by I Fought the Law- A Riotous Romp in Search of British Democracy (epub)
Chapter 9. The Secular Afterlife
It was 3 July and England had just been dumped out of the World Cup on penalties. Again. Meanwhile, amid the gloom of defeat, the nation was being overwhelmed by global warming. The south was taking a battering from a heatwave while the north sank temporarily under flash floods.
I was fighting my way across London on the tube during rush hour, which was a strange experience for a workshy layabout like me. I was wearing a suit and tie though, which helped me fit in with the sullen faces packed on to the Northern Line train. A few days earlier my great-uncle Fred had passed away at the age of eighty-eight and I was on my way to his funeral at the family home in Lincolnshire. ‘The family home’ sounds absurdly grand -1 don’t mean it in a Jane Austen way. It was just a very proud and ordinary house filled with wonderful memories. My great-grandparents, a gamekeeper and his wife, moved into it in the late nineteenth century and raised all ten of their children there, at least one of whom had lived in the house ever since. It wasn’t a very large house, with only three upstairs bedrooms, a small kitchen downstairs and a lounge, along with an outside toilet that had long since fallen out of use and a caravan in the garden that Fred and his wife Joan used as a sweet shop for the children of the village. But, as I said, it was a house overflowing with memories for the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren who visited it throughout their lives. The Newton family had been part of the community of Springthorpe for over 125 years. I wondered whether it would survive the loss of someone like Fred.
King’s Cross station was filled with men in suits and ties clutching copies of the Financial Times when I arrived shortly before nine. I guiltily bought a McDonald’s breakfast, a bottle of water and, largely out of curiosity, my own copy of the FT before finding my place on the train.
I once read somewhere that the only newspaper that tells you the truth is the Financial Times. Apparently, normal people like you and me don’t actually need to know the truth of what is going on in the world, which is why we buy all the other newspapers with supplements that tell us what problems we have and what we need to buy in order to cure them. The people with power and money, on the other hand, who have to know the truth to ensure that they keep hold of their money and power, quietly buy the FT.
I scanned a few of the headlines of that day’s edition. INCOMING CBI CHIEF SAYS BLAIR UNCERTAINTY IS BAD FOR BUSINESS; FURORE OVER SECOND HOMES IS MISPLACED, SAYS MINISTER; BNFL EXPECTED TO REPORT RETURN TO PROFITS; COMPETITIVENESS ‘SUFFERS FROM BAD GREEN LEGISLATION’; BUPA PREFERRED IN HEALTH DEAL; AL-QAEDA THREAT TO UK MAY BE GROWING, SAYS COMMONS PANEL; and THE CAR INDUSTRY NEEDS CARBON TRADING. I read each article in turn and got the distinct impression that because Richard Lambert, the new head of the CBI, said that business wanted him to go, Tony Blair would be replaced by Gordon Brown sooner rather than later. That because business didn’t approve, the proposed increase in taxation on second homes would not materialize after all. That because it was becoming more profitable, nuclear energy would soon become the ‘answer’ to our looming energy crisis and that any meaningful ‘green legislation’ would begin to disappear from government policy altogether. That BUPA would begin the process of privatizing the NHS, the hysteria around terrorism in Britain would be whipped up again as the anniversary of the 7 July bombings approached, and carbon trading would soon be adopted by all major political parties. It was like a corporate Christmas list to anyone with political ambitions. The FT doesn’t just tell you the truth. I’m willing to bet that because of the power held by business interests in modern Britain it also tells you the direction of future political policy, whichever party happens to be in government.
An hour and a half later my dad’s cousin Tony and his wife Cilia picked me up from Retford station as the GNER service for Leeds pulled away behind me. My granny was the one child who had moved far away from the family home. She couldn’t have gone much further than Chichester on the south coast, but this meant that my immediate family and I weren’t as close to that side of the family as the generations that had remained nearby. Which is a roundabout way of explaining that this was the first time I’d met Tony and Cilia. I knew nothing about them at all, other than that they were generous enough to come and pick me up from the station and drop me back after the funeral. ‘Don’t be silly, you’re family,’ Tony said when I thanked him profusely. In their eyes that alone seemed to entitle me to their limitless kindness and hospitality.
