Letter from Burnley: the shifting sands of the cost of living crisis

With a worsening crisis affecting his community, Alex Frost reflects on the growing struggle and the impact on its people.

Alex Frost

Alex Frost is a vicar in Burnley, Lancashire, and an advocate for the local community.

Two older men lean agains the wall of a football club's entrance, next to thin open doorways.

Burnley football club turnstiles.

Have you ever watched one of those retrospective television programmes, that takes us back to the 1980's or 1990's? They usually include clips of Wham or Oasis or Yuppies with massive mobile phones.

I don't know about you but the label 'The cost-of-living' is one that I suspect might take its own place in one of those shows twenty or so years from now. And I do wonder if things will be better or worse than they are presently.

You might that hope which ever political government of the day is in power in 2044, the cost of living crisis and poverty will have significantly shifted from where they presently are.

In my own town, Burnley in Lancashire, the shifting sands of such matters are starkly evident, and things seem to be getting worse rather than better. The evidence of a cost of living crisis has shifted matters from financial insecurity to many other areas. For example, within the cost of living crisis sits another crisis that appears to be getting more concerning as the months go by and we drop into the harshest months of the year.

He cites places of refuge as dangerous, violent, volatile places that are not in keeping with his desire to live a quiet and normal life that befits a gentleman in his late fifties.

That crisis is one of extremely worrying mental health issues with adults and some very young children in our community. On a personal level, there is nothing more painful than taking a funeral service for a young person who has taken their own life, which happened to me in recent months. Alongside such sadnesses, there are almost daily examples of individuals, many of whom are young mothers pouring their hearts out on social media with woes of poor mental health with seemingly nowhere to turn. In my own borough the mental support provision within the NHS is at breaking point with long delays for mental health counselling and support. Thank goodness then for the voluntary sector who help me to help others on a regular basis. After the pandemic of COVID in Burnley, where a recent Joseph Rowntree Foundation poverty report suggested 38 oer cent of children in Burnley live in poverty, we are in a battle to keep our most vulnerable people mentally well and with an optimistic outlook for a brighter future.

And then there is the matter of homelessness. Who'd have thought we'd be living in a time when people are now being evicted from a tent? And what about those who lived outside for many years - what are we to do for them? There is a chap in Burnley, who by choice is living rough behind our corporation cemetery because the accommodation offered to him would place him in a hostel where addiction and violence is commonplace. The only blessing to be taken from it is that he has found a warm spot and he is relatively safe against the winter elements that are coming our way during the winter. But the saddest thing about this gentleman is that it is a preferable option to what is offered were he to use the provision available. He cites places of refuge as dangerous, violent, volatile places that are not in keeping with his desire to live a quiet and normal life that befits a gentleman in his late fifties.

Watching young mums literally gathering up the crumbs from our food provisions at church is a chastening and humiliating experience for them and those who serve them.

And as the sands shift, what about our young people? In the school where I am a governor, 58 per cent of our children are on free school meals, and many come from broken homes and difficult circumstances. What encouragement can we give them to ensure their young lives are ones of opportunity, fun and learning? What can we do to ensure the struggles of the children's parents don't bring their own development to an uncertain and worrying future? Some parents in the grip of a cost-of-living crisis lose their filter on vocabulary and so every worry, concern, disappointment and crisis is shared. Shared with little boys and girls who shouldn't be constantly subjected to a world that is always churning out negative scenarios on their innocent and immature minds.

And what about the national celebration of a food bank and community kitchens and all they do for the poor people of our parishes? Three cheers for the voluntary sector who take the strain of a failing social security system that gives food with one hand but potentially snatches self-worth with the other. Watching young mums literally gathering up the crumbs from our food provisions at church is a chastening and humiliating experience for them and those who serve them. I hate foodbanks, not because of the good they clearly do, but, because they normalise and hold up a failing social security system in our country today.

As we approach Christmas and a new year, I wonder how the shifting sand of the cost-of-living crisis might influence, our cultural horizon? Is it idealistic, romantic or downright stupid to think we might change the great and mighty to think differently in their approach to poverty? I am keen football fan, and you might be familiar with the term 'He/She talks a good game' and after many years following Burnley Football Club I have witnessed on many occasions when Managers have talked a good game but sadly failed to deliver on the field of play. And I think that is true of the majority of our politicians of all parties. They can talk a good game but often fail to impress us because the substance doesn't match the sentences.

I am convinced through many years of dealing with abject poverty, that people in difficulty respond better to compassion over criticism, understanding over instruction, reality over rhetoric. So many people in my context don't want to be in poverty. They would prefer not to struggle, and they would recognise they need help. The shifting sands of surviving should encourage society to prioritise people before pedestrianisations of town centres, and hope over HS2 railway lines. As the sands of our landscape continue to shift, it surely must be the priority of the church, the government, and for people to stop people from sinking in a swell of poverty and hardship. When it does that, perhaps the church can demonstrate to the society, its role and its mission still has much to offer in 2024 and beyond.

