INEQUALITY HURTS: SO WHAT?
How to build on findings of The Spirit Level: a process for change
Aim: to open up discussion between those with most to gain from greater equality, those with most to lose (or give) and the majority in between. To record and diffuse that discussion as a stimulus to wider debate and action.
Objective: to get different class/income groups talking among themselves and between groups, to address differences and areas of agreement. With input from experts/thinkers and an opportunity to address their questions and conclusions to political parties.
Method
1.Select three focus groups drawn from
wealthiest 10%
poorest 30%
middling 60%
2. Focus: bring all groups together, intermixed as individuals, for outline of issues defined in Spirit Level: the damage done by inequality and the widening gap.
3. Discussion: Focus groups meet separately to discuss four questions:
why are the rich rich and the poor poor?
why has the gap widened?
c. what should be done?
what can WE (people in our position) do about it?
4. Confrontation: bring groups together to address points of difference and agreement.
5. Input: bring groups together with panel of experts and thinkers (who will have
previous session, either live or video) for questions and answers, in both directions.)
6. Review: reform focus groups, so each includes cross section, to see what has been learned, how views have changed and what can be done.
7. Demands: bring all participants, groups, experts etc together with a panel of
politicians from wide spectrum of UK parties (Ireland might have its own
version.)
8. Edit and diffuse video record: ideally a TV or film production company would
be involved from the start. This (as with BBC Choir series) could give
importance and urgency to the whole process. A film- or programme-maker might also want to follow some participants home.
Which leaves open several questions, apart from whether the process could work: who selects groups, who organises and chairs meetings, which producers/chanels might be interested, and who PAYS?.
Friday 13 November 2009
Swansea 'City of Sanctuary'
Ada's involved in a move to make Swansea a 'City of Sanctuary' to counter the nastiness of immigration controls and/or BNP. I was asked to do a piece on a dance-show called 'Oyster Bay' in which some asylum seekers had a hand:
What have asylum-seekers got to do with oysters? If Swansea still had oyster-beds, it might be a job, like cocklepicking. But overfishing and pollution killed the oysters, so there are no jobs in that. For anyone. Unless oysters can be helped to grow again. For the moment, oysters are Heritage, and Heritage is nothing if not Art.
Including Dance. Last summer Tandance – a local powerhouse I only heard about this month - did a show called Oyster Bay. All sorts of people were involved, from primary schools to colleges and several local, and not so local, dance groups. Tandance is funded to promote ‘education, integration, community engagement and social change.’ A tall order! But with research into once-and-future oystercatching went a widening net of local involvement, along the coast to Port Talbot and up the Swansea and Neath valleys.
One of the dance groups involved is Dynion, all male, another is Arabic, and behind the scenes, making boats and sails for props, asylum-seekers from several continents came and went. How many of them had their own experiences of setting sail? And getting washed up… And why dance, why art at all, for people just surviving?
Maybe it’s when you’re worst off that you most something to get you out of the rut. Unlike most other social activities, visual arts, music and dance don’t depend on language. In the Oyster show, these artforms went together. If asylum-seekers worked mainly on the artwork side, that’s because the long process through rehearsal to performance needs regular attendance. Which depends on a stability that most asylum seekers can only pray for.
Does it work, that little bit of distraction? Or does it just feel worse when you turn back to a painful past and uncertain future? Feedback was positive from the few asylum seekers who were able to see the show and report back. And some of us will know from our own hard times that a moment of warmth and light can go a long way. Sometime, somehow, somewhere, something better might be possible!
And for us, relatively secure in our ‘host community’, what’s in it for us? Walking along Swansea beach, I’ve often wondered about those oyster shells, and bits of coal that get washed up. Did somebody eat those oysters? Who dug the coal, did it fall in the sea, or was it pushed? In town, or on the bus, I wonder what’s behind different faces, darker skins.You can never tell what’s going on in someone else’s head, but the more sorts of people you get to know, the better you can guess, the more comfortable you feel in your own skin.
Carol Brown, the Arts Director of Tandance, recalls some little turning points over the past ten years or so. A white person saying. ‘That’s the first time I’ve touched a black skin.’ Like finding you can float! And a Townhill woman in a women’s yoga class who asked a Muslim woman - who’d somehow managed the session under her hijab - ‘What’s it like in there?’
Of course we’re different, Maybe the highest education of all is reaching out, exploring our differences together. Nothing human is foreign to me! Or as Carol put it when we talked in her Baglan office the other day ‘We are one whole…You cant be safe by closing your borders.’
What have asylum-seekers got to do with oysters? If Swansea still had oyster-beds, it might be a job, like cocklepicking. But overfishing and pollution killed the oysters, so there are no jobs in that. For anyone. Unless oysters can be helped to grow again. For the moment, oysters are Heritage, and Heritage is nothing if not Art.
Including Dance. Last summer Tandance – a local powerhouse I only heard about this month - did a show called Oyster Bay. All sorts of people were involved, from primary schools to colleges and several local, and not so local, dance groups. Tandance is funded to promote ‘education, integration, community engagement and social change.’ A tall order! But with research into once-and-future oystercatching went a widening net of local involvement, along the coast to Port Talbot and up the Swansea and Neath valleys.
One of the dance groups involved is Dynion, all male, another is Arabic, and behind the scenes, making boats and sails for props, asylum-seekers from several continents came and went. How many of them had their own experiences of setting sail? And getting washed up… And why dance, why art at all, for people just surviving?
Maybe it’s when you’re worst off that you most something to get you out of the rut. Unlike most other social activities, visual arts, music and dance don’t depend on language. In the Oyster show, these artforms went together. If asylum-seekers worked mainly on the artwork side, that’s because the long process through rehearsal to performance needs regular attendance. Which depends on a stability that most asylum seekers can only pray for.
Does it work, that little bit of distraction? Or does it just feel worse when you turn back to a painful past and uncertain future? Feedback was positive from the few asylum seekers who were able to see the show and report back. And some of us will know from our own hard times that a moment of warmth and light can go a long way. Sometime, somehow, somewhere, something better might be possible!
And for us, relatively secure in our ‘host community’, what’s in it for us? Walking along Swansea beach, I’ve often wondered about those oyster shells, and bits of coal that get washed up. Did somebody eat those oysters? Who dug the coal, did it fall in the sea, or was it pushed? In town, or on the bus, I wonder what’s behind different faces, darker skins.You can never tell what’s going on in someone else’s head, but the more sorts of people you get to know, the better you can guess, the more comfortable you feel in your own skin.
Carol Brown, the Arts Director of Tandance, recalls some little turning points over the past ten years or so. A white person saying. ‘That’s the first time I’ve touched a black skin.’ Like finding you can float! And a Townhill woman in a women’s yoga class who asked a Muslim woman - who’d somehow managed the session under her hijab - ‘What’s it like in there?’
Of course we’re different, Maybe the highest education of all is reaching out, exploring our differences together. Nothing human is foreign to me! Or as Carol put it when we talked in her Baglan office the other day ‘We are one whole…You cant be safe by closing your borders.’
Monday 9 November 2009
‘TROOPS OUT’ AT SWANSEA REMEMBRANCE EVENT
(Piece asked for by Quaker journal 'The Friend')
The banner said ‘Stop the war in Afghanistan. Remember the dead . Respect the living. Troops out!’ Holding the banner, standing in silence at the gate of St Mary’s Church, Swansea, were three people, two of them from Swansea Quaker Meeting.
Beside the main text of the banner were the words ‘welcome home’ and ‘peace’ (salaam) in Arabic. Round the border were scattered four black coffins and 40 white bundles – each standing for 50 dead. 200+ British servicemen and women, and about ten times as many Afghans. Another coffin was pinned to the fabric, representing the 30 soldiers killed since the banner was made.
The formal procession, marching band, uniforms and regimental banners, campaign medals and mayoral chains, unravelled in the street beside the church. As soldiers, families, ex-servicemen and local dignitaries passed through the lychgate on their way to the service, most of them averted their eyes, a few muttered ‘disgraceful’ or ‘shame on you.’ Several others said ‘quite right’, ‘I agree’ or even ‘Congratulations!’ A weeping woman, with her husband and young son, said ‘Please take it away.’ I tried to say that I was sorry, but that saving lives might be as important as mourning them. She said ‘If you were sorry, you would go.’
We didn’t, but that was why my wife had not wanted to join us. We had contacted the British Legion, the vicar of St Mary’s and the police beforehand to let them know what we planned, and to reassure them that the aim was not to oppose or disrupt. No answer from the Legion, the vicar said he was all for freedom of conscience but not on his turf, and the police said ‘thank you for letting us know, we have no problem with that.’ The local newspaper had already taken pictures of the banner which they published with a few paragraphs of explanation: this war is unwinnable, prolongs the agony of the Afghan people and is more likely to provoke terror attacks than prevent them.’
We plan a similar silent presence, with a few more people, at the Swansea Cenotaph, at the 11th hour of the 11th day… I’m thinking of adding a placard reading: ‘Spare them from their leaders’ lies!’
(Piece asked for by Quaker journal 'The Friend')
The banner said ‘Stop the war in Afghanistan. Remember the dead . Respect the living. Troops out!’ Holding the banner, standing in silence at the gate of St Mary’s Church, Swansea, were three people, two of them from Swansea Quaker Meeting.
Beside the main text of the banner were the words ‘welcome home’ and ‘peace’ (salaam) in Arabic. Round the border were scattered four black coffins and 40 white bundles – each standing for 50 dead. 200+ British servicemen and women, and about ten times as many Afghans. Another coffin was pinned to the fabric, representing the 30 soldiers killed since the banner was made.
The formal procession, marching band, uniforms and regimental banners, campaign medals and mayoral chains, unravelled in the street beside the church. As soldiers, families, ex-servicemen and local dignitaries passed through the lychgate on their way to the service, most of them averted their eyes, a few muttered ‘disgraceful’ or ‘shame on you.’ Several others said ‘quite right’, ‘I agree’ or even ‘Congratulations!’ A weeping woman, with her husband and young son, said ‘Please take it away.’ I tried to say that I was sorry, but that saving lives might be as important as mourning them. She said ‘If you were sorry, you would go.’
We didn’t, but that was why my wife had not wanted to join us. We had contacted the British Legion, the vicar of St Mary’s and the police beforehand to let them know what we planned, and to reassure them that the aim was not to oppose or disrupt. No answer from the Legion, the vicar said he was all for freedom of conscience but not on his turf, and the police said ‘thank you for letting us know, we have no problem with that.’ The local newspaper had already taken pictures of the banner which they published with a few paragraphs of explanation: this war is unwinnable, prolongs the agony of the Afghan people and is more likely to provoke terror attacks than prevent them.’
We plan a similar silent presence, with a few more people, at the Swansea Cenotaph, at the 11th hour of the 11th day… I’m thinking of adding a placard reading: ‘Spare them from their leaders’ lies!’
Monday 26 October 2009
To the woods
A piece for the Llanelli Star to report on progress in our commonwood:
Welcome to Troserch Wood, but leave your motor at the gate! Troserch Wood is a strip of ancient woodland, along the Morlais river north of Llangennech. The 80-acres of former Forestry Commission plantation was acquired three years ago to secure it for public access and wildlife. The aim was to keep an unspoiled wooded valley in the public domain – a greenwood and a commonwood! - while gradually replacing conifers with native broadleaved trees
.
The woods are managed by the Troserch Woodland Society (TWS), a voluntary association open to anyone with £5 to spare who shares these aims. An elected committee doubles as a not-for-profit limited company.
When we succeeded in getting the wood, with a grant from its former Forestry Commission owners (renamed Cyd Coed), we hadn’t really thought what to do with it. Luckily, the committee includes two foresters. With their advice and expertise, we organised the felling and replanting of about ten acres east of the river. Now, at last, the woods are free of heavy machines and the tracks more or less clear of mud. Gone are acres of dark pines. In their place, between lines of stumps and brush, several thousand newly planted ‘whips’ are sprouting leaves: oak and ash, rowan, elder and wild cherry.
With the felling and replanting, as with the original purchase of the woods, we’ve been very lucky with Cyd Coed and other grants. A new bridge and improved tracks serve to open up an area that had been effectively out of bounds for a generation, too steep, dark and dense for man or beast.
Now the landscape is revealed and sunlight flooding in. Dormant acorns, roots and bluebell bulbs have sprung to life, birds returned to nest in the brush left by the felling. Among the outcrops, springs and streams are manmade features, the outlines of old walls and tracks, spoiltips and ruins of old mineworkings…
Please heed the WARNING sign on the fences around old mine openings!
We hadn’t envisaged telling other people what to do or not to do. But with the property come responsabilities, and liabilities (and it will take some time before the Coal Authority makes good the caps on all the old drifts and shafts.)
We must also find our way through conflicts of interest. Forest tracks draw motorbikes and fourwheel drives, but we cant square that with wildlife commitments and the desire of most visitors for peace and quiet. In the event of a collision, who suffers, and who picks up the costs?
So the decision was taken to ban all motor traffic - motorbikes, quadbikes and fourwheel drives – from the forest paths (they’re already illegal on rights of way, though NOT on the ‘Roman Road’ that forms the western boundary). Mountain bikers and horseriders are welcome, on the understanding that wheels and hooves give way to traffic on two feet.
It’s hard to keep a proper balance between over-caution and irresponsibility. We don’t want to turn a wildish river valley into a bland pleasure park, or litter the place with warning signs and notices. The proceeds of timber sold may cover basic woodland management, but not the construction of immaculate footpaths or rangers to patrol or empty litter bins. Instead we rely on goodwill and common sense, we trust people to look after themselves and each other, respect the nature of the place and the feelings of other visitors.
So, come and have a look if you haven’t already. To get to the main carpark, at the north-west end of the wood, follow the Troserch Road north from Llangennech. Cross the A4138 roundabout and head up the hill. After a mile-and-a-half, where the road swings sharp left, turn right, heading north towards Llannon. After another half mile, and you’ll see a carpark on the right, with signboard and map of the woods and paths. There’s a picnic site nearby.
We also welcome proposals from groups and organisations for new activities – camping, orienteering, forest-school or woodcraft skills. School groups, scouts, you name it (whatever happened to the Woodcraft Folk?): get in touch.
For contacts and information on wildlife, history, see www.troserchwoods.co.uk . All TWS members are welcome to management meetings, first Wednesday every month, at 7 pm in Llangennech Community Hall.
Welcome to Troserch Wood, but leave your motor at the gate! Troserch Wood is a strip of ancient woodland, along the Morlais river north of Llangennech. The 80-acres of former Forestry Commission plantation was acquired three years ago to secure it for public access and wildlife. The aim was to keep an unspoiled wooded valley in the public domain – a greenwood and a commonwood! - while gradually replacing conifers with native broadleaved trees
.
The woods are managed by the Troserch Woodland Society (TWS), a voluntary association open to anyone with £5 to spare who shares these aims. An elected committee doubles as a not-for-profit limited company.
When we succeeded in getting the wood, with a grant from its former Forestry Commission owners (renamed Cyd Coed), we hadn’t really thought what to do with it. Luckily, the committee includes two foresters. With their advice and expertise, we organised the felling and replanting of about ten acres east of the river. Now, at last, the woods are free of heavy machines and the tracks more or less clear of mud. Gone are acres of dark pines. In their place, between lines of stumps and brush, several thousand newly planted ‘whips’ are sprouting leaves: oak and ash, rowan, elder and wild cherry.
With the felling and replanting, as with the original purchase of the woods, we’ve been very lucky with Cyd Coed and other grants. A new bridge and improved tracks serve to open up an area that had been effectively out of bounds for a generation, too steep, dark and dense for man or beast.
Now the landscape is revealed and sunlight flooding in. Dormant acorns, roots and bluebell bulbs have sprung to life, birds returned to nest in the brush left by the felling. Among the outcrops, springs and streams are manmade features, the outlines of old walls and tracks, spoiltips and ruins of old mineworkings…
Please heed the WARNING sign on the fences around old mine openings!
We hadn’t envisaged telling other people what to do or not to do. But with the property come responsabilities, and liabilities (and it will take some time before the Coal Authority makes good the caps on all the old drifts and shafts.)
We must also find our way through conflicts of interest. Forest tracks draw motorbikes and fourwheel drives, but we cant square that with wildlife commitments and the desire of most visitors for peace and quiet. In the event of a collision, who suffers, and who picks up the costs?
So the decision was taken to ban all motor traffic - motorbikes, quadbikes and fourwheel drives – from the forest paths (they’re already illegal on rights of way, though NOT on the ‘Roman Road’ that forms the western boundary). Mountain bikers and horseriders are welcome, on the understanding that wheels and hooves give way to traffic on two feet.
It’s hard to keep a proper balance between over-caution and irresponsibility. We don’t want to turn a wildish river valley into a bland pleasure park, or litter the place with warning signs and notices. The proceeds of timber sold may cover basic woodland management, but not the construction of immaculate footpaths or rangers to patrol or empty litter bins. Instead we rely on goodwill and common sense, we trust people to look after themselves and each other, respect the nature of the place and the feelings of other visitors.
So, come and have a look if you haven’t already. To get to the main carpark, at the north-west end of the wood, follow the Troserch Road north from Llangennech. Cross the A4138 roundabout and head up the hill. After a mile-and-a-half, where the road swings sharp left, turn right, heading north towards Llannon. After another half mile, and you’ll see a carpark on the right, with signboard and map of the woods and paths. There’s a picnic site nearby.
We also welcome proposals from groups and organisations for new activities – camping, orienteering, forest-school or woodcraft skills. School groups, scouts, you name it (whatever happened to the Woodcraft Folk?): get in touch.
