Dulce et decorum est?

Is it just me, or has there been more than usual of the "why bother with rememberance day" conversation around this year?  People asking why it matters, when they and indeed their parents weren't born until long after 1918 and 1945, and when no one they know has been killed in war.  Perhaps it's because we're a country that's been at war for a decade or so against an invisible enemy, where the conflict takes place in a distant country, and the only effects most of us see are stories about arms traders enriching themselves at public expense and the occassional repatriation parade at Wootton Bassett.

In our world of globalisation and international economies old fashioned values like patriorism seem out of date, smacking of racism.  For those of us who deplore BNP/ EDL style demonstrations of hate and fear of difference, it can be hard to reconcile a desire to welcome people of different races and faiths, and yet to appreciate the sacrifiice of so many young men and women who died because they thought they were fighting for the right side. 

But I do think there's still a place for remembrance.  Perhaps it's because I'm a historian by nature; perhaps it's because I've been to Ypres and Thiepval and heard the Last Post at the Menin Gate.  I've seen the remains of the trenches, seen the cemeteries, the gravestones stretching out all around you, seen the memorials to the missing and even found the name of a relative on one.  I've read the poetry, seen the photos and the films.  I've studied the history of the first and second world wars, as well as many others before that, and I've seen news coverage of quite a few in the last couple of decades.  I wouldn't regard myself as an expert on any, but I hope I know what I'm talking about.  Once you've seen the cemetaries, the memorials, you don't forget easily.

When I visited Flanders and northern France I was about fourteen.  It was a school trip.  We weren't naturally the best behaved bunch of teenagers, this was an ordinary small town comprehensive with no selection, and the people on the trip were of varied academic abilities.  But no one played up when we were visiting the memorials.  There was something about those hundreds and thousands of names engraved on the stone that impressed us all.  Of course, not everyone was so impressed- a coachful of French teenagers was visiting at the same time as us, and we were shocked to see their attitudes- climbing all over the memorials and shouting without seeming to care where they were.

But I can understand that the wars of nearly a century ago, of even seventy, can seem distant if you have no personal connection.  Perhaps that's why we need a day like Remembrance day to remember.  Because there was nothing new about people dying in war, but what the first and second world wars brought- and to a lesser extent the Boer war- brought the industrialisation of war, brought the business of killing into a modern era where it was possible to kill hundreds of men without ever seeing them.  Ever since that disconnect has only increased with the development of guided missiles and drones that can kill from hundreds of miles away.  Perhaps, in an era where for us in the west war is something that takes place a long way from where we live, and are for causes less straightforward than opposing the Nazi tyrrany, we- or at least our leaders and policy makers- need a day where the true cost of war in human life is brought home.

PS: if you don't understand the title, I suggest you see Wilfred Owen's poem of the same name, available here: http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/owen1.html 

Patronising? Don't worry your ugly little head about it.

Having lived in York for almost eight years now, I consider myself as a northerner by adoption.  My pronunciations of 'grass' and 'class' are faultless, I like chips and gravy, I talk disparagingly about soft southerners who panic at the merest sprinkling of snow.  But there's one supposedly northern trait I can't quite accept.

As my job involves answering phone calls, I come across this quite a lot.  And that is probably part of the problem, since on the phone it's difficult to judge if someone is being patronising or just friendly.  Especially when they have a heavy accent (Yorkshire is fine, and I'm getting the hang of the varieties of the Newcastle/ Durham area, but sometimes it's just too much.).  Can you tell what it is yet?

It's the northern tendency to describe the person they're talking to as 'luv' or similar.

I've heard this tendency described (by both southerners and northerners) as 'endearing' and 'friendly' and I'm sure that much of the time that's how it is intended.  The trouble is, most of the people describing it in that way are male.  If you're a young female and are being described as 'darling' by someone who is older and acts as if he's incredibly superior to you, it's not quite the same as when a middle aged lady is helpful in a shop.  I don't mind the latter kind.  What I object to is when the speaker is being partonising.  I got called 'darling' about seven times in the course of a minute long phone call yesterday.  If that's friendlyness, it's excessive to the point of creepy when it's from a man I don't know. 

It's worse if it's at work.  I have to be polite, which is seen as encouraging.  I can't challenge patronising behaviour.  I can't even report it to senior staff- what can I report?  A client was overly friendly?  I felt uncomfortable?  I'd just get told to grow up/ calm down, unless it was serious enough to claim sexual harrassment- and it's not, really.  Sometimes it's genuine friendliness which I may have just misinterpreted, sometimes the person patronising might not be aware of how they're coming across.  