We arrived in Springthorpe half an hour later, turned left towards the church, and then I saw the house opposite the churchyard in the middle of the village. It was probably the first time in almost twenty years that I’d been there. I got out of the car and was immediately overwhelmed with images and feelings. I could see my brother Gareth trying to play tennis on the grass; I could hear my great-aunt Joan calling ‘Yorkshire puddings!’ and see the most glorious smile on her face when we both ran into the kitchen. ‘It’s an old tradition, you know,’ she said as she took off her oven gloves and swept me on to a chair while my granny chuckled in the background. ‘In Springthorpe we have Yorkshire puddings with raspberry vinegar as a starter before we eat roast beef and more Yorkshire puddings for lunch!’
I walked through the little kitchen into the lounge and found Joan, in a black jumper with a single set of pearls around her neck, sitting in a deep trance. She got to her feet and briefly confused me with my dad while a tear like a rivet welded itself to her face. My memory immediately pulled Uncle Fred out from behind the curtains he’d just closed to get a better view of the cricket. Joan looked up at me, her eyes full of sadness, but proud of her grief, while Fred sat my nine-year-old self down patiently and tried to explain why ‘Cricket is the greatest game in the world!’
There was something in that house that even now I can’t put my finger on. Perhaps it was just the heat, or perhaps it was a sense of something else that is lost today. A sense of place and ‘being’ through all the seasons and the generations of your family’s life. Cousins and aunties, friends and neighbours began to appear in the room looking nervous and embarrassed at the long-lost faces, but soon their memories began to collect around them too and Great-Uncle Fred came alive on the deep green carpet. Someone said, ‘I remember this room as Auntie Gert’s bedroom before it became the lounge’; others nodded and smiled with their eyes. Another of my dad’s cousins, Zena, the kind of explosion of fun and laughter every family desperately needs, remembered being told as a child to go to the toilet before leaving to visit Grandma so she wouldn’t have to use the one outside. I introduced myself to her and Cousin Maureen as little Dan and they both nearly fainted. When we arrived none of us really knew what to say to each other, but our memories soon jostled together, pulling and shaking us all back into life. It was almost as if a house really can work its way into your genes.
Tony took me out for a walk around the village and told me a story about my great-uncle Irvine, who was sent out by his mother to the shop every week with a penny to collect her ‘medicine’ (which turned out to be a little bottle of gin) and another penny for him, which he always spent on cigarettes. He began drinking half the gin and smoking four cigarettes behind a haystack every time he went, filling the bottle back up with water afterwards on his way home. ‘There’s plenty water in Springthorpe,’ he always used to say. And so Great-Uncle Irvine developed a taste for gin and cigarettes from the tender age of seven. He lived to be well over eighty.
The church bells began to ring. One of them was obviously cracked and it clunked each time it fell, but the muffled sound was oddly appropriate. The little church was rarely used now, despite once being the hub of the community. My great-grandfather was the churchwarden when he was alive and his sons and daughters had played their part in keeping it, and the community, going, but now both were falling into disrepair. The family were bringing the little church back to life on this day of sadness, though. My second cousin Pauline, who was keeping another family tradition alive as a member of the cloth, was p
reparing to lead part of the service.
I walked at the back as we all made our way round to the entrance of the church. Tony pointed out the broken guttering on one side and said, ‘When I came to see Fred last week we talked about that needing to be fixed.’ The churchyard was completely overgrown with daisies and tall grass. It wasn’t just Uncle Fred that had died. There was nothing of the village left. The shop and the post office had gone, the school was long closed, even the pond had been filled in. Apparently the pub owners thought it was a waste of land and extended their car park over it, but now even the pub had closed down. There were white rocks that marked where the pond had been, like a mouth of small white gravestones being sucked back into the earth. Once there was a space in this country for places like Springthorpe, but today small communities are not profitable so they are deemed to have no value and are just left to wither and die.
After the service we went back to the house, drank cups of tea and talked about all the other brothers and sisters who had long since passed away. All of those ten children were gone now apart from my beloved granny, who hadn’t been able to come because of her health. I felt a twinge of panic and wanted to be with her, to listen endlessly to the stories of her life and her memories of our country, a country that was now changing even faster than when she was a nurse during the Second World War.
