history

The Currency of Love

~ Jim Hindle ~ 1 Comment

In the late summer of 1157, troops mustered by Henry II gathered on the saltings south of Chester to make their way up the coast of the Dee estuary.  They were attempting to crush the most northern Welsh princes who had run amok, in the eyes of the English, during ‘the Anarchy’ of the reign of King Stephen.  Thomas Becket, then still chancellor, had consulted soothsayers about the best time to launch the assault but they can’t have been much good given the problems the expedition ran into – Henry’s accompanying fleet mauled when it put into Anglesey, the king himself ambushed with his army in Flintshire, bombarded in a narrow pass by rocks and arrows, a massacre only avoided by Henry managing to fight his way out of a thicket.

Eventually the Welsh sued for peace as Henry advanced into Snowdonia.  Becket was busy handling paperwork in Chester at the time and the chroniclers do not mention any role he played in the combat itself.  But some of them stated he reinvented himself as a warrior from the time of the Welsh campaign.  Their views speak of the inconsistencies of medieval life where it was far from unheard of for chancellors and other high-status clerics to don chainmail and fight.  Becket certainly played his part in a later campaign that culminated in the siege of Toulouse where castles, towns and large swathes of land were razed to the ground and despoiled.  He personally led a cohort of some 700 knights from his own household, taking great personal risk and endangering his elite troops unnecessarily, an impulsiveness which some said first showed itself when he fell into a millstream when hunting as a teenager, possibly while trying to impress his aristocratic friend Richer de l’Aigle.

It all speaks of the juxtaposition of roles and ironies of the life of the man who consorted great controversy during his life if not necessarily its wake.  Becket we know could be stubborn and wilful, not unlike Henry, whose story forms the twin lodestar of the then archbishop’s fate.  Speaking of both of their lives it is easy to judge or jump to easy answers.  Becket after all had had a profound galvanisation of belief when made archbishop, possibly borne of insecurity regarding his fitness for the new role.  We know it marked a turning point, that the worldly, even sometimes violent life of chancellorship was now behind him.

If he could be set in his ways, religious to a fault, in some eyes almost fanatical at times, we can say too his actions spoke of a very real courage.  We know for instance that, even if some of his intuitions could be overblown, he certainly came to conceive that, in obstructing Henry, he was fighting a very real autocracy, even an actual tyrant and that he personally constituted the Church’s best defence in a struggle for supremacy that formed one of the themes of medieval governments for centuries either side of his life.

If any of that sounds abstract, we can consider that his messengers were sometimes tortured, swathes of his family and followers, including babes in arms, were cast out of their homes in the middle of winter in a fit of public retribution by the king, a whole religious order that had offered Becket shelter was threatened with expulsion, his bishops were menaced with threats of imprisonment or mutilation to speed along negotiations and his final days took place amid a climate of abuse and paranoia where his properties and followers in Canterbury were seized and harassed respectively and he was accused of inciting civil war.  He didn’t flinch in the face of any of this and, when the time came, while he very easily could have hidden, he chose to stand his ground in the face of men whose capabilities and intent could not have been hard to surmise.  Perhaps he was tired of pursuit.  Perhaps he could simply see where it was going and probably had been for years.

In England, it sometimes feels we can be too disposed towards an ingrained cynicism, resent success or can be too willing to knock a good man down.  What other country would take its national bard and undermine his achievements by accusations of collusion and ghost writing, his national holiday hidden away on St George’s Day (the anniversary of Shakespeare’s death) as if he doesn’t quite deserve a celebration of his own?

Perhaps the same can be said of our treatment of Becket; that, where there is doubt, it can go against him, that notions of Saints in any case are about as credible as a moon made of cheese and the very essence of religion is the stuff of fairy stories better relegated to a simpler, recalcitrant age.  We are all the bold enlightened now and ought to have no place for superstition, castigate at every turn the high and mighty even if such grandness was never a thing that they sought.  

But perhaps, as belief systems go, we can remember that, for all our modern cleverness, the most important things cannot be cut and dried and comprehended in a solely intellectual way.  Love itself, the fabric that binds the very world together, is not a thing of equations, that the best and truest alchemy is one first and foremost of psychology, that we cannot comprehend our most intrinsic gifts by seeking to pull them apart.

