Safeguarding Love

[This article was first published in the Lent/Easter 2025 edition of our newsletter - read the rest here!]

Since Keir Starmer took control of the Labour Party, I’ve found myself questioning my previous fealty to the Labour Party and the British State. Despite longstanding abstract commitments to mutualism and critiques of the modern nation-state, in practice, I became a Labour member and regular voter, who obsessed about parliamentary politics to an unhealthy degree. I can at least thank Sir Keir (and Dorothy Day) for helping to change that, with a spoilt ballot and membership card to show for it.

Despite serious misgivings about all recent Labour leaders, the selection of Starmer represented a new low. The ‘electable Corbynism’ sales pitch was a thin smokescreen for the party’s evident pivot to liberalism. And while that word might not sound so bad, my issue with liberalism is its oftentimes relaxed attitude toward death, an uncomfortable stance for a pacifist like me. This death drive was already evident in Starmer’s pre-leadership voting record, where he rebelled from his otherwise scrupulous party loyalty on both the failed 2014 ‘assisted dying’ vote and the 2015 authorisation of air strikes against ISIL (a coalition campaign that claimed the lives of over ten thousand civilians). This liberalism has only grown more pronounced in his leadership, with Starmer supporting the genocide in Gaza and the recent passage of an ‘assisted dying’ bill.

Two obvious objections may be raised regarding my critique of the latter. The first is a technocratic defence: Starmer was not directly responsible for the ‘assisted dying’ bill since it was a private member’s bill and MPs had a free vote. However, Starmer promised the parliamentary vote before the election, and it was his newly selected MPs who voted it through. Over two-thirds of Starmer's 2024 cohort voted in favour of it, while a majority of the old guard voted against it. The uniformly pro-euthanasia press conveniently ignored this, preferring to portray the result as a product of perfected parliamentary democracy rather than the outcome of Starmer’s pre-election purge of the Corbynite left, who overwhelmingly voted against the bill.

The second objection is that it is simply right to ‘give dying people … choice, autonomy and dignity at the end of their lives’. Of course, it is impossible to object to this framing of Kim Leadbeater, since it doesn’t actually say anything. In the abstract, most people would want to grant anyone “choice, autonomy and dignity”, which all sounds very appealing. However, what the bill’s advocates obfuscate is its concrete proposal: it would offer sick adults with a life expectancy below six months State assistance to end their lives via lethal injection without even informing their families. There are, of course, countless objections to this proposal, with regards to safeguarding risks, diagnostic limitations, corruption of the patient-doctor relationship, lack of conscience clauses, the legislative expansion, the lack of palliative care, the coercion of skyrocketing inequality, etc. However, the key issue is that to think even for a moment that some lives aren’t worth living is to have already lost sight of everything that matters. It reminds me of Elizabeth Anscombe’s rebuke of consequentialist moral speculation: “[I]f someone really thinks, in advance, that it is open to question whether such an action as procuring the judicial execution of the innocent should be quite excluded from consideration—I do not want to argue with him: he shows a corrupt mind.” And while thinking that some people are better off dead for whatever reason is certainly corrupt, it is infinitely more corrupting for society to tell the terminally ill, who are always prone to feeling a burden, that this is likely true of them. We must reject thinking along these lines, which can only lead to a dead end.

But what are we to do about all this then? Does this mean we need to double down on our engagement with parliamentary politics? If, by that, we mean voting, I cannot see the point: Labour, Lib Dems, Greens, and Reform all voted for the bill, whilst the Conservative PM, Sunak, publicly advocated for assisted suicide in the run-up to the election. So, as is the norm, there was not a life-friendly option to choose from. If, by engagement, we mean lobbying MPs ahead of the third reading, I might give a qualified yes. After all, I myself wrote to my Haringey MP, Catherine West, before the second reading, calling on her as a practising Quaker to take a pacifist stance and oppose both assisted suicide and the Gaza genocide. Of course, as expected, this well-known ‘Labour for Israel’ liberal ignored my email and voted for the bill, but it was still reasonable to reach out. My main qualification, though, does not stem from my absent hope that the bill will pass its third and final reading, despite the recent controversial dilutions of safeguards by the scrutiny committee, but rather because the minutiae of parliamentary politics distracts us from the real labour of safeguarding life. When the bill, or its future equivalent, does pass, the only protection terminally ill people will have left is the conviction that their life is worth living, and it is the collective erosion of this conviction in our atomised, ‘throwaway society’ that has brought us to this nadir.

Since my wife and I moved from the London Catholic Worker to Brentford late last year, prior to the birth of our first child, Silas, we have been privileged to peer into an image of an altogether different society. On Sundays, we walk a short distance from our house to attend Mass at St Mary’s Convent, the mother house of the Poor Servants of the Mother of God, which was founded by Venerable Frances Margaret Taylor, who heroically dedicated her life to care and advocacy for the poor and sick.

