What price Engineering in a nation of shopkeepers?

In 1644 John Milton, made out a case in his Areopagitica for freedom of speech. In passing, he observed great energy and potential in the English people:

Lords and Commons of England, consider what nation it is whereof ye are, and whereof ye are the governors: a nation not slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious, and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human capacity can soar to.

Almost two hundred years later, as British engineering swept the world, Robert Stephenson's London and Birmingham Railway Company established its engineering works halfway between the two cities at Wolverton in Buckinghamshire. In its day the works serviced and even built locomotives, some of which ended up in Australia, but its main task was the design and building of railway carriages, for which it was, in its day, the largest works in the world.

Even after Dr Beeching's cuts, something of the former glory remains, operated by a company called Railcare which boasts on its website

considerable expertise in Vehicle and Component overhaul, Incident Repair and Spares and Logistics, Railcare offers customers a total Rolling Stock solution.

The word "solution," outside a chemical context, usually means Corporate Bullshit Bingo. Even with an order book rumoured to be full from October, the enterprise is now on the financial rocks, and on 31 July the accountants moved in.

Next comes the butcher's bill, beginning with some 100 engineering jobs. It may be that productive activity can be saved in Wolverton, or it may be that Tesco's, having already taken over half the site, will end up with the rest. Who can tell?

Four questions arise:

1. How much of an economy should manufacturing represent?
   Somewhere in every advanced nation someone has to be making things in the real world. The almost complete destruction of British manufacturing industry in the past thirty years has been driven by the idea that wealth creation is fundamentally about manipulating money in ingenious ways, rather than producing tangible goods and services. Surely we can’t run the whole economy on smoke and mirrors.
2. What is the value of skilled labour?
   When engineering jobs go, the the country loses far more than simply manufacturing capacity. It degrades a whole economy to replace high value jobs with low paid low skill jobs, especially if these are temporary.
3. Lions led by donkeys?
   When business is all about financial ingenuity not engineering capability, be very afraid. The god that has usually failed in the past fifty years is not engineering, but management.
4. What’s the difference between spending and investment?
   In an economy that seems to be constructed around debt, much of it lodged in a mortgage bubble that will burst the moment interest rates climb anywhere near their historic levels, it seems incredible that money cannot be found to invest in productive long term industry.

Milton’s vision gives way to a nightmare where a tiny number of well-heeled financial manipulators with associated drones and loan sharks bob around in a sea of temporary schemes, paupers (in or out of work) and former skilled workers, all up to their eyeballs in debt. 

What sort of a future is that supposed to offer?

MK on the Isar

Here, in the Agora of the largest Christian Get-together in Europe, Milton Keynes Ecumenical Partnership have taken a stall. It’s dominated by Mrs Lazarus, by local sculptor David Moore. She was aspin off from Robert Koenig’s Odyssey project, which celebrated the East European relatives he never knew, some of whom had perished in the holocaust, and some of whom he had not been allwed access to as young man because of the divisions of Europe.

Mrs Lazarus has graced the Church of Christ the Cornerstone, on and off, for the past two years. She gained her name from the sculpotor's mpother, who kept returning from death’s door. The last eighteen months of her life, she picked up the name and it suck. She died at the age of 94 in March this year.

Like Lazarus, Mrs Lazarus is wrapped, with only her feet showing — the message is “we’ve only just begun” on the Ecumenical journey. The unwrapped portion of the bandage carries specific photographs and messages about inclusion, surprising new relationships, the joy of coming in many colours, and the challenge of faith-keeping. Text cards are also being distributed with quotations from pope Paul VI, Dom Helder Camara, and Fr Harry Williams, CR. The last is particularly significant:

God’s Love for me is his love for the world,
and so is mine for God,
if it is genuine.

Everything will be revealed when Mrs Lazarus returns to Milton Keynes, including the host of messages she has collected during her time in Munich. Sjould you be one of the 300,000 people celebrating hope in MInich, she can be found at stall A6 D09 in the Messe.

Evangelism: rewriting the Book

Many thanks to Jonny Baker’s excellent Blog for news about this project by Improv Everywhere — possibly more of a set-up job than appears at first sight, but the gift to a random couple of an off-the-peg wedding reception for nothing, celebrated with enthusiastic strangers. It’s an interesting way of spreading Joy. To go out and enact what we believe it’s all about is surely the heart of mission? If we want to have a real impact on people’s lives in places like Milton Keynes, I wonder if this is the sort of thing we need to be doing, rather than sticking in buildings, flogging dead horses, or conventional “Come and get it” Evangelism?

