This evening I turned over to BBC4
without knowing what was on - and was delighted to find Stravinsky's Petrushka
being played in a Proms concert.
And then I browsed through a bit of my email, while listening, to find a
statement by Tim Farron on the Calais situation.
And they were so much in tune. For
those who don't know it, Petrushka is the story of three marionettes, at a
Russian town's fair, manipulated by the puppet owner, and performing under his
rule for the entertainment of the assembled people at the fair. And the people
have their own lives and things to do, their dance, their joys, and take no notice of the puppets.
But the puppets have their own
lives, offstage or out of sight of the crowd, and there are tensions between
them, ending when one kills another. Petrushka, mortally wounded, breaks from
his booth, attempts to take agency and runs out into the fairground, the town
square, and with his dying movements accuses those who have not known of the
puppets' situation, effectively that of slaves of the puppetmaster; and his
death - the death of one whom the crowd thought of as not a person - troubles
them.
So then to Tim Farron's piece: the
central message of which is while we do need to 'police' boundaries and work on
security issues, the situation of those caught within this dreadful system of politics,
seeking freedom or new futures and issues of trafficking needs our attention in
other ways. I will add that we do seriously need to take on board the
predicaments of the people attempting to transport goods, and those who depend
on this trade (particularly important for Scottish seafood transporters who are
hit very hard by the situation). How do we balance this, somehow, with the
need to think of those breaking free of the camps as both victims of the
'puppetmasters' of their initial trafficking, and people attempting to take
agency and do whatever they can to draw our attention, the attention of those
sitting comfortably in our British homes, to what drives them to assay these
difficult and dangerous ploys?
Farron said that 'While the
Government is focussing on building bigger fences and bolstering security, we
cannot ignore the humanitarian crisis. Tear gas and dogs will never solve the
problems that these people are facing, and we should not turn a blind eye to
their suffering.'
Indeed: and a photo accompanying
his text showed a sign on the side of a makeshift tent, 'We are not dangerous,
we are in danger.' But I'd put his message more blatantly - that the solutions,
if there can be 'solutions', to the queues of lorries and the people dying on
the Mediterranean, the Calais camps and the problems of lorry drivers, have to
be in tune. We have to take our share of migrants to Europe, and in particular
we have to open doors as and how we can, to help with this crisis; at the same
time as exploring what the possibilities are in North Africa and Syria, and
what we might do that recognises the ordinary people and the everyday,
dreadful, things that they are facing there. And to take on board at least some of the
historical reasons for these fearful situations.
This doesn't mean that we should blame
the West for all the problems of North Africa and the Middle East. It does mean
that we need to see ourselves as part of an interconnected system, with what we
do and have done affecting other people's lives there; to acknowledge
responsibility for some actions and some mistakes, and to think about what
kinds of connectedness we can help create, and who we might connect with; and
in the meantime to recognise what privilege we have and to extend that hand of
help to others who, because of a specific situation at this specific time, have it not.