There’s something about death that pushes into focus how much of our lives we waste, how many minutes, hours, days and years we spend asleep in offices and factories, in meetings and seminars. Perhaps we need the sense of importance our careers give us, but I doubt whether anyone has ever lain on their deathbed and wished they’d spent more time at work. Of course many will bang on the table and talk about the need for careers to keep the wolf from the door, or say that it isn’t greed that takes our time from us but necessity. Most of us work full-time, five days a week, forty-eight weeks a year, from the age of eighteen to sixty-five (and probably well beyond for my generation) because we would all starve and live in penury otherwise. Well, stand back for a moment and ask yourself if that is a good enough life for the economic status Britain holds in the world. What’s the point of being one of the largest economies if none of us even gets to control our own time? According to the Office of National Statistics, the average amount of time working parents spend with their children each day is nineteen minutes. Nineteen minutes! They do get to spend another sixteen minutes with their kids, but they’re usually doing something else like housework at the time. The same study found that 50 per cent of mothers only want to work part-time so they can actually spend some time with their children. Why doesn’t the government do what it can to facilitate that instead of suggesting that schools stay open longer to offer free childcare so that parents can spend even more time in the office?45 No wonder the rates of family breakdown are skyrocketing. It’s clear to anyone with a pulse that the single biggest threat to the break-up of family life is our culture of overwork, but no politician or political party is ever likely to terrify the business community by telling you that.
Uncle Fred was an ordinary man who lived a long and happy life. No-one spoke of his work over those cups of tea in that old room we had all played in as children. No-one talked about the professional status he acquired. Perhaps I’m being naive and simplistic again, but life and death are unavoidably simple. If life seems too precious to be spent fighting your way through the rush hour or queuing up to buy the latest high-definition television set, then that’s because it is. If it seems too wonderful to be wasted on targets and league tables and all the other corporate infrastructure that binds us together in fear in the Britain of today, then that’s because it is. People often talk about trying to find a work-life balance. Well, as my friend Gwyn once wrote in one of his brilliant cartoons, one day you’ll find it - when you breathe your final breath.
On the train home I went back to the FT and read an interview with Richard Lambert, who had just been announced as the new head of the Confederation of British Industry. He was wonderfully forthcoming about the role he sees for business in modern Britain. I was feeling a little strained and reflective, but as I read I began to realize that the simple and obvious common sense of life and death has no place in the eternal world of work and business. According to Mr I^ambert, corporate interests that prize short-term profits above everything else pose no risk to human beings or their communities despite the reality of our daily lives staring us all in the face. ‘A healthy society needs a healthy business sector and vice versa,’ he said. ‘There is no moat or castle wall between them.’
It would be nice if that were true. There is certainly a big moat between society and business when it comes to tax. Oceans of water, in fact, between us and the Channel Islands, the Cayman Islands and all the other tax havens into which the large corporations pour their profits so they don't have to pay tax on the money they make here in Britain. It certainly feels like there’s a moat between us when I’m trying to cancel my mobile phone subscription for half an hour on the phone to someone in India, or trying to claw back the £25 the bank took out of my account for going 3p overdrawn. Lambert also revealed that ‘Politicians find it easier to deal with business than to tackle voters - especially when they are under attack.’ I had long suspected that to be the case, so it was nice to hear from the horse’s mouth that our politicians prefer to deal with businessmen than the people who actually vote them into government. Also, according to Mr Lambert, it appears that taxing global corporations that make billions of pounds of profit in Britain isn’t a good idea (again, that’s the ones who don’t farm them out to offshore accounts and pay no tax at all, like the entrepreneur Phillip Green, who according to the BBC’s Money Programme avoided a £280 million tax bill by doing just that). ‘A tax on business is a tax on everybody,’ he said. ‘We need to get across the idea that we’re all in this together.’ Oh, bless him. He struck me as absurd as the teenage anarchist I’d met on the first day of my journey back at the YMCA who wanted us to overturn the state. Both were so caught up in their extremist ideologies that they had completely lost touch with the reality of people’s everyday lives. Can even the supporters of the CBI read this stuff with a straight face?