MK NHS Hospitals Trust Good News

Licensing Karen Reeves to Milton Keynes Hospital as colleague to Carole Hough on Friday, felt like a new beginning for the trust, as well as the chaplaincy. Karen brings a strong professional background in hospital and community healthcare, along with a profound commitment to justice, social inclusion and peace. MK is very much the kind of diverse, fast-moving urban environemnt in which she has really flourished.

Milton Keynes has grown continuously and exponentially over 30 years, with a chronic and worsening overhang as money follows people, sometimes several years behind. This makes any social, health, educational planning a nightmare. Hospitals are especially vulnerable, as a burgeoning young population puts an immense load on the whole system. As MK grows into the 10th biggest city in the country, John Prescott's target for 2020, this problem rages on.

The temptation is always to sweat the immediate challenges, whilst ignoring the big unfolding context. MK Hospitals NHS Trust, chaired by Mike Rowlands and, since last summer, Walter Greaves, has worked hard to make the most of the realities, challenges and opportunities of Milton Keynes, short and long term. Where chaplaincy could easily become roadkill, the trust has worked hard to provide proper spiritual care in in very trying circumstances. Karen’s arival is a tanglible sign of that commitment.

After a few years of backs-to-the-wall, through which Carole has, incredibly, managed to cope, Friday’s service was good news. Karen’s arrival, partnership with bereavement services, a good and supportive trust (Thanks to Gill Rodney and, particularly Nicola Lester), means the chaplancy team is now back on track for full out of hours cover, increasing voluntary support, developing its present excellent ecumenical and interfaith character, and a host of other good work. The Creation hanging in the chapel was by sisters from Turvey Abbey — a beautiful piece of work, that looks all the better at a time of great hope, as well as challenge, for the hospital...

Reindeer and Robins at Tickford Park

A busy day yesterday visiting schools in the Newport Deanery, and I was delighted to get a healthy low salt school dinner at Tickford Park School in Newport Pagnell (MK LEA), as well as spending a wonderful question and answer hour with year six. Ann Tobia, Linda Coveney and colleagues have tackled the job of pulling together two old schools on adjacent campuses into one community, and I can honestly say it all jams together magnificently. Part of the enterprise was about brightening up the old middle school building, to make a more engaging and positive learning environment. Another part was choosing a name and designing a logo — an unusual and thought provoking tree arrangement, that says something very positive about learning & growing together.

Christmas is coming, and I loved the reindeer children had made with their hands (in various senses) all around the school. Year 2 robins and reindeer really flap their wings, too. There is a buzz about this whole school, children and staff together. They are expanding the children’s centre community provision on campus, and Revd Beverley Hollins and colleagues have been doing fantastic work with Tickford Park, including a project called Spirit Level, to help children come together informally for friendship and spiritual growth.

The heart of any community is the values by which it lives, and Tickford Park has developed its own values statement, which I could clearly see reflected around the place, on every level, in the ways people were treating each other, and working together.

There can never be another you

You are maore thn just special — you are unique As a human being you will develop qualities
and strengths that astound you. Use these strengths to overcome weakness Respect those around you Be kind to others, and above all, be fair. Trust in yourself and search for the best in everyone. Every day is a new beginning — colour it with happiness. Share in the joys of others, and be proud of your own successes Listen well There is never an end to learning

But I also noticed an adult/staff area, which said something interesting about the role of adults in creating a genuine learning community:

All the adults who work at this school act in the best interests of our children. We ourselves are learners. We know that investing in each others’ development is crucial to this school’s success. We embrace change, and even create it. We welcome accountability and are determined to raise achievement. Should you decide to join us yu will find people who believe that this is the best job in the world. We will sustain and energise you, and will help to top up your reservoirs of hope.

It’s interesting to see some basic attitudes spelled out in this way, and there are churches, as well as schools, that could benefit from embracing these kinds of ideals.

