Can Freemasonry find a role in the woke world?

Freemasonry has insinuated itself into our language – the ‘holy of holies’, the ‘third degree’, ‘on the level’. Its customs and practices have evolved over many centuries, smothering us in wool, like an enormous piece of knitting. How the hell can we get rid of it?

 

There was something about the coronation of King Charles III that was awfully familiar – the white robes, the gloves, the anointing with oil brought from the Holy Land, that business with the sword. Now, what was it? Oh yes, Freemasonry.

 

It shouldn’t really be a surprise, Freemasonry, the Craft, has been entwined through the British establishment for centuries and it put down deep roots throughout the colonies. It was big, back in the day. It was one of the key cultural mechanisms of the British Empire,

 

Edward VII was Grand Master of the United Grand Lodge of England from 1874 to 1901, until he was crowned. George VI was an enthusiastic mason, as was his brother, who served as Edward VIII, before his abdication in 1937. The role of head of the United Grand Lodge is now occupied by the Queen’s cousin, the Duke of Kent. His brother, Prince Michael of Kent, is also a senior mason. Prince Philip was a mason. King Charles never seems to have been one, breaking the recent link between serving monarchs and the masons that goes back to his great great grandfather. He’s not really into it.

 

The establishment will struggle to find a royal standard bearer for the craft, once the current Duke of Kent, who has the dismissive ‘you are a prole’ look of Martin Amis, pops his clogs. There just aren’t any suitably uptight royals in the next generation – Harry, no way Jose, William (nope, he’s sensitive, like his mum). Andrew? I don’t think so. He’s the public relations version of leprosy. They will have to find a more obscure, lower-tier royal to carry the banner and roll up the trouser leg. Hopefully one who isn’t a Nazi.

 

Does Freemasonry matter? Well, here are a couple of interesting facts. Fact one – Edward VIII was a fan of Adolf Hitler. They were photographed shaking hands, long after Hitler had begun rounding up and murdering Jews and Communists and euthanising disabled children. Fact two, so was the current Duke of Kent’s father, Prince George, who was the English grand master flash from 1939. He died when his RAF Short flying boat mysteriously crashed into a hillside in Scotland, on 25 August 1942, in broad daylight.

 

Was Prince George, an intelligent man who was rumoured to be Noel Coward’s lover and was a morphine and cocaine user, at the controls of the plane when it crashed?  Was he killed by MI5 on the orders of Winston Churchill (ironically, another Freemason) because it was feared that was about to do a deal with Hitler? We’ll probably never know, because the records have been destroyed, or sealed. The establishment is very good at covering its traces.

 

These two facts don’t mean that all Freemasons are extremely right wing – they’re not. But if you are you are right wing and a member of a uniformed service, like the police or the army, you are far more likely to be a mason, than if you are, say, a radical, left-wing layabout.

 

Jack Straw tries to clean up

 

There are believed to be about six million Freemasons in the world. The world’s largest masonic organization, the United Grand Lodge of England, which is a male only institution, has a combined membership estimated at around a quarter of a million,

 

Periodically, concerns are expressed in Britain that masons’ vows of brotherhood to their fellow craft members mean that they cannot exercise public duties dispassionately. High-profile scandals in the 1970s and 1980s, concerning the West Midlands Serious Crimes Squad and the Metropolitan Police’s Obscene Publications Branch, appeared to bear out these fears. More recently, there were accusations of a masonic cover-up in the South Yorkshire police’s handling of the Hillsborough football stadium disaster.

 

How many members of UK police forces and how many judges and magistrates are masons? How many MPs and members of the House of Lords are funny handshake merchants? We don’t know. And we can’t know. A Freedom of Information request will, strangely, get you nowhere. Unofficial estimates suggests that 5% of judges may be masons.

 

In 1997, incoming home secretary, Jack Straw said that members of the police, judiciary and probation service should be required to disclose whether they are masons and that, if a voluntary register failed, he would bring in legislation. The United Grand Lodge of England defended membership secrecy, citing the case of an Italian judge who was a Freemason, whose appeal to the European Court of Human Rights had succeeded. In 2009, rules requiring declaration for judges were withdrawn.

 

Since 2018, when there was a furore over masons in the Met allegedly blocking diverse police membership, the UGLE has been on a charm offensive, publicising its charitable efforts and its open, but not female, membership criteria.

