How I came to love my new neighbours

Moving to Liverpool, home to the team he hated, challenges football supporter Sam Tomlin’s sense of belonging.

Sam Tomlin

Sam Tomlin is a Salvation Army officer, leading a local church in Liverpool where he lives with his wife and children.

Silouhetted by red flare smoke, celebrating footballs wave red flags.

Liverpool football fans celebrate.

Fleur on Unsplash.

I was born in Exeter, England but my family moved to Oxford when I was two. I don’t remember Exeter at all. I am sometimes envious of people who proudly share how they were ‘born and bred’ in a city or town and trace their lineage there back generations. I profoundly identified with Nick Hornby in his brilliant book Fever Pitch when he describes being a white, middle-class, southern English man or woman as being ‘the most rootless creature on earth; we would rather belong to any other community in the world. Yorkshiremen, Lancastrians, Scots, the Irish… have something they can sit in pubs and bars and weep about, songs to sing, things they can grab for and squeeze hard when they feel like it, but we have nothing, or at least nothing we want.’

I began to love football and started attending games. My Dad, born in Bristol, took me to Oxford United and while I enjoyed going with my friends, I could tell he didn’t care as much when Oxford scored compared to when we went to Bristol City games when I would see a normally calm and controlled man hug random strangers and fall over seats. This is much more exciting – so I committed myself as a Bristol City fan which I am to this day.

Growing up in a school in Oxford, however, it’s not particularly cool to say you support Bristol City, so if you supported a lower league team you also pick a Premier League team. Mine was Manchester United for the very unoriginal reason that they were the best. I had posters of Roy Keane – my hero on whom I modelled my playing style and I even travelled up to Old Trafford when a ticket very occasionally presented itself. They were my second team – and a very close second.

Over the years I have come to deeply love the streets, landmarks and people who call this home as I have lived and served alongside them.

When you support a football team, you also commit to disliking other teams as part of the deal. Most teams have a local rival they enjoy hating, and while I certainly disliked Bristol Rovers, my particular ire was reserved for Liverpool, partly because they were Man Utd’s main rivals in the late 90’s and partly because some of my friends supported them (for the same reason I’ve always had an irrational dislike of QPR but that’s another story). I really disliked Liverpool – I didn’t quite have a poster of Michael Owen or Phil Babb to throw darts at but it wasn’t far off. Football rivalry is a serious business – in the 70’s and 80’s people lost their lives to football hooliganism and while this has thankfully decreased in recent decades, additional police presence is still required at local derbies as passions continue to run high.

I feel quite vulnerable sharing this publicly because it’s something I’ve never shared with the congregation I’ve been leading with my wife for over seven years. The reason for this is that we now live in Liverpool. God, it seems, has a great sense of irony – we became Salvation Army officers and not choosing where we were sent, the letter we opened in 2016 telling us where we would be ‘appointed’ said: Liverpool!

'The very first person you meet is the neighbour, whom you shall love… There is not a single person in the whole world who is as surely and as easily recognised as the neighbour.’

Søren Kierkegaard

Jesus says that the greatest commandments are to love God with everything that you are, and to love your neighbour as yourself. In response to a question about ‘who’ our true neighbours are, he shares a story about a man on a journey far from home who is beaten up and left for dead. His compatriots walk on the other side of the road, but someone from another, distrusted and strange land comes and takes care of him.

Søren Kierkegaard reflects on these stories and observes how humans like to abstract these commands to suit us better. We think our neighbours are those who look and sound like us as much as possible – this is the impulse of patriotism or love of country. But I have never been to Middleborough, Lincoln, or Dundee and while these people might be my compatriots, they are not really my neighbours – to some extent my love for them is an abstraction from reality. For Kierkegaard, ‘The very first person you meet is the neighbour, whom you shall love… There is not a single person in the whole world who is as surely and as easily recognised as the neighbour.’ In this regard, Kierkegaard suggests, Christian loyalty and love is more appropriately applied to a neighbourhood, town or city than it is to a nation or country (this essay by Stephen Backhouse explains more on this with reference to Kierkegaard).

The people I meet every day, walking around the streets of Liverpool are my neighbours and as such I am commanded as a follower of Jesus to love them. This love of God has not only helped me fall in love with a city I once did not know, but even transform something as ingrained as football rivalry. The most fundamental and formative songs I sing are about Jesus, not of a city and the narrative I try and organise my life around is found in the Bible not the history of a city or football club. But we are embodied creatures, and God creates us in and calls us to particular places, where we live, breathe and encounter our neighbours. I don’t think I’d go as far as saying I have become a Liverpool fan! I would still want Liverpool to lose if they played Bristol City and Man Utd, but the God who is able to transform even the deepest hatred into love has softened the heart of this southern, middle-class boy into a love of his new city, its people and perhaps even one of its football teams I once intensely disliked.

