Otago Daily Times July 8 2016
In a time of transition, is the timidity of the clergy killing the church? asks Ian Harris. Where does loyalty lie?
Why do so many ministers, retiring after a lifetime of service to their church, hardly ever go to church again? Not, usually, because they’ve lost their faith. Rather, they’ve come to feel out of sync with what they see happening there. Many lay people feel the same way. After loyally playing their part for years in parish life, they wake up one morning and ask themselves: “What exactly am I being loyal to? The church as an institution? A denominational heritage? A family tradition? The people of my parish? The minister or priest? The example of Jesus? Christ of the creeds?”
All these are worthy, but there’s a deep-down dissonance. The pieces don’t fit together as neatly as before. They don’t find church-going the energising, focusing, deepening experience it used to be. They hang on by their fingernails as long as they can . . . and then drop out. This malaise has been happening across denominations for decades, with Auckland Catholic Bishop Patrick Dunn last month highlighting the steady defection of New Zealand-born Christians as the “Kiwi drift”.
One used to hear people say they were subjected to so much religion while growing up that they were happy to break free of it as soon as they could. Winston Churchill was one such. He tells how at Harrow he attended three services every Sunday, plus morning and evening prayers through the week: “I accumulated in those years so fine a surplus in the Bank of Observance that I have been drawing confidently upon it ever since.”
That is not happening so much today, simply because so many parents decide not to introduce their children to church at all. Perhaps a reaction will set in one day when, as adults, a curious new generation begins to wonder what they have been deprived of. And perhaps not.
One major reason for the “Kiwi drift” is the churches’ failure to allow Christian faith to evolve in a changing world. They have clung to creeds, doctrines and practices that made excellent sense in light of the knowledge of former times, but which are crying out for a thorough-going re-interpretation in our 21st-century world.
I have had many letters reflecting that. After lifelong membership in her church, one woman writes: “What a pity the churches have kept silent and denied Christian people access to the thinking of modern scholarship. And how much pain its devotees could be spared as they are left to ponder their own apparently heretical views.”
Another, in her 80s and still attending church: “My faith journey has brought me to a place of questioning the dogma of the church . . . Sometimes it seems as though my efforts at finding a meaningful belief put me out on a limb, but now I realise that I am not alone.”
Their comments echo the views of ministers whose reading and thinking have taken them far from the point where their journey began. Together they are part of a far-reaching transition that is occurring within Christian thought, but not so much in regular church life – often the reverse as leaders dig in to resist substantive change.
Sometimes it is clergy who hold the church back. At the Napier Progressive Spirituality Conference in May, American United Church of Christ pastor Dr Robin Meyers declared bluntly: “The timidity of the clergy is killing the church.” Usually it is pastoral concern that deters them from offering contemporary insights on the Bible and faith, even when they would like to. But silence leaves people who would be open to such insights in limbo.
Sometimes it is lay people who block progressive alternatives, believing any change to ancient formulations would be a sell-out. There could be some truth in the prediction that the last seven words of the church will be: “We’ve never done it like that before.”
For me, the future of Christian faith does not depend on loyally keeping fossils warm, whether fossils of creed, doctrine, church order, or anything else. It hinges rather on identifying what is core to our Judaeo-Christian heritage, and then working out how people at home in the modern world can relate to it and express it honestly in terms of today. Which happens to be just what Christians of the 4th, 12th, 16th and other centuries did in and for their own times.
That would unquestionably be loyalty – but loyalty to the Judaeo-Christian core and the quintessential religious process, rather than to interpretations which, in our secular understanding, are no longer tenable.
Let the transition roll on!
Tuesday, 19 July 2016
Thursday, 14 July 2016
Hatred Unlimited
Uri
Avnery Gush Shalom July
9, 2016
A PALESTINIAN youngster breaks into a settlement, enters the nearest house, stabs a 13-year old girl in her sleep and is killed. Three Israeli men kidnap a 12-year old Palestinian boy at random, take him to an open field and burn him alive.
These are the manifestations of a hatred so terrible that it overcomes all norms of humanity. THIS WAS not always so. A few days after the 1967 war, in which Israel conquered East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, I traveled alone though the newly occupied territories. I was welcomed almost everywhere. At the time, Palestinians did not dream of an eternal occupation. They hated the Jordanian rulers and were glad that we had driven them out.