Tickford Park is very much a school where everyone matters, and I was fascinated to meet year 6 children who choose responsible hands-on roles in school, like being play leaders and facilitators for younger children, and even mediators. This is a fascinating responsibility to take on, and it certainly helps everyone feel they matter and can talk to someone when things go wrong. It’s a very caring and energising place. Where people have had to embrace challenging times, incuding the recent ending of Aston Martin production in the town, it’s good to find a school that’s really working out values and alignment issue in such a consistent and positive way for the future.

MK IPhone 3G Q Waterloo

Day off Friday. Time for hobbies. Like many Brits since World War 2, I love Queueing. I had a fantastic time at India House last year, eclipsed by five hours on the M40 before Christmas. Among great queues of the world, I experienced an unforgettable two days in the New York blackout of August 2003. In the end water sellers working for the Triads and a guy called Ricky with a yacht got my teenage daughters and me out of Manhattan and safe across the Hudson. Do you know, we were almost disappointed when it ended! So when I heard the IPhone 3G was comng out, I was thrilled. The whole online O2 upgrade system fell over on Monday because of sheer volume — auguring super queueing when the O2 shops opened Friday morning at 8.02 (geddit?). But where? I picked Milton Keynes — two O2 shops in close proximity. If no queue for one, there should be a real corker for the other.

Thus I reported for duty at 07·45 on Friday, to find just over 120 people raring to go. Like Oxbrdge high table, queueing pleasure depends largely on whom you get next door. Real names witheld, but I struck lucky. “Steve” was tatooed with various swirling curly wurlies, all dressed for Celebrity Love Island, with those ankle length camouflage combat pants so popular among Japanese troops who think World War Two is still raging. “Nigel,” let's call him, was a non designer faded polo shirt 60 pound skinny weakling, such as you might hope to find under a pile of bullies on the beach. “Maz” is in financial services, with square designer frames. Maz snickered out of work, tee hee. Keeping us all in line were about half a dozen O2 goons in designer apple tee shirts designed to mock the punters’ folly with slogans like “It’s here.”

Now some groups ain't no place for a lady — The Cardinals for example (Rome not Saint Louis). “Tracey” was there with two naughty little muppets in a stroller, but she shows up in pretty much every queue in Britain so she don’t mean nothing by it. Apart from her and two slightly yuppie suits, the rest, folks, was male. “What if the press show up?” asks Steve. “Good thing I've already got a girlfriend.” Interesting discussion about girlfreinds, and what they all thought we were doing. After this opening burst of cameraderie, we got back to playing with our old iphones and not making eye contact, in the rather ho-hum way males don’t, whilst staring at urinals. Time passed by.

Muffin 1 — Chocolate Chip
15 minutes in
Cheerful o2 goons come round with muffins and bottled water (H2O — geddit?). Ominously, labels picture the millennium dome. The Triads charged $20 a bottle for water at LaGuardia in the NY blackout. Then the feds showed up and started giving it out. So are these goons Triads or Feds? No charge. It’s the feds, with the news they think they have enough stock for all of us. IPhones as well as Water. Deep Joy!

Muffin 2 — Blueberry (not Blackberry)
45 minutes in
Funny, but this queue hasn’t moved for half an hour. Steve points out to me, and Maz agrees, that whilst 120 people started and about 20 of them seem to have gone in, none has come out. Scary, ja? Perhaps, I suggest, everybody is coming out as an o2 goon. Maz has been to Goa, initiating small talk about queues in India. None of us can bear to go to the front and check out what’s really happening, so we soldier on in faith. Russian soldiers at Borodino wondered if God was testing them. Stay or go? This is the summit of all queueing, the contest between anticipation and despair. One little guy’s carpark ticket runs out and he cracks. The three of us hang on in there, just.

Muffin 3 — Cherry
75 minutes in
Sturdy o2 goons come and fold the queue back on itself to stop a neighbouring boutique complaining. As we pass the shop front, a cheery o2 goon mocks the punters’ folly personally by flinging wide the glass door and crying “smell it!” Than comes the moment we have all been secretly dreading. An old lady potters over from Boots and asks the crucial, searing question — “what are you boys doing here?” O ground swallow me up! Steve deals with it for us, on condition we all agree to avoid future eye contact with old ladies until we’re safely in the shop.

Zero muffins.
95 minutes in.
O2 goons turning nasty. One comes out to warn us they have run out of 16 meg Iphones. One or two faces drop. This is a moment of decision — does voracious geeky desire to finger the latest in any form outweigh geeky desire to have the biggest and the best? Actually I only wanted an 8. No really. It was the free upgrade package on 8’s got me here in the first place. Honestly. All surrounding geeks instantly agree with me, apart from Tracey and the muppets, who bottle out. Ha! another test, and we have passed!

