Pornography: straws in the wind?

Following last weeks government announcement about a default block on online pornography, quickly followed by Microsoft suddenly discovering that they could make more difficult for certain sorts of web users, comes a third straw in the wind.

Co-op supermarkets have given lads mags a deadline of 9th September to introduce 'modesty bags' or be withdrawn from sale. Apparently the Daily Sport has already agreed to this - at our local Co-op, it's displayed at the eye level of an average 10 year old.

Steve Murrells, retail chief executive for the Co-operative Group, said: "As a community-based retailer, we have listened to the concerns of our customers and members, many of whom say they object to their children being able to see overt sexual images in our stores.

"Whilst we have tried to mitigate the likelihood of young children seeing the images with a number of measures in store, the most effective way of doing this is for these magazines to be put in individual, sealed modesty bags."

Well, no, the most effective way is not to stock them at all, the way you currently don't stock other pornographic titles. The local Tesco Express, which has all the papers at floor level, doesn't sell the Sport, though the lads mags are within easy reach/sight of the Year 6 kids from the local primary school. 

With 'No More Page 3' gaining signatories and influence, there are a few signs of hope that the tide of pornification is turning. But there's a long way to go, and vast swathes of the entertainment and fashion industries still defiantly waving Beyonce's booty at any notions of modesty, sexual purity, and respect for women as people rather than sexual objects.

Betting shops 'blight on our high streets'

The recent Future of Britain report asked consumers what would constitute their ideal high street. Top ranking were a bank, a chemist/health store, newsagents and family butcher/baker. Bottom of the list came a pawnbroker (3%) and a bookmaker (9%). To quote the report:

The fate of the high street is one of the issues that most concern the British public. The study found that 76% of adults are concerned about the future of our high streets and a significant proportion  would back a limit on the number of pawnbrokers and betting shops allowed to open in local areas....the vast majority of British shoppers regard betting shops and pawnbrokers as a blight on our high streets.

You don't have to look very far for the evidence. A cafe on our estate sadly had to close earlier this year due to lack of trade. The new owners of the unit are

the sign went up a couple of weeks ago, and our first local bookies is opening soon. Earlier this week the outlet right next door, a hairdresser, announced it was closing down. People have already noted that having a bookies next door would put people off using the place. I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes harder to let the unit as well. Sadly the bookies seems to outlast better shops - in a neighbouring estate the current line-up is a fish and chip shop, charity shop, bookies and tattoo parlour. Not so long ago we had a post office and fruit and veg shop.

The betting industry works hard to keep politicians onside, and problem gambling is on the rise, despite the recession (or maybe because of it - the industry seems to target poorer areas). Research suggests that if you increase access to gambling, that has a knock-on increase on problem gambling. But we can't just blame other people, local communities have to use the shops they want to keep: ASDA will keep trundling on, but the small business down the road depends on local people to use it. And if we don't, people like Ladbrokes will move in.

Double Standards

A couple of media stories:

Powerful piece on our double standards over abortion law, in the light of the paralympics.

Natalia Partyka was born without a right hand and forearm. She won her first international table tennis medal at the disabled world championship when she was 10. She has won more than 30 medals since. Steve Brown is Great Britain’s wheelchair rugby captain. Following an accident he broke his neck and trapped his spinal chord and is now paralysed from the chest down.

Both these individuals smash the convenient myth that aborting a disabled child is an act of mercy that cut shorts a miserable, undignified and frustrating life. This specious argument is incessantly advanced to justify Britain’s abortion law, which allows abortion up to birth if the child is “severely disabled” (but in practice covers easily corrected conditions such as cleft palates).

And a bizarre reaction to the latest retail sales figures. "The feel good factor from the Olympics failed to inspire spending" said the British Retail Consortium. It's a peculiar idea that automatically links feeling better to spending more. How many people, after watching Mo Farah win his second gold, immediately jumped off their sofas and though 'right, I'd better get down to Tesco and buy something' as an integral part of their celebrations? 

There's something insidious about the suggestion that our response to anything significant ought to be shopping. Is that all we are? The government thinks so: it's rumbling about making the Olympic extension to Sunday trading hour permanent. Good to see the boss of Sainsbury's speaking out against this last month. What a dismal Olympic legacy that would be.

Olympic Sponsors Parade, aka the Torch Relay

Went to the centre of Yeovil at crack of dawn today to watch the Olympic torch relay. First stop was bacon butties at the United Reformed Church, then we joined the growing crowds and waited.