Within a few years, all this had changed. The Palestinians realized that the Israelis did not intend to leave, but that they were about to steal their land, quite literally, and cover it with their settlements. Hatred is everywhere. The settlers terrorize their Arab neighbors, Arab boys throw rocks and improvised fire-bombs at passing Jewish cars on the highroads where they themselves are not allowed to drive.
BY NOW, the two peoples seem to live in two different worlds. A centuries-old Arab village and a new Israeli settlement, situated one mile apart, might just as well exist on two different planets. From their first day on earth, children of the two peoples hear totally different stories from their parents. This goes on in school. By the time they are grown up, they have very few perceptions in common.
In the Palestinian view, Jews ruled Palestine in antiquity for a few decades only. The Jewish claim to the country now, based on a promise given to them by their own private Jewish God, is a blatant colonialist ploy. The Zionists came to the country in the 20th century as allies of the British imperialist power, without any right to it.
Every Jewish child in Israel learns from an early age that this land was given by God to the Jews, who ruled it for many centuries, until they offended God and He drove them out as a temporary punishment. Now the Jews have come back to their country, which was occupied by a foreign people which came from Arabia. These people now have the cheek to claim the country as their own.
I AM convinced that it is in the vital interest of Israel to make peace with the Palestinian people, and with the Arab world at large, before this dangerous infection engulfs the entire Arab – and Muslim – world. The leaders of the Palestinian people, both in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, are still comparatively moderate people. This is true even for Hamas, a religious movement.
I would suggest that for the West in general, supporting peace in our region is also of paramount importance. The convulsions now affecting several Arab countries do not bode well for them, either.
Reading a document like this week's Quartet report on the Middle East, I am amazed by their self-destructive cynicism. This ridiculous document of the Quartet, composed of the US, Europe, Russia and the UN, is intent on creating an equilibrium – equally blaming the conqueror and the conquered, the oppressor and the oppressed, ignoring the occupation altogether. Verily, a masterpiece of hypocrisy, a.k.a. diplomacy.
Absent all chances for a serious effort for peace, hatred will just grow and grow, until it engulfs us all. Unless we take action to stem it in time. [Abridged]
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1467393036/
The Guardian view on war in Iraq: a country that we helped to ruin
Editorial
Guardian/UK 4 July 2016
This is not to relitigate the decision to go to war. There will be plenty of that later in the week. The point is that mistaken decisions to go to war have a more terrible cost than almost any other sort of mistake, and to remember the price that the people of Iraq have paid. The years of war pile on their heads like lime. The bomb in Baghdad appears to be a retaliation by Islamic State (Isis) for the loss of the third battle of Falluja. First it was taken by the Americans; then they were expelled by a Sunni uprising. Then they fought their way back in; then it was handed over to the Iraqi government. Two years ago, Isis recaptured it. Now the Iraqi forces, assisted by Shia militias, have recaptured the city again, but the surviving inhabitants are scattered into refugee camps in the surrounding desert.
In Baghdad, it was announced that the completely worthless fake bomb detectors sold to the security forces by a British businessman in 2012 – and based on a novelty golf ball detector – will no longer be used after this atrocity. But the same announcement was first made in 2013.
As both tragedy and farce repeat in an apparently unending cycle, it is tempting to ask whether the deaths in Iraq have led to any greater progress than did the slaughter on the Somme. In purely military terms, the answer is unpromising. Falluja it is only one part of a wider attempt to dislodge Isis from the cities that it overran two years ago, when the Iraqi army, supposedly trained and equipped at incredible expense, simply ran away as the enemy approached. The expense had been real enough, but it had all been translated into foreign bank accounts rather than training or equipment.
The decisive battle will come when an attempt is made to recapture Mosul. This was meant to have been started last year, and then again this spring. Now it seems to have been postponed again in the face of great military difficulties and dissension between the Kurdish and Iraqi forces, who are both fighting Isis together and manoeuvring against each other for position in the scarcely imaginable peacetime Iraq that must eventually emerge from all this horror.
