St Mary’s University – Dean of Faculty – Education, Humanities and Social Sciences. Professor of Finance, Public Policy and Ethics.
As well as Dean of the Faculty of Education, Humanities and Social Sciences at St Mary’s University, Philip helps to develop curricula and teaches in fields such as political economy, business ethics and Catholic social teaching. He also works for the Institute of Economic Affairs as Senior Academic Fellow. Click here to view Philip’s full profile
This post is reproduced by kind permission of the Catholic Herald who first published this article. It was written before the Pope’s encyclical Fratelli Tutti was published. The encyclical covers important themes about how we should care for those in need, including the elderly.
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AJP Taylor wrote in his Oxford History of England:
Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state beyond the post office and the policeman…He could travel abroad or leave his country forever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter a foreigner could spend his life in the country without permit and without informing the police…All this was changed by the impact of the Great War…The state established a hold over its citizens which though relaxed in peace time, was never to be removed and which the Second World War was again to increase. The history of the English people and the English State merged for the first time.
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A recent report in the Lancet spelled out in detail the alarming fall in fertility across the world. Demographic car crashes happen in slow motion and it has been known for years that countries such as Japan, Germany and Italy are about to enter population free-fall.
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“[I]t is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do.” (Quadragesimo anno, 79).
In the current crisis, there is much talk of “policy reset”. Some of that talk seems strange. We have the most centralised health service in the Western world and it has not obviously performed better than healthcare services in other countries. The NHS has also moved infected people out of hospitals and into care homes with disastrous consequences. Despite that, reliable sources in the UK government seem to be suggesting that, following the crisis, there will be a move to centralise political control of the NHS further and also that the NHS will take control of social care from local authorities.
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The UK government has borrowed huge amounts of money to try to deal with the covid-19 crisis. Catholic social teaching and thought discusses the question of personal debt and poor-country government debt a great deal but, oddly, there is no systematic treatment of government debt more generally. Yet there are several ways in which government borrowing might be thought problematic. This post will deal with just one aspect of the problem – distributive justice.
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In a recent letter, Pope Francis suggested that we consider the provision of a universal basic wage. In this article, which summaries an article that will appear in Pastoral Review in the autumn, we ask “Should the Universal Church support a universal basic income (UBI)?”
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This post by Philip Booth considers freedom of speech, conscience and religion in the context of specific laws in the UK which allow a great deal of administrative discretion in restricting those freedoms.
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In this post, Philip Booth discusses how the language we use in debates can get in the way of agreement and how Catholics interested in environmental issues should study the work of Elinor Ostrom for inspiration.
In the last blogpost on this site, I wrote about the importance of private property rights for environmental conservation. But there is more to this debate. And sometimes semantics gets in the way of reaching a common understanding on these issues. My garden, for example, is private property and nobody would doubt that. However, a community of monks might care for their (possibly very large) grounds, farm, gardens, bee hives, and so on by holding it in common – though they still hold it privately in common. Indeed, property titles can be quite complex. Under English law, there will sometimes be restrictive covenants, nested leaseholder and freeholder arrangements and property held under trust (including by charities such as the National Trust) and many of these devices will be designed to ensure good outcomes when it comes to sustainability.
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In this week’s post, Philip Booth discusses the papal encyclical Laudato Si, responding to Pope Francis’ desire for dialogue on the issues raised.
Bishop Robert Byrne of Hexham and Newcastle described Laudato Si, published five years ago next week, as a “prophetic document that has given a theological and spiritual framework to the environmental crisis facing our world”. An earlier post on this blog developed a similar point.
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It seems slightly strange to be posting on this blog in the middle (or, perhaps, at the beginning) of a global pandemic and national emergency about a subject which is not coronavirus. All intellectual and political discussion seems to have converged on that subject. Nevertheless, for those interested in other news, views and topical discussion based in Catholic social thought, we shall continue this blog on a range of issues, though next week we shall look at some aspects of the corona virus crisis.
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