After several local buses, an middle aged boy racer showing off his car, and various police bikes, came a parade of sponsors carnival floats, complete with freebies, logos and people trying to whip up the crowd into the nearest thing to excitement Yeovil can manage at 7.30am. Then, to the sound of church bells and local radio, came the flame itself, the thing we'd all come to see.

Arriving home, my inbox had a link to this piece by Jarrett, our local college chaplain. A local man has recently offered to sell advertising space on his body to support charities. Human billboard Chris Watson will have logos tattood onto his skin, in exhange for donations. Channel 4 have already spotted the story and are planning a documentary, which should boost the cash take considerably. Is this sacrificial giving, or the ultimate victory for marketing?

Jarrett writes of... the sheer volume and invasiveness of modern advertising. The places you can go without seeing advertising of any kind are rapidly depleting. Our recognition of company logos is an accepted norm in modern society. Students last week were showing me the highest downloaded free app on the iPhone: a Logos Quiz. Logos are displayed fully or partially, and you have to guess which company it is. Enough correct answers takes you to the next level where (yay!) more logos can be guessed.

The colonisation of the Olympics by branding and sponsorship (just watch Chariots of Fire, then compare and contrast with this: 14 logos and invitation to 'be part of it' by buying merchandise. Yes, if you haven't got £400 for the last remaining seats for the beach volleyball, you can always pretend you're there by shopping online.

Won't be long now.....

Toy Story

The Guardian had a profile last week of Gary Grant, who runs the toy chain The Entertainer. It's managed to stay in business through the recession, despite not opening on Sundays and not stocking any Harry Potter merchandise.

"Last year I prayed more about my business than I have ever done and in October, for the first time, I felt God say to me 'you need to call the staff together,'" he says. "I said 'God, you're mad, I'm not doing that' – because you can have a personal conversation with God – I got to work on Monday morning and I heard God ask me again, 'are you going to call the staff together?'"

So he did. The born-again Christian – or "charismatic Christian" as he prefers – emailed workers inviting them to a "time of reflection". "Ye of little faith," he jokes. "I thought six or so would come along and sit with me and pray for Woolworths and the 28,000 people potentially losing their jobs. I got six chairs out and went to get more and when I came back there were 30 people in the room. It was very moving."

Apparently there's a global shortage of Lego. There's plenty at Legoland, or perhaps James May still has it all.

A Moral Duty to Spend Money?

Woolly Thinking
Woolworths was heaving with bargain hunters yesterday, duped by the news stories of a big sale, and the sign in the window of 50% OFF EVERYTHING. If your eyesight was poor, you might miss the 'up to' hidden in the corner, and then wonder why there were virtually no half-price items in the store. In fact, the standard discount was 10%, some of which was the VAT cut.

Our appetite for deception hasn't been dulled by the debt crunch. If anything it's become even more acute. One seller in the market yesterday called out 'you'll never see these prices again' and I wanted to stop and ask him if he was telling the truth.

The Answer to Debt Is..... More Debt
But this pales into insignificance compared to the rabbit hole that is our economic policy. Here we are in a debt crunch (yes I know it's called the 'credit crunch' but the word 'credit' is marketing sophistry. It's debt) brought on by irresponsible lending, unsustainable levels of consumer debt, a house price bubble, and reckless borrowing at levels never seen before in the UK. So what shall we do? I know:

• The government should borrow at levels never seen before in the UK.
• Reduce interest rates, making it less painful to get into debt, whilst penalising those who've been responsible and saved money.
• As businesses struggle for cash, plough billions into the banks, the same banks who got us into this mess and last year gave bonus awards the size of an African country.
• Pass legislation on sustainability and a reduced carbon footprint, and at the same time yank every economic lever possible to raise levels of resource consumption by the general population

These are the kind of solutions that makes homoeopathy look scientific. Okay, within one story they make economic sense, but is the story the Wealth of Nations or Alice in Wonderland? Is there any society in history which has made it the moral responsibility of its citizens to spend money? There is such a desparation to re-clothe the naked Emperor which is our consumer debt society, and quickly, that surely we should be a tad suspicious. Where are the people asking fundamental questions about the system itself?

2 examples:

- after the short-term pain, a fall in house prices will once again enable a family to own a property without both parents having to work full time and shove their kids into (government sponsored) childcare to make it possible. At least, it will until you get clobbered with university fees. Families are suffering now because owning a home puts you at the limit of your financial resources, so if anything gives then there is no slack. But we have waited for the bubble to burst messily, rather than questioning how big it was allowed to grow in the first place.

- Where too are the voices which, when total consumer debt overtook annual GDP, reminded us that debt is money that doesn't really exist, that isn't really yours, and that one day you have to pay it back?