For contacts and information on wildlife, history, see www.troserchwoods.co.uk . All TWS members are welcome to management meetings, first Wednesday every month, at 7 pm in Llangennech Community Hall.
Stolen fruit: a date for lawmakers and enforcers
Latest round in the date war, this letter below went to a selection of ministers, law officers and local police. With each letter went a single stolen date, removed by me from the Swansea Tesco store.
Dear Peter Mandelson
FREE SAMPLE: CONFISCATED TESCO ‘WEST BANK’ DATE
You are now in receipt of stolen goods and whoever is in charge of import regulations may need to decide who’s responsible and what should be done.
I have recently removed this date among others, in packets labelled ‘Origin: West Bank,’ from the shelves of Tesco’s Swansea Marina store. Since last January I have confiscated a number of similar packets and written to Tesco CEO Terry Leahy explaining why. I offered to refund the price in full if he could show the dates were not the product of illegal Israeli settlements. In the ensuing correspondence, Tesco neither addressed the settlement issue nor took up my refund offer. I was banned from their stores but not prosecuted.
A more public ‘citizen’s seizure’ was then organised at the same Tesco store. Filmed and reported in the press, aYoutube clip of the event drew 50,000 hits. Although a woman accompanying me was charged, for some reason I was not. When the woman’s case came to Swansea Crown Court in June, the judge dismissed it.
Through my MP, Alan Williams I have written to government ministers urging them to bring UK law into line with the Geneva Conventions and UN Security Council resolutions to which we are signatories. Bill Rammell (then at the FCO) put the contradiction baldly in his reply: ‘…the building of Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories is illegal under international law. However the import and sale of products from Israeli settlements…is not prohibited by law in the UK, and we consider this is consistent with the UK’s international law obligations.’
This week I learned that that the government is citing a Security Council resolution to justify an otherwise illegal freeze on suspects’assets. This prompts me to adopt a similar line in a further citizen’s seizure. Where a process is inadmissible, not to mention cruel, so is its product – whether settlement dates, ‘blood diamonds’, evidence obtained by torture, or lampshades made of human skin. Where government lawmakers and enforcers fail to uphold our commitments in international law, citizens have a right and duty to step in.
Import and sale of settlement produce amounts to handling stolen goods, it undermines international law and helps prolong a conflict for which Britain bears heavy responsibility. I have auctioned previous consignments of confiscated West Bank dates in aid of Gaza relief (at £1 per date). Unless you need this sample as evidence, you may care to do the same. Or eat it and serve justice in some other way.
Yours sincerely
Greg Wilkinson (dgregwilkinson@yahoo.co.uk, phone 01792 455335)
Dear Peter Mandelson
FREE SAMPLE: CONFISCATED TESCO ‘WEST BANK’ DATE
You are now in receipt of stolen goods and whoever is in charge of import regulations may need to decide who’s responsible and what should be done.
I have recently removed this date among others, in packets labelled ‘Origin: West Bank,’ from the shelves of Tesco’s Swansea Marina store. Since last January I have confiscated a number of similar packets and written to Tesco CEO Terry Leahy explaining why. I offered to refund the price in full if he could show the dates were not the product of illegal Israeli settlements. In the ensuing correspondence, Tesco neither addressed the settlement issue nor took up my refund offer. I was banned from their stores but not prosecuted.
A more public ‘citizen’s seizure’ was then organised at the same Tesco store. Filmed and reported in the press, aYoutube clip of the event drew 50,000 hits. Although a woman accompanying me was charged, for some reason I was not. When the woman’s case came to Swansea Crown Court in June, the judge dismissed it.
Through my MP, Alan Williams I have written to government ministers urging them to bring UK law into line with the Geneva Conventions and UN Security Council resolutions to which we are signatories. Bill Rammell (then at the FCO) put the contradiction baldly in his reply: ‘…the building of Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories is illegal under international law. However the import and sale of products from Israeli settlements…is not prohibited by law in the UK, and we consider this is consistent with the UK’s international law obligations.’
This week I learned that that the government is citing a Security Council resolution to justify an otherwise illegal freeze on suspects’assets. This prompts me to adopt a similar line in a further citizen’s seizure. Where a process is inadmissible, not to mention cruel, so is its product – whether settlement dates, ‘blood diamonds’, evidence obtained by torture, or lampshades made of human skin. Where government lawmakers and enforcers fail to uphold our commitments in international law, citizens have a right and duty to step in.
Import and sale of settlement produce amounts to handling stolen goods, it undermines international law and helps prolong a conflict for which Britain bears heavy responsibility. I have auctioned previous consignments of confiscated West Bank dates in aid of Gaza relief (at £1 per date). Unless you need this sample as evidence, you may care to do the same. Or eat it and serve justice in some other way.
Yours sincerely
Greg Wilkinson (dgregwilkinson@yahoo.co.uk, phone 01792 455335)
I want my DNA back
This letter was prompted by Weekly Guardian articles on Justice and Civil liberties. A bit of unfinished business:
Ian Arundale
Chief Constable, Dyfed Powys Police
PO Box 99, LlangunnorCarmarthen SA31 2PF
Sir
Data Protection: please return or destroy DNA evidence taken from me in Llanelli, Spring 2003
One morning soon after the allied invasion of Iraq I was arrested, with one or two others, in the road outside Colleg Sirgar in Llanelli. I had joined students in a sit-down protest and remained seated when asked by police officers to clear the way.
I was lifted and manhandled. Although I did not resist, my arms were forced up behind my back, thumbs were pressed into the soft space under my ears, and my head banged down on the bonnet of a police car.
After a few hours in the cells, I was charged, then cautioned and released. I cant remember the exact charge, but I was asked if I agreed to a caution on the base of it. To get back to my family, I did, but only on condition that a reference to abusive language and behaviour was deleted.
In the presence of the desk officer, I asked the arresting officer to describe the abusive language and behaviour he accused me of. (This was the man who kept shouting ‘pressure points’ and sticking his thumbs under my ear; he also called me ‘a stupid old man’ and tightened the plastic cuffs until they hurt.) When he was unable to recall any abusive words or gestures I might have used, the desk officer agreed to delete the reference.
At the time, I did not object to the DNA swab and made no formal complaint about the manner of the arrest (as a young man I’d got used to some casual violence, both on the rugby field, and in protests over the Vietnam war). It was only later, when I discovered that the ‘abusive’ passage had not been deleted from the charge, that I felt a real injustice had been done: if I’d known the lies were staying in I would have refused the caution and fought the charge in court.
As it is, I was not convicted and did not accept the charge as given. Innocent of any crime, I ask you to destroy or return any DNA evidence retained by your force and ensure that related computer records are deleted.
I await your response - yours sincerely
David ‘Greg’ Wilkinson (formerly of Graig Fach, Llangennech, Llanelli SA14 8PX)
Ian Arundale
Chief Constable, Dyfed Powys Police
PO Box 99, LlangunnorCarmarthen SA31 2PF
Sir
Data Protection: please return or destroy DNA evidence taken from me in Llanelli, Spring 2003
One morning soon after the allied invasion of Iraq I was arrested, with one or two others, in the road outside Colleg Sirgar in Llanelli. I had joined students in a sit-down protest and remained seated when asked by police officers to clear the way.
I was lifted and manhandled. Although I did not resist, my arms were forced up behind my back, thumbs were pressed into the soft space under my ears, and my head banged down on the bonnet of a police car.
After a few hours in the cells, I was charged, then cautioned and released. I cant remember the exact charge, but I was asked if I agreed to a caution on the base of it. To get back to my family, I did, but only on condition that a reference to abusive language and behaviour was deleted.
In the presence of the desk officer, I asked the arresting officer to describe the abusive language and behaviour he accused me of. (This was the man who kept shouting ‘pressure points’ and sticking his thumbs under my ear; he also called me ‘a stupid old man’ and tightened the plastic cuffs until they hurt.) When he was unable to recall any abusive words or gestures I might have used, the desk officer agreed to delete the reference.
At the time, I did not object to the DNA swab and made no formal complaint about the manner of the arrest (as a young man I’d got used to some casual violence, both on the rugby field, and in protests over the Vietnam war). It was only later, when I discovered that the ‘abusive’ passage had not been deleted from the charge, that I felt a real injustice had been done: if I’d known the lies were staying in I would have refused the caution and fought the charge in court.
As it is, I was not convicted and did not accept the charge as given. Innocent of any crime, I ask you to destroy or return any DNA evidence retained by your force and ensure that related computer records are deleted.
I await your response - yours sincerely
David ‘Greg’ Wilkinson (formerly of Graig Fach, Llangennech, Llanelli SA14 8PX)
Remembrance Day: killing as we mourn?
A letter/feature for the local paper, trying to pull together race and war, focussing on next month's Remembrance Day ceremonies. I wrote the piece partly to atone for not going to London for a big Stop the War demonstration on the same day.
Saturday Oct 24th
To the Editor
South Wales Evening Post
I missed the BNP debut on Question Time. That was partly because here in Wales the programme was pushed into a late-night slot, partly because I felt people had already put up a good anti-racist showing job in Swansea last week. My wife helped make a big banner saying ‘Equality, Welcome, Respect’ and I joined the crowd behind it for a while, across the road from the Swansea Mosque.
That silent protest was called by Quakers, a sideshow to the larger demo in Castle Square. What I’m wondering about now is whether there should be another silent presence alongside the usual Rememberance Day event at the Swansea Cenotaph.
Like Nick Griffin, I have a father who served, in the Second World War, and like Jack Straw’s father, I myself refused to join the army. Instead I did a three-year stint in voluntary work-camps. Earlier, when we lived in wartime London, we had our windows blown out, twice. I hardly remember that, but what does stand out is my mother getting the news of her younger brother’s death. An army engineer, he was blown up, not long after the allied landings, by what would now be called an IED. At that time, we were sharing our house with a family of Jewish refugees: during the V1s and V2s we children camped happily under tables in the basement.
In my father’s or uncle’s place, faced with Hitler’s attack, I don’t know what I would have done. But that wasn’t the sort of war facing me when my turn came. Self-defence is one thing, but that didn’t seem to be the issue in Malaya, Cyprus, Kenya, Aden or Suez. Then, as now in Afghanistan, it wasn’t clear who or what were we fighting for.
The BNP links war and race, but in the wrong way. Like Harry Patch, I believe there’s no such thing as a good war and I want to remember the dead on both sides, all sides. Since the Hitler war, most of our foreign engagements have set ‘us’ - mainly white – against ‘them’ in various shades of brown and black, with maybe 10 of ‘them’ killed to every one of ‘us’. Add religion, as in Iraq, Afghanistan and the ‘war on terrorism,’ it’s worse, and the wounds take longer to heal.
One of my first work-camps was in an Algiers shanty-town, at the start of the Algerian independence war. One workmate, an Algerian student, was later killed. Another, a young French officer, joined us when he could because he wasn’t happy in his army role. After that war, I knew another Algerian, ‘freedom fighter’ or ’terrorist’ who never quite recovered from the killing he’d done. In Egypt, soon after Suez, I shared a flat with a black, gay, former US serviceman. Later became press-spokesman for the militant Black Panthers, but in Cairo his presence was a talisman to me: a lot of Egyptians were still bitter about our Suez attack, and I was easy to pick out.
Earlier this year, an old Algerian journalist colleague came to stay with us in Swansea. He was more religious than I remembered him. We took him to the Swansea Mosque – to pray for us, he said – and we enjoyed the halal chicken and lamb we bought in St Helen’s Road.
So… The equation of Islam = extremist = terrorist makes no sense to me, and I cant make sense of a world divided on religious or racial lines. I may not have fought in wars, but I have got close enough to know and respect people who did. I want to show my respect and remember the dead. But can I stand in mourning for the dead while turning my back on the ongoing waste of lives in Afghanistan? ‘Organised murder,’ to quote Harry Patch again, or bloody chaos, oil on the flames, a gift to the enemy.
It’s a couple of weeks from Remembrance Sunday and I would like to know what other people think, in Swansea or further afield. Especially those who have fought and suffered themselves, lost family or friends, welcomed home the disfigured or deranged.
Yours sincerely
Greg Wilkinson
dgregwilkinson@yahoo.co.uk
Saturday Oct 24th
To the Editor
South Wales Evening Post
I missed the BNP debut on Question Time. That was partly because here in Wales the programme was pushed into a late-night slot, partly because I felt people had already put up a good anti-racist showing job in Swansea last week. My wife helped make a big banner saying ‘Equality, Welcome, Respect’ and I joined the crowd behind it for a while, across the road from the Swansea Mosque.
That silent protest was called by Quakers, a sideshow to the larger demo in Castle Square. What I’m wondering about now is whether there should be another silent presence alongside the usual Rememberance Day event at the Swansea Cenotaph.
Like Nick Griffin, I have a father who served, in the Second World War, and like Jack Straw’s father, I myself refused to join the army. Instead I did a three-year stint in voluntary work-camps. Earlier, when we lived in wartime London, we had our windows blown out, twice. I hardly remember that, but what does stand out is my mother getting the news of her younger brother’s death. An army engineer, he was blown up, not long after the allied landings, by what would now be called an IED. At that time, we were sharing our house with a family of Jewish refugees: during the V1s and V2s we children camped happily under tables in the basement.
In my father’s or uncle’s place, faced with Hitler’s attack, I don’t know what I would have done. But that wasn’t the sort of war facing me when my turn came. Self-defence is one thing, but that didn’t seem to be the issue in Malaya, Cyprus, Kenya, Aden or Suez. Then, as now in Afghanistan, it wasn’t clear who or what were we fighting for.
The BNP links war and race, but in the wrong way. Like Harry Patch, I believe there’s no such thing as a good war and I want to remember the dead on both sides, all sides. Since the Hitler war, most of our foreign engagements have set ‘us’ - mainly white – against ‘them’ in various shades of brown and black, with maybe 10 of ‘them’ killed to every one of ‘us’. Add religion, as in Iraq, Afghanistan and the ‘war on terrorism,’ it’s worse, and the wounds take longer to heal.
One of my first work-camps was in an Algiers shanty-town, at the start of the Algerian independence war. One workmate, an Algerian student, was later killed. Another, a young French officer, joined us when he could because he wasn’t happy in his army role. After that war, I knew another Algerian, ‘freedom fighter’ or ’terrorist’ who never quite recovered from the killing he’d done. In Egypt, soon after Suez, I shared a flat with a black, gay, former US serviceman. Later became press-spokesman for the militant Black Panthers, but in Cairo his presence was a talisman to me: a lot of Egyptians were still bitter about our Suez attack, and I was easy to pick out.
Earlier this year, an old Algerian journalist colleague came to stay with us in Swansea. He was more religious than I remembered him. We took him to the Swansea Mosque – to pray for us, he said – and we enjoyed the halal chicken and lamb we bought in St Helen’s Road.
So… The equation of Islam = extremist = terrorist makes no sense to me, and I cant make sense of a world divided on religious or racial lines. I may not have fought in wars, but I have got close enough to know and respect people who did. I want to show my respect and remember the dead. But can I stand in mourning for the dead while turning my back on the ongoing waste of lives in Afghanistan? ‘Organised murder,’ to quote Harry Patch again, or bloody chaos, oil on the flames, a gift to the enemy.
It’s a couple of weeks from Remembrance Sunday and I would like to know what other people think, in Swansea or further afield. Especially those who have fought and suffered themselves, lost family or friends, welcomed home the disfigured or deranged.
Yours sincerely
Greg Wilkinson
dgregwilkinson@yahoo.co.uk
Afghanistan: Swansea rally address
This piece was written as an address to a Swansea 'troops out' rally. We made a banner and did all we could to promote it, but the Swansea Evening Post forgot to publish the piece advertising the event. Only about 100 people turned up, and we felt a bit lost in the crowd... So I didnt say all I'd intended, and I dont know how many people got the drift...
Friends, brothers and sisters – I can call you that because we’re all much like beneath our skins. Whatever the religion, race or language, we all laugh and cry, we all get wet when it rains. We all feel it when our people are attacked or someone dear to us is killed.
The first thing for us here now is to mourn the dead. Not just the 204 British servicemen and women, but all the people killed in Afghanistan. As Harry Patch reminded us, me must remember those on the other side of the line. For every coffin and flag carried off a plane in Wilthshire, there are ten white bundles in Afghanistan, bodies quickly buried in the ground they lived on..
As a child in the second world war, I was with my mother when she got the news of her brother’s death in Belgium. He was blown up by an IED, or boobytrap as they called them. And his widow came to live with us..
Some things ought to change, but don’t. Now again, we get public ceremonial, ritual mourning, then wives and families are left to their tears. Somewhere in Wales or Helmand a woman a woman will wake up at night, and believe for a moment it was all a bad dream, reach out in bed and find the empty space….
Let’s now take two minutes to remember ALL the dead and their families.
Our next task is even more important: to do what anything we can to stop this waste. Sacrifice is to fine a word. If we really respect our soldiers, we should bring them home, alive and in one piece. We’ve sent them on a fool’s errand: you cant impose democracy or free other people’s women by force. This war is unwinnable, it’s unaffordable and it does more to prompt terrorist attacks than stop them.
Our troops are doing the job we pay them to do. Bravely and as best they can. Not long ago, I heard a British para say the same about the Taliban: ‘They’re good,’ he saisd, and Jeremy Paxman blinked., ‘They know what they’re doing and they believe in what they’re fighting for.’ And a lot of the Afghan fighters, like are own, are doing what they do because there weren’t many other jobs around.
