Squeezing the PIPs

Well, today sees the beginning of DLAs (Disability Living Allowances) being replaced by PIPs (Personal Independence Payments), the moment that disabled people on the whole have been dreading, largely because we're entering unknown territory. To be frank, none of us believe that it is not a cost-cutting exercise. We suspect that the PIP assessors will have been told to be "rigorous" (wink, wink, know what I mean?) and even given reduction targets to aim at. That impression isn't helped by reports that George Osborne refused to face Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson, the disabled Paralympian, on TV (News report).

(Stop press: Just heard that Margaret Thatcher has died. Her PA who used to live in Stanford was an equally redoubtable woman. She found the young vicar somewhat tiresome but tolerable.)

I have just completed a survey for the MND Association which was asking about how we'd been looked after from before diagnosis and how we'd like to be cared for until we die. It occurs to me that this is at least one disability which usually is so rapidly changing that PIP assessors could no more keep up with it than the hard-pressed health and social care services. You see my brand of MND, Primary Lateral Sclerosis, is astonishingly unusual. It's over ten years since I received my diagnosis. The average life expectancy for MND patients from diagnosis is 14 months, i.e. from the time the doctor tells you what's wrong you're on this dizzying helter-skelter of losing your abilities until you die. The great thing about Disability Living Allowance was that assessing yourself with your doctor's advice you got access to a non-means-tested benefit quite straightforwardly. It was quite early on that I couldn't walk unaided, even with a stick. So I receive the highest mobility allowance, which enables us to lease a bigger car which I can get into and out of and we can fit my disability equipment in. It has considerably enhanced my quality of life.

Now imagine someone with a more normal rapid form of the disease. She's diagnosed. The PIP assessor comes round and our patient is still mobile and able to function reasonably at home, but within weeks she's losing her mobility and having falls round the house. Will the PIP fellow drop everything and come and reassess her? What do you think? Will he take her GP's or specialist's word for it? What do you think? On the present performance of assessors such as ATOS (the American multinational IT giant subcontracted by the government to assess suitability to work), it appears that on principle they discount the opinion of those who know the patient and the condition best. (See the Parliamentary Debate). As it is, I have had friends whose motability vehicles have arrived too late, and whose last months of life have been rendered harder than they were already by the slow delivery of service. Many of us fear that with the introduction of new, improved and supposedly more "flexible" system, even more will lose the crumbs of comfort to which they might have had access. And of course MND is not the only condition that involves rapid degeneration.

One after-thought: the disabled are often painted in the media and by ministers as "on the cadge". Of course you may be able to track down one rogue in a thousand. But the 999 would far rather be fit and healthy, able to live a healthy life and be able, like the Chancellor of the Exchequer, to park in disabled bays illicitly. By contrast, I know one driver with a disabled passenger who will actually refrain from using a blue badge, if the passenger is not disembarking. Integrity is not unknown among the disabled community. And what strange official mind dismisses the professional expertise of those who know best? Well, PIPs roll out in Oxfordshire in June. Perhaps then I'll be saying, "I told you so," - or will it be, "I was wrong"? It would be nice if it were the latter.

"Vested interests"

According to The Independent George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer, "was also fiercely critical of churches and charities which have opposed the Government's welfare cuts, describing them as simply 'vested interests' reacting with 'depressingly predictable outrage' to necessary change", in a speech staged a Morrison's distribution depot in Kent yesterday. The board in front of his lectern read, "For hardworking (sic) people". I'm sure his English teacher at Barnes Boys' Secondary Modern would have taught him that composite adjectives should be hyphenated, not to mention Gradgrind Gove or Bruiser Boris. However, far more importantly, he'd surely have heard in his youth the words of the prophet: 

"Woe to those who decree iniquitous decrees,
    and the writers who keep writing oppression,
 to turn aside the needy from justice
    and to rob the poor of my people of their right,
that widows may be their spoil,
    and that they may make the fatherless their prey!" (Isaiah)

That sort of "outrage" is the stuff of true religion. "Predictable", maybe; "depressing", indeed. But it's what church and synagogue leaders should be saying. 

What is very curious, to my mind, is his description of churches and charities as "vested interests". After all, if the welfare state is as inflated as he seems to believe, the charity sector should have less to do rather than more. Trimming the welfare state does not create more income for the charity sector. It simply creates more demand for the sector whose resources are squeezed as a result of cut-backs. Charities were predictably among the first candidates for central and local government "economies", on the specious grounds that they were "non-essential". That might have been so in a minority of cases, such as the Great Snoring Lace Making and Limbo Dancing Club, but the majority serve real needs.