Moreover, when the going gets tough the tough get going. Time for radical thnking. Nigel has a lightbulb moment. “Tell you what,” he says, “If we gaffer tape our old 2G 8gigs back to back to a new 3G 8gig, we'd have 16 gig anyway!” Great Thinking, Nigel. Thank you for sharing that. Maz takes Nigel aside gently to explain some of the drawbacks of his strategy. But we are impressed by the way the boy’s mind works.

Minus three muffins
100 minutes in
Joy! the front of the queue. Geeks all phone girlfriends, then remember girlfriends thought they were somewhere else. All geeks have some explaining to do, and this occupies the final three minutes of teetering Bridge-of-Doom anticipation.

09.35. Ushered to the Secret Place back of the store. Heart pounding, palms sweaty. Little black box in hand.This is it.

09.37. O2 upgrade system crashes. We’ll ring you when we can upgrade you. At any rate my old one still works. Actually it’s rather a good phone. Why did I ever want to upgrade it anyway? T. S. Eliot said the end of all our searching was to arrive where we had begun, but knowing what we were doing there. Sort of.
I think we’ve learned something today.
The end of all queuing, friends,
is Vanishing Point.

Would the Birdman do his Bird in MK?

Woodhill prison, chairing a board to appoint a new second chaplain. Alan Hodgetts and multifaith colelagues are doing great work together. I was also struck by the good humoured commitment of staff to running a safe and non-abusive, occasionally high stress environment.

The staff are magnificent. What’s wrong with our prisons is the fantasy surrounding them. Woodhill is sometimes ludicrously described in the media as “Britain’s own Alcatraz.” Just in case your editor is too dim to know the difference, Alcatraz is on the Left, & Woodhill below.

Perhaps the next phase of our glorious prison building programme could involve digging a replica of San Francisco Bay around it. We could import pelicans, fogs, and greased up Clints swimming up and down dodging the sharks, etc. It would only cost 2 or 3 billion pounds. Oh and we could mount severed heads on the gate — only you'd need crowscares, or the magpies get ’em — if that happens your heads are soon rubbish, and crime soars again. Oh and we could moor rotten hulks in the bay, with broadcast groaning day and night. Then it really would be Britain’s Alcatraz. State of the art in 1934, the real Alcatraz was obsolete by the mid sixties.

Ludicrous fantasy pretty much colours what Fleet Street imagines should go on in prison. Historical experience is that once you have prisons, you fill ’em. The UK government actually plans to build more; and now recidivism is back around its historic 70% rate in the system, this can only increase the amount of crime on the streets long term.

The only silver lining I can offer is the discovery, thanks to Maggi Dawn, of a fantastic blog by Anne Droid (The Reverend), Scottish prison chaplain teasingly called Get out of Jail Free. The names have been changed to protect the innocent. It’s a kind of reality checkpoint amidst all the idiot fantasy about prison. Go read it, particularly her stuff on forgiveness...

Dongles from the Geek Zone

Now Liberated by a Dongle, no less, which gives me broadband internet on my laptop pretty much anywhere for £15 a month — rather less than I’ve been spending recently sitting around Starbucks and chums at £5 an hour plus frappucinos. Yesterday’s blogpost was originated from the front (passenger) seat on the Linslade bypass. Apparently students and others are stoking up a wild dongle market. It all seems to work very well — oh and you get free use of Starbucks hotspots thrown in. T-Mobile setup instructions for my Mac were clunky, but sort of worked. Better use these; and Mac owners wanting full realtime usage info need a nifty Kiwi utility called Cheetahwatch.
I have already named the pinnacles of Bucks civilisation — Apple Store, Ikea, Lego store. Add to that a Hotel Chocolat, also in MK (where else), and your cup well and truly runneth over. Nothing geeky about that, anyway.

Brief and to the Point

In haste, I just wanted to share this challenging thought for the day, addressed to the male species from the wall of the smallest room at St George the Martyr Wolverton this morning...
Vile Rumour has it there used to be a notice on the wall of the bishop's loo at General Synod saying “Congratulations. You are currently the only bishop in the Church of England who knows what he is doing.”

