A thought on the election: the power of 3 words

Quite a few years ago, I went to a training session on communication for churches. In one section, they discussed mission statements. All too often church mission statements on noticeboards are lengthy paragraphs of how the church will worship more faithfully, care more lovingly, serve the community and several more laudable and Christian aims.

The problem with that, according to our speaker is that few remember or even read them to the end. They may be a useful reference document for a church council, but they won't galvanise a vision. What was needed was something more concise, and the examples he gave were perestroika and rainbow nation. In the Soviet Union as it crumbled, and in South Africa emerging from apartheid, very simple phrases or even a single word captured the aspirations of a nation and even entered the language of other countries. Looking back we can analyse and suggest they may not have achieved what they hoped for, but at the time they were very effective.

At the 2016 referendum, the Leave campaign coined "take back control", and in this election Boris Johnson and his cohorts kept saying "get Brexit done". Both phrases beg all kinds of questions, fail to stand up to rigorous intellectual scrutiny, and can get dismissed as empty. The point that was missed by those who mocked was that people remembered 3 words, and they meant that the focus came back again and again to the issue each campaign wanted dead centre, and kept attention away from more awkward questions or more nuanced arguments.

The remain campaign had no such equivalent phrase to counter the brexiters in 2016. In the election campaign, Labour's take on Brexit was complicated and had changed over the previous months, meaning the campaign could only come up with adding the derivative phrase "get Brexit sorted" as part of a much longer explanation.

A three-word phrase can be dismissed as a vacuous slogan, but Dominic Cummings and his team understood that the detail isn't important at impact. You can deal with that later - get the phrase in people's heads and the fewer words the better.

We probably won't have a General Election again  until 2024, but whenever it comes, don't underestimate the power of 3 words.

Brexit Tales 4: The Christian with the Tract

It would have been either 1982 or 1983 whilst I was a student. I walked past this bloke in Oxford and he pushed a leaflet into my hand - maybe he could sniff out Christians, or just spotted my bad clothes. I stuffed it into my coat pocket and thought no more about it for a couple of days, as those sorts of tracts are usually pretty awful - especially theologically and presentationally.

Some time the following week I must have been bored, as I found the leaflet in my pocket and took a look. The details are a bit hazy now, but I do remember clearly that it was very agitated about the EEC and the UN. The issue with the EEC was something to do with it having [then] 9 members states, which correlated with something about judgment or the end. Meanwhile the UN was seen as a step towards world government, which would apparently usher in all manner of evil (rather than a more peaceful world).

As is often the case with these kinds of tracts, it was all based on verses from Revelation. The approach is usually to try and find some kind of correlation between events, people or numbers in that book and see it as proof of some forthcoming significant moment. Over the years I've had a few circular letters that have long screeds of apocalyptic stuff sent to me as a vicar. This was an early encounter.

Since then it has intrigued me that a certain kind of Christianity has continued to have a hostile view of the EU in keeping with the man with the tract. I'll come back to broader-based Christian views of brexit in a future post; the opposition I'm talking about here comes from a very particular kind of spirituality which sees secular organisations not just as neutral or non-religious, but as actively hostile and even in the hands of evil. as such it can all get a bit conspiracy-theory in its most extreme forms.

Last summer I attended a course at a Christian conference centre. Another group of women from some kind of pentecostal/charismatic network were using nearby rooms, and it was a hot summer's day so the windows were open. One of our group overheard them earnestly praying that "these evil men won't thwart God's will for brexit". We concluded that dialogue in the bar later would probably not be fruitful. More recently I came across the website of another preacher of a similar theological ilk describing brexit as a miracle from God that will enable revival. I couldn't help thinking that it was all a long way from why many Anglicans voted leave (I promise I will come back to that!)

Anyway back to tract man. There was an address on the leaflet - some kind of PO Box if I remember right. So out of curiosity (and I was a Christian Union rep after all) I wrote him a reply, challenging some of the points politely, quoting the odd Bible verse and asking a few questions. The letter was returned - the address didn't exist. The EEC grew in number and became the EU with 28 members. Maybe tract man has another leaflet that can tell us what 28 (or 27) signifies.

Hang on. 27= 3 x 9. Suspicious, eh?

Brexit Tales 3: The North York Moors Railway

You probably weren't expecting that. Let me explain.

At the end of February half-term I had a day off. It was a lovely sunny day, so as trains were running, I went up to Pickering and took a journey on the North York Moors Railway all the way to Grosmont. It's a wonderful little place, complete with a picturesque station and a special Coop all of its own

As there was plenty of time, I decided to walk the Rail Trail back to Goathland and then catch the final train to Pickering from there. It's a decent length walk, but it follows the original tramway, built by George Stephenson that was replaced by the current railway. As a result it's a nice wide path, mainly flat, apart from quite a long, steady incline into Gothland itself.

Near the start of the walk, I noticed this sign

Full noticeboard

Then I spotted that the bottom of the sign had this (sorry about the quality)

The EU bit

It turns out that EU funding helped to make the Rail Trail happen. This small, fading label is the only evidence and reminder that that was the case (unless you download the linked leaflet and read the smaller print.) And all over the UK, I suspect that there are plenty of other projects and developments where we are completely unaware that EU money made it happen, as we aren't always very good at signposting it. A key part of debunking the £350 million a week on the side of the bus was the fact that a lot of EU funding flows back - including the "Thatcher rebate", payments for agriculture etc, funding research, Erasmus student scholarships, and funding for regional development.

Now at this point if any enthusiastic supporters of brexit have got this far, they might raise the fact that this funding is not completely under the control of the UK government. Let's be clear - that is true. In fact, I would suggest that is an advantage. A government of whatever political persuasion will always be susceptible to the temptation to be more generous to certain areas than others out of political concerns. Not exactly buying votes, but it helps. If the strategic allocation decision is taken further away, based on criteria agreed by all member states, then it has a much better chance of being free from party political bias.

Back in the 1980s, I was in Durham, and I remember people talking about how European funding provided significant funds for the North East as it lost its traditional industries. In the aftermath of the miners' strike and then pit closures, it meant that interest and initiative was taken, even though business parks and restoring the landscape couldn't bring back those traditional jobs. Similarly, Wales has received substantial funds. I looked it up: £3.8bn between 2007-2020 via European Structural Funds investment, helping support employment, training and research, £957m between 2014-2020 via the Rural Development Programme, supporting businesses, farmers and communities and £200m a year Common Agricultural Policy, helping 16,000 Welsh farms. Likewise, Cornwall has also had substantial EU regional funding. The sad irony is that these regions generally voted leave in substantial numbers.

Leave voters might say at this point that as the UK government won't be paying into the EU, it can do its own grants. However, we have yet to see enough political commitment to do so (and just at the moment it's hard to see who is in charge anyway!) The UK government did announce a "Stronger Towns Fund", but we have yet to see detail about the "Shared Prosperity Fund". What is clear is that the latter would need to send a lot more money to Cornwall, if it is to match what was scheduled to come from the EU. It looks like brexit will redistribute funds around the country, and the likelihood is that Eastern England and the South West will lose out.

Some of these changes might be desirable, but I'm not an expert so I don't know. What I do know is that when we voted in the referendum in June 2016, nearly all of us had no idea what impact our vote might have on the regional development funding our area would receive. If only we'd paid more attention to those little logos when we saw them, we might have asked more questions before we cast our vote.