Matthew 19.
4) “Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female, 5) and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh? 6) So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”
Furious mother of murdered Becky Watts slams parole board after girlfriend who helped killer murder her daughter and chop up her body is released after just eight years
The House of Commons declared that Taiwan is an “independent country” as Foreign Secretary Cleverly met with communist leaders in Beijing.
Trevor Phillips: ‘My immigrant parents did it the hard way. People paying to cross the Channel cheat the system’.
Sir Trevor Phillips hopes to present a ‘more nuanced’ political chat show, and reflects on the small boats crisis and his own upbringing
Sir Trevor Phillips is in a gloriously garrulous mood. We’re discussing how being a former Labour Party politician might affect his impartiality in his new role as the host of Sunday Morning Sky News’s flagship political show, and it swiftly becomes clear it won’t be an issue – it sounds like everyone in the Parliamentary lobby hates him.
“These people are not my mates,” he begins, cheerily settling himself into a bustling, no-frills back office at Sky News HQ. “They don’t really like someone who is not one of their own, coming in and being prominent.
“I’m going to be perfectly cordial and courteous and interested in people, but I don’t need their approval. You can’t be part of the club.”
Raised between British Guiana (now Guyana), Wood Green in north London, and an alumni of Imperial College, not being part of the club is clearly what makes Phillips tick. He jokingly refers to his career as “his long and unfortunate history”: there was the sparring with Ken Livingstone over issues of multiculturalism during his tenure as chairman of the London Assembly in the early noughties, during which Phillips espoused the virtues of integration rather than separatism, lest we “sleepwalk to segregation”.
Under Jeremy Corbyn he was briefly suspended from the party over allegations of Islamophobia in 2020, after calling British Muslims a “nation within a nation” (a suspension Phillips believes was simply payback for saying he couldn’t support Labour’s tolerance for anti-Semitism).
In between was his five-year tenure leading the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), which was dogged by rumours of dissent and departures.
Phillips, 69, is that rare thing: a Left-wing politician that doesn’t make the Right wing spit out their coffee. And when it comes to next year’s election his prediction is that “the Tories could win, but they will win in spite of the Conservative Party. Labour could win, but it will win in spite of its leader”.
His first show is broadcast this Sunday, taking over from Sophy Ridge. His interview style is more nuanced than the interviewers of old – he doesn’t want it to be just a “joust between blokes”.
“I don’t think that nowadays anybody’s that interested in seeing alpha males slug it out to see who is the smartest. They want to know what’s going to happen to my mortgage.”
Still, Jeremy Paxman is a friend. “I love him to pieces ... but I think one of the worst things that happens in the political interview is the popularising of the idea: ‘Why is this lying bastard lying to me’.” He says every politician featured on his show “is going to get a fair whack”.
“The fundamental point about all politics is this. It’s always about choice. And the point about the choice is that it’s never between good and bad. It’s always between bad and worse. My job is to compel the decision maker to be honest about those choices.”
Phillips knows a thing or two about tough decisions. He’s been at the sharp end of management, having been a producer at London Weekend Television before heading up the London Assembly.
Would he have expanded Ulez? Although he has given up his car, he says he wouldn’t. “It doesn’t seem to me that the likely impact is great enough to compensate for the impact on ordinary working people.”
Then came his leadership of the EHRC: one of the most difficult decisions he had to take there, he says, was to close down adoption agencies that would not take same-sex couples … a decision that also had racial implications.
“The community I come from would wholly support the idea that same-sex couples should not be given children. It was a very unpopular position amongst minority communities. But there are LGBT people who say: ‘What about us?’ I chose the side of equality, rather than my tribe.”
He reckons that a lot of people thought the EHRC should just be a state-sponsored pressure group, whose job it was to complain. But Phillips also wanted to be a problem solver. “When you actually do politics seriously, there’s always going to be people who don’t like you.”
Perhaps he does fit in after all: ironically, all this tussling has led to an empathy with those who put their head above the parapet … even in politics. He certainly has no truck for naive, binary idealism.
“The people who sneer at politicians are generally people who’ve never made a decision, bigger than what colour socks to wear today,” he says. “I think that the whole scepticism around politicians is just not right. Most of them try to do their best. Some of them are not very good at it.