More than 40 years ago, as a journalist I helped cover dead-end wars in Algeria and Vietnam. Then too Western governments and generals kept saying ‘We’re winning: just one more push, more troops, a bit more time. Luckily we had a Labour prime minister then who refused to follow the US to Vietnam. Later we watched the route of Russian forces in Afghanistan and only recently, we heard a commander in Basra say that British troops in Iraq were part of the problem not the solution.
If you’re in a hole, stop digging, but our sad clown prime minister drops us deeper in it. There’s talk about talks with the Taliban, and we send more troops. To kill and die in our name as we foot the bill. Every other day, another one or two. And, you wouldn’t know it from the media, but people round the country are coming out to call a halt. When Gordon Brown comes back from his holiday, there will be a packet of 1000 signatures from Swansea waiting for him, demanding withdrawal of British troops from Afghanistan.
TROOPS OUT! WHEN DO WE WANT IT? NOW!
In two months time, on Saturday October 24th, the Stop the War coalition is planning a national troops out march in London. Maybe we could get some buses organised for that.
Friends, brothers and sisters – I can call you that because we’re all much like beneath our skins. Whatever the religion, race or language, we all laugh and cry, we all get wet when it rains. We all feel it when our people are attacked or someone dear to us is killed.
The first thing for us here now is to mourn the dead. Not just the 204 British servicemen and women, but all the people killed in Afghanistan. As Harry Patch reminded us, me must remember those on the other side of the line. For every coffin and flag carried off a plane in Wilthshire, there are ten white bundles in Afghanistan, bodies quickly buried in the ground they lived on..
As a child in the second world war, I was with my mother when she got the news of her brother’s death in Belgium. He was blown up by an IED, or boobytrap as they called them. And his widow came to live with us..
Some things ought to change, but don’t. Now again, we get public ceremonial, ritual mourning, then wives and families are left to their tears. Somewhere in Wales or Helmand a woman a woman will wake up at night, and believe for a moment it was all a bad dream, reach out in bed and find the empty space….
Let’s now take two minutes to remember ALL the dead and their families.
Our next task is even more important: to do what anything we can to stop this waste. Sacrifice is to fine a word. If we really respect our soldiers, we should bring them home, alive and in one piece. We’ve sent them on a fool’s errand: you cant impose democracy or free other people’s women by force. This war is unwinnable, it’s unaffordable and it does more to prompt terrorist attacks than stop them.
Our troops are doing the job we pay them to do. Bravely and as best they can. Not long ago, I heard a British para say the same about the Taliban: ‘They’re good,’ he saisd, and Jeremy Paxman blinked., ‘They know what they’re doing and they believe in what they’re fighting for.’ And a lot of the Afghan fighters, like are own, are doing what they do because there weren’t many other jobs around.
More than 40 years ago, as a journalist I helped cover dead-end wars in Algeria and Vietnam. Then too Western governments and generals kept saying ‘We’re winning: just one more push, more troops, a bit more time. Luckily we had a Labour prime minister then who refused to follow the US to Vietnam. Later we watched the route of Russian forces in Afghanistan and only recently, we heard a commander in Basra say that British troops in Iraq were part of the problem not the solution.
If you’re in a hole, stop digging, but our sad clown prime minister drops us deeper in it. There’s talk about talks with the Taliban, and we send more troops. To kill and die in our name as we foot the bill. Every other day, another one or two. And, you wouldn’t know it from the media, but people round the country are coming out to call a halt. When Gordon Brown comes back from his holiday, there will be a packet of 1000 signatures from Swansea waiting for him, demanding withdrawal of British troops from Afghanistan.
TROOPS OUT! WHEN DO WE WANT IT? NOW!
In two months time, on Saturday October 24th, the Stop the War coalition is planning a national troops out march in London. Maybe we could get some buses organised for that.
Afghanistan: troops out
Here's a leaflet handed out in Swansea last month, when we took a table into town with a petition calling for troops to be withdrawn from Afghanistan. A thousand people signed.
AFGHANISTAN: ANOTHER DEAD-END WAR!
The British death toll approaches 200, with about thirty-times as many Afghans killed by allied forces. For every death, several are disfigured or maimed…
The government says war will help stop terror attacks in this country. The truth is the opposite. Explosives and poisons can be made anywhere. The London bombers planned their action in revenge for British actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The more Afghans killed by US and UK troops, the more friends and relations join the Taliban.
You cant impose democracy or free other people’s women by force. The more you use, the more they cling to old ways (European Churches grew stronger under Stalin).
The war in Afghanistan is unwinnable, a cause of terror not the cure. Iraq and Afghanistan are dead-end wars. The real threats to our way of life are not from jihad but inequality, climate change and all-consuming, well-armed greed (aka Capital!).
TROOPS OUT: BRING THEM SAFELY HOME!
Swansea Stop-the-War 07792720667 / 07895063020
AFGHANISTAN: ANOTHER DEAD-END WAR!
The British death toll approaches 200, with about thirty-times as many Afghans killed by allied forces. For every death, several are disfigured or maimed…
The government says war will help stop terror attacks in this country. The truth is the opposite. Explosives and poisons can be made anywhere. The London bombers planned their action in revenge for British actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The more Afghans killed by US and UK troops, the more friends and relations join the Taliban.
You cant impose democracy or free other people’s women by force. The more you use, the more they cling to old ways (European Churches grew stronger under Stalin).
The war in Afghanistan is unwinnable, a cause of terror not the cure. Iraq and Afghanistan are dead-end wars. The real threats to our way of life are not from jihad but inequality, climate change and all-consuming, well-armed greed (aka Capital!).
TROOPS OUT: BRING THEM SAFELY HOME!
Swansea Stop-the-War 07792720667 / 07895063020
Sunday 19 July 2009
letter to observer
Sir
Alan Milburn observes that the UK is ‘an unequal society in which class background too often determines life chances,’ with professions becoming ‘more socially exclusive, not less.’ And yet, in the dying days of New Labour, with no obvious contender on the left, he looks forward to a ‘great wave of social mobility’ in the near future.
Milburn rightly notes that greater equality would benefit many middle-income people as well as the poor and eschews ‘clumsy class-war politics’. But, while Barry Sheerman sees Harrovians who ‘walk around as if they own the world,’ a Fabian warns against ‘silliness about top-hatted toffs.’ The answer, he suggests, is not class-war, but a war against class.
From my own old public-school, Oxbridge and commonsense angle, it seems to me you cant have one without the other. We DO still live in an unequal class society, and most of us have an interest in freeing ourselves from BOTH the fine web of class divisions in and among ourselves AND the flexible domination of a self-selecting ruling class.
Wealth, class and income as we know them go together in a capitalist economy bound for nowhwere. Clumsy or silly as it may sound, I long for a credible alternative, a movement or party committed to joined-up human freedom, peaceful process and a sustainable world.
yours
Alan Milburn observes that the UK is ‘an unequal society in which class background too often determines life chances,’ with professions becoming ‘more socially exclusive, not less.’ And yet, in the dying days of New Labour, with no obvious contender on the left, he looks forward to a ‘great wave of social mobility’ in the near future.
Milburn rightly notes that greater equality would benefit many middle-income people as well as the poor and eschews ‘clumsy class-war politics’. But, while Barry Sheerman sees Harrovians who ‘walk around as if they own the world,’ a Fabian warns against ‘silliness about top-hatted toffs.’ The answer, he suggests, is not class-war, but a war against class.
From my own old public-school, Oxbridge and commonsense angle, it seems to me you cant have one without the other. We DO still live in an unequal class society, and most of us have an interest in freeing ourselves from BOTH the fine web of class divisions in and among ourselves AND the flexible domination of a self-selecting ruling class.
Wealth, class and income as we know them go together in a capitalist economy bound for nowhwere. Clumsy or silly as it may sound, I long for a credible alternative, a movement or party committed to joined-up human freedom, peaceful process and a sustainable world.
yours
Friday 26 June 2009
PRESS RELEASE 24.06.09: TESCO CASE DISMISSED
On Wednesday June 17th Judge John Diehl dismissed a charge of theft against Swansea campaigner d Murphy arising from removal of Israeli ‘West Bank’ goods from Tesco’s Marina store.
(I wasnt there but d said the judge layed into the CPS like Basil Fawlty with his hapless waiter. It was the judge who asked the defence to ask him for a dismissal... All very odd, a mixture of relief and disappointment, though there could still be a civil action for costs by Tesco, or the CPS might conceivably come up with a new charge of, say, criminal damage)
The protest action took place last January, in response to the Israeli invasion of Gaza. Ms Murphy was charged with theft after she and another protester, Greg Wilkinson, removed two trolley-loads of ‘West Bank’ goods from the shelves and wheeled them to the main entrance, marked them in red and dumped them as unfit for sale.
Outside the store, Free-Palestine protesters handed out leaflets explaining that goods labelled as ‘West Bank’, came from illegal Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory under military occupation. They argued that the British government recognises the illegality of both occupation and settlements, and that the import and sale of settlement goods is therefor unlawful: removal of the goods was comparable to a citizen’s arrest – serving to uphold the law, not break it.
In a letter to Swansea MP Alan Williams (May 14), the Foreign Office Minister, Bert Rammell, said ‘Mr Wilkinson…rightly notes that the UK considers the building of Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories is illegal under international law. However the import and sale of products from Israeli settlements is not prohibited by the law in the UK and we consider that this is consistent…’
Consistent? One purpose of the Tesco action was to challenge this curious consistency in court, to argue that the sale of fruit and vegetables from illegal settlements amounted to the sale of stolen goods – grown on stolen land for the profit of the thieves who stole it. The protesters welcome the judge’s dismissal of the case last week as a technical victory, but it also forecloses a more important argument about the import and sale of settlement goods.
In preparing for the trial-that-never-was, the defence team, led by a young Palestinian barrister, also received information from Israeli sources that settlement goods were routinely mixed in by wholesalers with Israeli goods, to be exported and sold under Israeli labels (strengthening the case for a more general boycott!).
Tesco is now pursuing Ms Murphy for repayment of what the store claims was the cost of the action. Like Mr Wilkinson in an earlier written exchange with Tesco bosses, Ms Murphy might consider repayment if Tesco could show that the goods she took were NOT the produce of illegal settlements.
(A Youtube video of the Tesco arrests has attracted nearly 43,000 hits and more than 1000 more or less rational comments - some anti-Jewish, some anti-Arab, some anti-Women, and we’re sorry about that sort of silliness!)
On Wednesday June 17th Judge John Diehl dismissed a charge of theft against Swansea campaigner d Murphy arising from removal of Israeli ‘West Bank’ goods from Tesco’s Marina store.
(I wasnt there but d said the judge layed into the CPS like Basil Fawlty with his hapless waiter. It was the judge who asked the defence to ask him for a dismissal... All very odd, a mixture of relief and disappointment, though there could still be a civil action for costs by Tesco, or the CPS might conceivably come up with a new charge of, say, criminal damage)
The protest action took place last January, in response to the Israeli invasion of Gaza. Ms Murphy was charged with theft after she and another protester, Greg Wilkinson, removed two trolley-loads of ‘West Bank’ goods from the shelves and wheeled them to the main entrance, marked them in red and dumped them as unfit for sale.
Outside the store, Free-Palestine protesters handed out leaflets explaining that goods labelled as ‘West Bank’, came from illegal Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory under military occupation. They argued that the British government recognises the illegality of both occupation and settlements, and that the import and sale of settlement goods is therefor unlawful: removal of the goods was comparable to a citizen’s arrest – serving to uphold the law, not break it.
In a letter to Swansea MP Alan Williams (May 14), the Foreign Office Minister, Bert Rammell, said ‘Mr Wilkinson…rightly notes that the UK considers the building of Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories is illegal under international law. However the import and sale of products from Israeli settlements is not prohibited by the law in the UK and we consider that this is consistent…’
Consistent? One purpose of the Tesco action was to challenge this curious consistency in court, to argue that the sale of fruit and vegetables from illegal settlements amounted to the sale of stolen goods – grown on stolen land for the profit of the thieves who stole it. The protesters welcome the judge’s dismissal of the case last week as a technical victory, but it also forecloses a more important argument about the import and sale of settlement goods.
In preparing for the trial-that-never-was, the defence team, led by a young Palestinian barrister, also received information from Israeli sources that settlement goods were routinely mixed in by wholesalers with Israeli goods, to be exported and sold under Israeli labels (strengthening the case for a more general boycott!).
Tesco is now pursuing Ms Murphy for repayment of what the store claims was the cost of the action. Like Mr Wilkinson in an earlier written exchange with Tesco bosses, Ms Murphy might consider repayment if Tesco could show that the goods she took were NOT the produce of illegal settlements.
(A Youtube video of the Tesco arrests has attracted nearly 43,000 hits and more than 1000 more or less rational comments - some anti-Jewish, some anti-Arab, some anti-Women, and we’re sorry about that sort of silliness!)
Friday 22 May 2009
THINKING AROUND EQUALITY
Inequality hurts, equality heals! In their book The Spirit Level (Allen Lane) my brother Richard Wilkinson and his partner Kate Pickett demonstrate the damage done by economic inequality and the benefits to most people of greater equality. These thoughts of mine are not a substitute for research, but the sort of searching-about that sometimes precedes research, or action. I’m trying to pick up where they leave off: if what The Spirit Level says is true (and it is!) then what’s stopping us, where might we find the will and ways to change?
A will to change?
The poor may be inclined to equality, but they lack belief in themselves and the possibility of a fairer world. How to build belief and realise potential power?
To move corporations and governments to redistribute, there must be a more general belief in and will to equality, a shifting concensus. We have to look beyond platonic argument, statistics and the promise of longterm gains for those with most to lose. Even simple economic solutions require change on non-economic fronts: to maximise mutual sympathy and social solidarity; to minimise individual and sectional selfishness; to embolden the poor and soften the rich; to replace dependence on money differentials with other bases for social standing and self-esteem
Monetised inequality
Money – wealth and income – is the main driver and measure of inequality under capitalism. Or, to put it differently, capitalism is monetised inequality. Money is the main handle on contemporary inequalities; redistribution of wealth and income is the most obvious means of redress…
BUT human inequalities did not begin and wont end with capitalism and the money economy. Inequality has taken many forms as swords were beaten into ploughshares, crowns into coins… stocks and shares. Capitalism, like the old feudal order, is not geared to equality. Money will not redistribute itself. We cannot assume that capitalism is fated to self-destruct, nor can we rely on science and sweet reason to motivate governments and minorities with most to lose.
Structural change
Differentials vary widely within and between capitalist economies, leaving room for improvement and convergence on best practice. But capitalism breeds and feeds on inequality of income and wealth; sooner or later, a move to greater equality will require structural change, a systemic commitment to sharing, co-operation and the public good as against private profit and sectional advantage. The need for structural change does not begin or end with capitalist finance and industry: it applies also, and immediately, to the way we organise education, health and other public services. How long can we tolerate a two-tier division between public and private provision?
Obstacles to change
The rich, or relatively rich – have-mores with most to lose – include most of the decision-makers and opinion-formers. As the Spirit Level shows, many of them may also stand to gain from greater equality BUT a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush: the prospect of measurable short term loss – reduced income or higher tax - is likely to outweigh the prospect of less quantifiable future benefits.
This conservative bias MIGHT not preclude a more equitable government from closing gaps. Higher benefits, wage regulation or progressive tax might be ‘sold’ as cost-effective: the costs to be offset by savings on health, law and order etc. BUT note recent flutter in the dovecot when tax was raised to 50% on incomes over £150,000 (although this is about six times the national average, which is already more than most of us can reasonably expect!)
Awaking desire and belief
The poor have always hankered for greater equality, the rich have half-believed in it – before the law, perhaps, or in the eyes of God, anywhere but the bank-balance or Land Registry. For the poor – the have-less majority – the task is to translate desire into belief and practical determination. For the rich, to find the combination of stick and carrot that will melt or frighten them into shelling out.
(Bankers’ bonus payments were publicised in the wake of their credit crunch debacle, but though they were named and shamed most did not waive or repay their bonuses. MPs too were named and shamed for greedy claims, and soon began volunteering to repay: not because they were shamed, but because their shaming was a threat to their jobs and salaries: constituency parties have the power to deselect and voters not to.)
And the carrots? If not wealth, we’ll need to offer other grounds for self-esteem and source of happiness. How to offer a foretaste of something better, while ironing out inequalities in the existing system and piloting alternatives?
.
What if we’re wrong?
The relative equality of Japan has more to do with the survival of older fraternal traditions than with the capitalist structure and dynamic those traditions restrain. But could that sort of counter-current go further, transforming structures from within? Could capitalism survive the erosion of differentials, with difference of wealth and income becoming largely symbolic (like the split seconds between winners and also-rans on the race course)? Could other measures of status, power and success come to replace big gaps in property and earnings: barristers have traditionally taken a wage-cut to become judges; occasional bankers and entrepreneurs turn from private greed to public good: might this not happen more generally within existing hierarchies and practices? Might not an enlightened Market reward the goodness of a company’s product and social practice as much as its prices and profits? We need to ask these questions, if only to understand our enemy.
A surface office culture of first names and shared canteens may indicate a deeper wish. It wasn’t for nothing that Christian monarchs washed paupers’ feet, and Officers still serve Christmas dinners to Men… But what are straws in the wind without wind?
Another dream
The Labour Movement - Labour Party and Trade Unions – was to have mobilised the power of the poor and the better nature of the rich to reappropriate the wealth of land and industry. A newly conscious working class, with nothing to sell but its labour, was to take over the means of production and mastery of their own lives. The ruling class would be subsumed, the state wither away.