Soul Destroying
A story is told of a Himalayan mountaineering expedition, where the Western climbers wanted to make quick progress. For three days they walked quickly, though the sherpas seemed reluctant. On day 4 the sherpas sat down and couldn't be moved. One climber asked the sherpa translator what was happening, and he replied: "after walking so fast for 3 days, they are now waiting for their souls to catch up with their bodies."

Maybe this recession, painful though it is for impatient Westerners, is the same thing happening on a national level. We have been rushing ahead of capacity - of our personal capacity, and that of the economy and the planet. It's time to stop and let everything catch up. Maybe as we stop we'll get the time to think, reflect, and adjust.

The danger of the pre-Budget report, the interest rate cut, and the Christmas sales, is that they perpetuate the headlong rush for debt-and-spend that is the UK consumer lifestyle. We rush past the shivering, naked Emperor, and are too busy shopping to wonder why we ache, and feel distant from ourselves.

Spend or Save?
Meanwhile we plaster a terrorist attack on a rich hotel in India across our front pages, but when twice the number fall in Nigeria, nobody hears, whilst 5,000 infants a day die from preventable water-borne diseases. One estimate puts the cost per head of clean water & sanitation at £15. That's under $40billion for all 2,500,000,000 people in the world who lack either clean water or proper sanitation, which is the same as the rise in government borrowing from 2008-9. At what point did this kind of maths start adding up?

In blog threads about faith, it's not long before people like me are taunted for believing in sky fairies and the like. But which Christmas makes more sense, the one where we spend, or the one where we, and others, are saved?

this is a cross post from Touching Base, a column hosted by the Wardman Wire.

New 'Touching Base' - is there such a thing as too much choice?

Beggars and Choosers:

In a consumer, choice-driven society, the question of British identity will never be settled. Consumer choice is all about the now, but the present without the past is a place without memory, a social form of dementia as the memories which created and sustained meaning are lost.

I enjoy the freedom to choose, but choice can never fully define who we are, or be the trump card in debates about morality, science, and economics. The Christian vision of identity - people created in love in the image of God - includes free will, balanced by reason, creativity, love, community, and a sense of place within creation. (Interesting that one of the upsides to recession is that we’re told we’ll all get more creative, as we’ll no longer be able to buy a solution to everything.)

In a couple of weeks I’ll be doing my first wedding of the summer. For the happy couples, the most amazing thing is not that they have chosen, but that they have been chosen. It’s in that context that love and identity can grow to their full extent.

more at the Wardman Wire from early this afternoon.

Downsizing our Pop idols

Justin Thacker at CommentisFree has some good things to say about the recent Joseph Rowntree foundation report on social evils. The JRF concluded, from a survey of 3500 people, that the greatest social evil was individualism and consumerism.

Feeding this worship of the self were the twin gods of consumerism and celebrity culture. Consumerism feeds it because every act of consumption reinforces the idea that I exist purely for my own sake. The celebrity culture fuels it because as soon as we start worshipping people for no other reason than their ability to attract such worship then our locus of admiration has shifted from an aptitude, such as artistic ability, to the individual as an individual.

In the report, the responsibility for this plague of self-indulgence was laid squarely at the doors of politicians, financial institutions and in particular the media (understood broadly to include advertising).

Thacker goes on to ask:
What if instead we pursued the logic of satisfaction whereby our goal is not the endless pursuit of desire itself, but rather contentment with what we already have? Indeed, what if contentment was found not in satisfying new desires, but in the deliberate relinquishment for the sake of others of what we already possess? What if personal downsizing became not just the mantra, but the practice, of our age?

It is more blessed to give than to recieve.(Acts 20:36)
Godliness with contenment is great gain. (1 Tim 6:6)

Consumer church

Very interesting post, 'we're all customers now' on the way the Anglican church has changed over the last generation, by a blogging vicar who's been around a bit longer than I have, and communicates well the sense of bewilderment at how church, culture, the role of the priest, and everything else, has changed.

On consumerism, here's a video clip (tried and failed to embed it here, sorry folks)I'm planning to use in a talk tomorrow on cultural change. King of the Hill is an excellent cartoon, and this great clip reflects perfectly the way church has become a consumer experience we shop around for, rather than a community we're part of. It also shows in a couple of perfect little snapshots some of the things which people find so alienating about our ways of worshipping.

Hank "That place is too big. What's that megachurch got, 5,000 members?"
Peggy (approvingly) "Yes, and it pampers all of them!"

Captialism Makes You Miserable

Can it really be the case that as we've become more comfortable, we've also become mentally ill?

