If I were to write that the launch of the new terminal at London's Heathrow Airport seems a sad affair, as much reported in the news, that would not do justice to the inconvenience experienced by the many passengers who became separated from their luggage.
Being an engineer at heart, I felt I had to enquire how extensive the commissioning within the project had been of the luggage handling system. Before opening the terminial, to what extent had they tried to simulate the arrival of aeroplanes full of luggage?
I e-mailed British Airways to ask their "Corporate Responsibility" department. They suggested I contacted British Airports Authority (BAA) who had "responsibility for" the terminal. They did not reply to my e-mail.
Surely there are serious corporate responsibility issues here? On the one hand this is just a private project. On the other hand, quite apart from the cost to someone of reuniting baggage with passengers scattered across the world, the cost to the country of the wasted time of so many passengers stranded at the airport is mind-boggling. If this were due to negligent project management, would the guilty firm get fined for this kind of thing?
This has not been a perfect project (but whatever is?) however hopefully once it is working we shall have some national pride in the finished product. I hope too that there has been some pride among the engineering team - at least before opening day. That is why I am also surprised that I have not been able to find some chronicle of the project plans on the internet.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, The Right Reverend Rowan Williams, has kicked up a bit of a storm with his very public suggestion that Sharia law should be made more legitimate in the UK, in civil matters. This is a difficult position for the head of the world-wide Anglican Church to take when much of British law has been intentionally built on Christian principles, and many Christians are being harshly treated because of (as they understand it) Sharia law.There is a fascinating article by Prof. Mona Siddiqui, in the March edition of Third Way magazine, criticising the way in which the Qur'an has been used to propagate oppression.
It is interesting that so many comments have been extreme, and that Muslims in Britain are not united in their support of his ideas - some saying for example "Which Sharia?" Likewise much newspaper coverage has been biased, and I have been impressed with the very balanced one-pager on Sharia Law in the latest edition of The Week.
I perceive that, for example, many of the difficulties that Muslim women face in Britain (for example to do with forced marriages and "honour crimes") stem from attempts to implement Sharia Law - or at least Islamic culture - so I find it difficult to see how extending an Islamic legal system will improve matters. Would women's testimony be given the same weight as that of men? Would women be the judges?
Commenting on the response of politicians, one journalist commented that when politicians are "running scared" of debate it is a sure sign that a debate is needed. Since I too believe in the need for issues to be discussed openly, I have hope that the Archbishop's courage will bear good fruit. We'll have to wait to see what kind of fruit they are.
During the last week has been Britain ravaged by flooding such as has not been seen since the 1940's. I am thankful that we are on high ground, and can't imagine what it must be like to have a metre or more of water in one's home.
I heard on the radio that some people have criticised the government for not setting up a disaster fund, so that people can give money charitably to help those affected, because this is what would happen if the disaster was overseas.
If this had happened overseas, our response may have been through government, or through some of our charities that specialise in such relief. It is interesting to wonder why people perceive a lack of it here. When New Orleans was flooded in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina, the President of the USA was much criticised for being slow and disorganised with the relief efforts.
My guess is that, more than complacency or poor administration, a big reason is that we like to think that we are a developed nation, which means that we do not think that we deserve to suffer natural disasters in the way that the developing world does.
Radio journalists have been trying to be creative in their coverage of this event. So I listened to an interview with an architect in Holland who builds riverside houses that will float. He talks of how they now seek to go with the flow of the river's movments rather than to fight it. A response on the BBC Radio 4 website (Michael Pemberton: #21) says that floating houses have also been built by the Thames. Maybe there should be more of them.
It is interesting that BBC News online today has a headline about the flooding, followed by "PM considers 56 day terror limit." Which has the capacity to cause more damage, the weather or terrorists? Or to look at that the other way up, maybe we need to thank God that on the whole our weather is reliable enough that we have some time to think about terrorists....? As the proverbial grandmother says: "Count your blessings."