The only consolation, and it is consolation of a very grim sort, is that there is now a clear war aim. Whatever else happens, the military defeat of Isis, and the annihilation of its self-declared caliphate, is a precondition for peace in the ruins. In the meantime, what Britain can do is to continue to supply aid, and see that it reaches the neediest. The war, along with sectarian cleansing, has made refugees of three million people. We need to remember our obligations to a country that we have helped to ruin.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/04/the-guardian-view-on-war-in-iraq-a-country-that-we-helped-to-ruin
(I must question strongly this continued commitment to a military road to peace. A.)
Sunday, 3 July 2016
Al-Hadidiya, Jordan Valley
Report by David Shulman Gush Shalom July 1, 2016
Four months away provide just enough distance to see the madness and the cruelty for what they are. Is it not mad to deliberately deprive human beings—families, children, the elderly– of water at the height of summer in a scorching desert? It was at least 37 or 38 degrees Centigrade, almost 100 degrees Fahrenheit, today in Al-Hadidiya. No running water, of course, and almost no water at all.
Once the sweet morning chill was soaked up by a white-hot sun, the world turned to flame. You could feel the liquid stuff of life being sucked out of you by the merciless sun-machine. As for us, wandering over the hills in search of the lost, ruined wells that once served Al-Hadidiya, we are drunk on the light, giddy with heat. Will I ever not be thirsty?
The Israeli settlement of Ro’i, half a mile away, has no dearth of water. Water flows freely through their pipes, some of which run through the grounds of Al-Hadidiya, and their swimming pool is, I presume, blue and beckoning and, above all, full of water. Drying out the Palestinians of Al-Hadidiya is a matter of policy, not a random affair. The Civil Administration knows what it is doing. Without water, they must assume, these people will either die or leave. We are speaking of ethnic cleansing.
Here is Abu Saqer, the strong-willed patriarch of this village who has lived all his life here among the rocks. He is at once calm, lucid, and embittered. It’s still early, around 7:30, when we sit with him in the tent as the terrible light comes flooding in, and this is what he says:
“The settlers and the Israeli state have committed many crimes and will commit many more, but the worse crime, a moral monstrosity, is denying us water. They have polluted our wells, filled them with rocks and dirt, dried them up by their deep drilling, and dried up the natural springs. I myself owned between 60 and 90 wells on the hills over there, and all of them have been destroyed. It happened already in the 70’s. At the same time, hundreds of cubic meters of water are being wasted on the settlers, on their lawns and swimming pools. Whole communities have been devastated, their people driven out, displaced by army camps and settlements. Once a hundred families lived here in Al-Hadidiya; only 14 are left. We have to bring water in tankers from far away, and often we are held up at the roadblocks for long hours, and we pay more than triple what any Israeli pays.
“In the late 80’s, at the time of the Oslo agreements, there was hope, but in the end the disaster became even more terrible. They are doing whatever they can to drive us out. We are simple people, in Al-Hadidiya. We want to graze our sheep, to feed our families, to educate our children. The Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the situation here should be frozen, and no more demolitions take place, but the soldiers pay no attention to the court’s ruling.”
Abu Saqer speaks slowly, weighing his words. But the story he tells is not only his. All Palestinian communities in the Jordan Valley offer versions of it—the same litany of wrongs, of state terror, and, again and again, of unbearable thirst. They thirst for water as they thirst for justice. Saqer, his son, leads us over the hill. Every few minutes he stops to show us another well that has been stopped up, blocked with stones and dirt. We count twelve on a very rapid circuit. Suppose you want to build a pipeline for water—to be taken from well-known, legal Palestinian sources and paid for according to a water meter that you install—so that your tents and shacks would have the elementary happiness of running water. In theory, you could apply to the Civil Administration for a permit. Your application will be rejected. Almost all such applications are. Palestinians in the Jordan Valley cannot get water through pipes or wells by the standard bureaucratic procedures. In desperation, lacking any alternative, they may try to put a pipeline in place. They can be sure the Civil Administration will send its soldiers and policemen to demolish it and to punish them. It happened today at Al-Hadidiya. I saw it. [Abridged]
https://touchingphotographs.com/2016/07/01/al-hadidiya-jordan-valley-david-shulman/
Four months away provide just enough distance to see the madness and the cruelty for what they are. Is it not mad to deliberately deprive human beings—families, children, the elderly– of water at the height of summer in a scorching desert? It was at least 37 or 38 degrees Centigrade, almost 100 degrees Fahrenheit, today in Al-Hadidiya. No running water, of course, and almost no water at all.
