BAE: ‘We train more skilled engineers in the UK than any other company... We’ve always hired and trained the very best of UK talent’
There is a skills shortage in many areas of UK science and technology. But arms production enjoys extensive government support. In 2005, around £2,600m of government R&D money went to the military sector while just £37m went to renewable energy. A recent government report estimated that the number of jobs in the renewable energy sector could, given supportive enough policies, expand from 8,000 in 2004 to as many as 35,000 by 2020. In contrast to arms companies, this work would be a contribution to global welfare and security.

The Jesus who comes down from his home in heaven, has a bad time on earth but then goes safely back to heaven, does not mean a thing to [this generation]. They just don't believe he did it. Perhaps only the Jesus who is still in trouble, who hangs like an unanswered question on the cross, speaks to them in a language which they understand. ...
Not the Christ who has risen, but the Christ who has not risen yet, who may never rise unless we help him: the forsaken Christ whom Mother Teresa meets in the outcasts of Calcutta - this is the Christ who still has power to attract. You do not have to be Christian to be attracted.

Your non-believing co-workers in the fields of philanthropy and politics do not despise you: but they do not envy you. Your Christianity, they feel, is something that you cannot help: like a club foot, or a lisp. It inhibits you: it may even give you a certain old-world charm. It is convenient for them, in that it inhibits you from the more bare-faced forms of rudeness and duplicity. They can make you blush, blackmail you by your Christianity. They may find you lovable, but laughable. Secretly, you rage against all this. You smile joyfully (for a Christian should be joyful), you are gentle and forgiving: but a raven gnaws your liver, and by night your doubts and detestations have a Roman holiday. You wake up feeling tetchy in the morning. You see your clerical collar hanging on a hook. 'How the hell did I get into this?' you ask. 'How the hell can I get out?' ... Perhaps you should be patient, show humility, wait for guidance; perhaps you need a holiday. Perhaps you should see a psychiatrist. Anyway, do nothing rash: you may square the circle yet. It may seem impossible: but with God nothing is impossible. Or is it? Can God give a man the strength to be a liar?

The further you go from Him, the nearer you get to Him.

You say goodbye to one Jesus: to the God who once and once alone walked in a human body.

What is left? Only a man; unique, as all men are, yet typical. All that he can do a man can do. Whether he has or hasn't is another matter.

What is he doing? Calling you to liberty, to the breaking of all idols that would cower you, including the idol which he has become himself.

... they have made another idol out of him, bedangled him with miracles. Blaspheme against this idol, and (they say) you go to hell.

To find him, you must leave him. Turn your back upon the idol: a strangely seductive idol yet, ultimately, unbelievable. There is something false about that sweet and gentle smile. That crown of thorns has become a diadem, made of real gold and jewels. That invitation to be free has become an imperial command. That manger has become a sepulchre. The Holy Image has become an Iron Maiden: inside it, Jesus, trying to get out.

Say goodbye to the official Jesus. Talk about it to the man beside you, walking to Emmaus. He is anonymous. If he is God, then so are you.

"Where is the one who is wise?
Where is the scribe?
Where is the debater of this age?"

Once I began to ask what it was that Christians had to communicate and whether it was true or not, I was in trouble. That is when the book blew up, and questions that I had dreaded now came flying through the air. What did I really think of Jesus as compared to the Buddha, Socrates or even his own follower, St Francis of Assisi? Did I really believe in him or not? What exactly did 'believe in' really mean? Did I really 'believe in' anything at all? Was my haunted feeling that I had to end up a believer based on nothing but panic?

To face such questions had become more urgent than to weigh the pros and cons of rocking the liturgy or dancing half naked in Liverpool Cathedral. My health, my sanity, my wholeness depended on it. If I could not dare to trust the truth - about Jesus, about myself, about anything whatever - then what in the whole creation was it possible to trust? Loyalty to truth came before loyalty to Christianity.

order

Factories relied for their smooth running on the rigid ordering of space, materials and people. People and things were assigned specific places within which they ought to remain. With ruination, the order of the factory falls apart as the previously contained comes tumbling out of place to mingle in profusion. The banal traces of power can still be identified: the routines, the apparatus, the spatially organised hierarchies and systems of work, and the notices drawing attention to rules and practices. Now, the offices situated above the shop floor crumbles to join it. Things are now out of place. In the factory products were compiled, listed, enumerated, stocked in units ready for transfer, but now these stacks mingle amidst an array of material. The order of the factory and the discipline to which it subjected its workers was transitory and seems arbitrary, but new ways of regulating workers and creativity persist according to fashions in management.