Social democracy did not, in that vision, stop short at the threshold of employment. Majority rule would be extended to where it mattered most: the direction of the business and industry that shape our lives and world. Long before Marxism, the ideal of commonwealth combined the economic with the social and political elements of community. Common humanity and common sense!
Nor did democracy in that vision lie primarily in election of representatives. More important was the power and freedom of groups and individuals to decide and act together in their own interests. Representative democracy would come into play where direct democracy fell short…
Facts of life
Somewhere between dream and ‘correct analysis’ lie facts of life. It is a fact that many men and women from different classes and cultures have agreed that things could and should be different, have shared a presumption of equality. Not just between friends, but between enemies:
‘If you prick us do we not bleed, if you tickle us do we not laugh…?’ Shylock may have been bent on revenge, but behind his pound of flesh is the simple symmetry of an eye for an eye. Our eye for symmetry is matched by a capacity for sympathy. Our individual mindsets are shaped and cross-cut by incoming signals and reflex responses. We are built to feel for each other and respond. In primates and other mammals, body-language works between us before we know it. The ‘limbic resonance’ in our middle brain is picked up on brainscans, and our responses can be observed in sympathetic reflex, from infectious yawning to the involuntary clenching of fist and raising of hand-to-mouth.. In the neo-cortex, the more specifically human bit of the brain, can be located a process of projection. Practical experiment indicates a corresponding ability to put ourselves in place of others, exchanging points of view.*
On that basis, through language, cross-referencing and generalisation we arrive at shared overviews, the best being those which correspond to the most varied viewpoints.
The processes of empathy, projection and overview stem from a common physiology, our evolution as a species in a shared world. Our genetic capacity for empathy and projection, interaction and co-operation is developed and extended through experience and practice, our families and a common culture developed as we live, work and play together (games have a special importance for human and some other mammals.)
Across divisions of class, occupation and gender, a shared animal life-cycle underpins a measure of common understanding: our lives describe a familiar arc from impotent infancy through capable prime, sage middle age and back into dependency. While men’s productive labour has become separate and specialised, women’s reproductive labour is more widely shared, the basis for a mutual sympathy denied to men.
The nearest we can get to objectivity, a balanced view, is not through detachment but the widest possible sympathy, which depends in turn on a range of shared experience, freedom to move and communicate, time to reflect.
*Thomas Lewis et al in A General Theory of Love
Biggest not best. A part or apart…
Fitness, as in the survival of the fittest, is not a matter of size, strength or even intelligence. Fitness means fitting in, adaptability.
Distinction, in the sense of dominating or standing out, may not be healthy. The tallest trees don’t stand alone or head-and-shoulders above the rest: they grow in woods, depend on their peers for support and protection from wind and frost; competition focuses their growth and draws them up. Ivy thrives because it does not overshadow or starve the trees on which it hangs.
Biological models do not apply directly to social development but patterns of thought derived from one sphere shape assumptions and attitudes in another. Our thinking is both anthropomorphic and a reflection of the world that informs it.
Why do we attach so much importance to the distinction between ourselves and other animals, to our own individual distinction and status in society rather than the qualities we can share and enjoy most widely?
Cyclical equality
A traditional tribal society may set sharp differentials between sexes and age-groups. Men’s and women’s roles are separate and correspond to a clear division of labour; but within each gender hierarchy, rights and responsibilities accrue with age, with rites of passage to mark transitions. Given a stable population in a stable environment, the lessons of experience hold good from one generation to the next and age confers authority. Most people, men and women, can hope to rise through the ranks from impotent infancy through productive/reproductive maturity to respected old age. Early subordination is compensated by later authority. The undeniable physiological differences between men and women combine with rigid demarcation of productive and reproductive functions to reduce the stress of inequality between men and women.
A choice of metaphors*
Thinking derives via metaphor from long experience in a concrete world. Conceptual understanding of the world is rooted in old interactions with nature and each other, preserved in language abstracted more or less unconsciously from familiar observations and routines.
Balance is important because we stand on two legs, and the word/metaphor re-emerges in justice, trade and finance, in scales and balance sheets. Manual labour, manufacture and management are all about how we handle things and each other. Evidence is weighed in court, to decide what this or that is worth, we weigh things up up among ourselves. What’s a life worth living, dying, killing for? We suffer highs and lows, psychological and meteorological. Investors seek high profits and low risks.
But what in the world – a spherical planet afloat in elastic space – do we mean by all this ‘high’ and ‘low’, up and down? Shouldn’t it be ‘in’ and ‘out,’ or roundabout? Was there ever a level playing field except in games? What do career ladders lean against? Each other? Odd that these metaphorical structures, convergent commanding heights can bring the great and good to actually touch, people much like ourselves, so close to each other, so far above our heads that they can whisper in each other’s ears.
Mental constructs arise from and return to physical reality and relationships. Their roots may be hardwired in our brains. But evolution is not monolithic, nor our brains short of alternative models and circuits: we’re not trapped in top-down pyramids.
* George Lakoff ‘Moral Politics’ etc
Competition and co-operation
Competition and co-operation are not mutually exclusive opposites but dynamic partners. The concept of equality involves comparison, measuring or balancing one AGAINST another. In games, as in life – though not quite a matter of life and death - we match, test and learn from each other. In play and in work, we learn to give and take, serve and return, win and lose. We may not always be equal, but we share a need for each other, in practice and for pleasure.
Some more equal than others
Disturbingly, some people – even peoples – prove more capable, more often, in more settings than others. Equality is an aspiration for the rest of us, a safety-net for high-fliers with the furthest to fall. If they survive their prime, they’ll grow old and need a hand. Meanwhile, if we’re lucky – given the choice and freedom to move around - we may recover on the swings what we lose on the roundabouts.
Barriers to empathy and mutual recognition
The more we can share and interact, compete and co-operate, recognise and communicate, the better our chance of mutual understanding: a combination of mutual recognition and informed fellow feeling. Our capacity for empathy and projection can only be properly developed if we can reach and see into each other’s lives in everyday day practice and exchange.
But, with divisions of income and wealth go divisions of occupation and class, environment, social status and real power. We are not just divided but ordered, segregated between richer and poorer, employers and employed, deciders and decided-for, those who can easily buy what they want and those who have to sell themselves. With segregation by income and class go other sorts of segregation: by age, race, gender and ability – not just discrimination against disability, but selection by ‘intelligence,’ the division of mental from manual skills.
The wider, more rigid and self-perpetuating the divisions, the less the social and practical basis for empathy and projection, the less free we are and the less able to feel for and recognise each other for what we are.
We don’t completely lose the capacity for empathy, the longing to bridge the gaps, but it’s a long shot. Separate but equal, apartheid, was always a delusion. Rich whites may applaud Zulu dances, rub noses with Maoris or swim with dolphins. Public schoolboys, and now girls go slumming. Aristos, actors and gangsters cosy up in clubs> But exotic fascination is no defence against mutual ignorance: noble savage turns to nigger-run-amok, good ole boys reveal themselves in lynchmob hoods; with phrases like collateral damage, deadpan officers contort the facts of death..
Equality and freedom
The wider the divisions of income and wealth, the steeper the ladders and wider the gaps between the rungs, the less freedom of movement and exchange between the occupations and lifestyles that the hierarchy separates. What’s obstructed is not just the capacity for empathy, mutual recognition and solidarity, but essential human freedom of movement and self-fulfilment, the possibility of getting beyond our given ladders, circles, fields and ruts. No blue-sky thinking from within the box!
How relative turns absolute
What we want, what we deem adequate - once minimal biological needs are met – depends on prevailing norms, so poverty is usually defined as less than 60% percentage of average wage.
Working on an isolated Manchester overspill estate in the early 1970s I was struck by the way relative translated into absolute poverty. Internally displaced persons spent on ‘luxuries’ and let ‘necessities’ slide. People came to Partington to escape homelessness or overcrowding, or because they had no job or family to hold them back. Transported from a more or less familiar old inner city to a maze of looping roads and empty grass, strangers took refuge in several sorts of brand-new council house, dog-packs beating tracks between the rubble and the grass. No gas meters, family and friends, second-hand shops…or jobs. But expensive central heating and free deliveries of HP furniture andTVs. Debts, rows, the need for drink or smoke more urgent than the will to cook or decent food. (I drank, smoked and rowed myself, but with more alternatives; job, wife and child, workmates and a van). Out of the remains of Tenants and Claimants groups came a People’s Rights Office. Where we learnt the worst of cut-offs, repossessions, fights and walk-outs, chip-pan fires, cot-deaths.
What’s changed, except for the worse? What better case or starting point for more equality?
Transparency
To expose the difference, to name and shame: following publication of Spirit Level, Dick Taverne introduced bill in Lords to make public company front their annual reports with an indication of the gap between top and bottom pay, the ratio of top salaries to wages of lowest-paid employees.
Equality worth fighting for?
Will information and reason do the trick? A combination of argument, naming and shaming, mutual understanding, altruism and enlightened self-interest?
Or will there have to be, a more direct confrontation between those with most to gain and those with most to lose? Are those who break the windows of banks and bankers’ houses to be condemned or applauded? Factory occupations? Wilful damage to 4x4s? Do we outlaw all violence, or distinguish between persons and property, between physical confrontation and killing people? Is the power of ‘reasonable force’ to be reserved to police (and unreasonable force to soldiers overseas) ?
As a community worker and adult educator, I found that aggression – in this case emotional - was an important element in mobilising ‘deprived’ groups in their own interest. Aggression, recognised, worked-through and laced with humour proved effective when it came to negotiations.
With our ‘Commonword’ writers’ workshop and publishing group in Manchester, the emergence of good new writing in a working class seemed also to involve an aggressive stand against some class conventions of prevailing Literature.
Expression, action and aggression are linked. Every outgoing and opening is also an assault, a challenge, displacement of what was before. Aggression, even violence, is not something to be suppressed and avoided at all costs. A fight that is not a fight-to-the-death is not the end of the story: peace is made, conflict tempered in negotiation, hard feelings softened and rewoven in mutual understanding.
What sort of stick will it take to shift a rich minority with much to lose? How can the poor majority unite in recognition of their rights, make themselves felt and undeniable? In assisting this process, we begin to recognise each other and ourselves, not just what sets us at odds but what we have in common and the pleasure of each other’s company.
PRECEPTS AND PRESCRIPTIONS
United we stand, divided we fall
Aesop(620-560 BC); picked up in US civil war Liberty Song by John Dickinson 1768 and later by patriots and trade unions around the world
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Various ancient Greeks and Luke 6:31, picked up in Charles Kingsley’s Waterbabies
Love thy neighbour as thyself:
Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself…. Leviticus 19:18
But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.
Leviticus 19:34
Jesus replied: “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ St Matthew 22:39.
Magna Carta 1215
XXIX. No Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the Land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either Justice or Right.
When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?
John Ball, c1381
Ball, an unruly priest, declared that ‘from the beginning all men by nature were created alike’ He called on his followers to ‘cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty’ (killing great lords of the realm, slaying lawyers, justices and jurors). On trial for his part in the Peasants’ Revolt, he was given his say, then hanged, drawn and quartered.
No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less…
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee. John Donne, Meditation, 1624
In the beginning of Time, the great Creator Reason, made the Earth to be a Common Treasury... but not one word was spoken in the beginning, That one branch of mankind should rule over another.
Gerrard Winstanley and others in The Levellers Standard 1649
Church of England Marriage Vows 1662
I,,
take thee.
to my wedded wife/husband,
to have and to hold from this day forward,
for better for worse,
for richer for poorer,
in sickness and in health,
to love and to cherish, to love, cherish, and to obey*
till death us do part,
according to God's holy ordinance;
and thereto I plight thee my troth.
*This obvious inequality is now mostly omitted. A Church report in 2006 said ‘obey’ might now be outdated and could be used by men to justify violence.
US Declaration of Independence
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness
Thomas Jefferson 1776
Liberté, égalité, fraternité French national motto, from revolutionary slogan 1789
All for one, and one for all! ‘Un pour tous, tous pour un’
Alexandre Dumas, Three Musketeers 1844; unofficial motto of Swiss Republic
Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère! (hypocrit reader, my double, my brother!)
Charles Baudelaire, Fleurs du Mal 1857
From each according to his ability, to each according to his need
popularised by Karl Marx in 1875 Critique of Gotha Programme
The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have…and everything which you are unable to do, your money can do for you.
Karl Marx again, from ‘Marx’s Concept of Man’ by Erich Fromm)
One man, one vote?
Corsica was the first European state to include women, from 1755 until 1769. In UK, women under 30 got the vote in 1928, and still have it today.
Four Freedoms
1. Freedom of speech and expression
2. Freedom of religion
3. Freedom from want
4. Freedom from fear
Franklin D. Roosevelt 1941
Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948
…recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world (Preamble)
Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate* for the health and well-being of himself and of his family… (Article 25)
*what’s ‘adequate’ must be relative, as is ‘want’ in freedom-from-want.
UK Equality Bill 2009
Its introduction stated: ‘The Government is committed to creating a fair society with fair chances for everyone. For society to be fair people must have the chance to live their lives freely and fulfil their potential. To achieve this we need to tackle inequality and root out discrimination.
Equality not only has benefits for individuals but for society and the economy too. A more equal workforce is a stronger workforce. A more equal society is one more at ease with itself.
To help us create the equal and fair society we all want to see we will introduce an
important new package of measures at the heart of which is a new Equality Bill’
‘Fair society with fair chances’? The draft bill pulled together anti-discrimination law on age, gender, race and disability. It seemed to overlook the elephant in the room, the widening gap between rich and poor (although the poorest happen to include a disproportionate number of women, blacks, disabled etc). Now an addition to the bill will ‘require Ministers of the Crown and others...to have regard to the desirability of reducing socio-economic inequalities.’
Inequality hurts, equality heals! In their book The Spirit Level (Allen Lane) my brother Richard Wilkinson and his partner Kate Pickett demonstrate the damage done by economic inequality and the benefits to most people of greater equality. These thoughts of mine are not a substitute for research, but the sort of searching-about that sometimes precedes research, or action. I’m trying to pick up where they leave off: if what The Spirit Level says is true (and it is!) then what’s stopping us, where might we find the will and ways to change?
A will to change?
The poor may be inclined to equality, but they lack belief in themselves and the possibility of a fairer world. How to build belief and realise potential power?
To move corporations and governments to redistribute, there must be a more general belief in and will to equality, a shifting concensus. We have to look beyond platonic argument, statistics and the promise of longterm gains for those with most to lose. Even simple economic solutions require change on non-economic fronts: to maximise mutual sympathy and social solidarity; to minimise individual and sectional selfishness; to embolden the poor and soften the rich; to replace dependence on money differentials with other bases for social standing and self-esteem
Monetised inequality
Money – wealth and income – is the main driver and measure of inequality under capitalism. Or, to put it differently, capitalism is monetised inequality. Money is the main handle on contemporary inequalities; redistribution of wealth and income is the most obvious means of redress…
BUT human inequalities did not begin and wont end with capitalism and the money economy. Inequality has taken many forms as swords were beaten into ploughshares, crowns into coins… stocks and shares. Capitalism, like the old feudal order, is not geared to equality. Money will not redistribute itself. We cannot assume that capitalism is fated to self-destruct, nor can we rely on science and sweet reason to motivate governments and minorities with most to lose.
Structural change
Differentials vary widely within and between capitalist economies, leaving room for improvement and convergence on best practice. But capitalism breeds and feeds on inequality of income and wealth; sooner or later, a move to greater equality will require structural change, a systemic commitment to sharing, co-operation and the public good as against private profit and sectional advantage. The need for structural change does not begin or end with capitalist finance and industry: it applies also, and immediately, to the way we organise education, health and other public services. How long can we tolerate a two-tier division between public and private provision?
Obstacles to change
The rich, or relatively rich – have-mores with most to lose – include most of the decision-makers and opinion-formers. As the Spirit Level shows, many of them may also stand to gain from greater equality BUT a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush: the prospect of measurable short term loss – reduced income or higher tax - is likely to outweigh the prospect of less quantifiable future benefits.
This conservative bias MIGHT not preclude a more equitable government from closing gaps. Higher benefits, wage regulation or progressive tax might be ‘sold’ as cost-effective: the costs to be offset by savings on health, law and order etc. BUT note recent flutter in the dovecot when tax was raised to 50% on incomes over £150,000 (although this is about six times the national average, which is already more than most of us can reasonably expect!)
Awaking desire and belief
The poor have always hankered for greater equality, the rich have half-believed in it – before the law, perhaps, or in the eyes of God, anywhere but the bank-balance or Land Registry. For the poor – the have-less majority – the task is to translate desire into belief and practical determination. For the rich, to find the combination of stick and carrot that will melt or frighten them into shelling out.
(Bankers’ bonus payments were publicised in the wake of their credit crunch debacle, but though they were named and shamed most did not waive or repay their bonuses. MPs too were named and shamed for greedy claims, and soon began volunteering to repay: not because they were shamed, but because their shaming was a threat to their jobs and salaries: constituency parties have the power to deselect and voters not to.)
And the carrots? If not wealth, we’ll need to offer other grounds for self-esteem and source of happiness. How to offer a foretaste of something better, while ironing out inequalities in the existing system and piloting alternatives?
.
What if we’re wrong?
The relative equality of Japan has more to do with the survival of older fraternal traditions than with the capitalist structure and dynamic those traditions restrain. But could that sort of counter-current go further, transforming structures from within? Could capitalism survive the erosion of differentials, with difference of wealth and income becoming largely symbolic (like the split seconds between winners and also-rans on the race course)? Could other measures of status, power and success come to replace big gaps in property and earnings: barristers have traditionally taken a wage-cut to become judges; occasional bankers and entrepreneurs turn from private greed to public good: might this not happen more generally within existing hierarchies and practices? Might not an enlightened Market reward the goodness of a company’s product and social practice as much as its prices and profits? We need to ask these questions, if only to understand our enemy.
