Ding Dong the Beeb’s impartiality is dead

I do not agree with a lot of the tweets that are flying about Margaret Thatcher The Guardian published an article about Thatcher being a remarkable woman, but an awful Politician, which kind of give me a framework to begin to understand this week.  Unfortunately the two are merging.

The BBC’s decision to play five seconds of the ‘Ding Dong the Witch is Dead’ – a song from a 1939 musical starring gay icon Judy Garland – is made in the light that the song has gained a cult status as a protest against the legacy of Thatcherism.  I appreciate the sentiment of the song as a protest, as a child I was taught the slogan ‘Maggie Thatcher milk snatcher’ it was part of growing up.  She was called a lot of things during her time as Prime Minister due to the misery she inflicted. Whilst I do not wish her personal ill (nor her family)I do appreciate the sentiment.

There are better songs to be honest ‘Ghost Town’ by ‘The Specials’ could almost be the anthem of Sheffield:

This town, is coming like a ghost town
Why must the youth fight against themselves? Government leaving the youth on the shelf
This place, is coming like a ghost town
No job to be found in this country
Can’t go on no more
The people getting angry

But the mood has been ‘ Ding Dong The Witch is Dead’ is the chosen song of protest, and whilst I do see the reasoning behind it I can see why celebrating the death of anyone is macabre, it shows the hatred in our hearts, and more than a lack of compassion, and even though compassion is something that Thatcher lacked for the North, but still my calmer voices says the song is wrong.

The decision has been made not play the song, even though it is in the ‘Top Ten’ – instead of impartiality and playing it as ‘another record’ it has made a political decision to censor a record because of pressure from the Conservatives who feel it is disrespectful  - which it is probably is.

Any decision we make, or do not make, is political. The decision, whether right or nor, was a political decision by the BBC and its impartiality has been seriously called into question.  .

George Orwell said

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

The record may be wrong, but the decision not to play is also wrong

I can say a lot about Thatcher, but she was about ‘freedom of choice and speech’ and the power of the market place, and this record being in the Top Ten is a result of market forces, and the Government cannot predict or control the market. I see a deep irony in that a woman who was for deregulation and that we cannot stomach today the results of the outcome, after all we had to stomach the ravages of Thatcherism.

Glenda Jackson speaks for me

“When I made my maiden speech a little over two decades ago, Margaret Thatcher had been elevated to the other place but Thatcherism was still wreaking, as it had wreaked for the previous decade – the most heinous, social, economic and spiritual damage upon this country, upon my constituency and my constituents.

“Our local hospitals were running on empty.

“Patients were staying on trolleys and in corridors.

“I tremble to think what the death rate for pensioners would have been this winter if that version of Thatcherism had been fully up and running this year.

“Our schools, parents, teachers, governors, even pupils, seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time fundraising in order to be able to provide basic materials, such as paper and pencils.

“The plaster on our classroom walls was kept in place by pupils artwork and miles and miles of sellotape. Our school libraries were dominated by empty shelves, very few books, and those books that were there were being held together by ubiquitious sellotape and offcuts from teachers’ wallpaper used to bind those volumes so that they could at least hang together.

“But by far the most dramatic and heinous demonstration of Thatcherism was certainly not only in London, but across the whole country in metropolitan areas, where every single shop doorway, every single night, became the bedroom, the living room, the bathroom for the homeless.

“They grew in their thousands. And many of those homeless people had been thrown out onto the streets from the closure of the long-term mental hospitals.

“We were told it was going to be called Care in the Community. What in effect it was was no care at all in the community.

“I was interested to hear about Baroness Thatcher’s willingness to invite those who have nowhere to go for Christmas. It’s a pity she did not start building more and more social houses after she entered into the right to buy, so perhaps there would have been fewer homeless people than there were.

“As a friend of mine said, during her era London became a city Hogarth would have recognise. And indeed he would.

“But the basis to Thatcherism – and this is where I come to the spiritual part of what I regard as the desperate, desperately wrong track that Thatcherism took this country into – was that everything I had been taught to regard as a vice – and I still regard them as vices – under Thatcherism was in fact a virtue: greed, selfishness, no care for the weaker, sharp elbows, sharp knees. They were the way forward.

