Category: Current Affairs

Let's start with a Fibonacci – you know the drill now, a spiralled increase of syllables for each line so that each line contains the sum of the syllables in the two previous lines. Simple. Well simpler than what I'm about to try and explain further down! Anyway it goes like this  1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 – and 55 if your are feeling silly, or have a lots to say. This time I've a lot to say!!

Job Centre Plus Fibonacci

Shout!

Rage!

Outrage!

Shout outrage!!

Job Centre Plus calls!!!

Job seekers, premium numbers.

People on benefits, made to phone 0845?

Job Centre Plus, a public sector service, diverts enquiries to premium charge lines!

Enquiries by phone about a letter intimating withdrawal of benefits cost a job seeker more than seven pounds to resolve.

Unemployed and looking for work; job seeker on minimum allowance; human being determined to maintain dignity; good citizen complying with written instructions; and costs them an eighth of their weekly income!

…….

Now the next line should be 89 syllables. And that would be really, really, silly. But since I'm trying to write coherently about a policy that makes coherence an emotional, intellectual and moral challenge, I'm going to try to write an 89 syllable one sentence essay entitled,

"The 0845 Job Centre Plus Scandal"

By definition people on benefits are low income,  and in a recession there are few jobs and more and more people looking for them, and those recently made redundant, or the long-term unemployed, whether young or old, male or female, are anxious to get a chance in life, so why does Job Centre Plus claw back benefits from those enquiring by phone about jobs? Scandalous!

…..

Only when it becomes personal do we discover the hidden injustices others have to put up with, day in and day out. Someone close to me took the £7 hit for phoning, as requested, to clarify the benefits position, and phoning, as advised, about job possibilities. I did a quick internet search and came up immediately with exchanges about the 0845 Job Centre Plus racket. You can start by looking here. I'm intending to follow this up with a letter to the local MP, and to the Minister at the DWP – that would be Iain Duncan Smith who did some research while in opposition into the difficulties faced by people on the lower ends of the income scale, if I recall….. Wonder if he remembers. Of course this nonsense pre-dated the present Government – but they haven't moved to change it either.

All depends how you say it.

If a local councillor expresses mild concern at the inconvenience of temporary roadworks, the headline reads " Councillor slams rogue firms amid ongoing traffic chaos". Made that up.

If a 24 year old high profile footballer for whom English is a second language comes to Manchester City and says the majority of manchester people support City, but admits he doesn't know much about Manchester, the headline reads. "Dzeco lays into United". "Star's first job to anger United". Not made up.

The devaluation of words, the addiction to verbal hostility, the habit of rhetorical over-exaggeration, – the manufacture of news by inflating the commonplace – all of them signs of a decadent discourse. By the way, exaggeration should suffice – over-exaggeration should mean the effect is dissipated by dawning incredulity – fatal to all propaganda!

Wonder how careful Christians are in the way we talk – Jesus' warning that we would have to give an account of every word we speak is another of those sayings sometimes reduced to manageability by saying it is recognised as Middle Eastern rhetoric, not literally meant. But suppose that's just the rationalising accommodation of Western minds trying to tame the wild words and moral demands of the Kingdom of God, in order to justify our own verbal proclivities? If I do have to explain every word I speak to One whose recall is entirely accurate and whose surveillance of heart, mind and voice is more comprehensive than any technology we can invent and install, I've had it. Or at least, I will have to do what in the end we all have to do – ask for mercy. But in the meantime – repent, and try harder to heed my words.

I am not an accountant.

I am not an economist.

I am not a professional poltician.

The world of national, international and institutional finance is as complex to my mind, and as inaccessible, as an esoteric gnostic myth, written on a much used palimpsest, in an ancient language barely visible let alone legible, to my untutored eyes.

But my uninformed gut feeling is that the impact of an across the board rise in VAT will make life so much harder for lower income people and families.

And my moral instinct is therefore that such a tax adjustment is demonstrably unjust, ruthlessly ideological, lacking in moral commonsense, devoid of political imagination and socially irresponsible.

It isn't the big consumer goods – but the increased cost of fuel, domestic energy, clothes, basic foods, the necessities, that will erode the security of poorer people.

Yet Tuesday morning we were afflicted by the sanctimonious tones of the Chancellor, Prime  Minister and Deputy Prime Minister that this is a tough call, but one that treats everyone the same. When will it dawn on them that to treat everyone the same is unfair, because not everyone is the same – else why a welfare policy at all!?