A surface office culture of first names and shared canteens may indicate a deeper wish. It wasn’t for nothing that Christian monarchs washed paupers’ feet, and Officers still serve Christmas dinners to Men… But what are straws in the wind without wind?
Another dream
The Labour Movement - Labour Party and Trade Unions – was to have mobilised the power of the poor and the better nature of the rich to reappropriate the wealth of land and industry. A newly conscious working class, with nothing to sell but its labour, was to take over the means of production and mastery of their own lives. The ruling class would be subsumed, the state wither away.
Social democracy did not, in that vision, stop short at the threshold of employment. Majority rule would be extended to where it mattered most: the direction of the business and industry that shape our lives and world. Long before Marxism, the ideal of commonwealth combined the economic with the social and political elements of community. Common humanity and common sense!
Nor did democracy in that vision lie primarily in election of representatives. More important was the power and freedom of groups and individuals to decide and act together in their own interests. Representative democracy would come into play where direct democracy fell short…
Facts of life
Somewhere between dream and ‘correct analysis’ lie facts of life. It is a fact that many men and women from different classes and cultures have agreed that things could and should be different, have shared a presumption of equality. Not just between friends, but between enemies:
‘If you prick us do we not bleed, if you tickle us do we not laugh…?’ Shylock may have been bent on revenge, but behind his pound of flesh is the simple symmetry of an eye for an eye. Our eye for symmetry is matched by a capacity for sympathy. Our individual mindsets are shaped and cross-cut by incoming signals and reflex responses. We are built to feel for each other and respond. In primates and other mammals, body-language works between us before we know it. The ‘limbic resonance’ in our middle brain is picked up on brainscans, and our responses can be observed in sympathetic reflex, from infectious yawning to the involuntary clenching of fist and raising of hand-to-mouth.. In the neo-cortex, the more specifically human bit of the brain, can be located a process of projection. Practical experiment indicates a corresponding ability to put ourselves in place of others, exchanging points of view.*
On that basis, through language, cross-referencing and generalisation we arrive at shared overviews, the best being those which correspond to the most varied viewpoints.
The processes of empathy, projection and overview stem from a common physiology, our evolution as a species in a shared world. Our genetic capacity for empathy and projection, interaction and co-operation is developed and extended through experience and practice, our families and a common culture developed as we live, work and play together (games have a special importance for human and some other mammals.)
Across divisions of class, occupation and gender, a shared animal life-cycle underpins a measure of common understanding: our lives describe a familiar arc from impotent infancy through capable prime, sage middle age and back into dependency. While men’s productive labour has become separate and specialised, women’s reproductive labour is more widely shared, the basis for a mutual sympathy denied to men.
The nearest we can get to objectivity, a balanced view, is not through detachment but the widest possible sympathy, which depends in turn on a range of shared experience, freedom to move and communicate, time to reflect.
*Thomas Lewis et al in A General Theory of Love
Biggest not best. A part or apart…
Fitness, as in the survival of the fittest, is not a matter of size, strength or even intelligence. Fitness means fitting in, adaptability.
Distinction, in the sense of dominating or standing out, may not be healthy. The tallest trees don’t stand alone or head-and-shoulders above the rest: they grow in woods, depend on their peers for support and protection from wind and frost; competition focuses their growth and draws them up. Ivy thrives because it does not overshadow or starve the trees on which it hangs.
Biological models do not apply directly to social development but patterns of thought derived from one sphere shape assumptions and attitudes in another. Our thinking is both anthropomorphic and a reflection of the world that informs it.
Why do we attach so much importance to the distinction between ourselves and other animals, to our own individual distinction and status in society rather than the qualities we can share and enjoy most widely?
Cyclical equality
A traditional tribal society may set sharp differentials between sexes and age-groups. Men’s and women’s roles are separate and correspond to a clear division of labour; but within each gender hierarchy, rights and responsibilities accrue with age, with rites of passage to mark transitions. Given a stable population in a stable environment, the lessons of experience hold good from one generation to the next and age confers authority. Most people, men and women, can hope to rise through the ranks from impotent infancy through productive/reproductive maturity to respected old age. Early subordination is compensated by later authority. The undeniable physiological differences between men and women combine with rigid demarcation of productive and reproductive functions to reduce the stress of inequality between men and women.
A choice of metaphors*
Thinking derives via metaphor from long experience in a concrete world. Conceptual understanding of the world is rooted in old interactions with nature and each other, preserved in language abstracted more or less unconsciously from familiar observations and routines.
Balance is important because we stand on two legs, and the word/metaphor re-emerges in justice, trade and finance, in scales and balance sheets. Manual labour, manufacture and management are all about how we handle things and each other. Evidence is weighed in court, to decide what this or that is worth, we weigh things up up among ourselves. What’s a life worth living, dying, killing for? We suffer highs and lows, psychological and meteorological. Investors seek high profits and low risks.
But what in the world – a spherical planet afloat in elastic space – do we mean by all this ‘high’ and ‘low’, up and down? Shouldn’t it be ‘in’ and ‘out,’ or roundabout? Was there ever a level playing field except in games? What do career ladders lean against? Each other? Odd that these metaphorical structures, convergent commanding heights can bring the great and good to actually touch, people much like ourselves, so close to each other, so far above our heads that they can whisper in each other’s ears.
Mental constructs arise from and return to physical reality and relationships. Their roots may be hardwired in our brains. But evolution is not monolithic, nor our brains short of alternative models and circuits: we’re not trapped in top-down pyramids.
* George Lakoff ‘Moral Politics’ etc
Competition and co-operation
Competition and co-operation are not mutually exclusive opposites but dynamic partners. The concept of equality involves comparison, measuring or balancing one AGAINST another. In games, as in life – though not quite a matter of life and death - we match, test and learn from each other. In play and in work, we learn to give and take, serve and return, win and lose. We may not always be equal, but we share a need for each other, in practice and for pleasure.
Some more equal than others
Disturbingly, some people – even peoples – prove more capable, more often, in more settings than others. Equality is an aspiration for the rest of us, a safety-net for high-fliers with the furthest to fall. If they survive their prime, they’ll grow old and need a hand. Meanwhile, if we’re lucky – given the choice and freedom to move around - we may recover on the swings what we lose on the roundabouts.
Barriers to empathy and mutual recognition
The more we can share and interact, compete and co-operate, recognise and communicate, the better our chance of mutual understanding: a combination of mutual recognition and informed fellow feeling. Our capacity for empathy and projection can only be properly developed if we can reach and see into each other’s lives in everyday day practice and exchange.
But, with divisions of income and wealth go divisions of occupation and class, environment, social status and real power. We are not just divided but ordered, segregated between richer and poorer, employers and employed, deciders and decided-for, those who can easily buy what they want and those who have to sell themselves. With segregation by income and class go other sorts of segregation: by age, race, gender and ability – not just discrimination against disability, but selection by ‘intelligence,’ the division of mental from manual skills.
The wider, more rigid and self-perpetuating the divisions, the less the social and practical basis for empathy and projection, the less free we are and the less able to feel for and recognise each other for what we are.
We don’t completely lose the capacity for empathy, the longing to bridge the gaps, but it’s a long shot. Separate but equal, apartheid, was always a delusion. Rich whites may applaud Zulu dances, rub noses with Maoris or swim with dolphins. Public schoolboys, and now girls go slumming. Aristos, actors and gangsters cosy up in clubs> But exotic fascination is no defence against mutual ignorance: noble savage turns to nigger-run-amok, good ole boys reveal themselves in lynchmob hoods; with phrases like collateral damage, deadpan officers contort the facts of death..
Equality and freedom
The wider the divisions of income and wealth, the steeper the ladders and wider the gaps between the rungs, the less freedom of movement and exchange between the occupations and lifestyles that the hierarchy separates. What’s obstructed is not just the capacity for empathy, mutual recognition and solidarity, but essential human freedom of movement and self-fulfilment, the possibility of getting beyond our given ladders, circles, fields and ruts. No blue-sky thinking from within the box!
How relative turns absolute
What we want, what we deem adequate - once minimal biological needs are met – depends on prevailing norms, so poverty is usually defined as less than 60% percentage of average wage.
Working on an isolated Manchester overspill estate in the early 1970s I was struck by the way relative translated into absolute poverty. Internally displaced persons spent on ‘luxuries’ and let ‘necessities’ slide. People came to Partington to escape homelessness or overcrowding, or because they had no job or family to hold them back. Transported from a more or less familiar old inner city to a maze of looping roads and empty grass, strangers took refuge in several sorts of brand-new council house, dog-packs beating tracks between the rubble and the grass. No gas meters, family and friends, second-hand shops…or jobs. But expensive central heating and free deliveries of HP furniture andTVs. Debts, rows, the need for drink or smoke more urgent than the will to cook or decent food. (I drank, smoked and rowed myself, but with more alternatives; job, wife and child, workmates and a van). Out of the remains of Tenants and Claimants groups came a People’s Rights Office. Where we learnt the worst of cut-offs, repossessions, fights and walk-outs, chip-pan fires, cot-deaths.
What’s changed, except for the worse? What better case or starting point for more equality?
Transparency
To expose the difference, to name and shame: following publication of Spirit Level, Dick Taverne introduced bill in Lords to make public company front their annual reports with an indication of the gap between top and bottom pay, the ratio of top salaries to wages of lowest-paid employees.
Equality worth fighting for?
Will information and reason do the trick? A combination of argument, naming and shaming, mutual understanding, altruism and enlightened self-interest?
Or will there have to be, a more direct confrontation between those with most to gain and those with most to lose? Are those who break the windows of banks and bankers’ houses to be condemned or applauded? Factory occupations? Wilful damage to 4x4s? Do we outlaw all violence, or distinguish between persons and property, between physical confrontation and killing people? Is the power of ‘reasonable force’ to be reserved to police (and unreasonable force to soldiers overseas) ?
As a community worker and adult educator, I found that aggression – in this case emotional - was an important element in mobilising ‘deprived’ groups in their own interest. Aggression, recognised, worked-through and laced with humour proved effective when it came to negotiations.
With our ‘Commonword’ writers’ workshop and publishing group in Manchester, the emergence of good new writing in a working class seemed also to involve an aggressive stand against some class conventions of prevailing Literature.
Expression, action and aggression are linked. Every outgoing and opening is also an assault, a challenge, displacement of what was before. Aggression, even violence, is not something to be suppressed and avoided at all costs. A fight that is not a fight-to-the-death is not the end of the story: peace is made, conflict tempered in negotiation, hard feelings softened and rewoven in mutual understanding.
What sort of stick will it take to shift a rich minority with much to lose? How can the poor majority unite in recognition of their rights, make themselves felt and undeniable? In assisting this process, we begin to recognise each other and ourselves, not just what sets us at odds but what we have in common and the pleasure of each other’s company.
Best of enemies?
Jeremy Paxman on TV interviewed war veterans about their experiences from the Falklands, Iraq and Afghanistan. In this company, including a woman reservist, Paxman was unusually polite. He asked one para, what he thought of the Taliban and the man said simply ‘They’re good..’ ‘What do you mean, good?’ said Paxman, taken aback. ‘They were good fighters... and they believed in what they were fighting for.’
In Palestine, I was struck by the writings of an early Zionist called Jabotinsky who argued for implacable action against Palestinian Arabs, because they, like the Jews, would keep fighting for their land as long as there was any hope…
The Algerian war was ended by General de Gaulle in what he called the ‘paix des braves.’ (Piaf’s ‘Je ne regrette rien’ was a theme tune for both FLN officers and French OAS).
(Class traitors: honourable profession! There has always been a small minority moved by compassion, discomfort, misadventure or objective reasoning to join the mob. They bring with them some weapons from the enemy, and an olive branch, the promise of more inclusive humanity to come.)
Common enemy: something to unite against
In the Second World War, civilian health in Britain improved and the mortality gap between rich and poor narrowed. Rationing boosted the diet of the poorest, morale was generally high, and the division and stress of social inequality were offset by patriotic solidarity. Does such unity require a dramatic enemy, and evil something and/or somebody to unite against?
Past radical strategies have often combined the two: monarchy and the king, feudalism and aristocrats, capitalism and the ruling class, bosses in bowler hats. If our focus is to be on inequality, who now best embodies this? Bankers, bosses, professionals, the wealthiest or highest-earning 10%...or 20% Anyone with more than us?
Or might it be possible to aim off, to find our unity – and will to equality – in face of some other common threat, for instance climate change? Or a combination of the two. Combatting climate change and inequality are closely linked: climate change, like wartime austerity, requires a general tightening-of-belts and sharing of resources: if only to keep the poor majority on side.
Objectively, the threat of climate change may be more real than the wartime risk to civilians of getting hit by bombs, but it’s not something we hear overhead like bombers at night, and – as with the threats of inequality – the enemy doesn’t come in recognisable uniform. If inequality or climate change do have a human face, it’s probably our own.
Simple redistribution
Simple the will were there, we could narrow differentials of wealth and earnings by:- progressive taxation on income, capital gains and inheritancestatutory minimum (and maximum?) earnings
- compulsion on employers to publish pay and expenses as well as shareholdings and dividends
- linking of pensions and benefits to average income (as distinct from ‘cost of living’)
incentives to employers to narrow pay differentials - tax incentives and encouragement for mutual,co-operative and community enterprise
Structural change - abolition or opening up of private sector services, particularly in health and education, which offer priority or privilege for cash
- extension of social democracy to capitalist companies, the right of workers to vote and be represented in policy-making, appointments and remuneration
- social contracts for companies and corporate bodies, including commitments to employees, customers, community, environment and the quality of goods and services they provide (including quality of media information!)
- removal of distinctions and barriers between mental and manual disciplines in employment, education and training
- a statutory year or two of community service/training (including art, sport and games) for young people between secondary and higher education, school and employment - to broaden experience, break down barriers and open up possibilities before lifetime choices are made.
- citizen’s contracts for individuals, a formal coming of age, making rights and responsibilities explicit. On a par with commitments of mutual care and loyalty laid out in marriage vows and citizenship ceremonies for immigrants
- an Equality Party might not come amiss, now Labour’s lost the plot (I might not join it, unless it were the other sort of party: Humanite, the French CP paper, used to run a street festival, with whisky and vodka to speed the ending of the Cold War. A big tent, perhaps?
Could the Equality Trust become or initiate a coalition of the poor and their representatives, unions, NGOs and other committed bodies?
PRECEPTS AND PRESCRIPTIONS
United we stand, divided we fall
Aesop(620-560 BC); picked up in US civil war Liberty Song by John Dickinson 1768 and later by patriots and trade unions around the world
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Various ancient Greeks and Luke 6:31, picked up in Charles Kingsley’s Waterbabies
Love thy neighbour as thyself:
Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself…. Leviticus 19:18
But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.
Leviticus 19:34
Jesus replied: “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ St Matthew 22:39.
Magna Carta 1215
XXIX. No Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the Land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either Justice or Right.
When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?
John Ball, c1381
Ball, an unruly priest, declared that ‘from the beginning all men by nature were created alike’ He called on his followers to ‘cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty’ (killing great lords of the realm, slaying lawyers, justices and jurors). On trial for his part in the Peasants’ Revolt, he was given his say, then hanged, drawn and quartered.
No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less…
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee. John Donne, Meditation, 1624
In the beginning of Time, the great Creator Reason, made the Earth to be a Common Treasury... but not one word was spoken in the beginning, That one branch of mankind should rule over another.
Gerrard Winstanley and others in The Levellers Standard 1649
Church of England Marriage Vows 1662
I,
take thee
to my wedded wife/husband,
to have and to hold from this day forward,
for better for worse,
for richer for poorer,
in sickness and in health,
till death us do part,
according to God's holy ordinance;
and thereto I plight thee my troth.
*This obvious inequality is now mostly omitted. A Church report in 2006 said ‘obey’ might now be outdated and could be used by men to justify violence.
US Declaration of Independence
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness
Thomas Jefferson 1776
Liberté, égalité, fraternité French national motto, from revolutionary slogan 1789
All for one, and one for all! ‘Un pour tous, tous pour un’
Alexandre Dumas, Three Musketeers 1844; unofficial motto of Swiss Republic
Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère! (hypocrit reader, my double, my brother!)
Charles Baudelaire, Fleurs du Mal 1857
From each according to his ability, to each according to his need
popularised by Karl Marx in 1875 Critique of Gotha Programme
The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have…and everything which you are unable to do, your money can do for you.
Karl Marx again, from ‘Marx’s Concept of Man’ by Erich Fromm)
One man, one vote?
Corsica was the first European state to include women, from 1755 until 1769. In UK, women under 30 got the vote in 1928, and still have it today.
Four Freedoms
1. Freedom of speech and expression
2. Freedom of religion
3. Freedom from want
4. Freedom from fear
Franklin D. Roosevelt 1941
Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948
…recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world (Preamble)
Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate* for the health and well-being of himself and of his family… (Article 25)
*what’s ‘adequate’ must be relative, as is ‘want’ in freedom-from-want.
UK Equality Bill 2009
Its introduction stated: ‘The Government is committed to creating a fair society with fair chances for everyone. For society to be fair people must have the chance to live their lives freely and fulfil their potential. To achieve this we need to tackle inequality and root out discrimination.
Equality not only has benefits for individuals but for society and the economy too. A more equal workforce is a stronger workforce. A more equal society is one more at ease with itself.
