Month: August 2022

Shock and Fear

Chris Swift1 Comment

In the suburbs of London it was odd to read a report where the cost of civic responsibility was described as the price of avoiding revolution. The article was in a local Barnet newspaper in 1910, and the revolt referred to which it referred was the French Revolution of 1789. The reference shows the very long shadow cast by that event across European popular thought. The comment arose in a discussion about the cost of poor relief in the borough. Business and property owners were moaning about the expense of looking after the poor, and it took a female member of the group to remind them that ‘charity’ was the price they paid to retain a system from which they benefitted considerably. Today, with the rapid rise of the ‘Enough is Enough’ campaign – uniting all kinds of people under the banner of unacceptable price increases – it appears that the prospect of popular agitation will force the hand of the next Prime Minister. However, rather than alter the operation of an economic system that favours the wealthy, just enough money will be dispersed to appease the masses. It remains to be seen whether we can continue as we are when an ever greater number of people fall into, or hover just above, poverty.

With what seems like a void at the heart of Government, there has been plenty of space for experts to voice their concerns about this unfolding energy crisis. Martin Lewis was clearly very angry when he spoke on Radio 4 on Friday. With appealing directness he defended ‘catastrophising’ for the very simple reason that, in the absence of Government aid, the energy price rise is a catastrophe. As someone who normally advises the less well-off about ideas to manage their funds more effectively, he had reached the point where he had nothing left to give. With a reputation built on creative solutions, the prospect of a financial dead-end for countless people had pushed Lewis to the edge.

It seems unlikely that the incoming Government will be able to replace the entire cost of rising energy prices across the economy. The suggestion so far is that low and middle income household will be supported – but it’s unclear what aid there will be for industry. This matters because without support industries will have little option other than to pass on price rises to consumers. It follows that inflation will remain high and, with below-inflation pay rises, people will be poorer. For this reason, even if there are funds to offset energy price rises, everyday life will in any event become more costly. People will have less cash, and even if gas and electricity bills remained the same, households would have to achieve savings in order to make ends meet. Heating or eating will remain a pressing question, because it is unlikely that government action will wholly mitigate the price rises that will touch every part of our economic system. The cost would be astronomical.

Macron said France and the French felt they were living through a series of crises, “each worse than the last”.

Quoted in The Guardian, 24 August 2022

Last week President Macron (according to Truss, a former ally of the UK), gave a very sombre speech. While criticised in some quarters for appearing to ignore those already suffering in France, Macron heralded the ‘end of abundance’. For the middle classes upwards this is perhaps an accurate description of recent decades and a warning that these days are over. To be fair to Macron, he described recent years as those which ‘could have seemed an era of abundance’. Perhaps, as we progress through the 2020s, there will be a growing appreciation that any sense of abundance belongs to an ever-shrinking group of people.

I have written previously that, by many measures, we are living in unprecedented times. The rise of food banks will now be augmented by the opening of ‘heat banks’. Public places where people can leave cold homes and gain some warmth and company. Quite what it will be like for people unable to leave their homes, or too far from heat banks, is yet to be seen. There are a host of medical conditions that will be aggravated by the cold, and in some cases it will lead to deterioration requiring hospital care. Once again we will have exceptional winter pressures in the NHS, whether or not COVID re-emerges as a significant issue.

One of the most worrying elements of the current crisis is the way it is impacting on households where two people are in work. When once this would have achieved enough income without support, people are facing in-work poverty. Even hospitals are contemplating hosting food banks to support their staff. A major achievement of the welfare state is that it moved support away from charity and promoted it as the organised actions of a just society. People didn’t need to feel ashamed or grateful. It was what ‘society’ meant, and offering support as a basic requirement was what people should expect. When Liz Truss, who is very likely to be our next Prime Minister, spoke about not wanting to give people ‘handouts’ it flies in the face of the post-war conception of society (but is very Thatcherite). A society which perpetuates a system excluding more and more people from a basic quality of life cannot go on indefinitely. I’m not advocating revolution – but it is something that becomes ever more likely as more and more people reach the point where ‘enough is enough’.

