bmwelby's blog

Thoughts from the mind of Ben Welby

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Re: The oddness of the political moment

July 9, 2024 / / 3 Comments

At the start of June, James Plunkett wrote a piece called The oddness of the political moment. It is amazing just quite how quickly the atmosphere has changed since the election (I’d attribute a lot of how I feel myself to having prayed through Croydon and then for all 650 MPs in the last week) but the post remains very timely and insightful.

I left a couple of comments around accountability. One on the accountability of those elected to serve, and the other about GOV.UK and the policymaking process. David Durant said one needed to be a blog post, but I’ve done both.

1. Accountability of politicians

“…it seems increasingly clear we need people whose day job it is to care about the infrastructure that underpins accountability and the associated discourse…”

The oddness of the political moment, James Plunkett (07/06/2024)

When I decided to leave the OECD, a major factor was the stark disconnect between its stated mission of ‘better policies for better lives’ and the practical reality that means the organisation has to prioritise diplomatic niceties over accountability. I accept that my expectations are perhaps unreasonable. After all, the OECD isn’t an organisation designed, set up or mandated to provide accountability when a member mis-steps. However, you can’t have a ‘rules based international order’ if there’s no accountability against those rules.

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I prayed for every single newly elected MP

July 7, 2024 / / 6 Comments
A screenshot from a web application showing a hexagonal grid map of the United Kingdom completely filled with red heart icons, representing each constituency. At the top, it says 'Constituencies left to pray for: 0' on the left and 'Constituencies waiting for prayer: 0' on the right. In the centre, there is a message that reads 'You have finished praying for the 2024 intake of UK MPs.' Below this message is a green button with 'Amen' and a prayer hands emoji.

A different kind of party

Recently God changed my plans for election night and inspired me to spend my night praying for each constituency and every MP. So we opened up Boon Café and Zoom for a watch party focused on prayer over punditry.

After the polls closed and before the results started to come in we prayed and worshipped. I had planned to bring Post Its and give space to lament over policies and poor governance. But I forgot them. And that was a blessing. There was still space to mentally and emotionally clear our prayer decks without spending too long on the shortcomings of the past. Fixing our eyes on Jesus was a much better way to spend our time before the first result popped up.

When it did I was grateful to Philip Brown and Alasdair Rae at Automatic Knowledge for sharing the hex map in a number of formats. Every time we prayed for an MP we could add a heart to our A0 poster, as well as automatically to the web app I’d built with the help of ChatGPT and data from Democracy Club1.

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My Pre-election Prayer Walk through Croydon

July 1, 2024 / / 4 Comments

On Sunday evening when I would normally have been watching England pull a rabbit out of a hat against Slovakia I was walking and praying the streets of Croydon.

I set off on this 15km/10m walk after Croydon Vineyard’s 4pm service. My route followed the boundary between the 4 Parliamentary constituencies of West Croydon, South Croydon, East Croydon and North Croydon and Streatham. When I first thought this would be a good thing to do I thought I’d do the perimeter of the 4…that would have been 60km. Something to do but over a period of time I think.

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Migration in Christian Perspective: Notes

July 1, 2024 / / 1 Comment

On Wednesday 19th June 2024, the Sanctuary Foundation hosted a half day conference at St. Mellitus College called “Migration in Christian Perspective”. With some of us gathered in person and many more tuning in from all over the world it was a fabulous afternoon of insight and wisdom drawn from the experience of some stellar thinkers and practitioners.

The materials from the event will come in good time (and I’ll link to them) but hope these notes are an encouragement or of value for others.

All these shared with the caveat that any of the mistakes and errors are down to my transcription and not the people speaking! I also didn’t take notes for every session so this is a partial record.

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I’m excited for #GE2024, but not for the reasons you might think

June 26, 2024 / / 4 Comments

I don’t know what you’re thinking about #GE2024, or elections in general.

A lot of us are cynical and disdainful, perhaps to the point where politics is an active sore in our lives, and the lives of those around us. There’s plenty of reason why our feelings about government and governing should provoke our grief, rage and distrust.