My elderly friend getting by on her pension will now pay an even greater proportion of her income to the Government, and do so from a margin of financial security with few footholds left.

The refusal to increase income tax we were told is based on the judgement that this would indeed hit the lower paid – well, how about increasing the threshold, or bringing back the 10p band compensated for by extra income tax further up the feeding chain – I use the slang deliberately, because this increase could well come down to choices about food for some people.

As I said – it's all very complex and ordinary folk like me should keep their noses out of such specialist, complicated, technical financiology (new word?) – but noses are not only for sticking in, they are for smelling, and I don't like the smell of a policy that is indiscriminate, declared irreversible, and reeks of social carelessness – by which I mean demonstrates an absence of care.

But I'm no politician or economist. Just a human being insisting that humanity is also an important criterion in socio-economic policy – and this tax adjustment seems to lack that entire dimension.

The photo above betrays the ethical dilemmas facing the LIb Dems – and the runaway ethical deflation reducing their currency and credibility, as promise and principle dissolve into compromise. But once again, that expedient compromise, as with the pledge on student fees, is one which will impact most on those with least.

Or am I wrong?

Haven't done a fibonacci for a while. A poem in which the syllable count of each line is the sum of the two previous lines – it goes thus 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34 and if you feel silly, 55!

DRAT THE VAT! (A FIBONACCI SPAT).

VAT!

DRAT!

Increase!

"Tough but fair."

"In this together."

Chancellor Osborne's perspective.

Single parents, pensioners, unemployed, low earners;

all rightly sceptical about the Chancellor's perspective on what's fair or unfair.

They ask, "Is it fair, a millionaire Chancellor, who has a Two/One in Modern History, from Oxford, should confuse fairness with justice?

One of the most important letters I ever received was from a Member of Parliament, the Honourable Judith Hart, MP, Later Baroness Hart of South Lanark. (Photo taken the year I was born). When I needed a Local Authority grant to afford further education my application was declined for reasons beyond my control, and which seemed at the time unjust. Judith Hart intervened and I was able to afford a year full time to get the Highers needed for University. My parents could never have afforded to keep me and pay for fees and accommodation and travel.The grant was small but enough.

Yesterday I listened to a young woman of 18 talking on radio about not having an Education Maintenance Allowance of around £30 a week. Without that little amount weekly, would she be able still to stay in education – "yes" she said, "but I would go without lunch".

That is a disgrace.

I don't mean that word to mean only that it is regrettable or even outrageous – though disgrace absolutely means both. I mean it is a policy that lacks grace, generosity, vision, imagination, compassion, understanding, – apart from lacking in any political sense whatsoever.It is a decision stripped of grace, and a decision that strips the hopes and ambitions of young people of grace, and turns aspiration into desperation.

Consider the figures. £1200 per annum is sufficient top up to keep a young person in Education for a further year, consolidating their qualifications and preventing them from going on the dole. So apart from that saving – how many could be afforded if a couple of bankers were not to receive their, let's say modest £1 million bonus? Huh? Do the maths. It's about 850 x 2 = 1700. Or how much does the taxpayer pay for a meal on an MP's expense account – much change from £30?

There are political and economic decisions that are always going to be hard to call. Choices are inevitable. But the choices we make as a society aren't just about what we do with money and where we make the cuts. Each choice is either for or against someone's life chances. I wonder how many of today's MP's in the Coalition Government have ever had to think twice about what to do with limited income. Eighteen millionaires in an austerity cabinet does suggest a lack of experience of the real world, the hard choices others have to make everyday. Would that today's decision makers had the political stature of Judith Hart to fight for the right of the young to have education based on ability not social class or economic security.

Are we really saying, you and me, ordinary UK taxpayers, are we saying to that young student that it's ok for her to go without lunch as the price for her education, that as a society we own that choice? Surely if she becomes a social worker, or a lawyer, or an IT specialist, or a manager, – whatever her eventual employment, will she not be a tax-payer who then carries the cost of others coming after her? And even if she doesn't – is education as a humanising and developmental process not something we value enough to underwrite some of the cost to make it as accessible as possible for each person?

There is something depressingly banal about a Government that lacks moral imagination, that rationalises broken pledges, that picks easy targets, that makes choices that are so against the least powerful they are embarrassingly partisan, and ridiculously out of touch with ordinary folk's struggles.