Repurposed

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Former generations excelled at avoiding waste. My grandparents, having lived through two Word Wars, knew how to make sure that seemingly useless packaging, or clothes that were coming to end of their life, found a fresh purpose. Growing up in the 1960s and 70s this seemed to me to be a needless attachment to things best thrown away. I appreciate now that if more of us had living with their attitude to possessions the world now might be a better (and cooler) place. The disposable society is minting new mountains of refuse every day. By and large, we have not lived carefully with the planet or appreciated the consequences of a cultural attitude of ‘buy-and-bin’.

Living in York I am reminded of the care and thought that has gone into repurposing things that have come to the end of one life, and begin another. Whether the eroded masons’ work, now removed from the Minster, that forms a border in the garden, or the spectacular pinnace – replaced in the last decade – which sits in the grounds of the Deanery. (It is pictured at the top of this blog, lit with tea lights). In some ways this recycling can be functional, in others a curiosity, like the stonework brought down to ground level from well over 100 feet.

Eroded masonry from York Minster is often used in nearby gardens to form borders.

Last week a news report feature one of the UK’s largest centres for ‘upcycling’. Here, items that would normally have gone into landfill are careful brought back to life and refreshed so that they can continue to be used. In some cases items find a new purpose – perhaps in a garden or elsewhere around the home. Seeing the large warehouse full of items awaiting attention was a salutary reminder of how much we dispose of without a second thought as to value, purpose or potential.

“Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable – which, I haste to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live.”

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

Physical ruins are a visible reminder of the fragments of re-purposed ideas; conventions; and language, which are part of our current reality. Like the rubble of Roman occupation on which York Minster is built, we know that the civilisation of two thousand years ago is visible in our road system and forms of political administration. Very little is without precedent and each generation makes use of the past in its own way. Perhaps we are rather better at recycling (or up-cycling) ideas than physical items. Certainly politics seems to offer little more than various re-castings of former ideologies. The process to find a new leader for the Conservative Party – and Prime Minister – has candidates raiding the perceived ‘glory days’ of Thatcherism to curry favour with a nostalgic party membership.

Christianity is a material religion. The incarnation fuses matter and spirit, flesh and breath. God is not separate from this reality and, when discarded and destroyed, Jesus is encountered in resurrection as a physical being. As the central event of the Christian faith, this divine refusal to abide in death suggests that even our most disastrous experiences can never be wholly written-off. Like Lazarus in his tomb, we may find ourselves unexpectedly dragged back into life. Whether it be the prodigal son; a disgraced woman cast before Jesus; or the sick separated from society, God appears to be unusually concerned with what we rubbish. As the UK heads towards what the NHS Confederation this week characterised as the risk of a ‘humanitarian crisis’ it is the responsibility of the Church to speak and act to ensure that we are not complicit in forgetting people below the political horizon. Healing and restoration abound in the presence of Jesus and the Church cannot be itself without fulfilling the same mission.

“Bricolage involves skill in sewing, mending, refashioning, and building, but it also involves perception of possibilities and imagination; one must wonder what things might become once they can no longer be what they were…”

Lang Hearlson, C. (2021). Theological imagination in a throwaway society: Contending with waste. Theology Today, 78(2), 158-169. Chicago

Where wealth accumulates

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Wharram Percy is perhaps England’s most celebrated deserted village. What had been a thriving community set in the rolling and rich landscape of the Yorkshire wolds, expired from a range of causes. There is probably no clear identification of a seminal bow, but a host of factors eventually led to the eviction of the last two families, Even if the Black Death had not impacted on the village directly, it led to a host of vacancies in city trades and no doubt acted as a magnet for younger workers who sensed that the tide was turning on rural life. Famously, in The Deserted Village, Oliver Goldsmith depicts a bucolic haven that gradually gives way to the corrosive influence of commerce and the appetite for wealth. Goldsmith’s observations omit the pressures and constraints of rural living, but the gist of the changes he describes have left echoes across England. It is estimated that 3,000 villages became deserted during the Middle Ages.