Becket then can stand as an icon for a world we should not let slip through our fingers.  While it can feel at times we haven’t learnt a thing since the eleven hundreds, can we be lit up at all by the things which ought to provide foundations for our lives – love, fidelity and principles; qualities Becket so surely helped embody?

The story goes, the day he fell into the stream at Michelham, the miller – oblivious to his presence – stopped the wheel in its motion just in time to avoid calamity by sheer feat of serendipity, an occurrence that was meant to have instilled in Becket a greater sense of providence and faith.  Can we, even now, cultivate a belief in the more mysterious aspects of this world, the kind of mysteries that can underpin it all; a language not forgotten of the currency of love, the human heart, where discoveries only lead to a better understanding of the sense that it is all still much bigger than us, that we still have so much that we can learn?

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Copies of ‘The Shrine Way: an English Pilgrimage’ can be ordered at westmarch.co.uk

Cruel and False Economies

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

Last year, October’s spending review ushered in a sense of disbelief akin to a thing like freefall: Doomsday had apparently come early for so many in the public sector, for so many of the inner city poor. If there had been any question about it before, now it was only too clear. The crunch had bitten deep, the shit had hit the fan and the government were, maybe if only for the space of a few days, seemingly made only too credible to many by the strength of something like conviction, something that passed for it, something sufficient to make people mistake it for genuine force of feeling. Though to their way of thinking, Cameron and IDS probably still believe that they are right, as for them to be right equates with a dismantling of the state, where the deficit may be unfortunate but dovetails neatly with their ideology. The true blue values of many Tories are both masked and miles away from endless touchy feely PR wooing of the swinging votes.

Nine months on from the election, the ground has been well primed with months of saturation in the press of stories of benefits scroungers, a national vilification that few have seen fit to deny. The climate is set and the sound of belts being tightened en masse hardens feelings to those who may be neither strong nor productive, who simply do not have a bus or bike to get on, who are set to be brushed beneath a rug of touted necessity, of a new and harsher colder world.

A kind of glee in many quarters sets the picture further down a deeply unsettling road. There was a sense of vindication which Cameron did not restrain from whipping up. “Think of how many nurses that money could employ,” he spouted, clear enough that you could almost hear the spittle on the mic as he talked about benefit cuts. “Think how many schools and hospitals it could help to keep running.” It was a denouncement so enthusiastic, that pandered so unapologetically to the most predictable and emotive lines of reasoning it sent a bolt of warning down my spine.

So London held its breath and even months on from the touted claims of “sociological cleansing”, the sense of shock, of something bitter sinking in has not entirely gone, even as the students vented the rage of a nation, even as that shock has been transformed to a kind of fire of the spirit and vindication that this cannot be allowed. Perhaps it is partly a reflection of this change of public mood that the proposed housing benefit cap has been postponed till this time next year. What’s clear is that if these measures are not moderated or overturned there will be very real misery. There will be greater homelessness. There is already stress in countless thousands of houses and on the estates.

What was shocking in reading some of the early comments on the web, the product of the vanguard of the loyal libertarians perhaps, or an indication of the power of Cameron’s crude popularism, was the drawing up of a thousand proverbial bridges. The poor are undeserving after all. Let single mothers be moved into bunkhouses. Let immigrants now find their own way home. This stunned and all too nearly broken Isle, this shocked and awed and deferential country; is this really now how it will stand; a shrugging of our shoulders and wallowing, complicit, in a lie that says it cannot be another way, that only the strong can survive, that only the virtuous prosper, that it is not for a government to be compassionate and the people all must fill the breach because the state has no greater role than sweeping the board clean to let the markets do how they see fit.

Such rushed and savage cuts in many quarters stand to only bring out cruel and false economies, the bills from block-booked B and B’s for the displaced being just one. Even the vaunted ideals of a move away from New Labour’s totalitarian streak are looking little more like cynical window dressing for what was an almost mandatory piece of mendacity for the elections.