“Some of them maybe are not very courageous. Some of them are completely mad. But almost all of the serious people are doing what they’re doing because they believe it to be right, not purely out of ego.
“I think there’s a bias against authority. There is a belief that anybody who actually is in charge, somewhere, is just kind of a bad guy. And I really hate that. It’s bad for a democracy.”
Phillips has long been a flagbearer for free speech. He’s supported Toby Young’s Free Speech Union, and lambasted the Left for its insidious war on it. Take the toxic trans debate: “It would have been a good idea, when the whole JK Rowling thing started [when she was cancelled over her views on transgender rights], instead of people going, ‘Oh, well, you know, we’ve got to have a balance and all that’, they’d said, ‘you may not like what JK Rowling said. And if you don’t like it, it’s open to you to argue’.”
Phillips’s comments on race have prompted plenty of arguments too, of course: so are we still sleepwalking to segregation?
“I don’t think we are as dim-witted as we were in 2005, when I said that. I still think that, as a country, we are not paying as much attention to encouraging the process of integration as we might do.
London, ahead of the last census, lost about 600,000, youngish, white people. It became more minority. And even within London, minority groups were mixing but they were mixing with each other.
“I think that there is a complacency about the extent to which our version of multiculturalism is working. Go to a town in the North West, Burnley or Preston, or Leicester, and you will find people get on perfectly well at work. But at 5pm they go back to the streets, in which everybody who lives there are people like themselves. Now, none of this is a crime. But it is not consequence free.”
Phillips, the youngest of ten children, was born in London to British Guianan parents (his father a railway worker, his mother a seamstress) who emigrated in 1950, two years after the first wave of immigrants set sail from the West Indies to London on the HMT Empire Windrush. In 1998, he and his brother, Michael, wrote the book Windrush: 75 Years of Modern Britain.
He thinks immigration remains a big political issue. “We are now beginning to treat all immigrants as though they are a single mass: asylum seekers, people who come legally, people who are here because of family reunification, and people who basically just cheat the system.
We’ve got to find who the illegal immigrants are – we’re now talking about upwards of a million people – very little effort is going into that, because actually, it benefits quite a lot of people.”
Secondly, once you have found illegal immigrants, they should be treated fairly. Most people of a migrant background will take that view because most of us did it the hard way.
The aunt who brought me up in British Guiana, who, equal to my parents, is the most important person to me in the world, could not come to my marriage, because we weren’t going to cheat the system and get her here by some dodgy means.
“I think it’s reasonable that those people resent the sense that people who are young, able bodied and if you’re paying to cross the Channel, well-off, can cheat the system.”
Turning to his show, he’s hoping to get his friend the author Salman Rushdie, recently subject to an attack by an alleged Iranian sympathiser, on as a guest. “If you’re going to talk about what the government should be doing about freedom of speech there’s probably nobody in the world better qualified to talk about that,” says Phillips.
Also on the wishlist? Jamie Dimon, the boss of JP Morgan, so that viewers can properly understand the cost of living crisis.
He will also be talking about mental health, particularly with young people, which has a deeply personal resonance: in 2021, Phillips lost his 36-year-old daughter, Sushila, to anorexia.
“There is no day I don’t think about her. She was also, in many ways, my collaborator, and actually doing the show wakes some of that up. She left an imprint on all of us.’
Phillips has another daughter, Holly, both from his first marriage to Asha Bhownagary, a child psychotherapist. He is currently married to Helen Veale, a TV producer.
His daughters, he says, have done the “hardest thing for anybody in the leadership or a public role to hear. They could say to me, ‘yeah, that is a really good idea’. But you know what? Somebody else could get away with that, but you can’t”.
You have to really trust somebody not to go ‘what are you saying?’ So I miss Sushila. I miss her immensely.”
He turns 70 in December, and this seems like the ideal way to spend his semi-retirement. Is this the more dignified option instead of Strictly?
“Ha ha! Honestly, just put it down to drugs. it’s fine,” he laughs. “Me and Kim Kardashian talk all the time!”
Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips starts at 8.30am on Sky News on Sept 3
The Hiding Place: A poignant film threaded with God’s grace in adversity.
