Muggings

Peter Maurin’s Easy Essay on St. Francis, printed in this year’s Summer LCW newsletter, refers to Johannes Jorgensen writing that ‘St. Francis desired that men should give up superfluous possessions.’ Similar words are constantly on my mind as I go about my daily business in London. I am typical of the guilt-ridden middle classes, all too aware of our good fortunes, born in the right generation at the right time. 1941 might seem an unlikely year, but I was fortunate enough to be geographically and socially placed to escape the worst events and their aftereffects. I am daily grateful for how things have worked out for me in the eighty years since.

A daily preoccupation of mine is how to give to the poor without becoming complacent, conceited, or indifferent. Living in London over the past 18 years, I’ve become increasingly aware that dropping £1 into a beggar’s plastic cup might be repeated ten times within half an hour, which is a shocking indictment of the steady deterioration in life for some people in my city. So, like most of my friends, I now restrict my offering to one a day and focus on the small, organised charities that have sprung up in recent years to reach wider groups of marginalised people. But I’ve been ‘softly’ mugged (meaning no threats, weapons, or violence were involved) at least twice.

On the first occasion, I was withdrawing money from a cash machine when a man tapped me on the shoulder, distracting me momentarily. He then snatched my card and ran off. I immediately rang my bank to stop the card, but the thief, having memorised my PIN number, had already stopped at another cash machine a few yards away and withdrawn £200.

 An off-duty policeman had witnessed the entire incident and insisted on taking me to the local police station to report it. When I later commented, ‘What a sad way to lead a life,’ the policeman gave me a look of sheer disbelief. He had no time for ‘that sort of scum who need locking up.’ The loss was later covered by my friendly, helpful bank, so I was completely unharmed.

Then, the other day, I was walking along an unfamiliar street when a distraught woman rushed up to me and insisted that she wasn’t asking for money, but could I please exchange some cash for a ten-pound note? She claimed the hostel she needed for the night refused to accept cash. Though this explanation seemed odd to me, I wanted to be helpful. Looking into my bag, I did indeed have a ten-pound note, which I gave her. She began pouring the coins into my hand but suddenly switched to pouring them into my handbag.

I walked away, feeling smug (as I tend to after thinking I’ve been helpful), and decided to check the coins. Somehow, by sleight of hand, she had given me only £2. Over the next few hours, I cursed myself for my own stupidity. I warned other people, some of whom said this was an old trick, while others advised, ‘Call the police.’ Nonetheless, I decided to return two days later, and there she was—same place, approaching passers-by with a handful of coins, same patter. I went up to her and introduced myself, whereupon she beamed and said, ‘Thank you, darling,’ and attempted to kiss me on the cheek. I stepped back and said, ‘You short-changed me.’

‘Oh dear, did I darling? Let me repay you,’ she cheerily replied.

‘No, I wouldn’t dream of taking it, but I think you need to get your life sorted out,’ I sternly told her, at which point she turned her back and walked off. Which is what I should have done as soon as she approached me. But, as I said, the urge to be helpful is in the DNA of most of us. That ten-pound note, in any case, represented ten days of not dropping a coin into a plastic cup, so in that sense, it was superfluous to me.

The need to live on one’s wits has been around since the beginning of society, and before the Welfare State, it was probably the modus vivendi for many. But this incident has made me wonder how many of us, in fact, graft from others perceived as far stronger than ourselves. I admit, I enjoy taking home souvenir table napkins and sugar packets if ever I’m invited to posh places to eat (increasingly rare these days, sadly). The recent scandal about our Prime Minister’s wife accepting expensive clothes from a wealthy donor makes me wonder about the whole business of taking from others. I wonder why the acceptance of something we cannot get for ourselves is seen as self-enhancing.

The young man involved in my first mugging was, according to the policeman who kindly helped me, part of a large gang operating all over London for a gangmaster. Some months later, most of them were jailed for 18 months to 4 years. The cost to the state would have been hundreds of thousands, and I wonder whether these desperate men benefited from prison. The second mugging involved a very desperate woman, and it has left me wondering whether I owe her any further obligation. She is clearly in deep trouble, and I know of several places where she might turn for constructive help—should she want it. Equally, I have to recognize that she is a self-determining human, clever and skilled in her strategies to survive in a difficult life.

My social work days are well and truly over, and I am now at the stage of trying to shed as many superfluous belongings as I can bear to part with. In the process, I am discovering that much of my stuff holds deep sentimental value, so my drawers and bookshelves remain stuffed, though no longer over-stuffed. I have to restrain myself from buying things that look lovely in the shop (charity shops, these days). In pondering these things, I discover—not without a wry smile—that I am facing my own deep flaws: greed and covetousness. It’s an interesting revelation. While I am no longer of the self-flagellation mindset, at times it remains irresistible, and I conclude: ‘Must try harder.’

I wonder what St. Francis would say?

