What really happens when the Grand National comes to town?

Enjoy those great experiences but remember the neighbours.

Stuart Haynes

Stuart is communications director for the Diocese of Liverpool.

Smartly dressed people crowd a station platform and stairs.

Racegoers arrive at Aintree station.

Merseyrail.

I love watching the periphery of events. Frequently I will be at a gig and find my eye and mind drifting to what is going on at the fringes of the stage. Security distributing water to the thirsty souls of the mosh pit whilst removing the crowd surfer of crushed individual (who invariably rushes back through the stadium to dive back into the fun). You have the semi interested standing at the back trying not to let a good gig interrupt their conversation. You see the road crew retrieving dropped mics, endlessly swapping guitars and nervously following the antics of the lead performers. It is all part of a community drawn together for a couple of hours, from the passionate obsessive to the mildly involved all being sucked into the occasion.

And for over 30 years I have watched the very fringe of the world famous Grand National event. My wife has taught at a school about half a mile from the famous racecourse so twice daily we pass it by to and from her workplace. I have been to corporate events, our diocese has even held some there, in the stands so have overlooked the course but I have never nor will I ever attend the race meeting.

But I am fascinated to look in and see the build-up.

It starts around February as you start to see the white hospitality marquees being erected. You get the big advertising wraps proudly displaying the meeting’s sponsor. Then this week the TV outside broadcast vans turn up, signs directing people to the correct car parks and drop off points appear and the sense of the scale of operations looms large.

Then there are the signs that someone like me trying to go about the ordinary business of the week don’t want to see. Road closures, no parking zones, diversions all being signposted telling me that this week will be challenging. Gone are the days then I was able to easily move house on Grand National day snaking past the ground while the horses hurtled round the course.

Travelling in early on race day mornings you see the workforce that comes in to support the enjoyment of the many on race day. A small army of mostly young people dressed in the white and black of waiting staff decamp from the early Merseyrail trains heading to set up in readiness for the day’s punters.

That’s the bit I mostly miss but it is when the community kicks in. Hordes of people in cars, coaches and trains descend on the area and while most are fine I know from friends living in the area that problems of low level anti-social behaviour affect many local residents when high jinks and too much alcohol spill over to a lack of self-control. And potentially a lack of respect with the notion that my enjoyment trumps anyone else’s rights.

To be fair I see this type of things coming out of a gig. The moment the house lights go on the crowd that had not minutes before been singing as one voice to the bands biggest hit become engaged in the understandable desire to get home, to get the car out of the car park. As we boisterously leave the venue hyped up by the adrenalin rush you get from a good gig the signs plea to respect the venue’s neighbours is readily dismissed or overlooked. Of course, that sign doesn’t apply to me.

Behaviour specialists will have no doubt studied the way this works in more detail and there is some research on how crowds behave which I believe informs safety management. This has got to be a benefit for all. And this may have been how things always were but around these events more and more local communities suffer from the impact of thousands suddenly descending and rapidly disappearing. It is similar to the impetus that has led to a backlash against tourists in cities such as Venice and Barcelona. Yes, these events do bring money into the economy, Taylor Swift’s Anfield concerts brought a great amount of revenue for Liverpool. However, a question would have to be how much that benefits the communities that take the brunt.

The Grand National is big but not unique. And I hope the hundreds of thousands who visit have a tremendous experience but as they do I also hope that they respect the community that they become and the community they land in.

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Column

Comment

General Election 24

Politics

7 June 2024

4 min read

Who’s right when hurling charges of hypocrisy?

Accusations highlight the risk of self-deception.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A newspaper headline, text and an image of the subject of the article.

Ashcroft's charge against Raynor.

David Yelland, X.

Lord Ashcroft launched an extraordinary new attack on Labour’s deputy leader, Angela Rayner, in the Mail on Sunday at the start of this week, claiming that his investigation into where she lived, allegedly for tax purposes, was never about money.

“Hypocrisy was always the charge against Angela Rayner,” he intoned, “not tax avoidance… And the stain will dog her for years to come.”