Corrie Ten Boom’s story of rescuing Jews during the Holocaust may be well known, but this new theatrical film portrays a relatable hero who still causes us all to ask questions about our response to suffering, says Emma Hide
Just like the internationally bestselling book and 1975 film before it, The Hiding Place theatrical film not only leaves viewers asking: “Could I have done the same?” but compels the question: “What can I do now?”
Adapted for the stage by AS Peterson and captured for the screen by director Laura Matula, the film chronicles the unwavering determination of the Ten Boom family as they risk their lives to rescue 800 Jews during the second world war. Rooted in biblical themes of faith, love, hope, courage and forgiveness, the performance takes its viewers on a journey into the depths of human resilience and capacity to love.
By Emma Fowle 25 July 2023. PC.
When Brad Franklin’s wife died suddenly, aged 37, she was pregnant with the couple’s seventh child. Four years on, Brad reflects on returning to ministry, widowhood, remarriage and glorifying God in our suffering
The story of Megan Franklin’s death is terrifying in its extremity and speed. Seven months pregnant, she was admitted to hospital on Christmas Day 2018. “We thought it was pregnancy-induced migraines,” remembers her husband, Brad. But on 29 December, she lost consciousness and had to be intubated. The next day, their seventh child, Euan, was delivered by emergency caesarean section.
Tests revealed Megan had contracted a bacterial infection, which resulted in a catastrophic swelling of her brain. All this had resulted from a scrape on her knee following a trip as she walked into a church a few weeks earlier.
“We prayed for a miracle,” says Brad. But a week after his wife was intubated, he realised that it “wasn’t going to happen”. On 6 January 2019, her life support apparatus was turned off.
Brad and Megan had moved to the UK from the United States in 2010. At the time of Megan’s death, Brad was a leader at St Giles Christian Mission, in London. Speaking of the care his church provided in the months following his
grief, Brad says: “I’ve never seen anything like it.” From making meals to looking after the children, their love and support was critical in giving him time and space to heal.
As a church pastor, Brad was used to expounding God’s word for others. Now, he had to find a way through his own intense suffering. “I wrote down a list of topics,” he says. “I wanted to think about anger; about God’s sovereignty; I wanted to think about how to respond to the children in this time.” As he began to return to ministry, nearly a year after Megan’s death, he wrote a midweek Bible study on heaven “because I thought it’d be good for the church…and good for me”. Believing in the hope that eternal life in Christ brings “was a truth we went back to again and again,” explains Brad. “It has been a constant encouragement for us.
“We all grieve differently,” Brad acknowledges, but understanding how God works “even through hard things” was pivotal in helping him weather the storm. It also helped him support his children – the eldest of whom was just 13 at the time of Megan’s death.
“How do you handle those situations? Telling the children that Mummy wouldn’t be coming home?” he asks, before explaining that grief is an ongoing process. “We talk about Megan all the time,” he says. “That’s just part of our life now. The important place she had – and still has – in our family, that is a constant.”
There have, of course, been tough times. When one of his children expressed: “Dad, this is rubbish. I don’t want things to be this way,” his response was to simply sit together in the pain. “Let’s not rush too much to an answer,” he says, explaining his parenting strategy has involved slowing down and encouraging his children to be honest about their feelings.
Through it all, Brad believes God has a plan: “His sovereignty and his goodness can’t be uncoupled from each other,” he explains. Some may find his Calvinist views hard but, for Brad, it is God’s goodness, displayed through the suffering of Christ’s death on the cross, that allows him to sit with such apparent contradiction. Citing the old William Cowper hymn ‘God moves in a mysterious way’, he explains: “There’s a verse that says: ‘His purposes will ripen fast / Unfolding every hour / The bud may have a bitter taste / But sweet will be the flower’. Cowper was no stranger to hard times – he went through real bouts of depression – but I love that picture. Right now, this is rubbish, as my son said. But I know God is good. I can go back to that.”
HIS SOVEREIGNTY AND HIS GOODNESS CAN’T BE UNCOUPLED FROM EACH OTHER
Two and a half years after Megan’s death, Brad remarried. Despite the fact that they had talked this through before Megan’s death, some did not understand his decision, and honest discussion was hard. “I’ve never read anything on remarriage after the loss of a loved one [from a Christian perspective]. I don’t know of anyone that has ever written on that,” he says. So he decided to write a book of his own.