The disordering of the factory which reveals it to be a part of history, contrasts with the heritage industry, which selects fragments of the past and places them into ordered displays and subjects them to narrative interpretations. Here, things are isolated, positioned against uncluttered backgrounds and do not co-mingle with other fragments. This presentation and codification of the past eclipses mystery and strangeness, replacing it with legitimate and authoritative ways of remembering, akin to the display of commodities, shiny, separate and alone. But the removal of clutter, disguises the profusion of matter and meaning.

As spaces by the side of the road, ruins can be explored for effects that talk back to the quest to create an impossibly seamless urban fabric, to the uses to which history and heritage are put, to the extensive over-commodification of places and things, to middle-class aesthetics, and to broader tendencies to fix meanings in the service of power.

Baby Dee: Safe Inside the Day

"As songs that go forgotten
Are found, remembered, loved, and sung again;
The father of all kindness,
The lover of our souls,
Will come to find us.
And if I can remain there,
And if I can remain there I will stay.
And I will live another day."

Martyn Bates & Max Eastley: Songs of Transformation

"This delicate lyric set me in mind of the undercurrents of magic that I felt to be ever-present, thinly-veiled within the Methodism of my youth. Ethel Flanagan, my long gone grandmother, was a staunch Methodist - and she never failed to see all of the gazing souls that floated above the trees at the foot of her garden, looking for her." [Martyn Bates in cd booklet, on The Cherry Tree Carol]

Billy Bragg: Mr Love & Justice

"We sing our songs of freedom and we sing our songs of peace
We sing about sweet harmony for to make the fighting cease
Let's sing one song for the folks tonight that are sleeping on the streets
Come on and sing their souls back home"

The passers-by were too busy with their shopping to notice me. They seemed prosperous and content, confidently strolling around a town that was entirely composed of shops and small department stores. Even the health centre had redesigned itself as a retail space, its window filled with blood-pressure kits and fitness DVDs. The streets were brightly lit, cheerful and cleanly swept, so unlike the inner London I knew. Whatever the name of this town, there were no drifting newspapers and chewing-gum pavements, no citizenry of the cardboard box. This was a place where it was impossible to borrow a book, attend a concert, say a prayer, consult a parish record or give to charity. In short, the town was an end state of consumerism. I liked it, and felt a certain pride that I had helped to set its values. History and tradition, the slow death by suffocation of an older Britain, played no part in its people's lives. They lived in an eternal retail present, where the deepest moral decisions concerned the purchase of a refrigerator or washing machine. But at least these Thames Valley natives with their airport culture would never start a war.

Early one morning, any morning, we can set out, with the least possible baggage, and discover the world.

It is quite possible to refuse all the coercion, violence, property, triviality, to simply walk away.

That something exists outside ourselves and our preoccupations, so near, so readily available, is our greatest blessing.

Walking is the human way of getting about.

Always, everywhere, people have walked, veining the earth with paths, visible and invisible, symmetrical or meandering.

There are walks on which we tread in the footsteps of others, walks on which we strike out entirely for ourselves.

A journey implies a destination, so many miles to be consumed, while a walk is its own measure, complete at every point along the way.

The innumerable challenges of being working-class in a liberalised economy - never mind the challenges of being working-class full stop - are reduced, in this season, to race and immigration alone, with those (and only those) who are white cast as passive victims of policies they didn't choose.

But here is the news: deindustrialisation, deregulation, poor pay and prospects, low educational standards, bad or insecure housing, pressured living environments and lack of control disproportionately disadvantage working-class people, whether they are white or not. Not that you would know it from watching any of these programmes.

On Oxford Rd., one participant found his way into an unlocked cellar with full access to the building’s electric panel. On Cross Street the participant discovered a Caffé Nero training centre located two floors above the café. His friend kindly slipped his job application under the training room door. A propane tank was also found in the same staircore. Interestingly, a door leading to the neighbouring Subway was also found. Subway is another chain store who have blanketed Manchester. These two chains were linked, not at the front, but at the back. Back stage and front stage became important themes ...

Why, then, do I kneel still
striking my prayers on a stone
heart?

[The Empty Church]