So, what exactly did the millionaire Irishman mean by describing churches and charities in that loaded fashion? Primarily one would guess that his faceless speech-writer was fishing for an emotive phrase to dismiss the considered and evidence-based criticisms of those who are nearest to the casualties of government policies. There's no doubt that the nationwide networks of churches and charities are far nearer to the ground than Whitehall speech-writers and politicians. It seems to be lazy pejorative rhetoric. However it's worse than that, because it's actually nonsense. What the Chancellor is not gracious enough to admit is that he will be relying on those very "vested interests" to be the first responders, paramedics and emergency wards for meeting the needs of the casualties of his "necessary change". That's why those "vested interests" have been setting up so many food banks and why homelessness charities are busier than they have ever been, with less funding. It's why medical charities are ever more called on to give the support previously provided by the NHS. It seems the only vested interest that churches and charities have is as providers. 

It's true enough that's what they are there for. But that is not what Mr Osborne was saying. Otherwise he would no doubt have been thanking them - and even resourcing them. The truth is equally that they are there to speak for the needy, the poor, the widows and the fatherless. They are there to speak against oppression and to campaign for justice. 

I'm not here writing about the rights and wrongs of government economic and welfare policy. I don't pretend to have a clue about politicians' true motivations and intentions. But to rubbish those who are raising legitimate concerns as having "depressingly predictable outrage" is to descend to schoolboy debating of a debased level. If we learned anything from the last century, it might be summed up in Pastor Niemöller's famous dictum: 

First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.

Then they came for the socialists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Catholic.

Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak for me.

Speaking out is how civilised societies are preserved. Meanwhile, one wonders what "vested interests" George Osborne and his colleagues might like to declare....

Mystery of Mary Magdalene

The Mystery of Mary Magdalene: I have just watched this BBC programme on iPlayer and am a bit bemused why Christian Concern announced in advance that showing it on Good Friday was "highly inappropriate and inflammatory" nor why they dubbed it "offensive". Melvyn Bragg concludes, "And I now understand why many Christians feel, despite all the many stories about who Mary Magdalene was, the most important thing is what she witnessed - the very first Easter." It was really rather good, I think.

Titian's Noli Me Tangere in National Gallery, London

Certainly it made me question some of the assumptions I'd previously made, particularly the conflations I'd liked to make bringing the Gospel stories together to make a coherent picture of Mary Magdalene (see God loves the red tops). I'm quite happy living with less certainty about that. Something which also should have emerged for anyone with an open mind was the essential historicity of the central events with which we know she was involved, the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. As Professor Tom Wright pointed out, if people had wished to concoct a story of such an improbable event, the last thing they'd have done at a time when women's testimony was inadmissible in a court of law was have a woman as the prime witness.

I just hope that Christian Concern's many supporters did not in the event deluge the BBC with complaints about the programme. It's sad that in this instance CC (who often highlight real issues) prejudged a programme on the basis of a press report and mobilised indignation unjustifiably. In my view it deserves plaudits for being informative and balanced.

I think there's a danger of fuelling religious paranoia unnecessarily. I prefer the confidence of Pope Francis's Easter morning message: “We too, like the women who were Jesus’ disciples, who went to the tomb and found it empty, may wonder what this event means. What does it mean that Jesus is risen? It means that the love of God is stronger than evil and death itself; it means that the love of God can transform our lives and let those desert places in our hearts bloom. God’s love can do this...." And his plea for peace, ending: “Peace in the whole world, still divided by greed looking for easy gain, wounded by the selfishness which threatens human life and the family, selfishness that continues in human trafficking, the most extensive form of slavery in this twenty-first century. Human trafficking is precisely the most extensive form of slavery in this twenty-first century! Peace to the whole world, torn apart by violence linked to drug trafficking and by the iniquitous exploitation of natural resources!" Peace to this our Earth! May the risen Jesus bring comfort to the victims of natural disasters and make us responsible guardians of creation."

Hope or nothing?

On Wednesday evening, when Sir Terry Pratchett was yet again "Facing extinction" on the BBC, I chose to read a remarkable book we'd been lent by a medical student (via her mother), called Proof of Heaven. It's written by Dr Eben Alexander, an eminent American neurosurgeon. He inexplicably contracted the vanishingly rare e coli meningitis, which rendered his neocortex effectively "dead" and sent him into deep coma from which his colleagues expected him never to emerge. Clearly he did emerge and live to tell the tale, and his story is remarkable. As a neurosurgeon he knows what he is talking about when it comes to brain function and he has seen patients in all states of consciousness. He describes himself as having been a convinced scientific sceptic about all things spiritual. However what he experienced in his coma and what he describes with as much scientific objectivity as possible completely changed his mind.

