Pilgrimage to the Shrine of Our Lady of Willesden

Our Lady of Willesden, the Black Virgin

This morning I took the train to North-West London on a personal pilgrimage to the Shrine of Our Lady of Willesden. A few weeks ago I received my copy of the new Britain’s holiest places by Nick Mayhew Smith. It’s a wonderful travel guide with personal observations to the places of Christian heritage around Britain. I must confess that I had never heard of Our Lady of Willesden. Reading Mayhew Smith’s one page write-up, I jumped on the train this morning to make pilgrimage.

The Shrine is both oddly English and oddly London. It is in the Parish Church of St Mary Willesden, a rather pretty English parish church surrounded by a verdant graveyard, typical of so many village churches up and down the country. Yet just beyond its stone boundary wall is a busy roundabout with red London double-deckers ferrying passengers to and from Neasden Tube Station.

St Mary's Church, Willesden

Why I’m supporting AV

I am surprised that there is the whole spectrum of strong views about the Alternative Vote among my friends and colleagues. UK voters are being promised a referendum on whether or not to adopt AV for electing the House of Commons, and the party lines seem to be shaping up as Labour and Lib Dems for, and Tories against (with sizeable groups within parties campaigning against the leadership). I am for it, but am shocked that those I consider the most progressive and/or radical are set against it. I am a member of the Labour Representation Committee, but was knocked back when I found out that the National Committee had decided to support the No campaign.

To be honest — and, if you are of the No persuasion, I shall grant you this as a starter — AV is not a very attractive option. If we were being truly progressive, we would want a referendum on adopting a system of proportional representation. Neither AV nor our current system are designed to return seats in Parliament in proportion to votes cast. However, just because AV is not the best ever option, it is does not automatically follow that we should keep our current arrangement. When given a straight choice between AV and the current FPTP system, AV is far better as it allows voters to express their true preference and return their preferred candidate, without wasted votes or vote splitting, and reducing the need for tactical voting.

This referendum is a distraction from the real politics of the dismantling of the post-war consensus on the welfare state and public services, which are far more important. However, if we have to do this, let us do it right.

There are three lies that are being spread by the No Campaign about AV

1. That we no longer have ‘one person, one vote’
2. That it will mean that a ‘loser’ will win and a ‘winner’ will lose
3. That it will cost a huge amount of money

Under AV everyone still has one and only one vote. The difference is that an FPTP vote can be wasted by voting for a candidate who does not stand a chance. With AV, instead of the vote being wasted, it is transferred to the next preference as ranked on the ballot paper. This does not mean you get two or more votes. It is still one vote, but it can now be recycled if the first preference polls badly. With FPTP the problem of wasted votes encourages voters to vote tactically rather than expressing their true preference. For example, many more people would probably vote for the Green Party, but they do not vote for them because they reckon that to do so would be a wasted vote. Thus, the Green Party’s electoral support is probably far lower than the true preference of voters.

Transgender and the church

Christina Beardsley

This week has been declared Transgender Faith Action Week by the Interfaith Coalition for Transgender Equality, a fact to which I was drawn by Becky Garrison‘s article for Cif Belief. This comes after the wonderful 4thought.tv (which airs short personal statements on controversial subjects after the evening news on Channel 4) spent a week discussing “Is it wrong to change gender?“

The week began with a video by Christina Beardsley, a Church of England priest, hospital chaplain and vice-chair of Changing Attitude. Beardsley transitioned a decade ago, after 23 years of ordained ministry, and gave a succinct and compelling 105 seconds on the church and transgender. After introducing herself, she loses no time in making the point: “There is no theological objection to someone changing gender”. No ifs, no buts, no cautious relative clauses, and it is a quote she takes from George Carey, former Archbishop of Canterbury, and one who in no way could be labelled as a liberal. If that were not shocking enough for many people ­Christian and non-Christian alike — she continues by lauding the Bible for being transgender friendly. I really enjoyed seeing her hard-hitting approach, made all the more necessary due to the inherent prejudice against transgender, despite strong theological arguments to the contrary.

I marched, but the media reported wrongly

I joined the March for the Alternative on Saturday 26 March with around half-a-million others. It was an exciting day, and good to see people of all ages, including little children, and all backgrounds dancing and chanting along the Embankment and en route to Hyde Park. I got back to see BBC News coverage of the event, and was angry, albeit not that surprised, to see a very skewed view of what went on.  I have had around two-dozen friends say that they wished they had gone on the march, but were concerned about this or that. I have to say that this march was ultra-safe, and the babies and toddlers only cried when they saw Cameron or Clegg’s face on placards! If you stayed home and only know about the march from media reports, let me tell you something you have not yet heard: it was a great day out for all the family.

