and going with the grain of behaviour, rather than trying to impose a Rightist worldview from the centre.

Luke de Pulford: The Big Society is arguably the best and truest statement of Tory ideology for generations

Luke de Pulford works for a homelessness charity in Canning Town, East London.

The Big Society has Labour reeling.  It’s the most significant political coup since Blair captured the Tories’ ‘tough on crime’ mantle peddling CCTV and controversial anti-terrorism measures.  Now - and you really couldn’t make this up - a team of old Etonians spearheading a party who brazenly declared there to be no such thing as society 23 years ago have infiltrated and occupied the Red heartland of social policy so ruthlessly that there’s no room for anyone else.  It’s quite brilliant.  Reduced to whimpering sentiments that amount to little more than admissions of political defeat (‘it’s not the Big Society, it’s the Good Society’ or one of my favourite Ed-isms so far: ‘We have got to take that term 'Big Society' back off David Cameron’) Labour are just waking up to the fact that they’ve been, well, outclassed.

Despite this, though, there remains a group of eye-rolling Conservatives who wince every time the words ‘big’ and ‘society’ are used in conjunction.  At the moment that’s every five seconds, which can’t be doing their crows’ feet any favours.  Why is it, then, that some Tories won’t back this political winner?  It can’t simply be that the phrase won’t abbreviate to anything other than B.S. – unfortunate, admittedly.

The most common objection is that the Big Society’s pie-in-the-sky inspecificities are alien to traditional, concrete Conservatism.  ‘We’re the party of workable, pragmatic solutions, not empty social rhetoric,’ one MP told me. 

There’s some mileage in this, but I don’t understand how it could be seen as a deal breaker.  It’s true that the aims of the Big Society read more like a philosophy than the statistic driven manifesto statements we’ve become accustomed to.  It’s also true that if it’s going to get off the ground it will need more fleshing out.