 

There are lodge websites all over the internet. You can easily find photos – a few black faces but mainly middle-aged white men wearing aprons. They look like the kind of people you would encounter at the bar of a golf club. With a couple of clicks, you can even take a virtual tour of the art deco Freemasons’ Hall which has a museum and looms spectacularly over London’s Great Queen Street, like a Babylonian ziggurat.

 

This is open-source, non-vanilla Freemasonry. The Met Police may be under attack for their racism, sexist and homophobia, but the masons are trying to find a niche in the culture wars, lying somewhere between me-too culture and wokery and a world of bizarre online conspiracy theories, in which alien lizard people abduct babies and hold meetings in secret underground bunkers, while flying saucers hover overhead.

 

The thing is, people love secret societies and funny handshakes. They just do. Freemasonry is the ultimate self-help group based on user-generated content. It has even insinuated itself in our language – the ‘holy of holies’, the ‘third degree’, ‘on the level’.

 

So don’t write of the masons just yet. The British establishment has the ability to place a rock band on the roof. it is malleable and adaptive. You know how you smiled when Charles, in his white robe, was being anointed with holy oil? That’s the smile that would land on your face at a village fete, at the dog with the waggliest tail competition, or when you discover a new Walkers crisp flavour. These customs and practices have rolled over us Brits over many centuries, like an enormous piece of knitting. You can’t easily unpick something like that. And maybe you shouldn’t.

 

Human beings are weird

 

Tbese are not just characteristics of Freemasonry. The mason’s apron is like the Catholic’s scapula. Revered texts, ceremonies, initiation rites and ranks of membership are common to all religions, clubs and sects. Humans are drawn to them because they confer order on a universe that may have no meaning or purpose. 

 

I'm a bit conflicted on this, because my grandad James L. Hatchett, who was the manager of Lloyd's bank in Droitwich, served as the mayor of that town and was a leading light in numerous local institutions, was a Freemason. He stood as an Independent. His campaign slogan in an election in 1956 was ‘Vote for Hatchett. He has no axe to grind’. There is something attractive about being an Independent, in a world of hectoring tub thumpers. In some ways, it's the spirit of middle England – which Droitwich, with its timbered buildings, its canal and its ugly ring road, physically represents. I never met him. He died just before I was born. When I think of my grandad, I remember the big leather chairs in his dining room and the neat garden, with its sweet willams and wallflowers. It's always summer. I refuse to believe that Jim Hatchett, mayor of Droitwich – who was a plump man with spectacles, somewhat bullied by his wife – was not a good person with only the best intentions. Of course, this could be entirely wrong.

 

Whether it's a cathedral or a scout hut, premises used for communal purposes embody, in their physical structures, narratives that correspond to a human journey. A Masonic lodge – they all have a black and white tiled floor, an altar and robing rooms – has the musty odours, tattered banners, stained glass and plangent organ music of a Christian Church – a strange English melancholy that makes you think of glorious deaths on foreign fields. Anyone who has been a mason would be entirely at home in the Houses of Parliament – which is not really surprising. Freemasonry is a church that was devised during the enlightenment, a period in which the cosmos could be interpreted as machine that had been set in motion by a divine maker – and measured.

 

Freemasonry’s functional roles – warden, deacon, chaplain, almoner, worshipful master, are filled by individuals who are architects, clerks, soldiers, engineers, judges, clerics and policemen in their other lives (no wonder there are conflicts of interest). It is an instrumental religion, rather than one of pious hope. Their goal is to climb Jacob’s ladder to heaven, or, in the case of the American founding fathers, several of whom were Freemasons, to build a successful country, in which an individual can become prosperous and drive around in a pick-up truck.

 

That is why Freemasonry, for all its protestations that is open, inclusive and gender non-discriminatory (I made that up) never can be. Secret societies are secret. That’s why we like them. English masonic iconography references the killing of infidels by the Knights Templar and of the dragon by St George, who slayed, symbolically, the pagan gods of nature. But it also has echoes of ancient Coptic and gnostic religions.

 

Animals were ritually sacrificed in the Temple of Solomon, which Masons profess to the physical prototype of their lodges. Their blood was spilled on the brazen alter. Freemasonry is a pre-medieval survival, as peculiar as King Charles’ accent. It can never be entirely normalised. There are masonic lodges for football, rugby and motor racing fans and women. There are Catholic lodges and black lodges. Freemasonry is big in Jamaica. Probably, somewhere in the world, there is a lodge of socialist Freemasons. Freemasonry is a synonym for an esoteric, self-protective form of secrecy. And human beings embrace that. They are just weird.

