Monday 27 January 2014

27th January 2014

It's enough to make you climb the walls.

And that's exactly what some of us did on Saturday.

Climbed the walls.

In our case it was a Birthday Celebration, and the walls that were climbed were 'climbing walls'.

I didn't participate, I spectated, but watching all these folk climbing the walls made me wonder.

What does it mean to climb the walls?

The Cambridge Advance Learners Dictionary defines it as 'to suffer unpleasant feelings, such as worry, in an unpleasant way'.

Looking around at the folk climbing the walls I wondered how many were suffering unpleasant feelings or worrying in an unpleasant way.

Of course 'climbing walls' are appearing everywhere, there are, apparently, more than thirty in Newcastle upon Tyne.

Many of them are in redundant churches, flour mills or sugar refineries or in other redundant commercial premises.

Height is the key requirement, 22 Metres we were advised, makes for a good climbing wall.

Most folk in the building seemed to be enjoying themselves, hauling themselves up and down, under and over, good exercise, a great way to get and keep fit, I was told.

But I still couldn't help wondering and worrying.

Worrying? In an unpleasant way.

The weather was very poor, heavy rain mixed with snow. Were people worrying about climate change I worried?

The economy continues to reward the rich at the expense of the poor. Were people worrying about the economy?

Despite austerity the budget deficit remains large. Were people worried about the deficit?

As a nation we still spend more on imports than we export. Were people worried about the balance of payments?

Everyday items, from eating to heating are rising. Were people worried about the cost of living?

Meanwhile wages are going down. Were people worried about the reducing buying power of the average wage packet?

Clearly they were climbing the walls.

It became an all consuming worry as I drove home.

After all if Labour re-introduce the 50% Tax Rate, we were advised, it won't raise as much as George Osborne's 45% because folk won't pay it and will use all sorts of creative accounting to avoid paying.

So that's a worry.

Still the folk at Davos were all listening to the world's richest man reassure them that it was all going to be OK.

In a Big Mac moment (As in Macmillan not Ronald McDonald) he reassured them that they'd never had it so good and soon Africa would be doing OK as well.

Well I guess they weren't climbing the walls.

The longer we are condemned to a diet of austerity porridge whilst being reassured that it is all in our best interests the greater the worry that what is actually happening is that the basic support structures that have made our society a reasonably fair and just society are being removed.

It's like being asked to climb that 22 Metre wall without a spotter, a rope, pitons, crampons or proper shoes.

It's enough to make you climb the walls, its such a worry.


Tuesday 21 January 2014

21st January 2014

To pick up from a previous post.

It seems that society is being restructured. It is not however the kind of restructuring that will bring justice for the poor.

I have to confess that I haven't watched Benefits Street on Channel 4. So that makes me something of an expert1 Though I have followed the debate and found it to be instructive.

The restructuring we are experiencing is being defined in a number of key ways. The smaller state. Benefits for the wealthy that will 'aid the recovery'. The reduction in the welfare bill.

There are crumbs thrown occasionally. Raising the minimum wage. Increasing the tax threshold.

But the inequalities illustrated by programmes such as Benefit Street are growing and an unequal society will never be a fair society, a society at ease with itself, nor will it ensure justice for the poorest.

I have lived in various locations around the country, some more salubrious than others and generally speaking I have managed to get by without falling out with the neighbours.

As I understand it the programme describes the lives of a group of neighbours in an inner city area of Birmingham.

I lived in Birmingham for six years.

I had a psuedo academic job in one of the Selly Oak Colleges and to make sure that I had a weekly reality check I also became an Assistant to the Chaplain at Winson Green Prison and covered for the Chaplain on his day off which was a Thursday.

In time I worked for a while with the East Birmingham Task Force and ultimately with the Birmingham Drugs Prevention Initiative, part of the Home Office.

Birmingham is a fantastic city and I enjoyed living in an outer City suburb, on the edge of the area known as Bourneville, the model village built around the Cadbury Factory, chosen because the house was affordable and I could walk to work, thereby saving on travel costs.

Benefits are an increasingly difficult concept and one of the common threads running through the discussion generated by the programme is: What is a benefit?

Is a pension a benefit?

If it is then I now live on benefits. It is certainly true that there is a connection made between what was paid in and what is received by pensioners, but in reality what I have paid in paid for the pensions of those who were pensioners when I was working, it is in fact those who are now working who pay my pension, collected via the taxes they pay, and indeed, the taxes I still pay because I am fortunate enough to have an occupational pension in addition to my State Pension.

In fact pensions take up nearly 50% of Britain's Welfare Spending compared with Job seekers Allowance at 10%.

Yet pensioners are protected and have been promised that they will continue to be protected with the triple lock guarantee recently renewed by the Prime Minister.