Advent Reflection

The Second Sunday of Advent adds a new word, a message about man’s authenticity. Someone who encounters the Ultimate, who knows about the end, must let go of every compromise. In the presence of the Ultimate the only thing that survives is what is authentic. All compromise shatters there. All cheap negotiating shatters there. All half-truths, and all double-meanings, and all masks, and all poses shatter there. The only thing that stands the test is what is authentic. It has evolved into what it was intended to become. Reality is ordered according to the authentic and healthy, to that which is true in being, and true in words, and true in deeds. Try removing from our lives—from our presence—everything that is inauthentic in being. Remove all cramps, all poses, all arrogance and hubris, and all human rebelliousness. How much of our lives disappears with these things? How much space would be freed up—and for what purpose? Really, for man, for God, and for life itself—think how much room would become free for life that is suffocating now! Now take from our lives all that is inauthentic in our speech. Take the lies away. How different relationships would be, if no one needed to figure on the other person speaking with a double meaning, or guardedly, or camouflaged—let alone deliberately lying! If a word were a word again, and a sentence were a sentence again, and a fact counted as a fact, how very different life would be!

In the Gospel for the Second Sunday of Advent, the figure of John the Baptist appears. Our Lord says of him: ‘What did you go out into the desert to see? A reed driven to and fro by the wind? Or what did you go out to see? A man in soft clothing? Look, those wearing soft clothing are in the palaces of kings. Or why did you go out? What did you want to see? A prophet? Yes, I say to you, and more than a prophet. This is the one of whom it is written, ‘See, I send My messenger before You to prepare the way for You’ ’ (Mt 11:7-10). This figure of John stands before us, solitary, austere, and weathered by the storms and lonelinesses of the desert and weathered by the storms and lonelinesses of the prison—but authentic.

The figure of John demonstrates two laws about authentic people and shatters two dangers to which man’s authenticity generally succumbs. He shatters two situations in which an authentic man so very often suffocates and drowns. The first law and the first danger: the prophet stands before the king. And the first point: do not permit regard for private security or personal existence to make you into an inauthentic person. So very often throughout history, whenever prophet and king have encountered one another, the king is always in the superior position. What is easier, what is simpler, than to muzzle a prophet! Yet, indeed, hasn’t it been—not the voices of those who went into the palaces and were welcome there—but rather the voices calling in the wilderness who filled the cosmos, who prepared the way, who directed people toward Advent, and who arranged for the proper meeting with the end and the Ultimate?

Prophet and king! The prophet must have known that the king’s power and force and majesty would fall upon him and crush him if he said, ‘Non licit: That is wrong because it is inauthentic and is not in accordance with the divine order.’ And John said it, and he was crushed, and he was brutalised, and—for all time and eternity—he stands as the witness within history, as the witness before the face of the Lord, as authenticity itself. And he was right!

Along with that are the second law and the second danger. Futility or ineffectiveness do not dispense one from speaking the truth, declaring what is wrong, and standing up for what is right and just. How could this prophet think he could interfere in the family history and family scandals of the king, and be successful? Whoever considers success, or makes his decisions or attitudes dependent upon whether something is futile or certain of success, is already corrupt. Then authenticity no longer means his personal encounter with what is real; it is rather his personal dependence upon success, upon being heard, on popularity and applause, and on the roar of the great throngs. He is already corrupt. And woe, if the prophets are mute out of fear that their word might not be heeded.

You must let people notice that you know about the end and have grasped that one of the essential features of life is called Advent. And that means encounter with an Ultimate and Absolute. And that means being impressed, being forged in this loneliness with the Absolute, and therefore, whenever it is time to give testimony, being untouched and untouchable when faced with compromise, half-measures, silence, anxiety, or cowardice. May God grant that we have people, that we have prophets, who unseal the actual meaning of Advent to us, and who are authentic, and who offer an authentic witness!

Externalisation

Those of us who are not saints are likely to find ourselves, eventually, asking the Lord ‘when did we see you a stranger?’ (Mt 25:44) We know in principle that what we do for the poor we do for Christ, but the definite moments when it becomes clearly imperative to act on that principle come up so rarely that, in practice, we generally do less than we should. We might recognise refugees and illegalised migrants today as some of those people among whom Jesus told us we should expect to find him, but we so rarely come face-to-face with them that we are not often so moved. Moreover, the state has set up its border regime in such a way as to make it as difficult as possible for us to be good.

As far as possible, asylum seekers are prevented from reaching Britain in the first place, but are kept in Calais, so that when the French police destroy the belongings of migrants and leave them to sleep in the cold, when they sink small boats at sea and leave people to swim back to shore, it is not really treated as a political issue here in Britain, despite the fact that our government directly funds it, and created in the first place the exceptional situation whereby the border is moved to Calais for the purpose of enforcement but not for the purpose of asylum. Those asylum seekers who do manage to reach the UK are without exception detained on arrival, and generally placed in an immigration detention system designed to isolate them. As far as possible, irregular migrants and the violence used against them, paid for by you and me, are kept invisible, so that people don’t, on the whole, think of these things as being done to human beings, but keep thinking in an abstract way about ‘securing the border’. This is one of the benefits of ‘externalization’ for the authorities.