Once the sweet morning chill was soaked up by a white-hot sun, the world turned to flame. You could feel the liquid stuff of life being sucked out of you by the merciless sun-machine. As for us, wandering over the hills in search of the lost, ruined wells that once served Al-Hadidiya, we are drunk on the light, giddy with heat. Will I ever not be thirsty?
The Israeli settlement of Ro’i, half a mile away, has no dearth of water. Water flows freely through their pipes, some of which run through the grounds of Al-Hadidiya, and their swimming pool is, I presume, blue and beckoning and, above all, full of water. Drying out the Palestinians of Al-Hadidiya is a matter of policy, not a random affair. The Civil Administration knows what it is doing. Without water, they must assume, these people will either die or leave. We are speaking of ethnic cleansing.
Here is Abu Saqer, the strong-willed patriarch of this village who has lived all his life here among the rocks. He is at once calm, lucid, and embittered. It’s still early, around 7:30, when we sit with him in the tent as the terrible light comes flooding in, and this is what he says:
“The settlers and the Israeli state have committed many crimes and will commit many more, but the worse crime, a moral monstrosity, is denying us water. They have polluted our wells, filled them with rocks and dirt, dried them up by their deep drilling, and dried up the natural springs. I myself owned between 60 and 90 wells on the hills over there, and all of them have been destroyed. It happened already in the 70’s. At the same time, hundreds of cubic meters of water are being wasted on the settlers, on their lawns and swimming pools. Whole communities have been devastated, their people driven out, displaced by army camps and settlements. Once a hundred families lived here in Al-Hadidiya; only 14 are left. We have to bring water in tankers from far away, and often we are held up at the roadblocks for long hours, and we pay more than triple what any Israeli pays.
“In the late 80’s, at the time of the Oslo agreements, there was hope, but in the end the disaster became even more terrible. They are doing whatever they can to drive us out. We are simple people, in Al-Hadidiya. We want to graze our sheep, to feed our families, to educate our children. The Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the situation here should be frozen, and no more demolitions take place, but the soldiers pay no attention to the court’s ruling.”
Abu Saqer speaks slowly, weighing his words. But the story he tells is not only his. All Palestinian communities in the Jordan Valley offer versions of it—the same litany of wrongs, of state terror, and, again and again, of unbearable thirst. They thirst for water as they thirst for justice. Saqer, his son, leads us over the hill. Every few minutes he stops to show us another well that has been stopped up, blocked with stones and dirt. We count twelve on a very rapid circuit. Suppose you want to build a pipeline for water—to be taken from well-known, legal Palestinian sources and paid for according to a water meter that you install—so that your tents and shacks would have the elementary happiness of running water. In theory, you could apply to the Civil Administration for a permit. Your application will be rejected. Almost all such applications are. Palestinians in the Jordan Valley cannot get water through pipes or wells by the standard bureaucratic procedures. In desperation, lacking any alternative, they may try to put a pipeline in place. They can be sure the Civil Administration will send its soldiers and policemen to demolish it and to punish them. It happened today at Al-Hadidiya. I saw it. [Abridged]
https://touchingphotographs.com/2016/07/01/al-hadidiya-jordan-valley-david-shulman/
I walked from Liverpool to London. Brexit was no surprise
Mike Carter Guardian/UK 27 June 2016
Thatcherism devastated communities throughout industrial England that have never recovered. Their pain explains why people voted to leave in the EU referendum
On 2 May this year, I set off to walk from Liverpool to London, a journey of 340 miles that would take me a month. I was walking in the footsteps of the People’s March for Jobs, a column of 300-odd unemployed men and women who, on the same day in 1981, exactly 35 years previously, had set off from the steps of St George’s Hall to walk to Trafalgar Square.
In the two years after Margaret Thatcher had been elected, unemployment had gone from 1 to 3 million, as her policies laid waste to Britain’s manufacturing base. In 1981, we saw Rupert Murdoch buy the Times and Sunday Times. We witnessed inner-city riots, unprecedented in their scale and violence, in Liverpool and London. The formation of the SDP split the left. The Tories lost their first assault on the coal miners, capitulating over the closure of 23 pits.
My father, Pete Carter, was one of those who organised the original walk. My journey was an attempt to work out what had happened to Britain in the intervening years. What I saw and heard gave me an alarming sense of how the immense social changes wrought by Thatcherism are still having a profound effect on communities all over England. It also meant that when I awoke last Friday to the result of the EU referendum, I wasn’t remotely surprised.