Review

Books

Community

Culture

15 November 2023

4 min read

Giving voice to those on the edge

A nervy, precarious read echoes the lives of outsiders across Europe. Simon Burton-Jones reviews Ben Judah’s This is Europe.

Simon Burton-Jones

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

A grandmother is embraced by two grandchildren.

Nino, from Georgia, embraces her grandchildren after their mother's death.

Ben Judah.

In The Dream of Europe, Dutch historian Geert Mak takes on the continent’s twenty-first century story.

There’s something contradictory, he says, about writing the history of an era when you’re right in the middle of it, of a world in which you’re fully involved.

His attempt to do this is built round three great socio-economic tremors: the global financial crash of 2008, the ensuing Greek debt crisis of 2009 and following years and the migrant emergency of 2015. It is a long, involved work.

Ben Judah has tried something very different in This is Europe (Picador, 2023). Adopting the style of his award-winning This is London, he tells the continent’s story via twenty-three disparate individuals. From Turks to Spaniards, Georgians to Swedes and Poles to Serbs, if there is one thing shared most in common, it’s the sense of outsiders trying to make their way from the edge of life to a place of security, even belonging.

History is having its makeover in the attention given to ordinary, prosaic, unseen lives that are lived in the shadow of bigger themes. Judah is not alone and not the first to deliver this, but it is a welcome departure from the grand sweeping narratives and ideologies by which the story of Europe has customarily been told.

He begins with a Dutch harbour pilot, Jelle, who boards and guides container ships into port. It is Europe’s consumer gateway. Jelle observes: ‘What rubbish is actually in these containers?’ It’s toys. TVs. Chairs. Tables. Bicycles. Shampoo. Only rubbish.

But the commentary on Europe’s excesses ends there and there is no logical progression in the book from seaport to city centre. Judah instead jumps from one location to another and tells each individual story in a staccato delivery that lends a sense of immediacy and urgency to their lives. It makes for a nervy, precarious read.

There is the resentful Romanian lorry driver whose account lifts the lid on the sordid risks long-distance jobs supply. The Latvian teenage girl who slips into online sex work, satisfying the fantasies of older men across the world but paying for her education along the way. The thoughtful Belarussian family that defies President Lukashenko and pays a heavy price. A young Turkish woman whose romance with an Austrian boy seems doomed to failure until the final moments. The Russian gas worker whose stint in the Arctic circle has a hint of the Gulag about it. A sex-obsessed Syrian refugee who makes it in the world of porn.

This latter case of the Arab porn star is indicative of Ben Judah’s journalistic style. The seemingly soulless promiscuity and infidelity carries no authorial judgment. Ibrahim escapes the war-ravaged Middle East, is subject to racist humiliation, has sex with anyone who is up for it and is about to be made homeless when he finds a way into an online Arab market in porn. It is part American dream and part pulp fiction set against the backdrop of conservative family Budapest. We are left wondering what to make of it, which is probably Judah’s intention.

Geert Mak speaks of Europe as a great project by free citizens who tried to take the course of history into their own hands instead of merely submitting to it; projects with their origins in the Enlightenment ideals of human rights, liberty, equality and fraternity.

Mak’s dreamy aspiration has just enough about it to attract outsiders but its values when probed are as malleable as playdoh. When pressure is applied, is it possible to say that Europe has cohesive and durable moral values, ones derived from its history? The liberal individualism drawn from the left, where identity has become more distinctive than class, is suspicious of religion that creates hard boundaries, and of objective moral values that constrain behaviour. The right, whose neo-liberal market forces have corroded the very family structures it claims to support, is wary of religion that champions diverse communities. The impact of the left and of the right in these ways is felt in the personal stories of Judah’s book. As unseen forces draw people to poles like filings to magnets, is there a way of transforming these emphases?

There is a relational view of life, perhaps buried deeply in the European Christian Democratic tradition, that values the person in community and the quality of our relationships at every level over ever-expanding GDP, that sacred cow of post-war politics. Where unity and diversity can be held in a creative partnership as we respond to the call to love others as we love ourselves. But it needs clear policy edges that rescue it from pious bromide.

In This is Europe we meet people who are deeply human and equally scarred, often by other people and the forces over which no-one seems to have control, who find their hope and meaning in the relationships they form and through which they make community. Further to the east, Belarussian author Svetlana Alexievich has spent a lifetime teasing out ordinary stories of the Soviet Union, from the veterans of Afghanistan to the victims of Chernobyl via the trauma of the nineties. Hers is a more discursive tale than Judah’s but carries the same sense of disorientation, loss and stoic hope.

Europe cannot be summed up, but Judah, in turning to its edges and listening patiently and empathetically to those who only want to make their way against the odds, inhabits the ethic of scripture in giving a voice to the voiceless. If its stripped back, breathless style carries echoes of Mark’s Gospel, the attention he gives to those in existential pain is St John’s. He calls them each by name. The moral question facing Europe is whether we really want to know their stories.