I have certainly read accounts before of near death events (NDEs), which frankly I found anecdotal and somewhat fanciful. I have heard one person talking about experiencing heaven, to whom I was inclined to give some credence in the light of the impact it made on her life, though I suppose some people might describe her as "flakey". However, I basically held the sort of view that this man of science had before his coma: "I doubted their veracity, mainly because I had not experienced them at a deep level, and because they could not be readily explained by my simplistic scientific view of the world.
"Like many other scientific skeptics, I refused to even review the data relevant to the questions concerning these phenomena. I prejudged the data, and those providing it, because my limited perspective failed to provide the foggiest notion of how such things might actually happen. Those who assert that there is no evidence for phenomena of extended consciousness in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, are wilfully ignorant. They believe they know the truth without needing to look at the facts" (p.153).

Well, in his fairly unique sort of coma (with the entire neocortex not functioning) he experienced what he could only afterwards conclude was an experience of consciousness completely independent of the brain. What's more, this experience was extremely vivid and detailed, but has none of the naïveté and self-referential aspects of other NDE survivors' accounts whose comas have been less complete. He gives an astonishingly objective account of the experience, in terms which make sense to the modern mindset, for example about the huge number of dimensions and the ability to comprehend without words. It does of course present him with a problem when he tries to describe the indescribable in language! However having made it his first priority after his medically improbable recovery to note down his memories as fully as possible, he gave himself the data to provide a coherent account. He experiences three regions or states, the muddy darkness of "the Realm of the Earthworm's View", the green brilliance of "the Gateway" and the black but holy darkness of "the Core".

At one point, he concludes, "love is, without doubt, the basis of everything. Not some abstract, hard-to-fathom kind of love but the day-to-day kind that everyone knows - the kind of love we feel when we look at our spouse and our children, or even our animals. In its purest and most powerful form, this love is not jealous or selfish, but unconditional. This is the reality of realities, the incomprehensibly glorious truth of truths that lives and breathes at the core of everything that exists or that ever will exist, and no remotely accurate understanding of who and what we are can be achieved by anyone who does not know it, and embody it in all of their actions.

"Not much of a scientific insight? Well, I beg to differ. I'm back from that place, and nothing could convince me (otherwise than) that this is not only the single most important emotional truth in the universe, but also the single most important scientific truth as well....

"It is my belief that we are now facing a crucial time in our existence. We need to recover more of that larger knowledge while living here on earth, while our brains (including the left-side analytical parts) are fully functioning. Science - the science to which I've devoted so much of my life - doesn't contradict what I learned up there. But far, far too many people believe it does, because certain members of the scientific community, who are pledged to the materialist worldview, have insisted again and again that science and spirituality cannot coexist.

"They are mistaken...." (pp. 71-73).

I can't help being struck by the contrast of the different views of reality and, therefore, meaning presented by Eben Alexander and Terry Pratchett. Strangely Alexander's seems to me to invest the present with the greater significance - it is part of a greater reality. What you see is not all you get. And the certainty that "love, unconditional love, is the basis of everything" invests existence with an unparalleled luminosity.

At this point this week it is good to have a scientist's testimony that we do not all face extinction when our brains finally pack up, but that our souls, our essential selves, will survive. As St Paul said, "If in Christ we have hope for this life only, we are of all people to be pitied. But in fact...."

PS Dear BBC, How about giving some air time to Dr Alexander's hope, instead of the diet of gloom you seem so fond of? And before you dismiss the idea, do you dare read the book with an open mind, right to the end, where the final evidential proof comes? It's available on Amazon and Kindle.

PPS Eben Alexander's version of what he experienced will not please a lot of Christians or people of other faiths, as he is not propagating a party line. He is simply trying to describe his experience and understand it in his terms. I think it's worth reading because of who he is and the profound impact his experience made on him - and because it brings the possibility of hope nearer. For me, nonetheless, the final and best proof of life after death remains what we celebrate tonight and tomorrow. "But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep."

The Pope and the paper-seller

I really liked this story about the Pope and the newspaper seller - which I've just lifted wholesale from The Catholic Newsagency

Pope calls Argentine kiosk owner to cancel paper delivery

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A man in Rome holds a newspaper with Pope Francis' picture on it March 14, 2013, the day after the Holy Father was elected. Credit: Mazur/catholicnews.org.uk.

Buenos Aires, Argentina, Mar 21, 2013 / 12:01 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Pope Francis surprised the owner of a kiosk in Buenos Aires with a telephone call to send his greetings and explain that he will no longer need a morning paper delivered each day.