It’s worth remembering that the current deficit, while it has risen sharply since 2008 is still just over half of what we faced after World War Two when it is placed in line with GDP. Admittedly that’s an extreme example; we had just come through a full scale global war, the years following 1945 brought with them a sharp decline in what we owed, our credit as a nation was still good and the role of a still bouyant US was no small factor. But it helps to show there are good grounds for reducing the deficit more gradually, if such a possibility can only be articulated to greater effect. But whatever the necessity, however undeniable the crisis, these cuts are being ushered in at their present speed and on their current scale because of Cameron’s view of what the government should look like, irrespective of what we stand to lose as a nation. And the cuts’ nature all too often seems to fly in the face of good sense, as the changes to the way tax is to be collected exemplifies.

Meanwhile, the poor have simply to pull up their own breeches and get on with it. It is will and work that make a person rich in his society, not chances dealt at birth or through health or education. The fact that there are now 2.5 million unemployed and only 500,000 jobs is an inconvenience that those in his circles will not have to suffer. It amounts to more than minimal government; it is effectively Social Darwinism, a return to the worst facets of nineteenth century attitudes to society at large. Factor in that, whether through design or accident, cities like Liverpool will be disproportionately hit and the whole thing takes on the pallor of a monumental sick joke. Except there is no joke, no waking up from the nightmare, no sudden admission from Downing Street that this has all been some mistake or monumental wind up from the start.

Across the South, in many coastal towns there looks set to be new ghettos for the poor; Hastings, in North Kent, in all the conurbations stretched out as a kind of commuter country nineteen thirties afterthought along the Sussex coast. If the caps continue, in fifteen years vast tracts of the South East will be made unaffordable to an equally vast tract of people, an ensuing migration to the far more jobless North only exacerbating the situation.

This could be avoidable if people are willing to conceive we have a choice and that it does not include another four and a half years of a coalition with such a shaky mandate from the start. The crisis is real, but this kind of short, sharp shock is exactly what neoliberals espouse as the best way to respond to it. The tragedy is that this may well lock the UK into a spiral of decline from which only the very richest stand to benefit. Economically, even when dealing with a deficit in a recession, these cuts represent an absence of clear thought.

Meanwhile everything that generations passed have fought for in the name of equality and freedom is being swept aside. The result may be a breeding ground for the kind of conditions that brought about an interwar interim of massive turbulence, which eventually necessitated the creation of a fully fledged welfare state as a way of ensuring a fairer society and more stable political climate. As Karl Mannheim wrote in 1943:

“All of us know by now that from this war there is no way back to a laissez-faire order of society, that war as such is the maker of a silent revolution by preparing the road to a new type of planned order.”

However we choose to do so (and this is worth a read for anyone taking to the streets), it is imperative that more and more of us continue to articulate our discontent. What stands in the balance is not just our own fate over the following months and years or the fate of generations down the line; it is an honouring of a tradition that goes back to at least the mid nineteenth century. It is an honouring of those who sought to reform a Poor Law that condemned the unemployed in a world of finite opportunities to brutal and degrading conditions in the workhouses. It is an honouring of those who fought for the notion that the poor have a right as a matter of course to a greater share of society’s wealth and who, while a culture of hard work should always be maintained, should not be subjected to humiliating means testing. It is an honouring of those who believed that the state had a greater role than fiscal maintenance or passing laws; that it could be an instrument in the building of a fairer and more egalitarian world.

Men and women have suffered and died for such dreams. Don’t let us fail to serve their memory because we have forgotten as a nation that such things were hard won, that we have been handed down unparalleled opportunities, damaged a little on the way perhaps by a thirty-year-long slumber Thatcher set the way for. But we must still be willing to believe that we have it in our hands to shape the kind of world we would see fit, as surely as a generation did sixty five years ago, blinking from the rubble of a global total war, sure of only one thing in a time of unprecedented uncertainty; that they had fought for a better world and would not see the chance for its creation snatched away by the duplicity of a party of privilege with no right to sell this country down the river. It was Ghandi of course who said that each generation must re-enact the struggle for its rights, or lose them. Be under no illusions; that time has come again, there is as much at stake today as there ever was in 1945.

Toppling King Coal

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

The news pops up unmissable, if it weren’t for every other scrap of news also popping at the same time, along with reports of Ann Widdecombe being transported by a showbiz wire above the heads of an incredulous or simple nervous audience on the now worryingly ubiquitous Strictly. So, this particular bit of news says ‘anger was justified’; and this from the former NASA scientist talking about the occupation last year of a coal powered power plant in Ratcliffe-on-Soar near Nottingham by a troupe of activists aiming to shut it down for a week.