Article

Assisted dying

Comment

Politics

20 February 2025

4 min read

The assisted dying bill is an undignified mess

Literally life-changing legislation needs a parliament at its best not its worst.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A parliamentary committee meets, sitting at wooden raised desks in a wood panelled room.

The bill committee meets.

The first clue came when MP Kim Leadbeater’s private members’ bill passed in the House of Commons at the end of November. She came outside to greet pro-euthanasia campaigners like she was emerging as a winner from the Big Brother house, in tears of joy, whooping and hugging and high-fiving, with prime minister Keir Starmer gurning awkwardly in her wake.

For her and her supporters, this was indeed great news. But these optics were far from great. It was as though she was celebrating the consequence of the legislation she’d introduced: “Whoa! Wonderful news everybody! We’re going to be allowed to help people to kill themselves.”

It’s not a good look, even to those who may wish for such assistance. Where was the dignity, the key word that assisted-suicide lobbyists have appropriated for their cause? Not in this carefree triumphalism, this cork-popping celebration of the prospect of death-on-demand.

Since then, the bill’s faltering passage through parliament has been characterised by this absence of dignity, a kind of cowboy rustler pushing a herd of supporters in a single direction, towards statute. And this lack of dignity matters. Not just because it is, literally, the most life-changing legislation any of us will see in our lifetimes, but because the dignity of parliament matters very much indeed.

I don’t mean the ritual flummery, the state opening by the monarch, people marching about with wigs and sticks, Black Rod and all that. I mean dignity in the sense with which we honour our democracy, the way in which we frame our legislature seriously and with due process.

Leadbeater presents as a good person and there is no apparent evidence to the contrary. But she is an inexperienced parliamentarian. Her selection for the seat of Batley and Spen, now Spen Valley, was rushed through in 2021, memories remaining acutely sharp of the murder of her older sister, Jo Cox, in the constituency in 2016. And, naturally, she has sat on the Government’s backbenches for less than a year.

Her inexperience of parliamentary process and scrutiny has shown. Committee hearings have been rammed with those who support assisted suicide and held in unseemly haste, such is the rush to get it into law. Before her bill’s second reading, she described it as having the strongest safeguards in the world, each patient requiring a sign-off from a High Court judge. When this proved impractical, the judge was replaced with a social worker, which apparently was “even safer”. So, safer than even the strongest safeguards in the world?

But more worrying still is how the passage of the bill has been factionalised. Leadbeater has alienated the mild-mannered by calling opposing voices “noise”, which is a bit like lamenting that a debate should have two sides at all. And she’s called those who disagree with her “unconstructive” and complained that opponents have “mobilised”. Well, duh. That’s how parliament works. Indeed, it’s part of its dignity, rather than a simple inconvenience for an MP in a hurry.

The media have noticed this lack of respect for procedure. I’m not sure that there’s ever been such resistance to proposed assisted-suicide legislation in the public prints before. Even the Guardian, which might be relied upon to see it as a progressive cause, has turned more than ambivalent. Only columnist and assisted-suicide flagbearer Polly Toynbee is available for a piece that amounts to saying we should move along, there’s nothing to see here and Leadbeater’s bill is doing just fine.

She, too, claims absurdly that opposition is only coming from people who oppose assisted suicide. Well, blow me down. Try as I might, I can’t trace her complaining that Lord Falconer’s supposedly independent Commission on Assisted Dying of 2011 was both funded and packed with his cause’s supporters.

In passing, it should be noted what an underminer of parliamentary dignity is Falconer too. He has claimed that justice secretary Shabam Mahmood’s opposition to the bill should be discounted because of her “religious beliefs”. Mahmood is a Muslim. For a constitutional lawyer, Falconer shows scant regard for our constitution. We might as well say that his views should be discounted because he’s a progressive secularist.

One might expect PM Keir Starmer to bring some quality to this, as an alleged stickler for legal procedure. It remains a mystery, as a supporter of the principle, that he’s left assisted suicide to a private members’ bill. If he really wanted it, it should surely be a Government bill. Cynics among us wonder if he has honoured a promise given to the terminally ill Esther Rantzen with token support for a private members’ bill, but knows it will fail.

Again, lack of dignity. If dignity in dying means anything since it was misappropriated as a campaign slogan for assisted suicide, then it should be accompanied by dignified debate and amendment in parliament. This bill has provided precisely the opposite. Let it die.

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