The title, When Sorrows Like Sea Billows Roll (Grace Publications), is lifted from another hymn, ‘It is well with my soul’, written by Horatio Spafford in 1873 following the death of his four daughters. Alongside the story of Megan’s death, the book contains 32 reflections, designed to act as “a guide for glorifying God through the loss of a loved one.”
It’s a searingly honest and, in places, hard read, which tackles – among other issues – his loneliness and battles with sexual temptation following his widowhood. It may not be the book for someone in the middle of their suffering, he acknowledges, before stating, with a mixture of compassion and honesty borne of great personal conviction: “God often uses hardships to grow us in holiness. That’s not to say, as a pastor, I’m gonna go in there, guns blazing, saying: ‘You need to glorify God in this’…But I hope that’s a conversation we have at some point. Maybe this book enters into that space. It’s meant to be a reflection of our grief that points us to Christ. I don’t think there’s much out there on that.”
38) “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’[h] 39 But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.
ARCAEOPTERYX AND AMMONITE. In 2018 scientists from Germany and Switzerland published a detailed description of an Archaeopteryx specimen they claimed to be the oldest Archaeopteryx. One reasons they claim this record is that the specimen was buried alongside an ammonite – an extinct spiral-shelled sea creature similar to a nautilus. Reference: Rauhut et al. (2018), The oldest Archaeopteryx (Theropoda: Avialiae): a new specimen from the Kimmeridgian/Tithonian boundary of Schamhaupten, Bavaria. Peer J 6:e4191;DOI 10.7717/peerj.4191 ED. COM. This is a classic case of evolutionists missing the point – being buried with a marine ammonite shell does not actually show how old the fossil is, but where a sea creature and flying creature have been catastrophically buried together. Rather than being obsessed with putting ages on fossils, scientists should be asking how did a deep sea creature and a flying land creature end up buried together. The answer is one that the evolutionists do not like – a very large flood sweeping across land and sea beds, creating masses of sediment, collecting anything in its path, mixing it up and dumping it. Mixed environment fossil deposits are not rare anomalies, but in fact, they are the norm! Sadly this is not well known because most scientific papers concentrate on detailed descriptions on only one fossil from a rock layer, with rarely a brief mention of other fossils found in the same rock. Creation Research has many examples of mixed environment fossils in our museums, including an ammonite buried with wood and fish buried with pine leaves. These can be seen in both our UK and Australian museums. Flood geology works way better than millions of years of slow burial. Useful Links from the Archive: Petrified Salamander, Old Salamanders Just Like New, Tree Amber Contains Sea Shells, Antarctic Fossil Haul |
That is the numbers of visits to this site in August 2023.
Matt 10:34-36 (NIV)
34 “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. 35 For I have come to turn
“‘a man against his father,
a daughter against her mother,
a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law—
In the 1990s, Professor Carsten Peter Thiede turned both Theology and New Testament criticism on their heads. His findings utterly destroyed the so-called research of countless academics - and they are incandescent with rage at the ruthless slaughter of so many sacred cows.
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According to a landmark survey of 1200 serving Church of England priests conducted by The Times (£), three quarters of them believe that Britain can no longer be described as a Christian country,
Almost two-thirds said Britain could be called Christian “but only historically, not currently”.
The survey uncovered a strong desire among rank-and-file priests for significant changes in church doctrine on issues such as sex, sexuality, marriage and the role of women to bring it into greater line with public opinion.
What’s striking isn’t just how many Anglican priests want to liberalise, but how many are so pessimistic about the future of Christianity in Britain. It’s not clear whether they think liberalising sexual doctrine will arrest the decline. They appear to fear all is lost.
What is clear is that they can’t see is that this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The church will indeed be lost if they abandon the beliefs for which it stands. Far from stopping the rot by going with the secular flow, they are likely to bring above precisely what they fear is already happening... Melanie Phillips.
Abortion giant Planned Parenthood will offer 100 free vasectomies in October via its mobile clinic dubbed "The Nutcracker." The move comes amid reports that more men have sought the procedure in the wake of the reversal of Roe v. Wade. Read more. |
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