Article

Culture

Politics

Re-enchanting

21 March 2024

6 min read

Re-enchanting councils - and glum councillors

Local government could be a place of humanity and beauty more than lifeless language and procedures.

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

A marbles staircase rises on four sides of a chamber.

Glasgow City Chambers' staircase.

Michael D Beckwith, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

At the local level in politics, I have found there is a stereotype that persists more than that of the corrupt politician. It is the glum councillor, the pothole poser, or sometimes the councillor looking glum while pointing at potholes. These are the photos that turn up on election leaflets, and in local news, and there are lots of them here in Devon because potholes are numerous and huge.

When I was a district councillor, I tried to push back against this image – I would smile, avoid photos with potholes, share the good stuff found in the community alongside working to improve what wasn’t working. But, looking around the council chamber, it was hard to deny. Sometimes the glumness would slip into sleep; I’ve seen councillors prodded awake ahead of important votes that impact tens of thousands of people. That is not just glum councillor, that is irresponsible, disengaged councillor.

And though the responsibility lies with them, this never surprised me. In my four-year term, I too felt a disillusionment creep in. And I am perennially hopeful; my default is to see possibility. But four years in a context of budget cut after budget cut, endless bureaucracy, lifeless language, and an aversion to trying things differently, even I started to slump in my seat. I never fell asleep, but sometimes my soul did.

Author-farmer Wendell Berry – who speaks with much affection and wisdom about the importance and strength of local community – said that

“unlike the local community, the government and the economy cannot be served with affection, but only with professional zeal or professional boredom.”

I have seen that professional boredom in the language, in the sterile council chamber bare of life, where processes and procedures rule more than humanity; where passionate members of the public would attend meetings only to be told they couldn’t input because they hadn’t pre-registered; where a meeting that finished before the allocated time was seen as successful, regardless of content. I’m sure it should feel more hopeful, more vision-led, more life-giving to be involved in local decision-making – it should be about placemaking more than simply ticking boxes and balancing budgets.

There are, of course, councillors who care deeply, and there are councils where local decision-making is being reclaimed by to serve the local community, economy, identity – like the independent councillors elected onto the town council in Buckfastleigh in South Devon who made it more plain-speaking, more accessible and more engaged; and the Flatpack Democracy movement started in Frome Town Council that has sparked similar local ‘revolutions’. But I think there is something else needed, if local government is to replace lifelessness with hope and vision. Something more upstream of the how.

When the spirit of the age feels like cynicism more than delight, more than beauty, more than possibility, it impacts our relationships and the places that should thrive on good relationships like local government.

In his essay The Joys of Storytelling, Ben Okri says, “In a fractured age, when cynicism is god, here is a possible heresy: we live by stories, we also live in them...if we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives.” I would often imagine a story of local government that makes space for enchantment. Former monk Thomas Moore speaks of reenchanting as a reawakening to the depth of soul that embraces us and the world. Councils, like lots of spaces, feel disenchanted. Perhaps much of our current disenchantment is symptomatic of our alienation from ourselves, from each other, and from our shared humanity – and from the belief that this shared state of being is strong enough to take the weight of our world, even as heavy as it feels now. When the spirit of the age feels like cynicism more than delight, more than beauty, more than possibility, it impacts our relationships and the places that should thrive on good relationships like local government. Everything dulls; we disconnect from our spirit-breathed humanity, we forget that we were pulled from the soil by a gardener God who made us to be with each other, surrounded by beauty and life.

In the book Faith, Hope and Carnage, the musician and writer Nick Cave says that the “luminous and shocking beauty of the everyday is something I try to remain alert to, if only as an antidote to the chronic cynicism and disenchantment that seems to surround everything, these days. It tells me that, despite how debased or corrupt we are told humanity is and how degraded the world has become, it just keeps on being beautiful. It can’t help it.”

