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

Character

Comment

2 May 2024

4 min read

How to react in an era of social media outrage

Media executions and the quality of mercy.

George Pitcher

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

A man in a suit stands on a gallery above a cavernous space in which are rows of desk

Huw Edwards stands above the BBC news room.

BBC.

The story of Huw Edwards presents challenges to anyone who wonders how to respond appropriately. The news anchor is back, on the news agenda rather than presenting it, having resigned from the BBC on “medical advice”. In news terms, it seems a long time ago – nearly a year – when stories emerged that he had paid a teenager for what are blushingly called “explicit images”.

His departure, rather belatedly said to have been inevitable, follows disclosures that he has continued to draw a very handsome BBC salary during his suspension from duty – and one that the corporation would rather not still be paying when it publishes its annual review of figures shortly.

The difficulties come when, putting aside prurience and distaste, one scrutinises why exactly the life and career of Edwards have been ruined. The police wasted little time last year in concluding that there was no evidence that a criminal offence had been committed. All that is left is a salacious whiff and the knowledge that Edwards has suffered a depressive breakdown of some sort

But that’s more than enough to make a major story in the era of peak social-media faux outrage. Think Philip Schofield, life ruined by stupidly lying about a fling with a much younger colleague (of consenting age). Think Caroline Flack, a reality actor with demonstrable mental health issues, hounded to her suicide. Think even the internet-sleuthing landslide that threatens to cover and suffocate comic Richard Gadd’s “true story” Netflix movie, Baby Reindeer.

While forgiveness liberates the forgiver (rather than necessarily the one being forgiven), Christians need to be wary of using forgiveness as a get-out-of-jail-free card.

So how to respond to the Edwards resignation? The question supposes that we must indeed respond and that might contain the principal point. A senior news anchor with the BBC is a public figure. As such, he (or she) needs to be trusted by the public. Consequently, Edwards is called to a higher standard of behaviour than that of his invisible viewers.

Serious people in serious jobs need to be taken seriously. And anyone caught with their pants down, literally or figuratively, cannot look serious.

Yet that still doesn’t supply us with a response (beyond “don’t be an idiot”). Actually, it rather complicates matters. It’s easier if a crime has been committed, because we can take refuge in justice, reparation for the victim and punishment for the perpetrator. None of this seems to be available in Edwards’ case.

Some will reach for forgiveness under these circumstances. But that’s insufficient, since for most of us Edwards has done nothing more than read the news off an autocue and speak for the nation during royal events.

We risk disempowering a real victim if we forgive on their behalf, so it’s inadequate to talk only of forgiveness in this circumstance. While forgiveness liberates the forgiver (rather than necessarily the one being forgiven), Christians need to be wary of using forgiveness as a get-out-of-jail-free card.

By contrast, “the quality of mercy is not strained” in this way through our mortal experience. It’s universal and unqualified.

In any event, forgiveness is a quality of compassion, the latter being the virtue to which we might most usefully aspire in response to the circumstances in which Edwards suffers. The root meaning of compassion is “to suffer with”, as in to share and, in doing so, profoundly to understand the suffering of another. In popular parlance, it might be to walk a mile in their boots.

To view the media execution of Edwards with compassion is to walk a mile in his boots and to accept, with humility, that we can be as fallible as him. Vitally, this is to show mercy rather than pity. The latter is filtered through human experience – Pieta is a Renaissance artistic meme, which invariably shows the Virgin Mary’s essential humanity at the deposition of her son from the cross.

By contrast, “the quality of mercy is not strained” in this way through our mortal experience. It’s universal and unqualified. Shakespeare’s famous line is given to Portia in The Merchant of Venice. One of the things it tells us is that to pity is human, but to be merciful is divine.

It’s from theological, cardinal virtues that mercy flows. But it’s born of compassion, which has its Christological source in the suffering (or Passion) of Christ, in which the human condition – sin, frailty, pain, death – is shared with the divine.

That’s a worldview that holds Huw Edwards in its gaze. It’s a wholly loving gaze that seeks to share his despair and failure, which is the ultimate act of compassion. Edith Cavell, the nurse who was shot as a spy in Flanders in the First Word War, came very close to it when she said before her execution: “Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.”

Edwards doesn’t (literally) face a firing squad, so direct comparison is invidious. But our response might still be a compassionate one. We may not be able to walk a mile in his boots. But we can try.