Leaving aside whether stains dog people or the other way around, this is extraordinary not because Ashcroft attacks a senior Labour figure – day follows night, etc – but because it’s the sort of volte face that journalists call a reverse ferret.

Had Rayner been found by investigating police officers to have committed a tax-fraud or electoral offence (and, to be clear, they didn’t), we need to ask ourselves whether Ashcroft would have run with the same line.

Imagine: “Angela Rayner has committed a crime, but this is really about hypocrisy.” Do you think he’d have gone with that? Neither do I.

Usually, charges of hypocrisy are levelled at politicians who use social privileges to which they’re opposed in principle.

Hypocrisy is invariably the charge when there’s nothing else to go with. And that must raise questions about what hypocrisy really is.

It’s clearly not just about telling lies. In the first televised debate this week between Rishi Sunak and his rival for premiership, Keir Starmer, the former repeatedly (12 times) claimed that Treasury officials had independently calculated that the latter’s spending plans would add £2,000 to the tax bill of every family in the UK. A published letter subsequently showed that the Treasury had specifically told the Government that this figure was bogus and not to be used.

Was this hypocritical? No, it was just plain wrong – in the sense of both inaccurate and immoral. The opportunity for hypocrisy came when both leaders were asked whether they would use private healthcare for a family member in need. Sunak said he would; Starmer said he wouldn’t. If Starmer now ever uses private health facilities, Mr Hypocrisy will be ringing his door bell.

From this, we deduce that hypocrisy is pretending to be what you’re not. So Donald Trump poses as a great statesman, the saviour of his nation, but goes down for all 34 felony charges of falsifying accounts to hide his pay-off of former porn actor Stormy Daniels, in order to protect his electoral prospects. That’s hypocrisy, precisely because he’s pretending to be someone he isn’t.

That hypocrisy is exacerbated when Trump holds up a Bible to support his authority – or, indeed, publishes his own. Likewise, when a rich TV evangelist is convicted of sexual abuse (there are, tragically, too many examples to choose from).

By contrast, is Rayner pretending to be something she isn’t because her family has used two properties? Very probably not. Similarly, we might like to ask whether SNP deputy leader Kate Forbes is a hypocritical politician because she’s a Christian, or a hypocritical Christian because she’s a politician. Very probably neither. Being both is who she is.

Usually, charges of hypocrisy are levelled at politicians who use social privileges to which they’re opposed in principle. Like when Labour MP Diane Abbott sent her son to a fee-paying school. Private education, like private healthcare, is only meant to be available to those who support it ideologically, rather than just financially. Otherwise, it’s hypocrisy.

The problem here is the presumption that the private sector is only available to those who endorse it. So it’s hypocritical for socialists to use it. But that presumption moves very close to the view that working people should know their place (a social order, incidentally, that the Christian gospel defies).

There is no inconsistency – and consequently there can be no hypocrisy – in wanting the best for our own children, while concurrently wanting the best for all children. One might even call such a policy something like levelling-up, should such a thing exist.

We may not know what Angela Rayner’s shortcomings are, but simply having them doesn’t make her a hypocrite.

A biblical definition of hypocrisy might be the hiding of interior wickedness under an appearance of virtue. In Matthew’s gospel, it’s the charge levelled at Pharisees whose good deeds are entirely self-serving.

In this manner, moral theology would point to hypocrisy being the fruit of pride. But simply to hide one’s own shortcomings isn’t necessarily to be construed as hypocrisy, because there’s no moral obligation to make them public.

In that context, we may not know what Angela Rayner’s shortcomings are, but simply having them doesn’t make her a hypocrite. Otherwise, we’re all hypocrites (and there may be some truth in that).

It reduces to resisting the temptation to point to the mote of hypocrisy in our neighbour’s eye, while failing to attend to the beam in our own. That would also be to avoid self-deception. The kind of deception that pretends that one’s actions are in the public interest, when clearly they are only serving your own. Which, neatly enough, brings us back to Lord Ashcroft.