He was killed in acƟon on 4th November 1918, a week before the armisƟce.
Mayday Note April is the Cruellest Month ‘We should be proud of the fact that we are a Christian country,’ s said David Cameron in his speech* at the Downing Street reception for Church leaders on April 9th 2014. He went on to say, ‘Jesus invented the Big Society; I just want to see more of it.’ Seeing himself as an apostle, he continued, ‘What we need more of is evangelism.’ Though admitting that his welfare cuts were ‘controversial’, he insisted: ‘I hope I can enthuse political institutions, my party and my government with a sense of evangelism about some of the things we are trying to change in our country…That to me is what the Christian message is about.’ Later at the reception a soprano sang Ave Maria on the same day – as people did not fail to note with a hint of Schadenfreude – that Cameron’s Culture Secretary Maria Miller resigned over fraudulent expenses claims. The Maria of Luke’s gospel, to whom the angel Gabriel addresses his ‘Ave!’, sings of a God who has ‘filled the hungry with good things.’ The following week Cameron wrote further about his Christianity in the Church Times, seeking ‘a greater sense of evangelism about some of the things we are trying to do… it is through the reforms to welfare that make work pay that our long-term economic plan can best help people’.
On the very day this article was published, the Bishop of Oxford and food poverty campaigner Keith Hebden (whose book Seeing Justice was reviewed by Pauline Pearson in Sofia 108) tried to deliver a letter to Cameron’s constituency office in Witney. The letter, signed by 42 Anglican bishops and 600 more clerics, warned that hunger in Britain is now a national crisis. A recent report has revealed that almost a million adults and children received emergency supplies from food banks in the past year, an increase of 163% on the previous 12 months amid rising living costs, low pay and welfare problems.
The delegation found their way barred by police officers. The message was clear: ‘Buzz off, bishops, you lovers of skivers, loungers and scroungers!’ Hebden put it more diplomatically: ‘It is deeply ironic, to say the least, that on the same day David Cameron was writing in the Church Times talking about what a good Anglican he is, he was wasn’t able to receive his own bishop in his constituency office. I think that speaks volumes.’ *hƩps://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/easter-recepƟonat-downing-street-2014 As I Please John Pearson visits World War 1 graves.