Around 1:30 p.m. local time on March 18, Daniel Del Regno, the kiosk owner’s son, answered the phone and heard a voice say, “Hi Daniel, it’s Cardinal Jorge.”

He thought that maybe a friend who knew that the former Archbishop of Buenos Aires bought the newspaper from them every day was pulling a prank on him.

“Seriously, it’s Jorge Bergoglio, I’m calling you from Rome,” the Pope insisted.

“I was in shock, I broke down in tears and didn’t know what to say,” Del Regno told the Argentinean daily La Nacion. “He thanked me for delivering the paper all this time and sent best wishes to my family.”

Del Regno shared that when Cardinal Bergoglio left for Rome for the conclave, he asked him if he thought he would be elected Pope. 

“He answered me, ‘That is too hot to touch. See you in 20 days, keep delivering the paper.’ And the rest is, well, history,” he said.

“I told him to take care and that I would miss him,” Del Regno continued. “I asked him if there would ever be the chance to see him here again. He said that for the time being that would be very difficult, but that he would always be with us.”

Before hanging up the phone, he added, the Pope asked him for his prayers.

Daniel’s father, Luis Del Regno, said they delivered the paper to the former cardinal’s residence every day.

On Sundays, he said, the cardinal “would come by the kiosk at 5:30 a.m. and buy La Nacion. He would chat with us for a few minutes and then take the bus to Lugano, where he would serve mate (tea) to young people and the sick.”

Among the “thousands of anecdotes” the elder Del Regno remembers is one involving the rubber bands that he put around the newspapers to keep them from being blown away when they were delivered to the cardinal.

“At the end of the month, he always brought them back to me. All 30 of them!” 

He said he gets goose bumps whenever he thinks about Pope Francis’ simplicity.

“In June he baptized my grandson, it was an amazing feeling,” Del Regno said. “I know what he’s like. He’s one of a kind.”

There's a speech in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar where Brutus describes the way of the ambitious in the world. 

"But when he once attains the upmost round.

He then unto the ladder turns his back,
Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees
By which he did ascend." 

I must say Pope Francis seems the diametric opposite of what Brutus feared in Caesar. He displays the utterly unfashion-able virtue of humility - which, in the Church's year, we shall see exemplified on Thursday, the night on which Jesus washed his disciples' feet, much to their embarrassment. The service where that is remembered and reenacted was always one of my favourite times.  

As I've said elsewhere I think that the Pope and the new Archbishop of Canterbury are both good news for their Churches. See Religion's premature obituary. The signs are good.

Following St Francis

I'm often grateful that I was encouraged to study Classics at school. It was certainly useful when it came to teaching English literature and of course later to reading New Testament Greek. But I got a slightly ignoble enjoyment from telling Jane yesterday the papal name that Cardinal Bergoglio had chosen before the Sky News boffins had worked it out. Mea culpa! 

Mary Kennedy, a nice Scottish Facebook friend, had written about the seagull on the now famous temporary Sistine Chapel chimney, and so I tuned in yesterday afternoon, while working on an article, to the Vatican "chimney cam". It was just the right balance between the diverting and uneventful having the picture alongside the document. Then at about 6 o'clock I noticed a trickle of smoke, which soon billowed white over the roof. Time to turn on Sky News.
It was simple but effective theatre. Getting on for an hour later came the announcement in Latin:
"Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum: Habemus Papam. Eminentissimum ac reverendissimum Dominum, Dominum Georgium Marium Sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae Cardinalem Bergoglio. Qui sibi nomen imposuit Franciscum." 
"I announce to you a great joy: We have a Pope. The most eminent and reverend Lord, the Lord Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church, Jorge Mario Bergoglio. Who has given himself the name Francis." The commentators told us that Cardinal Bergoglio had been Archbishop of Buenos Aires in Argentina. When he appeared, I thought he looked a nice friendly chap. 

In the course of commentary later it sounds as though appearances weren't deceiving. He's known for his unostentatious lifestyle, using the bus, living in a flat not a palace, cooking for himself - and, most importantly, being on the side of the poor. He's known in the slums of Buenos Aires, for example, for his concern for Aids' victims. Mary also put a link to the new Pope's Lenten letter which I liked. Near the end he said, "This year of faith we are traversing is also an opportunity God gives us to grow and to mature in an encounter with the Lord made visible in the suffering face of so many children without a future, in the trembling hands of the elders who have been forgotten and in the trembling knees of so many families who continue to face life without finding anyone who will assist them."