While I've been thinking about this, my copy of The Week arrived with an extract from the article by Alice Miles in The Times. She too takes the line of "Count your blessings" as she says, "If this is a national disaster, I’m a tomato." (Does she look like a tomato?) So maybe the reason we don't have a disaster fund for Tewkesbury is because our floods are not on the scale of those that seem to happen regularly in Bangladesh.
Yet I would not wish on anybody the heartache and hassle of cleaning up a home after these floods, even if you have a good insurance company. Insufficient mention is given to those whose income has been wrecked by the deluge, such as farmers. So, even if floods are a natural event, I can understand the criticism of the government for failure to develop flood defences to cope with this level of flooding. Presumably somebody in government has made a choice that the probability of this level of pain and suffering does not justify the costs involved.
I enjoyed watching the last episode of the current series of Dr Who on t.v. at the weekend. Mankind, trillions of years hence, finds a disappointing Utopia and then travels back through time to today to kill off its ancestors. (Doesn't that mean that they kill themselves too? That's the paradox.) For them, chasing the dream of Utopia did not work.
So I was surprisingly interested by a radio interview* I found myself listening to yesterday morning. According to philospoher John Gray, the idea of Utopia derives from the Christian Myth that there is a better life hereafter. He sees much death having come from attempts to create Utopia - for example by seeking to enforce a particular democratic vision of Utopia on the people of Iraq. He sees the Enlightenment, a secular movement, dangerously colluding with religion by continuing with the idea of Utopia, which he also sees in Marxism. Instead of Utopia, John advocates his version of Realism: working in the present with the reality that we discover. Fascinating stuff!
In the past there has been debate amongst Christians about whether we should be trying to create Utopia. The usual Christian language is about whether we seek to build God's kingdom now, or whether we don't bother with that because all this will be burned up anyway to be replaced by the "new heaven and new earth." I believe that most Christians see a role in trying to improve the world we live in; but it seems that some are trying too hard by seeking to impose it on others.
All this misses out the perspective of the mystic (Christian and other). That perspective is less concerned with the future, and more concerned with attention to the present, and attention to God. The motto** "All is well" (from Julian of Norwich and others) encourages not the enforced change of others, but a desire to understand others. This sounds like John Gray's Realism to me. Maybe he is a modern mystic.
* BBC Radio 4 Start the Week with Andrew Marr 09:15 - interviewing John Gray with Eric Hobsbawm (historian) and Pat Barker (author). John's new book is Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death or Utopia (published by Allen Lane). For more detail see the review in The Independent. **A quote from Anthony de Mello in his book Awareness.
I found myself remembering today that William Wilberforce committed his life to two objects: "the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners." Manners in his language may translate better as moral values today.
This year we celebrate the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade (although there is still work to be done). What about the second object?
I feel a call to this. In Britain today people moan about bad behaviour, such as "road rage" and "binge drinking" while at the same time struggling to reinvent values to improve British society. I don't see that we need to reinvent values: the core Christian values, that we once inherited and developed, seem to appeal to all "people of goodwill" regardless of what religion they claim. What is sometimes called the Golden Rule summarises part of this, the way that people should relate to one another: "do to others as you would like them to do to you."
It seems to me that when we note what is good manners, or bad manners, we are well in touch with our own values and the values that our society aspires to. So it would be a good way forward to share Wilberforce's second object as well as his first: the Reformation of Manners.
This is not a crusade to change others: like all good leadership it needs to start with "me" and the example that "I" set. Let's go for it!
The other day I turned on the radio while I was driving, and found myself listening to a programme on BBC Radio 4. It was about Florence Nightingale's work on hospital design in the 19th Century.
That's a good lesson to remember, and particularly important for organisations seeking to provide some kind of care for people. Today some people are worried about going into hospitals in Britain because they may catch a "superbug" (such as MRSA); and the government has just published statistics on death rates in hospitals. Organisations are encouraged to do risk assessment, but that is not the same.
When starting some new venture I tend, in a visionary kind of way, to think of all the good that I want to come out of it. Maybe I should spend more time thinking about how to avoid doing people harm at the same time!