The main contingent of the march were the unions. There were lots of Unison, Unite and GMB banners there. There were firefighters marching in pristine uniforms. Teachers were marching, as were students. A huge Postman Pat was leading groups of posties. Plenty of Labour Party branches were there with banners, as were a few Green Party branches and the assorted other parties of the Left. Campaign groups were out, like Stop the War and UK Uncut. Many spent hours on coaches from Scotland and Northern England to get there. A group of carers for the elderly marched with placards, each bearing a photo of an older person and their message of support for the march — an old woman grasping her zimmer frame: “I would march if I could”. It took two hours for those at the back of the march to reach the starting point on the Embankment from which the front moved off. If each of us who marched has a handful of friends who stayed at home yet support us, the march represents many millions of Britons who refuse to accept the government’s rhetoric on necessary cuts. This is no minority, this is mainstream.

Census awkwardness

Domesday Book

Census day is almost upon us. Filling in the census form is not that difficult, and, seeing as it is used to direct government policy and funds, it is fairly important. Genealogists love those old censuses, like trainspotters anoraking for the Flying Scotsman, but as a statistical exercise the census is deeply flawed. Governments need information on their citizenry to function well, and we have been subjected to them since Mary and Joseph travelled to Bethlehem, and Will Conker got his hands on our Domesday Book. Fears about invasion of privacy, Big Brother and the database state are almost certainly overstated; of all the information held about citizens the census is probably the most secure and the most difficult to misuse. However, I am concerned that huge US arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin have been given the contract to process the census forms. We have been given assurances that the data will be safe, and I believe them (after all, I do not think the CIA would find our census returns that interesting, as they can already locate and profile each of us in a dozen different way).

So, what is to be done? I do not recommend doing anything illegal with census forms. Not returning the form, failing to answer a question (except an optional question like the religion one) or supplying incorrect information can land us with a £1000 fine. However, I do object to Lockheed Martin getting public funds for census work. Their plan is to process your census form in a few seconds flat, using computers that scan the pages, rip the information and add it to the database all at once. My suggestion is that we make them work for their money. After all, if I make a few innocent mistakes on my form and turn their few seconds into ten minutes of entering data by hand, that’s less profit going to the arms dealer, and more to the minimum-waged workers at the processing centre. If enough of us are awkward enough, the casual workers at the centres will get more work and pay, and Lockheed Martin will make less profit. After a bit of searching I found some nice tips on how to be census awkward — short version / long version. Here is a very short guide of how best to fill in the census form:

1. The bar codes help Lockheed Martin process the form really quickly, to slow them down a bit
   1. It is always fun to fill in some of the white spaces in the bar codes on most of the pages.
   2. It is very easy to loose the envelope and then have to fold the form twice to fit another envelope and write the Freepost address on it. This might prevent the initial registering of the form as sent (so someone might call round and ask if you have sent it) and make it difficult to feed the crumpled pages into the machine.
2. The machine uses optical character recognition to rip the information of the form. It is far too easy to write in joined-up or go outside of the boxes, which means the machine cannot read the form.
3. A few mistakes and crossings out, especially with those tick boxes, is inevitable, and just makes it more difficult to figure out.

Remember to be nice to the poor people at the processing centres (write ‘sorry’ when you make mistakes), and remember not to miss a question out (unless you supply the missed information by letter later, which will really slow them down) or supply incorrect information. Stay legal, and reallocate our tax money away from a cluster-bomb multinational to the people so desperate they signed up for casual work in their processing centres.

The case against bombing Libya (via jonesblog)

Owen Jones has written this well thought-out piece about Western military intervention in Libya. Whereas I criticized those who suggested that nothing should be done, the gung-ho readiness for jetting off to Libya while totally ignoring violent repression of peaceful protesters in Arabia and the Gulf is problematic.