"The citizens of selfish capitalist countries are twice as likely to suffer from a mental illness as the citizens of countries in mainland western Europe, which practise 'unselfish capitalism'," argues psychiatrist Oliver James.

He says studies show that 23% of Americans, Britons, Australians, New Zealanders and Canadians - all English-speaking "selfish capitalist" nations - suffered mental ill-health in the past 12 months. But only 11.5% of Germans, Italians, French, Belgians, Spaniards and Dutch experienced mental problems.

"The media, advertising, reality TV shows and so on, they give people unrealistic aspirations that they simply cannot meet with their wages and living standards. As a result, people get sucked into competitiveness and workaholism.

"We end up tirelessly striving for material wealth and valuing it over family and friendships. This really heaps pressure on people, damaging their health."

The message is clear, he says: "Selfish capitalism is bad for your mental health."

Read the rest of the story here.

Nestle vs King Herod: No Contest?

After my crisis of conscience as Father Christmas Last week (see Integrity Part 2) I mentioned to one of the organisers of the Christmas party that I had a bit of a problem with giving out stuff from Nestle. Well, word seems to be getting round, and a few folk in the school playground, who were unaware that there was anything wrong with Nestle, are now asking what the issue is.

More details can be found on the Baby Milk Action site, but here is the bare bones of it.

The World Health Organisation estimates that 1.5 million babies die each year because they are not adequately breastfed. Despite what is claimed on baby milk substitutes, breast milk is still far superior for babies as a source of nutrition and disease prevention. What's more, it is safer - where formula milk has to be made up from contaminated or unsafe water supplies, there is a high risk to the baby. The risk of death from diarrhoea and pneumonia increases dramatically if a family uses formula milk in an area with an unhygenic water supply.

As a result the WHO has a set of marketing codes, to safeguard vulnerable people. Nestle has violated these codes more often than any other company. Whilst breastfeeding is recommended up to 6 months as the best option for a childs health, Nestle markets is products in the developing world as suitable from 4 months, and sometimes much younger. Health workers and key opinion formers are showered with gifts and free samples, and claims of health benefits of milk substitutes are exaggerated. In China, the worlds biggest market, where Nestle is having a big marketing push, exclusive breastfeeding of infants has declined from 76% to 64% in less than 10 years. Nestle has stationed doctors in Chinese supermarkets to give out free samples and deal with questions. The international code on marketing of breast milk substitutes forbids promotion direct to parents, but this is exactly what Nestle are doing in China, and many other places.

The result of their actions is to place the lives and health of millions of babies at risk.

The Nestle boycott began in 1977 in the USA, and spread across the world. It's old news, which is probably why so few people know about it, or folk who used to boycott Nestle assume that everything is fine now. The Church of England announced a boycott of Nestle in the early 90's, with a measurable effect on sales, but in the face of a p.r. blitz by Nestle over the following years decided not to renew it. I'm a Church of England vicar who thinks that was a mistake.

The only thing that Nestle understand, and other companies like them, is money. The thing that will change their practices is a financial hit, and one thing that Western consumers have is spending power, to use, or to withdraw. It's a chilly day today, and to keep warm I'm wearing a t-shirt which says "How you spend controls what happens on the planet."

So here's what not to buy.

Nescafe and all Nescafe brands
Rowntrees products (Nestle bought the company a few years ago) such as Kit Kat & Lion Bar
Ski Yoghurts
After 8's
Yorkie
Buxton Mineral Water
Nestle cereals: Shreddies, Cheerios, Golden Grahams etc.
Cosmetics by Garnier, L'Oreal, Lancome, Matrix and others
Winalot and Felix pet foods, among others.

For a fuller list go here.

In at least one respect Nestle are worse than Herod (the king responsible for the deaths of the Bethelehem babies at the time of Jesus). Herod didn't pretend to care, but then he'd never heard of marketing.

Buy Nothing Day

Today has been Buy Nothing Day, which is fine by me - see this interesting article on the BBC website of the psychology of bargain hunting.

Whilst we're on shops, we're planning to show the film 'Wal-Mart: the high cost of low price' next weekend, just in time for the Christmas rush, along with a Fair Trade stall. It's not what you'd call a balanced movie, the format is a series of episodes which take the words of the Wal-Mart bosses, and measure them against reality on the ground.

If you want a UK perspective on the same issue then try Tescopoly, a web watchdog on the impact of the Big 4 supermarkets on UK communities. Their 'local campaigns' section details what's happening near you. Good to hear, by the way, that the Tesco plans for the centre of Darlington were overturned after popular protest, well done folks.