But sometimes it is genuinely patronising.  Perhaps it's less of a northern thing, and more of a class thing.  Because I am a receptionist, typically a low skilled and low paid job.  A lot of our clients are people who are pretty well off- business owners, professionals.  And although by no means universally, some people do seem to regard me and people like me as unworthy of equal treatment.  Class may not be determined by birth, but it is often, on an every day level, determined by money.    

What the Dickens!

Laptop problems a couple of weekends ago led to me actually settling down to read a book- Charles Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby, to be precise.  Dickens has a wonderful way of describing what life was like for the Victorian poor, of describing what it was like to scrape a living in any way you could.  Even those with what we would think of as decent office jobs were often still despearately poor and at the mercy of their masters- Bob Cratchit, for example.  Being able to save up for the future was as much of an impossible dream as it is for many today, with every penny needed to pay the rent and keep the household fed, clothed and warm.  A single incident outside a person's control- illness, a rise in prices, loosing your job- could drop an entire family from 'getting on all right' into poverty at a moment's notice, and there was no safety net of the welfare state. 

Any of that sound familiar?  It did to me.  As I was reading I kept thinking how little some things have changed.  Low paid employees (the retail and service sector today as much as office and manufacturing) are still at the mercy of their employees, particularly temporary or part time workers.  Often rules supposedly imposed for the good of employees aren't enforced- even the minimum wage- as employers today complain about employee rights stifling business growth.  Well, call me a radical, but I can't help but think that if you can't afford to pay decent wages to your employees and treat them as human beings rather than robots, your business probably has other problems.  With plans afoot to refuse legal aid for employment matters the situation isn't likely to get much better.  Perhaps we need reminding why some of these laws were brought in.

While reading I kept wondering what Dickens would have written about had he been writing today.  Would Fagin's gang have been drug dealers in inner city estates?  What would he have had to say about Coketown's post-industrial decline?  Would Paris be replaced in A Tale of Two cities by Tripoli, or Kabul, or Cairo?

One thing he wouldn't have had to change is the unpleasant portrayal of bankers and money-lenders.  Nicholas Nickleby even has a cameo by a corrupt MP!  Unfortunately some things do not change.  But sometimes I think we find it hard to accept how little change has been made in some areas.   We can accept poverty in past, or far away in Africa.  But the statistics that show how many children in this country, in 2011 are living in poverty are too hard to handle.  We categorise all those without jobs, for whatever reason, as 'lazy dole scum' and think that all those who are homeless are to blame for their plight. 

But today, like in the nineteenth century, it can take very little for a seemingly comfortable family- or individual*- to find themselves in real difficulty- for food, for heating (a BBC report last week said that a fifth of households in Britain are affected by fuel poverty, and costs are still rising) and for accommodation.  Selling off council houses was great for the families that could buy them, but no so great for their children who now have little access to affordable housing.

This wasn't intended as rant, merely a reflection on what a modern Dickens would be writing about today. I  wonder if there is anyone writing with the same knowledge and ability to evoke the world of the poor as completely as he did?  Given our cynicism today it would be quite a challenge to make critics understand what that world is really like, and to stop them in their calls to tear apart the safety net of the welfare state.

Unfortunately, whereas Dickens' characters all seem to end up at least comfortably off- due to mysterious benefactors,  jovial philanthropists, rich relations' wills or just hard work and good luck; many people today are still hoping, like Mr Micawber in David Copperfield,  for something to turn up. 
 
Personally, I would love bump into some benevolent benefactor in the street, who would decide to give me a good job and ensure the people around me got the help and security they need.  Unfortunately that's still in the realm of fiction. 



* Individuals are actually often worse off.  Without legal dependents, and still classed as 'young,' if I were to loose my job and accommodation I'd be a very low priority for help from the overstretched local authority.  And to anyone who says that's what housing benefit is for, that really only covers rent (for a single room) if you're lucky.  Deposits, bills etc are another matter.  Not to mention getting a landlord who's willing to take you.

