YOUNG PEOPLE WAKING
UP IN BRITAIN By Victoria Turner, United Reformed Church
The COVID-19 pandemic has hit the United Kingdom hard. We have been in lockdown again since Christmas, and it looks like it will stay this way for at least another month. It dawned on me, or more, hit me like a tonne of bricks, in a recent meeting with the World Communion of Reformed Churches, that the actions of the UK government do not only effect those within the UK. I was surrounded (virtually- this was on Zoom) by Christians from South America, Palestine, India, and South Africa who do not yet have access to the vaccine that the UK has in abundance. I realised that our inaction, our non-response to this pandemic, has not only harmed those within our country but has put others in a more dangerous condition. The World Health Organisation has called for there to be equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines, for the UK to give up some of its excess when we have vaccinated our most vulnerable to help the world rid itself of this virus. Considering the UK government’s recent track record of ignoring its own struggling population, the likelihood of this is extremely low. As schools are shut, children are no longer receiving free school mealssomething created so that the poorest children in our country at least have one proper meal a day. It was decided a replacement for this service should be created. The Conservative government decided that poor people could not be trusted with money so gave them vouchers. An allowance of £30 per two weeks, per child was given in voucher form. Unproved rumours then circulated that these vouchers were being traded for drugs, so they gave them food. But what transpired was not £30 worth of food. The Conservative government employed an external catering company that feeds the country’s private schools, to enact this task. It is estimated that the company spent £5 of the £30 on food per child. Families were given half a can of tuna packaged ironically in a plastic money bag. Half a pepper. The charity Unicef, for the first time in 70 years has had to step in to feed British children. We see our government and our media criminalising our poor to detract from the criminalisation of Capitalism. The logic is that it is the poor’s own fault that they are poor. Opening my Twitter today, my first three tweets showed a huge queue for a food bank in Glasgow- in the snow, two surgeons being interviewed on the BBC where only one, the male one, was called ‘Professor’, and a fashion shoot for a top designer, set in a council estate. This is the face of one of the world’s richest countries: austerity, sexism and overt corruption. This is Empire, White Nationalism, and Imperialism at its best. The British flags came out at the beginning of the pandemic in the daily government briefings and they have only got bigger. When a new strain of the virus was announced in the UK, the media largely ignored this reality and focused on closing borders to stop ‘foreigners’ coming in. A 100-year war veteran has been immortalised in journalism for raising money for the National Health Service by walking laps of his garden. The government and media, on his death, tried to organise a national wide clap for this man (clapping was also prominent at the beginning of the pandemic as a patriotic ritual for the Heath Service). Our publicly owned health service that has been victim of decades of cuts from the government, relying on charity is apparently something to celebrate. Alongside many other white people, a black, queer, young (and generally wonderful but I’m biased) Church of England chaplain spoke out against this ‘cult of white British nationalism’ on Twitter, at the same time offering prayers for the person of Sir Tom. He received hate not only from white people on Twitter, who called him racist, but also from the news and from his own Diocese who made him remove his Tweet, sign a digital charter- publicly share that he had done so, and now he is subject to an investigation. So not only is this white nationalism popular in public opinion, this propaganda is uncritically promoted by the media, and legitimised by the established church. What hit me in that meeting of the World Communion of Reformed Churches, was that this could have been avoided. The UK is an Island. Like New Zealand we could have isolated ourselves to keep everyone (us and others) safe. But our economy was more important. We could have created a working track and trace system, like South Korea, but our government paying ridiculous amounts of money to their unqualified friends seemed like a better idea. Instead of calmly dealing with COVID-19, and listening to scientists, the government tried to overlook and hide the problem as much as possible.
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INSiGHT | February 2021
