On the Ground

On my day off yesterday I heard Frank Field MP and the ubiquitous Fr Giles Fraser on the radio as part of the continuing story of religious leaders criticising the Government's welfare reforms, beginning with soon-to-be Cardinal Vincent Nichols and then a statement to which many of the Anglican bishops gave their names a couple of days ago. "What the bishops are doing is reflecting the experience they have seen through their clergy on the ground", Giles Fraser commented. "My church in south London is opening as a homeless shelter, we have people sleeping in our pews overnight, we are cooking for them. Homelessness in London has gone up 60 per cent in the last two years, this is the reality. Please acknowledge this."

Naturally, things differ from one place to another. Here in a superficially affluent area we do have a foodbank, established in one of the local churches some time before the current welfare reforms began, and I haven't enquired into the circumstances in which people find themselves using its services most often, although I understand it does a disturbing amount of business. However my impression from talking to people is that while the foodbank is there, and things are indeed tight for quite a lot of people, a struggle to make ends meet isn't necessarily the great social fact in this area, and while homeless people do pass through, that's not a huge problem either. Very much more people of working age seem to find the great oppression they face is work itself, the amount of time taken up with travel to and from work, the burdens work places and constraints it forces on family and community life; the sense in which they face a dreadful trade-off between material security on the one hand and, on the other, the elements of life that security is supposed to support and make possible. Linked with this is an anxious competitiveness concentrated on children and schools, on maximising the supposed life-chances of your offspring at any cost. So much of it seems based on a fantasy of the way the world really works, but that's easy for me to say, freed as I am by my stipend from the necessity of working for a living. The connection between the problems the bishops are complaining about and the way things seem to me, here, is that the approach to welfare which produces the one is generated by the ideology of competition and achievement which are reflected in the other.