To help us create the equal and fair society we all want to see we will introduce an
important new package of measures at the heart of which is a new Equality Bill’
‘Fair society with fair chances’? The draft bill pulled together anti-discrimination law on age, gender, race and disability. It seemed to overlook the elephant in the room, the widening gap between rich and poor (although the poorest happen to include a disproportionate number of women, blacks, disabled etc). Now an addition to the bill will ‘require Ministers of the Crown and others...to have regard to the desirability of reducing socio-economic inequalities.’
Monday 27 April 2009
SPARTACUS, AGAIN…
Watched bits of Bolshoi Spartacus on TV Friday night, because I remembered being moved by final scene nearly 50 years ago. I saw the same company do it, in a very similar production in Cairo. I was teaching in a government school, on a year out from Oxford, at a time when the Soviet Union was courting Nasser’s Egypt. Most people in Cairo were not that keen on Russian ballet, and nor was I. But I’d heard of Ulanova and now Plissetskaya, and tickets were cheap enough for me to risk it.
Seeing it again, I’d forgotten how formulaic it was, this Spartacus, with its alternating solos and choruses, virile slaves and camp legionaries, sincere young lovers and cynical coquetry. But the Cuban lead dancer believed in what he was doing, and at the end – after missing most of the battle scenes for Have I got News for You – I was moved again by the final set piece.
Spartacus dead, mourned by his lover and the remnants of his army. Earlier his body has been hoisted aloft, like a dead animal, on the points of Roman spears. Now he is lifted gently by his followers, raised slowly on a human pyre of upstretched arms. The light picks up the whiteness of the arms and fingers that almost hide the body they support. From behind, there rises the body of the bereft woman, vertical, eyes and arms raised in supplication, then folding forward over the body, head down, dark hair like a waterfall onto the bearers’ hands and arms…
Except that this production was not quite as I remembered it. The curtains closed while the woman was still reaching up with a halo of round shield behind her. I prefer to remember it as it was... Isn't memory always as it was?
Now I realise that this is one of several related images I bear in mind and recall from time to time. A couple come from other people’s art, a couple from my own life and this is the first time I’ve made the link between them all.
In the first London production of West Side Story there was a dance sequence marking the death of the young lovers, and what might have been their meeting again. The two bodies rise, as if flying in a dream, lifted, one from each side out of the dark wings. Their paths, orbits, cross, through a pool of light high above the middle of the stage and sink back into darkness. A rainbow drained of its colour and promise, no sweet sorrow, bottomless despair.
Antonioni, in Red Desert, I think, has a young woman driving through the desert inb an old car, hearing the radio report of her lover’s death as the police close in on a plane he’s hijacked then returned to base. Act gratuit… She stops the car by the road, switches the engine off and stands, back to camera, in silence at the side of the road. Beyond her is a scrubby bush, its tangled branches in contrast to the long, smooth hair that hangs down her back. She stands for what seems a long time, then her hair, and the wiry bush begin to move, stirred by a sudden breath of wind.
Only now it occurs to me that these images have engraved themselves on my mind in tribute to an actual memory. I remember, or have reinvented, the sight and sound of my mother as she heard the news of Tony’s, her younger brother’s, death not long before the end of the war. He, I learned later, was killed by a booby trap as the Germans retreated from the Ardennes. We were back in London, in the basement of our house, when she got the news on the phone, from her mother perhaps. All I remember is the wail or groan my mother made, unlike any sound I’d heard from her, and the way she slumped against the wall. It must have been a wall-mounted phone. If I’m not imagining it, she crumpled, slid down into the angle of wall and floor.
My mother had thick, dark hair and her name was Mary. Now I wonder if religious pictures – all those images of Virgin Mary and her crucified son – helped link that early experience of mine, and hers, to later images of stage and film. Images fresh images beget, or hook up like trucks on a train. We seem to need those images, to know what it is we might be feeling or have felt. The images can be received, or made up in our own heads, by mistake, as it were, in dreams or on purpose in words or paint or dance. And music? I’m never sure how that works, carrying so much feeling with no image to speak of…
I was going to say we may need some image between ourselves and a reality we cannot quite face head-on, and some mirror to catch and hold it in. Perseus was given a bright shield, looking into that he could see enough of the head with the snaky locks, to cut it off before it turned him to stone. Perhaps it’s not just monsters we need to contain in images, but things, people, we may have loved.
Not just mothers, or lovers snatched by death. I loved Beatrice, but we parted alive and in good health. She died very young, but it was nearly 20 years after we split up that I heard about that. I had written to her c/o her mother, in the hope we might meet. Not to pick up where we left off, but lay the ghosts of eternal youth, each other all those years ago. Malheureusement, Beatrice est decedee. Her mother's letter shocked me, although she wrote affectionately and enclosed pictures of her daughter's two teenage children. I was shocked not only that Beatrice was dead, but that she'd been dead for four years with me imagining her alive, since just before Will was born. Besides, grief was new to me. I remember walking out of our house in Swindon, going nowhere in particular, and seeing a woman with a child in a pushchair coming towards me. They looked nice, and I was half ashamed to find myself noticing that. Half a minute later, when they were ten yards away from me that I realised that the woman was Ada and the boy in the pushchair Will.
It wasn't long before I remember the story of the other Mary, Magdalen, walking desolate in the garden and mistaking the risen Jesus for a gardener. Religious images, romantic images, have a lot to answer for. What would we do without them?
Watched bits of Bolshoi Spartacus on TV Friday night, because I remembered being moved by final scene nearly 50 years ago. I saw the same company do it, in a very similar production in Cairo. I was teaching in a government school, on a year out from Oxford, at a time when the Soviet Union was courting Nasser’s Egypt. Most people in Cairo were not that keen on Russian ballet, and nor was I. But I’d heard of Ulanova and now Plissetskaya, and tickets were cheap enough for me to risk it.
Seeing it again, I’d forgotten how formulaic it was, this Spartacus, with its alternating solos and choruses, virile slaves and camp legionaries, sincere young lovers and cynical coquetry. But the Cuban lead dancer believed in what he was doing, and at the end – after missing most of the battle scenes for Have I got News for You – I was moved again by the final set piece.
Spartacus dead, mourned by his lover and the remnants of his army. Earlier his body has been hoisted aloft, like a dead animal, on the points of Roman spears. Now he is lifted gently by his followers, raised slowly on a human pyre of upstretched arms. The light picks up the whiteness of the arms and fingers that almost hide the body they support. From behind, there rises the body of the bereft woman, vertical, eyes and arms raised in supplication, then folding forward over the body, head down, dark hair like a waterfall onto the bearers’ hands and arms…
Except that this production was not quite as I remembered it. The curtains closed while the woman was still reaching up with a halo of round shield behind her. I prefer to remember it as it was... Isn't memory always as it was?
Now I realise that this is one of several related images I bear in mind and recall from time to time. A couple come from other people’s art, a couple from my own life and this is the first time I’ve made the link between them all.
In the first London production of West Side Story there was a dance sequence marking the death of the young lovers, and what might have been their meeting again. The two bodies rise, as if flying in a dream, lifted, one from each side out of the dark wings. Their paths, orbits, cross, through a pool of light high above the middle of the stage and sink back into darkness. A rainbow drained of its colour and promise, no sweet sorrow, bottomless despair.
Antonioni, in Red Desert, I think, has a young woman driving through the desert inb an old car, hearing the radio report of her lover’s death as the police close in on a plane he’s hijacked then returned to base. Act gratuit… She stops the car by the road, switches the engine off and stands, back to camera, in silence at the side of the road. Beyond her is a scrubby bush, its tangled branches in contrast to the long, smooth hair that hangs down her back. She stands for what seems a long time, then her hair, and the wiry bush begin to move, stirred by a sudden breath of wind.
Only now it occurs to me that these images have engraved themselves on my mind in tribute to an actual memory. I remember, or have reinvented, the sight and sound of my mother as she heard the news of Tony’s, her younger brother’s, death not long before the end of the war. He, I learned later, was killed by a booby trap as the Germans retreated from the Ardennes. We were back in London, in the basement of our house, when she got the news on the phone, from her mother perhaps. All I remember is the wail or groan my mother made, unlike any sound I’d heard from her, and the way she slumped against the wall. It must have been a wall-mounted phone. If I’m not imagining it, she crumpled, slid down into the angle of wall and floor.
My mother had thick, dark hair and her name was Mary. Now I wonder if religious pictures – all those images of Virgin Mary and her crucified son – helped link that early experience of mine, and hers, to later images of stage and film. Images fresh images beget, or hook up like trucks on a train. We seem to need those images, to know what it is we might be feeling or have felt. The images can be received, or made up in our own heads, by mistake, as it were, in dreams or on purpose in words or paint or dance. And music? I’m never sure how that works, carrying so much feeling with no image to speak of…
I was going to say we may need some image between ourselves and a reality we cannot quite face head-on, and some mirror to catch and hold it in. Perseus was given a bright shield, looking into that he could see enough of the head with the snaky locks, to cut it off before it turned him to stone. Perhaps it’s not just monsters we need to contain in images, but things, people, we may have loved.
Not just mothers, or lovers snatched by death. I loved Beatrice, but we parted alive and in good health. She died very young, but it was nearly 20 years after we split up that I heard about that. I had written to her c/o her mother, in the hope we might meet. Not to pick up where we left off, but lay the ghosts of eternal youth, each other all those years ago. Malheureusement, Beatrice est decedee. Her mother's letter shocked me, although she wrote affectionately and enclosed pictures of her daughter's two teenage children. I was shocked not only that Beatrice was dead, but that she'd been dead for four years with me imagining her alive, since just before Will was born. Besides, grief was new to me. I remember walking out of our house in Swindon, going nowhere in particular, and seeing a woman with a child in a pushchair coming towards me. They looked nice, and I was half ashamed to find myself noticing that. Half a minute later, when they were ten yards away from me that I realised that the woman was Ada and the boy in the pushchair Will.
It wasn't long before I remember the story of the other Mary, Magdalen, walking desolate in the garden and mistaking the risen Jesus for a gardener. Religious images, romantic images, have a lot to answer for. What would we do without them?
Wednesday 15 April 2009
‘Wots left?’ Beginning with Love...
LEFT = Love, Equality, Freedom, Truth and Love comes first. So what might it mean?
A feeling for somebody or something. Need or desire for others, pleasure in their company. Seeking what’s best in and for them. Kinship and communion in a world we share. Love thy neighbour as thyself, do as you would be done by etc/
BUT what if we DON’T love ourselves, or cant count on others responding as we would?
Virtuous and vicious circles: given love, we learn to love; unloved, we don’t… Kinship, familiarity, goes with closeness, mutual understanding and sharing – looking after each other as we look after ourselves. Abused, we're inclined to abuse, but sometimes, mercifully, dont (a restorative mutation?)
Love’s not just a feeling, but a fact of life, a capacity built in. We are born dependent, survive only when cared for. Caring is at once physical and emotional. What we get becomes us, the feeling and responses along with the weight we gain from our mother’s milk.
From mothers and sons to sons and lovers, dependency mutualised. And daughters? More complicated perhaps... As sons become fathers and daughters mothers, we become each other as we become ourselves.*
We’re shaped by what's done to us and what we do. We understand each other – and the world - through our interactions. We’re formed, transformed, imprinted as we engage, reach out, take hold and register. Our hand takes the shape of what it can grasp and bears it to mind.
What we perceive, the image we recall, is not neutral or coincidental: we see what we’re looking for, what strikes or is shown to us. Five senses, plus one equals six. Seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, touching plus the stirrings inside ourselves - 'heart' or 'gut' feelings, an amorphous sixth sense, no less physical than the rest.
Infants depend on mothers and fathers, adults on a wider material world. As we grow up, we can no longer be rely on food and warmth being brought to us. But with our growing abilities, and a bit of luck, we can find more or less what we need. The world as we know it, need it and love it, is at once physical and human, economic and social and…
And what? Good? Beautiful? Loveable? I can neither dismiss those words, or know what to make of them, unless it’s a tautology – circular, with one leading to the other and back.
We don’t just see the world for ourselves, or as it is, but through the images and language of others. Some images are held up, over our heads as it were, for special reverence. Meanwhile we learn from each other and get to know each other as we make our living together. Our world-view, skills and circumstances, like our languages and landscapes, towns and villages, are common property.
Now we begin to realise that our world, like our parents, is not immortal. As we grow stronger, and our world in some ways weakaer, it too depends on us.... What am I saying? My parents are already dead, I am the endangered one! Which doesn't matter if people and places I love live on. My now, their then, if not quite interchangeable.
By nature and nurture, we have more in common than we have to set us apart. BUT that doesn’t make us identical. In our genes and upbringing, history and circumstances we are also, inevitably, different. Often we are encouraged to hide or ignore this difference – sometimes to exaggerate its importance, in ourselves or others. If familiarity breeds contempt, this is usually because we take each other, or the world, for granted, fail to register difference and change.
CONTRADICTION: I am me and you are you, a tree is a tree and a forest a forest. Although in fact none is the same, from one to another, or moment to moment, life is not long enough to mark the differences. We’re bound to label, class, prejudge, assume. We take what is to be as what has been, for granted...'til Birnam wood do come to Dunsinane.’ The unmoveable moves, or the worm turns, whatever that may mean, and we’re taken by surprise. For better or worse.
True love, like survival, treads a narrow and uncertain line between known and unknown, an act of faith or tentative presumption, between what we most fear and desire. Like driving at night, when what looks like a road ahead, a familiar pattern of light, could be almost anything.
Idolatry, Romantic love, and Hate. In romantic love, we idealise, imagine an other from afar. We may prefer a ready image to what we cannot, or will not face or handle in the flesh. Sometimes we carve up the world itself between imaginary Heaven and Hell, a higher Spirit and a load of material mechanics. Then, somewhere between these higher and lower orders, the baby is lost with the bathwater. As God is Good, Eveil - the devil as lived - becomes possesses some hapless neighbour. We tar and feather a class or race as Monsters, Beasts – anything to disguise the likeness to ourselves.
And sex? How could I have got so far without it? Sex is central to love, where two become one, then three: as single cells meet, combine and multiply to become someone else. But sex may also be at odds with love in its other forms. Sex tends to be exclusive, while Love - as in Christian love - is open to all. That's a contradiction I've tried and failed to solve at least once in my life.
*QUESTION ARISING:
Women can bear and feed babies, men cannot. Where does that leave our aspirations to freedom and equality? For all the gender overlaps and cross-overs, men and women are different. And the same may go for races!) The point is not to deny the statistical evidence, the norms of male and female body and mind, but to see that those norms dont confine or subordinate un-necessarily. Contrary to the scripture, we are not created free and equal. Some are bigger, stronger, cleverer than others, just as some are gentler, more patient or imaginative (it's not either/or, the combinations and permutations are infinite!) The point is to recognise that no statistical generalisation need apply to any individual: the fact that most men are more like this, most women more like that, must not be allowed to prevent any man or woman from breaking free, diverging, combining and crossing imaginary lines. Nor must a generalised difference be translated into assumptions of superiority and inferiority: we may say, in the most general terms, that one sex or other may be better at this or that, in this or that setting; but not that one set of abilities or qualities outranks another over all. With the future uncertain, we cant know which of all those abilities and qualities we will most need. We may need all our options to survive, recognised, understood and freely available between us.
It may not even be a question of yours or mine: the dividing lines may run across us, not between us. The bit of my mind that registers arm or leg, or fear or pleasure may register and assimilate a movement observed before it registers it as yours or mine. Empathy doesnt begin with the heady business of Me imagining I'm You. It's a reflex rooted in the nature of perception and physiology. If I see a footballer kicked in the balls, my body reacts before I know it. Even men have phantom pregnancies.
We're not created free and equal, but the freer and more equal the better - recognising and drawing on all we've got.
Friday 3 April 2009
From waft to waft
Images that yet fresh images beget, if only smells. This time the leap is from gorse, coconut, to orange, from South Wales to Western Algeria. It's 1962, soon after the Algerian independence war, and I'm driving through the night from Tlemcen, near the Moroccan border, to Algiers. We've been told to get someone there by tomorrow. It's a long drive, after work, and I'm on a threadbare high, between coffee and exhaustion. There's nothing else on the road, economy flat and people still afraid, the line blurred between the freedom fight and banditry, the struggle to survive. I dont feel afraid, unless it's the fear of a rabbit, mesmerised by the beam of my own headlights and compelled along the long straight road ahead.
A bit of open window helps me keep awake, and suddenly I feel myself relax.
Orange blossom, the scent from unseen orange groves is everywhere. I can feel the trees nearby in the darkness and the same sweet air running through them, the car, my lungs and heart, whatever that may mean. On the wings of a smell, all's well.
In a few months the oranges will be ripe, then overripe, in piles beside the road. The colons have gone, and with them the markets that would have taken them, turned them into money, solid food not Midas oranges.
Images that yet fresh images beget, if only smells. This time the leap is from gorse, coconut, to orange, from South Wales to Western Algeria. It's 1962, soon after the Algerian independence war, and I'm driving through the night from Tlemcen, near the Moroccan border, to Algiers. We've been told to get someone there by tomorrow. It's a long drive, after work, and I'm on a threadbare high, between coffee and exhaustion. There's nothing else on the road, economy flat and people still afraid, the line blurred between the freedom fight and banditry, the struggle to survive. I dont feel afraid, unless it's the fear of a rabbit, mesmerised by the beam of my own headlights and compelled along the long straight road ahead.
A bit of open window helps me keep awake, and suddenly I feel myself relax.
Orange blossom, the scent from unseen orange groves is everywhere. I can feel the trees nearby in the darkness and the same sweet air running through them, the car, my lungs and heart, whatever that may mean. On the wings of a smell, all's well.
