It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. And a windy one, and a wet one, come to that. Everywhere is now coated in a deep layer of wet dead leaves. On the plus side, this means leaf-mould beyond our wildest dreams, except that I have temporarily run out of bin-bags and need to get some more on the next Sainsbury’s order, but once these arrive I can scoop up the dead foliage and set it a-mouldering and a-mulching to my heart’s content. There should be no shortage of compost next year. Unfortunately, I also need some lime, to counteract the acidity of our soil, and that only comes in 17KG tubs, so I am loath to order any in case the courier leaves it somewhere where I can’t move it to get my wheelchair past!
But yes, this was the week when the wind got up, the rain came down, and the leaves came off. I found myself thinking of that Gerard Manley Hopkins poem that starts:
But yes, this was the week when the wind got up, the rain came down, and the leaves came off. I found myself thinking of that Gerard Manley Hopkins poem that starts:
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
A cheery little number, but nevertheless appropriate for this time of year. On Saturday, the weather really felt like the end of the world was nigh. At about 11.40AM it was as black as Satan’s knickers outside, the wind sprang up, and horizontal rain was lashing across the decking. The string of prayer flags which Owen kindly put up for me in the balmy days of September became detached at one end, and was flailing and whipping about in the wind like something demented, possessed. Matilda went outside for all of five seconds before turning tail and fleeing back to the warmth of the padded armchair six feet from the stove. She is still in it now, as I write, although she has moved a couple of times in the last 24 hours, mainly to make the short trip to the saucer of Felix on the conservatory floor.
Misty, Debbie and Zak (who stayed over for a couple of nights) have been coming back in the cold and dark from their daily route-marches over t’moors, plastered up with mud and wet through, including one memorable occasion when Debbie apparently slipped off a stepping stone and ended up sitting on her backside in a fast-flowing, icy, stream. Nice. The dogs think this is all great fun, and Misty has come to recognise the early signs of Debbie getting ready to go walkies, trotting back and forth to the door in the mistaken belief that it will somehow speed things up. Zak, when he’s here, picks up on this vibe and joins in, so for at least twenty minutes before any dog-walking expedition actually sets off, my wheelchair is like a tiny island in a sea of milling dogs.
This is also officially the firework season, of course: I know this because, in common with at least 10,000 other people, I signed a government petition to restrict or ban the use of fireworks other than in organised displays, on the grounds of the distress they cause to dogs, cats and other animals. Because more than 10,000 had signed, the Junta was forced to respond, which it did, rather snootily, by saying:
This is also officially the firework season, of course: I know this because, in common with at least 10,000 other people, I signed a government petition to restrict or ban the use of fireworks other than in organised displays, on the grounds of the distress they cause to dogs, cats and other animals. Because more than 10,000 had signed, the Junta was forced to respond, which it did, rather snootily, by saying:
We are aware that fireworks can cause distress to animals. Restrictions on the general public’s use of fireworks, and permitted noise levels, already exist and we have no plans to extend them. Current firework regulations allow fireworks for home use to be sold during the traditional firework periods of Bonfire Night (15 October – 10 November), New Year’s Eve (26 December – 31 December), Chinese New Year (the day of the Chinese New Year and three days immediately before), and Diwali (the day of Diwali and three days immediately before).
What is staggering to me about this bland response to me is that the “traditional firework period of Bonfire Night” apparently officially extends from October 15th to November 10th. When I was a child, it was, er, Bonfire Night.
You could question, I suppose, the premise that it’s a good idea to celebrate the downfall of Guy Fawkes at all, especially as in some places, Lewes for example, it’s still tinged with the Protestant vs Catholic sectarianism that has tainted so much of our recent history. But then, on the other hand, if there is nobody left to recall who Guy Fawkes was, and what he did/didn’t do, there’s also a danger that we not only forget the lessons of history, but that we might even be forced to re-live some of the more unpleasant ones. The same argument applies to Remembrance Sunday. As it stands, if some politician comes along and says “I know, let’s round up all the Jews and gas them”, or “Let’s dig a huge trench right across Northern France and then sit in it for four years lobbing poison gas shells at each other”, there’s still somebody, or a few somebodies, who will say, “Hang on, remember what happened last time?”
