Letter from Burnley: the shifting sands of the cost of living crisis

With a worsening crisis affecting his community, Alex Frost reflects on the growing struggle and the impact on its people.

Alex Frost

Alex Frost is a vicar in Burnley, Lancashire, and an advocate for the local community.

Two older men lean agains the wall of a football club's entrance, next to thin open doorways.

Burnley football club turnstiles.

Have you ever watched one of those retrospective television programmes, that takes us back to the 1980's or 1990's? They usually include clips of Wham or Oasis or Yuppies with massive mobile phones.

I don't know about you but the label 'The cost-of-living' is one that I suspect might take its own place in one of those shows twenty or so years from now. And I do wonder if things will be better or worse than they are presently.

You might that hope which ever political government of the day is in power in 2044, the cost of living crisis and poverty will have significantly shifted from where they presently are.

In my own town, Burnley in Lancashire, the shifting sands of such matters are starkly evident, and things seem to be getting worse rather than better. The evidence of a cost of living crisis has shifted matters from financial insecurity to many other areas. For example, within the cost of living crisis sits another crisis that appears to be getting more concerning as the months go by and we drop into the harshest months of the year.

He cites places of refuge as dangerous, violent, volatile places that are not in keeping with his desire to live a quiet and normal life that befits a gentleman in his late fifties.

That crisis is one of extremely worrying mental health issues with adults and some very young children in our community. On a personal level, there is nothing more painful than taking a funeral service for a young person who has taken their own life, which happened to me in recent months. Alongside such sadnesses, there are almost daily examples of individuals, many of whom are young mothers pouring their hearts out on social media with woes of poor mental health with seemingly nowhere to turn. In my own borough the mental support provision within the NHS is at breaking point with long delays for mental health counselling and support. Thank goodness then for the voluntary sector who help me to help others on a regular basis. After the pandemic of COVID in Burnley, where a recent Joseph Rowntree Foundation poverty report suggested 38 oer cent of children in Burnley live in poverty, we are in a battle to keep our most vulnerable people mentally well and with an optimistic outlook for a brighter future.

And then there is the matter of homelessness. Who'd have thought we'd be living in a time when people are now being evicted from a tent? And what about those who lived outside for many years - what are we to do for them? There is a chap in Burnley, who by choice is living rough behind our corporation cemetery because the accommodation offered to him would place him in a hostel where addiction and violence is commonplace. The only blessing to be taken from it is that he has found a warm spot and he is relatively safe against the winter elements that are coming our way during the winter. But the saddest thing about this gentleman is that it is a preferable option to what is offered were he to use the provision available. He cites places of refuge as dangerous, violent, volatile places that are not in keeping with his desire to live a quiet and normal life that befits a gentleman in his late fifties.

Watching young mums literally gathering up the crumbs from our food provisions at church is a chastening and humiliating experience for them and those who serve them.

And as the sands shift, what about our young people? In the school where I am a governor, 58 per cent of our children are on free school meals, and many come from broken homes and difficult circumstances. What encouragement can we give them to ensure their young lives are ones of opportunity, fun and learning? What can we do to ensure the struggles of the children's parents don't bring their own development to an uncertain and worrying future? Some parents in the grip of a cost-of-living crisis lose their filter on vocabulary and so every worry, concern, disappointment and crisis is shared. Shared with little boys and girls who shouldn't be constantly subjected to a world that is always churning out negative scenarios on their innocent and immature minds.

And what about the national celebration of a food bank and community kitchens and all they do for the poor people of our parishes? Three cheers for the voluntary sector who take the strain of a failing social security system that gives food with one hand but potentially snatches self-worth with the other. Watching young mums literally gathering up the crumbs from our food provisions at church is a chastening and humiliating experience for them and those who serve them. I hate foodbanks, not because of the good they clearly do, but, because they normalise and hold up a failing social security system in our country today.

As we approach Christmas and a new year, I wonder how the shifting sand of the cost-of-living crisis might influence, our cultural horizon? Is it idealistic, romantic or downright stupid to think we might change the great and mighty to think differently in their approach to poverty? I am keen football fan, and you might be familiar with the term 'He/She talks a good game' and after many years following Burnley Football Club I have witnessed on many occasions when Managers have talked a good game but sadly failed to deliver on the field of play. And I think that is true of the majority of our politicians of all parties. They can talk a good game but often fail to impress us because the substance doesn't match the sentences.

I am convinced through many years of dealing with abject poverty, that people in difficulty respond better to compassion over criticism, understanding over instruction, reality over rhetoric. So many people in my context don't want to be in poverty. They would prefer not to struggle, and they would recognise they need help. The shifting sands of surviving should encourage society to prioritise people before pedestrianisations of town centres, and hope over HS2 railway lines. As the sands of our landscape continue to shift, it surely must be the priority of the church, the government, and for people to stop people from sinking in a swell of poverty and hardship. When it does that, perhaps the church can demonstrate to the society, its role and its mission still has much to offer in 2024 and beyond.