According to the FT, the channels of communication within government were well greased by Lambert’s predecessor, the parasitic pachyderm Sir Digby Jones. Lambert, the paper stated, ‘has inherited ... an organisation whose voice is now a powerful one in Whitehall’, leaving him to set the role of the CBI and their members in Britain’s future. ‘We’re here to champion the conditions under which business can flourish and attack barriers to its growth,’ Lambert explained. ‘Our members are always quick off the mark and it is because we are such a broad church that we can have an enormous impact on policy.’ ‘Attack barriers to its growth’ is an interesting choice of words when you consider that the ‘barriers’ he’s talking about are people. People like Dorothy, and communities like the one she was fighting to protect in Derby. (Dorothy, incidentally, became the target of a hate campaign a few weeks after Mark and I visited her. Bottles and stones were thrown at her night after night, then she started to receive death threats. She could handle all that, but it was the promise of a violent sexual assault if she remained up there one blustery night that finally persuaded her to come down. She was terrified and contacted the police, who told her she would have to give up her protest for her own safety. Derby will get its casino built on a flood plain after all, and Adam from the pub, the man with the black eye, will no longer be able to take his son to their favourite place by the river to feed the ducks. I can’t imagine he’ll take the time to write to the council or his MP to complain about it, though.) Lambert claimed that the CBI has ‘an enormous impact on policy’. One would hope that voters have an equal impact, but people like Dorothy can’t afford to employ a lobbying firm to fight things like the Riverlights development. Of course we’re not supposed to need to employ a lobbying firm because we have MPs to represent us.
I
flicked through to the sports section and found a particularly curious story with the headline NATIONAL HYSTERIA THAT COULD DESTABILISE BRITAIN. Its central argument, that overt nationalism during the World Cup could lead to a break-up of the United Kingdom, which would in turn be a very bad thing for business, seemed out of place among the other articles. After the confidence and bravado emanating from the rest of the paper I couldn’t help but detect a distinct whiff of fear here. It was a message of corporate doom that seemed to imply power had not yet shifted completely into the hands of the money markets and shareholders of corporate Britain. The final paragraph read, ‘As football gets ever more significant, and the political and cultural implications of devolution sink in, this has the potential to destabilise the country in ways we cannot yet grasp. This might not bother Steve McClaren, Eriksson’s successor. It should worry Gordon Brown, the next manager of the UK.’ Perhaps this is what Orwell meant when he wrote, ‘One day Patriotism and Intelligence will come together.’ This sleeping giant of Patriotism, shackled to football, cricket and the Queen, has a different role to play in our lives. It should really be what we rally around to celebrate our sense of national and community pride. No wonder taking power back to a community level, the policy with which Sergeant Gary Brown has had such success in Spilsby, is so feared by the corporate behemoths. Decentralizing power into local communities might improve people’s lives but there’s no money in it, so the very idea terrifies them.
If that is what the business community fears then I have news for the CBI and Richard Lambert, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and anyone else seeking to control Britain’s future political agenda. There is a moat between the ‘experts’ who govern us and we amateurs who just want to lead happy lives. No-one with a brain, even those who support the CBI’s interests, believes for a second that ‘we are all in this together’. Try and get away with saying that in the Bransholme Estate in Hull or in Cumbernauld, or to the families of those who’ve committed suicide because they were in so much debt. Or the rest of us, for that matter: the people who want their children to go to university but who now can’t afford the fees; the ones paying off those car loans; the ones dutifully buying all those DVDs. Or my stepgrandfather, who worked hard and paid tax throughout his life and saved every penny he could lay his hands on only to be told that because he’s got assets of more than £20,000 he’ll have to sell his house to pay the £800 a week his new nursing home will cost. If he wants a room with an ensuite bathroom it’ll cost him £1,000 a week. Thank God we have such a powerful economy that shareholders can make tidy profits from our pensioners when they come to the end of their lives. Thank goodness the free market has devised such an effective way of taxing the elderly and moving money from their bank accounts into the pockets of shareholders rather than their families or the state. Thank God for the market answering all our problems, and making every decision we face come down, somewhere along the line, to the mindset of a tedious desk job with its obsession with ever-expanding profits. That’s sure to give us all a great quality of life. If we are all in this together, when are the rest of us going to get a bite of Britain’s enormous economic fruit? All I can see us sharing equally is Britain’s mountain of debt.
