I trust you’ve enjoyed some time off over the Christmas period. Some of our
extended family work in the NHS and so have had days or nights on duty;
meanwhile my brother who’s a clergy person was working Christmas Day and was
working again yesterday. When we had a meal with my siblings and partners on
Thursday he told me he was going to preach about the Holy Innocents, the
children under of two years and younger whose massacre King Herod ordered in a
gruesome footnote to Matthew’s story of the first Christmas. I’ve no idea what
he was going to say to encourage the good people of West Oxford.
However
there is a topicality about the story – which maybe he will allude to. Because
of course it’s thanks to an angelic tip-off that the Holy Family become
refugees fleeing into Egypt. Sarah Teather of the Jesuit Refugee Service
pointed out on Radio 4 yesterday morning how easy it is to sanitise the story. “…it
might be easy to gloss over the surface of the story of the Flight to Egypt; to
wrap it up in Christmas cheer and leap straight to the lucky escape of the Holy
Family. [Rachel weeping for her children] calls us back – to the horror
of Herod’s atrocity, to the open wound of forced exile and the enduring trauma
of violence, which cannot be mended by cheap comfort.”
According
to the UN Refugee Agency there are currently 68.5 million forcibly displaced
people worldwide, two million more than the population of the United Kingdom. I
find it deeply troubling that 220 people since November have been so desperate
to seek protection that they have risked their savings and their lives to cross
the Channel in rubber dinghies – and we have dubbed it a “major incident”
(presumably a euphemism for crisis) and we don’t mean it for them but for us.
The Home Secretary has broken off his family holiday to “take charge”, the
Junior Minister for Immigration has leapt into action and the MP for Dover has been
joining in the hoo-hah. Comments have been dressed up in concern for the
migrants’ safety and indignation transferred to the gangs who exploit them and
set them off on the dangerous crossing. However it is clear, is it not, that
what is fuelling this fire is an antipathy to people seeking safety and a new
life in this country? There is little doubt that if one of these little boats
had contained a homeless carpenter and his wife and baby child they would have
been unwelcome here too.
How
pathetic is a country as wealthy and populous as ours getting all hot under the collar about
a few hundred folk asking for our help! In fact I think it’s worse. It’s a sign
of nastily insular and selfish opinion formers who probably reflect the
nation’s mood. It is profoundly at odds with the supposed Christian values
which we, like Hungary, purport to espouse. Those values have been more
faithfully reflected by the so-called “Stansted 15” who risked being locked up
and incurring criminal charges for protecting 60 people who were being forcibly
repatriated to countries where they believed their lives to be in danger.
 |
| ©Kristian Boos |
“Many
will face persecution, harm or death when they arrive, or the widely documented
violence and abuse from security contractors on these flights.
“The
Stansted action was the first time people protesting against the immigration
system grounded a deportation flight in the UK. Several people due to be forced
onto the flight were able to stay because of the action, which bought time to
hear their applications” (Stansted 15 story).
Incredibly the fifteen have been found guilty under a law which originated in
terrorism legislation.
For
Christmas my daughter gave me the dvd of The
Greatest Showman, the musical about the impresario P.T.Barnum, whose circus
of oddities brought him money and notoriety. From the start he is hounded by a
prominent theatre critic named James Gordon Bennett, who will not concede that
Barnum’s show is serious entertainment. For years there is nasty opposition to
the “freaks” who provide the acts, which culminates in a brawl between the
actors and the right-wing thugs who want them out of New York. The thugs set
light to the theatre and Barnum is ruined. At this point Bennett appears and
sits beside Barnum on the steps of the charred ruins.
James
Gordon Bennett: I never
liked your show. But I always thought the people did.
P.
T. Barnum: They did. They do.
Bennett:
Mind you, I wouldn’t call it art.
P.
T. Barnum: Of course not.
Bennett: But… putting folks of all kinds on
stage with you… all colours, shapes, sizes… presenting them as equals… Why,
another critic might have even called it “a celebration of humanity.”
P.
T. Barnum: I would’ve liked
that.
Will
this country remain a celebration of humanity, or will the purists and the
thugs they persuade drive away the alien who seeks to sojourn here?
I
wouldn’t like that.
No comments:
Post a Comment