Epiblog for Palm Sunday

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. I hardly dare believe that winter might finally be losing its grip, and I am trusting in spring, but keeping my powder dry, just in case. After all, there once was a cricket match in Buxton in June where snow stopped play. Derbyshire has always been a bit of an alternative universe, though.  But the snowdrops have been out for weeks now, the daffodils, that “come before the swallow dares, and take the winds of March with beauty” as Shakespeare might have put it, indeed did put it, are out, and there’s just the faint hint of what the Harley Lyric Alysoun calls “bethuene Mersh and Averil, whan spray beginneth to springe”.

The squirrels and the birds are certain that it’s spring, and are getting on with putting back the nutrition that surviving winter has taken out of them. We’ve had all the usual suspects, blackbirds, pigeons, a robin, plus the other day, I saw a sparrow come down to the bird-food dish, now quite a rarity, although when I was nobbut a lad, every hedgerow was full of their brawling, eager presence. I mentally reassured it that it apparently held a special place in the mind of God, according to the Gospel of Matthew at least:

Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.

So, there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow (where have I heard that before!) Whatever the reasons for their decline, Matilda isn’t one of them. I was a bit worried this week that she was really slowing down because she spent most of the day sleeping in the conservatory, on the woolly blanket Maisie made her, which is spread over one end of a little settee that catches what sun there is. I have come to the conclusion, though, that she is just being a cat, and doing catty things.  She does revive and wake up towards dusk, and goes out for a patrol around the decking and the garden.  I think she might have just adjusted her daily routine because Zak’s staying with us, and we’ve also had one or two bits done to the house this week.

Yes, with the coming of spring, we have decided once again to try and grasp the nettle of “home improvements” and pick up from where we got to last time the bug bit us. The alternative is sinking further and deeper into a morass of clutter. Part of the problem with our house is that there are lots of little things wrong with it, but joiners and the like want big jobs they can get their teeth into, and charge a whole day for.  Anyway, this week we decided that the time had come to take on some of the larger tasks.

The front garden was the first, on Wednesday. Martyn the gardener took off some more of the dead branches of the trees, and also cleared both sides of brambles and ground elder. The last time it had been done was when Owen had a go at it, out of the goodness of his heart, with hand tools. Martyn was more mechanised, and hit it with a ground level Blitzkrieg by taking it off with hedge clippers.  So, at least that will be in check for another few months. There is still tons to do, however.

While he was sawing and grubbing away outside, the joiner arrived and I showed him the list of jobs, which he then took away with him, promising to estimate on them as soon as possible. Finally, on Friday, the plumber came to change over our old double Belfast sink for a new one, so that I can get in and out of the kitchen more easily.  This has been an absolute boon and a blessing, although I will miss the old sink, as it was much more convenient sometimes to have two basins side by side. Anyway, currently it’s languishing in the garage, awaiting a new home somewhere as yet undefined.

The dogs, meanwhile have had a relatively uneventful week. Apart from last night, that is.  Because Debbie had been watching the rugby, it had got rather late in the day for going off and yomping over hills and mountains high in the camper van, so instead she took Misty and Zak on a more conventional trundle, round what is known as “the circuit” – basically, out of our house, turn left, go down Big Valley into Armitage Bridge, climb up out of Armitage Bridge on carriage drive to Woodhead Road, walk along Woodhead Road back towards Huddersfield, until you get to Lockwood Bar crossroads, turn left on to Meltham Road, and then walk back up to the house, crossing under Lockwood Viaduct on the way.

Lockwood Viaduct is a massive Victorian structure that spans the valley and carries the line from Sheffield to Manchester. As Debbie and the dogs were plodding along in the dark, heading for home, they came under the viaduct and came face to face with a woman who stopped them and asked them if there was any way of getting “up there” – pointing to the viaduct. Ever helpful, my wife started to say “I think there are some steps, somewhere…” before “twigging on” and realising that the woman seemed in something of a state, and she wasn’t wearing a coat.  Anyway, they talked for about half an hour and eventually Debbie was able to phone her partner (the woman’s phone was out of juice) and he came down and collected her, allowing Debbie, Misty and Zak to continue home.  Whether she was sufficiently distraught to have actually climbed the steps to the top of the Viaduct parapet and then actually do anything silly while she was up there, remains what Donald Rumsfeld would call an “unknown unknown”, but I was glad, for one, to think she had met Debbie. As I said to Deb when she had recounted the tale, “We don’t have much money, but we do see life.”

