A voice to the voiceless

Curious how interesting conversation can be on Twitter despite the draconian limitations of its format.

Today an exchange with a fellow tweeter Diana Smith (@mulberrybush) introduced me to a remarkable video, Game's Over (@GamesOverFilm):




Ironically, Diane is based in Stafford where we used to live. A shame our paths didn’t cross at that time. Still, at least our 140-character exchanges are making up for it now.

What frightened me most about the government that took power in Britain in 2010 was not so much its delusions, its mendaciousness or even its incompetence, but its indifference to the plight of others.

‘Lack of compassion can quickly slip into cruelty, and this is going to be a cruel government,’ I told a friend who’d voted Tory.

‘Oh, come on,’ she replied, ‘you’re not giving them a chance. And how can they be worse than Gordon Brown?’

That comparison with Brown was striking. In trying to understand politics, I find myself increasingly using two sets of polar oppositions based on terms which might at first glance not seem that opposed: politician and statesman on the one hand, empathy and charisma on the other.

The essential task of a politician is to win office, and charisma helps enormously. David Cameron had bags of it, as did Nicolas Sarkozy in France, and they won the highest offices in their respective countries.

Gordon Brown, on the other hand, was a hopeless politician and short on charisma. He came across as boorish, churlish, uncouth. His defeat came in large part because voters chose charm over unsmiling competence.

For competence is what Brown had in spades. And he made up in empathy for what he lacked in charisma. He could understand the pain felt by people whose suffering he didn’t necessarily share.

The effect was striking. Within eighteen months of the most serious economic crisis the world had seen for a century, the Brown government had Britain back to growth with unemployment falling.

That’s statesmanship.

Cameron’s crew have taken us back into recession and sent unemployment climbing towards record heights, and it isn’t just incompetence. As Game's Over shows, the fundamental problem is that they don’t care.

Their charisma makes them articulate, even inspiring. Most of the people they are harming are tongue-tied or even voiceless.

A politics that matters, a politics that leads to justice will set as its key goal to give such people their voice. To speak for them when that’s necessary, but far better, to help them speak for themselves. For that we need statesmen not politicians and, while charisma will do no harm, what matters far more is empathy.

That’s why next week’s election in France is important. Sarkozy has panache  but no empathy and, as he’s shown over five years, precious little competence. His challenger, François Hollande, has made a virtue of his very ordinariness. What he has promised to do is to speak up for the powerless and he shows every sign of meaning it. 

Of course, like all leaders of the Centre-Left, he can disappoint too. He’s started talking about the need to limit immigration, a subject he’d studiously avoided previously. But then, you do have to get elected to do any good and, with 18% of the electorate voting for the far right, he presumably feels he owes them some concession.

Still, he’s ordinary and empathetic, and he’s up against charismatic and remorseless. And at the moment the polls are showing him on 55% to the incumbent’s 45%, with nearly a quarter of even the far right voters coming over to his side.

Maybe, just maybe, the French are showing us that our celebrity-obsessed societies are beginning to see through charisma and understand that a good politician can’t hold a candle to a real statesman.

We in Britain also have a leader of the opposition who’s having trouble connecting with the electorate, a Gordon Brown rather than a Nicolas Sarkozy. Though his Labour party sits on a comfortable lead over Cameron’s Tories, Ed Milliband is simply not setting the electorate alight. On the other hand, every time he speaks out he does so with increasing authority and he shows his ability to empathise with the marginalised, the underprivileged, the suffering.

A government led by such a man won’t be perfect, any more than a government led by Hollande would be, but it will at least aspire to social justice and decency. There’s no such aspiration today, as Game’s Over shows. A society which at least sets out to ensure none are excluded, all have a voice, is a better and healthier place for everyone to live, whether we are among today’s victims or not.

Mr Ordinary may win in France next Sunday. And if he does he will set an example for us on this side of the Channel.

One I hope we shall emulate at the earliest opportunity.

The Sixties were roaring. But when exactly?

The conference speaker, no doubt wanting to get going on an informal, personal note, started his presentation by telling us that he’d been brought up ‘in the roaring 1960s of the last century.’

Problem was I took nothing in from that point onwards. It’s the kind of sentence that gets me musing.

First, I wondered idly whether any century other than the last could be said to have had any ‘1960s’. 

Probably not, I decided. On balance.

Next the reference to the last century set me thinking. The conference was about ageing, so had the speaker been brought up in the sixties of some earlier century, not just the contents of his paper but the mere fact that he was giving it would have been exceptionally interesting.

But then I naturally realised that though amusing, this again was idle speculation. No-one addressing a conference today could possibly owe his upbringing to the sixties of any century before the last.

Unless, the thought flashed into my mind, it was a conference of spiritualists. And one of the participants had performed the appropriate rituals and summoned a presence in the approved way.

