Pope snubbed by Scottish Catholics

Thousands turn down the chance to see the Pope in person, and controversy over costs continues.

Controversy has broken out over the Pope's planned open-air Mass at Bellahouston Park, near Glasgow, with many parishes returning more than half of their allocated tickets for the event.

The organisers now reportedly fear that attendance will fall short of the 100,000 they expected to come to the Mass, which will cost £1.5m to stage. Each of Scotland's 450 Catholic parishes received a pro-rata ticket allocation based on the size of its regular congregation, but the Herald reports that, in some cases, only one-sixth of the parishioners are planning to take up their places at the papal event.

In 1982, Pope John Paul II celebrated Mass at the same site on a sunny afternoon, with 300,000 people in attendance. The choice of this site has been interpreted as an attempt to re-create the success and popularity of that service for a pope who has been under siege in recent months.

The open-air Mass requires participants to be in their places hours before the two-hour service begins, and it is thought that fears about the weather and long travel times are putting people off. Distant parishes are also planning to watch the service via video link, rather than travel to the other side of the country to attend in person.

The service, which will take place on 19 September during the Pope's state visit to Britain, has also reopened the debate over the cost of the papal trip to Britain. Although it insists that pilgrims will not have to pay to attend the Mass at Bellahouston, the Catholic Church has asked each parish to make a donation of £20 per attendee -- an obligation that many parishes have passed on to their parishioners.

The total cost of the visit, which will be borne by Britain, as the host nation, provoked outrage in some quarters when it was revealed that it could exceed £20m. As well as asking for "voluntary donations" from the public to cover the cost of specific events, the Catholic Church is also asking members to donate towards the overall cost of the visit, which it currently estimates at £7m.

The Church is also selling merchandise to coincide with the trip. T-shirts, fridge magnets and mugs are available, as well as more conventional religious artefacts.

Besides being hit by low attendance figures, the Pope's visit could suffer from a lack of television exposure, after BBC workers threatened to strike during that period (which will coincide with other major events such as the Last Night of the Proms) over pension disputes. Workers are being balloted on the issue; a result is expected in the week before the Pope is due to arrive in Britain.

Add to this the stated intention of Richard Dawkins and others to attempt to arrest the Pope for his alleged complicity in the child abuse scandal while he is on British soil, and we could be in for an eventful visit come September.

Caroline Crampton is head of podcasts at the New Statesman.

PHOTO: GETTY
Show Hide image

The Conservatives’ lack of strategy is highlighted in their reaction to Claire Kober quitting

The leader of Haringey Council will not stand for re-election in May.

Today Haringey, tomorrow the world? The leader of Haringey Council, Claire Kober, has quit her post and will not stand for re-election in May, and the story makes most of the national papers. (The Conservative party is also going hard on the story on Twitter and, more importantly, Facebook.)

I don't want to dwell too long on what has happened in Haringey because I've written about it before. The short version is: while you can't understand events in Haringey without some reference to the wider changes in Labour since 2015, you also can't understand it without reference to the Council's proposed regeneration scheme – just as you can't understand, say, the Richmond by-election without some reference to local opposition to Heathrow and to Brexit. Drawing conclusions about what is going to happen as far as Labour's inner life is a bit like drawing conclusions about the ability of Brexit to win seats for Liberal Democrats across the country.

The more interesting thing is the Conservative reaction, which highlights a bigger problem for that party: which is that they have no clear message or strategic argument. Say what you like about them, under David Cameron and George Osborne the big message that the cuts were necessary and that only they would take the big decisions needed to get Britain back into the black was repeated, time and again, through both big government events, and media appearances by government ministers to activists on Twitter. Journalists got bored of the words “long-term economic plan” but it did, at least, succeed in cutting through.

What's the big argument that the Conservatives want to have with Labour at the next election? They're quite good at leaping on whatever happens to be big in the news that day, but, however one might wish it were otherwise, voters simply don't care about Momentum, Labour's NEC or when Jeremy Corbyn last appeared on PressTV.

The Tory problem partly flows from their leadership problem: they can't prosecute a big argument about what the next election should be about under their current leader. The parliamentary arithmetic means they can't really do anything requiring controversial legislation and Brexit saps the organisational ability of the civil service to do anything big, either.

Their hope is that when the new leader comes in they will impose some kind of strategic vision and direction that gives them a narrative and a purpose that allows them to regain their majority next time. Labour's campaign surge does show that, if you do almost everything right and your opponent does almost everything wrong, big changes can happen even at the eleventh hour. But they're betting an awful lot that Labour's next election campaign will make as many mistakes as May's did.

Stephen Bush is special correspondent at the New Statesman and the PSA's Journalist of the Year. His daily briefing, Morning Call, provides a quick and essential guide to domestic and global politics.