Article

Change

Community

Politics

8 July 2024

6 min read

Camden: what’s up in Keir’s backyard?

The new Prime Minister’s constituency has valuable lessons for the country.

Simon Walsh

Simon Walsh is a communications consultant, journalist and non-stipendiary priest in the Diocese of London.

Kier Starmer walks along a residential development's path with two other people.

Starmer and local councillors in Camden.

‘What good ever came out of Nazareth?’ was asked of Jesus. The same might now be said of Camden, which lies at the heart of the Holborn & St Pancras constituency. A safe Labour seat since the 1980s, its present incumbent is Sir Keir Starmer who has been handed the keys to Downing Street in the General Election.

His wallet apparently has on it ‘Take me home to Kentish Town’. Two buses link Kentish Town, where he lives, with Whitehall – a route of about four miles. He will go into government with a very full in-tray, and many of them are issues he knows first-hand from his own constituency. I know them too, having lived there for 20 years.

Sometimes I cover services for a clergy colleague in the nearby parish of St Mary’s, Somers Town. The church is on Eversholt Street which runs along the eastern side of Euston station, incidentally the capital’s first mainline railway terminus. Last year, as I arrived for a mass one rainy Saturday morning, a random group of people sheltered in the doorway. They were, I discovered, addicts waiting for a drugs drop. Towards the end of mass, one of the group – a young woman – came into the back of church and found a pew in which to start preparing her fix. Once I had disrobed, I asked if she wouldn’t mind doing it somewhere else.

Another time, in the same church, a young woman from Spain was asking for money. She had answered a job advert on social media to come and work on a chicken farm. Having arrived and paid her accommodation for a week, she found there was no chicken farm, and trying to find other work was almost impossible because of paperwork. What could we do to help? The church itself is in dire need of financial support too.

St Mary’s Flats... were among the first examples of public housing in the country to have electricity and Jellicoe became something of a social housing celebrity.

Somers Town was transformed 100 years ago when its energetic parish priest, Fr Basil Jellicoe, created the first housing association. Dismayed by the squalor of Victorian tenements, he set about raising funds for The St Pancras House Improvement Society. Jellicoe was only in his mid-20s but had a solid Anglo-Catholic background founded on mission and a heart for the poor. The cramped and filthy conditions with extreme poverty were ‘an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual disgrace’ – for him, the opposite to the sacraments.

By the time Jellicoe moved from the parish in 1934, the slums had been cleared and a number of the new blocks built, the first being St Mary’s Flats, with others given saints’ names. They were among the first examples of public housing in the country to have electricity and Jellicoe became something of a social housing celebrity. Tragically, having worn himself out he died at the age of 36. His legacy is one of praxis – active Christianity meeting social problems where they are – and his model became the blueprint for many other housing associations since.

No surprise, therefore, that families struggle to afford to live in the area and migrate further out. As a result, schools have started to close.

The area remains a swirl of social problems in addition to the drugs. Mental health issues are rife. There are plans to redevelop St Pancras Hospital which houses mental health services. The area suffers from traffic and noise pollution, and lacks communal spaces. Camden Council recently saw fit take one corner of a public green in Somers Town on which to build a tower block of multi-million pound flats, handy for nearby St Pancras Station. Crime rates are high with muggings and mobile phone thefts a daily reality. Last year, as mourners left a funeral one Saturday afternoon at St Aloysius Church just a few streets down from St Mary’s, a drive-by-shooting injured six people. Starmer called the incident ‘appalling’ and spoke of ‘extra patrols and community support’ after a conversation with police.

The area has become highly expensive. Local businesses are being priced out by increased rents. Very little social housing has been built this century. The average house price in NW1, which encompasses the Nash terraces of Regents Park, the council blocks and social housing of Somers Town, is £1.3 million. A two-bed flat is in excess of half a million quid. No surprise, therefore, that families struggle to afford to live in the area and migrate further out. As a result, schools have started to close – four in as many years recently. In his acceptance speech in Camden Council’s offices near St Pancras station, close to the world-renowned Crick Institute and Facebook’s UK headquarters, Starmer namechecked the mythical ‘girl from Somers Town’ and his hope for her future.

Charles Dickens went to school around here and knew these streets well. His 1848 novel Dombey & Son detailed the destruction and chaos caused in the area by the building of the railway line through it. 175 years later, it has been HS2, the great White Elephant which has dug up streets, seen whole blocks of accommodation and hotels demolished, diverted roads, and axed much-loved institutions like the Bree Louise pub. There has been no benefit to locals so far (quite the opposite, in fact) and it is a stain on both Labour and Conservative administrations. Sir Keir says he is furious at the ‘big hole’ left by the down-tools project. There is fear now that the redundant land will be subject to a ‘gold rush’ as developers circle to pick up some prime real estate.

Interviewed in June by the Camden New Journal, Starmer said: ‘The government has earmarked money for Euston. I want to see that money and obviously, if we come into power, we’ll see through all this money – and not stripped away from other projects which is the usual trick.’ He also said: ‘The other thing is we need housing. Camden desperately needs housing as many places do. So we will use it – if we are privileged to come into power – as part of our plan for 1.5 million homes.’

His manifesto has five pledges:

Kickstart economic growth

The cost-of-living crisis is biting hard here and the inequalities are stark. People need real money.

Make Britain a clean energy superpower

It’s going to need more than a few on-street charging points for electric vehicles. And the carbon footprint of that HS2 project?

Take back our streets

He wants to halve crime rates but London has around 106 crimes per 1,000 people and his own constituency feels less safe than it used to.

Break down barriers to opportunity

Camden already ranks highly in the deprivation index where barriers are concerned: schools, homes, jobs…

Build an NHS fit for the future

Again, the hospitals and GP services are cracking – high demand combined with under-investment is deadly.

