Letters - 26 January 2018
From solving poverty to 'never again'
Solving poverty
Friends concerned about the levels of poverty in the UK can welcome the news of Claire Ainsley’s appointment at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) to take forward its proposals to end poverty (19 February).
Poverty is about people lacking the resources necessary to share in ordinary and inclusive levels of living. The cause of poverty , I think, is the unequal distribution of personal and public resources by society’s structures, not poor people’s individual behaviour or deprivation.
Friends will be familiar with burning issues such as food poverty, homelessness and destitution, which are among the signs of someone’s lack of the resources that aid social inclusion and freedom of choice.
The 2016 JRF report on ‘solving poverty’ is full of ideas about to cope the consequences of such evils. Campaigning about the unequal distribution of resources that, it can be argued, cause poverty in the first place is regarded as ‘political’. The JRF, as a charity, avoids do so.
In this context, Friends can support the JRF and Claire Ainsley in finding better ways of addressing Joseph Rowntree’s original insight that ‘much of the current philanthropic effort is directed to remedying the more superficial manifestations of weakness or evil, while little thought or effort is directed to search out their underlying causes’.
John Veit-Wilson
Sharing belief
I was interested to read David Rubinstein’s account of the survey at Friargate Meeting (19 January), but must say I was saddened, rather than fascinated, by the comment of a member ‘…how little we know of the spiritual beliefs of those who sit alongside us’.
In view of our, laudable, lack of creeds or set beliefs, it would seem particularly important that we share the beliefs we hold individually with each other, in ministry, special meetings and conversation, not only for their intrinsic interest but, also, because they might be helpful to others on their spiritual journeys.
Martin Hartog
‘Quakerspeak’
I’m puzzled by Roland Carn’s article ‘Thee and thou’ (3 November). I have always been wary of the seemingly automatic conjunction of those two words when describing not Quaker speech of the seventeenth century but in our own times. This form of speech derived from Yorkshire dialect ‘tha has’, which would in the seventeenth century have translated into ‘Thou hast’, but in more recent times into “thee has”. This was the usage around fifty years ago among people in the US who still spoke ‘Quakerspeak’.
I spent ten years in a Quaker school in Pennsylvania, where what was regarded as original Quakerspeak was still spoken among close friends and family members. But ‘thou’ was never, ever used. It was always ‘thee has’, never ‘thou hast’, or even ‘thou’ or ‘tha” has.
When in the 1960s I visited a Quaker community in Ohio where some people also used this form of speech, it was at that time also ‘thee has’, not ‘thou hast’.
Roland cites similar people today saying ‘Will thou come this way.’ This suggests that Quakerspeak in Ohio has undergone alteration in the past forty-five years: ‘thou’ was never heard in the 1960s and it would have been ‘Will thee come’.
Whether or not George Fox would have said ‘thou hast’ is a different matter. His accent would probably have been that of Leicestershire rather than Yorkshire. Was he influenced by Yorkshire dialect?
Arthur Kincaid
Never again
Richard Drake (24 November) claims that peace witness is possible at all times. It is likewise, in my view, the case that the Royal British Legion could perform its charitable work without its current ceremonies of remembrance. Wearers of white poppies seek to complement these ceremonies with the aim of ensuring that folks’ ‘tryst of love with them that sleep’ is not impaired by dishonourable omission of the original and vital vow ‘Never again’.
Frank McManus