Whilst job seekers it is implied are 'shirkers' in contrast with 'hard working people'.

This knotty thread is tangled further by the commonly held view that benefit fraud is undertaken on a massive scale whilst in reality it is a minor issue, in the millions, compared with tax avoidance in the billions.

When the plans were laid for the re-development of Birmingham City Centre, around the canal basin, which coincided with the introduction of Right to Buy, there were rumours that tenants in the tower blocks around the re-development area received letters offering to fund the purchase of their flats with a guarantee that they could remain in them as long as they wished.

It may well have been an Urban Myth, it might possibly have been true, but what is clear that in London and other large Metropolitan Centres, that a high percentage of previously local authority flats are now owned and let by private tenants.

My experience, as a parish priest in both inner and outer city suggests that if we want to live peaceable lives where each individual and family enjoys a quality of life, at ease with themselves and their neighbours then the security we require is the security of home and income that allows us to develop a quality of life, whether on Benefits Street or anywhere where we choose or can afford to live.

To achieve this we need two things.

A plentiful supply of good quality homes with a variety of tenures and social as well as private landowners contributing to a mixed economy. Housing Benefit secures the housing needs of people across a wide spectrum of ages and classes and itself costs less than half the cost of pensions.

The second essential is a guaranteed social wage pegged as is the pension at the level of RPI, Inflation or 2.5%.

These two essential benefits could be achieved if the Treasury focused its attention not on Benefit Fraud which costs marginally over a billion a year, and which a guaranteed social wage would probably eradicate, but instead sought to address the leakage of almost fourteen times that amount through what we usually call tax avoidance, so much more polite and so much less threatening than fraud.


Monday 13 January 2014

13th January 2014

So the French have said a firm Non to fracking, presumably with a shrug of Gallic indifference.

So not to be denied, Total are here to frack.

The thread of history here is somewhat tortured, snaggled, knotted up like the wires you need to charge all your devices.

I unravel them, plug in, charge, remove said device and when I return to repeat the process the wires are once again wound around each other, for comfort? for relief? or just because they can?

It would seem that they are alive.

We have always found our energy sources beneath our feet.

After my time as a Curate in Hatfield and Dunscroft in the Republic of South Yorkshire, the congregation at Dunscroft gave me a Miner's Lamp.

It has remained as a reminder of the dark and dusty and claustrophobic work that so many of the congregation undertook in Hatfield Main Colliery, often walking miles to the coal face before hacking and shovelling and loading often in darkness, and bent double in the narrow seams.

Deriving energy from the earth is always difficult and dangerous, whether we are chasing peat, natural gas, wood, coal, or oil.

Wind and Solar and tidal sources simply cannot provide what is needed and Hydro Electric, whilst efficient and clean also impacts on the environment.

So if we want energy, we have to dig it out from under the ground we are standing on.

This carries the risk that if we dig deep enough eventually we could fall into the hole we have dug.

Bore holes to the centre of the earth could tap the huge energy beneath our feet, as natural warm hot springs in Iceland or Jules Verne, might suggest.

But if we live in the temperate west, with cold winters and warmer summers, then we will need to heat as well as eat.

The view of fracking has been coloured by the emotion generated.

Water pumped under pressure and the chemicals used, suggest that we could release undesirable consequences not the least, earthquakes and chemical run off.

One strong argument for fracking or Hydraulic Fracturing to release gas from Shale, is energy security, Britain has exported its energy dependency, coal and gas are now almost exclusively imported and as the world becomes more uncertain  with events in the Middle East, Europe and former Soviet Countries some form of certainty over how we generate energy is urgently needed.

In the US fracking has changed the economic picture increasingly pointing toward a more sustainable energy future and lowering costs.

So the debate will doubtless go on.

Like the clothing company that played around with its initials, anti frackers have used the alliterative quality of the verb, to frack to make their feelings towards the companies who have acquired the licenses perfectly clear.

And of course the political commitment of the coalition Government raises questions about how much is simply politics and how much are carefully considered energy policy for the future.

But there it is, vegetation from thousands of years ago, created the coal we have relied on and in my family I am aware that two of my grandfathers were Miners before they went to war and one great grandfather died in a pit accident.

In Britain mineral rights belong to the Crown, so a speculator such as the founder of fracking, George P Mitchell cannot as he did in America, amass an enormous personal fortune, the benefits to the Treasury are significant and measured in Billions and the energy reserves will more than compensate for declining reserves in the North Sea.

The first shale gas field has been identified on the Fylde Coast near Blackpool, which has one amazing benefit, whatever the outcome for the future of energy supplies in the UK at least Blackpool will be able to keep its lights on .......



