Grandstanding

[Rosalind Mitchell]

This week's edition of The Friend contains a letter over my name
which bears a passing resemblance to the one I originally wrote.
The letter is in reponse to last week's piece by Michael Bartlet,
Parliamentary Liaison Officer at Friend's House, about Trident and
its successor, a matter of great significance in the proud and
gritty town where I was born and now inhabit once again.

I say "a passing resemblance" because I spend a good part of last
Monday exchanging emails with Trish Carn negotiating a form of
words which she could find acceptable. The truth is that I
conceded ground and agreed to drop one of the important points
from my letter in order to be able to make the secondary point,
that if the Trident replacement is to be scrapped then some other
realistic way has to be found for the people of Barrow to earn a
living. Trish thought I was "attacking" Michael, which may or may
not be true but isn't the term I would have used (I'd have said
"challenging"). In particular, I had charged Michael Bartlet with
"grandstanding".

In truth, Michael's article annoyed me. Not because I disagreed
with it because there was nothing in it I could disagree with.
His easy platitudes about the irrelevance and immorality of
nuclear weapons, which probably didn't give a single one of his
readers pause for thought, come silkily and easily from the pen of
a London lawyer, but they would just sound smug to people whose
livelihood he would cheerfully write off from the comfort of his
warm London office. He deserves to be challenged, I think.

Rosie


--
Currently reading: Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi

[simon gray]

i don't subscribe to the friend, so i've seen neither the article nor
the letter[*], so i can only wade in in general terms.

[*] i'm also not asking for it to be reposted here - if i'm not
prepared to pay to subscribe to the friend, i don't have any
expectation that i should be able to see its content for free.

one of the things which does irritate me - not just about many
quakers, but my wider left-ish middle-class-ish right-on-ish peers -
is the tendency we have, whilst complaining about how the other half
don't know how the other half lives, we fail to realise that for many
people, we too are part of that other half who don't know how the
other half lives.

the price of food is the thing i tend to focus the most on, as
somebody who has always first visited the reduced fridge (originally
out of necessity, now out of habit) at the supermarket before making
any decisions about what tonight's tea is going to be. we chearfully
complain about supermarkets, and how the price of food is too cheap,
whilst at the same time failing to acknowledge that for many people -
especially nowadays with the proliferation of foodbanks - even the
cheapest food of 'too cheap' food is too expensive; we write articles
on our apple macs pointing out the working conditions of the people
who supply primark and call for boycotts, not remembering that for
many people primark is the only shop from which they can get
reasonably stylish clothes (not everybody lives somewhere which has
good quality charity shops.

and so it is here.

it's true, we do have a responsibility to campaign about These Things
That Are Wrong. and whilst it's true that - just as when rover in
longbridge closed, british steel in consett closed, kraft in kirkby
closed - the death of a monocultural industry in a town doesn't
necessarily mean the death of the town itself, we would do better to
acknowledge the unintended consequences of what we might wish for
rather than just ignoring them.

--
www.star-one.org.uk ~ www.winterval.org.uk ~ www.birmingham-alive.com