Amongst the letters I received on the occasion of my ordination, having completed University and College training, was a brief note of congratulations from Judith Hart, who had followed my progress for five years, and seen the difference a small bursary made to the life chances of a young man from a low income and working class home. Not just moral imagination, but political conviction married to wise priorities based on humane goals. For a return to such politics, I pray and read Amos, Micah and Isaiah.

As heat is reduced by the shadow of a cloud, so the song of the ruthless is silenced. Isaiah 25.5

Every generation has its symbols of courage, hope and freedom. For over 20 years Aung San Suu Kyi has spoken truth to power, and power has sung its ruthless song, seeking to drown out the melodies of hope, the anthems of freedom and the hymns of truth.

But these too have their songs and their singers. In her first words to the gathered crowd greeting her release she said, "There is a time for silence and a time to speak."  In a symbolic act potent with its own meaning, wearing the trditional lilac dress, she placed a flower in her hair. Flowers, are fragile sources of seed, each seed itself latent with life and replete with new possibility. The great visions of freedom and hope that illumine Isaiah and Micah, look forward to days when human beings live without oppression, fear and confiscated speech – desert places burst into bloom and the wilderness is carpeted with flowers. This woman embodies that humane hopefulness, that yearning for liberation of mind and soul, that humanising hunger for freedom to speak the words that change the world. On a day when we remember the cost of freedom, and the sacrifices of those who died to preserve it, we require to give integrity to our rhetoric; our prayers of intercession should include people like Aung San Suu Kyi, Shirin Ebadi (Iran) and Liu Xiaobo (China):

Lord silence the voice of the ruthless,

and give voice to the words of the oppressed.

And as Advent draws near, and we reflect on the people who walk in darkness, and languish in prisons of other people's making, it is central to the church's mission to articulate hope, to sing the song of the merciful, to speak truth to power and pray for those silenced by the songs ruthless. This God-loved world is a dangerous place, and there are deserts waiting to blossom, and other songs waiting to be sung.

 

I like spring onions. Salad needs the fresh, sharp, kick of mild onion to balance the sweetness of tomato and the slight bitterness of leaves. Never occured to me to ask where the spring onions come from, and who picks them.

So when I hear that Romanian children as young as 9, and up to 16 have been harvesting spring onions in Worcestershire I'm appalled, angry, ashamed. But wearing a cotton dress and sandals in October and in a northerly wind with low temperatures. And as employed supplementary labour to their parents with derisory wages. At that stage I'm beginning to feel as if time has slipped and words like safeguarding, child protection, and human rights have still to be invented and legislated into existence. And then to fuel embarrassment and incredulity with more anger, I discover there is a Gangmaster's Licensing Authority which has the good purpose of "regulating those who supply labour or use workers to provide services in agriculture, forestry, horticulture, shellfish gathering and food processing and packaging".

And I am relieved and grateful such an authority exists and intervened in this case. But my anger and incredulity is that such a regulatory body is best described by the word Gangmaster; that such a body is necessary is patently and sadly obvious. But that in this country the children of migrant workers can be so unprotected as to be defined as those whose welfare depends on the Gangmaster (say that word out loud) the Gangmaster's Licensing Authority is for me a moral disgrace.

And it leaves me with several questions. Which supermarkets are stocking food harvested under such exploitative conditions? Do supermarkets have codes of practice for their suppliers and do they enforce them? How does such exploitation of children in forced child labour relate to the UNICEF Convention on the Rights of the Child? What is the sub text, the subliminal impact on how we see other human beings, when we legitimate such discourse as "gangmaster"? What are the criteria for slavery, and which of them do not apply to a child with no choices, nor protection from the demands of the labour market, and no status in a country of which they are not citizens?

According to the Guardian, "the minimum working age in UK and European law is 14 although 13-year-olds can work in special circumstances. The number of hours children aged 14 and 15 can work is controlled and restricted to school holidays and weekends. There is no minimum wage for under-16s." Now as a boy I used to pick berries in the summer, and potatoes in October, for what was then not a lot of money. In Scotland the October school break is still called by those old enough to remember "the tattie holiday". But I was never forced to work. I was older than 9 years of age. I was paid enough to make it worth it. I had warm clothes. I wasn't denied school. And home was just a mile away.And the farmer wasn't a gangmaster!