Perhaps the Junta should conscript Guy Fawkes into their benighted “British Values” campaign as an example of how things can go wrong when you become so radicalised that you want to settle international arguments with domestic high-explosive. Because that’s what ISIS do, isn’t it? They blow up innocent people in order to try and force a political/religious settlement. Whereas this week, Michael Fallon, the defence secretary, argued that the UK should bomb Syria (which we’re doing anyway, but not in an “official” capacity) and blow up innocent people in order to try and force a political/religious settlement. Oh, hang on…
Perhaps the Junta should conscript Guy Fawkes into their benighted “British Values” campaign as an example of how things can go wrong when you become so radicalised that you want to settle international arguments with domestic high-explosive. Because that’s what ISIS do, isn’t it? They blow up innocent people in order to try and force a political/religious settlement. Whereas this week, Michael Fallon, the defence secretary, argued that the UK should bomb Syria (which we’re doing anyway, but not in an “official” capacity) and blow up innocent people in order to try and force a political/religious settlement. Oh, hang on…
Actually, in the case of the government, it’s not so much ignorance of the lessons of history, as a wilful refusal to learn the lessons of history, even though they know exactly what those lessons are. It’s almost as if, in some areas, in some perverse way, they are determined to repeat those actual mistakes because they don’t care about the consequences, when compared to the chance of staying in power for ever and/or creaming off yet more money for the rich.
There is a concept called Godwin’s Law, which states that in every and any given political argument, someone will inevitably drag in the Nazis as an example of why a given idea is wrong or evil. It happens so regularly, that, as a rhetorical gambit, it has become almost discredited. This is fortunate for the government, because they ignore several of the lessons of Nazi Germany, and nobody picks them up on it. Scapegoating specific communities as the cause of all that is wrong with society, for instance. These days it’s the Muslims, although it’s often (apart from the “immigrant go home” vans) a very subtle and insidious kind of propaganda, whereas in Weimar Germany it was the Jews, and was expressed in much more blatant terms.
Not just the Jews, of course. Disabled people were also a target, and I found myself enlightened as to the true, chilling extent of this by a blog posting I was directed to this week. This was on a blog called Granite and Sunlight, written by a disability activist in Scotland on the subject of “Aktion T4” which was the Nazi’s term for the systematic eradication of disabled people. What had prompted the piece was the outrage when Sioux Blair-Jordan, a Labour member and disability rights campaigner, had said in her speech at the Labour conference that if David Cameron gets his way over replacing the EU commission on Human Rights with his own, home-cooked “Bill of Rights”, disabled people may as well walk into the gas chamber today.
I have paraphrased those words, but that is the gist of it, and it provoked a howl of outrage from the media, who thought it was probably going too far (hah! They should talk) to make such outlandish and untrue statements (unless they are something about Jeremy Corbyn) and also from official Jewish bodies who seem to think in some cases that the Holocaust is their own personal property and only they are allowed to get upset about it. This is not to detract from the fact that they did suffer. Horribly and unimaginably. But they weren’t the only ones.
Aktion T4 began with propaganda: “[£200,000] is what this person suffering from a hereditary defect costs the People’s community during his lifetime. Fellow citizen, that is your money too.” This is actually a translation, with modern-day equivalent sum inserted, of the text of a Nazi poster of the 1930s. However, it could easily have been a Daily Mail headline from last week. The entire blog is too long to quote in full (though it is well worth reading) but the crux of the article is set out thus:
Many such items of propaganda were distributed, citing the cost of supporting disabled people to the taxpayer, how many healthy people could be fed and housed for the price of just one ‘Hereditary Defective’ (the title of a particularly brutal propaganda film showing the worthlessness of the life of a sick person). But before the move towards ‘mercy killing’ was the push towards resentment, something we in the UK should recognise. Germans were told that the state could do more to help them if it wasn’t for all the ‘defectives’ they had to look after. They were told that it was their business, because it was their taxes paying for it.
Not just the Jews, of course. Disabled people were also a target, and I found myself enlightened as to the true, chilling extent of this by a blog posting I was directed to this week. This was on a blog called Granite and Sunlight, written by a disability activist in Scotland on the subject of “Aktion T4” which was the Nazi’s term for the systematic eradication of disabled people. What had prompted the piece was the outrage when Sioux Blair-Jordan, a Labour member and disability rights campaigner, had said in her speech at the Labour conference that if David Cameron gets his way over replacing the EU commission on Human Rights with his own, home-cooked “Bill of Rights”, disabled people may as well walk into the gas chamber today.
I have paraphrased those words, but that is the gist of it, and it provoked a howl of outrage from the media, who thought it was probably going too far (hah! They should talk) to make such outlandish and untrue statements (unless they are something about Jeremy Corbyn) and also from official Jewish bodies who seem to think in some cases that the Holocaust is their own personal property and only they are allowed to get upset about it. This is not to detract from the fact that they did suffer. Horribly and unimaginably. But they weren’t the only ones.
