Letters - 29 April 2011
From the cuts to James Turrell
Time to face reality
It was brave of you to devote a whole page to Tom Jackson’s stern enjoinder ‘it is time to face reality’ (15 April). With a little more research on his part I’m sure Tom could have made his ‘reality’ a little more real. He might, for example, have put the UK’s current national debt and deficit in an historical and in an international context. He would have been startled and we would have been reassured at the numbers that popped up. Then again, he might have explained how cutting aggregate expenditure in an economy that is barely growing (and may even be shrinking) is the royal road to National Debt reduction.
Colin Rendall
In relation to Tom Jackson’s opinion article, the April employment statistics from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) are bleak reading for the North East as, despite a national rise in employment of 17,000, the North East has bucked the trend with unemployment rising by 11,000 in the region. The figure now stands at 10.4 per cent – the worst in the country. And it is the region’s young people who are even more disproportionately affected with over a quarter (26.6 per cent) of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds out of work. Behind the statistics are stories of personal tragedies for the young people involved. For instance, one young man in Gateshead last week, eighteen years of age, committed suicide after countless failed job attempts (Evening Chronicle 21/4/11).
Young people’s services such as the Connexions Service, which gives careers advice to the young unemployed, are being slashed and in some places closed down. As are many youth projects especially those in the voluntary sector.
Young people going to university face £27,000 worth of debt plus interest. The use of the retail price index (RPI) will be even more costly for students yet to go to university as the Education Bill currently going through Parliament includes a clause allowing ministers to charge up to commercial loan rates (RPI, plus three per cent) for future student loans. With tuition fees set to treble and the cost of student loans rising, sticking with RPI will cost students many more thousands of pounds
The support for families are being slashed. In the words of the Child Poverty Action Group: ‘It is absolutely staggering to see in the “strategy” cuts to housing benefit and support for sick and disabled families that will make poor families poorer. On top of benefit cuts, wage stagnation and rising prices for basics like food, fuel and clothes mean there is an immediate crisis for families.’
The bank bailout is responsible for most of this country’s debt. Even so, our national debt is a lower proportion of gross domestic product (GDP) today than in seventy of the last hundred years. The cuts will lead to more unemployment and associated costs. More poverty and broken lives. As Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel award-winning economist, has said: ‘Britain is embarking on a highly risky experiment. More likely than not, more data point to the well-established result that austerity in the midst of a down-turn lowers GDP and increases unemployment.’
Martin Lightfoot
I wish to express my thanks to Tom Jackson for his comments in ‘the coalition, the cuts and the costs’ (15 April). He sets out the problems we face and the facts that our present way of life is unsustainable and unrealistic.
He seems to be concerned that he is in a minority. Cheer up, Tom! When two members of the Jackson clan can agree, there is surely room for optimism.
William Jackson
Refusal or engagement?
Quaker social witness as expressed in the ‘letters page’ seems to take two forms. There is the witness of refusal – the refusal to participate in a census run by an arms company; the refusal to pay taxes for war or to buy goods from oppressive regimes. The witness of abstention and boycott is in line with our quietist tradition but can sometimes seem to be just gestures. Then there is the witness of engagement. The AV referendum on 5 May gives an opportunity to engage with the political future. I urge Friends to study ‘Alternative Vote’ against ‘First Past the Post’ and act accordingly. I will be casting my vote in favour of AV, which by leading to MPs being elected by a majority of local voters will improve democracy and be a step forward.
Mark Frankel
Boycott, divestment and sanctions
Sarah Lawson describes the boycott of [Israeli-produced] goods from the West Bank as an attempt to ‘coerce Israel into single-handedly making peace with people who have never recognised its right even to exist’. Since the Oslo accords of 1993 were based on an acceptance by the Palestinians of Israel’s possession of seventy-two per cent of pre-1948 Palestine, that ‘never’ is simply not true. What Sarah does not seem to appreciate is that the Palestinians, having given up their claim to more than the twenty-eight per cent allowed them at Oslo, find that even that twenty-eight per cent is eaten away by the encroachment of Israeli settlements.
The intractability of the Israel/Palestine conflict is the result of failure to attend to the terms of the Balfour declaration of 1917. The ‘national home for the Jewish people’ was to be established on the clear understanding that nothing should be done ‘which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’.
Soon after the publication of this declaration, a Church of Scotland minister with an intimate knowledge of Palestine, George Adam Smith, published a pamphlet entitled Syria and the Holy Land, which assesses the prospects for Palestine after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the first world war. He is sympathetic in some ways to Zionist aspirations, and considers that there is enough room in the country to absorb a fair number of Jewish immigrants. Nonetheless, he expresses anxieties that the subsequent history of the region have shown to be all too well founded. In particular, he questions whether Zionist writers have realised the economic and social disturbances that ‘the resettlement and rebirth of Palestine’ would necessarily involve.
How do Zionists propose to preserve the legal rights and secure the social health of the fellahin, or to prevent the continuation of that process of buying and crushing them out of their communal property, by which so many have been reduced to the position of serfs?
He insists that it is essential for the Zionists to remember ‘what very serious difficulties have still to be thought out’.
Sadly, the thinking was never undertaken, and the Zionist enterprise soon settled into a situation of mutual hostility. That situation will not change until, however belatedly, the Israelis heed George Adam Smith’s counsel. Israel has to be accepted as a given in the Middle East, but it is a given where there is much to be forgiven.
Geoffrey Carnall
Sad to say, the opinion article from Sarah Lawson (21 April) is very one-sided.
I shall leave aside her version of the 1940s history (a long story in itself, with the destruction of many Palestinian villages and the displacement of many Arabs) to comment on other points.
The writer is trying to ‘rubbish’ the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians. Why do they not have this right? In the 1940s, the area was called ‘Palestine’.
Why is a boycott of settlement goods linked with anti-Semitism? Cannot intelligent people tell the difference?
It is generally regarded, by international law, that an occupying power does not have the right to promote settlements on the territory they occupy. Israeli settlers grab land, steal water and uproot olive trees. The separation wall takes in much Palestinian territory and separates Palestinians from their own lands. The settlement harms Israel’s own long-term interests as it hinders the establishment of peace and justice for all parties.
If the Palestinians recognise Israel, will Israel recognise a Palestinian state? Will the occupied territories (including Jewish exclaves) be handed back, so that the new state is viable? (But I would favour one, multi-ethnic, multi-faith state.) This indeed would be a step to peace and justice.
David Harries
James Turrell and the Large Meeting House
What good news that James Turrell has agreed to contribute ideas for the redesign of the Large Meeting House (15 April)!
If there is anyone who wants to know more about James Turrell’s work and its expression of Quaker insights may we suggest they look at a copy of Go Inside to Greet the Light. This short film on DVD was made jointly with the Yorkshire Sculpture Park and shows how people experience in the Skyspace ‘a place just to “be” at a very deep level’. James Turrell speaks of his Quaker grandmother’s guidance and links are made with the theology of light and traditional Quaker architecture and testimony. The narration, drawn from the words of visitors, is spoken by Judi Dench.
The film is being used in the fundraising campaign of Chestnut Hill Meeting, Philadelphia, which hopes to build a new Meeting house to plans given by James Turrell, where people of all faiths will be invited for quiet reflection and social action (see www.chfmnewmeetinghouse.org).
Susan Robson & Helen Meads