On one side of the chapel, there, sit the very infirm residents of the in-house Maryville Care Home, and on the other side sit the residents of the attached St Raphael’s Home for adults with learning disabilities, many with conditions which meet the current criteria for late-term abortion, such as Down’s Syndrome (91% of diagnoses lead to termination). Throughout the Mass, there is a hum of activity as the Poor Servants sisters quietly move about the room helping the residents: giving them water, wiping their faces, adjusting their clothes, moving their wheelchairs, distributing Communion, etc. But the real power of the experience lies in the evident tenderness of each interaction. The unforced love that the sisters exhibit for their profoundly dependent community residents stands as a countersign to a culture that insists that we stop “prolonging human life way past human usefulness” (to quote the useless commentary of Matthew Parris).

Ultimately, then, I believe with Dorothy Day that it is only in the ‘scandal’ of the works of mercy and the labour of love that we can begin to turn the tide on our culture of death.

Tom Dennehy-Caddick

Solidarity and Racial Justice

From September to December 2024 I was in Calais, at Maria Skobtsova House, a house of hospitality for the most vulnerable refugee women and children on the move. It was a difficult and deeply scarring experience; living in solidarity with and opening myself up to love for these women also meant experiencing great pain due to the hardships in their lives. All of the women and children I met had experienced police brutality and were continuing to experience it as they went out to attempt to cross the Channel. Many had also been victims of exploitation, extortion and violence from the smugglers as well as from the state. One woman had lost a baby due to the conditions in the camps, immediately before she had come to our house. She announced this at the dinner table one day out of the blue and then moved on to doing the dishes.

Our role wasn’t to save these women but to create a space where they could share these experiences. Through sharing, they were able to process some of the trauma and work past it. Often the most crucial time to be a compassionate listener was the early hours of the morning when people would troop back in, having survived a shipwreck or an attack by the police and all they wanted was to eat, tell about it and go to bed. The first time it was told was serious, but by the time they woke up again, it was something that could be laughed about. Paul in Galatians 6:2 urges us to “Bear one another’s burdens and so fulfil the law of Christ.” But it is not an easy task.

It is also a struggle to break down your expectations, cultural norms and the power dynamic which exists between those with papers and those without. While living together, cooking, eating, dancing and watching children nothing separates us, but there will always be moments when the power dynamics become clear; deciding who can enter the house, distributing scarce resources, mediating others’ conflicts and, of course, when it comes time for volunteers to leave, often taking an easy ferry across the same water which has caused these women so much hardship. Not acknowledging this power imbalance causes more harm than good.

As a volunteer sometimes it is difficult to even recognise when people are simply agreeing with you, acquiescing to your requests, because they see you as someone who has power over them. I experienced this as a white child in rural Zimbabwe, when seeing some adult men taking the girls’ netball ball to use for football, I stormed over and demanded it back. I was fired by righteous anger; this was a ball for the girls and the men had used their age and gender to take it from them, but they had given it to me, not because I was right, but because I was white. The girls, my classmates, were not overjoyed that I had spoken on their behalf. Reflecting on this experience as an adult I resolved to take more time to think before acting. Am I speaking for a community I am not part of? Am I fully conscious of the power dynamics in this situation? Is everyone involved informed of all the facts so they can make their own decisions and have agency? Am I the right person to be taking action in this circumstance?

I often had to do this introspective work in Calais, particularly when mediating racial conflicts. With large groups of people living in small spaces, conflict inevitably arises. At one point, the house was split between Arab and East African women. A small conflict had started, between two people, but due to their not talking to each other directly it had ballooned to involve all of the people living in the house and to include tirades about the cultures and religiosity of the people involved. We had a few talks with people directly but no one was opening up. As volunteers, we had to step back, reflect and ensure that how we approached this conflict didn’t, in fact, reinforce harmful dynamics. We decided to take an informal, communal approach; remaining at the table after dinner and using non-violent communication techniques so that everyone had an opportunity to speak and be heard. It is a strange position, as a white person, to be mediating a racial conflict, but being outsiders gave us an advantage. While we lived there, were known and trusted, we also were not weighted to one side or the other. It took a long time and many attempts to leave the table, but we managed to reach an end point of apologies and a tentative truce. A week later, one of the Arab women risked her life for two of the African women.

In the end, as one woman said “We are all refugees, no one is better than the other.” And there were huge acts of kindness, love and solidarity between people of all backgrounds. It is easy to see yourself as a saviour in these situations, to want people to need you. But what I saw was that, no matter what we did, the greatest acts of kindness came from refugee to refugee. And to love someone fully, to be in solidarity with them, I couldn’t be a saviour, however tempting. I couldn’t wrap people in my love and keep them safe from everything. In the end, part of fully loving someone is giving them agency to leave and to make decisions which may put them in danger.