Aktion T4 began with propaganda: “[£200,000] is what this person suffering from a hereditary defect costs the People’s community during his lifetime. Fellow citizen, that is your money too.” This is actually a translation, with modern-day equivalent sum inserted, of the text of a Nazi poster of the 1930s. However, it could easily have been a Daily Mail headline from last week. The entire blog is too long to quote in full (though it is well worth reading) but the crux of the article is set out thus:
Many such items of propaganda were distributed, citing the cost of supporting disabled people to the taxpayer, how many healthy people could be fed and housed for the price of just one ‘Hereditary Defective’ (the title of a particularly brutal propaganda film showing the worthlessness of the life of a sick person). But before the move towards ‘mercy killing’ was the push towards resentment, something we in the UK should recognise. Germans were told that the state could do more to help them if it wasn’t for all the ‘defectives’ they had to look after. They were told that it was their business, because it was their taxes paying for it.
After the last 8 years of government (it started well before the Conservatives took office in 2010), most disabled people have either been or have known victims of members of the public demanding to know why they have a Blue Badge. When told they have no right to private medical information, the response is always the same: ‘I pay for you to live, my taxes keep you alive.’ Some go on to explicitly state that they have the right to know that any given disabled person is doing as much as they can to ‘get better’, and I’ve seen it argued multiple times that this should include access to medical records to show that they are ‘trying’. The Germans were given first the resentment, and then the salve to let them believe their hardened hearts were actually kind ones: the push for mercy killing.
That this was actually carried out, on a large scale, is beyond doubt. Obviously it was nothing like the scale of the systematic extermination of the Jews, but it still happened. The blog continues:
None of this could have happened without the initial propaganda campaign. The Third Reich managed to successfully change the narrative from disabled people being part of the population (before access to modern medical care, disability was common and accounted for) to their being worthless drains on society, and that it would be better for everyone – the people paying the bills and the poor, suffering souls – if they were put out of their misery. They needed both resentment and dehumanisation for it to work, and they created both easily with insidious campaigns which are mirrored in every major newspaper in the UK today.
So, yes, not so much ignoring the lessons of history as deliberately seeking a pattern from the fascist era and repeating it today. I don’t believe that there will be camps built into which disabled people are systematically herded, but the DWP has been quite successful at killing people as a result of benefit sanctions, and wilfully refuses to confront the scale of its own carnage. You could argue that there is a moral difference between driving someone to suicide and rounding them up and gassing them. Just in the same way, maybe, as you could argue that there’s a slight moral difference between an innocent bystander, a child perhaps, being blown up by ISIS and the same child being blown up by one of our bombs. You could argue it. And good luck with that one.
The DWP did suffer one reverse in its attempts to establish the Fourth Reich this week, however, when the Trussell Trust rejected its proposal for DWP observers to be installed at food banks in order to monitor their usage and offer “advice”. It’s pretty clear to me that any “monitoring” would involve checking up on the entitlement of people to be there, and any “advice” would probably be along the lines of “I advise you that your benefits are now sanctioned”. Well done, the Trussell Trust, for seeing off what is also the creeping institutionalisation of food banks, adding another layer of “acceptability” as they are subsumed into the DWP system, so that they become seen as the norm, and not as part of an appalling anachronism of poverty and inequality. I hope the other organisations operating food banks will do likewise, and tell the DWP and ipso facto the Junta, to concentrate on curing the disease instead of trying to massage the symptoms.
The DWP did suffer one reverse in its attempts to establish the Fourth Reich this week, however, when the Trussell Trust rejected its proposal for DWP observers to be installed at food banks in order to monitor their usage and offer “advice”. It’s pretty clear to me that any “monitoring” would involve checking up on the entitlement of people to be there, and any “advice” would probably be along the lines of “I advise you that your benefits are now sanctioned”. Well done, the Trussell Trust, for seeing off what is also the creeping institutionalisation of food banks, adding another layer of “acceptability” as they are subsumed into the DWP system, so that they become seen as the norm, and not as part of an appalling anachronism of poverty and inequality. I hope the other organisations operating food banks will do likewise, and tell the DWP and ipso facto the Junta, to concentrate on curing the disease instead of trying to massage the symptoms.