By the end of the week, we both felt as if we’d spent the day in a tumble drier, so we shut all the doors, got the house warm, fed the dogs and the cat, and fell to discussing the next stage of what we are planning to do with the camper van.  Coincidentally, Father Jack at the garage had rung up to say that another of his customers would be disposing of their VW camper van, a T4 model, in September, and were we interested.  They sent some pictures of it to my phone and yes, it was indeed a nice van. There were only three problems - the timing was wrong, in that if we were looking for a new vehicle, summer is the time; we couldn’t afford it anyway, and I am not entirely sure that the interior layout of the T4 would be suitable for my wheelchair shenanigans.  Still, it was a nice thought, and I thanked them.

Wheelchair shenanigans have been very much in the public mind this week as well, with the resignation of Iain Duncan Smith in the wake of the budget. The budget itself was pretty much as I expected, the same voodoo reverse-Robin-Hood economics, take from the poor and give to the rich. On top of the £30.00 per week cut in ESA, they were also going to cut PIP, the new “Personal Independence Payment” which is already a poor replacement for the old DLA, as the DWP are using the migration process to winnow out perfectly good claimants purely for the purposes of economics.

If there was any doubt on this matter, one has only to read the heartfelt plea of one of the victims of this process, published on social media this week.  I will quote it in full.

Good news from Camp Cameron; in three weeks time I will no longer be disabled.

You may have seen mention here or on Instagram about my almighty battle to keep my little cottage. The battle should not be so mighty; a simple case of switching me from the DLA, (the old disability benefit for which I was assessed and awarded), to PiP (Cameron's new disability benefit).

This morning I found out that my claim has been unsuccessful; I am not considered sufficiently limited by my condition to receive state support. Further, as of April 2016 my disabled status will be revoked.

Under the new system I must wait a further 8 weeks until I am allowed to launch an official appeal. It is called the mandatory reconsideration period. It means the same people will assess the same evidence again and they are allowed to take two months to do so. I am allowed to submit no further evidence nor have any advocate speak on my behalf.

I have been applying for this benefit since Nov 3rd. I asked how I should cover my rent in such a period? I was advised to vacate the one bedroom property I have occupied for five years and be sheltered in homeless accommodation whilst they make their decision. Being legally homeless is the only way to receive social housing within the first 12 months. I have been further advised that a hostel bed will be easier to find for me if I rehome my dog. When their attention was brought to the fact I am bedbound for long periods they suggest a women's refuge will 'reduce my chance of being attacked' and that I 'get on with' applying as beds are 'competitive'.

Though ill and cognitively compromised, I am a fairly smart woman with a excellent support network, above average negotiation skills and a reasonable education (and clearly some good self esteem, haha). This is not the case for many sick and disabled people in this country who undertake this fight alone. I have had my situation verified by case workers, lawyers, doctors and members of my community. I have gathered letters, had phone calls made on my behalf, attended all appointments and returned all correspondence and my claim has been denied.

Over the five month application period I have had to find ways to cover a £500pm shortfall myself. I have done this through a combination of overdraft/credit cards and resourceful cost cutting. I reduced my food outgoing by 50%, downgraded my internet and phone packages, stopped using the oven, cut back on supplements which are vital to the maintenance of my health. I have done a winter with no heating, sleeping in jumpers, spooning the dog. Unsurprisingly my health has declined.

It is well known that more than 50% of disability decisions are overturned at tribunal. Introducing a mandatory wait for tribunal is a shocking and woefully under-publicised discovery. Another two months, another £1000 shortfall, another eight weeks and news from all departments that funding is further cut for 2016. The reason they can vote for a £30 p/w reduction for existing recipients is because they simply can't imagine £30 being a significant sum of money. They can't see £30 as a week's food budget or two months of electricity.