Cave’s words echo Dostoevsky who wrote in The Idiot that ‘the world will be saved by beauty’, which in turn, echoes earlier sentiments from the likes of Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas who taught that God is truth, goodness and beauty. In the Bible, Jesus pointed again and again to these things too – in people, in creation, in God. They feel like good things to point the way now; more timeless and apolitical than any current ‘vision’ in government, more tangible than a distant government, more life-giving than purely balancing budgets as a goal. Of course, local government also needs better and more reliable funding, more efficient processes, passionate people, and lots more – but I think these things are more likely to come, in part, from a re-enchanted local government that draws on the “luminous and shocking beauty” of the everyday, and of local people and places. To start to make space for that re-enchantment, government could experiment with three things (which, more than funding, need people willing to try, to think beyond business-as-usual, to take existing resources and think about how they can be used even slightly differently).

It may not need to overcome death, but local government could embrace local people, their humanity, their aliveness.

First, it could move away from language that is detached from emotion and care and life. The word ‘enchant’ has its root in words – cantare means ‘to sing’ – Councils could aspire to make language beautiful more than bureaucratic, clear instead of obscure. It could invite local people into decision-making using life-giving and locally meaningful words and ideas, rather than excluding them with jargon and lifeless language. For this, we’d need the help of local storytellers, poets, writers, speakers – people who can wake us up with the power of words.

Second, local government could bring that “luminous beauty” into the space, rather than sealing conversations and processes away in characterless buildings. Meetings I’d go to were usually in bland rooms, with beige walls, nylon grey carpets, lukewarm coffee. Letting even some of the beauty of this world in – perhaps with colour, architecture, art; perhaps with stories and creativity and food; perhaps with some meetings outdoors in the beauty of the world – would, I think, breathe life into the space, and into relationships, and so into what becomes possible.

Lastly, re-enchanting local government must include re-humanising it, because humanity at its best is relationship and soul and care; it contains the same possibility that was present in Eden when all this was dreamed up. If, as Christians believe, humanity is made in God’s image, then God is endlessly creative; God is about the detail of our lives as well as world-shaking stories; God is about life – life that is so alive it overcomes death. It may not need to overcome death, but local government could embrace local people, their humanity, their aliveness; it could ask them to show up as themselves, with all their strengths and weaknesses, their ideas and hopes and fears, rather than shut them out because they cannot bend to inflexible meetings and procedures and language. It would not shy away from these things; it would use them to create new life and thriving places.

Re-enchanting local government could, I think, bring us closer to beauty, to the goodness of each other, to the truth of people and places. From there, I think it becomes possible to restore relationships, to imagine what government might be at its best, and to view it as a place-based way of knowing and actually serving people. I think it becomes easier from there to look downstream – to re-think processes, the voting system, and the rules of ‘business as usual’ – and perhaps even to fix potholes and the glumness that goes with them.

Article

Art

Culture

Trauma

War & peace

23 June 2025

5 min read

Forgotten soldiers and new narratives are shaping how we mark our wars

Writing our history of conflict is as much a war of images as of words.

Susan Gray

Susan is a writer specialising in visual arts and contributes to Art Quarterly, The Tablet, Church Times and Discover Britain.

An actor reads a speech at a commemoration

Timothy Spall recites Churchill.

Sky News.

Heading into an intense summer of World War Two remembrance, with May’s commemoration of the 80th anniversary of VE Day followed by marking the end of war in the Far East in August, it is remarkable how well the essentially Edwardian model of honouring the war dead has stood the test of time.

In The Edwardians Age of Elegance exhibition, at the King Gallery’s, a room is devoted to the passing of the extravagant turn-of-the-century era into the sombre age of war memorialisation, following World War One. George V commissioned traditional English artist Frank O Sullivan to paint the inaugural service for the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey. The long canvas, with a domed frame at the centre to accommodate Edwin Lutyens’ freshly unveiled, lofty Cenotaph, captures the solitary King walking behind a flag draped coffin, mounted on a gun garage, as the parade passes the war memorial. Initially a temporary wood and plaster structure, Lutyens’ Portland stone monument commemorated over a million soldiers lost in the Great War, some buried near the battlefields near where they fell, and nameless others whose remains had been obliterated by mechanised warfare.

Attended by widows, ex-servicemen and armed forces personnel, the 1920 Armistice Day ceremony marked a shift away from solely glorifying commanders and officers, placing the sacrifice of ordinary combatants centre stage. The monarch symbolised his gratitude to his people, rather the other way around.

