The 2015 election edges closer

Half-way until the next General Election, how do we think the Labour front bench is doing?  Are they convincing as a credible government in-waiting?  Well, in their favour they have more female MPs in the shadow cabinet than their opponents and they do have some confident and weighty figures.  It’s only a personal view – I don’t know any of them personally, and only have their public performances to go by - but here are the ones I feel are the more heavyweight hitters:

Ed Balls (Shadow Chancellor).  Yes, still carries some baggage from being Gordon Brown’s man but a master of his brief and a real bruiser in political debate.  On the downside, the public continues to hold him largely to blame for the state of the economy at the time of the last general election. 

Yvette Cooper (Shadow Home Secretary).  Capable and a good performer in public. Seemed to manage the Chief Secretary and Work and Pensions portfolios in the Brown government well.  Popular among Labour MPs, topping the poll for Shadow Cabinet elections.

Andy Burnham (Health). There must be harder jobs than opposing a Tory health secretary but Burnham seems to do rather well.  

Chuka Umunna (Business, Innovations and Skills)  Bright, confident and seems very ambitious, he is a convincing performer.

Douglas Alexander (Foreign affairs).  Solid performer. Conveys integrity.

However, for me, the star of the Labour first team is Jon Cruddas MP for Dagenham and Rainham and Policy Review Co-ordinator.  Not a glory-seeker (he didn’t want to be Deputy PM if he had won the deputy leadership of the party).  He faced-down and saw off the BNP in his east London constituency.  He isn’t afraid to be known as a left winger (or at least what passes for left in today’s Labour Party).  His ideas command respect and he seems to have integrity.  Politics needs more like him.

For me, most of the other members of the Shadow Cabinet – including the leader and deputy – seem pedestrian at best.  I am nearly as tired of seeing Caroline Flint as I became at seeing Hazel Blears in the last Labour government.

It won’t be enough for Labour to count either on the public’s unhappiness with the Conservatives or the deep losses the Lib Dems are expected to face following their opportunist alliance with the Tories.  If there is to be a change of government, they need to up their game a great deal.  They also need some policies.  There is a poverty of thinking arising from the three main parties’ determination to hold the centre ground, which is why UKIP seems so buoyant.

Lemon posset

The last few posts have all been a bit serious. So here's something more fun as we face the weekend.

Three years ago, to mark a milestone birthday, I visited River Cottage in Dorset. I spent a day learning about curing meat - a very worthwhile day as those who have eaten breakfast at ours will know, since we now cure our own bacon.

Nikki and I have eaten at the River Cottage canteen in Axminster a couple of times and one of the desserts there was an amazing lemon posset. Very tasty and simple to make. Before I tasted this for the first time I had the odd notion that a posset would be like the blancmange or junkets I remember from early childhood but this is much better.

I had a birthday this week and we celebrated with this pudding once again. Here's the recipe, to serve 6:

600ml double cream
150g caster sugar
Juice of 3 medium-sized lemons
Lemon zest

Pour the cream into a large saucepan and add the sugar. Warm gently, stirring to dissolve the sugar, then bring to a boil and boil for exactly three minutes, without stirring. Remove from the heat and whisk in the lemon juice and zest. Pour into six tea cups or small glasses. Cool, cover, and refrigerate for four hours before serving.

Enjoy

Three small but significant events in the past fortnight and their impact on my thinking...

The first was the fun of facilitating a review and planning exercise for a church-based project in north-east London supporting homeless and isolated people, set up following a report I wrote in 1998. One of the issues arising from this review is that new employment opportunities need to be created for people who, owing to disability, mental illness or offending history will never be attractive to employers.  Employability schemes tend to cherry-pick those most likely to enter employment, leaving others with little hope of ever being shortlisted.  When I had my first experience of employment in the 1970s (in local authorities), far greater allowance was made to find employment opportunities for all people.  Efficiency savings, downsizing, outsourcing (and other euphemisms) now mean that the workplace focus is on maximizing productivity to the exclusion of the other, equally important, purposes fulfilled by work.

A second event this past fortnight is the closure, after some 17 years, of a church-based employability scheme which has enabled hundreds of people to find employment or vocational training.  Having been involved in its early planning, as well as accompanying this social enterprise over many years until I left London, I grieve the loss of both the project and much-valued colleagues, as well as sharing a sense of pride in the team, the trustees and their work. Motivated by Christian concern but not ramming Christianity at people, this scheme’s success arose in part from it being local to the population it served and from the fact that it refused to cherry-pick the most employable clients. They often chose to work with people that the other agencies would have dismissed as uneconomic. North-east London is the poorer for its departure.