In a few months the oranges will be ripe, then overripe, in piles beside the road. The colons have gone, and with them the markets that would have taken them, turned them into money, solid food not Midas oranges.
HINDSIGHT
You should be reading this from the bottom up, because the poem below follows from the shooting reference in my last piece. It also links to a poetry-reading we went to in Swansea the other night, with a former US soldier Brian Turner reading from his book Here Bullet. One of his poems (In the Leupold scope) sees life in Iraq through the site of a gun and reminds me of mine from Bethlehem. It's addressed to an Israeli conscript. I call it Just Looking, but its power, if any, lies in the possibility of not just looking. In a village near Nablus two years earlier I was introduced to a little girl with a bandage round her head. Her scalp had been grazed by a bullet from an Israeli settlement high on the hill above. The bullet could not have come her way by chance. Not a ricochet, or crossfire: there had been no battle going on. I photographed the girl where she had been standing, in the back yard of her family home. Now it seemed like a game, but behind her I could also see the outline of settlement buildings atop the ridge. Someone up there must have found her in his sight, and pulled the trigger. As a child with an air rifle, I was shocked when I hit a robin perched high on a tree. I must have been about 15, old enough to know better, but the robin had seemed so small and far away, the odds against hitting it so high.
JUST LOOKING
My flat in Bethlehem looked down on a curious religious site called Rachel's Tomb. A small domed building overlooking a Muslim cemetery has been squared up and fortified as a Jewish pilgrimage venue. From my balcony I can watch the changing of the guard and soldiers taking up positions as coaches full of pilgrims pull up in the dust. One soldier covers the main road, another the smaller road that leads down past the cemetery to the Aida refugee camp. Sometime boys throw stones and the soldiers shoot teargas and soundgrenades to drive them off. On this occasion, a boy's head appears above the cemetery wall and a soldier raises his gun.
Just looking, you say,
And I,
In hindsight
Reply:
A cat
May look at
A queen
But not down the scope
Of an M16...
Soldier, reflect
As you watch
The boy
Behind the graveyard wall
Watch you.
Your gunsight sees
What he cannot.
His features,
Shaving mirror sharp,
So much
Like yours.
Eye for eye?
If looks could kill...
Your other self
He knows
A bullet
From a stone.
You should be reading this from the bottom up, because the poem below follows from the shooting reference in my last piece. It also links to a poetry-reading we went to in Swansea the other night, with a former US soldier Brian Turner reading from his book Here Bullet. One of his poems (In the Leupold scope) sees life in Iraq through the site of a gun and reminds me of mine from Bethlehem. It's addressed to an Israeli conscript. I call it Just Looking, but its power, if any, lies in the possibility of not just looking. In a village near Nablus two years earlier I was introduced to a little girl with a bandage round her head. Her scalp had been grazed by a bullet from an Israeli settlement high on the hill above. The bullet could not have come her way by chance. Not a ricochet, or crossfire: there had been no battle going on. I photographed the girl where she had been standing, in the back yard of her family home. Now it seemed like a game, but behind her I could also see the outline of settlement buildings atop the ridge. Someone up there must have found her in his sight, and pulled the trigger. As a child with an air rifle, I was shocked when I hit a robin perched high on a tree. I must have been about 15, old enough to know better, but the robin had seemed so small and far away, the odds against hitting it so high.
JUST LOOKING
My flat in Bethlehem looked down on a curious religious site called Rachel's Tomb. A small domed building overlooking a Muslim cemetery has been squared up and fortified as a Jewish pilgrimage venue. From my balcony I can watch the changing of the guard and soldiers taking up positions as coaches full of pilgrims pull up in the dust. One soldier covers the main road, another the smaller road that leads down past the cemetery to the Aida refugee camp. Sometime boys throw stones and the soldiers shoot teargas and soundgrenades to drive them off. On this occasion, a boy's head appears above the cemetery wall and a soldier raises his gun.
Just looking, you say,
And I,
In hindsight
Reply:
A cat
May look at
A queen
But not down the scope
Of an M16...
Soldier, reflect
As you watch
The boy
Behind the graveyard wall
Watch you.
Your gunsight sees
What he cannot.
His features,
Shaving mirror sharp,
So much
Like yours.
Eye for eye?
If looks could kill...
Your other self
He knows
A bullet
From a stone.
Monday 30 March 2009
FOOTPRINTS
A lovely sunny day, but cold. The tide was out and I walked with Ada down to Three Cliffs Clefts Bay, or Three Clefts Bay according to an old man who told us where and how to park, which path to take. From the wide, wet sandy beach we walked up winding paths of deep dry sand to the headland above. Piles of flowering gorse on either side, waves of scent across our path. Vanilla, I thought, but Will on the phone ‘Coconut’ and I think he was right. What’s in a smell?
Looking down from the headland, back onto the beach we’d walked across, we could barely make out our own footprints. What did stand out were two firm dotted lines of hoofmarks. We’d seen the horses ahead of us, turning when they reached the waters edge to splash along the line of the surf. The prints set me wondering. ‘Light footprint’ is a phrase in vogue, with the special reference to carbon emissions, and the assumption that the less mark we leave on the world the better. Does that go, I wondered, for the mark we leave on other people?
In the last Weekly Guardian, Monbiot gave a frightening forecast of global warming, which, he said, is now unpreventable. Too much talk – hot air – since Kyoto, and not enough action. Now temperatures likely to rise by 4 degrees, not the 2C maximum envisaged at Kyoto. And the hotting up will last another 1000 years.
I assume that the heating and drying will hit hardest in warmer areas, with deserts expanding north and south into more temperate grainlands of
Mid-West and Mediterranean. In our hemisphere, cultivation, if not cultivators, would be driven northwards. The developed, mainly northern, countries would expand food production, keep what they needed for themselves, export any surplus in aid or for profit, and combine to defend themselves against starving immigrants. As already happens, but less.
A terrible irony: those most responsible for famine best placed to survive it, while those who never did much harm are left to die. The northern peoples had to keep warm, turned to fossil fuels when the firewood ran out. The difficulties of making a living in a colder climate compelled them to innovate, industrialise.
Left to themselves, older, more relaxed economies might, but probably wouldn’t, have survived: even without colonial exploitation. New ways have ways of jumping gaps.
Apart from noting that, what would I do, what do I do? Drive less, heat less, foreswear cheap flights, or long journeys in general. Eat local, seasonal foods, fresh, not frozen (Polar bears are getting smaller, Ada read. Weigh one third less and eat each other when there’s nothing else in diminishing icelands)
If I assume that human populations will also have to shrink, how much to I care if this comes about through starvation, war and disease on other, unfamiliar continents?
We were talking over lunch a couple of days ago about the boundaries of empathy, how they expand and contract. How much can we feel for other people, over distances and differences? Or under pressure, in time of scarcity or frear. Primo Levi concluded from his concentration camp experience that great hardship did not breed solidarity, did not make people nice, and that it was not the good who survived.
What do I feel? Richard once had a dream of life breaking down at Fawler, our parents manor in what’s now Oxfordshire, after a nuclear attack on London: starving survivors fanned out across the countryside, breaking in, taking whatever they could. Why not? And what were we to do?
I remember the hardline Zionist, Zabotinsky, who warned that the Palestinians, like the Jews, would never give up their land, that there would have to be a fight. When I read that, it was almost a relief: not that he was showing mercy, but at least respect for his enemy. I can imagine feeling, even as I raised my gun to shoot, ‘My brother, my like…there but for the grace of God – what God? – go I.’
A lovely sunny day, but cold. The tide was out and I walked with Ada down to Three Cliffs Clefts Bay, or Three Clefts Bay according to an old man who told us where and how to park, which path to take. From the wide, wet sandy beach we walked up winding paths of deep dry sand to the headland above. Piles of flowering gorse on either side, waves of scent across our path. Vanilla, I thought, but Will on the phone ‘Coconut’ and I think he was right. What’s in a smell?
Looking down from the headland, back onto the beach we’d walked across, we could barely make out our own footprints. What did stand out were two firm dotted lines of hoofmarks. We’d seen the horses ahead of us, turning when they reached the waters edge to splash along the line of the surf. The prints set me wondering. ‘Light footprint’ is a phrase in vogue, with the special reference to carbon emissions, and the assumption that the less mark we leave on the world the better. Does that go, I wondered, for the mark we leave on other people?
In the last Weekly Guardian, Monbiot gave a frightening forecast of global warming, which, he said, is now unpreventable. Too much talk – hot air – since Kyoto, and not enough action. Now temperatures likely to rise by 4 degrees, not the 2C maximum envisaged at Kyoto. And the hotting up will last another 1000 years.
I assume that the heating and drying will hit hardest in warmer areas, with deserts expanding north and south into more temperate grainlands of
Mid-West and Mediterranean. In our hemisphere, cultivation, if not cultivators, would be driven northwards. The developed, mainly northern, countries would expand food production, keep what they needed for themselves, export any surplus in aid or for profit, and combine to defend themselves against starving immigrants. As already happens, but less.
A terrible irony: those most responsible for famine best placed to survive it, while those who never did much harm are left to die. The northern peoples had to keep warm, turned to fossil fuels when the firewood ran out. The difficulties of making a living in a colder climate compelled them to innovate, industrialise.
Left to themselves, older, more relaxed economies might, but probably wouldn’t, have survived: even without colonial exploitation. New ways have ways of jumping gaps.
Apart from noting that, what would I do, what do I do? Drive less, heat less, foreswear cheap flights, or long journeys in general. Eat local, seasonal foods, fresh, not frozen (Polar bears are getting smaller, Ada read. Weigh one third less and eat each other when there’s nothing else in diminishing icelands)
If I assume that human populations will also have to shrink, how much to I care if this comes about through starvation, war and disease on other, unfamiliar continents?
We were talking over lunch a couple of days ago about the boundaries of empathy, how they expand and contract. How much can we feel for other people, over distances and differences? Or under pressure, in time of scarcity or frear. Primo Levi concluded from his concentration camp experience that great hardship did not breed solidarity, did not make people nice, and that it was not the good who survived.
What do I feel? Richard once had a dream of life breaking down at Fawler, our parents manor in what’s now Oxfordshire, after a nuclear attack on London: starving survivors fanned out across the countryside, breaking in, taking whatever they could. Why not? And what were we to do?
I remember the hardline Zionist, Zabotinsky, who warned that the Palestinians, like the Jews, would never give up their land, that there would have to be a fight. When I read that, it was almost a relief: not that he was showing mercy, but at least respect for his enemy. I can imagine feeling, even as I raised my gun to shoot, ‘My brother, my like…there but for the grace of God – what God? – go I.’
Sunday 29 March 2009
About Mary, my mother...
updated six months after her death
Mary was born into the First World War and bore her own children into the Second. Between those times she followed her mother Elsie into the Society of Friends. Unlike her mother, she became and remained a pacifist.
Mary was the third of five children, born in Trinidad where her father Eric, was resident judge. Next born were twin boys. A year into the war, one of them, Christopher, died. Their mother took the other four children home to England, the advantages of modern medical care outweighing the danger of German torpedoes on the Atlantic crossing.
This was the first of several separations that marked Mary’s life, and later ours. Now I realise how much family break-up, like family fortune, stems from our traditional matrix of empire, war and class. (With the difference that marriages so divided by continents require no divorce.)
Mary’s father stayed in Trinidad and for the next ten years his children didn’t see much of him. When he came home, the family had learned to live without the gruff old bigot: an Ulster protestant, Eric walked out of any Sunday service that smacked to him of Papism; lipstick was for Scarlet Women not his daughters. Mary remembered having to kiss him, the porridge in his moustache, before leaving for school. Only later did she begin to feel for the poor old prodigal, returning as a stranger to his own family. She just remembered his big hands bathing her as a baby, before they left Trinidad. How many British judges bathed their babies then?
My own father George walked out when Mary grew fat with me. Men often fall in love with images, and now his image of her was spoilt. I wonder how much of her heartache then fed through to me. After days, or weeks – Mary never told me - George came back. When I was born, he liked me, though maybe I too was not quite what he expected. They’d chosen the name David, but, according to Mary, George looked at me and said ‘We cant call him David… Gregory, Gregory Grunt.’ His elder brother, Gerald, had called him Grunt when they were boys, and for years my father called me Grunt, which I still associate with his laughter and affection. George’s behaviour may have left much to be desired, for Mary at least, but for us children his was the lighter, happier presence. Perhaps he had the advantage of the prodigal, feted whenever he returned – from work, the war, or sailing holidays. She was fated to be always with us – except when we were sent away to school. Odd that parents of their class found it normal to put their children in care. Was it that they attached so little importance to childcare, or lacked confidence in their own abilities. My theory is that prep- and public schools were designed less for happy families than for nation-building: children were systematically removed from intimate family and local community, and the gap filled with more abstract vocation, institutional loyalties and duties. William of Wickham founded Winchester to produce reliable and competent functionaries, as distinct from clerics. And the system extended to a whole range of other professions, institutionalised substitutes for more direct humanity.
As young children in England, Mary and her brothers and sister spent a lot of their time in the nursery with scolding nannies and mutual bickering relieved by what Mary remembered as rather formal meetings with their mother in the drawing room. Elsie was a highminded and public-spirited woman, but little bodies – perhaps all bodies - bored her. She had little interest in day to day childcare, let alone childsplay. For Mary, getting away to Downe House, founded and run by her mother’s sister Olive, was a liberation. Elder sister Erica was already there and Anne Bradby, later Ridler, became a friend for life.
At school Mary was quite bright and read a lot. She regarded herself as hopeless at games and wanted to become a nurse. That was vetoed by her family, backed by her father’s doctor brother, Almroth Wright. Reasons given were poor pay and unsocial hours, but there may also have been fears for her health – when infections were more common and effective drugs more rare - or her virtue.
Were nurses easy game to doctors then, and is this something that her famous uncle would have taken into account?
Perhaps the great doctor should have known better, or perhaps he did, and a few years later George and Mary were married from his house in Paddington. By then, Mary had suffered another setback. She got to Oxford and read English for a year or two at St Hilda’s before announcing her intention to marry George. Then her father – who always felt poor in his big house on Blackheath – stopped paying her fees. ‘You’ll have a husband to support you and wont need a degree.’
This was a terrible come-down, and Mary felt it all her life, never quite confident of her own ability or social standing in a class where Oxbridge educations was the norm. What would she have done if she HAD gone on to get her degree? Would George have been any more willing to let her out to work, or she more able to overcome his opposition? As we knew them, Mary was always the more downright and forceful in her beliefs and opinions, but it seems to have been George who mostly got his way. And that was so from the start. Mary said she’d been incredulous when he asked her to marry him; she’d not taken him seriously at all. But he seemed quite undeterred and later remarked, in a matter of fact sort of way, ‘You will, you know.’
Mary always liked reading and read to us. As a teenager she and her friend Ann were spellbound by a writer, Charles Williams (precursor of magical realism? ) who they met on holiday at Aisholt in the Quantocks. Among Mary’s papers are several beginnings of journals, a first few handwritten pages in otherwise empty exercise books. Her sister had been secretary to TS Elliot, Ann Ridler became a respected poet, and Mary may have been too much in awe of Writing to believe in her own or keep at it. If so, I know how she felt.
But, unlike me, Mary kept reading. She read fast, and, in her later years at least, indiscriminately. I sometimes felt she never quite adapted to real life, the bitty mundanity of things, her own and other people’s inadequacies. In later life, again, gardens were an exception. She always loved flowers, but, once there were no more children to tend to, she took to the practical business of gardening with a new enthusiasm.
Perhaps Mary should have been a nurse. Just before the war, she had plans to open a children’s home and they rented a large house. But money ran out before the bombing and evacuations began. In my childhood memories, it was when we were ill, hurt or in danger that Mary excelled herself. She may have found everyday housework demeaning, but in emergency she was transformed. She was calm and capable, gentle and cheerful: with such a mother and nurse, how could we be upset or afraid or ill for long? Nor was it only when we were ill or in danger. Although Mary was often cross with us, especially me, her eldest, this was made up at bedtime. It wasn’t just the comfort of a story or nursery rhyme and prayers by the bed. Somehow I was also made to understand that whatever we’d argued over wasn’t all my fault. At the end of the day, Mary was humble, understanding and honest with us.
Later, when I got into trouble at school or gave up what looked like a good job, or brought back a partner who might have seemed unsuitable (that word again!), neither Mary nor George turned their backs on us. This wasn’t because Mary didn’t care about convention or what other people thought, but when it came to it – out of love for us or for underlying truth – she never sided with the enemy. The last time I saw her, a week or so before she died, I said I would like to tell her some of this, the nice things I remembered about her, rather than save it in memoriam. She was pleased, thanked me for thanking her. I also asked if she’d sometimes have been disappointed in me, and she said she had. But for once we were happy together, and it didn’t matter any more.
Mary often longed for a career in the wider world, but at home she was rarely just a housewife. In the war, once we got our own house, we shared it with a Jewish refugee family. Then, after the war, when the Wachters went back to Austria, their place was taken by the widow and children of Mary’s younger brother Tony. A succession of au pairs became friends, grannies and great aunts moved in next door and for some years, about when I was leaving home, Mary became a sort of foster mother to half a dozen nephews and nieces, sent back to school in England from overseas bases and colonies.
News of Tony’s death in the Ardennes came as a terrible shock. He and Mary had been very close, but when war broke out Tony joined up and had little time for her pacifism. Direct experience of war may have changed his mind, and his last letters from the front were thoughtful and affectionate. Mary had told him she was worried about losing George, to the enemy or other women. Now Tony told her not to worry, he knew how it felt, for both of them, and George would be back.