 

Will Hatchett has been a social policy journalist since 1986. He was editor of Environmental Health News from 1998 until 2018. The views expressed here are purely his own.

 

‘Back to basics’ on law and order

Policing has lost its way and is picking up the piece of a broken society. What’s the answer? We need a huge shift of resources to community-based services and a radical re-set of the role of the English and Welsh police services.

 

New Labour, from 1997, brought a new language and a new energy to social policy, not least in the hotly-contested area of law and order. It was as if a management consultant had been welded to a social worker. The party coined the phrase ‘social exclusion’ to replace the scary word ‘poverty’. ‘Joined-up’ and ‘community’ were popular adjectives. The public sector was blasted by business jargon and key performance indicators.

 

We owe the phrases, ‘community safety’ and ‘neighbourhood policing’ to this era. First term New Labour gave us the Crime and Disorder Act in 1998, community safety partnerships and anti-social behaviour orders, ASBOs – a fist in a velvet glove. The party was guilty, at times, of draconian responses to public order issues and of courting favourable Daily Mail headlines but it spoke to the social causes of crime and called upon a community response, beyond the boundaries and jurisdictions of the police – very different to now, when ‘victim blaming’ rules and the Daily Mail makes rather than merely influences policy.

 

The then novel concept of ‘joined up’ multi-agency working, bringing together police forces with council services, including environmental health, housing and social services can be seen, in retrospect, as bright point in decades of social policy decline. It was an approach that began to reduce long-standing inequalities.

 

Nixon of Dock Green

 

Jim Nixon, director of community safety for public protection software company, RHE Global, remembers those times well. In 1995, he was just starting out as a ‘beat bobby’ in Sandwell and Walsall, working in two tough areas of multiple deprivation, in the west midlands. Neighbourhood policing, he recalls, benefitted from ring-fenced funding. It was a key strand of well-resourced local authority regeneration projects.

 

Nixon says of his time in Smethwick, in Sandwell: “We were eight police officers, assigned to a very deprived beat, and dealing with everything. It could be low-level anti-social behaviour, or it could be burglaries, or armed robberies. We got to know everybody and everything that went on. We’d cover miles. We didn’t have a car. We would only use a car if we had arrest somebody.”

 

“Our role was to engage with the public and to get good quality intelligence. In terms of drug issues, we didn’t just tackle the dealers, we talked about rehabilitation with drug users. So it was a holistic service.”

 

Public sector budgets were slashed from 2010, with the austerity-led policies of the Coalition. More than a decade of continuing cuts have drastically reduced the footprint of local government to a faint shadow.

 

The ASB Crime and Policing Act of 2014 was a milestone. A tidying up exercise, it amalgamated 19 sets of ASB powers into only six, including public spaces protection orders, banning specific acts in designated areas, enforced by fixed penalties, issued by the police. It also attached civil injunctions to ASB measures, thereby reducing their evidential burden.

 

Many of the measures were opposed for impinging on civil liberties or even for criminalising lifestyles. But, to some extent, they were an inevitable response to a thinly-resourced policing system, in which community outreach could only be regarded as a luxury. They were also an attempt, suggests Nixon, to bring the English and Welsh police services under the firm grip of national control.

 

That attempt was doomed to failure, as it would be now. There are 43 police forces in England and Wales. They all have separate procurement and human resources arrangements and databases. They are all doing their own thing.

 

The latest iteration of national ASB policy, the Anti-Social Behaviour Action Plan, published in March, rings the changes on post-Coalition themes. It employs catch phrases, such as ‘hotspot policing’, ‘immediate justice’ and ‘zero tolerance’. It criminalises new behaviours, such as begging at cash points or cars at traffic lights and increase the upper limits of spot fines. The plan focuses on enforcement and punishment, rather than addressing the causes of ASB or even acknowledging that they should be tackled.

 

Police identity crisis

 

The youth services that were so successful in the late 1990s and early 2000s in keeping young people out of trouble are a distant memory and the concept of neighbourhood policing is virtually dead. Nixon reflects: “Police numbers are so low that even if you are on a neighbourhood team, you will invariably be used for response duties, on a daily basis.”