Let us not forget that the Tory MPs who voted for these cuts and this system are the very same ones who happily trousered their own pay rise and who are always eager when there is a photo-opportunity to be had with a disability charity in their constituency. I have started going through the list of Tory MPs who voted for the ESA cut and, where any of them have links with charities, writing to the charity to point out the disparity of such an association. I hope they are all disowned. If not, people will only draw their own conclusions, and the charity will be tainted by association.

The woman, Rachel Schmitz, quoted above is not alone: one of the things to be said in favour of social media is that it does allow sometimes for the pure, unfiltered message, the authentic voice. Here is another such, this time taken from a “Twitter” thread and stuck together:

A lot of us were saying pre-2010 that a Tory win would mean the suffering of a lot of disabled people. Very few people believed us. They promised that disabled people would be protected, that we need to care for the most vulnerable in society (as they still are). They got around it by claiming enormous levels of fraud, that we have an easy life while others are struggling. Instilling an us vs them.

Despite it being known to be lies, destroying the lives of so many already suffering, they continue even now to do the same. The divide and conquer rhetoric has weaved its way through our society, people can’t wait to vent their anger at someone they’ve seen standing up out of a wheelchair or carrying shopping, having no clue as to their ailments.

The press know this and feed it with stories of scroungers, light on facts and instead full of speculation. MPs pile in by talking about people ‘taking advantage’, feeding it more. Rather than stand up for us, when the average person speaks of ESA/PIP, the first thing they talk about is ‘if you’re GENUINELY disabled..’

Not that it’s awful so many of us are dying, often by our own hand. Not that we’re losing homes, losing our care, being dragged through hell. Nope, instead ‘well as long as you’re NOT faking’. We know what they think of us, what you think of us. We’ve heard you loud and clear. It’s always “I didn’t mean you, you’re okay, it’s THEM” They’ll even speak to you about how they saw their neighbour doing this and that “they’re the ones I mean, the people who are faking”. They have no idea of the state of our health but feel they’re in a position to judge.

I’ve had it. I used my disabled badge when spouse drove me to the shops. Someone wrote into the local paper aghast at someone so blatantly “abusing” it simply because I was young, the car was sporty (an MR2), and they couldn’t see what was wrong with me. I was so crushed. People are watching us all the time, waiting for us to do something to justify saying “FAKE DISABLED!”, taking pictures of us.. Is it any wonder we’re getting anxious about leaving the house? Going out terrifies me at times. There were enough obstacles already without having to try and avoid unwarranted suspicion.

I’ve been followed, spat on, had my chair moved without permission, spoken down to, verbally abused… and all *because I’m disabled*. This is what all this rhetoric does, what it culminates as. Hate crimes are skyrocketing because of it.

So it came as something of a shock on Friday, when Iain Duncan Smith, the man responsible for this situation, suddenly resigned, claiming, in the wake of the Budget, that:

"I am unable to watch passively whilst certain policies are enacted in order to meet the fiscal self-imposed restraints that I believe are more and more perceived as distinctly political rather than in the national economic interest"

There are two possible explanations for this bombshell. One is that he has seen the light, and that he was in fact always Mr Nice Guy, but he was possessed by the demon spirit of George Osborne, and has no recollection whatsoever of strangling all those pensioners and forcing Bedroom Tax victims to jump under lorries. He finds himself (a bit like the Liberal Democrats when they realised they were doomed in the 2015 election) in a state of having had a sudden epiphany. Or a bit like someone who wakes up the morning after a particularly memorable party, with a hangover the size of Estonia, and their friend rings them up and fills them in on what happened. “What? I did what? I jumped up and punched the air in triumph when the cuts were announced? No way! I declared them fit for work and two hours later they died? You’re kidding me!…” and so on.

