The Last Voter in England?

Thursday 15 November, and Election fever grips the Land. Three cheerful tellers sit behind a table in our village hall like the wise old monkeys they probably are, as the People Decide. The girls and boys in political rosettes have stayed away, I notice. Or maybe the Three Wise Ones are political, but hiding it in the interests of Police Impartiality.

The UK Police and Crime Commissioner race is on, and so’s the Kettle.

This is British democracy at its glorious best and awful worst.

I'm a congenital Voter, Me.

Like them or hate them, you can't complain about them if you didn't bother to elect them, say I.

There's enough mitteleuropean blood in my veins from my parents’ generation to appreciate a country where you can vote.

The more of this sort of thing we do, the more we may get a taste for it and build a more participative intelligent democracy. That’s my fantasy, anyway.

So why are some 80% of the voters likely to sit this one out?

Well, for a start, nobody really knows what the hell it’s supposed to be about. In the bad old days you elected a council, and they put people on a governance authority for your local police. It was a bit of British great and good stitch up, but by and large it worked. Jolly PC49’s gave kiddies the time of day, the beer stayed warm, England lost the Test Match, and old maids cycled safely to early communion through autumn mists.

Many suspect this whole thing ain’t broke, and this is just £75m going on another lame stunt by our leaders to convince us they believe in democracy and so should we. They could be right, but...

For seconds, there's little to argue about from a strictly party political point of view, until someone is crazy enough to start a political party dedicated to sacking police officers, penny pinching myopia, mind-numbind levels of bureaucracy, letting fraudsters get away with it, and rewarding Thieves with knighthoods.

No party believes in that prospectus. But they all implement it anyway. So where’s the choice? And why have a Party political beauty contest about it?

Finally, few of the candidates are known across the area they will represent. High deposits and the lack of a mailshot are said to have stacked the odds against independents before they got out of the starting gate. So perhaps this is a referendum on whether you want to vote for party candidates or independents. For all we know some of both are completely crazy, but what do we know? They are all going to reduce bureaucracy, put more officers on the beat, catch crooks, save money and generally make us feel good. They’ll get us Police who are Judge Dredd, George Dixon and Inspector Morse rolled into one.

So what’s not to like? Vote early, vote often, as they used to say in northern Ireland. I managed the first, and felt pretty damn smug about it for at least ten minutes. Next step in my democracy rollout — a directly elected General Synod.

EDL Aylesbury: wingnuts lock down

Day out in Aylesbury with Frs Shane Wood and David Cloake, as the EDL came to town. Lord knows why Aylesbury, but the day demonstrated clearly the strength and cohesion of the town, in the face of major frustration and annoyance. However unwanted it all was, it did bring people together. I spent the day on walkabout with visits to the TVP Silver Command, Jamia Ghausia Mosque, and Young People’s activities at CGS in Southcourt, among other places.

The tiny but good humoured UAF event at Vale Park, whilst basically irrelevant, was no bother at all. The EDL have been trying to build numbers on their outings, so will doubtless be disappointed by a modest turnout. There was only one public order arrest, with a small number of others for offensive weapons and, inevitably perhaps, one drunk and disorderly EDL member. There’s always one. The day demonstrated great patience, professionaism and good humour from our police and emergency services. An Al Jazeera reporter commented, on the basis of experience all over the world, on the “gentlemanly” way TVP had approached a pretty daunting task.

Above all, the day saw a basically good humoured, cohesive community cope, mainly cheerfully. Most people, wisely, stayed away. I feel really sorry for the town’s small traders, innocent people, who have lost thousands of pounds so that EDL could indulge their ignorance and insecurity in public.

One or two aspects of the day struck me as quintessentially Engish.

• We believe passionately in free speech, in the town John Hampden and John Wilkes served as MP’s. This particular exercise cost hundreds of thousands of pounds, if not millions, taking into account lost income to local businesses on a bank holiday weekend. If EDL’s views reflected local reality, they wouldn’t have to bus in people from all over the land. The 50 odd EDL members in the town can’t be expected to cough up the £20-30,000 each their antics have cost their neighbours, I suppose, but the idea was, understandably, expressed by various locals during the day. Balancing the right to free speech against the right to get on with your life unmolested was the original wingnut dilemma I discussed last week, and things seems to have worked out relatively peacefully, if unfairly weighted against local traders.
  
  
• The power of Twitter was demonstrated interestingly when silly rumours started up mid-aftermoon that someone had firebombed the mosque — this on the back of various tales on the streets about stabbings in the town over the previous few days — all rubbish. Enough is enough, so Fr Shane and I went down to Havelock Street for a very English Nice Cup of Tea with the Mosque president, a photo of which we tweeted straight out, to demonstrate that we weren’t actually in a war zone. Samosas followed soon after.
  