“What concerns me is that I’m beginning to see possibly the re-emergence of that total traducing of what I regard as being the basis of the spiritual nature of this country, where we do care about society, where we do believe in communities, where we do not leave people to walk by on the other side.

“That is not happening now. And if we go back to the heyday of that era I think we will see replicated again the extraordinary human damage that we as a nation have suffered from”

Baroness Margaret Hilda Thatcher, by women

She is finally dead, and to be honest is not like I thought it would be.

Baroness Margaret Hilda Thatcher died, in comfort, surrounded not by family but by people paid to care for her. On 08 April 2013 she entered immortality.

I am choosing ‘she entered immortality’ with care as it is  a line from ‘Evita’. In a cold Buenos Aires cinema the film slowly winds to a stop and a booming voice announces:

It is my sad duty to inform you that Eva Peron, spiritual leader of the nation, entered immortality at 20:25 today.

Their lives having passing images of each other,  both were operating in a ‘mans world’ both took on impossible odds, and both held power, both engendered a mythology about their lives, but in so many other ways they are the antithesis of each other.  The final similarity is how the truth will lie buried with them, surrounded by the myth.

A couple of weeks back it was reported that from Thatcher’s private papers that she cried uncontrollably for 40 minutes before a speech on the Falklands War, this was the first time I had noticed that Thatcher’s story was being rewritten. We had to feel sorry for this vulnerable woman, this leader.

Then came her death, the Twitter went into meltdown.  The Tories had been fed red meat and were in a frenzy slapping down any criticism of this woman, she was the saviour of the United Kingdom, from the brink of a precipice, she was Churchill, she was Wellington, and she was Elizabeth Tudor and of course Marilyn Monroe.

The Telegraph proclaimed she was a ‘working class hero’ someone ventured that her most cruel policies were not all her own, that she was a housewife. The rewriting of history was being penned.

Even as a Socialist I have to agree that the Unions in the 70’s were way too powerful and that any country needed to be run by the elected Government, but she went too far, too fast.

My first recollections was seeing Thatcher as Prime Minister was speaking  the words of Francis of Assisi

Where there is discord, may we bring harmony.
Where there is error, may we bring truth.
Where there is doubt, may we bring faith.
And where there is despair, may we bring hope.”

Her words on the steps of No 10 were as callous and as shallow as her policies. She brought, and still does, discord and despair.  I well remember the human misery she caused in Sheffield, and many other places, the decimation of villages, towns and cities offered as sacrifices on the altar of monetarism.

Thatcher’s Britain was a cruel and hard place, the poor – as now – were scapegoats, and to be weak was to fall victim.  I remember walking around Sheffield looking for a job, any job, because she had left the city a wasteland; once proud steel workers reduced to sweeping the floors of Shopping Malls, unemployment at 4 million, wages at an all time low. Sheffield, were I come from, was battered, she closed the steel works, she closed the pits, she flogged off anything she could lay her hands on.

Someone said

“Thatcher did more damage to Sheffield than Hitler did”- it was true.

The stories of the Miners Strike, the human misery visited on the coalfields was heartbreaking. It was not the politics that was heartbreaking, it was the broken families, the ruined lives, the sense of despair that still lingers even now.  Even during the devastation of the war people had hope and purpose.

Of course change was required, but it was brutal, and how come other countries still have mines and steel works, and a manufacturing sector?

From Sheffield we could see the affluence of the south growing, we were not part of the United Kingdom anymore, she had favoured the Moneylenders over the Miners, they grew richer, we grew poorer.  The difference in wealth between rich and poor tripled under Thatcher, Child poverty skyrocketed.

Glenda Jackson the Member of Parliament for Hampstead said today, 10 April 2013, said this:

Everything I’d learned & still believe to be a vice was hailed as a virtue under Thatcher, greed, selfishness and envy … of unleashing the most heinous economic, social, and spiritual damage in the history of the UK

Glenda Jackson came from Nottingham, she knows where I am coming from.