‘Brought up in the sixties of the sixteenth century,’ the chairman would announce, ‘our next speaker is going to talk about Elizabeth I’s attitude towards ageing, basing himself on his numerous conversations with her on the topic.’

And as the incantations started a figure in a ruff would slowly begin to take form behind the speaker’s lectern.

I checked out the conference. As far as I could tell, there were no white sheets or clanking chains, no one who appeared transparent or even diaphanous. With disappointment, I had to resign myself to the evidence: there would be no 150-year old speakers at this meeting.

No-one wandering around the place with his head under his arm. Though maybe one or two with their heads up a different part of their anatomy.

Not likely to appear at a conference on ageing near you any time soon

The pets take over from the pet substitutes

It’s always seemed to me that children are really only pet substitutes. So it’s perhaps not surprising that since Danielle and I became empty-nesters, we made up for the departure of our children by investing an unhealthy amount of time and attention in our pets: Janka, our rastafarian dog, and Misty our self-assured cat.

This all came to a head when we spent what struck me as an eye-watering sum on the biggest sofa we’ve ever owned. It’s going to be a factor if we ever move: we’ll have to measure any house to establish its capacity to accommodate our sofa.

In the meantime what the sofa itself accommodates is Misty. He approves. It meets his exacting criteria for comfort and size. He has made it clear that this is his sofa to lie on, just as it is poor Janka’s to be ordered off.

Misty will share the sofa as long as it doesn't interfere with his plans

Danielle rather likes the sofa too and complained the other day that Misty was taking up a lot too much of it.

I have no idea how she could voice such a clearly irrational complaint. If a piece of furniture turns up in Misty's house it’s clearly for his enjoyment.

Not that he’s unprepared to share it. All we have to do is fit around him. He’s prepared to be tolerant, certainly, but not if it means giving up his obvious prerogatives.

It’s as though all those years of fitting our lives around our kids’ convenience had taught us nothing. We’re suckers for punishment, for being pushed around by others under our own roof.

Before it was the pet substitutes; today it’s once more the pets.

Janka, not allowed on the new sofa, makes do with the old one

Enter the Lord's house if you wish, but without compulsion

It was touching to read the account, in ‘Our local rock’, of a priest with that mixture of sensibility and wisdom that helps the best Christians make life richer for those around them.

I too have had the privilege of meeting men and women like Father R, among senior and junior clerics, and among the laity. And I’ve met them among Hindus, Jews and Moslems as well as among Christians. There’s no doubt that they bring comfort in a world that’s often short of it, making us all better off for their presence. 

It is the behaviour of such people that helps reconcile me to their beliefs. Because in what I admit is a relatively simplistic attitude on my part, I find it hard to accept that principles developed by an essentially agrarian society 2000 years ago are going to be helpful in understanding where we stand today. Particularly as I often find them deeply flawed.

Take the story of the prodigal son. Isn’t the gross injustice of his being rewarded out of his brother’s inheritance after running through his own, blatant to anyone who reads it? What about the Gadarene swine, driven to their deaths with not a thought to their owner’s livelihood? But the worst of all is Luke 14:23:

And the owner said to his servant, 'Go out to the streets and to the place of hedges and compel them to enter, that my house may be filled’

That’s provided justification for forced, often violent, conversion down the ages.

Still, faced with people like Father R. I find it easy to say, ‘if it generates such goodness, perhaps I can live with the incoherence of the Church’s principles.’

The trouble is not these individuals, it’s the institutions, the churches, to which they belong. Those institutions are far more than the sum of their parts; above all, they’re far more powerful than the sum of their parts. And, sadly, some of the individuals are a lot less nice than Father R.

Look at that quotation from St Luke again. ‘Compel them to enter’. It’s that compulsion that’s the fearful key to much religious behaviour. I can’t imagine Father R behaving that way, but what about Scottish Cardinals fulminating against homosexuality, or fundamentalists picketing abortion clinics to intimidate women who are already going through a difficult and unhappy moment?

I don’t call on any devout believer to be well-disposed to homosexuality or abortion or any other aspect of human behaviour they dislike. You don’t want a gay sexual experience? Don’t have one. But don’t dictate their behaviour to other people who don’t share your view. When a TV programme turns up that shocks your religious sensibility, change to another channel. If you don’t like a full-face veil, don’t wear one, but don’t shut out a woman who does.

Father R draws strength from the Church behind him and uses it to spread harmony. That’s religious behaviour at its best. He has entered into the lord’s house and it gives him solace which he shares with others. But he isn’t trying to compel anyone else to enter too.

When religions learn to follow Father R’s example, society will become an immeasurably more civilised place. But while they continue to apply the principles of Luke 14:23, anyone who believes in decency or tolerance has to oppose them. And this applies to any belief system, not only to Christianity.