Finally, I saw a documentary – the third in the Secret Millions series on Channel 4 which can be seen here. Katie Piper, herself a victim of a horrible crime, is shown spending time with ex-offenders, exploring the creation of a social enterprise around the manufacture of high end value furniture.  For some of the people she worked with, this was their first experience of paid employment and its transformative properties. The documentary ended with the news of a Big Lottery award to fund similar social enterprise start-ups for ex-offenders across the country. The work of the Acumen Trust was also mentioned in this regard.  I have seen first-hand some similar projects in First Fruit (manufacturing cheerleaders’ accessories – but it’s paid work!) and Greenworks in London Borough of Newham; also Aspire which is in other UK cities.  I also co-led an attempt to set up a co-operative in Redbridge some years ago.

Too many of my friends are denied the dignity of work and the sense of wellbeing it can bring by an economic system that measures the worth of a worker solely in efficiency and productivity. Nor can we rely now upon schemes that match people and skills with existing vacancies. We (and by this I mean people with consciences and – I dare to hope – people of faith) need to do more to create wealth for its social as much as its financial ends.  And yes, I am aware of the irony of speaking of wealth creation less than a week after the ceremonial funeral of its champion, as I gaze upon the world she is partly responsible for shaping.

I am due a sabbatical in 2014 and I am wondering if this time might be used to explore practical options for the creation of further social enterprises (CFS already has our shop, Shared Space).  I would be glad to hear about examples of community-led social enterprises which have succeeded and, as importantly, those that have failed. 

Society, post-Thatcher?

The day after the ceremonial funeral of Baroness “there is no such thing as society” Thatcher, here is something to challenge each of us.  How many of your neighbours can you name?  Do you know anything about them, beyond that quaint English nod and half-smile when you see them?  Or have you lived alongside familiar strangers maybe for years?

The irony is that so many of our unknown neighbours are likely to be on Facebook, Twitter or other social media. So, in pursuit of ‘community’ online, we tend to neglect the real community literally on our doorsteps. 

A few years ago, Sikh neighbours 4 houses away had a fire which badly damaged their first floor.  It required two fire crews to put it out. The following morning I pushed a card through their front door, expressing our sense of shock and offering practical help. The door flew open and an angry housewife demanded to know what the card was.  As I explained, her face changed from suspicion to amazement. She and her husband later shared that that was the first card they had received from neighbours in decades.

Which is why, despite the risk of cheesiness, I applaud GOOD magazine (www.good.is) which has decided to do something about our lack of neighbourliness.  They've announced a new global holiday: Neighbour Day, falling on Saturday 27^th April.  Sure, it’s a flimsy reason for just getting to reach out and introduce yourself to neighbours but at least it is action of a sort.  Here’s what they suggest to get us started:

1. Download their Neighbourhood Toolkit here to kickstart your action - yes it's American but try to cope.

2. Help them document what Neighbourday looks like, feels like and sounds like to set the example for years to come. Tweet and Instagram with #neighborday if you want to contribute to their collaborative Neighbourday Documentary.

3. Spread the word. Tell your friends,family and church that Saturday 27 April is global Neighbourday.

It was because there was nothing to do that I did it...

No, not a confession but the opening line from R.S.Thomas's poem 'Pluperfect,' from which the name of this blog is taken:

". . . There was a vacuum 

I found myself in, full of echoes

of dead languages. Where to turn

when there are no corners? In curved

space I kept on arriving at

my departures . . .

. . . Where are you? I

shouted, growing old in

                        the interval between here and now."

I am no longer surprised to see the Phoenix collection of Thomas's poems on the study shelves of ministers. For, though we may not all inhabit the same depths of anguish as the Welsh poet-priest, there are - for me at least - times of frustration that I spend much energy being active in the name of a sometimes elusive God. Which is not to say 'absent' but perhaps not as obvious as I would wish. Like another religious poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, "I greet Him the days I meet him and I bless when I understand."

So why a new blog? There are some excellent ones which I have noted on the main page here but does the world really need another blog? I wrote an occasional one for Church from Scratch and have added the archive from this here also.  I kept a journal for a while. Neither of these helped me to address two unresolved needs.  Generally I only  know what I think on a range of topics when I begin to write about them. Secondly, after 30 years exploring the Christian way as a preacher, and despite enjoying an itinerant ministry as a guest speaker in a number of churches, I have no weekly pulpit.  As someone reminded me again this morning, we are what we do. It is part of who I am to want to explore and unpack truth in the company of others, by preference in dialogue. I have also written an occasional newsletter to friends who have supported and encouraged us since our move to Southend in 2009 and it is now time, I feel, to move on to different ways of sharing news.

Finally, Thomas's concluding lines hint that God is often sought not in the hurry and busy-ness of everyday life, which I find only anaethetises me to what is most important, but in the spaces between activities - echoes of the 'timeless moments' in Eliot's 'Little Gidding' - more poetry... 

Therefore, one hope for this blog is for a little more time to think aloud among friends, on many topics and I'd be glad of the company of anyone who wanted to join in.