Women bishops in the CofE

Do you agree that ordained women in the Church of England in the 21st Century should be eligible for the episcopacy?

If so, please sign this petition
When this post was written earlier today the number of petitioners was 660. You can check the present total in the graphic (it is always slightly in arrears.)

Change.org|Online Petition Form

I know my rights, guv

It is not unreasonable that creative people should receive financial reward for their efforts (or the economy of Jersey would collapse - but that's the subject of a future post.) After all, we wouldn't want to see Andrew Lloyd Webber or Lady Gaga languishing in a garret, now would we? (the question is rhetorical.)

But there does come a point at which the administrative costs of putting another 4p into Cliff Richard's pension fund become disproportionate, and point to the absurdity inherent not in the law of intellectual property itself, but in the application of that law to the bitter end.

The big record companies, fed up with the loss of revenue from P2P networks, are targeting churches and hairdressing salons because they are easy prey. The PPL licence was introduced on 1 January 2012 - if you play a CD or a cassette or even an MP3 in your place of work (or parish hall) you now have to cough up to keep a few dozen people in luxury for the rest of their lives. Oh, and you'll need a PRS licence as well. PRS splits your 4p two ways - 2p to Sir Andrew, and the other 2p to his publisher and record label (let them squabble over the proceeds.)

Copyright enforcers are the new brigands. That they have the law behind them means little - so do the outfits that clamp your car and demand a ransom for its release. Put a CD or a tape on in your rest room in your tea-break, or in your loo, you girls who work in hairdressing salons, and you can expect a visit from the heavies - you're playing music, and a member of the public with acute hearing could hear it - so cough up, or we break both yer arms.

The reporting requirements for small rural churches are now such as to inspire the ghost of Charles Dickens to pick up the quill again. They make the law, and certainly the application of it, look a ass. The combined PPL/PRS licence now threatens to make every keep-fit group hiring a church hall keep records of needle time across hundreds of recording labels. Not quite accurate records, of course, but approximate.

In this first year of reporting we, the church officers responsible for reporting our various hall user groups' needle time once we've collated them, only have to supply approximate percentages in four categories - Christian, classical, choral and modern pop, a ludicrous categorisation which could only have been put in place by a more than usually intelligent aardvark. That's a relief in a way, because I don't get paid by CCLI to do their tax-collecting work for them. But I am accountable to my PCC, and I am a charity trustee because I'm a member of that PCC.

So I think I am probably obliged by my trusteeship to ensure that none of our licence money goes to CD labels that haven't actually been played. Good stewardship, the Charity Commission calls it.

And that rather stands the reporting requirement on its head. CCLI should be producing the evidence that none of our church money has been paid to somebody who didn't deserve it, even if was only a fraction of a penny. For justice to be done, every group that plays music during its activities in a church hall will need a needle-time recordist who is also an expert in copyright law. Then they will know, and Sir Cliff will know, that that extra penny in his royalties that cost £25 to raise, by volunteer tax collectors, was raised lawfully.

Think I'll put a CD of Bach organ music on now to clear my head. It's 51 years old, this recording. It's the one we put on in church when it's open, so that metal thieves will think there's somebody in there, and go away. It's also out of copyright, ho-ho. Sorry, Sir Andrew. Sorry, Sir Cliff. Sorry, Your Ladyship. 

combined cost to our small rural parish church of CCLI copyright licences, PPL and PRS licences this year - £300, all but a penny or two.

Lord Lloyd-Webber's personal fortune - according to the Sunday Times Rich List 2012 - is £590,000,000, give or take a bob or two. That's more than three times what David Beckham has amassed by kicking balls round fields.

The Gove Bible

I've now had an opportunity to handle one of the copies of the Bible that the present Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, has caused to sent to every school in the land, including primary schools. It is a beautiful object, bound in red, the pages with silvered edges, protected by a sturdy slip case, and some philanthopists have had to fork out a bob or two to meet the £375,000 bill.


But what edition of the Bible is it, you are entitled to ask. One in simple English appropriate for schoolchildren of all ages, with the juicier bits of the Song of Solomon discreetly reworded?


Is it eckerslike. It's a facsimile of the 401-year-old King James Bible, complete with the archaisms of the English of that period (modern editions of the King James Bible update spellings and character substitutions in the interests of greater readability.) As a bonus it also includes earlier forms of the lectionary, prescribing the readings for every day of the year.


It would be a marvellous tool for scholars - but for primary school kids? Even their teachers would be struggling with the orthography.


The clue is in the press release that went with the distribution. Apparently the King James Bible is an icon, in the debased set of resonances that that word now carries ('iconic' is used at least eight times in any single early evening TV news programme, so that it now means roughly 'mildly interesting'.)


An education secretary who compounds a bungled project with the language of spin is inviting ridicule when he makes portentous statements about the English of the KJV.

I do it my way

It's open season for prepositions in the newsrooms, it seems. Traffic reports on Radio Lancashire now suggest that we look to the roads, not at 'em. It could have been the sort of slip-up that anybody could make on air, I thought, until the lady said 'And now let's look to the trains.' Yes, indeed, let us look to the roads and the railways. They should certainly be treated with circumspection, being much in need of attention.

This was hard on the heels of an expert on something-or-other on Radio 3, a few minutes earlier. The 'coup de gras', he said, confusing his paté de foie with his grace. The 'blow of fat' ? I rather like it.

And there was me, thinking a 'coup de grace' was a lawnmower. You unlearn something every day when the wireless or the telly is on.