Cup Runneth Over in MK — Official

Day off with Lucy in the vibrant new City of Milton Keynes. New Apple Store, now open. A couple of weeks ago I thought they’d veiled the Apple Store for Lent. Ruddy good idea, if Apple were serious about helping me in my struggle against temptation. Who am I that I should serve an episcopal Area that now has its very own Ikea, Lego Shop and Apple Store? She hung onto the plastic, though. Good move. Damage Report Minimal. We got away with a tee shirt and ideas for a birthday present.

Toxic Moonshine about Muslims

Lots of press hoopla about “no go areas” for Christians, comprehensively summarised on Simon Sarmiento’s news blog, here and here.
It is immoral, horrid and shameful to bear false witness — the Ninth Commandment refers. The Scriptures instruct Christians to live at peace with our neighbours, so far as in us lies. In my many dealings with Muslims in Slough, Wycombe, Chesham, Aylesbury and Milton Keynes, including our few Muslim majority Church of England schools, I have always experienced courtesy and mutual respect. I have no idea what a no-go area would look like, nor would I want to. Buckinghamshire is a fairly conservative county, and, we do not really do radical “Multiculturalism” either. Sorry to diasappoint everyone, but there you are. I have, however, experienced some striking instances of hysteria aimed at Muslims:

1. An opinionated gentleman at the University of Buckingham who knew almost nothing about Muslim history and banged on obsessively about it using some stuff he'd got off the Internet
   
2. Hate mail here after I attended an Iftaar in Milton Keynes with Anouar Kassim
3. Last year‘s scare stories about extremist literature in a Mosque in High Wycombe, which turned out to be disingenuous hufflepuff, cooked up by a silly right-wing think tank.

Of course there are a few crank Muslims. There are a few crank Christians, too. And crank atheists. My (Hungarian) mother told me all about Central Europe in the 1930’s, and the lies and stereotyping aimed at Jews. Hitler lied. Millions died. This stuff is dangerous, and it is easy in a stable and humane country like ours to underestimate the stakes when people start to play fast and loose with it.

Early Years excellence

I went yesterday to reopen St Andrew’s Church of England Infant School, in Great Linford, a genuine village pocket of Milton Keynes. It’s had to reinvent itself, against the odds, after losing a much-loved, long serving head. Small scale and limited resources make total renewal a very challenging process. Frankly, St Andrew's almost went under, but with hard work, inspirational leadership from Anne Sheddon, a community campaign that surprised the powers that be, along with brilliant support from parents and friends including Peter Ballantine (local vicar), this school is really humming. Completely refurbished, it now has a staff room, admin area, head teacher's office and excellent learning space, along with a thatched barn that’s crying out for a village nativity one day. Everything now feels so right you wonder how it used to be!
The small scale helps everyone feel valued in a very special way, but what struck me most, apart from a fantastic whole school Space display, was the excellence of its approach to early years education.

Early Years language education is a big national can of worms. Pretty much everywhere else in Europe children get far more enriched kindergarten experience before being expected to tackle academics. The English are obsessed with formal learning, and stack the whole system top-down so that you get far less money for labour intensive early years work than you do later! It's one reason that, in spite of so much hard work, we achieve such low national language standards at 11 compared to, e.g., Nordic countries. Children can survive, and some even excel at, formal early years working, but for many of them the national curriculum learning process for writing is a house built on sand. Imagine how discouraging it would be to have a pushy football coach if you had only basic ball skills and confidence. You’d fake it, and feel bad most of the time. With writing, notoriously, some boys (particularly) half get it, then sign off and become increasingly disaffected throughout key stage two. Backfilling pre-learning attitudes and skills with bored tweenagers is blue murder.

At St Andrew’s they take an approach pioneered in Sweden by Ragnhild Ousorren called Write Dance. This uses physical and social activity to grow spatial awareness, confidence and pre-writing skills. Children really enjoy themselves, acquiring (without knowing this is what they’re doing) pre-writing skill, in a very engaged, multisensory way with music. As a result, they stand a very much greater chance of achieving confidence with writing in a couple of years time. Until we can tame the ignorant naional obsession with formality in the early years we won't achieve Nordic standards of language learning excellence. They just might here, though! At least they are trying to help their children achieve real confidence and competence with writing, and the result is fun, learning and joy.