Which means, by the way, that it applies just as much to militant atheism. Followers of Richard Dawkins, please take note.

Curse the weather

Glorious piece of conversation overheard on the bus today.

The speaker was a young woman clearly not inclined to make any concessions to conventional standards of good language.

‘[Adjective drawn from a verb representing the act of sexual reproduction] [noun denoting a place of punishment in the afterlife]! Why did I put my nice new £120 boots on today? The rain’s just ruining them! I should have come out in my Wellies...’

Don’t you love it? I’ve always thought that complaining about the weather was one of the most completely pointless activities imaginable, even though we all enjoy indulging in it. It's like moaning about a fundamental law.

‘What can they have been thinking of? The ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter isn’t a rational number. Who works that way?’

‘I know, it’s appalling. And the atomic number of Uranium is 92. It isn’t even prime!’

But complaining that the weather has spoiled your nice new boots takes the ticket.

I tried to conjure up an image of possible responses. Dark clouds rolling sulkily away and slinking off in embarrassment to rain on someone else? An offer from the meteorological office to pay for a new pair of boots? Or at least a decree from the Pope ruling such behaviour an intolerable breach of divine subordination of nature to man, or in this case woman?

I found myself smiling as I listened to the outburst. Especially as the sun had come out. A refreshing change: all those grey skies, all that drenching rain were beginning to drive me crazy.

After all, it’s nearly May, for God’s sake.

Why does this keep happening to me?

Healthcare: the kids are as bad as oldies

I was intrigued by an article I read recently by Denis Piveteau, a member of the French equivalent of the Supreme Court (the Conseil d’Etat) and also chair of the Commission into the future of health insurance in France.

We all know that one of the great issues of our time is the ageing population and the impact it has on health services. We all know that because it keeps being said. In the same collection as Piveteau’s paper, David Oliver from the Department of Health in England pointed out that ‘people over 65 account for 60 per cent of admissions, 70 per cent of bed days, 80 per cent of emergency readmissions or deaths in hospital and nearly 90 per cent of ‘delayed transfers of care’.’

But Piveteau recommends that we distrust simplistic soundbites. It isn’t just the old who consume healthcare services. He tells us that in France, at least, ‘people aged over 75 represent about a fifth of the total expenditure on healthcare of the population, or roughly the same as is consumed by people under 30, and those who are over 85 represent about the same as those who are under 10. And yet no one would ever think of claiming that people under 30 or under 10 are responsible for the deficit in health insurance in France’.

Now it’s true that the proportion of the population under 30 or under 10 isn’t growing, while the proportion over 75 or 85 certainly is. The ageing population is going to be a much bigger factor in determining the future of healthcare over the next few years than the younger age groups.

Even so, it’s great to have a little context, a little perspective. Expenditure on the very old is certainly high, but so is expenditure on the very young. We don’t resent the latter; it might not be a bad thing to be more tolerant of the former.

And that is the balanced view on an impartial observer of the human scene. Who, you may be surprised to learn, will be 60 next birthday.

You think we're the problem? Take a look at the kids.
And we don't make as much noise.

No reason to whine about an English bottle

Years ago, living in France, I introduced a role-playing exercise into a course designed to give the staff of a French company enough multi-cultural sense to handle relations with their English colleagues.

One group had to play the role of a French wine importer — that’s right, importer — selling English wine to a French potential client. To make the whole thing more realistic, we provided some Kentish wine from for them to propose to their prospective clients.

I won’t name the vineyard, partly to protect the guilty, but above all because I (mercifully) can’t remember what it was called.

The role-playing was a disaster. Group after group would start brilliantly, with the ‘salesman’ extolling the virtues of ‘his’ product, the ‘client’ questioning the assertions with scepticism but courtesy. Then they would taste the wine and all attempt at pretence would collapse, just as they themselves collapsed into hopeless laughter. The stuff was undrinkable. Ghastly. In the end, we used it for cooking a couple of times until we decided that it was spoiling the taste of the food and threw it out.

So it was with pleasure that some years later I bought a bottle of English sparkling wine for a French friend who is by a long stretch the most sophisticated wine connoisseur I know. He drank it with some reticence, and then with delight: his verdict? Outstanding.

Things have moved on still further since then. I read in the Observer at the weekend that production of English sparkling wine is growing at an awe-inspiring rate. And indeed that Champagne growers are beginning to look at the possibility of buying into English vineyards.

What I particularly liked about the article was its reference to the Cornish wines from the Camel Valley. We tasted a still white during our recent visit to Cornwall, and liked it so much we had some more the following evening. It has been winning international competitions, and it was easy to see why.

Another good reason for a trip to Cornwall

A long way indeed from that multi-cultural exercise with bottles that only strengthened the cynicism of the Frenchmen taking part.

Always nice to see a historical stereotype being reversed.