People do have epiphanies, of course, and there is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, and all that.  The Sun had a typical Sun headline for Cameron: ‘Beware the IDS of March’, and the other explanation, continuing the Roman theme of the Sun headline that will be lost on 99% of its readers, is that IDS is lining up to be the Brutus to Cameron’s Julius Caesar.  We should be under no illusions that Cameron is now toast. Maybe with a side of Caesar salad, but toast nonetheless. You could almost feel sorry for him.  His cardinal error was to ignore the old maxim of the medieval Chinese warriors in, those manuals like The Art of War by Shih-Tzu – “never start a battle which you are not sure of winning”.

He didn’t have to include the referendum which will now be his undoing in the manifesto. Or if he did, he didn’t have to go ahead with it. There are plenty of other things that will damage the national interest – turning all the schools into academies for instance, or selling shares in the bailed out banks at a £22 billion loss to the exchequer, which were not in any manifesto, but which they are pressing on with regardless. He only came up with the idea of the referendum to try and negate the electoral pull of UKIP, and he must now be bitterly regretting that he didn’t just let UKIP supporters carry on gnawing at their walking-sticks and howling at the moon, and just put up with the occasional defections of some appalling old Bufton Tufton Tory MP in a Barbour, whom nobody had ever heard of anyway.

But no, he’s called it, and he’s going to lose.  He’s going to lose because, in the great confusion, which both sides have deliberately engendered to make it easier for them to lie about the concept of Brexit, the message about the benefits of remaining in Europe, and the fact that you can only reform an organisation from within, have been swamped and sunk like a boatload of refugees in the Med, by thinly-veiled racist rhetoric from the “no” camp on immigration.  Thus, on 23^rd June, every racist granny and white van man bigot in the country will vote for Brexit not on the basis of better economic prospects for the UK outside of Europe (because there are none) not on the basis of increased security (it will be worse) not on the basis of keeping the good legislation on human rights, employment and the environment from the EU, but on the mistaken premise that leaving the EU will make it easier to keep out brown people and stop them being given benefits, free TVs and free council houses.

Cameron’s party was the author of much of this rhetoric in the first place, until they found it was actually feeding and giving succour to UKIP, and tried to back pedal it a bit. So they find themselves in a bit of disarray, facing both ways at once, and against a background of Osborne having to down grade forecasts and announce yet further missed economic targets. Small wonder then, that IDS, seeing his moment, should plunge home the dagger, for entirely personal and self-advancing reasons, while claiming a pious conversion. Either he’s after Cameron’s job himself, or he knows that Boris Johnson will be PM in the autumn and Johnson has promised him the role of Chancellor.  As I said, it is almost possible to feel sorry for Cameron, who has revealed himself to be a tactical nincompoop, announcing last year that he would resign as PM in the course of this parliament (mistake # 1) and then holding this bloody referendum when he didn’t have to (mistake # 2).

Just pause to think about that, dear reader, for a moment. When Cameron is choosing curtains this autumn, for his cosy little retirement home in Witney Scrotum, the PM of Great Britain will be Boris Johnson and the President of the USA may well be Donald Trump. Time for a re-make of Dumb and Dumber? The Tories are rattled, though, make no mistake. The febrile atmosphere within their ranks caused by Cameron haplessly re-igniting the Euroskeptic days of the 1990s which exasperated John Major into calling them “bastards” and telling them to “put up or shut up” has been made even more poisonous by the benefits cuts debate and Osborne pressing on into the valley of economic death, even though he is now the only person in the country who believes that “austerity” is working.

Nicky Morgan, the remarkably ineffective education secretary, who makes even Michael Gove look like a towering statesman, flounced out of an interview with Sky News this week after 24 seconds because the interviewer asked her about the conflict between what Osborne said about benefit cuts (“we are committed”) and what she had said on Question Time the night before (“the cuts are just an idea”).  They are fighting like rats in a sack, no doubt, behind closed doors.  She did well to flounce, actually, because otherwise someone might have asked her the awkward question “what happened to the title deeds of the schools which have become academies and what will happen to the title deeds of the schools which will become academies?