  
• As the EDL went home (by way of some high jinks in Morrison’s car park) I noticed boarding coming down from the Green Man in the Market Place.
  
  Like Noah’s dove returning to the ark, this was the first true sign of normality’s return, and it was great to have a pint in there as it reopened at 6·00. Nice pint, too.
  
  
• A more public all-clear came at 7·00, as bellringers met at St Mary’s to ring the Church bells. A couple of bottles of Champagne were opened and shared. The mp3 below records the happy sound of some changes rung, along with a small amount of associated ribaldry. “Thanks,” said one local resident. “This means we’ve got our town back.”
  

L4/19-22 Housing, Police, Queuing

19. Buy The Big Issue or contribute to a housing charity. Aha! There’s a lady near Missenden Station who sells TBI and I did this one the week before I had to anyway, so I left it at that, assuming timing isn’t critical. At Church we've been supporting the Old Tea Warehouse in High Wycombe — they're now producing a rag, which I gather can be got, among, other places, from a table at the back of All Saints High Wycombe. Next time I'm in, I'll give that a go...

20. Say hello (’ello, ’ello? — sorry) to a Police Officer. I have to confess to not having bumped into one on Friday, and thinking I could end up inside for wasting Police Time if I dialled 999 just to thank them for being themselves. I have, however, always made a point of trying to get to know and work with my local police service. It seems to me police officers end up doing pretty much all the jobs the rest of us would rather not think about, from clearing up after road crashes to managing drunks in our new 24 hour alcohol-sodden town centres. Of course there's good and bad in everyone, but I'm not sure the media and copshow stereotypes help, either. In Thames Valley they've done some really headline work with restorative justice. I don’t think most police officers I know want putting on a pedestal — just some basic respect for what they’re trying to do, and a bit of awareness that there’s a human being inside the uniform. I wouldn't have thought that’s too much to ask, but often, apparently it is. I sometimes look in on the notorious but revealing Coppersblog. It gives down-to-earth view from the other side of the counter, and I find it injects a bit of (alternative) reality into all the media hype and cynicism.


21. Chat to someone in a Queue. Trouble was, the only queues I got in on Saturday were queues of cars. I had a very nice chat with the lady in the fish (as in aquarium) shop, but there wasn’t a queue. Tried to find a queue in Staples, but got served first time (for the first time ever). Even the local Somerfield was a no-queue zone. Grrr! Whatever is happening to the British! No queues! Not when you want one anyway. I’ll see how I do in the next queue I hit...

22. Think about how to make space for stillness in the week ahead. A rather busy week, but I have a cunning plan. As well as injecting fractionally more silence into morning prayer with Lucy, I'm going to try and get out walking or running, away from the phone and everything else. See how that goes.

Remembrance on the roads

On Sunday I was in Thame to help lead the annual Thames Valley Police Road Death Victims service. 3 people a week die on our local roads, 70% of them under 45. That this is one of thirty events around the country indicates the sheer scale of the heartache that people have to carry after these catastrophic bereavements. Worldwide, it’s the equivalent of a 9/11 every day. David Wilbraham, force chaplain reminded us never to forget in the dark that which we knew in the light of those we love. He quoted an old bit of wisdom from Lancashire mill towns where he served his curacy, which calls all of our life a weaving:

Not till the loom is silent, And shuttles cease to fly,
Will God unroll the canvas, And explain the reason why.
The dark threads are as needful In the Skillful Weaver’s hand,
As the threads of gold & silver In the pattern He has planned.

Road death is the sort of problem most of us just don’t want to think of most of the time, but it happens every day. Dr Cicely Davey, who lost her husband only two years ago recited a poem. The courage of the people I met was overwhelming, and the kindness and consideration of those present from Police, Ambulance, Fire & rescue and NHS emergency services. Every day they tackle what has to be one of the most harrowing and unpleasant jobs there is, and here they were helping people through the long term slog of coping with what happened in an instant, gently and considerately. Also there were Roadpeace, Brake, and Sara Thornton, Chief Constable. The service culminated with an act of remembrance with white petals on the altar, one for each life commemorated, and two minutes silence. Supt Mick Doyle led prayers near the end of the service:

We can shed tears that they have gone
Or we can smile that they have lived.
We can close our eyes and pray that they will come back
Or we can open our eyes and see all the good they have left us.
Our hearts can be empty because we cannot see them
Or our hearts can be full with the love we have shared.
We can turn our backs on tomorrow and live yesterday
Or we can be happy for tomorrow, because of yesterday.
We can remember them and only that they have gone
Or we can cherish their memory and let it live on.
We can cry and close our minds, be empty and turn our backs
Or we can do what they would have wanted:
Smile, open our eyes, love and go on.