Not least significant is the name he's chosen. Popularly known as the first ecological saint, Francis of Assisi's real passion was for sharing the love of God with all his creatures, especially with the marginalised such as lepers and the poor, despite his merchant father's protests. "Following the Gospel literally, Francis and his companions went out to preach two by two. At first, listeners were understandably hostile to these men in rags trying to talk about God's love. People even ran from them for fear they'd catch this strange madness! And they were right. Because soon these same people noticed that these barefoot beggars wearing sacks seemed filled with constant joy. They celebrated life. And people had to ask themselves: Could one own nothing and be happy? Soon those who had met them with mud and rocks, greeted them with bells and smiles" (Catholic Online Encyclopedia). I like the prospect of this radical a Pope.

No doubt he is in for the muds and rocks of diverse critics. Indeed I've already seen hints of it in the British media. He dared as an Argentine Archbishop to have a view about our Falkland Islands, for goodness sake! However next week both the Roman Catholic and the Anglican Churches will have new spiritual leaders installed - both of whom appear to have "a bias to the poor". Perhaps the Spirit of God is saying something to Christians and to the world, about his priorities. 

Keeping religion out of politics

It's commonly claimed that religion should be kept strictly private. There's a long tradition of that view stretching in this country at least back to Thomas à Becket whom Henry II famously called "a low-born cleric" or a "turbulent priest", because he would not put the King's interests above divine ordinance, leading to his assassination in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170. In more recent times it was echoed by the Thatcher government when Robert Runcie prayed both for British and Argentine casualties after the Falklands' conflict and then put his name to the 1985 Faith in the City report (a government "source" rubbishing it before publication as Marxist propaganda). It was particularly puzzling and galling that former Scot's Guard and Military Cross winner, favoured Tory choice for the archbishopric, should be so turbulent as to suggest that the individualistic policies of the government might have contributed to poverty in the cities of Britain. And of course Rowan Williams got up the nose of successive governments, including Mr Blair's, with his rigorous questioning. And now David Cameron must be having similar thoughts to Margaret Thatcher concerning Old Etonian, Justin Welby. Of all people, the former oil executive, "within a month", questioning how benefit cuts would affect the poorest children - what is it about the post of Archbishop that suddenly turns sound men into bleeding-heart liberals? Certainly arch-conservative columnist, Melanie Phillips, who sometimes talks good sense, is at a loss to explain it and can only vent her spleen on such meddlesome men.

Strangely enough I heard her on The Moral Maze last week maintaining, I think, that belief in God was needed to underpin ethical behaviour; I recall her mentioning "conscience". It might occur to her that the way we treat the vulnerable, such as children, in our society is, or should be, a matter of conscience. I guess it certainly is for Justin Welby and his 44 merry colleagues. It seems to me that they are doing no more than their Christian conscience demands, as paralleled in the early equivalent of a welfare state. "They only asked us to remember the poor - the very thing I was eager to do." In this case, the Children's Society, because it is that admirable charity which has, I suspect, enlisted the bishops' and other church leaders' support, is asking for the welfare uprating bill to be amended in the House of Lords next week in order to protect children in particular from the ravages of inflation, which the financially robust are able to ride. The letter written by the bishops and published by the Sunday Telegraph seems to me a justifiable request to a still well-off government to remember the poor. And it seems to me that faith without a public conscience is dead. So I am glad that the new Archbishop has already indicated his intention to follow Jesus in being "on the side of the poor" and powerless.

Having said that let me add a postscript concerning the plight of politicians. It is all too easy and all too frequently done to indulge in government-bashing. After all the High Court of Parliament is adversarial, and it is right that governments be held to account. However on Saturday I was talking to someone who has had the closest contact with the highest ranks of government, and he said that ministers have an impossible job; their days are filled with meetings and briefings from civil servants and advisers. They really have no time for quiet reflection about the big issues. Once in power they hardly have time to think. The implication of what he said, I take it, was, "Have some sympathy for these people. They're trying their hardest with impossible jobs."

On Saturday, the Home Secretary, Theresa May, who's not a politician I readily warm to, gave a speech looking to the next General Election. It was mischievously cast by the media as a leadership salvo. For me, more interesting because I suspect more genuine, was what she said at the outset: "It’s often said that politics is about public service, and of course it is. But to me, it’s about much more than that. Politics is a passion. A passion to make a difference. To change lives for the better. To stand up for people who work hard and want to get on in life. To help people to help themselves and their families. To help those in genuine need." I do appreciate that there's a bit of coding about strivers and skivers in those last phrases. Nevertheless the phrase "a passion to make a difference" does, I reckon, reflect the initial and fundamental motivation of the majority of those who enter the risky front line of politics, with its minefield of corrupting power. I guess that's why St Paul urged, "Pray every way you know how,... especially for those in power to govern well".