Article

Change

Mental Health

2 April 2024

4 min read

Don't try and cope on your own

The company of those who care helps when handling traumas.

Katherine Amphlett

Katherine is a counsellor based in the West Midlands.

a man in a wheelchair sits in a subway station holding a sign reading 'seeking human kindness'.

Michael, Boston, 2018.

Matt Collamer on Unsplash.

I did a horrible piece of training at the weekend. You have to do a lot of continual learning if you’re a counsellor, and some of it is hard going. This particular session (with Cruse, a national bereavement charity) was about self-harm, and it contained sheets and slides and lists of the ways in which people hurt, damage and punish themselves. Usually as a way of expressing another kind of pain or because it’s the only thing they can control in a chaotic world. Six hours of it, on Zoom.

All of us have topics that we struggle with – areas that we find difficult to contemplate – and self-harm is one of mine. It is so far from my own experience of reality that it makes me feel square and naïve and overprotected, and every part of me revolts against it in some way. How terrible that people who are already suffering can only find relief by inflicting further harm on themselves! And some of the injuries are so grievous. Mortifyingly, my main reaction on this occasion was an urge to put my fingers in my ears and tell everyone to STOP IT... not just the trainer, but the poor souls involved in hurting themselves too. Training can be humbling, in the way it reveals the limits of your own compassion to you.

Clearly though, telling people to ‘stop it’ is not an option, however you might feel! So what to do?

Christianity, usefully, offers quite a lot of different options for coping with difficult life stuff, so I started considering some of these as I attended to the trainer. The peaceful, thoughtful series of Lent reflections I’ve been listening to recently, for instance… might they help? Um no, not suitable really. Too meditative. You can’t ‘gather the scattered pieces of your consciousness and centre them on God’ when someone is talking about teenagers cutting themselves in ‘risky places, or too deep’ I found. Tranquillity of mind is too passive a response.

So then I thought about people talking sometimes of being able to hand over their troubles to Christ. He ‘takest away the sins of the world’, as the communion service puts it... his arms are open and he is God, so he can bear the weight. But that didn’t work either. Too mystical. It felt as if action was required, not meek handing over of sorrows because I couldn’t bear to contemplate them. I don’t think we’re meant to dodge responsibility and simply go, ‘Ugh, you have these ones Lord because I don’t want them’.

So, I sat there writhing inwardly and feeling sweaty and miserable and wishing I was somewhere else.

This kind, accepting, unshocked conversation was immensely comforting and reassuring, I found. There was safety in it, and daylight, and hope.

But then I started wondering how everyone else at Cruse copes with such things. I began looking at the other faces on my screen… the 21 of my colleagues who were also attending the training, almost all of them volunteers.

There was the strong, calm face of Manju, an Indian doctor lady, and Suki, a smiley gappy-toothed African lady, who both work on the triaging team, assessing callers as they come in and assigning them to helpers. There was Richard the First and Richard the Second, both white, one younger than me, one older, both friendly and knowledgeable and kind. There was Naga, a retired nursing sister who looked Scandewegian, and Christina, ditto – except she’d been a teacher. And Nick, not much more than a teenager by the look of him, and Sat, a big Brummie taxi driver in a turban. William looked as if he might be an academic, with his leather elbow patches, and Keith had his sound off due to the presence of a large cat on his desk, which leaned over periodically to miaow into his mike. Lots of others too.

And suddenly I realised that there was my answer: all those good people, giving up their Saturday because they cared. Listening to stories of suffering because they wanted to understand better, in order to be able to help – to do something for the broken and the sad among us.

That’s the presence of God, surely: that an army of people turn out, day in, day out, to do things simply because they are good. There is no payment, no special recognition. They have to listen to some very difficult things and contemplate darkness that they wouldn’t necessarily in their own lives. But there they all were that morning, one small group among thousands of others all over the country no doubt – ready to serve, and cheerful and friendly and attentive.

They talked matter-of-factly about cases they’d encountered and situations which can lead people to injure themselves, and about self-harm as a phenomenon in certain social groups. About how it can be treated, about how it can heal and disappear with the right care and compassion. About how sometimes it can even be preferable to other alternatives. It is much easier, for example, to stop self-harming than it is to recover from an eating disorder.

This kind, accepting, unshocked conversation was immensely comforting and reassuring, I found. There was safety in it, and daylight, and hope. A feeling that even if someone is suffering, there are others who are able to meet them there, to keep them warm and hold them up. That people do act as the hands and feet of God actually sometimes, regardless of creed or faith or fallenness.

Looking at them all I felt so much better… and that if they could do it, I could. We only need to work in company together and our collective strength will keep us all afloat, rescuers and rescued alike. ‘Be not afraid’ the Bible says over and over again. It is very much easier not to be, when you’re not trying to be brave by yourself.