The measure of a society is how it treats its children. To put it another way – this week, the measure of a society is how we harvest our spring onions.

The Chinese Government were never going to welcome the news that Liu Xiaobo had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. No Government is likely to be enthusiastic about its own internal dissidents being honoured by the rest of the world. And those of us who live in so called liberal democracies should perhaps hesitate and look carefully at what we hold in our hands before hurling it at others. We may break our own glass house. I say "so called liberal democracies", because I doubt if our society is as liberal as we'd all like to think; and not everyone would say that what we have is in any strong sense, a democracy.

Nevertheless. I risk the surrounding glass houses as I hold in my hand at least one smooth rounded stone. (By the way amongst my favourite objects are stones which have been rounded by the lapidary patience of water – a metaphor for slow but transformative change?) That the award of a Peace prize should be described as obscene is one of those paradoxical statements which betray irreconcilable differences of perspective.  But then to talk of irreconcilable differences also calls in question the point of a Peace prize if conflicting ideologies are incapable of understanding, and even revision of thought. The Chinese Government has an entirely consistent record of putting the interests of the Party before the rights of its people. Liu Xiaobo was an activist during the Tiannemann Square protests, and has been in and out of prison since – currently serving 11 years for writing ideas contrary to those approved by the Government.

The West has little assumed moral superiority left. We have our own embarrassments, our own crimes against other parts of the world, our own problems of seeking a more just and humane society. People in glass houses…. But whether here or China, I refuse to have good called evil without rejoinder, or to have just protest silenced without protesting, and I want to describe as nonsense, literally and rhetorically, the notion that the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to an imprisoned activist whose chief weapon was a pen or keyboard, is in any sense an obscene act. Rewarding peacemaking  can never be anything other than transparently humane. That such an accusation could come from a Government which has the Tiannemann Square massacre in its recent history exposes the toxic political doublespeak that is the favoured discourse of those for whom human rights are cheaply negotiable. The statement is itself, an obscenity. 

With objections too numerous to enumerate, and with arguments too obvious to argue,  and for reasons to reasonable to rationalise, the following report of the financial activities of Manchester City FC are morally unacceptable. Not singling this Premier League English club out, (so I've shown Chelsea players – apparently one on £150,000 per week) just offering an example of ludicrous extravagance that is so morally compromised it is hard to get any ethical handle on it.  Please place the figures below ( the published audit figures popularised for public consumption) alongside the realities of poverty and struggle for individual people who are unemployed, chronically unwell, single parents, or low income families. And then recall the Amos vision of a just society, preceded throughout his prophecy by harsh questions to the extravagant grinders of the poor, and luxuriating mega-rich on their Bentley sofas – ok forgive the anachronism:

But let justice roll down like waters

and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

 "The figures also show details of City's astonishing spending spree on players and salaries which have led to record losses of £121.3million. Although City's turnover increased by 40% to £125m this has been swamped by total salary costs of £133.3m, a £50m rise on a year ago.

The annual report also shows that the club's net spending on transfers has totalled a staggering £403m since 2008. City's net spending this summer was £96.6m – they actually spent around £126m but recouped £30m from the sale of Robinho and other players.

As of June 1 2009, £185.2m had been spent on transfers and this was followed by a further £145.4m in the following 12 months offset by sales totalling £24m.

The good news for City is that their turnover has also risen hugely, mainly due to a large increase in commercial income, from £87m to £125m."

Sometimes the politics of envy is a morally defensible position. I covet the money that pours Niagara-like into football -not for myself.

I wonder what difference it might make to a hundred families to have the equivalent of the cost for one of those famous celebrity / footballer parties?

Or the difference it would make to the hospice provision in this country if for a year ten footballers decided to take their £100,000 per week every second week and donate the alternating payment. Daft maths I know but we are talking daft maths anyway. The answer is £26,000,000 give or take.

I'm not blaming the footballers – I am asking about the ethical maturity of a culture that has no problem with such daft maths. And I'm not pointing the finger as if I stood outside all this nonsense – I am part of a society that has lost its sense of proprotion, that has mislaid its capacity to measure value, that long ago silenced its ethical klaxons where money is concerned, that lives in a cultural world where virtual fantasies about being mega-rich occlude the counter-experience of many for whom poverty and lost life-chances are not a virtual but a real nightmare. The published finances of a football club such as those quoted above are worth considering alongside the massive cuts about to affect many vulnerable people in our society.