The Falklands War was hailed as Thatcher’s finest hour, cementing her reputation as an ‘Iron Lady’.  The blood from that war has stained her soul; an avoidable war the Government of the day ignored every warning from the British Ambassador to Argentina, ignored the ‘exploratory expedition’ to the outlying islands, sank the ‘General Belgrano’ as it headed for Port, away from the war zone.  She won another election over the dead bodies of British and Argentinean Troops.

Her list of inhumanity is getting buried, the refusal to impose sanctions on South Africa over apartheid (Bishop Tutu begged for them to be imposed), the sheltering of Chilean Dictators, the Section 28, ‘Suss Laws’ Hillsborough.

As a final insult the raw meat fed Tories are giving Thatcher a ‘Ceremonial Funeral’ – such funerals are for the ‘good and the great’ and to unite people of the country in grief and appreciation.  Thatcher divides, and so does the funeral,

I do not gloat in the death of Margaret Hilda Thatcher, her judgement will come before God, but history is being rewritten, as Golda Meir, Israeli Prime Minister said:

One cannot, and must not try to, erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.

Who is the criminal, things I fail to see.

It was a classic.

Lost in Brussels I had boarded a packed Tram to get to somewhere where I knew, I had been on my mobile and had put it in my pocket. A guy brushed past me and bumped into me, I saw his face and was annoyed that he was so clumsy. I got off the Tram.

My mobile had gone.

I had failed to see the classic pick pocketing ploy, I was so stupid, but that doesn’t excuse crime, I had failed to see what had happened. I had lost my phone, my Credit Card, and the rather cute picture of my partner on the phone. To be honest I am more annoyed at losing the picture of Holger than anything else.

There was a lot of things I failed to see.

I had failed to see the people around me, I had failed to notice the person on the Help Desk at Brussels Nord who was giving me directions to the Police Office in his limited English (my brain is now hardwired into trying to speak in German, my partner is German, and what little French I knew has evaporated, or will not come back to me easily). Being told by the Police Office to go Brussels Sud and having to ask directions I had failed to notice the people begging on the street because I had lost an expensive Mobile. People who are thinking where they are going to sleep, if they will be able have a meal, I failed to see them because I had my phone stolen

I failed to see that I could have a ‘Spare’ Mobile which I used to ask for help getting the telephone number, and failed to see that @TabithaNYC was probably doing something at work and very kindly broke off to tweet me the number of my Bank, and then again the number of O2. I failed to see that @Mags_Cat was telling me that she was dealing with the District Nurse and couldn’t help. I did see that but couldn’t process that.

I didn’t see the help at Brussels Sud in finding the Police Station, again the SNCB person who directed me to the Police Office, he had his prescription stolen a week earlier, and only now I am beginning to see that the Belgium Health Service is different to ours, why would we report a stolen prescription. I failed to see that I live in a country where if I lose my prescription I just go to the Doctors and get another one, I failed to see how much I take that for the norm.

I failed to see the Police Officers patiently filling in forms and letting me use their phone to finally get in touch with O2 to block the phone. More than anything I failed to see how easily I could just ‘get the next train home’ and whilst it is a massive inconvenience, and a financial cost to replace the handset it does not mean I will go without food this month, it means I will not be able to spend the weekend trainspotting at Loughborough, or eat out for a while.

The major thing I fail to see is the person who stole my phone. Why did he need to do it, why did his conscience allow him to do it. I am assuming this is not his first crime, and probably not his last, what turns somebody to crime? Are the pressures of our society so great that we ‘must have’ more than we need, or afford?

I will never see how this person’s life turns out, will it involve more crime (I refuse to call it petty) or will he, with luck, move on from it to a more stable life, but chances are that he will not, will he move from crime of opportunity to more organised crime. I wonder what his friends are like, I wonder if the elation of getting my Samsung will last more than a few hours, or a day, and that the emptiness of ‘wanting’ will begin to gnaw at him again, or will it be sold to feed a drug addiction? I will never know, but I have the questions.

I need to dissect this, the reason for this blog, and move away from the primal feeling of retribution and punishment. I need to move away from the primal feeling for revenge because that is not where I want to live.

There is so much I fail to see, and I am turning this around, I want to use this experience to help me see, to turn this into a positive.