The Arab Spring has given way to a cold snap: Tiananmen Square-style massacres of protesters in Yemen, the Saudi invasion of Bahrain and full-blown Western intervention in Libya. It was never going to be easy. The Middle East is the most strategically important region on Earth, and also boasts the biggest concentration of brutal dictatorships: no coincidence, of course. With United Nations approval, Western bombs are now raining down on Libya. Th … Read More

via jonesblog

Related Articles

• Arguments against bombing Libya (liberalconspiracy.org)
• “Arabs wonder: “Why Libya and why not Bahrain, Yemen, Tunisia or Egypt? “” and related posts (friday-lunch-club.blogspot.com)
• Interventionists Struggle to Reconcile Libyan Action with Repression Across Arab World (news.firedoglake.com)
• Why is US backing force in Libya but not Bahrain, Yemen? (worldtruthtoday.com)
• Why MPs must say yes on Libya | Douglas Alexander (guardian.co.uk)

Bright sadness: thoughts for Ash Wednesday

Those who know me know that I take fasting pretty seriously. That does not mean that I am a master of the fast; I get grumpy, get tempted when I fast; I am weak, ill-disciplined and self-centred. However, I am serious about fasting because I am slowly coming to understand that fasting helps me to understand those most deplorable qualities in me. It certainly is not pretty, but does give invaluable insight. It is a pain, but full of gain.

You see, the date of Easter is in the diary, it will come and there will be hallelujahs (that word was typed before Shrove midnight!) aplenty, but it can mean very little if we simply let it fall upon us. A few years ago I walked to the summit of Mount Snowdon. It was a great climb, but I was put out to see people arriving at the summit by train from Llanberis. They had not put in the time and effort, but just bought the ticket. However, I overheard their loud complaining about the weather or the less than perfect view, and I understood that my investment gave the greater enjoyment of the beauty and magnificence of that little bit of creation. We often arrive at Easter like those who roll off the train, and we might get something from the experience, but it is definitely worth arriving the hard way, for the hard way is the way of beauty.

The classic move of giving up chocolate is simply useless. I mean, what is the point or significance of that? Fasting need not be extreme (and should not be if you have health problems), but it should make some significant impact on our lives. This webpage offers some suggestions and advice on fasting. Remember that we can have Sundays off from fasting, and that is why there are 46 days from Ash Wednesday to Easter. As the average British person consumes so much more than the global average, and not just in terms of food, fasting can have a social-justice focus too.

International Women’s Day

Why are films so sexist?

Image via Wikipedia

Why are films so sexist? I do not have the answer, but they are. In spite of grumpy government ruminations that film studies is a ‘soft’ subject, the medium is a vital expression of our cultural values. Films are mesmerising propaganda tools too. The recent The King’s Speech (which I have not seen, and thus am not reviewing) makes use of the ‘personal triumph against adversity’ genre, which any filmgoer will know, and molds it around one of the richest and most powerful men of his time (he liked people to call him Emperor of India) overcoming a speech impediment. Thus, we have a film in which we hoi poloi and made to root for power and establishment, despite the fact that when applied to life it is against our best interests.

There are many who blithely will tell anyone who cares listen that feminism is no longer necessary as we have sexual equality. Such people will cite all sorts of anecdotes to say it is so, but refuse to listen to the evidence that every sphere of power and money in the UK is dominated by men, be it government, banking, board rooms, chief police officers. And film operates as an amplifying feed-back loop on our society: film reflects our values, intensifies them and dictates them back to us. That is why film studies are necessary, and how they gratuitously exacerbate inequality.

A few days ago, my friend Hannah introduced me to the Bechdel Test. It seems that everyone else knew about this but me. The Bechdel Test was created by Alison Bechdel in her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For to demonstrate the overwhelming sexism of film medium. It is a very simple set of three criteria that any film should be able to pass easily, but almost all fail. The criteria are that a film must contain at least one scene in which

1. There must be at least two women (usually interpreted to mean two named women characters)
2. They must talk to each other
3. They must talk about something other than men

Spit, more spit and streaking

In the last article, I discussed the strange swearword ‘raca’ that turned up, or got edited out of, last Sunday’s Gospel from Matthew. In this morning’s Mass, the Daily Eucharistic Lectionary gave us Mark 8.22-26 for our Gospel. There’s not really much of a link between the two, apart from the spit.

Today’s Gospel is the pericope of Jesus‘ healing of a blind man by putting his spit in his eyes. The healing takes two goes — first, the man sees people but they look like trees walking around. Characteristically for Mark’s Gospel, Jesus tells him not to tell. The spit, the walking trees and the messianic secret all add up to make a rather odd incident.

The oddness of this incident is one of the pieces of evidence that Mark’s is the earliest gospel. The three synoptic gospels — Matthew, Mark and Luke — share a lot of passages in common, some even verbatim, and often order this material in a similar way. Mark, being the shortest gospel, has parallel texts of almost every passage in either or both Matthew and Luke, so it seems that Matthew and Luke are based on Mark. Markan priority — the hypothesis that Mark’s Gospel was written first — is strengthened by the few scraps of Mark that do not appear in the other two. One of them is the spit-and-trees pericope above.