George came back and Tony didn’t. Tony’s Tanya came to live in our house with her two children. Tanya’s mother had painted the portrait of George that I now have on the wall. It was commissioned, Mary said, so that we would have something to remember him by if he was killed. As it was, George came safely home and – unless Mary imagined it – fell in love with Tony’s widow Tanya.
Whatever wounds the war opened up between them remained hidden from us. There must have been ideological differences too. Now I wonder how they felt, even before George was called up, when he brought home little boxes of sten-gun parts for us to assemble on the dining room table. (No wonder those guns were unreliable!) Later, I asked my mother why she had seemed so calm one afternoon in London when a flying bomb bumbled overhead. We were having a picnic tea in the big garden, the Kensington square behind our house, and we all stayed put. We may even have had malt bread. When I asked Mary, half a century later, why she’d taken it so calmly, she couldn’t remember the occasion ‘By then I may have felt we had nothing to lose,’ she said. For me that picnic stood out as a happy time with her, along with a bicycle ride in the country years later, when we stopped for a glass of cider, at a wooden table in the sun outside a pub.
After the war, ideological differences became less important. Mary remained a Quaker and a pacifist, George an agnostic with a shelf full of orange New Left Bookclub books – which disappeared as the Cold War set in. (Did the ripples of McCarthy extend this far?) George and Mary shared the outrage and pity of Suez and Hungary, Prague and Vietnam, and some of that got through to me. As time went on, they also shared more happiness. When George’s elder brother Gerald died, he left them enough for George to stop work and buy Fawler Manor. It was only now that George had given up his job that Mary felt able to go out to work. It may have been simply that with children gone she had more time, but it was also clear that they were now comfortably off; her voluntary work was acceptable, not like a paid job when people might have thought he couldn’t afford to keep her. Mary committed herself to Quaker business and Marriage Guidance.
She also took to gardening. As a child, I remember it was George who dug and planted vegetables at weekends. Now he’d retired, the vegetable patch slowly reverted to grass and it was Mary who took up spade and trowel, planting and weeding long herbaceous borders, head high with daisies and delphiniums.
When George died, 11 years ago, he left a letter with his will in which he said that Mary had made a better man of him. With him gone, after 60 years together, she often wished she too were dead. I found it hard to answer when she said that: how can such gaps be filled, such an intimate absence, large as life?
In her childhood, before meeting George, Mary didn’t get much tender loving care or playfulness. George brought a lightness and humour new to her. She had the courage of her moral convictions, but he had a more primitive confidence in his own feelings, impulses right or wrong. Without him, on her own in a ‘sheltered’ Oxford flat, there was little that we, the rest of her family, could do with our dutiful visits and telephone calls. Mary didn’t find it easy to make new friends – as distinct from Friends – or float on casual acquaintance.
Among Quakers, Mary was confident, capable, even authoritative. Perhaps it was the egalitarian simplicity of the Society of Friends that freed her, or a shared moral commitment absent in other social gatherings – in which Mary often felt ill-at-ease. Perhaps she also had a class advantage, even without an Oxford degree. People recalled her principled effectiveness in committee work, and the beauty of her voice in ministry… Whereas, as a teenager, I would hear her speak in meeting, serene, eyes closed, and think ‘If you could see her at home!’
Several times in the last few years of her life, Mary became seriously ill – a fall, a minor stroke or infection, sometimes all combined. Several times we thought she would die and talked of living wills, but each time she clung to life and revived. On one occasion, as she was leaving hospital in a wheelchair, a tall black male nurse called across ‘Hey, Mary, aren’t you going to say goodbye?’ She turned and they shook hands. She said ‘I hope you have a very happy life.’
Afterwards she remarked how strange it had been to be washed and changed by a big black man. I remembered her talking of her father’s big hands bathing her, and wondered if there were also black hands then, a nursemaid’s perhaps, in Trinidad. More recently, when Mary stayed with us in Wales, it was Ada’s Papist hands (do
these things come out in the wash?) On one occasion, when Mary was taken ill in Oxford, it was I, with help from Janet, her grand-daughter, who was privileged to do the washing and changing. Good for us, if not for Mary who was barely conscious.
Maybe Mary should have been a nurse, but it wasn’t just good nursing, in the technical sense – or even good NHS medicine – that brought her back to life, or helped her die so peacefully. I think what made the difference had more to do with kind hands and hearts, and that what she got from her carers in hospital and nursing home was a new, very basic, but life-giving confidence in her own existence
Mary’s class and upbringing had led her to believe that what mattered in life as how she performed and appeared. Not quite Manners makyth man – George’s Winchester motto – but righteous behaviour and belief. For 90 years she had
tried to do and think aright, to live up to high standards and ideals. Then, with old age and sickness… All fall down! Sick to death non-compos and fit for nothing, why should anyone care for such stinking mess?
Except they did, even strangers, who cared enough to feed, wash, change, bethere at her side to welcome her back. Smiling, embracing her.
It seems to me that Mary had a new lightness about her last summer at St Katharines in Wantage. I don’t think it was just a loss of memory that freed her to be happy, made her eager to get up, out and about again. What she’d learnt, or relearned, late in life was this: if people could bear and care for her at her worst, and greet her with a smile or caress when she opened here eyes, she MUST be worth something. If that was true, then life could be worth living too. Good enough to be going on with!
Greg Wilkinson 21.11.08
(with additions 29.3.09)
updated six months after her death
Mary was born into the First World War and bore her own children into the Second. Between those times she followed her mother Elsie into the Society of Friends. Unlike her mother, she became and remained a pacifist.
Mary was the third of five children, born in Trinidad where her father Eric, was resident judge. Next born were twin boys. A year into the war, one of them, Christopher, died. Their mother took the other four children home to England, the advantages of modern medical care outweighing the danger of German torpedoes on the Atlantic crossing.
This was the first of several separations that marked Mary’s life, and later ours. Now I realise how much family break-up, like family fortune, stems from our traditional matrix of empire, war and class. (With the difference that marriages so divided by continents require no divorce.)
Mary’s father stayed in Trinidad and for the next ten years his children didn’t see much of him. When he came home, the family had learned to live without the gruff old bigot: an Ulster protestant, Eric walked out of any Sunday service that smacked to him of Papism; lipstick was for Scarlet Women not his daughters. Mary remembered having to kiss him, the porridge in his moustache, before leaving for school. Only later did she begin to feel for the poor old prodigal, returning as a stranger to his own family. She just remembered his big hands bathing her as a baby, before they left Trinidad. How many British judges bathed their babies then?
My own father George walked out when Mary grew fat with me. Men often fall in love with images, and now his image of her was spoilt. I wonder how much of her heartache then fed through to me. After days, or weeks – Mary never told me - George came back. When I was born, he liked me, though maybe I too was not quite what he expected. They’d chosen the name David, but, according to Mary, George looked at me and said ‘We cant call him David… Gregory, Gregory Grunt.’ His elder brother, Gerald, had called him Grunt when they were boys, and for years my father called me Grunt, which I still associate with his laughter and affection. George’s behaviour may have left much to be desired, for Mary at least, but for us children his was the lighter, happier presence. Perhaps he had the advantage of the prodigal, feted whenever he returned – from work, the war, or sailing holidays. She was fated to be always with us – except when we were sent away to school. Odd that parents of their class found it normal to put their children in care. Was it that they attached so little importance to childcare, or lacked confidence in their own abilities. My theory is that prep- and public schools were designed less for happy families than for nation-building: children were systematically removed from intimate family and local community, and the gap filled with more abstract vocation, institutional loyalties and duties. William of Wickham founded Winchester to produce reliable and competent functionaries, as distinct from clerics. And the system extended to a whole range of other professions, institutionalised substitutes for more direct humanity.
As young children in England, Mary and her brothers and sister spent a lot of their time in the nursery with scolding nannies and mutual bickering relieved by what Mary remembered as rather formal meetings with their mother in the drawing room. Elsie was a highminded and public-spirited woman, but little bodies – perhaps all bodies - bored her. She had little interest in day to day childcare, let alone childsplay. For Mary, getting away to Downe House, founded and run by her mother’s sister Olive, was a liberation. Elder sister Erica was already there and Anne Bradby, later Ridler, became a friend for life.
At school Mary was quite bright and read a lot. She regarded herself as hopeless at games and wanted to become a nurse. That was vetoed by her family, backed by her father’s doctor brother, Almroth Wright. Reasons given were poor pay and unsocial hours, but there may also have been fears for her health – when infections were more common and effective drugs more rare - or her virtue.
Were nurses easy game to doctors then, and is this something that her famous uncle would have taken into account?
Perhaps the great doctor should have known better, or perhaps he did, and a few years later George and Mary were married from his house in Paddington. By then, Mary had suffered another setback. She got to Oxford and read English for a year or two at St Hilda’s before announcing her intention to marry George. Then her father – who always felt poor in his big house on Blackheath – stopped paying her fees. ‘You’ll have a husband to support you and wont need a degree.’
This was a terrible come-down, and Mary felt it all her life, never quite confident of her own ability or social standing in a class where Oxbridge educations was the norm. What would she have done if she HAD gone on to get her degree? Would George have been any more willing to let her out to work, or she more able to overcome his opposition? As we knew them, Mary was always the more downright and forceful in her beliefs and opinions, but it seems to have been George who mostly got his way. And that was so from the start. Mary said she’d been incredulous when he asked her to marry him; she’d not taken him seriously at all. But he seemed quite undeterred and later remarked, in a matter of fact sort of way, ‘You will, you know.’
Mary always liked reading and read to us. As a teenager she and her friend Ann were spellbound by a writer, Charles Williams (precursor of magical realism? ) who they met on holiday at Aisholt in the Quantocks. Among Mary’s papers are several beginnings of journals, a first few handwritten pages in otherwise empty exercise books. Her sister had been secretary to TS Elliot, Ann Ridler became a respected poet, and Mary may have been too much in awe of Writing to believe in her own or keep at it. If so, I know how she felt.
But, unlike me, Mary kept reading. She read fast, and, in her later years at least, indiscriminately. I sometimes felt she never quite adapted to real life, the bitty mundanity of things, her own and other people’s inadequacies. In later life, again, gardens were an exception. She always loved flowers, but, once there were no more children to tend to, she took to the practical business of gardening with a new enthusiasm.
Perhaps Mary should have been a nurse. Just before the war, she had plans to open a children’s home and they rented a large house. But money ran out before the bombing and evacuations began. In my childhood memories, it was when we were ill, hurt or in danger that Mary excelled herself. She may have found everyday housework demeaning, but in emergency she was transformed. She was calm and capable, gentle and cheerful: with such a mother and nurse, how could we be upset or afraid or ill for long? Nor was it only when we were ill or in danger. Although Mary was often cross with us, especially me, her eldest, this was made up at bedtime. It wasn’t just the comfort of a story or nursery rhyme and prayers by the bed. Somehow I was also made to understand that whatever we’d argued over wasn’t all my fault. At the end of the day, Mary was humble, understanding and honest with us.
Later, when I got into trouble at school or gave up what looked like a good job, or brought back a partner who might have seemed unsuitable (that word again!), neither Mary nor George turned their backs on us. This wasn’t because Mary didn’t care about convention or what other people thought, but when it came to it – out of love for us or for underlying truth – she never sided with the enemy. The last time I saw her, a week or so before she died, I said I would like to tell her some of this, the nice things I remembered about her, rather than save it in memoriam. She was pleased, thanked me for thanking her. I also asked if she’d sometimes have been disappointed in me, and she said she had. But for once we were happy together, and it didn’t matter any more.
Mary often longed for a career in the wider world, but at home she was rarely just a housewife. In the war, once we got our own house, we shared it with a Jewish refugee family. Then, after the war, when the Wachters went back to Austria, their place was taken by the widow and children of Mary’s younger brother Tony. A succession of au pairs became friends, grannies and great aunts moved in next door and for some years, about when I was leaving home, Mary became a sort of foster mother to half a dozen nephews and nieces, sent back to school in England from overseas bases and colonies.
News of Tony’s death in the Ardennes came as a terrible shock. He and Mary had been very close, but when war broke out Tony joined up and had little time for her pacifism. Direct experience of war may have changed his mind, and his last letters from the front were thoughtful and affectionate. Mary had told him she was worried about losing George, to the enemy or other women. Now Tony told her not to worry, he knew how it felt, for both of them, and George would be back.
George came back and Tony didn’t. Tony’s Tanya came to live in our house with her two children. Tanya’s mother had painted the portrait of George that I now have on the wall. It was commissioned, Mary said, so that we would have something to remember him by if he was killed. As it was, George came safely home and – unless Mary imagined it – fell in love with Tony’s widow Tanya.
Whatever wounds the war opened up between them remained hidden from us. There must have been ideological differences too. Now I wonder how they felt, even before George was called up, when he brought home little boxes of sten-gun parts for us to assemble on the dining room table. (No wonder those guns were unreliable!) Later, I asked my mother why she had seemed so calm one afternoon in London when a flying bomb bumbled overhead. We were having a picnic tea in the big garden, the Kensington square behind our house, and we all stayed put. We may even have had malt bread. When I asked Mary, half a century later, why she’d taken it so calmly, she couldn’t remember the occasion ‘By then I may have felt we had nothing to lose,’ she said. For me that picnic stood out as a happy time with her, along with a bicycle ride in the country years later, when we stopped for a glass of cider, at a wooden table in the sun outside a pub.
After the war, ideological differences became less important. Mary remained a Quaker and a pacifist, George an agnostic with a shelf full of orange New Left Bookclub books – which disappeared as the Cold War set in. (Did the ripples of McCarthy extend this far?) George and Mary shared the outrage and pity of Suez and Hungary, Prague and Vietnam, and some of that got through to me. As time went on, they also shared more happiness. When George’s elder brother Gerald died, he left them enough for George to stop work and buy Fawler Manor. It was only now that George had given up his job that Mary felt able to go out to work. It may have been simply that with children gone she had more time, but it was also clear that they were now comfortably off; her voluntary work was acceptable, not like a paid job when people might have thought he couldn’t afford to keep her. Mary committed herself to Quaker business and Marriage Guidance.
She also took to gardening. As a child, I remember it was George who dug and planted vegetables at weekends. Now he’d retired, the vegetable patch slowly reverted to grass and it was Mary who took up spade and trowel, planting and weeding long herbaceous borders, head high with daisies and delphiniums.
When George died, 11 years ago, he left a letter with his will in which he said that Mary had made a better man of him. With him gone, after 60 years together, she often wished she too were dead. I found it hard to answer when she said that: how can such gaps be filled, such an intimate absence, large as life?
In her childhood, before meeting George, Mary didn’t get much tender loving care or playfulness. George brought a lightness and humour new to her. She had the courage of her moral convictions, but he had a more primitive confidence in his own feelings, impulses right or wrong. Without him, on her own in a ‘sheltered’ Oxford flat, there was little that we, the rest of her family, could do with our dutiful visits and telephone calls. Mary didn’t find it easy to make new friends – as distinct from Friends – or float on casual acquaintance.
Among Quakers, Mary was confident, capable, even authoritative. Perhaps it was the egalitarian simplicity of the Society of Friends that freed her, or a shared moral commitment absent in other social gatherings – in which Mary often felt ill-at-ease. Perhaps she also had a class advantage, even without an Oxford degree. People recalled her principled effectiveness in committee work, and the beauty of her voice in ministry… Whereas, as a teenager, I would hear her speak in meeting, serene, eyes closed, and think ‘If you could see her at home!’
Several times in the last few years of her life, Mary became seriously ill – a fall, a minor stroke or infection, sometimes all combined. Several times we thought she would die and talked of living wills, but each time she clung to life and revived. On one occasion, as she was leaving hospital in a wheelchair, a tall black male nurse called across ‘Hey, Mary, aren’t you going to say goodbye?’ She turned and they shook hands. She said ‘I hope you have a very happy life.’
Afterwards she remarked how strange it had been to be washed and changed by a big black man. I remembered her talking of her father’s big hands bathing her, and wondered if there were also black hands then, a nursemaid’s perhaps, in Trinidad. More recently, when Mary stayed with us in Wales, it was Ada’s Papist hands (do
these things come out in the wash?) On one occasion, when Mary was taken ill in Oxford, it was I, with help from Janet, her grand-daughter, who was privileged to do the washing and changing. Good for us, if not for Mary who was barely conscious.
Maybe Mary should have been a nurse, but it wasn’t just good nursing, in the technical sense – or even good NHS medicine – that brought her back to life, or helped her die so peacefully. I think what made the difference had more to do with kind hands and hearts, and that what she got from her carers in hospital and nursing home was a new, very basic, but life-giving confidence in her own existence
Mary’s class and upbringing had led her to believe that what mattered in life as how she performed and appeared. Not quite Manners makyth man – George’s Winchester motto – but righteous behaviour and belief. For 90 years she had
tried to do and think aright, to live up to high standards and ideals. Then, with old age and sickness… All fall down! Sick to death non-compos and fit for nothing, why should anyone care for such stinking mess?
Except they did, even strangers, who cared enough to feed, wash, change, bethere at her side to welcome her back. Smiling, embracing her.
It seems to me that Mary had a new lightness about her last summer at St Katharines in Wantage. I don’t think it was just a loss of memory that freed her to be happy, made her eager to get up, out and about again. What she’d learnt, or relearned, late in life was this: if people could bear and care for her at her worst, and greet her with a smile or caress when she opened here eyes, she MUST be worth something. If that was true, then life could be worth living too. Good enough to be going on with!
Greg Wilkinson 21.11.08
(with additions 29.3.09)
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