Following my previous post on things I learned at Bible college about how to have a reasonable discussion, here is another: you need to accept that people are inconsistent.

That is to say, it is entirely possible that someone you are debating with will hold two opinions that you believe cannot logically be held at the same time. In a reasonable discussion, you need to accept that this is so without assuming evil intent. One good reason for doing so is that it’s probably true of you also – no-one currently on earth has a worldview and set of opinions which is entirely self-consistent and logically perfect.

What you should not do is claim that one or both of the views “isn’t really their view”, or that they are lying or dissembling when they claim to hold both. You are, of course, entirely entitled to point out the inconsistency as you see it, and ask them how they reconcile the two positions. It may be that they haven’t noticed the conflict, and this will cause them to think. Or it may be that you haven’t understood their position fully, and after discussion, you agree the two views are actually compatible. Or it may be that your worldviews and base assumptions differ to such an extent that what you believe is logically impossible, they think is logically fine.

The clearest examples are also the most controversial, but to try and illustrate: some people I talk to cannot understand how my beliefs about church leadership are consistent with with my view that everyone is created in the image of God and therefore equally valuable and important. But I, of course, think these views are entirely consistent. And I often cannot understand how the views on human rights espoused by some people I talk to are consistent with with their views on abortion. But they, of course, see no conflict. Regardless, in either direction, it’s not OK for either me or them to make bold statements that the other party is a liar, is debating in bad faith, or is in other ways evil just because, in that party’s opinion, the other person’s set of views is not logically coherent.

The Labour party have objected strongly to the government “buying” stability in the form of a majority by sending money to Northern Ireland at the request of the 10 DUP MPs, who will now support them.

But it seems their objection is not to the principle, but to the currency. The newly-approved currency for the purchasing of government stability is the blood of unborn children.

Lord, have mercy.

In UK politics, at least, the language of “cuts” is common (most often preceded by the word “Tory”). There are to be cuts to this budget, and cuts to that service, and cuts to the other program. Cuts are almost universally seen as bad. But almost any change in any funding arrangement can be portrayed as a cut of some sort.

Let’s say the budget for activity X is £100,000 in 2015. In 2016, it’s £90,000. Is that a cut? Clearly. But what if it’s £100,000? Well, that’s a “real-terms cut” because of course inflation means that money this year is worth a bit less than money last year. OK, so let’s make it £102,000, to account for inflation. But the Retail Prices Index has gone up by more than that, so it’s still a “cut”. £105,000? Well, in fact, the costs of doing X have gone up significantly this year because of reasons, so that’s also an “effective cut”. More people using a service? An increase can be portrayed as a cut. More expensive and better treatment option becomes available? Even an increase can be portrayed as a “cut to that service”.

If you move resources from activity X to activity Y, then your opponents can focus on “cuts to activity X”. If you want to start doing a new activity Z, and don’t want to increase your budget, them something somewhere has to be “cut”. There’s always a cut somewhere you can find to complain about if you look hard enough.

If the previous administration was massively mis-spending their money and you have a big rearrangement of priorities, lots of things are going to be “cut”. If a particular client group such as the elderly has been doing extremely well for the past N years (triple lock, anyone?), and you change things to be more equitable, that’s a “cut”. And if that group is particularly photogenic or sympathy-worthy, no matter how much they were getting before, they can get the public on their side by objecting to the cruel “cuts”. Once a set of people has got access to a pot of government money, entitlement sets in extraordinarily quickly.

The difficulty for politicians, of course, is that it’s very difficult to say something like “well, pensioners have been coining it for the past 10 years, and it’s time we had a bit more equity”, because the press can always find a frail-looking pensioner who will be outraged on camera that they now apparently have to choose between food and heating.

The only way to avoid anything which seems like a cut is always to increase budgets for everything. And that normally means tax increases to pay for it (or, via borrowing, putting the bill on our children who can’t object, which is a sadly all-too-common move for politicians to avoid having to pay for what they are doing). But there are limits to how much you can increase tax, because taxation changes behaviour. It’s generally accepted when talking about carbon emissions, or cigarette smoking, or sugar consumption, that taxing something means you get less of it. But people shy away from applying this logic when it’s applied to incomes, or sales, or company profits (which are, absent a monopoly or criminal activity, the reward for hard work and entrepreneurship). Taxing those things means you get less of them too – less economic activity, smaller economy, poorer people.

So when someone tries to engender outrage by simply saying “something is being cut!”, remind them that pretty much everything’s a cut, and point them at this article. Just because something qualifies as a cut, and the group or activity receiving less money is deemed worthy of support, doesn’t make the change necessarily wrong.

How many billion pounds did George Osborne cut government spending by in the “age of austerity” from 2010 to 2016? Have a guess.

How many billion pounds did George Osborne cut the welfare budget by during the same time? Thought of a figure, or even a percentage? Good.

When you adjust the figures for inflation, it turns out that he cut government spending by a whopping £1.2 billion over 6 years. That’s about £200m a year – as the Taxpayer’s Alliance points out, the cost of one Boaty McBoatface. Another way to put it would be just under 0.03% of the total budget, per year. Basically, he didn’t cut government spending at all, in purchasing power terms. (In terms of numerical pounds, of course, it went up. It’s only about even when adjusted for inflation.)

But what about welfare? OK, so he didn’t get overall spending down, but surely he’s been savagely cutting the welfare budget, in order to pay for more tanks, guns, bombs, duck houses and other pointless stuff the government fritters its money away on. Right? Well, again after adjusting for inflation, it turns out he reduced the welfare bill by… <drum roll> minus £1.2 billion a year. That’s right, it went up. There were reductions on welfare spending for those of working age and children, but these were more than offset by the increases in benefits paid to pensioners.

Given that the government is still spending £67 billion more each year than it takes in taxes, and has just decided to abandon its commitment to balance the books by 2020, it seems likely that the new administration is going to be just as bad. Our national debt is currently around £1,782 billion – which will already be a burden borne by our children, either in repayments or interest payments. And it seems like our current intention is, scandalously, to keep adding to that burden. Where’s the intergenerational justice here?

A good person leaves an inheritance for their children’s children… — Proverbs 13:22a

Scared people act irrationally.

I’ve been pulled over a couple of times in my life, to receive a talking-to from a traffic policeman about a piece of dubious (although not dangerous) driving. I’m not afraid of the police, though. Some people are. And when people are afraid, they do irrational and unwise things – like running away from what they fear.

A man commits a minor traffic infraction, and runs from the police. 7 police break down the door of his house, enter with guns drawn, tase him, and pepper-spray his 84-year-old mother, before pinning her to the ground and arresting her as she cried “Help me, Jesus”. What sort of country does this kind of massive overreaction happen in? One guess. In the UK, the registered keeper of the vehicle would probably have got a £50 fine in the post two weeks later. Do our roads contain a significantly higher incidence of dangerous driving?

Scared people act irrationally. Why are people scared of the police? Because of incidents like this. Why does this sort of thing happen? Because people act irrationally and the police see it as a provocation. This is a cycle that isn’t going to be easily broken. But the burden of breaking it lies with the police.

Last year in the US, the police killed around 1146 people. In an average year in the entirety of the UK (population: 1/5th of the US), the police fire their guns at all less than 10 times. Are US suspects really so much more dangerous than UK ones?

We had an EU Referendum evening at my church last night; in honour of it, I have written “A Christian Case for Brexit“, which are some of my thoughts on the referendum issue from a Christian point of view. Many of the arguments and points most commonly deployed in the public debate on the referendum are not particularly interesting, and I think some important issues have been somewhat overlooked.