Not that they are likely to listen, in a week when Tory MP Philip Davies (the man who thinks that disabled people aren’t “worth” the minimum wage) talked his way through a “filibuster” to prevent legislation being enacted that would have given free parking at hospitals to carers, and Tory minister Alistair Burt employed a similar tactic to prevent legislation that would have allowed the NHS to buy drugs more cheaply once their patents had expired. He obviously cares more about expired patents than expired patients. This, too, in the week when we learn, locally, that Slaithwaite Health Centre is likely to close because of the cuts, yet Kirklees and Calderdale NHS Trust is paying £500,000, which could have gone directly into patient care, to consultants instead, in a bid to find out… how it could save money.
People occasionally say, oh, all this stuff about the NHS being dismantled and about how disabled people are being targeted, it’s all scaremongering, isn’t it. They could do well to ponder the story of the former bus depot in Blackburn that seems destined to become the first manifestation of the new “workhouse” system. Shamefully, the council which has signed the deal to bring this into being, Blackburn with Darwen, is Labour controlled.
The semi-derelict structure is to be transformed into a charity and recycling centre where up to 10 otherwise homeless people would live on-site, under supervision. It would be run as an arms-length operation by a charity called Recycling Lives which aims to use the revenue from the sales of recycled scrap metal, tyres, plastics, televisions, and other items will provide training, work experience, education and employment. All this is very laudable, in some ways, but on the other hand, there are many unanswered questions: presumably these people will have to be paid at least the minimum wage, but will there be deductions for food and accommodation? How much of their attendance will be voluntary, as opposed to compulsory? And what’s the difference between people recycling televisions in a 21st century workhouse in return for a bed and a bowl of gruel, and people picking oakum in a 19th century workhouse in return for the same deal? Obviously, in this weather especially, it’s better that 10 people who would otherwise have been sleeping out in the cold are under cover and presumably warm and dry – but look at the precedent it sets to the Philip Davieses of this world. This one will need watching.
So I sit here, wearing a red poppy, a white poppy and a purple poppy, and it’s Remembrance Sunday, the rather depressing end to what has been, quite frankly, a rather depressing week. Even the appearance of the television Christmas adverts has failed to cheer me up, not that it ever did, particularly, but at least there was scope for derision and sarcasm. This year’s crop are particularly lacklustre, and I have to say the rather odd offering from John Lewis would be vastly improved if somebody photoshopped in a few penguins at strategic moments in the narrative.
The red poppy is in commemoration of all those who died, the purple poppy is to remember all the innocent animal victims of war, and the white poppy from the Peace Pledge Union is worn in the fervent hope that nothing on the scale of the two world wars must ever be allowed to happen again. Personally, I think we should have a campaign of sending white poppies to warmongering politicians, the ones who would happily fight to the last drop of someone else’s blood, in the same way that those appalling society women used to hand out white feathers to supposed “cowards” in the street in World War One.
The red poppy is in commemoration of all those who died, the purple poppy is to remember all the innocent animal victims of war, and the white poppy from the Peace Pledge Union is worn in the fervent hope that nothing on the scale of the two world wars must ever be allowed to happen again. Personally, I think we should have a campaign of sending white poppies to warmongering politicians, the ones who would happily fight to the last drop of someone else’s blood, in the same way that those appalling society women used to hand out white feathers to supposed “cowards” in the street in World War One.
In a week which contains both All Souls’ Day and Remembrance Sunday, I suppose it behoves me to try and clarify what it is I personally hope to achieve by remembering not only the vast armies of the dead in their abstract form, but also the individual ways in which war touched our own family: Gunner Harry Fenwick, gassed at Ypres in 1917, William Evans of the Suffolk Regiment, died of wounds, 1915, and Pilot Officer Jack Ross, DFC, who died when his Spitfire ditched in the Irish Sea on convoy escort duty on 6th January 1942. Traditionally, we are supposed to give thanks for their sacrifice, although I still strongly believe, and maintain, that the soldiers who lost their lives in the First World War did so not in some heroic sacrifice to uphold “freedom” but rather in the first mechanised manifestation of the wars which had plagued Europe for the previous century – all about who was to be “top dog”, with all its colonial, imperial, and economic implications worldwide.
The second world war was a different matter – yes, in that conflict, they were fighting against a malign and evil tyranny, the true extent of which didn’t become fully apparent until it was finally defeated. And yes, we do owe them a debt. They had seen how the generation which returned from the battlefields of Flanders in 1919 and 1920 was cruelly lied to, and ended up not with “homes fit for heroes” but with struggling on through unemployment, crash and depression. They were not going to let it happen again, and in 1945 they voted in an administration that brought into being, amongst other social reforms championed by Beveridge, the National Health Service.