A lot of us are apathetic. We’ve been disappointed too many times to keep seeing any merit or relevance to the whole exercise. Maybe it was a struggle to even read beyond the word “election” . If that’s us then we probably won’t vote. And nobody could lay any of the blame for that decision on us.

A lot of us still have some optimism about politics and policy, or at the very least recognise its potential for achieving particular goals. Some of us have active roles in a party. For others we might stick a poster in the window or an emoji on our socials. It could be that our commitment to our party or policies means overlooking the means so long as we achieve ‘our’ ends in battling an injustice and delivering an important cause.

I’ve worked in and around government for 15 years. That limits what’s possible in party political terms1. But if you spend enough time with me then I will more than likely have tried to persuade you that it’s important for Christians to care about the quality of how government goes about its business.

It’s a core part of who I am. I have a recurring prayer that “those who govern the world would fall in love with the values of the King and His Kingdom”. I’m even writing a book with my friend Dave that’s intended to be an encouragement to Christians by offering a hope-filled, faith-inspired perspective on democracy and how we’re governed.

So that means I’ve been anticipating this election for a long time, and frankly growing ever more restless at the need for change. I can’t say I’m impressed with these last 5 years (or with much of several previous electoral cycles to be honest). Once the election was announced I was looking forward to the night of July 4th into July 5th as being one of enjoyable schadenfreude2.

But then a couple of Sundays ago God challenged me in a moment when I was supposed to be listening to a sermon but was in fact being distracted by an email.

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The FaithTech Playbook: A Redemptive Approach to Tech

June 25, 2024 / / 1 Comment

Technological progress has always shaped society and today is no different. It infuses everything, everywhere (even in the depths of the Amazon rainforest).

It affects the things we see and recognise and use. And it affects the unseen influences that shape our day to day lives without our realising it. As a Christian, thinking about the relationship between technology, digital practice and my faith has added an extra layer to my work helping the public sector do good things with digital.

Genesis 1:27 tells us everyone is made “in the image of God” and I see that spark of the divine reflected in how everybody explores their love for the world and those around them. When I had the opportunity to join GDS I had no idea that I would find Kingdom values and Gospel practice cropping up in user-centred design and the government design principles but I believe they do. I’ve contributed some of my thoughts on “Faith in Technology” in an interview with my one-time colleague Richard Sargeant for his podcast Faith in Action. For a time I was part of an advisory group to the Church of England on their digital work. And I got involved with Kingdom Code at its outset in order to meet other Christians in the world of tech (the 2024 hackathon is coming in October).

And yet somehow I had missed the existence of FaithTech and the work they’re doing to create a global network of Christians in tech.

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Welcoming Well: thinking Christianly about asylum policy

June 19, 2024 / and / 3 Comments

This is a piece I co-wrote with Andy Brims. Andy is part of the team at Croydon Vineyard Church and has directed Vineyard English School since 2019. VES provides free conversational english classes in Croydon, and has welcomed hundreds of asylum seekers and refugees since its inception in 2015.

Under the auspices of Vineyard English School we recently hosted a roundtable on ‘Welcoming Well‘ which surfaced the idea of a Framework for Feeling At Home which you might want to look at in conjunction with this piece for practical ideas of how you and your community might respond to the needs of refugees and asylum seekers in your midst.

The Human Face of Asylum Anxiety

In the nondescript hotel lobby that doubles as a makeshift classroom each Wednesday, Tariq1, a new student lingered after our English class. Anxiety lined his face as he pulled us aside, his words tumbling out in heavily accented English. “Am I going to be sent to Rwanda?” he asked with fear in his voice, “I’ve got a domestic worker visa…my wife is pregnant”. His raw vulnerability highlighted to us the grim reality facing those navigating the asylum process in the UK.

A couple of weeks previously Farhan2 and Ayesha*3 had met us in a similar state of panic. For months these educated professionals and their eldest children had been regularly attending our sessions while  their two youngest settled into local schools. Yet now the Home Office had told them they were to be relocated, immediately, to somewhere in the country they didn’t know, as though they were a problem to be solved, not people to respect.