 

The police are normally the first on the scene when things go wrong – they are the experts in first response. Unfortunately, they are now sometimes the only ones on the scene. Nixon says: “You've often got police officers sat there for hours and hours in A and E departments, waiting for an entire shift for someone who is qualified to deal with mental health issues to arrive. That's why you're not seeing police officers on the streets.”

 

The police, Nixon says, are suffering from an ‘identity crisis’. Much-maligned, they don’t know what they are supposed to be, or to do, any more. In practice, they are picking up the casualties of the collapse of multiple public services. He argues: “Enforcement is only part of the solution. There needs to be a massive shift to early intervention, as far back as nursey school years, and a massively increased investment in preventive and reactive mental health services.”

 

Bring back the Peelers

 

The primary focus of community safety should not be enforcement, Nixon argues. That should be a last resort. It should be more about preventing problems from happening and nipping them in the bud. Tech should be used as a tool to facilitate this. We certainly have a lot of it – phones and tablets to share data, communicate with colleagues and access guidance on complex legislation, and, of course, lapel cameras, CCTV and drones. Unfortunately, local authorities, like police forces, are all going their own way – both institutions are only using a fraction of the potential of technology to ‘join up’ services.

 

Absolutely vital, at this point, many people believe, is a fundamental review of the role, accountability and governance of the police services. Why not a Royal Commission? With the police under increasing scrutiny, the issue is certainly large and important to merit one.

 

The Conservative politician Sir Robert Peel was there at the beginning – he established the London Metropolitan Police in 1829 – and he set some firm ground rules. ‘Peelism’ states that policing should “prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment; that the power of the police is dependent on public approval of their existence; that the police should exercise their powers with courtesy and good humour and that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action.” That, Nixon suggests, might not be a bad point to start from.

 

Will Hatchett has been a social policy journalist since 1986. He was editor of Environmental Health News from 1998 until 2018. The views expressed here are purely his own.

 

On ‘Bread 2’ and the rise of alt-carbs

The launch, this month, of the Superloaf by Oxford-based company, Modern Baker, turned the thoughts of this blogger to the topic of the role of bread in the politics of health. It's pretty important – most of us eat it everyday – and, in some ways, it defines countries and their cultural attitudes to health and food – the French stick, sold and consumed each day, versus the British long shelf-life polywrapped sliced loaf.

 

Well a new player has just entered the crowded bread ‘space’ on these shores. The Superloaf, now available in branches of M&S and through Ocado has been billed by its creators, with a degree of marketing hyperbole, as ‘smart bread’, an ‘alt carb’, and ‘Bread 2’. So what is it?

 

First, it’s sliced bread in a poly wrapper, like we’re us used to. It’s made with standard white flour on high-speed machinery using the Chorley Wood bread process (invented in 1961 and used for 80% of British bread). It is co-manufactured by Hovis. However, the Modern Baker company uses what it describes at ‘targeted fermentation’. It omits refined sugars and adds fibres and bioactive plant compounds, to create a product that, the makers maintain, is better for blood sugar levels, more nutritious and has fewer carbohydrate than standard, mass-produced bread.

 

Its ingredients include psyllium husks, pumpkin seeds, brown flax seeds, apple cider vinegar and kelp – which would all be at home on the shelves of a health food shop. It does contain salt, which is bad for blood pressure, but far less than conventional bread.

 

Backed by funding of nearly £1m from Innovate UK, Modern Baker has grown to a 15-strong workforce and can make up to 20,000 loaves a week. The makers say that their product has the fluffy deliciousness of mass-produced bread – that claim has yet to be put to the test by this blogger.

 

Is this baking innovation a good thing? Hell, yes. As I may have mentioned before, ultra-processed food, especially in carbohydrate-rich forms, such as the nation’s favourite, sliced white bread, is a major contributor to the obesity-linked conditions which are clogging up the NHS. But the Superloaf is not cheap. Its recommended retail price for a 400g loaf, £2.30, compares unfavourably to Ocado’s M&S soft white medium sliced loaf, which costs 85p and weighs in at 800g.

 

In other words, it is four times more expensive – placing the gut microbiome-friendly Superloaf at the costly, niche end of the bread market, rather than in the school lunch box. In a more sensible and healthier world, the UK government would intervene in the bread market with taxation. A loaf of medium-sliced white bread would cost more than twenty cigarettes and the Superloaf would be less than a quid.