‘Here as I take my solitary rounds,
Amidst thy tangled walks, and ruined grounds,
And, many a year elapsed, returned to view
Where once the cottage stood, the Hawthorne grew,
Remembrance wakes with all her busy train,
Swells at my breast, and turns the past to pain’.

The Deserted Village, Oliver Goldsmith, 1770

A generation earlier a similar theme was explored by Thomas Gray in his famous Elegy. The subject here is not a deserted village but rather the individuals who lived and died in an English village. Like Goldsmith’s later work, the virtues of a simple life are extolled and contrasted with the vanity and pomp of new wealth. It marks the emergence of a theme which lasted for the following two centuries – and includes the work of the Romantic poets. It was becoming clear that a way of life was ending in England and there were plenty of people who lamented its loss. It must be said that, on the whole, these writers were not the ones living without the convenience of a growing range of emerging technologies or, if they did, it was through choice. Even today, wi-fi access is an issue where rural communities often have to wait long after towns for the delivery of services most people take for granted. This was true for everything from measures to improve public health to electricity and the telephone. On a personal note, it was my parent’s generation which was the last in our family to have a living connection to people still working the land. In the 18th century most urban dwellers would have had links to relatives living and working in a rural context. They would have heard at first hand how life was changing.

Beside other examples of graffiti at the main door at St Mary’s Wharram Percy, a small carved cross

In more recent literature, such as Remains of Elmet by Ted Hughes, the focus is not on deserted towns or distant generations, but on the supplanting of one people by another. Hughes observes changes that saw one set of trades giving ground to new occupations – or no occupation. He writes reflectively on life in the Calder Valley as industries declined and nature reclaimed the land while sealing the scars of human labour. In poems such as Crown Point Pensioners Hughes commemorates the ‘survivors’ who reached advanced age despite the legacy of war and the demise of traditional industries. Published in 1979 the collection of poems could not have been more timely: it was the year when Thatcherism began to eviscerate much of the North with devastating effect. Today, nature has indeed reclaimed many places once reduced to rubble, but the damage wrought by political change in towns and villages has passed down the generations. As Dr Jane Roberts observes in a paper published in 2009, drawing on her experiences as a GP working in Easington, government policies have frequently had the effect of disadvantaging people in communities where structural violence has had the greatest consequence. Narratives of individual improvement only add to the sense of failure for those whose life-opportunities have been dismantled and removed.

‘As long as we fail to acknowledge and confront the realities of patients whose illnesses and distress are often the manifest expression of the structural violence which encapsulates their lives we collude with the system and deny patients their basic human right to health and equal access to healthcare resources’. 

Roberts, J. H. (2009). Structural violence and emotional health: a message from Easington, a former mining community in northern England. Anthropology & Medicine, 16(1), 37-48.

The last two families in Wharram Percy were evicted sometime around 1500 (to make way for sheep). It is hard to imagine what it must have felt like to abandon the village and make a fresh start elsewhere. There will always be change in the economic and social life of communities, but there is no doubt that some forms of change are better supported than others. When we understand that structural violence is a choice, rather than an inevitability, we create space for society to act in ways that promote a more inclusive social justice. In England, in the 2020s, we may all be forced to learn what the victims of capitalism around the world have known for centuries. Our economic way of life accelerates the acquisition of resources by the rich as it simultaneously increases the relative (and absolute) poverty of the people who generate that wealth. The question as to whether our economic system can continue to widen this gap will become more urgent this winter with steep rises in energy costs. To paraphrase Goldsmith, the deserted villages are a graphic example of the dramatic change ‘Where wealth accumulates’ and people rot.