Becoming Responsible

The Irresponsible Socialist

Sitting in my friend Bill Water’s surgery in Hatfield in 1969 waiting for him to get around to seeing me, like most Doctor’s he was running late, I got into conversation with the man sitting next to me, he was a Miner from Hatfield Main Colliery.

He was suffering with what I immediately recognised as Emphysema, caused by breathing coal dust and doubtless aggravated by smoking.

The price that working people pay for the jobs that they do is a high one and is paid in terms of poor health and disability as they grow older.

My Uncle Harold died of Asbestosis; he had worked as a Lorry Driver, delivering asbestos across the country. I occasionally spent a school or college holiday travelling with him, helping him with his work including unloading the sacks of raw asbestos.

When asbestos was recognised for the killer that it is there was a survey undertaken to identify buildings with asbestos, I recall him commenting that they would have been better interviewing him as he had delivered the asbestos when the buildings were building sites.

He even mentioned that he had delivered asbestos to Hatfield School, from which eventually it was removed.

When I was called into the surgery Bill looked surprised and suggested that, as a favour to him, in the future I should ring him at home and he would see me privately.

I was grateful but had to make it clear that my commitment to both mission and socialism meant that I had to take my place in the queue, even if my presence in the queue embarrassed both him and certain of his patients.

In almost every job that I have undertaken there has been an element of some kind of socialist analysis.

Sometimes the analysis was of a contemporary situation and sometimes it was a reflection on the history of the place.

In Little Hulton for example the church had been built by public subscription with the wife of the colliery owner standing at the colliery gates to take up a collection every pay day in order to raise the funds for the building of the new church.

It was important to understand that history.

At the same time I found myself drawn into a debate with the Local Authority over their housing policy which meant that young people from the estate had to move away when they married because all new tenancies were awarded to people being displaced by the slum clearance programme in inner city Salford.

My work in Bolton involved reflecting on and analysing the impact of unemployment on young people and their families. There were practical responses, such as the counselling scheme, Concern and the projects Work Piece and Mouth Piece alongside the squatting campaign aimed at using the properties emptied to make way for a new inner ring road.

I was eventually invited to join the Board for Social Responsibility in Manchester which was debating the role of community work strategies and techniques in developing the Churches mission and ministry in the inner city parishes of the Diocese.

Mission and Politics came together on one occasion when a Vicar of an inner city parish cast a young unmarried mum as the Virgin Mary in a Nativity Play in the parish.

The subsequent scandal spilled over into a wider debate and eventually came to the attention of the Bishop who called the Parish Priest in to discuss the situation.

The Bishop’s House was on Bury New Road overlooking part of inner city Salford.

Whilst they were talking the Bishop moved to the window and opened the curtains to look out over the parish, it all looks so peaceful from here he commented, yes, the Parish Priest apparently replied, as Hades might look from the comfort of Abrahams bosom.

Some clergy become party politically engaged and active, I never have.

I have always been political but with a small p, but that has not stopped me from having strong views and expressing them as seemed appropriate.

On one occasion in America I was driving around a small town in New Hampshire. The car was a rented Cadillac with Massachusetts licence plates, in the car was Janet, our three daughters and William our son.

We were scouting out a possible job opportunity at the suggestion of my friend Rick Stecker.

After the third stooge round the town centre I looked in the rear view mirror to see that I was being followed by a police cruiser, oh oh I thought, time to leave and so we headed for the town line, as we crossed out of his jurisdiction the cruiser did a U turn and sat straddling the white line.

We were, as Rick said later that night over a glass of wine, being shown off the premises; after all he would have seen three dangers, a Cadillac, Massachusetts licence plates and four blondes. You are lucky that he didn’t pull you over.

It was for all the world like the scene from the first Rambo movie when Brian Dennehey’s Sherriff invites Silvester Stallon’s Rambo to move on.

But it happened twice more in the UK.

After I had been designated as Britain’s first Punk Parson I was followed along the Motorway back from Salisbury where we had been staying with Janet’s Stepmother, by a Police Car.

Nervous at being followed I pulled into a Motorway services only to be followed in, circled in the car park and then saluted ironically before the police car drove away, the officer in the passenger seat smiling to himself as though we had been safely seen on our way.

Then I appeared on the Jimmy Young TV show in an interview with Norman Tebbit.

Mr. Tebbit was more than holding his own and it was hard to engage with him as Jimmy Young was managing the interview closely.

Out of the corner of my eye, however I noticed that the producer was holding up a hand written cardboard sign saying, ‘less Tebbit! bring back the Canon’.

Seizing the opportunity I was able to bring the first half of the show to an end by reeling off a great list of statistics, most of which I had made up, concluding by saying: and that, Jimmy is the reality of life today in Mr Tebbit’s and Mrs Thatcher’s Britain, cue audience applause and adverts.

That night I was driving back from the TV Studio in Leeds followed by a Police Car which escorted me over the Tyne Bridge.

The next morning I was awoken at 5 00 am to be told that my office in the Church had been broken into.

Kids, said the officer when I arrived, they have no respect.

The computer was open at the page where I had prepared my notes for the Jimmy Young Show.

Cleaning up later, my colleague commented, this wasn’t kids, this was someone looking for stuff and trying to look like it was kids.

The next day my next door neighbour was broken into, again she expressed a view that it was not a robbery but someone looking for something.

They probably didn’t find it because they had broken into the wrong house.

Sometime during my work in Newcastle, the Board for which I served as the officer was described in a Diocesan Synod as, The Board for Socialist Irresponsibility.

When the epithet was coined it received a few sniggers and there was laughter in the Synod but it was a cheap joke given that the Board was seeking to address some deep seated social problems in a region which had been de-industrialising with the attendant legacy of high unemployment, poverty concentrated not only in the inner City but in the large peripheral estates characterised by Billy Connolly as ‘deserts with windows’.

So whilst I am happy to claim the epithet for myself it is interesting to reflect how the notion of irresponsibility has now come to define Capitalism, something of an oxymoron I suspect.

The debt crisis, unemployment, increasing poverty, the policy of austerity pursued by the current coalition government all conspire to remind us that it is not socialism that is irresponsible, but the capitalism that helps itself to inflated profits, huge unearned (in any reasonable definition of ‘earned’) bonuses, that avoids paying its taxes, shelters its assets in offshore accounts and uses its wealth to ensure that governments that represent its views are elected.

This irresponsible capitalism is the legacy of the Thatcher years and it is still wreaking havoc, destroying communities and setting people at odds with each other, as the recent riots evidence.

I admit to being an irresponsible socialist, irresponsible because I have never been a member of a political party, never canvassed and never been active in seeking to shape society politically.

In retirement I have joined the co-op Party and am now secretary of the North Cumbria Branch of the Co-op. After years of irresponsibility I am finally trying to become a responsible socialist.