Ceremonial Great War gun carriages featured in the London VE Day parade on 5th May. And the King’s Troop, Royal Horse Artillery provides gun carriages and teams of six black horses for state funerals. Following World War Two, and complete mechanisation of artillery, George VI instituted a troop of horse artillery for ceremonial occasions, enshrining the continuation of practices from a previous era’s warfare.

Layering memorialisation upon memorialisation was also evident in the 5th May ceremonies when actor Timothy Spall read an extract of Churchill’s Whitehall speech, given to the crowds when European hostilities ended.

“In the long years to come, not only will the people of this isle, but of the world wherever the bird of freedom chirps in human hearts, will look back on what we have done and they will say do not despair, do not yield to violence and tyranny, march straight forward and if needs be, die unconquered.”

Narratives around the present and recent past are codified with a focus on forecasting how future generations will view events when looking back.

While Europe celebrated in early May 1945, the one million troops of the Fourteenth Army continued fighting the Japanese Army through Burma and the Pacific. Dubbed the Forgotten Army and the Forgotten War, their campaigns were underplayed in the Allies’ wartime narrative. Singapore’s fall to Japanese forces in February 1942 was seen as a shameful defeat. Remoteness from London of the Far East campaign, and the vastness of the theatre of war, made it near impossible to report on by radio and print journalists. Letters to and from the Fourteenth Army took months to reach their destinations. Soldiers and civilians held as prisoners of war by Japanese forces were forbidden to make images or create records of their captivity, making contemporaneous images of their incarceration rare. But drawings of camps and hospitals by Jack Chalker hidden in hollowed out bamboo sticks, acted as preparatory works the artist to later make paintings such as his painting Medical Inspection, Chungkai Hospital Camp 1943, created in 1946, and now held by the Royal Army Museum.

As traditions of commemorating the war dead evolve, new grey areas come to light, demanding space in the official narrative

Contrasting the paucity of images of the war in the Far East, with the array of works depicting the Blitz in London - created with American audiences in mind, in the hope of winning support for the Allied cause - together with photographic images of North African and Middle East operations, it is little wonder the Forgotten War struggles to be remembered. Veterans of the Far East campaign and POWs were far more likely to join ex services organisations such as the British Legion and Burma Star, than those who served in Europe. Marginalised from victory and peacetimes narratives, the Forgotten Army chose to remember together.

Before Victory over Japan’s 80th anniversary is commemorated on 15 August, with the famous cover photo of an American sailor dramatically embracing a woman in a white dress showing on repeat, the 80 years since the dropping of atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki will have to be faced. Mainly civilians died as a result of impact and sickness from the bombing of Hiroshima on 6 August and Nagasaki on 9 August, with estimates of between150,000 -246,000 deaths. Whether the only use of nuclear weapons in warfare was justified, as it prevented loss of life from not having to wage a military campaign to occupy mainland Japan, or the horrific sacrifice of so many civilians was a war crime, remains a morally grey area.

As traditions of commemorating the war dead evolve, new grey areas come to light, demanding space in the official narrative. Actress Sheila Hancock wrote recently about the trauma and fear of being an evacuee, sent away from her London family as a small child, to an emotionally neglectful home in the ‘safer’ countryside. Forced adoption of children born to lone mothers, and the stigmatising treatment expectant women received at the hands of Christian denomination- ran mother and baby homes, is a wartime and postwar story now demanding to be heard.

Lesser documented stories of marginalised civilians, and combatants in faraway places take time to emerge, fighting to be heard above familiar images of plucky cockneys in bombed out buildings and amorously celebratory sailors. Shaping a multifaceted history of conflict is as much a war of images as of words. And as families become more transnational, the search for a shared narrative can replace clinging to the right or official story.

The idea of army chaplain, the Reverend David Railton, to commemorate an Unknown Warrior with honour, still resonates over a century later. Railton’s battlefield altar cloth, known as the Padre’s or Ypres Flag, covered the coffin on its journey from Boulogne to Westminster Abbey.

Stretching and fraying to include the stories of groups previously overlooked, the Edwardian fabric of military remembrance is proving remarkably strong.

The Edwardians: Age of Elegance, the King’s Gallery, until 23 November.

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