A prophet is not welcome in his own country, it was said. Although the new Prime Minister was elected with a majority in his home seat, it was down to 18,884 votes from the 2019 endorsement of 36,641 votes – a drop of almost 50%. In this election, an Independent candidate called Andrew Feinstein polled 7,312 votes with his pledge to improve life for local residents. Starmer’s constituents will be counting on him to fix the nation along with the problems on their own streets. Otherwise, safe seat or not, he may no longer be welcome in Camden either.

Article

Belief

Creed

Identity

Truth and Trust

18 November 2025

5 min read

Calls to revive the Enlightenment ignore its own illusions

Returning to the Age of Reason won’t save us from post-Truth

Alister McGrath

Alister McGrath retired as Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford University in 2022.

In the style of a Raeburn portrait, a set of young people lounge around on their phones looking diffident

Enlightened disagreement (with apologies to Henry Raeburn).

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

Is truth dead? Are we living in a post-truth era where forcefully asserted opinions overshadow evidence-based public truths that once commanded widespread respect and agreement? Many people are deeply concerned about the rise of irrational beliefs, particularly those connected to identity politics, which have gained considerable influence in recent years. It seems we now inhabit a culture where emotional truths take precedence, while factual truths are relegated to a secondary status. Challenging someone’s beliefs is often portrayed as abusive, or even as a hate crime. Is it any surprise that irrationality and fantasy thrive when open debate and discussion are so easily shut down? So, what has gone wrong—and what can we do to address it?

We live in an era marked by cultural confusion and uncertainty, where a multitude of worldviews, opinions, and prejudices vie for our attention and loyalty. Many people feel overwhelmed and unsettled by this turmoil, often seeking comfort in earlier modes of thinking—such as the clear-cut universal certainties of the eighteenth-century “Age of Reason.” In a recent op-ed in The Times, James Marriott advocates for a return to this kind of rational thought. I share his frustration with the chaos in our culture and the widespread hesitation to challenge powerful irrationalities and absurdities out of fear of being canceled or marginalized. However, I am not convinced that his proposed solution is the right one. We cannot simply revert to the eighteenth century. Allow me to explain my concerns.

What were once considered simple, universal certainties are now viewed by scholars as contested, ethnocentric opinions. These ideas gained prominence not because of their intellectual merit, but due to the economic, political, and cultural power of dominant cultures. “Rationality” does not refer to a single, universal, and correct way of thinking that exists independently of our cultural and historical context. Instead, global culture has always been a bricolage of multiple rationalities.

The great voyages of navigation of the early seventeenth century made it clear that African and Asian understandings of morality and rationality differed greatly from those in England. These accounts should have challenged the emerging English philosophical belief in a universal human rationality. However, rather than recognizing a diverse spectrum of human rationalities—each shaped by its own unique cultural evolution—Western observers dismissed these perspectives as “primitive” or “savage” modes of reasoning that needed to be replaced by modern Western thought. This led to forms of intellectual colonialism, founded on the questionable assumption that imposing English rational philosophies was a civilizing mission intended to improve the world.

Although Western intellectual colonialism was often driven by benign intentions, its consequences were destructive. The increasing influence of Charles Darwin’s theory of biological and cultural evolution in the late nineteenth century led Darwin’s colleague, Alfred Russel Wallace, to conclude that intellectually and morally superior Westerners would “displace the lower and more degraded races,” such as “the Tasmanian, Australian and New Zealander”—a process he believed would ultimately benefit humanity as a whole.

We can now acknowledge the darker aspects of the British “Age of Reason”: it presumed to possess a definitive set of universal rational principles, which it then imposed on so-called “primitive” societies, such as its colonies in the south Pacific. This reflected an ethnocentric illusion that treated distinctly Western beliefs as if they were universal truths.

A second challenge to the idea of returning to the rational simplicities of the “Age of Reason” is that its thinkers struggled to agree on what it meant to be “rational.” This insight is often attributed to the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who argued that the Enlightenment’s legacy was the establishment of an ideal of rational justification that ultimately proved unattainable. As a result, philosophy relies on commitments whose truth cannot be definitively proven and must instead be defended on the basis of assumptions that carry weight for some, but not for all.

We have clearly moved beyond the so-called rational certainties of the “Age of Reason,” entering a landscape characterized by multiple rationalities, each reasonable in its own unique way. This shift has led to a significant reevaluation of the rationality of belief in God. Recently, Australian atheist philosopher Graham Oppy has argued that atheism, agnosticism, and theism should all be regarded as “rationally permissible” based on the evidence and the rational arguments supporting each position. Although Oppy personally favours atheism, he does not expect all “sufficiently thoughtful, intelligent, and well-informed people” to share his view. He acknowledges that the evidence available is insufficient to compel a definitive conclusion on these issues. All three can claim to be reasonable beliefs.

The British philosopher Bertrand Russell contended that we must learn to accept a certain level of uncertainty regarding the beliefs that really matter to us, such as the meaning of life. Russell’s perspective on philosophy provides a valuable counterbalance to the excesses of Enlightenment rationalism: “To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.”

Certainly, we must test everything and hold fast to what is good, as St Paul advised. It seems to me that it is essential to restore the role of evidence-based critical reasoning in Western culture. However, simply returning to the Enlightenment is not a practical solution. A more effective approach might be to gently challenge the notion, widespread in some parts of our society, that disagreement equates to hatred. We clearly need to develop ways of modelling a respectful and constructive disagreement, in which ideas can be debated and examined without diminishing the value and integrity of those who hold them. This is no easy task—yet we need to find a way of doing this if we are to avoid fragmentation into cultural tribes, and lose any sense of a “public good.”

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