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Prime Minister, please don’t re-open the debate about ULEZ

June 15, 2024 / / 1 Comment
This entry is part 4 of 5 in the series ULEZ

I had to sigh heavily when I saw this tweet from Prime Minister Rishi Sunak with its pledge to “End Labour’s unfair ULEZ Expansion”.

Just last month, Sadiq Khan won a resounding victory in the Mayor of London elections, an election that had come to be seen as a referendum on ULEZ.

At the time, I revisited the Department for Transport data for the third time and established that between March 2022 and September 2023 there was a 40% reduction in the most problematic private cars. To my mind that makes ULEZ a successful policy intervention. It also means that the incumbent government is campaigning on the basis of something that affects just 331,632 private cars in London, a city of 9 million.

Well, it affected 331,632 private cars by the end of September 2023. I asked ChatGPT to help me with the linear regression and it told me this month, June 2024, the figure will probably be 230,000.

I wonder how many policies have generated so much airtime for such a small proportion of the population. It is deeply perplexing that ULEZ has worked its way into our national psyche (not to mention the time I’ve spent looking at it myself!)

Does the latest dataset support that projection?

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What makes you feel at home?

June 7, 2024 / / 4 Comments
The image shows a vibrant and welcoming scene outside a building. The building resembles a church with a large banner displaying the phrase "Welcoming Well". There are diverse groups of people, including men, women, and children, interacting and socializing. Some are sitting at tables enjoying food and drinks, while others are standing and chatting. The setting is lively and inclusive, reflecting a sense of community and togetherness. The background features urban elements with a mix of nature and cityscape.

After leaving the OECD one of the things I’ve been doing is volunteering with our church’s English School. And specifically I’ve been supporting the weekly classes run by Andy inside one of the hotels providing accommodation for asylum seekers.

This experience has been both humbling and incredibly impactful. It’s been such a privilege to spend Wednesday mornings with a diverse collection of people looking to the UK as the place where they want to build a new, safe, life. Our classes have ranged from 4 people to over 30 and in total I’ve met with over 100 people from more than 25 countries; all of them eager to improve their English.

You won’t be surprised that I didn’t support the anti-immigration rhetoric of the political right even before I joined my first class. But I really don’t think it would take more than a couple of mornings spent with these men, women and children for those that do to conclude that much of the way these needs are portrayed is warped and distorted. As you get to know people trapped in the limbo of asylum and learn about the obstacles people face, even after being recognised as refugees, I’m confident they’d actually become passionate advocates for wholesale renewal of our discourse and our practice.

Unfortunately, it’s going to take time to rethink our response to the needs of refugees and asylum seekers. So my prayer and hope is that a future government builds its policy from a place of compassion and grace. And that they recognise the worth of the individuals at the heart of the asylum process.

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ULEZ is a successful policy intervention.

May 1, 2024 / / 2 Comments
This entry is part 3 of 5 in the series ULEZ

So, we arrive at Judgement Day for Sadiq Khan’s time as Mayor of London. And we’re being asked to judge him solely on whether we think the Ultra-Low Emissions Zone (ULEZ) is a successful policy intervention or not. His Conservative opponent, Susan Hall, certainly doesn’t think so and has promised to scrap the expanded ULEZ on her first day in office.

I’ve written before about how the Conservative party has weaponised ULEZ instead of seriously thinking about how government and Mayor can work together to achieve the intent behind this policy. Obviously that’s not going to happen but it’s still disappointing to have seen the Mayoral election reduced to a referendum on ULEZ.

Having crunched the data before it is only right to see whether we can gauge the success of ULEZ in terms of its impact on car ownership in London. Fortunately the Department for Transport have published an updated version of the veh9901 dataset (here’s the dataset I used for this post, captured in the Web Archive) that takes us through to September 2023.

And having looked at the data (which includes an 8 month lag don’t forget) it’s such a pity that we spend so much time listening to people having to defend or attack ULEZ rather than recognising ULEZ as a successful policy intervention because its achievements are significant, to the extent that I’m doubting my sums.

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