I have lost an object, it holds no sentimental value, only a residual monetary one

MP’s do not represent us, they represent themselves

Something like 100,000 people have signed a petition for Iain Duncan Smith to live up to his comment that he could live on £53 a week, which is the amount that as Works and Pensions Secretary he has said is that the State will provide to the unemployed.

The amount doesn’t really matter as the Benefit Cap does not include the infamous ‘bedroom tax’ that means if you live in social housing and you have more bedrooms than the State says you need then you start paying between £14 and £25 a month of Benefit. It sounds fine apart from the fact that there is not enough ‘appropriate accommodation’ available.

The Social Welfare Changes have come in all at once, this is seismic shift in social welfare policy, all at once, without considering the effects, it social engineering on a national scale. Another of the proposals is that people unable to find work or on Benefits will be given ’food vouchers’ – those who have fallen on hard times are to be further stigmatised by this Government which, quite frankly, hates poor people.

The Daily Mail ran a story on January that stated Helen Grant, Equalities Minister:

An MP who claimed £20,000 a year for a London flat despite having a £1.8million home in nearby Surrey has complained that she is struggling to sell her house.

The house is 19 miles from the House of Commons, and she has been receiving £1,600 per month for her second home, as far as I am aware my local MP (a Conservative) lives 77 miles from London, lets say 80 miles from the House of Commons and claims £1,050 for rent, which is far more understandable, but the number of people who commute to London from Swindon is a fair number, I am sure our train service could stand one more. The claims that everyone is in this together rings hollow, we are not all in this together. The weak of our society are being far more harshly treated than the rich.

All this has been done in week when the ‘rich people’ have been given a tax cut.

The New Statesman asked the leading members of the Cabinet if they were prepared to live on £53 a week, these are the answers

David Cameron

“A Downing Street spokeswoman said ‘The Prime Minister, like the Secretary of State for Works and Pensions , feels that benefit levels are fair”

Translation – I am not going to answer the question.

Greg Clark, Financial Secretary to the Treasury

“I think it’s in incredible struggle to do and I think any MP, anyone earning a comfortable wage that an MP has would certainly struggle …”

At least some recognition

George Osbone’s reply was the most damming

“I don’ think it is sensible to reduce the debate about one individual’s personal circumstance. This debate is not about one any individual.”

It is sickening that the Chancellor cannot understand the concept that the policies of this Government are affecting individuals, that is what Government is all about, society, individuals. feel the Chancellors remarks show what the Tories are really doing, dismantling society to recreate it in their own utopian nightmare, regardless of the human cost. It is about ideology, not about governing responsibly. It is just about conceivable that the Tories actually welcomed the financial crisis, an excuse to implement their twisted policies.

Next on the agenda is workers rights.

The Easter Message

It is reassuring that an ex-Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, chose Easter to articulate the message of the Gospel that the Church, and by extension, God does not really like gay people, and that neither does he like the idea of equal marriage. The same old spurious arguments are trotted out that the ‘Church defines marriage’ and slightly more bizarrely that Jesus Christ said that marriage is between a man and a woman – if you could you point to the scripture I would be intrigued. The fact that marriage is a legal arrangement defined by the State seems to have escaped Lord Carey. But the good Lord is against Equal Marriage, as I am sure he was for slavery, and was about to make things crystal clear at a really big ‘I hate fags’ rally right after Easter, but due to events it had to be cancelled – shame really.

The good Lord (Carey) is obsessed by Equal Marriage. It rather a shame he is not obsessed about the incidental stuff of life, like homelessness, poverty, and unemployment.

Honestly I am not reassured by the Church at all, well its very vocal minority, I am not assured that a Cardinal of the Catholic Church who was so prejudiced against queers and deviants that he had to resign over allegations over inappropriate behaviour with Priests, or how the Priests were bullied into silence, and even now have their motivations questioned. More than anything else I am not reassured that the Church has got a grip on what the Easter message is, or should be about.

Giles Fraser in an article last week ruffled quite a few feathers in his article “I bang my head against the wall when evangelicals turn Jesus into Cheesus” (well worth a read on Sunday Morning)

I couldn’t help but see the article, that was largely seen as an attack on the evangelical wing of the Church, with a lot of ‘huffing and puffing’ from the disgruntled ‘Jesus lite’, as call to get back to basics in the Church.