The action is a clear case-in-point of a host of issues wider than the heavy handedness of the police response; the right to protest, how this may somehow impinge on wider rights if it means it interferes with the public’s ability to watch Ann Widdecombe – and many more besides – sailing literally or metaphorically with apparent tranquility above the host of disbelieving heads. These millions of mesmerized, vaguely despairing or just bored – a number I could be in on another night – caught in the glare of a mass media that has become both slicker and strangely more popular as it gets ever more debased, suggest we will not think again about our actions even as the savage weather of a dawning century paws with renewed ferocity at the door of our collective consciousness.

And that of course is why those protests took place, why one hundred and fourteen people felt inclined to brave the vagaries of trespass and the response that was bound to come with it. We’re all of us only too aware of the wolf down the road, of the carbon ratcheting up as we hurtle down the motorway of ambivalence towards a fate we all try not to think about. Really, it is not indifference but a kind of collective terror at the situation that we’re in that makes the retreat to the semi fantasy of Saturday night TV seem all the more appealing.

So many now will not join up the dots. The more pronounced the arguments become, the greater the need to take stock of our situation then the greater the temptation not to engage, to turn the other cheek, to ignore the growing feeling that one day soon we will not be able to ignore the rising tides or signs of climatic instability. It is here now, with us, this is the perfect storm, Northern Europe freezes while in Canada and elsewhere the temperature is well above the norm.

But somehow, for the most part, it does not seem so bad. So long as we are warm and have enough to eat we discover our capacity to be content. Sitting virtually incarcerated in cars on the immobilised motorways a thousand motorists turn up the radio and keep their fingers crossed. The more fortunate of us curl up in our living rooms as ice locks us all in and scour our DVD’s and anything else that will help to pass the time and really all of this is only natural; to make the best of any situation. But we seem at times strangely reluctant to not let ourselves really appreciate the nature of our situation, we do not feel inclined to count the cruel tally of the coal as the carbon stacks up from the stacks that churn it out. And partly this is understandable as to do so is to walk along the edge of a kind of precipice looking out over our future, one that does not reassure, an apparently perilous path that could lead us all too easily down a scree or more sudden slope towards despair.

The actions of those at Nottingham in 2009 were of those who chose not to look away, who sought to raise awareness that here, in Britain in the Twentyfirst Century we are rolling on quite happily with the burning of a fuel that is the major cause, besides the oil we use in cars, of anthropocentric driven climate change. Whether we continue to use coal in anything like historic quantities sets up the expectancy or otherwise for any other country in the world to follow in our wake, or set off on another, far more hopeful path.

Of course, it is not enough to beat our chests and sing out; “let there be no more burning of coal.” We have to take stock of the truly huge scale of the problem, of how much we are reliant of this source of fuel, of how comparably unreliable alternative sources of energy can be when providing the necessary base load capacity to enable sixty one million viewers to turn on their kettles in the breaks between Ann’s airbourne debuts on the box. The answers are there but they require both political will and appropriate investment.

In the recent court case, it was argued that seeking to engage the public by encouraging the use of less power on certain days would have been a more constructive response. But, as James Hansen argued, we need to leave the stuff in the ground, not merely moderate our use of it. In that sense taking on a government policy where coal is all but mandatory looks alot more credulous.

Speaking on a debate on Radio Four recently, George Monbiot defined a crucial element of justification of any protest as one of accountability, of surrendering yourself to the full force of the law if you are to break it, in the belief that your actions will be tried in a court, that the rightness of your cause will meet the rigors of the legal system and have the chance to be vindicated in the process. As I understand it, the protestors at Ratcliffe were planning to lock on en masse; in this, they had made the decision to have their beliefs put to just such a test and in the process to present themselves as accountable for their deeds.

However much such protests may make us uncomfortable, they remain, at their best, a simple articulation of an article of a clarified awareness. Whether or not shutting down power stations is the best way to go about it, even an action like this can serve to remind us that things are wrong, that we cannot afford to sit by in denial or complacency while we betray the future through the failure to acknowledge that there must be change, that whatever the complexity, whatever psychological mires we may face, we are at a turning point and must look for and continue to express our expectations that we can moderate our impact on this earth, that we remain – to a possibly still crucial degree – the masters of our destiny if we can only see it.