This is why I think it’s important to remember. Because of the contrast between what the dead of 1939-45 fought for and how it has ended up today, being stripped bare and run ragged for lack of funds; being hived off and closed down, bit by bit, by politicians who block attempts to procure cheaper drugs or free parking for carers, by politicians who are happy to have the sheer gall, hypocrisy and brass neck to wear a poppy on Remembrance Day. Yet we can always find money for bombing people. We can always find money for bombing Syria, to create more refugees who will then drown in the Mediterranean in a desperate bid to escape a war zone. And the boats keep coming, and the children keep drowning.
Our own state here at home is nowhere near as desperate as that of people with nothing other than the clothes they stand up in and a desire to escape conflict, but we should also remember, compare and contrast the days when we used to be abel to afford schools and libraries and hospitals paid for by the state and owned and operated by us all, for the benefit of us all. I have often quoted Arthur Mee’s scathing words from Who Giveth Us The Victory (1918) – I quoted them last year on Remembrance Sunday - and yet still they ring true, today of all days:
“It is pitiful to think that thousands of these men had better homes in the trenches of Flanders than in the sunless alleys of our Motherland. Do thousands of children come into the world, to gasp for life in a slum; to go to school hungry for a year or two; to pick up a little food, a little slang, and a little arithmetic; to grovel in the earth for forty years or to stand in steaming factories; to wear their bodies out like cattle on the land; to live in little rows of dirty houses, in little blocks of stuffy rooms, and then to die?”
If the sacrifice of all the war dead means anything, it should be our promise to them that things got better as a result of their dying – that they truly did give their todays for our tomorrows, and that we won’t allow that message to be twisted and we won’t let their achievements be dismantled and we won’t forget the lessons of history, nor cease to point out instances when it’s all happening all over again. Looking at what’s happening now to the world that was repaired and renewed in 1945, I find myself almost wishing that the vast, shadowy armies of the dead could somehow rise again, muster, and march on parliament, with bayonets fixed.
As always, of course, next week promises to be even busier. It includes tasks as diverse as garnering estimates for security lighting, writing three press releases for three different books, and reprinting the batch of invoices I spilt coffee over yesterday. Plus two book launches to organise, two signing sessions to organise, and a hospital appointment which is going to take out most of Thursday. The weather will doubtless make it a sombre week, if nothing else does. It’s that time of year, I’m afraid.
And where is God in all of this? Where indeed. Did God allow two world wars and millions of deaths, see the painful emergence here in the UK of a better, more prosperous, more compassionate society only to see it all being dismantled again since the 1980s, brick by brick? Where were the lightning bolts? This is a time of year when reality can often seem less real, and the supernatural more natural than we think. Yet I still can’t reconcile myself to the concept of Onward Christian Soldiers and God being on our side, the sort of jingoistic “scrag Johnny Foreigner” “they don’t like it up ‘em” remembrance that appropriates even Christianity in its subtle peer-pressure to wear a poppy and “support our troops”.
And where is God in all of this? Where indeed. Did God allow two world wars and millions of deaths, see the painful emergence here in the UK of a better, more prosperous, more compassionate society only to see it all being dismantled again since the 1980s, brick by brick? Where were the lightning bolts? This is a time of year when reality can often seem less real, and the supernatural more natural than we think. Yet I still can’t reconcile myself to the concept of Onward Christian Soldiers and God being on our side, the sort of jingoistic “scrag Johnny Foreigner” “they don’t like it up ‘em” remembrance that appropriates even Christianity in its subtle peer-pressure to wear a poppy and “support our troops”.
If Jesus is anywhere in all of this, he’s in the boats with the refugees, in the cellars of Syria with the children flinching at each fresh explosion; he’s in the border camps inspiring those who are collecting and distributing food and blankets. He’s with the people who are trying to stop the last remaining shreds of our once great, once compassionate Britain being unpicked. And if he’s not that quick at answering prayers these days, he’s probably got his hands full.
I’m going to cut this Epiblog short here because I’ve got other stuff to do tonight to prepare for the week to come, and try and get ahead of the game. Plus I am expecting two drowned rats in the persons of Debbie and Misty to appear through the doorway shortly and the stove needs bombing up. But I’m also cutting it short because I don’t have any answers to why God lets things such as war happen, other than that God has his reasons, and they are not our reasons. And having said that, there’s not much more to say, really.
Next week the poppies will all get put away again for another year, but the important thing, I think anyway, is that the remembrance continues.
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