I left Liverpool the week of the Hillsborough inquest verdict, flowers and scarves still adorning lampposts. The inquest had finally vindicated the families of the 96 killed at the 1989 FA Cup semi-final, exposing the lies and cover-ups of the police, the media and the political class, who had spent over a quarter of a century traducing not only those fans, mostly working class, but also the city and its people. In fact, that demonising had found expression in 1981, too, when Geoffrey Howe suggested to Thatcher privately that, after the Toxteth riots, Liverpool should be subject to a “managed decline”.
I walked through Widnes and Warrington, past huge out-of-town shopping centres and through the wastelands of industrial decay. In Salford, down streets where all the pubs were boarded up and local shops, if you could find them, had brick walls for windows and prison-like metal doors, I found a home for sale notice. My host was selling her terraced house. I sat in her living room as the estate agent brought around potential buyers. They were all buy-to-let investors from the south of England, building property portfolios in the poverty, as if this was one giant fire sale.
“Is this a thing now?” I asked the agent. “It is,” he replied. In Salford, down streets where all the pubs were boarded up and local shops, if you could find one, had brick walls for windows and prison-like metal doors.’ On I walked. Through Stockport, Macclesfield, Congleton. The flag of St George flew, from flagpoles, from guttering. Leave posters were everywhere. I didn’t see a single one for remain.
Just before Stoke-on-Trent, I passed the immense workings of the Chatterley Whitfield Colliery, closed down in the 1970s. The mine, one of Europe’s largest, had become a heritage centre and museum. In 1993 even that had shut.
In Hanley, I started asking people what they thought about the referendum and if they wouldn’t mind telling me how they’d be voting. There was little reticence. “Out,” they would say. “No question.” “Why?” I’d ask. “Immigration,” would come the response. “We want our country back.”
The Potteries museum opened in 1981, the year of the People’s March. There I read about Stoke’s industrial heritage, the ceramics, the coal mines, the steel industry, employing tens of thousands of people. All gone now.
Stafford, Cannock, Wolverhampton. Different towns, same message: “There’s no decent work”; “the politicians don’t care about us”; “we’ve been forgotten”; “betrayed”; “there’s too many immigrants, and we can’t compete with the wages they’ll work for”. Nobody used the word humiliation, but that’s the sense I got.
In Wolverhampton, the Express and Star newspaper was reporting on the fury from Wolves fans at the football club’s new shirt sponsor. It was to be the Money Shop, a payday lender. In Walsall, where I went to college, I walked around a town centre unrecognisable from 30 years earlier. Everywhere there were betting shops, dozens of them, and right next door to every betting shop was a pawnbroker or payday lender. It was a ghoulish form of mutualism, or symbiosis, the “natural” market at its most efficient.
And there was another thing I noticed about all of these towns: the ubiquity of mobility scooters, and not all of them being driven by the elderly. Was this a manifestation of the established links between poverty and ill health?
I walked on. Birmingham glittered, a skyline of cranes and high streets of fashionable shops, a confidence, a bounce. But out of the city centre the familiar motifs returned: boarded up pubs and shuttered shops, leave posters in windows, and a proliferation of hand car washes. It began to make sense why these have blossomed in modern Britain: why invest in expensive automated machinery when labour can be sourced so cheaply.
Nuneaton, the home town of George Eliot and Ken Loach, had more charity shops in its high street than anywhere I’ve ever seen. And some of those charity shops had closed down. What does it say about a town when even the charity shops are struggling? ‘I started asking people if they wouldn’t mind telling me how they’d be voting. There was little reticence. “Out,” they would say. “Why?” I’d ask. “Immigration,” would come the response.
In Coventry, whose car industry is now mostly gone, there seemed to be a construction frenzy. These were mostly new buildings for the colleges and universities, competing not only for a bigger share of domestic students but also for the lucrative foreign student market. A friend doing an MA in the city told me that 90% of the students on his course were from overseas, and the majority of them Chinese.
As I moved south, I thought that the economic picture might change, but in Rugby, Bedford, Luton the high streets all had the by now familiar composition: betting shops, fast-food outlets, tattoo parlours. And the answer to the question “in” or “out” never changed either. “We’ve been left behind,” a white, middle-aged man told me at a bus stop as I rested in Hemel Hempstead. “Those politicians don’t care about us. Immigration has ruined this country.”