Having attended an evangelical and more traditional Anglican Church in Southampton, and prior to that a Pentecostal Church, I couldn’t help but see his point. The evangelical church has a tendency to gloss over reality, preaching some kind of nirvana, which ultimately spawned the ‘get rich quick’ TV evangelism. There are a lot of sincere and caring people in the evangelical wing of the Church, but the cheesy Blairite tone of the charismatic movement glosses over the ugliness of the Gospel.

As Giles Fraser points out “

No PR agency in the world could sell the disturbing message of a broken man on the cross. That’s why we get Jesus-lite”

The Easter story is a disaster story, this is because it is presented from the human standpoint. The saviour of Israel stands at the door of Jerusalem, expectations are high, the occupying Roman forces will be defeated, and he goes and gets crucified. Not only does he get crucified his followers who have been with him for three years flee in panic.

Men who have travelled Israel with Jesus, the Son of God, scatter, tell lies, deny him and deny themselves.

As usual it is the women who are left to pick up the pieces.

How can you sell that story? The central character of your revolution is not only dies, Che Guevara died but remained an inspiration, but is not crucified, and at least led a revolt.

The sell is not an easy one, well its impossible.

That is why we have Easter Sunday, these abject failures of followers galvanized and empowered by God go on and change history.

The narrative that the Church chooses is the victory on Sunday, not the dismay on Saturday, but the lives of many are of the dismay of hope. How do you remain faithful to the faith when you are persecuted, tortured and imprisoned, or homeless? It is a story that the evangelicals cannot tell. The suffering of Christ and Christians is as important as the jubilation.

Christianity is lived in the hope of a better things, it is not having an easy time, it is about how ‘learn to dance in the rain’.

The problem that I think Giles Fraser was trying to address was put like this in an essay from the left-wing Frankfurter Schuler

“Religion was, for them, not only the opium of the people, but also a repository of hope that had become unintelligible to itself”

To me the hope of the Easter message is that failure is not the end of the story, we have tomorrow.

In defence of freedom

Today, apart from gathering my skirts and heading to Kidderminster, the United States of America’s Supreme Court will deliberate the issue of Gay Marriage – or as it should be called – Equal Marriage.

To call it ‘Gay Marriage’ identifies it as  a minority group issue, it is all about gay people wanting rights, rights that they really don’t deserve because, well they have a label and the label is not the same as ‘us’ – so we demean the call for equality, can’t we?

Calling the issue as to what it is, Equal Marriage, puts the argument in a unequivocal way, it is about equality, without discrimination, for consenting adults, free from duress, to legalise their relationships and have the State to recognise their commitment to each other. It is not about special rights, it is simply by getting rid of discrimination.

If people disagree with Equal Marriage the first question is that needs to be asked is ‘do you believe in freedom of choice’.  The State prescribes our liberties, in America they formally codified in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. The State takes some of our freedoms, whether we have a Constitution, in return for protection – is called ‘the contract between the State and Citizen’ and basically we sacrifice our rights to kill each other for the protection of the State to stop people who want to kill us.  They can stop from doing things that are harmful, like what drugs we can take or buy’.  This is good.

Equal Marriage does not fall into any category of being harmful, it does not harm anyone, it actually does not affect anyone apart from the people getting married.  If you do not want to get married to someone of the same sex then you are free not to, you are free to not to go to their wedding, but you are not free to do is to stop them from getting married – it does not affect you.

Society will not crumble, if marriage was to cause the decay of civilisation then I am sure the soaring, mixed sex, divorce rates would have seen to that. I am sure the very public 72 hour marriage of celebs would have been more dangerous to our morals, or the multiple affairs of our leaders.

Equal Marriage is not going to end civilisation.

Equal Marriage is not only about getting married, it is about freedom, it is about equality – not just for gay people, but for everyone, even the people who do not want Equal Marriage.  If freedom and liberty can be denied from one group of people then why not Methodists, Mormons, people from Kidderminster, from New York?  Freedom has to be enjoyed by everyone, or else it is a privilege to be granted and removed at a whim.

 

If you believe in freedom, if you believe we all have a right to choose, then the logic must be for you to support Equal Marriage.