 

Don’t expect such a fiscal intervention to happen any time soon. No government in history has been elected on a manifesto promise of making bread more expensive.

 

Revolting bugs

 

Before trading standards services took on the job, environmental health practitioners and their predecessors used to tackle the mis-selling of food. It was a serious business – bread could lose most of its nutritional value by being adulterated with chalk dust or alum, milk was routinely watered down.

 

In some cases, adulterated food was highly toxic. In 1858, the nation was shocked when 21 people died in Bradford after eating the products of ‘Humbug Billy’ – sweets to which arsenic had been mistakenly added, instead of a popular sugar substitute, powdered gypsum, called ‘daff.

 

The case brought to light the need for specific, food-related legislation and a spur for this was provided by the work of chemist and pioneer microscopist, Arthur Hill Hassall, who carried out the UK’ first comprehensive food sampling programme, in the 1850s.

 

Hassall had previously appalled the public by discovering, through his lens, a new universe of weird-looking bacteria and other micro-organisms in water from the Thames. His equally alarming discoveries concerning food were published in The Lancet and led to the Food Adulteration Act of 1860.

 

The pioneering act of 1860 was strengthened in 1872, by the addition of sampling officers and public analysts, and, in 1875, the Sale of Food and Drugs Act introduced meaningful sanctions for those adding injurious substances to food or drugs.

 

The war against food adulteration and mis-selling is far from over – as the ‘horsegate’ scandal of 2013 made clear and this year’s discovery of rotten pork being sold for human consumption. A country disrupts relations with its main trading partner and abandons food controls imports to avoid bureaucracy – what could possibly go wrong?

 

What it says on the box

 

Adding extra ingredients to a staple of life to make it healthier, has a more recent history. The fluoridation of water to reduce tooth decay is a classic example. It was speculated in the nineteenth century that diets supplemented with fluoride would protect populations against tooth decay. Experiments in the US in the 1940s, confirmed the hypothesis and the fluoridation of water was born.

 

By 2008, more than 70 percent of the US population was served by fluoridated public water supplies. In England, as of 2023, only 10 percent of the population benefits from this scientifically-validated public health measure. Its opponents, who were the anti-vaxxers of their day, have been spreading a trail of disinformation since the 1960s.

 

Food fortification, or enrichment, has been less controversial, although it is opposed by some on civil liberties grounds. UK regulations of 1998 require that all flour, except wholemeal and some self-raising flours, is fortified with calcium, iron, thiamine (vitamin B1) and niacin (vitamin B3). It’s not uncommon to see niacin, riboflavin, thiamine, vitamin B6 and folate among the lists of ingredients of ultra-processed and extremely sugary cereals. In 2011, Kellogg’s made a commitment to add vitamin D to all of its children’s cereals.

 

Adding folic acid, which produces vitamin B9 in the human body, to bread has been adopted in more than 80 countries in the last two decades. It is proven to reduce birth defects, such as spina bifida, and anaemia. The US was the first country to mandate folic acid in bread, in 1998. Australia, New Zealand and Canada, followed suit. The UK government is currently consulting on a proposal to add 250 micrograms of folic acid per 100 grams of non-wholemeal flour.

 

You could say, as some food campaigners do, that much of this chemical fortification is merely adding nutrients back to ultra-processed foods from which they have been stripped, in a less bioavailable form. This blogger could not possibly comment.

 

The latest, and controversial to some, gene-editing technology known as CRISPR now enters the picture. CRISPR, is already being used to biofortify cereal crops such as rice, wheat, barley and maize, for example, adding carotenoids to rice, which convert to vitamin A and can prevent blindness. Tomatoes engineered to contain high amounts of gamma aminobutyric acid (GABA) are designed to reduce blood pressure.

 

The Superloaf, which is the product of five years’ research into the relationship between producing and baking dough and the gut biome, is a good example of ‘food as medicine’ – a trend which will certainly continue. EHPs and their colleagues, trading standards officers, will be tasked, as they have been since the nineteenth-century, to protect the public and to test marketing statements against reality.

 

Will Hatchett has been a journalist since 1986. He was editor of Environmental Health News from 1998 until 2018. The views expressed here are purely his own.