I walked into central London, through Chiswick, past people sitting at pavement cafes, shops selling expensive furniture, estate agents offering two-bedroom flats for a million pounds. Through Hyde Park and on to Wellington Arch, with all the pomp and puffery of empire, and then Buckingham Palace, as tourists lapped up the pageantry. I was in, literally and spiritually, another country.
In 1935, a young Laurie Lee set off to walk across Spain, from north to south. In the book the adventure would eventually lead to, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, Lee describes a country riven by inequality, of communities in grinding poverty, and an out-of-touch ruling elite. The fascists and the communists both laid claim to the discontents, the rhetoric becoming increasingly polarised. The narrative resonated across the European continent. By the time Lee got to Malaga, in the summer of 1936, the Spanish civil war had begun.
I thought about Lee’s journey, about Europe in the 1930s and 40s, and thanked God for the 70 years of peace we’d had since. I walked up Whitehall. On 30 May 1981, Thatcher had refused to meet the marchers to accept their 250,000-strong petition. On 30 May 2016, I paused at Downing Street, all high fences and machine guns now, and spoke to one of the armed officers. He told me about the attacks on police pensions, about the terrible morale these days in the force.
A girl came up, spoke in faltering English. She was on a school trip from Belgium. She had a project to complete, she said. Could I help her? She held up a piece of A4 paper. “Can you tell me who this is, please?” On it was a photograph of Margaret Thatcher.
Thatcherism devastated communities throughout industrial England that have never recovered. Their pain explains why people voted to leave in the EU referendum
On 2 May this year, I set off to walk from Liverpool to London, a journey of 340 miles that would take me a month. I was walking in the footsteps of the People’s March for Jobs, a column of 300-odd unemployed men and women who, on the same day in 1981, exactly 35 years previously, had set off from the steps of St George’s Hall to walk to Trafalgar Square.
In the two years after Margaret Thatcher had been elected, unemployment had gone from 1 to 3 million, as her policies laid waste to Britain’s manufacturing base. In 1981, we saw Rupert Murdoch buy the Times and Sunday Times. We witnessed inner-city riots, unprecedented in their scale and violence, in Liverpool and London. The formation of the SDP split the left. The Tories lost their first assault on the coal miners, capitulating over the closure of 23 pits.
My father, Pete Carter, was one of those who organised the original walk. My journey was an attempt to work out what had happened to Britain in the intervening years. What I saw and heard gave me an alarming sense of how the immense social changes wrought by Thatcherism are still having a profound effect on communities all over England. It also meant that when I awoke last Friday to the result of the EU referendum, I wasn’t remotely surprised.
I left Liverpool the week of the Hillsborough inquest verdict, flowers and scarves still adorning lampposts. The inquest had finally vindicated the families of the 96 killed at the 1989 FA Cup semi-final, exposing the lies and cover-ups of the police, the media and the political class, who had spent over a quarter of a century traducing not only those fans, mostly working class, but also the city and its people. In fact, that demonising had found expression in 1981, too, when Geoffrey Howe suggested to Thatcher privately that, after the Toxteth riots, Liverpool should be subject to a “managed decline”.
I walked through Widnes and Warrington, past huge out-of-town shopping centres and through the wastelands of industrial decay. In Salford, down streets where all the pubs were boarded up and local shops, if you could find them, had brick walls for windows and prison-like metal doors, I found a home for sale notice. My host was selling her terraced house. I sat in her living room as the estate agent brought around potential buyers. They were all buy-to-let investors from the south of England, building property portfolios in the poverty, as if this was one giant fire sale.
“Is this a thing now?” I asked the agent. “It is,” he replied. In Salford, down streets where all the pubs were boarded up and local shops, if you could find one, had brick walls for windows and prison-like metal doors.’ On I walked. Through Stockport, Macclesfield, Congleton. The flag of St George flew, from flagpoles, from guttering. Leave posters were everywhere. I didn’t see a single one for remain.
Just before Stoke-on-Trent, I passed the immense workings of the Chatterley Whitfield Colliery, closed down in the 1970s. The mine, one of Europe’s largest, had become a heritage centre and museum. In 1993 even that had shut.