Monday 6 January 2014

6th January 2014

The year has turned.

And no sooner than Christmas is tidied away it is Epiphany.

The church I was Vicar of near Bedford, used to set the Magi off on their Journey on Christmas Eve, slowly they wound their way Eastwards, (I know they came from the East but the Crib was under the Altar and they always set off from the West Window) until they arrived at the crib with their gifts.

I hope that I haven't caused too many folk to lose their faith over the years I have been a 'punk' vicar, but I do recall one person complaining, after a sermon in which I suggested that no-where in the New Testament does it say that there were Three Kings, just Three Gifts, that I had challenged everything that she had believed.

Oops!

Sorry!

But three gifts, three Kings, Herod's helpful directions and Mary and Joseph high tailing it to Egypt have, for me at least this year a resonance.

We are always being offered a vision, always following a star to some better place.

Governments are always promising, as New Labour did, that things are going to get better, well, they did, and they didn't.

Now we are told that for the hard working, all will be well, whilst for the shirkers, all will not be well.

This Epiphany for many people, any hope of Gold, Frankincense or Myrrh will be as mythical and impossible to dream of, as cheap ipads. For some this year, the Christmas Stocking was lucky to be half filled with a couple of Walnuts and a Satsuma. For the rest there were Food Banks.

Co-op Food has been holding collections of food in its stores, for distribution to Food Banks.

This has been very successful and Co-op Members and customers have been generous in donating food which has then been delivered to the Food Banks by Committee Members.

This suggests that the general public, or at least those who shop in the Co-op, are much more sympathetic to those reliant on Food Banks than Mr Duncan Smith or Ms McVey appeared to be in the debate in Parliament.

Why sympathetic and why the increase in the use of Food Banks.

The Trussell Trust opened one Food Bank in Salisbury before the last election, by the time of the election there were 10.

This could be, as has been suggested a tenfold increase, but we know about statistics and certainly such a sloppy use of statistics would not have been allowed in my School, and anyway the Trussell Trust now operates 400 Food Banks in partnership with local churches and all those who use them are referred, either by Social Services, The DWP or GP’s.

The vast majority of people who turn to Food Banks are struggling to feed their children.

Child Poverty in Eden is lower, under 10%, of the population than elsewhere in Cumbria, it is significantly higher, in Carlisle, on the West Coast and in Barrow.

It has been suggested that Food Banks are indicative of the much rumoured 'big society' but I suspect that they are symptomatic of a wider malaise in Society, although the response to them is indicative of a more generous view within wider society than appeared to be expressed by those on the Government side in the recent debate.

As an Anglican Clergyman I have over the years welcomed many different types of person to my front door and provided food and drink. Many of those people were homeless and had a variety of problems often associated with substance abuse or misuse. Most appeared pleased to see the sandwich or whatever, apart from one man who came on a difficult day, I was eating a Beetroot sandwich so I shared it with him, he was so outraged that he threw the sandwich onto the ground and stormed off, shouting as he went, that the previous Vicar always served Fried Egg and Bacon.

People now turning to food banks do not fit this stereotype.

The ending of crisis loans, increases in rent, increases in energy costs, (my own energy costs have risen by £50 per month over the last year), mean that for some people, especially those with young families, as John Major observed, are having to choose between ‘eating and heating’.

We are faced with an administration that has launched a wholesale attack on those reliant on benefits, drawing a mean distinction between the ‘hard working’ and the ‘scrounger’, and this from a Chancellor photographed, sitting in his Land Rover eating a Burger whilst parked in a disabled space?
  
In the Financial Times this weekend the Chancellor is quoted as promising to save, ‘Billions of Pounds from the Welfare Bill’ a promise clearly linked in the same paragraph to Tax Cuts.

I have always taken the view, underpinned by the training course I was required to attend when I first joined the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance in 1963, that Beveridge’s attack on the 5 Giants of Squalor, Ignorance, Want, Idleness and Diseaserepresented the intellectual basis for the MPNI’s (Now DWP) mission.

Alongside Beveridge’s generous response to social need lies R H Tawney’s view that ‘major structural change is required to bring about social justice for the poor.

Sadly the ‘structural change’ being implemented by this Government, the smaller state and less intervention, with the Market setting both the pace and the rules is resulting in a very different outcome whether in work, pay, health, housing, welfare or education.

That Food Banks are a necessity for many people after four years of austerity, largely borne by the poorest, many of whom are working and actually earn their poverty, is in my view a disgrace.

The Magi have arrived at the Manger, I wonder what wisdom those wise men might wish to offer us today? Or whether as T S Eliot had it in his poem they were left: 

no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, 
With an Alien people clutching their gods.