Emotional immigration

I have very little right to speak (or write) about immigration.  I grew up in a part of the country where non-British born people and non-white people were practically non-existent. Perhaps my own views are coloured by that, although they are in fact different to those prevailing in my home county.  Then I moved to York, again predominantly white, although with a sizable Asian population (mostly Chinese).  But my friends over the years have included people from Finland to Japan, the Netherlands to the USA, and friends and acquaintances of mine have themselves gone to live and work in Japan, Bangladesh and Denmark.

David Cameron has once more waded in to the debate to say he is in favour of 'good' immigration (although exactly what that is is still unclear to me, but perhaps that's just me missing the point).  It disappointed me that he was still lumping together economic migrants, asylum seekers and other forms of migration together in one speech, without seeming to acknowledge the differences between coming here in search of money or education; and being forced to flee your homeland because of violence or persecution.  I'm sure he's aware of those differences personally- at least I hope so- but to lump them together as 'immigrants' (which to many people in Britain is a negative term) in his speech helps confuse the debate.

But another question has been interesting me recently, ever since a debate I saw about Europe with UKIP's Nigel Farage, when he refused to acknowledge that for some people questions of nationalism have emotional elements.  I don't think that feeling emotionally attached to your country, or your currency, or your history and traditions, is wrong.  It can be wrong if you let things that are unjust (eg not giving women the vote can be defended on grounds of 'tradition') continue on that basis alone, but the sentiment itself isn't necessarily bad.

I think there is a similar emotional element to immigration.  And this has been influenced by the media and by our fears.  If someone says the word 'immigrant' you probably think of someone from Pakistan or India, or perhaps the stereotypical Polish Plumber.  Most of the criticism seems to be aimed at them.  And so Cameron's speech made me wonder.  What would our reaction have been if all (or most) of the thousands of people coming to Britain each year were French?  Or Italian?  Or from Canada, or Australia?
  
They would equally be immigrants, equally 'coming over here taking our jobs and our houses and our healthcare'.  But I'm not sure we'd see such vitriolic attacks in the media.  I can't quite picture youths in balaclavas painting 'Frogs go home' on the wall of a French restaurant.  And that leaves me wondering why.  Is it because these are countries we see as our equals, in terms of wealth and international influence?  Is it because they are predominantly white?  (although so, of course, is Eastern Europe).  Is it because we think we understand their culture, that it's not so different to ours, even if the language is? 

I don't know.  But I think it's an interesting question.  This debate isn't just about numbers and facts, it's about people's perceptions and emotions.  As I started by hinting, even in my white, rural English childhood home local people dislike immigrants.  Probably because they don't know any.  If they did, they might realise that there are people, individual stories, behind the numbers, and the question is not as simple as it sounds. 

Reflections on 'the outsider'

I love my local library.  (Yes, we still have a library, although before long it won't have any staff.)  There was an exhibition there recently about York's refugee committe in the early to mid 20th century.  It was fascinating reading about the help given to refugees fleeing from Nazi Germany in the 1930's, about factory workers who couldn't have been paid all that much themselves contributing a few pence a week to pay for a child evacuated from Germany to be cared for and educated.

It made me wonder whether society's reaction today would be towards a similar crisis.  So often refugees, asylum seekers, illegal immigrants and legal migrant workers are all lumped together by the tabloid press as a seething mass of people 'coming over here taking our jobs and our houses and using our services.'   It can be hard to separate the different groups and the different issues.

Today, those who come here seeking safety from persecution or violence in their homelands face many difficulties once they manage to get here, from official forms and interviews to surviving on meagre resources in a land where they may not speak the language or know anyone, and where often the public are unwelcoming.  Despite the coalition government's pledge to end child detention for asylum seekers, too little has been done so far.  I wonder what the factory workers who helped pay for German children's keep would make of Yarl's Wood detention centre?

But one thing that encourages me when I read stories about refugees and asylum seekers is how often a church is involved, how often it is church members leading the fight against deportation for families and individuals who have been failed by the system. 

All through the Old Testament God encourages his people to care for the 'outsiders' living amongst them.  Although it's easy to loose sight of this amongst the passages commanding his people not to intermarry with the surrounding tribes (in an attempt to stop them drifting into worshipping the false gods of those tribes) there were always non-Israelites living amongst God's people.  Some, like the Moabite woman Ruth, even became ancestors of King David and ultimately of Jesus Christ.  Jesus himself showed his concern for those who were considered 'outsiders' in his society.  So it seems to me only right that the church should be active on behalf of those 'outsiders' to our society.