But there are limits to what the authorities can do in countries like Britain and France, with the remnants of a commitment to humans rights and a relatively open media able to report on abuses. Consequently, the policy of British and European governments is increasingly to outsource border violence to those governments and other groups which can get away with it. In recent years this has involved substantial payments to the border agencies of authoritarian and semi-authoritarian states along the north African coast through which many migrants travel in hope of reaching Europe via the Mediterranean. In September, Keir Starmer visited Rome to praise the supposed successes of these initiatives in reducing the number of those crossing the Mediterranean, and announced that £4 million would be given by the British state to the Rome Process, one of the funnels through which aid to these agencies is poured.

We find that those crossing the Mediterranean are often more frightened of being returned to these countries than they are of dying at sea, to the point of refusing to send out distress calls until they are out of Tunisian or Libyan waters. The Tunisian government has openly adopted a practice of systematic pushbacks into the desert— men, women and children are driven out into the Sahara and abandoned, often with no food or

water and with their phones confiscated.

They are left to walk for days back to the coast or die in the attempt. Several mass graves have been found in the Sahara but there is no way of knowing how many have been murdered in this way, partly because the Tunisian government makes it virtually impossible for NGOs to operate there. A recent UN report found that twice as many people now die in the Sahara as drown in the Mediterranean. In exchange for this contribution to Europe’s border security, European governments have given hundreds of millions of euros to the Tunisian government in the last few years, including €105 million in 2023 specifically to fund Tunisian border control, in full knowledge of the methods used.

The situation in Libya is, if anything, even worse. There is no centralised coast guard or border force in Libya, which has been split between two rival governments since the civil war, each of which is effectively a coalition of smaller militias; the role of a coast guard is undertaken by these various militia groups. Those migrants who are captured while travelling through Libya, or intercepted by the so-called coast guard at sea, suffer what a UNHRC report, published last year, described as ‘an abhorrent cycle of violence’. The report found ‘that migrants across Libya are victims of crimes against humanity and that acts of murder, enforced disappearance, torture, enslavement, sexual violence, rape and other inhumane acts are committed in connection  with their arbitrary detention’— sexual slavery is also systematic. It is normal for migrants detained in Libya to be held for ransom, either from their own funds or their relatives’, to the extent that forced labour and extortion have become what the report calls a significant source of revenue for Libyan militias and state institutions.

Facilitating this, European governments, including the British government, have given tens of millions of euros worth of aid to Libyan groups in the last few years to fund their actions at the border. Furthermore, European border agencies routinely share the coordinates of migrant boats with the so-called Libyan coast guard, even when merchant vessels and civilian rescue ships are much closer, because civilian ships would be unable to return rescued people to Libya under international law, as an unsafe country. As an example of what happens to those returned there, the UNHRC report cites a documented instance of a boy, a refugee detained in Ayn Zarah in Libya, who having been tortured, and in immense pain, hung himself. His body was left hanging in front of other migrants for a day and half before it was taken down by guards. There are countless similar stories. In the same month as this report was published, the British government announced another £1 million in funding for Libyan border authorities.

All this is being done, at least in part, on our behalf and with our tax money. It would not be accepted if it was happening in this country, but because it is being done far away, to people who are not deemed to matter, it is barely even reported on. It happens with the tacit acceptance of people in this country because we allow migrants to be marginalised— because, for the sake of a sense of security here in the centre, we are willing to overlook the violence at the border.

This article was first given as a reflection at a monthly vigil outside the Home Office on Marsham Street, during which we name and mourn those killed each month crossing European borders. I hope that we thus play some small part in opposing the border regime. Christians in this country have an obligation to rehumanise in the public mind those who are dehumanised by state policy. We have as much as we can to bring people who are marginalised into the centre of our communities. We have to keep talking about these things in the centres of power, of government, of the media, of the churches, of our own communities.

Our religion, after all, began with a crucifixion. It was such an awful and humiliating form of death, as far as the Romans were concerned, that the crucified person suffered a sort of social death as well— they were placed in a state of exception, as someone you couldn’t relate to socially in a normal way. On the edges of settlements, they were marginalised in every possible sense. And when God came into the world that was where he chose to place himself, and for two thousand years we have been putting the cross right at the centre of our worship— that is what Christianity is. We are hypocrites, then, if we centre the cross but don’t centre those being crucified at this moment. If there’s any comfort to take from all this it’s the certainty that, however successful or otherwise we are at this work of social rehumanisation, God will always be successful, because he himself won that victory on the cross. As Reverend Munther Isaac said at Christmas, God is under the rubble. God is in the deserts, in the detention centres, and at the bottom of the sea. If we want to find him, that’s where he’ll be. Jesus remains at the cross.