A celebration or a denial of humanity?

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.

Saturday 30th July 1966

Fifty years ago today, I was in Istanbul. I remember it clearly because we called in at the consulate there to hear the result of the World Cup Final from Wembley, before crossing the Bosporus to camp on the eastern side.

I was in my teens then. One brother was doing a gap year in Iran. Another was doing post-graduate studies in Jerusalem, and the third was mid-degree at Cambridge. At the end of the war my father, an RAF chaplain, had been posted in Palestine where he worked in the Moral Leadership School based in Jerusalem. During that time he had acquired a unique knowledge of Biblical topography. Among other things in her busy life my mother had been bringing up four boys in the post-war years. My Cambridge brother had the crazy idea for using his long vacation: how about the family in the UK driving overland to Jordan, meeting the other two in Jerusalem, and then returning via Israel and Greece?

There were a number of complications, although none as big as they'd be today. It was mainly a matter of getting all the necessary visas and not letting on that we were visiting Israel (as even then the surrounding Arab countries would not have let us through had they seen an Israeli visa on our passports). It was the year before the Six Day War. There was one big problem. We had the car, a shiny black Consul 375, a roof rack, a tent, a home-made awning which could be attached to the roof rack - but we had zero mechanical know-how between us. However we did have a good family friend, Peter, a post-graduate engineer, who knew more than we did, and although he couldn't afford holiday for the whole trip, he would accompany us on the outward journey. My brother from Iran would take his place on the return leg.

The car stood up to the journey pretty well. I think we broke down first on a German autobahn, then in northern Yugoslavia (as it was), had its exhaust replaced in Ankara (very efficiently) and lastly was driven into a ditch by a friendly local lad while we were walking through Hezekiah's Tunnel in East Jerusalem. In Yugoslavia our breakdown was enlivened by a local boy with a crewcut and big grin - perhaps barely eleven - whose conversation on finding we were English largely consisted of naming all the England football team, "Bobby Charlton (rolling the 'r'), Bobby Moore, Jacky Charlton, Gordon Banks...." He knew them better than us. We had no car radio, but we did discover England had reached the final, and so we made for the consulate on Saturday 30th July 1966, to discover that England had won.

There are many tales to be told of that eventful journey, but talking about it today with the brother who masterminded it we reflected how different, indeed how impossible it would be now. I think we drove through Holland, Germany, Austria, Yugoslavia (now Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia), Bulgaria, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan to Jerusalem; and, having crossed to Israel, by boat to Greece, Yugoslavia (now Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia and Slovenia), Italy, Switzerland and France. Bulgaria I remember as quite militarised, along with the ox carts. My brother was chatted up by a drunk Syrian "prince" when we were camping outside Damascus, our friend had his film confiscated after taking a photo of an Italian WW2 aeroplane in Lebanon and I was ordered out of the car at the Jordanian border in order to see whether my hair was too long. I still wonder if they would have given me a number one on the spot. Apparently I passed. But that was the sum of our difficulties. Oh yes, and we got soaked in Austria, eventually resorting to a hotel in Vienna, the Roter Hahn, who were understandably dubious about these bedraggled individuals dressed for camping rather than sightseeing. In the end they gave us a room. And then on the return journey crossing the Mediterranean rough enough for seasickness my father dubbed our converted coaster ferry, the Black Hole of Calcutta, with so many crammed in cabins and on the deck.

BBC Exodus : Our Journey to Europe

Jane and I have just been watching the BBC's moving trio of programmes called Exodus: Our Journey to Europe. The description read, "In 2015, we gave cameras to some of the people who smuggled themselves into Europe, to record where no-one else can go. The result is a terrifying, intimate, epic portrait of the migration crisis." Many of the places were where we had travelled 50 years ago. Through Europe borders are closed or manned by armed border guards, which to my memory only seriously occurred in the Middle East on our trip. Now central Europe is struggling to cope with the desperate migrants and the fear of terrorism. And of course after the coup Turkey is no longer the relaxed welcoming place we knew. No way would or could we cross Syria, that poor war-shattered country. What a mess we have unleashed! How different from the order of 1966!

And our discomforts were less than nothing when we watch the refugees ruthlessly exploited by the people smugglers, loaded into overcrowded inadequate boats to face the Mediterranean, trudging through all weathers for mile after mile, being refused entry to countries, struggling for survival in "The Jungle", fleeced by con men. What has happened to progress, to the optimism of evolution? When the media have not been preoccupied with Brexit and the turmoil of domestic politics, they have used the First World War to fill up spare hours and pages. "The war to end all wars". A hundred years on the world is as violent and war-torn as ever. 

So today, I'll not be madly celebrating what the BBC, in its customary hyperbolic style, this morning dubbed "the greatest day in British sporting history", but reflecting instead on the folly as well as the goodness of human nature.

Jo Cox - More in Common

On Thursday a graduate of the same college as I went to in Cambridge was murdered. She was a 41-year old mother of two. Her name was Jo Cox. Soon the referendum hubbub was silenced. The press changed its usual tune from cynicism to praising politicians. We were reminded that people can and do enter the political arena, not from selfish ambition but out of the desire to make the world a better place.

Jo Cox had spent most of her working life in humanitarian service with Oxfam, Save the Children and the NSPCC. Within a year of being elected to Parliament in 2015, she was jointly chairing the all party Syria group and speaking up for the Syrian refugee children stranded in Europe. And yet on Thursday outside her Yorkshire constituency office, she was attacked and killed by a sick man who in court gave his name as "Death to traitors, freedom for Britain", whose real name is Thomas Mair and who seems to have been obsessed with neo-Nazi literature. Whether the man was influenced by the xenophobia peddled by some politicians and journalists, whether he disliked Jo Cox's pro-European stance, or simply her willingness to mix with support people of all colours, races and creeds, or whether he was suffering from an acute mental illness, we can't know. Perhaps it was a lethal cocktail of all of them.

Until her attack and death hit the news, I confess I did not know about her. But as her story and the tributes from all directions poured in, I soon gathered what an exceptional and lovely person she was, as is her husband, Brendan. When she died, he tweeted this touching photo of her beside the boat that was their London home on the Thames. The more I read, the more I thought, "She would have made a really great prime minister." To which Jane commented, "Not that I'd have wished it on her." However, in my view, she had the quality and talent that would have made her one of the best prime ministers of modern times. (Not a great accolade, you might think.)


One of the quotations that has appeared on Facebook since Thursday is poignant. The words with which it ends are especially so, because as history would have it she did risk life and limb, for the sake not only of her children but also for the thousands who have no one to speak for them. And the path she took cost her life.

I'm not sure that the by-line "Another angry voice" quite captures the spirit of Jo Cox. I suspect it is better represented by the man who knew her best, her husband, in the remarkable statement he issued on Thursday:

“Today is the beginning of a new chapter in our lives. More difficult, more painful, less joyful, less full of love. I and Jo’s friends and family are going to work every moment of our lives to love and nurture our kids and to fight against the hate that killed Jo.

 “Jo believed in a better world and she fought for it every day of her life with an energy, and a zest for life that would exhaust most people.

“She would have wanted two things above all else to happen now, one that our precious children are bathed in love and two, that we all unite to fight against the hatred that killed her. Hate doesn’t have a creed, race or religion, it is poisonous.

“Jo would have no regrets about her life, she lived every day of it to the full.”

As one of my friends commented, "Love wins." We have to believe it. We have to work at it. We have to love.

One way you can express a little love is to contribute to Jo Cox's Fund, set up in her memory by her friends and family, at GoFundMe.