In Hanley, I started asking people what they thought about the referendum and if they wouldn’t mind telling me how they’d be voting. There was little reticence. “Out,” they would say. “No question.” “Why?” I’d ask. “Immigration,” would come the response. “We want our country back.”
The Potteries museum opened in 1981, the year of the People’s March. There I read about Stoke’s industrial heritage, the ceramics, the coal mines, the steel industry, employing tens of thousands of people. All gone now.
Stafford, Cannock, Wolverhampton. Different towns, same message: “There’s no decent work”; “the politicians don’t care about us”; “we’ve been forgotten”; “betrayed”; “there’s too many immigrants, and we can’t compete with the wages they’ll work for”. Nobody used the word humiliation, but that’s the sense I got.
In Wolverhampton, the Express and Star newspaper was reporting on the fury from Wolves fans at the football club’s new shirt sponsor. It was to be the Money Shop, a payday lender. In Walsall, where I went to college, I walked around a town centre unrecognisable from 30 years earlier. Everywhere there were betting shops, dozens of them, and right next door to every betting shop was a pawnbroker or payday lender. It was a ghoulish form of mutualism, or symbiosis, the “natural” market at its most efficient.
And there was another thing I noticed about all of these towns: the ubiquity of mobility scooters, and not all of them being driven by the elderly. Was this a manifestation of the established links between poverty and ill health?
I walked on. Birmingham glittered, a skyline of cranes and high streets of fashionable shops, a confidence, a bounce. But out of the city centre the familiar motifs returned: boarded up pubs and shuttered shops, leave posters in windows, and a proliferation of hand car washes. It began to make sense why these have blossomed in modern Britain: why invest in expensive automated machinery when labour can be sourced so cheaply.
Nuneaton, the home town of George Eliot and Ken Loach, had more charity shops in its high street than anywhere I’ve ever seen. And some of those charity shops had closed down. What does it say about a town when even the charity shops are struggling? ‘I started asking people if they wouldn’t mind telling me how they’d be voting. There was little reticence. “Out,” they would say. “Why?” I’d ask. “Immigration,” would come the response.
In Coventry, whose car industry is now mostly gone, there seemed to be a construction frenzy. These were mostly new buildings for the colleges and universities, competing not only for a bigger share of domestic students but also for the lucrative foreign student market. A friend doing an MA in the city told me that 90% of the students on his course were from overseas, and the majority of them Chinese.
As I moved south, I thought that the economic picture might change, but in Rugby, Bedford, Luton the high streets all had the by now familiar composition: betting shops, fast-food outlets, tattoo parlours. And the answer to the question “in” or “out” never changed either. “We’ve been left behind,” a white, middle-aged man told me at a bus stop as I rested in Hemel Hempstead. “Those politicians don’t care about us. Immigration has ruined this country.”
I walked into central London, through Chiswick, past people sitting at pavement cafes, shops selling expensive furniture, estate agents offering two-bedroom flats for a million pounds. Through Hyde Park and on to Wellington Arch, with all the pomp and puffery of empire, and then Buckingham Palace, as tourists lapped up the pageantry. I was in, literally and spiritually, another country.
In 1935, a young Laurie Lee set off to walk across Spain, from north to south. In the book the adventure would eventually lead to, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, Lee describes a country riven by inequality, of communities in grinding poverty, and an out-of-touch ruling elite. The fascists and the communists both laid claim to the discontents, the rhetoric becoming increasingly polarised. The narrative resonated across the European continent. By the time Lee got to Malaga, in the summer of 1936, the Spanish civil war had begun.
I thought about Lee’s journey, about Europe in the 1930s and 40s, and thanked God for the 70 years of peace we’d had since. I walked up Whitehall. On 30 May 1981, Thatcher had refused to meet the marchers to accept their 250,000-strong petition. On 30 May 2016, I paused at Downing Street, all high fences and machine guns now, and spoke to one of the armed officers. He told me about the attacks on police pensions, about the terrible morale these days in the force.
A girl came up, spoke in faltering English. She was on a school trip from Belgium. She had a project to complete, she said. Could I help her? She held up a piece of A4 paper. “Can you tell me who this is, please?” On it was a photograph of Margaret Thatcher.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/27/liverpool-london-brexit-leave-eu-referendum
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