Local authorities are forced to hand over the title deeds of schools which become academies, and are not fiscally compensated for this. Title deeds, like everything else in life, have a value, and the monetary value of the title deeds of the schools privatised thus far has been estimated at £10 billion. Yet Michael Gove, in response to a freedom of information request, said that he had “no recollection” of any title deeds. So £10 billion of public assets has been transferred out of public ownership and has vanished into a black hole, just like that, at a time when we are so short of cash to spend on bombs and rockets that we are slashing benefits, and no one says a dickey-boo?  Yoo-hoo! CPS! Director of Public Prosecutions! Sleeping on the job again?

Today is Palm Sunday , and as I’ve written at least once before on the very well-known story of Jesus riding in triumph into Jerusalem, only for those same crowds that previously cheered him, to turn and demand his crucifixion a few days later. I am not enough of a Biblical scholar, either, to get to the bottom of whether or not Jesus chose an unbroken colt for his triumphal entry in order to fulfil ancient prophecy, except to say that whenever people in the Bible do anything completely wacky or random, the excuse is that they are usually fulfilling ancient prophecy.  Instead, I’d like to think about Easter as a time for renewal, and as my text, I am not taking something Biblical, but instead, a poem, The Stare’s Nest By My Window,  from Meditations in Time of Civil War by W. B. Yeats.

The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned.
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war:
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare,
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

The “stare” in this case being Yeats’s Irish poetical way of saying “starling”.  On one level, it’s a simple nature poem, describing the bees using the abandoned nest of a starling on a ledge outside the window of Yeats’s room at Thoor Ballylee.  A hundred years ago next Sunday, however, in Dublin, the Easter Rising of 1916 started, and began a process which led first to the civil war in question, then the decades of sectarian strife and murder in the North.  Yeats is making a heartfelt plea for regeneration and renewal.  The bees are a metaphor for all the people who need to come back, because they had previously turned their backs on the troubles and the violence, and work together to rebuild Ireland.

It seems to me a very good analogy for the situation we now find ourselves in. We’ve had something akin to a civil war (albeit undeclared, people have still died, however) since 2010, and maybe, just maybe, now it is all starting to come apart at the seams and there will be an opportunity for growth and rebuilding again. We’ve fed the heart on fantasies, alright. The fantasy that austerity will produce growth, to name but one. Nobody has yet satisfactorily explained to me how, if you owe someone 100 apples, you pay them back by cutting down the orchard. And the heart has indeed grown brutal on the fare – as a society, we are less compassionate and forgiving than I can ever remember in my lifetime.

If renewal comes, however, it will need to be more than simply a matter of economics and politics. It needs to be a spiritual renewal, as well, a re-focusing on the things that really matter, like compassion, mercy, respect, humanity, and it needs to embody the virtues espoused by the Good Samaritan.  Now is the hour. Spring is a time of renewal and rebirth, and, if you believe in him, a time when Jesus produced the ultimate game-changer, a comeback that would put even Elvis in the shade.  Talking about a revolution, says Tracy Chapman, starts with a whisper.  It ends with the honey-bees, building in the empty house of the stare.

For my part, I’ll be carrying on with my own personal plan to renew our immediate environs and try and improve them a bit and reverse some of the depredations caused by years of neglect, some of which was avoidable, some not.  I need to get my herbs in the tubs, and I am going to try and plant some roses – it’s long been a dream of mine to have a rose-garden.  Still, like the song says, along with the sunshine, you have got to have a little rain, some time.  And there’s always the work, and the accounts, and the etcetera, etcetera.

Still, as I type this, on the day of the Equinox, and at 19 minutes past 5 in the P.M., it’s still light outside. Debbie and the dogs will be back soon, though, so it’s time for me to empty the bin and put out the ash, fetch in some coal and put the kettle on. But underlying these mundane tasks I do feel, at least, today, in spite of all the grim nastiness of the world, a faint note of hope for a change – a faint murmuring of honey-bees gathering for summer? Honey bees, come build in the empty house of the stare.