After all, if you had to leave Britain and ended up in a strange country, with no friends, little money and without knowing the language, wouldn't you hope someone would help you?

The Big Society and the church

The church- and I suspect faith groups in general- have been trying to work out what they make of teh 'Big Society' ever since it was announced.  As I said before, there has mostly been a cautious welcome along with some concern about what it could be used for.


For many churches or organisations, initial reaction has been positive- a chance to work with the community and reach a greater number of people, to raise the profile of work the already do by linking it under the 'Big Society' label, maybe even the hope of more money for what they do- although that's looking less and less likely.  None of these are bad things.  Churches do some great work with their local and national communities, and are sometimes underrecognised or treated with suspicion.

What will be hard for the church is not to get pushed into filling all the gaps left by the government's programme of cuts.  While the government are mostly saying that the cuts are driven by a need to reduce the deficit rather than by ideology (whether you believe that or not), it does seem that people will be more dependant on voluntary organisations for help previously given by the government.  I'm wary of the church (or any faith organisation) being seen to take on work formerly done by the government- it's laying ourselves open to charges of favouritism and exploiting those we seek to help.  

The people who are worst off are also the people who the church has a duty not to forget.  I suspect that if the government, local or national, is doing less churches and other groups will step in to try to help.  But without the resources, the connections, the people with training, expertise and experience there will be much they cannot do and many gaps they cannot fill.  What is supposed to happen then, with the state safety net if not removed then so relaxed and unrepaired that it is unable to help?  I don't like to think. 

Lurking somewhere in the Conservative- and indeed in the British- psyche is the suspicion that if people are in trouble it is their own fault- that their own actions, directly or indirectly, have got them there and so they 'deserve' the trouble they are in.  Perhaps they're sometimes right (liberal friends gasp) although it's pretty hard to see how, for example, someone who's unable to work because of a disability becomes less entitled to state help because they still have the disability a certain length of time.  But I don't think that's either an answer or a reason to leave people starving and freezing to death on the streets, or to clog up hospitals with those who haven't got a home and family to go to.  That seems to me unworthy of the country we like to think we are.

The Big Society- as I see it

Hello there.  Long time no post.  Hopefully this won't continue.  Anyway, for now, here's something.

The 'Big Society' is much in the news again of late.  Reaction to it still ranges from 'what?' to 'isn't that what I do anyway?' to 'cutting services by stealth.'  Possibly the failure to come up with an easily understandable soundbite is one of the biggest problems facing the 'Big Society.' 

But the welcome from churches- identified as major players in the 'Big Society' vision- has often been cautious, and perhaps should be more cautious still.  While the aim (getting people to engage more with their community and to take responsibility for what goes on there) seems to fit well with much of what churches already do and should be doing more of, as time as passed since Cameron started talking about the 'Big Society' suspicions of what might be lurking behind it have grown.  While I do think that the prime minister is sincere in what he says about fostering community and volunteer-run local services being better for people than big central government; there is no doubt that this is also very convenient for his government in the midst of its' programme of cuts.

Perhaps it's ironic that this government that says it dislikes the idea of big government telling people what's good for them is in fact doing just that.  The problem I have- and that I think the church is facing- is that we already do voluntary work.  We know what the pitfalls are- struggles to find volunteers, unreliability, people moving away and difficulties finding people with the right skills to fill the posts, struggles to fit in enough family and leisure time as well as volunteering and actual work, struggles to find appropriate venues and, of course, finding enough money.  Volunteer run services are great, I don't dispute that.  But can you really rely on them to be there 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year?  I'm not sure you can- or that you should.

I think my biggest problem with the 'Big Society' is not just that it's easy to use it to cover up damaging cuts in areas that the vast majority of people agree (when they bother to think about it) should actually be the business of central or local government- care for the elderly and disabled, for the homeless, for those escaping abusive relationships or with nowhere to go coming out of care, prison or hospital.  I think it bothers me most that while in the nice, peaceful and fairly well-off (and mainly Tory) shires where people have enough money to contribute and families aren't working all hours of the day to make ends meet, it might just work, with some help. (Obviously these are the places that Cameron etc know-and possibly care- most about).

But in places far from London, or in council estates where those that work often work unsocial or irregular hours, and where those that don't are too depressed and discouraged to bother with abstract nouns like 'community', I think it will be a whole lot harder to get off the ground.  Unfortunately, those are exactly the places that need it most.