Matthew leads Gateway Church, Poole. With his wife Grace, Matthew enjoys going for long runs and bike rides along the coast and deep into the Dorset countryside. Having four daughters he is also a keen student of female psychology. Matthew thought he was going to be an agricultural research scientist but somehow ended up as a pastor. This has confirmed his belief in the sovereignty of God. The Finnish Saga with (l-r) Karl Watson (bass), Dave Kusworth (gtr), Tyla (vox+gtr), Paul Hornby (drums) Not only do many British institutions and organs of state simply not want to comply with the policy goals of elected governments — whether, for example, Brexit or immigration — they couldn’t carry them out if they so desired.

Tate Britain has rehung its art collection: What can we learn?

In the time it takes to fly from London to Chicago, each finds something in the other that they didn’t even realise they needed. Remarkably we got our work visas after the standard four hour wait. And immediately insisted we go to an Indian restaurant in Earls Court to blow the top off a few. Hornby paid. “I’ll put it on me card”. I always remember him saying that, it was like his catch phrase.I did hear some whispers though. One of the most profound was one of the most simple. It’s Christianity 101: don’t worry, be grateful. As a musician and performer he is still writing, recording and touring. Since his debut album he has recorded and released 25 solo albums, 12 albums with The Dogs and numerous album side-projects. He has written songs for TV, Movies & other artists and he runs his own record label and publishing company, King Outlaw Records. As we sat in the bar at Liverpool Street Station we were approached by a male and female police officer and asked to accompany them to a makeshift police station – a portacabin on the station concourse – where Kusworth and I were strip-searched. Apparently someone had reported us for smoking ‘strange-looking and smelling cigarettes’. It turned out to be my Gitane Internationals – a long, white, king-size French cig. Now, alas, extinct. W hat went wrong with Liz Truss? How did the clear winner of the first Tory leadership election of 2022 throw it all away? It was by being in office when the music stopped. To see how Truss failed is more than a story of her personal incompetence, it is to appreciate that she squandered no great and glorious inheritance. For the disastrous rule at the Treasury of George Osborne and Philip Hammond and Rishi Sunak (and before them Brown and Darling), left her nothing to fritter away. For a generation Britain has refused to face up to its problems. Now it can no longer look away. Covid has pushed this situation to crisis point, with sections of public sector Britain seeming to have all but given up. All with official encouragement by so many others whose salaries are taxed out of those who remain in private employment. Much of the media has been shy to give due coverage to this collapse of the public service ethic as if doing so is somehow unpatriotic or poor form.

The State We’re In’ (Online / UK) The Gallery: Open Call, ‘The State We’re In’ (Online / UK)

How did we become this vulnerable? Everyone realises at an intuitive level that Britain isn’t working: that in some deep, fundamental way, an irreversible rot has set in — of leadership and management, of institutions and methods. We measure and analyse whatever we can to discern the roots of this malaise and suggest solutions. (How I have come to despise that word, solutions. Every business that has ‘solutions’ in its title simply adds to the weariness and cynicism: take your business solutions, your cleaning solutions, your software solutions and drown them in a bottomless sea of apathy.) We see therapists for our personal wounds and angst. Economists present different routes to economic bounty. Politicians spin a brighter future. We’re not very good, though, at assessing how the multifaceted social changes of the past decades have impacted our national psychology. How could we be? It’s too complicated, there are too many variables and unknowns.Engel gives the example of it becoming a legal requirement in 1973 to wear a helmet when riding a motorcycle. Not to wear a helmet might seem madness (riding a motorcycle, period, might seem madness) but a motorcycle helmet doesn’t make life any safer – or more dangerous – for anyone other than the biker. So why should the individual not be free to make that decision for themselves? Rather than policies sloganised as “austerity” or “outsourcing” having shrunk the state, these measures have conscripted much of what we laughably describe as the private sector as auxiliaries of the state, whether in propagating progressive diversity agendas, or complying with the ever-growing mass of regulation pouring forth from parliament. Thus the already incapable British state is weakened still further as it swells ever larger.