Anti-racism is an ongoing process, as Dom Hélder Câmara said “We are all called to build a world of peace, but we must also build a world of justice, for one cannot exist without the other.” True justice requires that we look to the root causes of these problems, that we truly love our neighbours and oppose inequality and oppression wherever we encounter it. An impossible task, but as I was told in Calais: “We do what we can and the rest is on God.”

Moya Barnett

Tea, Coffee, Cocoa

[This article was originally published in our newsletter for Lent/Easter 2025 - read the rest here!]

 For a long while now,I’ve spent a few hours every couple of weeks giving out food with a few different organisations. On a recent shift I saw something unusual: in the long queue were a couple of families with children. The temperature was close to freezing and children were standing with their parents on a dark pavement next to a busy road junction so that they could get a hot meal. I was distressed by the fact that children have to do such a thing in a wealthy country, and maybe more so by the thought of their parents having to explain it to them. I have seen worse things, but this upset me because it was something new and I am not yet used to it. It reminded me of how I felt when I started doing this sort of work, and, for the first time in my relatively sheltered life, coming into contact with human need so directly. Not that the first few times were particularly emotionally difficult – serving a long, fast-moving, and sometimes impatient queue from tables set up on a pavement is exciting, and I imagine excitement will be the dominant emotion for most people at first.

The difficult thing is not that visitors come, but that they keep coming. It is not difficult to serve at a soup run just once, because that first time you are thinking only in terms of the immediate need you are resolving: the people in front of you need food, and you are giving it to them. What is difficult is serving the same queue week after week, with many faces becoming familiar, and starting to think of hunger itself as a continuous problem, persisting over time, which you are unable to resolve. In this sense it does not matter that you are giving out food now – the hunger will still be there next week. This is easy to understand in the abstract, but harder to take when it is your own work being flung against the intractable problem, and those affected are in front of you.

We all want power. The least of us are not very different from the great in this way. Parents want the power to feed their children, the hungry want the power to feed themselves, politicians want the power to enrich or aggrandise themselves. People who perform the works of mercy generally want the power to relieve the need they see. I would like to be able to resolve the problem of poverty by waving my hand. I wonder whether I am more distressed by seeing the suffering of others or by the consciousness of my impotence to resolve it. This is a sort of arrogance which is perhaps difficult to distinguish from altruism, and ironically is likely to reduce our usefulness still further. The people I want to help are often able to do far more for each other than I do for them. I have seen people in precarious situations, with very little energy to spare, devote all of it to helping the people around them, and doing so very effectively because, sharing similar experiences, they know what they need. Usually, the most useful role those of us who are relatively privileged can perform from outside is to facilitate solidarity without imposing ourselves too much, but the more obsessed we are with the restrictions on our own agency the more we’ll struggle to do so. 

Over the course of a cold winter, we have seen this tendency play out lethally in London through the disorganisation of council-provided “severe weather emergency protocol” (SWEP) shelters. Beds have remained unoccupied while people have remained outside in the freezing cold because councils have insisted on assigning beds through their own small internal referral teams rather than utilising the knowledge of the many dedicated grassroots organisations, which know who needs shelter and where they are, to say nothing of the experience of rough sleepers themselves, who of course know perfectly well that they need to be indoors on freezing nights. The desire to be the one to solve the problem and the concomitant desire for control are temptations which run right through all charities, from professionalised institutions down to small volunteer-organised teams, and is probably a large part of why ‘charity’ has acquired such a bad name. I expect that we have all done some sort of harm, to some extent, for these reasons.

These reflections make me more and more convinced of the importance of humility, which used to be regarded by Christians as a great virtue. The word comes from the Latin humilitas, derived from humilis, the quality of lowness, itself derived from humus, meaning ‘earth’, giving the word the additional sense of ‘groundedness’. One who is humble is close to the earth, and thus aware of their limitations as an earthly creature. Reflecting on my limitations is a great consolation because, without reducing my motivation to do what I can to work against problems, it undercuts the sense of frustrated omnipotence which makes me want to eliminate them all myself. It also helps me to serve those I serve in a more practical way, by keeping me conscious of the limitations of my experience and the need to defer to those who have more of it. Humility will help us to avoid doing harm when we think we are doing good.

If we lived in a sane society humility would be regarded as an indispensable virtue in private and public life; it would be taught in schools and there would be a general understanding that the lack of it is both unhealthy and actively dangerous. Of course this will not happen, and of course in my own life I will not succeed in cultivating it as much as I should. But I can work on it. We at least have the advantage of the example of the Cross, on which Jesus exhibited perfect humility, taking on the maximum possible degree of limitation and accepting it, and thus saved the world. We also have the ministry of Mary, who understood and accepted the divine will when nobody else did, because she was uniquely willing to accept just the role she was given in it, and, because of this, received as a spear through her own heart the crucifixion of her son. She was able to participate in the greatest of all human actions just because of her humility. We cannot hope for anything more.

Thomas Frost